The Loo Review

This loo smells like curry.

Erected in 1893, says the White Chapel Works stone outside of the trendy Taja curry house. This little Indian restaurant is in a building that actually once was a public lavatory. Now, however, it exists as a psychedelically painted restaurant that stands oddly away from the main strip of stores and close to the street. The inside of this old loo has been gutted and redesigned. There is room only for a couple of tables and thankfully the open kitchen area allows you to see most of your food being prepared. What is lacking in food quality is made up for by the odd sensation of knowing you are dining in style where almost a century of Englishmen have come to relieve themselves. That, and venturing to the loo within a loo, which is more than satisfactory with nice smelling soap and pleasant décor.

This loo is posessed.

There was something wrong in the busaba eathai loo the day I was there. The automatic faucets in the sink were turning on and off of their own accord, shooting irregular bursts of water into the too general direction of the basin and when I arrived a woman in her 30’s was cringing in the corner.

“This loo’s crazy,” she muttered as I tried the first stall.

The door was extremely heavy and at first I thought the stall was occupied. I persisted, however, and slowly the door opened.

Wide-eyed, the woman said “Blimey[sic], I thought they were all full…for so… long…”

I had to switch to another stall, this time with paper, and rushed to get out of the tomb-like space as fast as possible. When I came out, the faucets were silent. There was plenty of soap and the rest of my loo experience was uneventful. As I mounted the stairs back to my pumpkin curry, I could hear a man’s surprised exclamation and a woman’s apologetic panic. The ladies’ is the first door on the left.

Entering the gents at The Providores and Tapa Room is to find an establishment that truly appreciates its loos. Dark walls give way to a gleaming porcelain urinal resting on the wall, a single spotlight trained down upon it. One can not help but take pause and admire the simplicity of the loo, sinks on the left with space enough for someone to wash while another is relieving himself, with this vision of plumbing as the focus of the room. Caution must be taken when actually utilizing the facilities, however, as the moment one approaches the urinal, he will cast his own shadow over it, severly hindering the usefulness of the illumniation.

Those uncomfortable without full visibility might consider using the stall instead.

As can be expected, the portable loos provided backstage at the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week event in New York’s Bryant Park are a cut above other portable restroom facilities. Upon entering the unit, an overhead light is illumniated, activated by standing on the soft, carpeted floor. Simultaneously, an “occupied” sign is lit outside the loo, to avoid the door-handle-jiggle (with its often-accompanied accidental-opening) which is common with the standard red/green occupancy indicator.

The flushing mechanism of this toilet is also quite unique in that there actually is one. Upon completing one’s business, a foot-operated lever is pressed and the bottom drops out of the toilet bowl, depositing its contents into the holding tank below. Release the lever and the trap-door shuts again. Neat and clean.

Additional features of the loo include a working sink, a fan to keep the air circulating, a heater for proper climate control. All in all, the perfect treat after a grueling walk down the runway.

The bathroom on my floor as work is accessible only with a key, which serves to prevent the unwashed masses from using the facilites that are reserved for the unwashed privileged folks who need to pee in the course of a normal, coffee-fueled work day.

The men’s bathroom has both a standard urinal as well as a toilet in a stall. The first thing that should be noted about the stall is that it faces the door to the bathroom, which means that if the stall door happened to be open when another person entered the bathroom, then the first thing that said person would see would be the toilet stall. This does not seem like so much of a concern except to realize that there is no handle on the door to stall, requiring the occupant of the stall to pull the door shut by grasping on to the top edge of the door and pulling in closed. It is not always the case that the occupants of my floor have accomplished this task and on numerous occassions I have entered the bathroom to be confronted by more of my floormates than I ever would like to.

Assuming one is finally able to enter the stall (and pulls the door shut, as is only appropriate in such situations) one would note that the walls are rather narrow around the toilet. Looking down, one would note that there are ten and a half tiles between the walls. At two inches each, the stall measures just under two feet wide. While sitting on the toilet and feeling claustrophobic (escaping the stress of the work day) one is reminded of the story of William Taft who was so fat that he got stuck in the White House bathtub. One would consider this image (with a particularly large gentleman being stuck in a too-narrow toilet stall) amusing. One would be correct in this assessment.

The bathroom itself is fairly nice, being cleaned every day by a professional cleaning who replace the toilet paper and soap and urinal cakes on a semi-regular basis. There is, however, no hot water coming out fo the sink, shut off either to protect the folks at work from hurting themselves or to save money. The soap in the dispensers is of a particularly high quality (for public-ish soap), including just a touch of moisturizer and scent, it would appear. The paper towel dispenser is always stocked and contains product at least an entire step up from the brown paper towels of elementary school days of old.

He had 3 minutes.

He used his pass card and made his way down the stairs to the bathrooms he knew were lesser used past the security cameras, acting natural.

He had 2 minutes and change.

He felt for the baggie in his change pocket of his suit. He felt o.k. like the meeting would be o.k. He knew there were another round of layoffs coming and his white powdery assistant had become his white powdery crutch. A baggie of courage. There were no meetings without a line before anymore. There was no chance the company would make it at this point and he, Matt Eljer wasn’t as invincible as the drug could make him feel. He was smart enough to know better.

