Bathroom Cop
Poop is always in fashion, but our moment is unusually ripe with it. Recent months have seen stern warnings about the health risks of aerosolized feces and, notoriously, an injunction against rimming from the New York City Health Department. Wastewater surveillance, we have learned, may lead to a brighter tomorrow. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal has noted an uptick in bidet sales, many from a startup called TUSHY, whose copywriters earn their paychecks: “We’re a little constipated with orders … our TUSHY Team is working their butts off to drop this next load.” A five-thousand-word piece about the economics of potty training surged in popularity and Banksy, working from home like the rest of us, has made a canvas of his lavatory.
What to say about all this? Maybe the toilet-paper shortage, pressing thoughts bowel-ward, has loosed our animal spirits. Maybe we have the space, finally, to linger on such things: relax the pace of life a few clicks and we are all Germans, reading the tea leaves through our toilet seats. Whatever the case, the renewed focus on studying, avoiding, or otherwise neutralizing our excrement suggests an urgent fear of our bodies and their emissions, effortless reservoirs of disease. Everyone poops, no one is safe, and a grand international scatology could be an idea whose time has come.
Feeling as impure as the next recluse—my TUSHY bidet is due this month, be it known, in the best-selling “white/bamboo” color—I put on White Shit’s record Sculpted Beef, from 2009. A hardcore band of no particular renown, White Shit* performed for just two years before they, too, were cast into history’s septic tank. Their song “Bathroom Cop” is about the troubles of enforcing a certain social contract:
Well there’s no benefits and the hours are terrible
I’m just doing my job
There’s only two things you should be doing in there
You can bet I’ve seen it all
The most degrading, the most repulsive, most horrifying things I’ve ever seen
You’ve been in there a long time
Don’t make me come in there …
I’ve got a badge
Hearing the song made me miss waiting in line for the bathroom. When the mind thrills to that—when nostalgia defaults to nostalgie de la boue—you know you’re in trouble. Specifically, I missed the shaggy camaraderie of a bathroom line that’s too long and too slow, stalled by a common enemy, the person or people in the bathroom. I missed the conjecture about what unnatural acts might cause one to remain for so long behind locked doors. I could even bring myself to miss the queasy foreboding that comes when, at last, it’s your turn to cross the threshold, and you must confront the evidence of your predecessors. As revolting as such scenes can be (especially should it fall to you to clean them up) each is the record of a crowd, a group inscription in filth. I remember a night at the Talking Head in Baltimore, circa 2007, when the venue was so packed and the restrooms in such disrepair that men and women alike were peeing in the sinks. Every lock was broken, every fixture clogged and spilling over onto the floor, which splashed with puddles of waste.
Lest you think that I’m like a baseball fan who enjoys the long row of urinals more than the ballpark franks, I should say that the feeling passed quickly—“Bathroom Cop” lasts less than two minutes, and by the end of it I was comfortable again in hygienic isolation. What persisted is the sense that I’ve forgotten more than I remember; that there are dimensions of public life I don’t know I’ve lost, that will require a fragile bodily trust to regain. The Washington Post reports that Americans dread the return of the public restroom, which the paper describes, swooningly, as “a tight, intimate, and potentially germ-infested space.” Amid details about touch-free fixtures and widely spaced urinals are two remarkable sentences. “A Texas barbecue restaurant reopened only after hiring for a new job category: a bathroom monitor, who assures that people waiting their turn are spaced well apart… Some mayors have even talked about hiring guards to assure that toilet paper doesn’t walk off the premises.” The Bathroom Cop has reported for duty.
*I discovered the group when my own band, Vulture Shit, looked for other shit-minded acts on the horizon. Not surprisingly, they were legion. White Shit were one of the better ones, though Full Toilet were pretty good, too, and subtler, in their way. Which reminds me: I wonder sometimes about the fate of Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet, stolen from Blenheim Palace last September and still missing. Is it in use, wherever it is? I hope so. It strikes me that, now more than ever a place where no strangers are allowed, a master bathroom is the perfect hiding place for it.
