by tim rogers
11082005
???????????
So it turns out I've grown up into an adult who enjoys a peaceful, quiet bowel movement every day.
At night, I dine on food -- very foody food, these days, for that's what money buys -- and in the afternoon, I eat this curry-rice combination at the cafeteria upstairs, on the top floor, sitting in front of a window by myself with a cellular phone, sometimes catching a glimpse of my clean-shaven reflection, sometimes feeling dizzy, sometimes tracking crows with my eyes as they disappear out past vanishing skyscrapers in the mist. I am an adult, eating an adult meal, working in an adult company full of adults. At precisely noon-thirty I board the elevator headed upstairs; at precisely ten-thirty the next day -- exactly twenty-two hours later, as per high school biology textbooks, I feel a burning that borders on yearning. I stand up suddenly, snap my fingers, and point finger pistols at the secretary, who's by now staring at me. "Toire toire, toiretoiretoire," I say, and she grins and says, "See you later!" in this calm way.
I then find myself in the bathroom. It's dark, smells of cherry air-freshener. The floors are clean enough to -- well, let's not say "eat off of," because if you're like me, nothing is clean enough to eat off of (we can only compromise). Let's say the floors are clean enough to sit on. Indian-style. Wearing pants. Most of the employees in the floor this toilet serves wear little slippers around the office. I really wish I had some of those slippers. I just sit around in my socks. The slippers are all too small for my feet. I get three or four bizarre compliments a day about the size of my feet, usually from Chinese women. Here I could make a joke about the Cultural Revolution if I suspected you'd have the knowledge to be properly offended.
So I'm in the toilet, and it's clean. I set my phone down on the little table -- in case it rings -- and maybe I read a book, or a shoujo manga, or look over some printouts. That's what I do. That's my job -- looking over printouts of videogame boxes to make sure they don't suck. I can do this anywhere -- even on a toilet. Though I usually do it while sitting in a nice comfortable chair, or standing on the window ledge and looking out at Tokyo Highway Route 246 and wishing I had a cup of tea. I get the cup of tea. I drink it, the clock strikes ten-thirty, and I'm in the bathroom. Sometimes I don't look at the printouts, sometimes I sit there thinking about rock and roll. The toilets here are conducive to such thinking. I set aside a little time a day for it. I eat dinner like a Spanish person, at about nine in the evening, though I reckon I usually eat something with a lot of tomatoes, which speeds up the shitification of it, which means I'm going to be sitting on the toilet again at shortly after six, which is shortly before I go home. It all works out in the end; twice a day, I get a little break. I sit down on the robotic toilet seat and my thighs warm up. I relax. I think about rock. I think about going home and playing my guitar. I usually end up doing that, and then I eat something, and then I go to sleep.
I like to think of myself as a courteous defecator. The people around here take pretty erratic lunch-breaks; some go as early as eleven, and some go as late as one. It's for this reason that the cafeteria runs a flexible schedule when it comes to lunch service. They are efficient. You take one look at the young girl who serves that curry rice, and her perfect bandanna, her perfect straight teeth, her curled skin, her cherry-dyed hair, and you hear her tell you good afternoon in that softly husky voice, and you know, deep down, that any meal she serves you will digest with physiology-textbook precision. So it is that, owing to the rough two-hour range of the lunch period, we have a rough two-hour Morning Shit Rush. Though when evening comes I tend to take as long as I have to, in the morning, as I said, I am courteous. I take no more time than is necessary. I suppose when I was young, and shat the shits of boys, I shit shortly; well now, I have grown, I have cast away childish shit, and I am a man, and I shit the shit of a man. I'm not yet fifty years old, or Korean, so I can't stand (or sit) to shit in one toilet for more than thirty minutes at a time. I do tend to, at least, eat like a Korean, at least at night, so sometimes I acheive a flow like a gentle firehose of clam chowder, and sometimes I overdo it, making the toilet tremble like a lion was roaring, while being dunked face-first in it.
