you know what’s crazy. I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Music City Bathroom Attendants.
It’s so aggressive, so damn intrusive, so freaking annoying, my buddy paid one of these guys $20 and said “that’s it. I’m done with you. Don’t f*** with me or any of my boys. We’re gonna take a piss when we want to take a piss and nobody is gonna pan handle us, got it?”
You know it’s crazy when you have to invite the piss attendant to your table and point out your posse so he knows who to leave alone in the rest room.
Really?
This crazy story starts in a country music honky tonk in a glitzy little town far far away.
I walk to the restroom.
I push open the door.
It’s like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy pushes open the door to the Yellow Brick Road and the black and white yields to a technicolor burst of amazement.
Only this is the reverse.
The honky tonk is relatively clean and full of good energy.
Open the door to the bathroom and its like entering a petri dish full of Ebola virus.
The urinals are next to each other and there is no partition. If you are going to stand beside your neighbor, let’s just say everyone’s business is going to be in full view.
STRIKE UP THE BAND EVERYBODY.
I don’t even know what that means…anyway.
The walls are streaked as if there has been a drive by shooting with mud bullets.
The porcelin is stained, filthy like a rest stop bathroom in Juarez.
There are two men in this small bathroom. They are wearing white shirts and bow ties from the James Bond evening wear collection.
One of the men has what appears to be a glass eye. It wanders the room like a spy surveillance camera.
“Good afternoon sir,” he says.
The other urinal man suspiciously eye balls me as I warily move to the catch basin protruding from the wall.
If I didn’t have to go so bad, I would have turned and walked out.
I step into position and stare uneasily at the wall before me. There is no interesting periodical hanging up, no sports page for me to read, no video to watch. The wall before me is tired, stained with the number of a girl named Maria.
This bathroom has the feel of a back alley abortion clinic.
“Who thought it was a good idea to book two of us at the same time,” one says.
The man with the glass eye mutters something that sounds like a curse word.
I am growing angry. This is a filth swamp. Why would any business owner think this bathroom needs an attendant. What it needs is a thorough cleaning, a check from the health department, a visit from the CDC.
I finish and begin to walk to the sink. While I’m still fastening my belt a bottle of something pink is thrust into my field of vision
“What’s that?” I ask annoyed at the sudden, inappropriate violation of my personal space.
“To make you fresher,” the attendant with the glass eye says.
“Make me fresher?” I say aloud. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Yes sir. Bring you some class.”
He pumps a pile of soapy goo into my hand.
I look at him like the tin man looks at rain. I’m pissed. I wanna say don’t touch me glass eye. I bite my tongue.
“Yeah, like this is going to class me up,” I retort.
I want to slap the guy in this head but my hand is full of cleanser or God forbid something else.
He is standing almost on top of me while I begin washing my hands.
Glass eye is breathing pursively, talking in some guttural toilet gibberish I do not understand.
The feeling is uncomfortable. There should be a perimeter rule in a bathroom. This guy is breaking the rule.
I am seething. He picks up a towel and holds it out waiting for me to finish.
“Dry yourself off,” He says.
There’s a novel idea stench bag.
I grab the towel and dry my hands.
“Why are there 2 guys in this creepy bathroom?” I ask.
The two men grumble, wondering the same thing.
“it’s stupid as a motha f**** if you ask me,” glass eye says under his breath in a syntax more convoluted than a swirling toilet flush.
There is a five dollar bill in their dish. That’s $2.50 a man. Why would anyone even do this job. You work in a soiled bathroom and listen to the sounds of excrement all day. You violate the code of bathroom etiquette by staring, you breach the rules of personal space every minute of every day. It’s ludicrous.
In my estimation; bathroom attendant is a job only slightly better than equine insemination attendant.
I open my wallet and pull out a couple of dollars.
I toss the dollars in the plate. Normally after I use the bathroom there is a sense of relief. But now I’m angry. I was just violated and ripped off. For what? Did I really class myself up?
I look at the nasty little bathroom that reminds me of a Tia Juana birthing chamber.
I stare at the two bathroom miscreants. They are deviants dressed in white, toilet paper and urinal cakes are their tools of the trade.
Everyone has to make a living but this is too weird.
I leave and enter the realm of music feeling a little soiled.
Over the course of the evening I will visit a few more clubs and each is seemingly more disgusting than the last.
In one bathroom, the attendant is seated on the commode behind a shower curtain. That’s right, there is no stall door, it is an opaque, plastic shower curtain. I am unclear if he is tired of standing or actually using the john. Either way, he is muttering to himself.
I am scared. I am disgusted. I am amazed that world famous music venues have such disgusting facilities.
By the end of the evening, I refuse to use the bathrooms. I decide I’d rather walk into the cold night, walk a block up the street, and enter another bar that I am not even drinking in to use bathrooms that are normal, well lit, and clean.
Bathroom attendants are disgusting and unnecessary.
And that is crazy.™