BIHKAL: Riverside Perk

It’s time for the next installment of my N-part series: "Bathrooms I Have Known and Loathed." This time, we’ll take a journey back to my late teen years, a good deal of which were spent at the Riverside Perk coffee house in Wichita, Kansas.
I always rather enjoyed the Perk. The coffee was good, the atmosphere was good, and occasionally you would see ridiculous paintings by local artists. My favorite? An 8 foot tall carrot, rendered in a cubist style, complete with a frame made from 10-inch wide hammered copper. It could have been mine for the low, low price of only five thousand dollars. If you buy in the next twenty minutes, we’ll throw in a 5 foot radish! That’s a three thousand dollar value, for free!

Anyhow, in this small local coffee shop lurked a bathroom left over from CIA experimentation in psychological torture techniques. A crack team of hardened surrealists could not have developed a more unnerving public space. The bathroom was always very clean and well kept, and no single component was particularly disconcerting, when considered in isolation. Taken as a whole, however, the bathroom insinuated itself into the darkest depths of my lower mind. In an attempt to recreate the effect, I shall now switch to second person; please secure your safety bar, and keep your hands inside the car at all times.

You walk down a small, short hallway, through a beaded curtain, past an antiquated pay-phone. You turn right and find the men’s restroom. You open the door. The first thing you notice is that the room is very small: only about 5 by 6 feet. There is a single toilet and a sink. Also, the floor is not quite level. This creates an inexorable pull to the rear of the room, while ensuring that no single corner in the bathroom is quite square. The whole affair is vaguely disorienting, in a subliminal sort of way. Your disorientation grows as you notice that the walls are all papered with a giant brown cowprint pattern. Yee-haw! The walls seem to swim in and out of focus, like so many little dogies gettin’ along in the dusty parts of your psyche. Attempting to find your grip on sanity just long enough to relieve yourself, you decide to focus on some particular place in the room. You look directly forward, above the toilet. Looking back at you: a 1950’s pinup girl dressed in full cowboy get-up, complete with six-shooters and spurs. And she’s topless. And she’s looking directly at you. And so are her breasts. You suddenly have the irrational fear that someone is going to open the door and catch you staring intently at Chesty LeRoux’s last stand with your pants undone. You turn quickly to your right only to find…

SOMEONE STARING AT YOU!

It takes awhile to recover from the initial shock, then you realize…

YOU’RE STARING AT YOU!

Has the bathroom actually warped space time?! No, there’s just a giant mirror (insert obligatory "The English Beat" reference here) installed directly to your right (recall, if you will, that this room is already incredibly small). Now you, too can enjoy catching yourself staring intently at Chesty LeRoux’s last stand with your pants undone. Oh yes, above the mirror: a giant pair of steer horns (only slightly larger than the kind you might find as a hood ornament on a Cadillac El Dorado). At least there’s a strange 50’s western theme emerging. This gives you comfort. It all begins to fit together (if perhaps a little sloppily). Then you turn to your left. Look! It’s another picture. A picture of a topless ice skater. An incongruous topless ice skater.

Now, your choices have been reduced to a giant longhorn-framed portrait of the jackass currently trapped in the hellish "other place" that is Riverside Perk’s bathroom, Shootout at the Double-D Corral, or Tiffany the Inexplicable Topless Ice Princess. You look towards the corner, the last potential refuge for your poor eyes. There you find an antiquated breaker box, complete with scarily decayed wires hanging out of it. "Surely, this can’t still be powering this entire building," you think, when suddenly it emits A GIANT BLUE FLASH and the lights go out. While you attempt to finish your bathroom business in the dark, the doorknob begins to rattle and jangle maniacally. You manage to squeak, "Hang on a minute," in a tiny frightened voice, then fasten your belt and escape, only to find the attractive coffee-shop girl blocking the doorway. You scurry back to your table, happy to have escaped with your sanity. So happy that two hours later when you realize you’ve been walking around for two hours with your fly undone, you’re not even upset. It just reminds you of how wonderful it is to be alive—alive in a world where the familiar rules of logic, time, and space still apply.

Yes. This actually happened to me.

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X-Men Movie and Computer Woes

Amy dragged me out to see the new X-Men movie on Friday. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. Maybe it's just because I went with low expectations, but I don't understand why reviews for the movie have been so lukewarm. Is it great cinema? No, but neither were the first two. I understand that the character development and dialogue were not quite as sharp as in the first two movies, but I found the plot at least passable rich, and I felt that the conflict between the X-Men and the Brotherhood exhibited a moral ambiguity and complexity largely lacking in the first film.