Ten minutes is how long my shit takes to complete. Now a regular adult, I eat regularly, and I shit regularly. I get it finished. I say, let's do this shit efficiently. Let's get this shit out of the way. I make sure not to carry anything into the shitter that I'd be uncomfortable with anywhere else. The reasons for this are as plain and clear as they are brown and muddy. Warm robotic toilet, dim lights, safe, clean floor. Shitting in socks, feet firm on a smooth, hard floor. This is comfort. Your mind doesn't wander in shituations like this, because it doesn't have to. You are an animal blest.
The toilet seats all have bidets. I don't find this too weird. I've seen bidets on toilets before, even messed around trying to use one once or twice, and ended up feeling too French. The water is warm, which is nice. It's a perfect temperature, it must be heated to exact human body or something. I wouldn't be surprised if the computer chip in the toilet seat measures the temperature of my ass down to ten significant digits Celsius, reports back to the water heating cylinder, and readies the bidet. Then I don't press the bidet. I stand up, flush the toilet, and it sucks that shit and that paper down like it was a fat little kid with a straw in a root beer float. The computer chip -- in Our Company, they all run on something we call the "Emotion Engine" -- puts on a little sad face and says, "BIDET CIRCUITS GETTING LONELY." I think something like a hundred yen a month is taken out of my salary for the bidet; if I actually used the bidet, they're probably only take twenty yen. In a World-class Japanese Corporation, you pay for what you don't use. If you think that sounds silly, try telling that to these Millions of dollars in profit.
The idea of the bidet doesn't bother me. I've gotten over it. I said that in the last paragraph. I say it again, here, for emphasis. The bidet doesn't bother me. Sometimes, in anonymous, public, department-store settings, I'll gladly wait in line to use a toilet with a bidet. This isn't because I want to use the bidet; it's just because the fact that the toilet has a bidet is important to me. It's the thought that counts. It elevates the toilet from being a mere hole in the ground. They have plenty of those in Tokyo -- holes in the ground, paved with porcelain, hand rails on the wall, rubber grips stained the color of dehydrating urine with the hands of millions of men who didn't want to squat, yet faced a choice: squatting right now, or certain death on board a long train home.
Sometimes, after waiting in line for a public toilet, I'll hear a telltale hiss. The man in the neighboring stall is -- is -- he's using the bidet! It causes me to put on my chuckling face. I don't actually chuckle out loud, because to chuckle while shitting would constitute shitting discourteously. It's funny to think that men actually use the bidet. You go to a hundred fancy toilets, and you might not hear the bidet once. Yet you go to a fancy toilet, maybe in a big hotel in Shinjuku, and look out -- the guy in the neighboring stall (sixty million people live within an hour of Shinjuku, and it seems that half of them are there all the fucking time, so of course the toilets are always occupied) will use that bidet because he's the kind of man to use his fingers to do toilet paper's job.
I guess the idea of a bidet -- and I understand both that I'm dwelling on this and that it's not the central point of this piece -- is the same as the idea that it's okay to slip your hand between your butt cheeks if you're in a shower, surrounded by pouring water, coated in a thin layer (or thick lather) of soap. The ass is one of those things you have to clean, because it's stereotyped as dirty. I'm sure it's not exactly filthy all of the time, though as a man who has on occasion (and not shamefully) cast a glance in the toilet before flushing, I can admit that whatever produces that can't exactly be something you'd introduce to your grandmother without a thorough, continuous washing. I guess the French -- good on them -- discovered (in addition to "young girls look really good in this school uniform") that the bidet is a proper way to assure that the booty gets the best possible cleaning after doing its dooty. What it does is create a localized shower environment in the vicinity of your asshole. Who knows -- maybe the American obsessive-compulsive paranoia about "always wash your hands after you use the bathroom!" is a leftover from French hygenic history. We know the French were filthy; we hear tell of urns in the palace stairs at Versailles, full to the brim of the piss of passing royals. We hear about ladies hiking up their skirts and wiping away menstrual blood with napkins. We hear that, and think, "Eeew." It's a queer image -- a lady in a shimmering, gorgeous dress, abandoning the banquet hurriedly one second, and coming back a second later adjusting her long white right glove. It's safe to say that all the stories we hear about the sterility of old aristocrats, the likes of whom babbled about politics and did nothing dirty outside of cheat on their wives or husbands, have such a glow of cleanliness about them because their writers chose to ignore the filth the way a Hollywood film might choose to rename "Coca-Cola" "COLA," the way a Japanese manga about Tokyo will scarcely ever mention the name of a real-life train station. There's a dissimilar shynesses in the arts that imitate life because they have to and the arts that imitate(d) only the parts of life they saw fit to imitate. Or maybe someone (one of the Louises, or Marie Antoinette, perhaps?) saw fit to obtain "all manner of filth" as an intellectual property before anyone started making literature anyone in the 21st century would care to read. Who knows.
