Smoking In The Girls Room

 

 

A few days ago I was at a pizza parlor with my family plowing through a large, extra-cheesy, thin-crust sausage pizza.  Suddenly my 3 year old daughter Autumn announced that she had to go pottie.  I said I would take her since my wife Nadia was busy trying to get our 1 year old son Jack to eat something…anything.  The kid hates eating and just wants to run around all the time.  So I followed my daughter through the maze of tables back to where the bathrooms were.  I tried the men’s handle.  It was unlocked so we walk in and Autumn runs over to the toilet ready to pounce on it.  “WAIT!” I yelled out in horror.  “Don’t touch anything!”  It was a nasty, disgusting mess.  The seat was up, there was pee all over everything, and it looked like it had not been flushed since the Clinton administration.  Autumn is still oblivious to the notion of what is ‘gross’ or not.  If I had not stopped her she would have run right over and plopped her little bottom down on that wretched and defiled throne of filth.

 

I quickly ushered her out of that hellhole and decided to try the women’s room.  Chicks have to sit down so it just had to be better than the men’s toilet that had been ruined by the pigs next door.  I gingerly tried the handle.  It was open, so I took a quick glance around and jumped in the room with Autumn.  Sure enough the seat was down and dry and I hoisted her up and let her do her thing.  Then came a knock on the door.  “Just a minute!”  I said in a high girly voice, hoping the lady would go away.  After washing Autumn up I cautiously opened the door and peeked out.  Yep, the middle-aged woman was still standing there and she give me a surprised look that turned into a nasty look, which then turned into a somewhat understanding look when she saw Autumn at my feet.  I gave her a raised-eyebrow shrug and squeezed past her in the tiny bathroom/hallway out into the freedom of the pizza parlor.  This brief encounter in the women’s room then got me thinking about all of the other times I have been in a women’s room for one reason or another.

 

Not including all the times as a humiliated young boy when my mom would drag me into public bathrooms with her to keep me safe from the evils of men’s rooms, my earliest trip into the ladies room was at 4H camp in the Wisconsin Dells when I was about 13 years old.  I was just entering the wondrous and confusing world of puberty.  I did not know how to make out with a girl, but I knew I really wanted to.  Luckily for me there was a pretty, and already well endowed girl there named Kelly Waldorf who was my age and seemed like she was into me.  Our first night there all of the grownups were hanging out around the main campfire so me and Kelly and the rest of the kids decided to play ‘Truth Or Dare’.   You know the game…where you go around the circle and take turns asking someone:  “Truth or dare?”.  But where should we play?  We decided the girl’s camp bathroom/shower was large enough to hold all 10 of us and would work just fine.  After getting a few inevitable but informative ‘truths’ out of the way (“Do you think so-and-so is cute?”, etc…), we eventually got around to the much funner ‘dares’ (“I dare you to kiss so-and-so for 15 seconds.”)  This is the greatest game ever in the history of the world I thought!  I got to kiss one girl who was a couple of years younger than me, but what I really wanted was to kiss Kelly.

 

Finally it happened and the two of us were ‘dared’ to kiss for 20 seconds!  We stood up and I leaned in with my lips pursed, clueless, and then a wonderful strange thing happened…she stuck her tongue in my mouth!  Instant pubescent boner.  I stuck my butt out so our middle parts weren’t touching anymore, but it was apparent through my shorts and I was sure she had felt it…but she kept on kissing me!  I struck back with my tongue in earnest.  I had no idea what I was doing, but it felt good and it felt right and I was in heaven.  Right in the middle of a kissing session with Kelly though an older lady walked in.  Total buzz kill.  The first thing she saw was Kelly and I with our tongues down each other’s throats and she let out a gasp and started yelling at us…all of us…telling us to get the hell out of the women’s room.  I started to run out but she grabbed my arm and led me back to where the parents were and promptly reported me to Kelly’s dad and told him exactly what she had seen.  He gave me a stern look, but in the end the parents nervously laughed it off.  Kids making out in the girl’s bathroom…somewhat troubling but not the end of the world.  I was kept away from Kelly though and there was no more kissing to be had on that trip.  Totally sucked, but to this day it was still one of the greatest, most thrilling nights of my life…French kissing a real girl for the first time.

