I have used bathrooms in bus and train stations, on planes, trains and busses, and of course all sorts of offices. Even, I think, once, a gas station.
The WORST: About 20 years ago, I was appearing in an off (off!) Broadway show. The teeny theater had no facilities, so we made arrangements with a, umm, “tenement” next door to use their hall bathroom. One of the other actresses and I would go together, it was such a horrible neighborhood. One night, we walked down the dark hallway, unlocked the door, and there was a DEAD JUNKIE ON THE TOILET.
We made new arrangements after that. With a hotel up the street.
Oh, lieu…
I once was the first person to use a public rest room after two ladies locked themselves in. (supposedly one was pregnant and the ladies room was full.) The ladies room was empty (so said the woman who left it) and when I went into the men’s room, there was a bent up spoon and a burned pack of matches on the floor. Hmmmmm…
I used to go to this bar that featured live bands and the dirtiest bathrooms in town. The stalls were sometimes missing doors, the sink was ofen propped up with a 2 x 4, and you never new if there would be toilet paper available. After a few beers and a couple of opening acts, though, it became necessary to make use of the sub-par facilities. A friend of mine entered the stall and screamed / laughed. She then had to show me what had elicited that response: perched atop the toilet seat was a fresh poo. I still wonder how much alcohol one has to consume to not be able to realize one is missing the target (so to speak).
At a bar I used to (embrassingly) frequent, I headed to the women’s room, which contained four stalls. Fully THREE of the four toilets had a mound of very moist and drippy poo just behind the toilet seat. The fourth had an unflushed floater.
Hmm, can’t beat a dead junkie. There’s the ‘passed out bum in a public park restroom’ incident, and the ‘feces smeared all over the inside stall walls in grade school’ one, but that’s about it. Plus a few ‘someone didn’t take a dump for a week then deposited the whole pile at once, and unsuccessfully tried to flush it down’ incidents.
About 6 or 8 weeks ago, I was in a bathroom at work washing my hands. A man walked in with a popped bag of microwave popcorn. He went into a stall, sat down, and the sounds eminating from the stall showed that he was eating and eliminating at the same time. Pretty gross !
Man, a dead junky. That’s a juggernaut of a public restroom story.
I remember walking in to use a restroom at McDonalds whereupon I find a guy in the handicapped stall (who was not handicapped), door flung wide open, sitting on the toilet ferociously (I mean, his ass was on the toilet, and he was leaned way over) and he was making “hnnnnnnnnnnng” noises, faec strained, etc. I was actually shocked, like at a horror movie, as I had just rounded the privacy corner and whamo! There was this guy, hunched over, terrible strained look on his face, pants around his ankle, making strange noises… I jumped. LOL
I can only imagine the guy was fighting constipation or something, but damn did it look painful, and damn was it loud. Why o why he didn’t shut the door I don’t know.
I couldn’t pee after seeing this man fighting goliath, and especially after hearing it.
I dunno, maybe not that great. But it sticks in my mind much more readily than the usual shit splatter one finds. (I swear, I just want to know how they do that, it seems biologically impossible… what are they, hippos or something?)
What I hate is when they’re out of toilet paper and your butt looks like an apaloosa. Man, I do everything I can to insure business is taken care of at home.
I dunno, maybe the dead junkie was some sort of psychopathic Martha Stewart thing. I mean, anyone can have Yankee Candles or potpourri on the back of the toilet, but nothing says “Complete Raving Loony” like a dead junkie.
All I got for a bad bathroom story is second-hand rumor. On submarines, all of the effluvia of everyday digestion gets pumped into large sanitary tanks (no, I don’t think they get the irony). When the tanks are near full, they empty them by pressurizing them with air so that the “stuff” gets blown out the bottom through a large valve (a process known as a sanitary blow - again, totally unexplored humor).
Now imagine what happens is they do a sanitary blow and one of the toilet valves isn’t quite shut. Again, I’ve never witnessed it, but as I understand it a true shit-storm is not a pretty sight.
I always am thankful that I’m a man and can usually use a public restroom without touching anything.