Either way, we end up with rigorously, robotically clean futures, here in the present; the Japanese were mostly content to do their own thing, until 1868, when suddenly they were threatened with genocide unless they traded their precious silk (which wasn't even their invention) for American things like Tabasco sauce, which they didn't even want. They evaluated the Western world, and after two world wars had been fought and won, when they started installing toilets a man can sit down on, they put bidets on all of them. The Japanese are notorious culture-borrowers; nothing they have here is their own. The roofs of their traditional architecture are Chinese in origin, sumo wrestling is Chinese, sushi is Korean -- we've been over this before. Yet I'd like to believe they borrow things, usually, with good taste (with the exception of squid-ink pasta) and put good things to good effect (except hip-hop). I'm not puzzled by the bidet -- it was most likely selected because the Japanese, high on trusting the French since the schoolgirl outfit proved so amusing, decided to roll with the idea -- so much as I'm pleasantly surprised to find Japanese people using it.
You'll hear it hiss, and then gurgle. Sometimes, before it hisses and gurgles, you'll hear a newspaper folding or a magazine closing. A leather briefcase's buckles snapping open, the newspaper being crammed in. The buckles closing. Everything must be out of the way. Click, click, click the bidet head unfolds underneath the thick plastic toilet seat. Then hiss hiss, gurgle gurgle. There's sometimes a crunch and a scrunch of the hollow plastic seat (it has heating coils in it, remember) as the driver in the adjacent lane shifts around, trying to center the bullseye. The shifting lasts until it stops, and the gurgling becomes hushed, until it suddenly stops with a snapping click-click-click. Then the toilet paper rolls, tumbles. Roll, tumble. Then you hear it ripped off with a snap. It's usually of tough substance, more positioned to dry your hands than do anything else. You hear the sound of it being crunched between two hands. It makes no sound when it enters the toilet. There is standing, belt-buckling, and an echoed flush. The briefcase raised from the floor, the door opened. You've yet to lower the landing gear on your own personal shit-plane (perhaps you're still in the middle of the Pacific), so by the time you arrive at your destination, unbuckle your safety belt, and wash your hands like a good American, the bidet-user will be long-gone. As most toilets in Japan tend to have three or four stalls, if you were waiting in line before boarding, the chances that the guy who comes to shit in the stall next to you is the guy who was standing behind you in line resemble a veritable shell game of toilet circumstance. It's all anonymous. Bidet as you are, bidet as you like. No one's going to think you the lesser man, most of all me.
AND THEN WE HAVE THE TOILET IN MY OFFICE. It has two urinals and two stalls. Two stalls! Two gorgeous stalls with floors you could sit on (Indian style, wearing pants)! You sit on the toilet, feel warm, think about whatever helps you cope with the loss of a little weight (ho!), and go about filing your papers in the office. And then -- and then -- the guy next to you uses the bidet.
