Restrooms are neither roomy nor restful – an almost-excerpt from my novel.

I know no one likes public bathrooms. Except maybe Larry Craig-doh! But seriously. I can only speak for women’s rooms, but they are built to breed filth, fear, and germ panic.

When I go inside a bathroom, I have to do a quick smell check. It is imperative that I know whether or not I can take my time peeing, or only take as long as the longest breath I can hold. For if it smells bad in a bathroom, I feel like if I breathe it in, I am breathing in that particular smell’s associated germ system.

Then I have to check under the stalls for feet. I make sure the stall I chose is not a stall that someone has just come out of. The germs! I can’t help but feel that entering the general area into which someone has just deposited those things that their own body deems poisonous is like playing Russian Roulette. Surely the airborne E-coli will find its way into my lungs and kill me.

I also need to be sure I pick a stall that has no one in the stalls adjacent. I can’t stand to pee next to others, because then I feel like I have to race. Since I am a hoverer, pee races are not advised as they create a backsplash and my clothes, thighs and the seat get sprinkled with human rain. But don’t worry, I always wipe up the messes I make.

When I used to look more like a boy, I’d walk in and all the women would stare at me, wondering what the hell I was doing in there. They’d locate my lumpy chest, absorb the information they deemed was proof, then sneered, but didn’t chase me out. Sometimes, I’d already be in there and a woman would come in through the door, lay eyes on me, then walk directly back out to check the sign, making sure she walked into the right bathroom. Do people do that? I mean, do people really ever walk into the wrong restroom? Isn’t it the one thing people do right most of the time? Pretty much if we are in there, aren’t we supposed to be in there? Bathroom choice should definitely be an honor system thing.

After my intense moments of deliberation I pick a lucky stall. Using toilet paper, I slide the latch behind me. Which brings me to my first real problem with public restrooms. Why do bathroom stall doors push in? When a door pushes in, it takes all the space up so that, in order to get into the stall and be able to shut the stall door behind you, you have to shimmy yourself in between the side of the toilet seat and the separation wall. Why God? At all costs your leg CANNOT touch that nasty toilet seat, so you press yourself against the separation wall but that thing can’t be all that clean either! You slide the door past your knee and latch it closed, take a breath, then pee.

Now, if the doors simply opened out, you could just walk into the stall and not have to worry about any contact at all. Wouldn’t that make more sense? Not to mention if you are in any way large (I am 5′2″ and 165 and have a hard time!) or have a bag with you (what like 99.9% of women?) then it is guaranteed you will make contact with the disgusting seat and need to destroy your clothes. All because of the hinges on a door being the wrong way. This is why we want to use the wheelchair stall. It is the only reasonable stall.

It makes me wonder if the folks who design bathrooms ever use them. I mean they must, right? Because they are certainly not saving it all for the hole in their back yard. Yet it seems as though they have no idea what would really make a public bathroom functional, clean, and frankly, restful.

So: I carefully pull my pants down and hold them a safe distance from the bowl with one of my hands. The other is for reaching the paper. I watch the stream, making sure it doesn’t splash. You must strike a delicate balance as a hoverer: too close and the back of your thigh or your pants will touch the bowl; too far and your urine will miss, causing the pee to stream over the side of the bowl and probably onto your shoes and clothes.

I never, ever ever sit on a public bathroom toilet seat! If there comes a time when I must, I first wipe it down with toilet paper then place two or more “seat protectors” down before I sit, making sure there will be absolutely no contact with me and that seat. My mother trained me early on never to touch, breathe or sit in a public bathroom. In fact, not even at a friend’s house. When I was little, if I couldn’t hold it until we got home she’d hold me up over the public toilet seat at least a foot, and let me pee from that height down into the bowl. Then she put me down and say “Hands in pockets!” Imagine how difficult and embarrassing if I had to poop! I distinctly remember only letting go of one nugget that slid right into the bowl like a diver, hardly any splash at all. I was humiliated and red, kind of how a city dog must feel in the middle of a high-use pedestrian sidewalk, hunched and humble as a coil of his poop can’t seem to come out fast enough, the whites of his eyes showing every time a passerby looks his way. To this day I can’t go Number 2 anywhere but in my own house.

