In September of 2003, my friend Dana and I took advantage of $200 round-trip tickets to Amsterdam. The first night, we ingested nearly every type of drug found in the Red Light District, drank copious amounts of booze, and even sat in the audience of a live-sex show. (During one of the acts, a stripper pulled me onstage to eat a banana out of her snatch. Fun!)

Sometime during the day that followed, I discovered one of the most convenient and disgusting aspects of Amsterdam, the urinoir. Located in the middle of the Red Light District, the urinoir is nothing more than a hole in the ground (leading directly into the canal, no doubt) in which to pee, bound by a metal wall that offers semi-privacy and a direct line into the hole. Hit the wall, feed the hole.

Curiosity at what this "urinoir" is.

Finding the urinoir, I was a bit shocked and amused, which was not lost on the guy behind me nor, surprisingly, on the guy in the urinoir.

"Am I really going to do this?"

I got my chance and, thanks to the semi-privacy of the wall, I had no stragefright.

"Forgive me father, for I have sinned..."

After a couple days of pot and mushrooms in Amsterdam, Dana and I took our show on the road, catching a train to Antwerp, Belgium. After spending a few days in a hostel, we upgraded to a bona fide hotel room, complete with private restroom and a working bidet. We were in heaven.

The facility in question.

Being an American all of my life, I’d never had the pleasure of using a bidet. Back where I come from, we use toity paper to clean our behinds. Oh, the wonderful rush of water on a tender taint.

"Yeeee-haw! That's what I'm talkin' 'bout!"

I found these photos digging around in my storage area. It’s nice to see that even back then I was concerned about documenting bathroom experiences.

“Ya gotta spend some time, love
Ya gotta spend some time with me
And I know that you’ll find, love,
I will possess your heart.”
– Death Cab For Cutie
“I Will Possess Your Heart”

Unless you’ve heard me laugh — truly laugh — at something exceptionally funny, it’s safe to say that you know I’m not a woman. Yes, my girlish snicker aside, I am 100-percent man, a hetero-dude who loves naked women as much as divorce lawyers love marriage volatility. I pee standing up (most of the time). I can name nearly every great band of the last twenty years. And I would trade places with Mad Max, Michael Jordan, Darth Vader, and Peter North any day of the week…for various reasons.

As with many men — and what has become the subject of myriad arguments, I can only imagine — I lack insight into the female experience, such as feelings, reaction, interpretation, desires, turnoffs, and the like. Fortunately, I’m not here to rewrite the formula for the next relationship manifesto you’ll seen in the virtual bargain bin on Amazon.com.

The insight I’m looking for is female analysis on the typical restroom experience in this country. I want to know dislikes, expectations, spontaneous fixes, and various anecdotes that I have absolutely no idea about. This meant that I had to spend some time with some girls, get comfortable enough to ask them some uncomfortable questions, and then, well, record them — possess their knowledge. And I wasn’t looking for the type of giggling hair-twirlers who look to their best friend and say “I don’t know” a hundred times before offering a one-word response. I wanted input. This meant I had to hand-select some girls I knew who were not only insightful but funny and clever and totally unafraid of some free-form communication.

The girls who provided responses were more helpful, funny, clever, and, at times, caustic than I could have ever hoped for. So much so that I’ve decided to turn their responses —along with my corresponding input at times as a burgeoning bathroom expert — into a series of blogs that will be published here in the next couple months.

I first asked the ladies about their general impression of restrooms, whether the general state of ladies’ rooms instill much confidence that any given bathroom will be in an acceptable state or if they assumed the worst. “This depends on where I am,” said Pam from Wisconsin. “If I am in a halfway decent restaurant (e.g., something above the level of an Applebee’s), I expect the bathroom to be equivalent to the food (i.e., halfway decent). In office buildings, I expect the same. Places like Target, Kohl’s (i.e., larger retail stores) tend to have smellier bathrooms. A nicer retail store, such as Macy’s, I expect to have a nicer ‘powder room.’ I would say I only assume the worst in fast food restaurants, gas stations, beaches, and other public places, such as rest stops.”

Astrid from Wicker Park agreed. “Generally women’s restrooms are fine — though my standards on the subject are pretty low. Smell isn’t an issue in women’s restrooms so much as filthiness,” Astrid said. “Also, gaggles of women putting on make-up, drunkenly gossiping and blocking the sinks from the rest of us are super annoying.”