I used to live near a Korean man who shit some epic shit. He would occupy the only toilet and make ferocious sounds about it. We'd all wait -- we lived in a guest house here in Tokyo -- for this guy to finish. It was some epic shitting, the shitting this guy shit. We sometimes got bored and/or tired of that shit. Sometimes we had shit of our own we couldn't get out of the way until he finished with his shit. He was a comic figure; when he stepped out of the toilet in his too-loose yellow T-shirt and pink baggy gym shorts, drank a two-liter of mugicha and then flashed us a thumbs-up and shouted "OKAYSORRY!" with a pleasant smile and a mouthful of tea, well shit -- we thought that shit was hilarious. We loved that guy. Eventually, one day, he produced a black suit with a black tie and black sunglasses, received a briefcase from the younger Korean man who was filling his mugicha bottle every morning and handing him papers on the rooftop, and -- I shit you not -- he checked out, never to return again. Days later, hundreds of people were dead, though most of them unrelated, and by natural causes, so the jury's still deliberating on what his shit had to do with that shit.
Now, flash forward a couple of years, where I work in an office where discussing the bowel movements of Korean unintentional cartoon characters is not welcome. It is no problem to talk about girls or pornography. It just seems like shit is taboo. This is because the toilet has a grip on us all. It is fine and luxurious, and it has a fine and luxurious bidet, and the bidet is never, under any circumstances, a topic of conversation amongst co-workers. The world in Japan has never warmed up to the bidet the way the bidet warms up to your ass. I'm certain the people who work for companies that make bidets don't even talk about their use. There are engineers, and then there are engineers. I'd love to sit in on a board meeting of the Toto Corporation -- Japan's proudest maker of robotic toilet seats, and a multi-million-dollar company -- and keep a digital tally of the number of innuendoes flying around. Man, I'd run out of room on my hands and feet, and probably have to use other, more arbitrary body parts. Then the shit would really hit the fan.
When the guy in the stall next to you uses the bidet just as you reach for the toilet paper, what do you do? Do you hurry up so you won't have to catch him at the sink in thirty seconds? Or do you slow down, waiting for him to leave first? Last Wednesday, I was deadlocked with a bidet-user (who had also apparently eaten something . . . soupy-sounding for lunch the day before) who just wouldn't leave the toilet. I sat there praying -- come on, get out of here. He was ashamed. He didn't get the idea that I wasn't going to judge him either way. He didn't realize I was giving him clearance. I wasn't going to say to him, "You can leave first, man," because he'd probably recognize my voice, and that would defeat the purpose. I wanted him out first so I wouldn't have to look him in the eye. I didn't want to look him in the eye because he didn't want to look me in the eye. Even big, chubby, shameless Chinese dudes are shy about their toilet humour. It's a cultural gap for which the world has not enough steel to bridge. They'd need to start dismantling train tracks all over Japan. Might as well let it be. Let the river flow. Let it go. Slow and low, that is the tempo.
Eventually, I picked up my cellular phone and starting clicking random buttons. I updated my Japanese blog, saying only, "As a child who wanted to be an airplane pilot, a prosthetic surgeon, a film director, a lawyer and a rock star, I never once imagined I'd be working a part-time job with full-time pay for one of the world's top consumer electronics manufacturers, and updating a blog in Japanese while sitting on a toilet, waiting for a man who used the bidet to leave and wash his hands before me so I don't have to make eye-contact with him." Just as I finished this one sentence, he opened the door and plodded out in a silent huff.
He didn't wash his hands.
That was a close call.
In our floor, there are, I suppose, twenty-five employees. Maybe twelve males, thirteen females. For every chief there is a secretary. Et cetera. Me and Drew once wrote half a song lyric about it: "Sexy secretaries. And sexy section chiefs. Having sexy sex. On sexy desks." Repeat ad nauseum. You can also try this little tune, too -- "It's amazing what you'll find, when you're dancing in a line, with--" well, maybe I'd better not say that last word. That's the soul of the song, that last word. We should make a recording of that one, put it up here. I'm sure Drew could do a little something with a witty funk guitar style.