Of course now I hear the leather-soled heels of a person’s shoes scuff across the tiled floor and head into the stall right next to me. Why, God? The inevitable physics of the multi-stalled bathroom! No matter how many stalls there are, the person who comes in after you will always gravitate to the adjacent one. Who wants to share a wall with someone who is peeing, or worse, when the smell comes right in like there isn’t even a half-metal wall there at all? Human beings: we’re so weird. We make all these things to separate ourselves from each other– computers and e-mail, iPods, cars, portable DVD players—when the truth is, we are simple social animals, craving togetherness even in elimination.

Now it is time to flush. The best flusher I ever used was in an airport bathroom. It was a foot pedal on the floor in easy distance from the rim of the bowl! So why don’t all bathrooms have this? Why does the flusher either have to be 1) the giant steel bar fourteen feet in the air, forcing you to use your hand and therefore grip right into the crap someone else left on their from the diarrhea they had earlier that day, or 2) an automatic flush?

You know the automatic flush never flushes at the right time. You go in, you pull your pants down and Whoooosh! There it goes sucking you and all your belongings down the rabbit hole. You grit your teeth and keep on peeing, because what else are you going to do? Wind, air, and tiny splatters of your pee are hitting you on the backs of your legs and butt, because the velocity of the autoflush is like a Level fucking 4 tornado.

So then you finish. You pull up your pants in a bit of a rage, and get ready to leave. But guess who’s not flushing now…and there, in the bottom of the bowl is your tampon, your poo, and a wad of toilet paper. So you wave your hand over the sensor, trying desperately to set it off: but no dice. Eventually, you’ve got to leave the stall. So you step back, make room for the door, try not to touch what you just deposited into the pretty white porcelain bowl, you look both ways, then you run out of there.

And now it’s time for the hand-washing sham. You come out of there ostensibly with gallons of pee and pounds of poop on your hands. You touch the spigot (depositing germs) you touch the soap (depositing germs) you wash your hands then touch the paper towel dispenser handle (gaining new germs from the people who don’t really wash, just rinse, then get paper towels). So essentially your hands are dirtier now than when you went in, the difference being: it was your germs on your hands before. Now it is someone else’s. Wonderful!

So to all the bathroom architects of the world, here are my tips:

No fabric please. Fabrics just absorb microbial evils. If urine or feces gets on fabric, kiss it goodbye: it instantly soaks in and can never be removed. So all those “lounge” and “salon” areas for women to sit, relax, apply makeup, and blouse out their shirts an smooth their lines? Vinyl and linoleum, please.

What you need to do is make everything automated (except the flusher, which should be an easily accessible foot pedal) so that you slide your hand under the soap and out is comes. You rub your hands together to make suds, then slid them under the spigot and out it comes. You shake the excess water off your hands in the sink, then slide your hand under the paper towels and out it comes. Perfect. Now add to that stall doors that open out, and you’ve got the bathroom of our dreams. And oh yeah: make sure the hooks on the backs of the doors are sturdy. No one wants to put their bag on that disgusting floor.

And finally, please avoid hot air hand dryers. All these things do is burn your hands, chap your hands (even though they say the opposite) and blow bathroom germs all around. Also avoid spigots and soap dispensers that are too close to the vanity. What’s the use washing your hands if in order to get soap and water on them you have to basically lay your hands against the sink? Disgusting!

When it the ordeal is over and my bladder is free, I make my way through the door and it is like moving from back stage to on stage, from hell to heaven: I breathe a clean breath, I put on a smile and I pretend I never went in. Simple as that.

Tags: humor, nanowrimo, nanowrimo excerpt, OCD, public restrooms