Editor's note: This is the second in what may soon be a series of reminiscences of special bathrooms past. Here is the first; if you have one of your own, by all means send it in.
About half a dozen years ago, my Mississippi hometown converted my old high school building into a Performing Arts Center in which repertory and road companies of Broadway shows, operas, and other musical events now perform throughout the entire month of May. Being a fan of the theater as well as a performer myself (during high school and college), I have taken advantage of this Festival of Music, as it is called, and attended at least one event each season since it began.
The very first season was a trip down memory lane for many reasons. I had not walked the halls of my old high school since I was a teenager, many decades ago. I got a lump in my throat when I saw how the city had refurbished the old auditorium in which, as a freshman, I'd performed Shakespeare's Pyramus And Thisbe from A Midsummer Night's Dream. They'd transformed it into a state-of-the-art facility worthy of the most consummate New York professionals. Walking past former history and math classrooms now designated as dressing rooms or prop and costume storage also dredged up many indelible memories of my old alma mater. Most touching of all to revisit, however, was my old high school bathroom.
Walking into the downstairs boys' bathroom during a piss break at that first Festival intermission, I noted the changes that had inevitably come with the passage of time. The white-tiled facility now seemed much, much smaller than it had when I was a freshman -- for some reason, I pictured it over the years as the largest bathroom in the Western world. The five doorless stalls in which my friends and I had conversed while relieving ourselves between classes or before or after school now had cloth curtains which could be pulled closed for a measure of privacy. Gone also was the distinctive disinfectant smell of the urinal cakes that had prevented any pooper from overpowering the place with the aroma of his anal output.
A fresh measure of poignancy was injected into my return when I regretfully recalled that three classmates with whom I had interacted in that bathroom were now no longer in this world. Though two of them were a couple of classes above me, I knew their names quite well; I remember casually joking with them while taking a dump on some innocent freshman afternoon. Carl served in Vietnam as a fighter pilot. He did not come back. He is still officially MIA, and a street has been named after him in my hometown. Les drowned in a boating accident, along with his brother-in-law.
Most heart wrenching of all, however, were my memories of my time shared with Bill. Bill was arguably the best athlete in our class. He received a football scholarship to a major SEC school and had a bright future ahead of him. Some predicted All-American. Imagine my shock and horror late in the summer before my sophomore year in college when I learned that Bill had dropped dead on the practice field of a rare congenital heart ailment. He was nineteen. All of us who were his classmates and friends attended his funeral in tears.
All of that and more came rushing back to me as I recalled the afternoon Bill and I happened to take dumps side by side. He was taking a break from practicing his shot in the gym, and I was taking a load off before my ride home showed up. We joked about a lot of things that day. Nothing that I can specifically recall -- stall-by-stall joking was just something all us guys had grown adept at and comfortable with, thanks to the open nature of the facilities.
Returning from my piss break for the second act, I was full of mixed emotions. They say you can't go home again; but in a very real sense, I felt as though I had. I had relived a very innocent and easy-going period of my life -- and brief though it was, it was deepened and illuminated immeasurably by the events that awaited me and all of us in the real world after graduation, in the world beyond the womb-like walls of the downstairs boys' bathroom and the school around it.
I've returned to the Performing Arts Center for many additional events. These days, even while using the facilities for intermission pisses, the memorymobile no longer kicks into high gear. But I still get a lump in my throat when I turn towards those curtained toilets and think for a moment of those fine departed fellows and the camaraderie we enjoyed in the bathroom of our youth.
-- The Big Wiper