I'm straying from the point. And I haven't even gotten to it yet. Let's try here: This world is full of compound psychopaths. I take it psychopaths who blame their environment for driving them to kill are really copping out. Saying "movies made me kill" or "music made me kill" or "videogames made me kill" or even "I went temporarily nuts, man!" is a lot like a tiger saying "I'm a tiger because I'm a tiger!" I'm not saying I support psychopaths, or even that I understand them. I'm just saying that they're made up of little things. They're people whose inner filing cabinets are getting messier with every new buzzword the media makes up. Normal people -- the earliest humans, according to research archaeologists are conducting in tandem with the police, were task-oriented individuals (who also beat their women, which wasn't so nice) -- have a natural way of slotting things into their right places. Psychopaths in prehistoric times would most likely find themselves gored to death after they tried to kill a fucking wooly mammoth with a coconut. This isn't to say that they're stupid -- for all you know, that dumb psychotic bastard thought he was going to win. So yes. Keep that in mind:
I asked the readers of this page last week if they'd ever brushed their teeth in the shower, and if they'd think it was weird if someone else brushed their teeth in the shower. I asked this because I saw a man brushing his teeth while standing at the urinal here in this fancy, clean office building in the fanciest, cleanest part of Japan, and maybe the world, even. I saw another man with one hand working a toothbrush and the other steadying his johnson (I didn't see the johnson, so I'm not sure it deserves a capital letter) to piss. Once I saw the third man doing this, I figured, shit, I guess it's normal. In fact, it's beyond normal -- have you ever taken a morning urine-evacuation with a toothbrush in your mouth? Some of you out there get drunk, or get high, and I know some of you have weird mornings every once in a while. I know this because I get neither drunk nor high, and I have some weird mornings. Though it's been a long time since I've had the luxury of a morning shower (lord, six months now -- I can only shower at night, or shower in the morning in a public bath), I will have it once again, and I'll probably brush my teeth in there, while I'm at it. I'll do this after I go running in the morning. Going running at night -- which I'm doing lately -- is going to get tougher as the nights get colder.
I spend nine hours a day in this office; don't take this to mean that I'm a hard-worker all of a sudden. I spend maybe an hour and a half actually doing anything. The rest is a lunch break. I used to see "The Jetsons" as a kid, where George has to get into work at nine in the morning and press this one button, because the button can't press itself, and it never struck me how lonely that is until I got older, got a job, quit the job, was told I was fired on the way out, and spent the next four years wandering the earth wronging rights when I should have been trying to live comfortably. Don't buy into the rock and roll stereotype of a man who wanders and plays the guitar under bridges. Your hands get cold. Your bones try to stand on end all at once. If you're going to get better at guitar, you need a room, and some headphones. Suffice it to say, all I have now are the guitar, and the headphones. I'd kill for a room, I swear. If they let me take my guitar into the office (I'm guessing they wouldn't like that), I tell you, I'd work overtime.
So suffice it to say the office is something like your second home. It certainly feels that way. It's definitely a place to get comfortable brushing your teeth (even I have a travel toothbrush in my desk drawer), comfortable enough to urinate while doing so. If they had showers -- actually, they do, in the basement. Well, I was going to say that some of the higher-ups probably feel comfortable pissing in that shower. The comfort applies to realms outside excretory functions and tooth-brushing: comfortable chair, personal stereo, spotless toilet. The spotless part irks me the most, because being apparently pre-diabetic, I have to urinate something like twenty times a day, and I find that six times out of ten, the maid is in there wiping a smudged corner of the urinal next to the one I've set my sights on (then again, there are only two), and that she's wiping the faucet just when I go to wash my hands. She's an upkeep lady, not a "cleaning" lady; it's her job to wash all the toilets in the building, and at her white-haired, drooping-faced age she's learned that it's best to keep them clean rather than clean them. She works tirelessly, buzzing around twenty-two bathrooms on eleven floors with her little service elevator. I don't think anyone else uses that elevator. She's a superstar. God bless her. She always does a little bow and gently tells me, "Good evening, sir." I want to look at her like Aragorn at the end of "Return of the King," and be like, "Hobbits, you bow for no man." I really mean it. It'd probably come off as condescending. The formality creeps me out a bit; she does more for people's lives than I do; then again, maybe calling people "sir" is part of the same pleasure she seems to derive out of keeping toilets clean. She's a human being detached from all the things that make human beings go wrong. She goes home every night at six-forty-five, the same time as me, and she sometimes gives me that little head-bow in the elevator, and sometimes she's not there at all.