 

Another incident I had in a girl’s bathroom was in the mid-90’s when I was working at WPS Insurance in Madison, WI.  It was a crappy place to work, but it is where I had met many of my lifelong friends including Mitch Manson, Brad & Erin Pronger, Daddy, Bonnie & Clyde, Derrick and Charlotte Goetz, Glenn Kampson, and Lauren Hatch.  One day Charlotte and I were talking in the hallway, heading back to our workspace, and as we passed the women’s room Charlotte interrupted our conversation to announce that she had to step in for a minute.  I wanted to finish what I was saying so I said “Fine” and stepped into the bathroom with her, in plain view of the 20 or 30 people manning the phones in our work station.  She looked at me funny but we continued the conversation for about a minute until one of the VP’s of the company happened to walk in.  She looked at me.  She looked at Charlotte.  She frowned.  I mumbled some unintelligible apology and ran out of there.  From his seat about 20 feet away Mitch was laughing his ass off as I headed for my desk.  About 5 minutes later I was called into the ‘Office’ with the VP and a Union Rep for an interrogation.  In the few years that I had worked at this place I had gotten into so much trouble that this was the very least of my infractions, but they wanted to know why I was in there and if I understood that it was wrong.  I had no idea why I went in there with Charlotte, but yes I understood that it was wrong so I let them scold me for awhile and I promised that I would never ever do it again and they let me go.

 

But it happened again.  About 6 or 7 years ago I went to see a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball game with Ernie Hagen at the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis.  We both have season tickets.  Ernie’s tickets are kickass courtside seats that cost a fortune whereas my tickets are crappy upper-deck seats that cost next to nothing…they are basically just to get me in the arena.  Ernie’s dad was using Ernie’s tickets that night so we were in the upper deck using my tickets.  Ernie was not impressed with the view.  After about 10 minutes he announced that he needed to get high, so we went out in the hallway to find a place.  The Wolves were not doing very well that year so there was hardly anyone in the upper deck.  We went in to the nearest bathroom and Ernie told me to keep watch while he took a couple of hits off his pinch-hitter.

 

There was no-one in the bathroom.  Ernie selected the end stall farthest away from the door to toke up in.  I don’t smoke weed anymore so I was standing along the row of stalls with nothing to do so I decided to take a leak.  I turned around to pee in a urinal…but…there wasn’t any.  What the f*ck?  It was a large bathroom and I thought maybe they were tucked around a corner or something so I looked left, right…nothing.  No urinals.  This was the stupidest men’s room I have ever been in I thought.  Just then someone walked in so I turned towards Ernie’s stall and gave him the old “cough, cough” signal for him to be cool.  Then I turned to look at the intruder and…it was a chick!  Oops, she must have accidentally came in the wrong bathroom.  I felt sorry for her so I smiled and gave her that unspoken tilted-head nod that says:  “Ah well, mistakes happen.”  But she didn’t blush and turn around and run out.  No.  She just stood there staring at me with this weird look on her face.  She was glued to her spot, unwilling to advance but not retreating.  I stood there, waiting for her to leave, extremely confused by her demeanor.

 

Suddenly the light bulb went on.  This wasn’t the stupidest men’s room in the world.  We were the stupidest men in the world because this was a women’s room!  Duhh.  That’s why there were no urinals and that’s why this lady didn’t leave after seeing me in there.  I quickly ran over to Ernie’s stall and in a hurried hushed voice I said:  “Ernie!  We have to go!  We’re in the women’s room!”  “What?!”  “Yeah, c’mon!  Let’s go!”  Ernie put away his stash in record time, popped his head out, looked around in embarrassment, and then we ran out of there mumbling “Sorry.” as we scooted past the chick.

 

From smoking weed a few years ago at the Target Center to getting my first French kiss way back when I was 13 years old at 4H camp to, I have had some good times in the women’s room.  No lessons to be learned here…just have fun out there and keep your head up.  You never know when you might find yourself in the wrong bathroom at the right time.

