When I was fourteen and my brother was eleven, our parents decided to take us down to New Orleans for our first introduction to the French Quarter, the romantic destination of their honeymoon years prior, and the very spot where I was conceived (or so I've been told). We stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel, one of the oldest and most venerable in the city. There were many things I remember about that first visit -- the rich food, walking down Bourbon Street peeking into the strip joints (but not being allowed to go in, of course), the artists drawing portraits in Jackson Square, and the coffee and beignets at the world-famous Cafe Du Monde. Not to mention a wonderful ride on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, the only one still running these days.

But the thing I remember most of all was the most bizarre bathroom I have ever seen in my life. When we first checked into the hotel, I suddenly was hit with the urge to purge. I just couldn't wait until we got registered and the bellman got all our luggage organized. I had to go then and there. So I told my Dad I was off to find the bathroom, and I would join up with them later.

I got directions to the men's room and was told it was in the basement of the hotel. I followed the arrows down a flight of stairs, turned a corner sharply to the left and saw four barber chairs in front of me, three of which were occupied by men getting their hair cut. A huge mirror backed them up, but what was in front of them totally blew me away. Facing those barber chairs and those barbers busy practicing their craft was a gigantic L-shaped men's room, which consisted of about twenty closed stalls with doors high enough off the floor so that the fellows on the toilets were basically visible from the knees down. The urinals turned out to be in the other part of the L-shape, continuing out of sight until the corner was turned.

What I saw as I continued to approach these semi-private stalls (and what the barbers and their customers were seeing all the time) was a vast lineup of men doing the doo in what might have been a museum exhibition of pooping techniques. Some of them had kept their pants at or up above the knees, but others had puddled their pants around their ankles. One guy had dropped trou all the way and then spread the morning paper all over the floor of his stall, where he was reading at his leisure. It was an intimidating and surprising sight, occurring as it was in the middle of the hotel barbershop.

I remember very clearly scouting the row of pants and legs for an unoccupied stall where I might perch. I ended up slightly out of sight of the men getting their haircuts and quickly relieved myself without any problem. On the way out, I was still marveling at the men in the barber chairs, who weren't batting an eyelash at the members of their own gender farting and grunting and plopping across the way. This was, I might add, an enormous, white-tiled room, and the toilets were far enough away so that the odors did not apparently reach the barbers and their customers. At least none of the men in the barber chairs were turning up their noses that I could see.

Still, shameless as I was even then, I couldn't get over the design of this facility. And it brought all sorts of questions to mind. A mother innocently taking her little boy down for a haircut would certainly have been in for a rude awakening, although perhaps the hotel staff would have informed her that she could not do so due to the fact that the barbershop doubled as the men's crapper.

In subsequent years I learned that the hotel did away with this concept, shutting down the barbershop and moving the men's room to another floor, where it was much more modestly conceived with the traditional attendant distributing the colognes and towels and holding out his hand for a tip from well-heeled executives. But I have never forgotten my fourteen-year-old amazement at wandering into such a bizarre facility.

To this day, I still wonder what the hell somebody was thinking to come up with that arrangement. Did they run out of money at some point and decide, "Why, of course, we can combine getting a haircut and taking a shit since those things naturally go together? Why, sure--barbers and BM's are a time-honored tradition!"

My Dad, incidentally, refused to believe me when I described it to him later. He insisted I was confused -- that no one could possibly design something so unconventional and unwieldy. He wouldn't even go down with me to the basement so I could prove it to him. Good thing he didn't want a haircut that weekend!

-- The Big Wiper [1]