I think if I were a greater human being, just by a little bit, I'd be a real entreprenuer. Working for a company makes me realize that my four years of forced frugal living (a more politcally correct way to say "homeless," I don't know) taught me a lot about efficiency and waste. I sit around questioning where my salary comes from, and how many others in the office could be let go; it's taken a while, though it's finally sunken in that companies, even enormous ones, do not aspire to be universes unto themselves; they do not desire to grow endlessly; they are content providing their employees and consumers with varying degrees of comfort, videogames, high-definition televisions, salaries, proprietary storage mediums (!), and the occasional fancy omelette for lunch. They say the section chief is paying for it, and he's the one to put down the cash, though we all know where that cash is really coming from. I'd personally rather eat something cheaper and, by my tongue's tale, tastier, though hell if I'm going to try telling him that. I guess you could call these my ethics. What a strange set of ethics I've grown up to have, spending more time a day figuring out in my head where each yen of my salary comes from, thinking of who I'd lay off if I were Chief Officer In Charge of Off-Laying, than actually doing the research I'm paid to do. I mean, that's not to say I don't do what I'm supposed to do, because I do. I do it exceptionally well, even. I still wouldn't fire that maid. If Ken came over here and said, "It's you or that maid," I'd say, "Well, then, I guess it's me."
If the maid is a human detatched from wrong, then there lurks a psycho-killer somewhere in our office. I will relate this story now; I think I've given it adequate preface. It's not much of a story. It goes like this:
I hate the sound of people brushing their teeth. It really disturbs me. Especially when they start doing the hefty, bread-and-butter stroke. You know what I'm talking about -- scraping the tops of the teeth. I brush my teeth the way a dentist teaches you to, little half-turns of your wrist, downward from the gums, then a once-over on the tops, then a scrape of the tongue. That's all it takes! Not three minutes, and your teeth are as gorgeous and cavity-free as mine. My dentist -- last time I saw her was five years ago, now that you mention it -- told me that brushing your teeth too much is as bad as not brushing at all. She was wearing a shiny Rolex, so this sheds so new light on the argument of "Why are Japanese people's teeth so bad?" The former multiple-choices were
a.) the dentists suck [the idealist's buck-passing option]
b.) the water doesn't have fluoride in it [the american patriot's option]
c.) the people don't brush their teeth [the misanthrope's option]
and d.) all of the above [the "i live in japan" option]
Now we have a new choice, that being the confused one: "The people brush their teeth too much." I have a friend who must spend a half an hour scraping her teeth in the morning. You see this one guy in the office here sucking a toothbrush at his desk. I guess seeing Japanese people at the office all day is a lot like seeing them at home in the morning: with their pants down (though not (always) literally). I want to jump up and say, "Look at my teeth! Look how perfect they are! I'm not going to say I never brush my teeth, because I don't want to lie to you! I just want to show you the power of moderation!!" They'd probably just laugh at me. That seems to be what they do.
So today, I sit down on the toilet, this morning, for my morning appointment with Dr. Porcelain, and I'm a good lap around the track when someone enters the adjacent stall, sits down, and turns on the bidet without ceremony. I cock my head to one side and wonder -- what the heck? Why the bidet before the shit? And then I hear him opening his little briefcase, which might be an overnight bag. I hear the zipper shake and tinkle once it's open. Yeah, it's a little overnight bag. He's silent for a second, the bidet running. Keep in mind these toilet-seat-embedded bidets are gentler than the French high-pressure models. It won't spray you in the face -- it has a sweet little arc. I don't hear any plastic crumpling at all. He's not shifting on the seat. Just the sound of the bidet hissing.