Kel from Seattle disagreed. She thought that public ladies’ rooms were some of the most disgusting places on the planet. She had a keen system for avoiding surprises, though: “I keep my expectations very low and then, as someone once taught me, I lower them again.”

Howardina Hughes from Streeterville said she had no patience for public restrooms. “Public restrooms are the bane of my existence. I have dreams — actually they are probably more aptly named nightmares — where I am forced to use some sort of women’s room that is in some state of utter and extreme vileness.”

She went on. “And as long as we are discussing proper terminology ‘Ladies room’ is a misnomer. Rarely do I find a restroom that is ladylike, nor women acting ladylike in them. Who are these women who don’t wash their hands? Who pee on the seats? Who drip everywhere? And a better question, who are these women’s mothers?”

“My heart bleeds for them,” she added.

And I thought men were the only ones with horror stories. Yeesh!

We delve deeper into the world of the ladies’ room in the blog, where we ask the ladies about their experiences in men’s rooms and some of the craziest things they’ve done in bathrooms.

Stay tuned.

Is there an obligation for a nice restaurant such as Everest or Geja’s to have clean restrooms? My opinion? Absolutely. The tab at the end of the meal offers all the evidence you need for this. But if there’s an obligation for one restaurant, does that same obligation stand at a McDonald’s in, say, downtown Chicago, one whose front counter borders on chaos day in and day out? My opinion? No.

For starters, there are no homeless people taking “baths” in the sinks of Everest or Geja’s. No soccer mom from Naperville looking for the Magnificent Mile is popping into either of those places for a hover shot. Secondly, the product. Two dollars for a cheeseburger on your lunch break is a world of difference than the thirty bones you’ll drop down for an appetizer at one of the aforementioned places. Also, consider the amount of clientel. That McDonald’s will see one or two hundred people come in and out between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on any given weekday, their busiest time, while Everest will see maybe forty or fifty people for dinner. But one of those dinner parties will spend more than fifty to sixty of the McDonald’s customers, so there’s where the differences in expectations comes into play.

What to Expect:
Good restaurant owners will know that each diner will use their bathroom at least once during the average dining time. Granted, this is subject to any given patron, but owners/managers should at least calculate for this. Bar managers should add two or three times per person, and depending on how disgusting they’re willing to let their establishment get, they should send someone in with a bucket for a quick scrub-down once every two to three hours. Or maybe, for a restaurant, once before the dining rush and once immediately afterwards, if not at the end of the night. Either way, you can’t go wrong with a scrub-down every two hours, again, depending on the rush and how many people are coming in and out. No sense sending someone in there to empty the garbage can when there’s been two old bats sitting at the bar all day, each still sipping on their second draft of Pabst.

And let’s think about the historical precedent here: The commode as we know it today is a relatively new luxury/convenience, thanks to Thomas Crapper. (Late 19th Century, early 20th.) And I can’t imagine anyone during the height of the Roman Empire moaning about their sanitation system or the facilities available to them because, as I’ve read and seen on the History Channel time and again, the Romans were as advanced as we were in regard to figuring out how to dispose of their waste. We simply benefit from the hundreds of years of hindsight and gradual technological innovation. There was no recorded precedent for the Romans. They probably figured the system they had worked and their shit don’t stink. And they were probably right.

My Expectations:
A friend asked me if I had taken a picture of the bathroom at Club Sandwich in Sandwich, Illinois (yes, that’s it’s real name), and I said that I had and that it was a pretty standard bathroom, the kind you’d see in any number of diners, dive bars, and the like. She said that I should’ve seen it when the place opened. She said that it was in such a state of disarray that the men patronizing the place would go outside rather than use such a ghastly restroom.

So should I be happy that I used a clean restroom when I found myself at Club Sandwich? Or has this project, i.e., blog/site, given me a new sense of inquisitiveness that propels me to want to see a bathroom in such a shitty state. On the flipside, would I want to use a filthy restroom if I found myself with a surprise attack of diarrhea? Wouldn’t I be grateful that the owners had gutted the filthy restroom and created a somewhat pleasant place to dispense waste? My opinion? I can’t really say.

