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.
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.
posted by Justin at 11:24 PM
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