Then the toothbrush enters his mouth. Scrub scrub scrub. Scrub scrub scrubscrub.
What. The. Hell?
My mind races. My hands rise from my -- uh, my knees -- and form fists. Is he brushing his teeth with the bidet? Why? Why? Why? Then I cool down a bit; I figure that my racing mind is connected mostly to my hating of that vile sound, like a hundred wooden spoons dragged across cobblestone on a rainy day, echoed in the shallowness of the room. Maybe he's just shy about brushing his teeth in front of the mirror? Maybe he has a silly little shyness about someone seeing him.
Spit.
The fists form trembling, open hands. No way no way no way. I can almost picture the scene, though for some reason, in my imagination, it's me, not him -- I don't even know who he is at this point -- brushing my teeth, standing in front of the toilet. And it hits me like imaginary anger hits a method actor -- if I were shy about being seen brushing my teeth in front of an office toilet's mirror, I'd be even more shy about the chance of a fellow worker hearing me brushing my teeth in the stall, and then making funny eye-contact with me when I'm on the way out. Oh no -- I'm not a mild-mannered tooth-brusher. I'm brushing my teeth like I want to kill them; like I ate something unholy last night and I want to erase the hate. I'm not shy -- I'm fucking nuts!
Yeah, and then he undid the belt, let slide the pants to the floor, and sat on the toilet. He then ran the bidet. While shitting a hurricane. And brushing his teeth. And gagging as the brush entered his throat. He was probably pissing at the same time. If he'd also taken the time to jerk off, that would be what we call "A Neopolitan." Yet he one-upped even the Neopolitan. Added a scoop of chunky mint-chocolate-chip on top -- spread his legs, rustled khaki, clinked his belt against the concrete floor, and spat into the bowl.
Ten minutes this cycle persisted. My hands were frozen; my lower colon was bound in fear. Yesterday's curry rice had slammed on the brakes and said, "Whoa now -- that's some offensive shit." I'm sitting there on a toilet, dabbing my sweaty temples with a wad of toilet paper, hands freezing, a bizarre mixture of temperatures and sensations. Never before have I been so startled by a fellow human being's hygiene. I want to see this man's face, so that I know what his kind look like; yet also, I do not want to see his face, for it would make me the only person at the Daily Planet who realizes Clark Kent is Superman, and that would make me a potential hostage of Lex Luthor, and I don't have time for that shit. I hardly have time for this shit -- the toilet this morning overstayed its welcome. The maid ducked in, pushed a mop and bucket in, and then out. Maybe the noise frightened her off. Maybe she'd heard this man before and never felt the courage to look him in the eye. Not at all a curious fear for someone who spends a third her life in bathrooms. We all have places that are our homes; wherever you go, there you are, et cetera. She knew when to light out. I was locked, grimly, trying to finish an important bowel movement. Yet even then, I knew I couldn't fini shit before this man. I'd have to let him go first.
As the frightening, evidently psychotic cycle of hygiene continued, I thought a lot about culture shock. I thought about how my mother once said that she and her co-workers were shocked and appalled when their new Mexican hiree was discovered to be disposing of toilet paper in the garbage can and not the plumbing. I wanted to tell her, Mom, most of the world does it that way. I figured she wouldn't believe me; I hadn't seen any more of the world than she had. All I had, at that point in my young life, was the creativity to hold a hunch, and the innocence to never hold a grudge for reasons of hygiene. Well, now, I've seen essentially the entire world, and I know that most places throw toilet paper away in the garbage can. In some parts of Japan -- even as close to Tokyo as Saitama -- you can find public toilets with little plastic garbage cans in the stalls. My mother was merely being naive about the whole thing, and God bless that about her. Americans are a flushing people; throw it all in the bowl and flush it down. When my parents' septic tank back in Indiana gets full, they all yell at each other, puzzled, about who's flushing down the most toilet paper. Damn it, people, you all are!! If you want the toilet to behave, you're going to have to have it switched out for one of these Japanese robot toilets. They can swallow up anything. They have suction units to aid in the disposal of toilet paper. They're quite fantastic.