Ladies’ Expectations:
And before I drag this on any longer: In my experience with ladies’ rooms, which is slim, I have noticed that they are more times than not cleaner than men’s rooms. No surprise there. However, I’ve heard female friends on more than one occasion complain about how filthy ladies’ rooms tend to be and even had one comment that she’d rather use any men’s room stall than use a typical stall in the ladies’ room. I found this hard to believe. I’ve spent a lot of time in men’s rooms and figure that men spill about 1/5 of every pee break onto the seat or on the surrounding tile. Think about it. That’s a lot of urine not making it to the bowl.

My first job in Chicago was at a small PR firm at Randolph and Wells. We shared a bathroom with two other companies on our floor. The women at my company would tell tales of a woman dubbed “The Sprayer,” who apparently doused the floor every time she peed. If one of the girls was unlucky enough to be in the next stall, they could count on getting some splashback on their shins. I vividly remember them warning each other as they grabbed the bathroom key, “The Sprayer was in there,” alluding to the puddles surrounding the toilet.

Yes, girls can be bad, but I wouldn’t say they’re worse. At this point. I plan on expanding on this for a future blog. I’ll have to find some ladies to talk about their a) experiences and b) expectations…anonymously, of course.

Great Expectations:
So should we expect a clean restroom at a four-star restaurant and expect a less-than-sparkling one anywhere with high foot traffic? My opinion? Probably. But part of the fun I’ve had doing this blog is if I find the reverse to be true. Really, expectations are nothing if not anticipation of a letdown.

Byrrd
Friday, February 13, 2009
2:22 p.m.

You have to go again?!

Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that…

It’s become a part of my character — as a source of derision (“You’ve got the bladder of a sixty-year-old man”; “You’ve got the bladder of a three-year-old girl”; “You’ve got no bladder whatsoever”) and bewilderment (“But you just went!”) and outright embarrassment (asking to go in a job interview, sneaking through people in the middle of a theater — yeah, I’m that guy). All of which can happen in the course of one day.

Yes, I’ve learned to live with a small bladder. For the most part it doesn’t affect anyone and hasn’t proven to be that much of a nuisance to me, so before you tell me to go running for the Flomax, let me say that I’ve got 15-20 years until middle age so I’m not ready for a prescription to control a problem that mostly affects guys old enough to be my father. Might as well put me in a pair of Depends.

No, the reason I mention this small bladder I’m forced to live with is because without it this site would still be floating in cyberspace in a sea of ones and zeroes…instead of a site dealing with numbers one and two. In a way. More than the act, this site focuses on the rooms themselves, what makes them unique, interesting, boring, disgusting, or just plain odd. I also mention what I’m doing at the time to put some context behind the pictures and words. And many times they aren’t rooms at all, but alleys, fields, bushes, driveways, foyers, parking garages.

This site is not entirely without precedent. Crappers Quarterly (http://www.crappersquarterly.com/index.htm) focuses more on, as its title suggests, crapping, and I’ve found the site to be wonderfully perverse and hilarious. But it seems to have been abandoned as it started to build some reviews. Then there’s Poop Report (http://www.poopreport.com/), “your #1 source for your #2 business,” a fantastic site that features stories and poems and anecdotes about the brown stuff — and even honors its greatest contributor with the Poolitzer Prize. Genius. But different from what I’m going for.

I put the wheels in motion for this project on June 14, 2006. From there, I started accumulating pictures and writing accounts for each day, documenting only new bathrooms I use on a given day, thus avoiding seeing a thousand pictures of my home can, and I really had no idea how the end product would look. Hell, I’m new to the blogosphere so I’m not really sure if this will be the final iteration of this site. I do know that it’s a work in progress, and that I’m going to keep recording bathrooms and thoughts — some bathroom accounts will be short, maybe two lines, while others will be inspired and end up being long-winded ruminations. If you do some searching in here, it’s easy to see how that can happen.

So feel free to look around, and if there are any bathrooms out there you find interesting and would like to share, I want to see them. Navigate your way to the “Contact” page and send your information and photos, and I’ll most likely post them in the Men’s Room or Ladies’ Room, depending, of course, on what’s what in the gear department. If you’d like to see the bathrooms I’ve found myself in these past nearly three years, navigate to “Bathrooms By Month.” This is all me. And if you don’t want to wade through page after page, check out the search feature and type in some keywords. You know the drill.

And definitely come back and visit. I’ll be posting blogs on a regular basis, though, again, having just gotten up and running with this site, it’s hard to say how often. The bathrooms, though, will be constantly updated, so there’s always going to be new content to see at Ugh, the Places I Go!

Byrrd
January 27, 2009
12:25 a.m.