When I first moved to NYC the first couple of friends I made happened to be gay. They invited me to a bar call Splash for what was called Musical Mondays. The bar has tons of video screens and they played clips from musicals and people could sing along if they wanted. Now I like musicals. I also had no other friends and I liked free beer. (The bartender liked one of my friends, also the beer at gay bars is colder than straight bars I don’t know why) So I would go with them and hang out. I actually knew more musicals then my so-called gay friends. Plus how could looking at Ann Margret be gay.
Anyway the place has one huge restroom. Fine by me, there were some women at the bar who had different reactions to this but that was their problem. At this place even the restrooms have little video screens over the urinals. But they don’t show clips from musicals on them.
No they don’t.
They showed stuff that I had never dreamt of before in my life.
Years ago I worked at a fast food place that was open 24 hours. One evening around 11:00 PM a man came up to us and whispered that when he walked toward the men’s room a woman was by the door propositioning him for prostitution. The manager made his way over, and a rather haggard looking woman walked out of the door side in a hurry. We called the police and gave a description.
A day later, a policeman came over to ask questions about the incident. It turned out they arrested her and she was a ‘known’ prostitute. But the bad part was they warned us to look out for her again because she was known to operate out of restrooms at places in the area, and they wanted to see our video tape of that night to see who went in right before - becaue they ‘had evidence’ that she had a trick there right before.
Not nearly as interesting as a dead junkie or David straining with Goliath (lol!), but curious nonetheless:
I was at work and this fellow went into a stall right when I stepped up to a urinal. Within seconds, there was the “shooka shooka shooka” sound of him spinning the roll to get some toilet paper. But it went on for a long time…
I glanced down below the stall door and he had already sat down, so it wasn’t like he was fashioning a makeshift butt gasket or anything. Then - he did it again!
I was amused and amazed. I waited for a while - faking fixing my hair or something - to see him come out, but he pulled one of those “I intend to sit here until I know the bathroom is vacated” things. I never did figure out what the heck was going on…
A (straight) friend of mine was in a public bathroom sitting on the can. He absentmindedly started tapping his foot. He noticed the guy in the stall next to him was tapping his foot too. So he stopped. And the other guy stopped. So he tapped. And the other guy tapped. He was thinking that was pretty odd, when he noticed that the guy in the next stall was now on his knees halfway under the stall divider, and was masturbating into my friend’s stall!
My friend had unwittingly stumbled into one of those George Michael bathrooms, and accidentally tapped out “the code.”
1985, Van Halen concert at the Capital Centre in Landover, MD.
The line for the girls bathroom was insanely long. Girls were walking into the mens bathroom to do their business. Guys were pissing in the sink. Dudes were smoking weed in the stalls. There was puke all over the floor. Feces were smeared on the walls. God, it was just awful!
i can’t junkies, but it’s been pretty bad in my school bathrooms.
aside from the fact the lady janitors always clean the bathrooms and won’t leave for about five minutes as you stand there about to make a toilet out of your pants. and they take they’re jolly time. ugh.
two weeks topped it though. since all the urinals were being used (there’s only two in this particular bathroom) i decided to use a stall to relieve myself. alas everything has used cigarettes on it. and suddenly the smell of smoke permeates through the bathroom as i leave the stall. some overconfident jock asks me if i was smoking. i was ready to injure him.
Once 3 of my sisters and I went to this dive bar to see a local group that we liked. The bathroom was so disgusting as to defy description but I’ll try.
The first thing one noticed was an almost palpable stench.
After our eyes adjusted to the dim light of one solitary 25 (15?) watt bulb hanging by a wire from the ceiling we could see that located directly underneath it was it was a drain in the untiled, concrete floor into which ran a steady trickle of some unidentifiable fluid.
No doors on any of the 5 stalls, No paper products of any kind anywhere except a few used matchbooks and tampon wrappers.
Every toilet was piled up to top with an unholy mixture of shit, piss, puke and blood and there was a used tampon was in one corner and a used condom was in the other. The crowning touch was a used syringe discarded in another corner.
There was no running water of any kind except for the steady drip drip drip of water leaking from under the sink and stalls.
My sisters and I took one look and decided going outside behind the dumpster would be way better than this. We were not really surprised to find that there was already a line queued up with apparently the same thought.