And then he stands up and does his belt. He spits into the toilet again. The bidet stops hissing, and then starts again. He scrapes his teeth violently for two more minutes, now spitting every ten seconds. He must have wet the brush so he can rinse his mouth -- this is how you brush your teeth in the shower, you see, without a cup of water. He dries his hands with the toilet paper, crumples it around for a couple seconds, zips up his little bag, throws open the door, and taps out. I'm sitting there breathless. I hear the bathroom door open and close. My traffic jam moves smoothly, until everyone's left town. I wash my hands, splash water on my face, look at myself, and feel all the years catch up with me. I guess I'm grown up now. I might as well get married and buy a dog. Hell, I'm in a confessional mood today. I can't have kids. I tried to donate some sperm for money a long while ago and they told me I just don't have the juice. I asked how many sperm were in the sample, and the doctor said, "Not that many." I said, "Enough to count on two hands?" He said, "Yeah." I told him, "Well, naturally, you counted them, then?" And his reply was, "Yes." And I said, "Well?" And he said, "Well, there weren't any." The question of who to sue about this is answered by "I don't want kids anyway," so lying in court about the boys I wanted to raise to be football stars to make huge money would go against my principles. And the doctor who did the operation on my nuts when I had that hernia -- it must have been him (okay, maybe not) -- though he was a quack and his surgery undid itself seven months later, he still seemed like a nice enough guy. Told me not to look at my urine the first couple of times I pissed after the surgery. He told me this as the anaesthesiologist administered his namesake. I woke up remembering his words. Maybe he had a sense of humor. They led me to the toilet, and squirt. Like the hiss of a bidet. Blood as red as black, sticky, cold as Coca-Cola syrup. Everything smelling like formaldehyde.
I emerged into the hall. I had just witnessed Psychotic Hygiene. It had been a psychological accident of self-maintenence. No man who would enter a toilet for such reasons could be normal -- more than that, he could not possibly be not a potential murderer. There's a psychiatrist on staff in the complex here; if he's worth his salary (someone here has to be -- the maid can't be the only one), then when I told him about what I heard, he'd pick up the red phone and call the police to see about installing cameras in there so they can catch the bastard and lock him up before he causes someone serious harm. Jack Nicholson's character in "As Good as it Gets" did a thing with Neutrogena soap, using one bar until it worked up a lather and then throwing it away. That was cute like a big dopey basset hound. This massacre involving the bidet, the toothbrush, and yesterday's lunch was a cold-blooded, rabid pit-bull of an act.
Back in the office, stretching my back -- I look over the wall that seperates our section from the other section on the floor. I look to see a man shifting into place, settling down gently onto an until-recently-wet pair of buttocks. No one is moving. I look at my section. Everyone is either sitting down relaxed or standing up watching softcore porn on a big TV in the corner and giggling in the name of research. A man with a leathery face stands in front of the coffee robot, waiting for it to dispense his cup of black coffee. I look at him. He looks at me. He looks over my shoulder, at the door beyond me. He looks down at the coffee cup, the power meter growing, indicating that it's soon time to drink. He licks his top teeth under his lip. He takes the coffee, gives me a nod, and heads out into the hall -- into the bathroom. I relax. I look back out into the office.
It could be anyone. One day I might lock eyes with him. Now that I know it wasn't the chief at the coffee machine -- well, it's one of the other ten men on this floor. The candidates will drop one by one.
Does this mean I should quit my job now, or what?
--tim rogers
