A Royal Flush
Messes in Loos, Banos, Toilettes, Heads, and W. C.s…
“It all started with a turd. A particularly smelly, hidden turd…”
As a fifth grader it was a high honor to be named distributor of art supplies for the fifth AND sixth grade. Only the teacher and I could access the art “closet”. The “closet” was actually a large room off the sixth grade classroom (perhaps originally intended as a lounge or conference area). It was beautifully paneled with floor to ceiling bookcases and replete with fireplace, though unlike the fireplace in the main classroom, could not say that on either side of it hung – amazingly – original works by Normal Rockwell.
If there was one person in the class whose personality most reflected the angry figure in Rockwell’s painting “The Babysitter” in the main classroom it was Kenny.
Kenny was angry. People said he was an orphan. People said he had “issues”. One day Kenny snuck into the art “closet” and deficated. He not only deficated, but he hid his “produce” in little spaces all over the room. The custodian, long suffering Mr. Kirby, was constantly coming up to remove newly found “tid bits” of Kenny’s present, and spray a disinfectant. He came and cleaned and sprayed – and he came and cleaned and sprayed – and he came and cleaned and sprayed.
I still remember telling the teacher, Mrs. Bates, that I was sorry but the “art supply room smelled again”. She would call Mr. Kirby. Mr. Kirby would come. He cleaned and sprayed until the last day of school.
* * *
A Fleet – NOT of HM’s Navy…”
By the next year the room had been not only cleaned but painted, and all remnants of what we called “Kenny’s hidden turd” had been vanquished. But Kenny was not done. He discovered a new hobby – stopping up all the commodes in the boys room down the hall and THEN using them, flushing, and causing his “productions” to plop over the rim and float like little ships from stall to stall.
One day, certain I was sick, I wanted to go home. My father was called at work. Meanwhile, I was instructed to wait in the boys room. One will never know if it was Kenny’s “fleet” sailing about the stalls or simply the flu, but somehow the satisfaction of throwing up all over Kenny’s little armada was diminished by the rank smell and lack of ironic perception in a child. The happiest words I heard that day was the call into the room by the school secretary: “your Father’s here!”
* * *
Smoking on the Poop Deck
In middle school – caught in those awkward “in-between” years – visits to relieve nature’s call took a more malevolent turn. Going to the boys room had to be planned. It had to be anticipated, a strategy to predict the least-used time of day and least-used facility. I had determined that this was mid-afternoon in the room across from the principal’s office. It was a brilliant piece of logistical planning – except on the rare occasions when Erik decided this was the best place to have a smoke. (I later discovered my tactical error: the principal had his own bathroom – so never used this one.) Erik was a tall boy with dirty blond hair who was focused on appearing mature for his age – quite impossible if you had seen him in the shower during gym class.
Kenny had been angry. Erik was just mean. He would always put out his cigarette and flush it when the door opened. Perhaps his meanness was linked to how much he watched his pilfered loot swirl away. Erik could not only threaten, he could push, punch, and worst of all, he could feign to steel: Anything. Homework notebooks. Artwork binders. Projects – or simply books. He saw all that was not his as fair game to distract the intruder, and provide a means of inducing promises not to report his actions.
Prone to alliteration – even then – Erik came to be known in my mind as the “tall mean boy with a bad habit and a little penis”. Looking back, perhaps his small bathroom habit kept him from other substances being smoked – or going up noses – behind the gym after school. At least we all knew not to take THAT route home…
* * *
“In the Middle Watches of the Night…”
Yuck. Ick. Not again… For years the gross, messy dreams came a few times a week and at every hour. Sometimes just before waking – those dreams we remember so vividly. In these nocturnal “visions”, every bathroom was filthy, every toilet was overflowing, and I had to use them anyway.
Images of school bathrooms, public bathrooms, and later foreign bathrooms, loos, Banos, toilettes, W.C.s, at home, at relatives, at friends houses, always a horrid mess came into the dreams. Clean as one might, they were never clean. Flush as often as one could, they never cleared. Scour, swab, wipe, wish the mess away – nothing worked – any effort was always futile.
The dreams intensified in the old seminary dormitory – as every morning one used a rusty stall and shower in a booth where one learned to “jump” out of the way of scalding water if a toilet flushed on your floor – or the floor above or below. In reality, the room was cleaned once a week – yet used by twenty men. The only thing we didn’t mind were the peeling paint chips above the tiles as you pulled them off to squish the slower crawling bugs who wanted to join you in the shower – among (as we all joked) – the “pubic hairs of our founding fathers”.
The dreams never went away – even on this holy ground of learning systematic theology and the applied hermeneutics of ontology and etymology. Not nightmares – ever. Not scary visions – really. Just disgusting little episodes interspersed with all the wonderful and imaginative dream life of a busy mind trying to make sense of the world.
* * *
A Royal Flush – “Ship-shape in Bristol Fashion”
Years and decades passed. Then one night, of after an unparticular day and quite an ordinary volume of dinner, the usual bathroom dream began. It was a large, old bathroom, but far from antique or even traditionally elegant. As usual, it was a mess – everywhere. Thank goodness we do not smell in our dreams – usually.
Then IT happened. After years of trying – in a myriad of settings – this room actually became clean. The harder it was worked on, the more clean it got. Still an old 1960’s bathroom, it started to shine as it became clean. It was a very nice bathroom in its own way – with a huge light-blue tub, a pristine white sink, and an empty commode filled with… water.
I finished cleaning and immediately threw up the missing, hidden turds, and more. They came like a volley from my insides. I flushed, and the water came back clear and sparkling in the basin. I stared.
From that night the dreams stopped. Somehow I had played a hand – and it was a royal flush. It was a victory over I do not know what – save to say that from that point, on the rare occasions of having to use a facility in the world of dreams, they were quite unremarkable.
finis
D. S. Lamoureux
Norman Rockwell’s “The Babysitter” (Taft Elementary School – 1974)
Stock Images Courtesy of
Pixabay – Devanath (edited), Willgard Krause: “Boy at Imaginary Door”, Erich Westendarp: “Tall Ships”.
Adobe Free Assets. Unsplash – Photos for Everyone.
2021