We had the joy of sitting in front of about 12 people from Yorkdale Mall's Apple Store. Amy's commentary on this situation is better than I could come up with. To be fair, my experiences with Apple support at the "Genius Bar," have been incredibly positive. These particular fan-boys were most likely sales droids, which from my experience are largely under-qualified automata whose existence consists almost entirely of waiting for Steve Jobs to pull the string coming out of their backs so they can spout disingenuous Apple propaganda.

This brings to me the first of my computer woes. I love my Mac. I even had a disturbing moment there when I almost turned around to enter an argument the sales droids were having about Apple hardware being overpriced. You know you've become a zealot when you start arguing with Apple employees because they don't like Macs enough. Anyhow, one of the things I love about OS X is the fact that all of the text boxes in every Cocoa application have built in spell checking capabilities and, more importantly, Emacs keybindings. Years of using Emacs have pretty much crippled me when it comes to editing text on a computer. Here we come to the problem: neither Firefox nor Camino use the standard Cocoa text widgets for text-entry boxes. This means that my keybindings no longer work! I've been (grudgingly) using Safari, but I've recently discovered that Blogger's support for Safari is sketchy at best. As a result, I am currently writing this post in Camino. I know that I can easily simulate the Emacs bindings in any Mozilla browser, but they're just not quite as slick as with Safari, which even supports multi-line kill/yank with CTRL-K and CTRL-Y.

Much more irritating is the ongoing saga of my video card (a rapidly aging Tyan-manufactured Radeon 9800 Pro). Essentially, it continues to lock up after about 15 minutes of Rise of Legends. I've tried every combination of driver/software fixes. Finally, this afternoon I yanked the little bastard out of my computer, and removed its heatsink. The fine folks at Tyan had applied thermal grease to the GPU with all the meticulous care of your typical Taco-Bell-sour -cream-gun-operator. I fixed it up as best I could without a spare tube of thermal paste, and then reassembled it. The card seems to run about 10 degrees C cooler now, and I think I may have finally fixed my lockups. Strangely, I've never had any issues with Half Life 2, so I still suspect that there may be a Direct 3D related software bug lurking somewhere in my drivers. Next time, I'm buying nVidia.

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BIHKAL: The Shakespeare Cafe

As I've noted before, Toronto is rather clean for a city of its size. This does not, however, mean that every space in the city is spectacularly clean. Allow me to tell you a tale of one space that was spectacularly less than clean. To begin, I must describe "The Shakespeare Cafe." Picture the typical yuppy coffee shop: bar-top tables everywhere with people disinterestedly reading the news, a few overstuffed sofas, a few overpriced pastries, and some cute little plants and faux statues. You're getting close to picturing the Shakespeare Cafe. But you'd also have to add the giant Chinese buffet crammed in the corner as an afterthought, as well as the three televisions showing "Driving Miss Daisy" and the tiny convenience store selling batteries, feminine hygiene products, cigarettes and candy bars. And, as a final touch, 3 feet down from the candy bars you can purchase liquor by the drink. A very odd place, to say the least.

While at the Shakespeare Cafe, I am struck with an impending disaster of the gastrointestinal variety. In recognition of my French-Canadian friends, let's just say that I feel as though a "numero deux" is imminent. I begin to nonchalantly scan the room, searching for the facilities. Finally, I see a dark passageway leading south past the magazine rack. I go down said passageway and come to a locked door. A sign hangs on the door. It has been written with what appears to be a Crayola marker and has since yellowed and almost disintegrated. As Crayola markers and standard copier paper are apparently a very expensive commodity in these parts, the sign has been painstakingly laminated with scotch tape (of which there seems to be an endless supply!). The sign hangs at a bit of an angle. Written on the sign in broken English is: "Restroom ONLY for PAYING CUSTOMERS. Turn knob after we buzzer you." Unfortunately, the cursive "z" looks rather like a "g" when hastily written and smeared on a dark bathroom sign, causing me to wonder, "Just what the hell do I have to do to use the restroom in this place!?" Putting these thoughts aside, I try the handle, which is smeared with the sweat of a thousand sweaty-handed men. Nothing happens. I throw my shoulder against the door. Nothing happens. I see the small Asian woman who sold me my coffee coming around the counter, and so I ask about the bathroom, and gesture towards the door. She tells me, "Wait. I buzz you. Then open door." She descends into the bowels of the Shakespeare Cafe, which at this time are the most horrifying place I can possibly imagine.

Soon, however, I won't have to imagine.

