avatarOscar Rhea

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Insignificant Restaurant Worker

There’s a Big Red Dick in the Bathroom

And other toiletry tales

(Photo from https://www.123rf.com/)

When I was eight years old, my basement was terrifying. It wasn’t so bad if the lights were on, but the light switch was at the bottom of the stairs. That meant I had to descend into the dark, step by step, never sure if the creaks beneath my feet belonged to me, or to Tim Burton’s Oogie Boogie. Leaving the basement was worse. I would shut the light off and sprint up the stairs, convinced that horrifying burlap demon was going to catch me by the heel and drag me back to his lair in the laundry room.

I’m not afraid of basements anymore. When you grow up, your horrors become abstract. I’m afraid of apathy, and alcoholism, and the random tax audit that will force me to count every penny I’ve been tipped since 2006. After eighteen years of pretending to be an adult, the only everyday space I’m afraid of is the public bathroom at my bar.

I don’t piss in public. Not at my bar. There’s a staff bathroom in the back — 24 square feet of bag and boot storage for a dozen cooks, dishwashers, and servers that happens to contain a toilet and a sink. There is always pee on the seat, the toilet rocks back and forth on uneven tiles like an ocean liner, and at least once a shift a cook subsisting on a diet of eggs and onions unloads a putrid package that lingers in the air for half an afternoon.

Still, the staff bathroom is my premiere salle de bain. Back there, I know what I’m in for. I can brace myself. I can plug my nose.

The public bathroom is an inescapable cavity of human shame; a chamber of reprehensible surprises. I only venture through her swinging door when a customer stumbles upon a problem.

That customer never caused the problem, by the way. I only ever interact with Good Samaritans — blameless bystanders who have ‘discovered’ that the toilet is clogged, or that ‘somebody’ has recapitulated their Lucky Charms into the urinal. To prove their innocence, they act outraged. “You need to do something about this!”

Never in fifteen years has a customer ever said: “I’m sorry, I had an accident in there.’

Accountability stops at the asshole.

I like to think that I have grown a layer of plumber’s skin — that armor that allows those miracle workers to spend two hours wading through the feculence of society’s nether world before biting into their complimentary hot hamburger sandwich with extra gravy without batting an eye. Big shits don’t bother me. I can handle a broken tap, a broken door, a broken tile, or a hole in the wall large enough for Andy Dufresne. I have caught and killed countless numbers of cockroaches and mice. Once, in Australia, I did battle with a spider the size of my foot with only a plunger for a sword.

I am prepared for unpleasantries, but I have my limits. It took me four attempts to remove a full colostomy bag some inconsiderate bowel cancer patient had deposited in the ladies sink before I could hustle it out of the building without gagging. I once walked into the men’s to replace the toilet paper only to find an entire stall dripping in blood, with bloody fingerprints on every imaginable surface. There was so much bright red in that stall that I half expected to find a fresh corpse stuffed into the garbage. Those were truly bad days.

Then there was that lovely evening two years ago, when a teenager — a child, legally speaking — came to the bar to tell me that a man was masturbating in the handicap stall. Before I opened the bathroom door I could hear him moaning. Not knowing what one is supposed to do, I knocked, yelled ‘What’s going on in there?’, and hoped.

Thirty seconds later, a man emerged. A man who either had a severe psychiatric disability, or was a better actor than Daniel Day Lewis. Either way: he left without any further incident.

So last Monday when Ben — our most beloved bar regular — returned from his afternoon tinkle and whispered: ‘I’m afraid there’s a big red dick in the bathroom’, I strapped on my mental armor. The image I conjured during that long walk down the bathroom hallway was of a ten-inch crimson dildo, rising out of the toilet bowl like an angry cobra. I stopped at the door for a deep breath.

‘Aren’t Mondays supposed to be easy?’

I entered.

Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of the real thing. This is a recreation. (Photo by the author)

The bastard was well over two feet tall, rendered on the wall permanent marker. It wouldn’t respond to soap, or any standard cleaners. Bleach? Please.

While I waited for special graffiti remover to come in the next day, I had to cover up the abstract still life with duct tape to keep it from the eyes of impressionable youths.

I despise bathroom vandals, but the size of this audacious male member almost made it art. For the rest of the afternoon the bar flies would giddily gather in the Men’s, peeling back my duct tape to dramatically reveal the monstrosity to every newcomer. It was more popular than a pinball machine, and the story of the Ben discovering a big red dick in the bathroom will be a part of our bar’s lore forevermore.

If nothing else, it was a Monday twelve lonely drunks will never forget. But if I catch you drawing a big red dick in my bathroom, I’ll lock you in with that colostomy bag until it’s gone.

Catch another installment of my Insignificant Restaurant Worker series:

Restaurant
Bartender
Restaurant Business
This Happened To Me
Nonfiction
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