Men will recognize this dilemma. Women will be horrified and go out of their way to avoid me. No change there, at least.
Feeling
the call of nature, I strolled into a public restroom recently and made
a B-line for the row of urinals – three of them in all, placed
alongside and below a barrage of scrawled graffiti and some eerily
professional-looking cartoon renderings of body parts. (Apropos of
nothing, apparently there’s a woman named “Amber” who’s quite adept at
entertaining gentlemen callers.) Standing at the middle urinal was, as
you might expect, a man.
There
was nothing particularly unusual about the guy. Nothing
attention-grabbing. Naturally, I was only afforded a view of his
backside (thank goodness), but everything looked as it should: hair on
his head, clothes on his back, no weird growths or otherwise alarming
deformities. The kind of guy you notice without really seeing,
especially in a restroom scenario, when a man’s attention is
hyper-focused on one specific task to the exclusion of all else. And yet
I was horrified. Dismayed. Annoyed and flabbergasted and various other
adjectives.
Given a choice of empty slots, you never, ever, take the middle urinal.
It’s
one of those unspoken guy rules. Generally, men don’t like doing their
business in close proximity to other men unless it’s absolutely
necessary. If it’s halftime at Foxborough and there’s a crowd, there may
be no other choice but to rub shoulders with some beer-bladdered gent;
in this case, you suck it up, stare at the graffiti on the wall, and try
not to think about the inherent ridiculousness of what’s taking place.
But barring packed stadiums or amusement park bathrooms in July,
accepted guidelines for men’s room etiquette stipulate that you leave at
least one empty urinal between you and the next guy. It’s a courtesy. I
believe I speak for most men when asserting that a little personal
space is appreciated in these circumstances, considering we’re ... well,
doing what we’re doing.
If
there are three urinals and you take the middle one, you force the next
schmuck to either saddle up next to you or take a stall. In the Middle
Ages, this was an offense punishable by up to ten flogs with a donkey
whip. Or maybe not. There’s a chance I’m making that up.
I’ve
made no bones about the “eww” factor inherent in most members of the
male persuasion. No matter how immaculate one considers oneself, no
matter how neat or hygienic, pretty much anyone capable of a five o’clock
shadow has the capacity to be out-of-this-world disgusting. In no area
is this more manifest than at the urinal. I’ve stood next to dapper
dudes in glittering business attire and shiny shoe leather cut from the
hide of endangered turtles; I’ve stood next to dirt-heeled manly-men in
John Deere caps dressed almost entirely in plaid. It makes no
difference. The grunts of satisfaction, the sighing, the tuneless
whistling – they’re universal trademarks, an evolutionary calling card
that exclaims, “Hey everyone, guess what I’m doing!” It’s not something
you want to be near. Even the one-urinal buffer isn’t enough at times.
Some of these animals make me wish I could hop in a boat, motor my way
to an undiscovered island paradise, and whittle away my remaining years
spearing fish and singing campfire songs to bug-eyed lizards. Remind me
to bring my ukulele.
Only
in a men’s room would you encounter a dynamic in which people are
forced to go onesies in a row against a wall. It makes me pine for what I
imagine is the relative discretion of a women’s room, with the safety
of stalls sequestering one biological act from the next. It should go
without saying that my experience with ladies’ restrooms is limited – at
least since the restraining order – so much of what I imagine is my own
sexist mythology: pinkish hues, soft piano music, immaculate bath
towels slung across the arms of winged angels clad in sparkling gold.
This is what I picture because I’m an ignorant tool. The reality is
undoubtedly more pedestrian than the fantasy, but it’s difficult to
envision a scenario in which two women are doing their thing in the kind
of proximity that would cause discomfort in the most crowded of subway
cars. How would that even work? A row of porcelain bowls facing a wall
caked with long-defunct phone numbers and dirty limericks? It’s
unworkable. Only a man is consistently subject to this particular brand
of grimy hell.
You’d
think maintaining buffer urinal integrity would be common practice at
this point. Especially in a three-urinal situation, the middle one
should be reserved solely for emergencies: men who would absolutely die
if they couldn’t fulfill an immediate need. If Bill Dribblepants suffers
from a rare genetic disorder whereby his bladder explodes like a
homemade pipe bomb if filled to a certain capacity, then by all means,
he should take the spot next to me. I’ll even allow for one accidental
graze of the shoulders in this unlikely circumstance. In all other
scenarios, usurpers of a man’s buffer space are just being boobs. Hear
that, random guy I saw one time? You are a boob.
This
has long been an informal guy rule, but maybe it should be codified,
made into some sort of compulsory practice with a catchy-sounding law,
like the Urinal Proximity Respect Act. Usually the restroom would be the
last place I’d implement legal intervention of any kind – stay outta my
john, Uncle Sam! But I believe it was the founding fathers, penning the
great Declaration of Independence, who advocated for the right “to
pursue life, liberty, and relief at Denny’s without some putz groaning
in our ears.” Wise thinkers, these men.
Might
want to double-check my research, though, just to be safe. There’s a
pretty good chance I’m making that up, too.
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