A buzzer sounds from the door, followed by a mechanical click. The whole experience is remarkably like that scene in Silence of the Lambs where Jody Foster goes to see Hannibal Lecter in the maximum security prison. Behind the door is quite possibly the scariest bathroom I have ever been in. Now I know why Toronto is so remarkably clean: all of the city's filth has simply been piled into the men's room at the Shakespeare Cafe, guarded by an electronically locked door presided over by a small Asian woman selling coffee, Chinese buffet, and liquor by the drink in her spare time. I'll insert a line break here for you to ponder this fact.

Have you pondered? Good, because whatever you're thinking of cannot come close to the horrors that I faced on that dark day. At first, I was struck with the distinctive potpourri of urine and raw sewage. Everything was harshly lit by two flickering fluorescent lamps. In the unnatural light, I discerned two urinals on the wall, one leaking onto the floor, the other covered with a black plastic trash bag. There was no sign on the urinal, simply a large black Hefty bag secured with tape. But, as they say, a large black Hefty bag is worth a thousand words. Directly across from the urinals was a stall that was closed. I unlatched the stall, expecting to find a group of mole people waiting in the dank corner. Rather, I found a dilapidated toilet and a large flat white object about 7 by 13 inches. I was thoroughly repulsed at this point, but I had come too far to turn back. I examined the toilet. It had a seat, which was lucky for me, considering the circumstances. The seat was clean, save for a single, meticulously placed drop of urine. I rapidly wiped this away with a swatch of toilet paper, and pretended that I hadn't seen it. I then proceeded to answer the call of nature, hovering half above the befouled toilet seat. This was tricky, as the seat was attached by a single hydrogen bond between itself and the one remaining molecule of porcelain on the toilet. The toilet had apparently been cast from cement, and then later covered in porcelain to keep up with the increasingly baroque tendencies of bathroom style. The latter had flaked away, leaving some kind of stone dwarf-throne above which I now teetered. I reached for the toilet paper, only to find that there was only 1/5 of a roll remaining. Furthermore, the roll was only half-attached to the wall via a rusted, broken fixture. It was attached in such a manner as to make its removal impossible without ensuring its fall into the brown water pooled around the toilet's base. After completing the task at hand, I turned to flush the toilet. Suddenly, I placed the large white object. In my desperate delirium, I had taken it for a large air freshener. No, in fact it was the top of the toilet. That's right: the toilet's tank had no cover. Gazing into the naked tank revealed a mass of rusted machinery thatat one time probably served as a flushing mechanism. I tentatively turned the lever on the toilet. It turned a full 360 degrees and nothing happened. Upon examination, I realized that it was not attached to anything in the toilet. My only choice was to roll up my sweater and reach into the toilet tank until I had found the chain that, in happier, lighter times, had been attached to the handle. I pulled this up and (thankfully) the toilet flushed. I immediately proceeded to wash my hands in the sink. The soap dispenser was empty, as evidenced by two pieces of filthy soap left sitting on the counter (normally I would consider "filthy soap" an oxymoron but in that horrifying space outside of time, far removed from the light of Heaven, it was not). While washing my hands, I noted a second door in the bathroom, leading deeper into the Cafe.

I shudder to think what could have been behind that door. It had been boarded closed, and then duct-taped for good measure. It was half broken, hanging on its frame as though someone had kicked it in from the other side. I dried my hands and left.

The hand dryer was brand new and worked perfectly.

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New Series: Bathrooms I Have Known and Loathed (BIHKAL)

They go by many names: bathroom, washroom, restroom, even the austere "W.C." Call them what you will, they all have the potential to spell out one thing: bowel-quivering terror! In keeping with an earlier promise, I have decided begin an N-part series, titled "Bathrooms I Have Known and Loathed," devoted to certain facilities whose horrors are boundless. Each part in the series provides an in-depth account of my experiences in the hellish depths of the world's most vile restrooms. These are places where the laws of time begin to blur, Lovecraftian settings that, by all rational reckoning should not be.

Shortly, I shall post the details of a foul encounter that sets the mood for our tour of horror. Before I do that, however, some background. Before moving to Canada for graduate school, I briefly visited my girlfriend in Toronto. I was amazed at the general cleanliness of the city, especially considering its size. During this visit, I (unfortunately) developed a theory that partially explains the urban anomoly that is Toronto. The post which follows details the experience that inspired this theory (apologies to those who have already read this in an early form...by now you should be familiar with the shameless recycling of old material that I tend to pass off as actual creation).

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So...

I finally decided to break down and join the infernal ranks of the self-obsessed. Here you'll find random witticisms, streams and streams of epic, adequate prose, and probably a lot of jokes about poo. Enjoy!

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