That Takes Talent

There are reasons why teachers don’t normally use the public access bathrooms at school. Most of those reasons should be somewhat obvious. I don’t have any problem being in close proximity to teenagers, as long as it’s in the classroom or the hallway or the cafeteria or library or even at sporting events from time to time. After all, the job description demands, or at least implies, it. All normalcy, however, vanishes once inside the bathroom. There’s something about dropping trow, even three inches of trow, around teenage boys that feels innately creepy. Besides that, they’re incredibly foul and fetid creatures. And I don’t just mean the words that come out of their mouths, that I can usually handle. But only about one in nine will wash his hands when done excreting, and even fewer will flush down said excrement.

The hand-washing thing I can kind of get; it takes time, and when you’ve got seven minutes of traveling time, there is precious little of it to be spent wasted on something as banal as wetting, soaping, rinsing, and drying of hands. I get it, and am even guilty of it myself occasionally (but mostly because I don’t like getting wet). But what I don’t get is why they don’t flush. That action takes approximately half a second to perform. And if you’re good, and have perfected the walk-away-flush technique, then it doesn’t take any time at all. This technology is too good to waste. What’s odd is that I’ve even noticed this behavior from grown men. I’ve been in bathrooms lined with urinals and commodes—twenty or more—and not a one will be free of human waste. I know women don’t do this: I’ve asked them.

So like I said before, I don’t normally use the student bathrooms. I try to make sure that I do my business in the teachers’ lounge restroom at lunch. It’s a lovely single-seater with an exhaust fan, a framed poster reprint of Monet’s Lily Pond on the wall, and a door that locks. You’ll notice I use the word restroom here; this is the one room in the entire school that I can enjoy any sort of rest and peace. Once or twice I’ve spent my entire conference period just resting here. Regrettably, most days I only get to spend a minute and a half in this holy of holies—the post-lunch micturition (that means to pee).

Tragically, there are days when I’m neglected even that short respite, usually due to forgetfulness (how does one forget to pee?) or poor planning. There have been a good number of days that I have gone from 6:30 in the morning to 3:45 in the afternoon without having gone to the bathroom. If I don’t go during lunch, then I’ve doomed myself to three and a half more hours of urethrian torture. “What’s the big deal,” you ask; “why not just go?” Well, do you have any idea what would happen if I were to leave 30 sixteen-year-olds unattended for even a minute and a half? Probably nothing. Most likely they would patiently await my return.

(I’m saying this straight-faced—no ironic sarcasm. I really think it would be fine. But in the unlikely scenario that I leave the room to take a whiz, and that Weston has just this morning learned that his girlfriend Summer has unwittingly cheated on him with his identical twin brother Easton, and that all three are in the class, and that Weston just happens to be carrying a pocket knife on his person, and that he has spent the entire day waiting to shell out his vengeance on Easton, and that after a volley of several heated exchanges between the doppelgangers, Weston plunges across the room, knife in hand, aimed directly at the cheating heart of the other half of his mother’s split egg, only to be intercepted by the faithful heart of Summer, who earnestly believes she’s protecting her boyfriend Weston, and as she gurgles her final dying devotion to the love of her young life, she is mistakenly clutching the hand of Easton—that perfidious parasitic paramour—and that her last words are all a worthless lie…well, that would be bad. Someone could lose a job over something like that. So I stay, and I persevere.)

Herein lies the biggest beef I have with my profession: When Nature calls I can’t answer it. Like other humans, I have relatively little control over when and where this call happens, but unlike other humans, I have to just pucker and squeeze, no doubt doing irreparable damage to bladder and bowels. Actually, this isn’t really my biggest beef with teaching; it’s merely a symptom of the true big beef. The true big beef is that at every turn, my adulthood is stripped away from me. I can’t pee when I want to; I can’t have a mid-day beer when I want to; I sure as hell can’t swear when I want to; and I have to eat my lunch (which only ever gets as good as mini-corndogs and fries) in 27 minutes.

And now this week…this is the week I have lunch duty, which means that I get to eat my lunch in the hallway so I can stop kids from doing whatever it is they’re not supposed to be doing. Basically this means that I throw mini-corndogs and fries at band geeks making out in the stairwell. Can you picture it? A grown-ass man, sitting in a chair, his Salisbury steak in his lap, wondering what his life has come to.

Well, needless to say, this week I have not gotten my 90 seconds of sanctuaried rest and have been forced to hang with the boys between the last and next to last classes of the day. And here’s where this story finally comes to a head. Two days ago, while waiting for either a urinal or a commode to be vacated, I noticed that one of my students was at the urinal. He appeared to be holding up and looking at some object while doing his thing. The object was blocked from my view, but I assumed it had to be a cell phone and that he was text messaging a friend. Now I’m not normally one of those guys who tries to initiate conversation mid-stream; in fact, I’m usually pretty put off by guys who do try that sort of thing. But I ignored my better judgment and asserted, “Hey, that takes talent.” As he turned his upper torso around toward me, I gazed past his puzzled face and noticed that the thing he was holding was a bottle of water. Apparently he was reading the contents label or the nutritional facts or the explanation of how a reverse osmosis purification process means that “when you’re drinking our water, all you taste is the water.” Eventually we met eyes, and he said, puzzled look still on his face, “What? Peein’?”

Like I say—there are reasons why teachers don’t normally use the public access bathrooms. And sometimes it’s our own damn fault.