As he made his way into the stall he fished the baggie from his pocket. An untouched eight-ball fresh from his now old buddy Red. They met and shook hands at least twice a week, usually behind the police museum near Wall St. Briefly discussing work and relationships and sports, Matt knew absolutely zero about sports but could fake it like a $500 hooker. Drugs, now there’s a recession proof business. He started pissing while holding his dick in his left hand to mask the sounds of his premeditated fumbling, chopping and sniffing. He always had about 10 things going on at the same time, the powder let him become a laser, one shining point of focus. As the baggie snagged on his pocket watch chain it slipped from his grasp and fell with an audible plunk into the freshly pissed-in toilet.

As he at once reached instinctively into the bowl and rolled up his sleeve he tried to remember if it was Pavlov’s or Skinner’s theory that would account for this behavior. Then it suddenly didn’t matter as his fingers hit the lukewarm water and his eyes caught the letters at the base of where the seat attached to the bowl “E L J E R”. He knew for the moment that this was his destiny, that he needed no behavioral theory to explain it. He stifled a laugh.

He had 1 minute and knew he had to choose between doing a line and washing his hands. What do you think he chose?

”Matt, I’d like you to meet our new head of IT, Don Hanson”

”Don, Matt Eljer”

(handshake)

*Many thanks to Greg “Sugar” Sucrose for the name, and to all the others who looked.

If I believed in a benevolent omniscient omnipotent being, I’d thank him or her heartily for this wonderful bathroom. Somehow, despite being in a public park, this 2-stall loo manages to be clean (more or less, leaning toward more) stocked with toilet paper, a sink, soap, and paper towels. In an agnostic world it’s hard to know who to thank for this miracle, except for maybe the people who run the really nice little outdoor cafe adjacent to said wonderful bathroom. In fact, I have only one complaint about this bathroom: it’s only open during the summer, like the cafe. Hear my plea, Mister or Ms Park Tender, give us our delightful facilities year round. Please?

If I didn’t mind pee all over the seat, this would be one fine multi-stall loo in this multi-screen moo-vie theater. However, I do mind pee all over toilet seats, and so despite the ample amounts of TP provided by the good people of the Loews Cineplex on 84th and B’Way, I give this bathroom a hearty YUCK.

I was at this porn palace in order to see a very avant garde series of one act plays being put on by Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppolla’s literary magazine. I tell you this because I don’t want anyone thinking that this site is written by the sorts of persons who are so secure in their intellectual, professional, heterosexual identities that they go visit strip clubs and then tell everyone about it under the guise of it being an ‘experience worth deconstructing’ or any such drivel. I don’t care to participate in the intellectual, professional, heterosexual co-opting of seamy things, no I don’t.

There was no sex at all going on at the Show World I visited; it was, as I say, a series of completely sexless one act plays I came for. Well, the plays weren’t completely sexless- the 5 I saw were all about how relationships between people who love each other (or should) get screwed up, by convention and its bearing down on the interaction of two individuals, by preconceived ideas about how two men in a bar should begin to relate, by a narrator who speaks out loud the story he’s imagining is the life of two people eating brunch. They may have dealt with issues of sex and sexuality, but there was no actual nudity on stage the night of my visit to Show World. Well, there was one suggestion of nudity, and the beginning of sex, but nothing lewd occurred, anyhow. Let’s put it this way: no one got turned on by what was on stage. Bit of a shame about that, though the plays were actually quite good. And the theater itself was sort of neat, too. It was red and black with art deco-y patterns made of pieces of mirrors all over the walls and ceiling. Those I was there with (no, I don’t make a habit of going to porn shops on 8th Ave and 42nd Street alone, thank you very much) and I enjoyed the looks of the place for some time, which is really neither here nor there since this is a site about toilets, not about porn decor.

So let me get back to what I was meant to be writing about: the toilets of Show World, which I have to say, aren’t great. There wasn’t enough toilet paper (luckily I had some tissues in my bag), the hand drier didn’t work, the soap was a bit watery and not so nice smelling, and there was an unidentified liquid surrounding the base of the toilet which I’m afraid I may accidentally have splashed on my leg.

This train ride was a real treat. I was lucky- my law firm paid for me to sit in the business class section of the train, so I can’t (and won’t) comment on what the business classless lavatories might be like, but I will tell you this: the bathrooms I saw (and I saw a few, as I made it a point to visit three separate stalls during my 1.5 hour trip. You see, don’t you, why toilets interest me so?) were fantastic. They were large, had easily lockable doors, clean, colorful toilets and sinks, soap, paper which chafed not, and a choice (!) between paper towels and a hand drier. They even had little indicators on the outside of the door to let a person know whether another person was already occupying the stall the first person thought she might go and use, if no one minds. Though it’s neither here nor there (quite literally, since the train is almost constantly in motion, moving through any place that might be called a ‘place’ at such high speeds that I think it’s fair to say that the train is never ‘there,’ if you catch my drift), I do feel it worth mentioning that the whole train was a delight, from where I was sitting.