Italy

It was August of 1990.  My girlfriend Lona and I had just spent close to 4 months backpacking around the Greek Isles.  Our money was starting to run out and the acid already had run out, so it was time to cash in our one-month Eurail passes and head to our final destination of Dublin, Ireland, with the goal of seeing as much stuff as we could in between.  We would end up visiting 10 different countries on this 6-month trip and I suppose I will get to writing about all of them eventually, but I will just do one or two at a time and not necessarily in order.  So much happened in Greece that plenty of stories will end up coming out of those 4 months, but this entry will be focused on the week we spent in Italy.

It was time to leave Greece and we were a little worried.  We had become extremely comfortable there.  We had made a lot of friends from Greece and other travelers from around the world, we had learned enough of the difficult language to get by even in towns that spoke no English, and it was very difficult leaving this place that we had come to love.  But it was time, so we cashed in our Eurail passes (which also covers boats) and literally fought our way on to a large ship from the Greek port city of Patras over to Italy's port city of Brindisi.  It was an overnight trip and we got there the next day scared shitless.  It was the same way we had felt when our plane from Chicago landed in Athens, Greece back in April.  Fear of the unknown with a new country and a different language and strange money.  But at least when we had landed in Greece it was with our best friend, roommate, and travel companion Claudia Tribbiani who had been to Greece before.  She had long since flown back to the States however and we were on our own, winging it through Europe with nothing but our backpacks and not even a travel guidebook.

There was not much to do in Brindisi so we grabbed some pizza at a local shop and headed to the train station intent on getting to Rome as soon as possible.  When we got there we found a youth hostel and checked in and took a deep breath.  We had done it!  We had left the safety of Greece and we were in Italy.  Time to explore.  Rome is such an incredible dichotomy of modern city intermixed with ruins everywhere.  It is a weird thing to see cars and taxis on a busy street whizzing by the ancient Roman Colosseum.  We toured the Colosseum and were amazed at the stuff that used to happen here all in the name of entertainment.  You think football is a violent game...try dueling it out with a pack of lions.  The Romans imported exotic animals from all over Africa, staged great land battles, lavish sea battles by filling the floor of the Coliseum with water and floating war ships, and had men fight each other to the death.  It was incredible to stand in the middle of it and picture yourself there 2,000 years ago with a massive crowd of patrons cheering your near-certain death.  It was very creepy.

Another beautiful but creepy place we visited was the Vatican.  Incredible untold wealth greet you as you wander around in amazement.  Beautiful paintings, frescoes, stained glass, jewels, crowns...and so much history.  It seemed somewhat hypocritical to me however, the centerpiece of a religion that was supposed to be about peace and love housing enough wealth within those walls to feed a starving nation many times over.  But I love history, good and bad, and it was an amazing place to visit.  We walked out of there that night feeling like we had just come from another world, and that point was driven home when we were confronted by a heroin addict on the street outside.  He was a nice guy and he just wanted a cigarette.  It was sad to listen to his story in broken English.  We went to the nearest bar and had a beer with him and then he wandered off.

After a couple of days of touring many more museums, churches, and big beautiful piazzas (sort of like town squares) throughout modern and ancient Rome it was time to move on to Florence.  This is an amazing city full of gigantic churches and cathedrals that defy the imagination of how they were built.  I can build a bird house, a tree fort, and with the help of my dad a front porch...but Florence's Cathedral, the Duomo is a miracle.  It took two centuries to be deemed finished and it is incredibly beautiful.  It dominates the city's skyline, and you can see panoramic views of Florence when you climb up the 436 steps to the top of the dome.  Another icon we had to see was the Statue of David located in the Accademia Gallery...it was cool to see in person but after a couple of minutes it doesn't seem so great.  The thing I remember most about Florence was losing Lona.

Of course this was before cell phones so in the past 4 months we had always looked for landmarks to meet each other at in case we got separated.  Or the hotel or youth hostel we were staying at...if we got lost, just meet back at the hotel.  Lona has an incredibly bad sense of direction so that is why I was always so adamant about having a plan in case one of us got lost.  But we were so excited when we got to Florence that we just checked into the hotel, threw our bags on the bed and headed out without talking about meeting places.  The first thing we did that first night in Florence was buy a huge bottle of red wine, a loaf of bread, and sat ourselves down in a piazza watching a street band play music.  We laughed and talked and ate and drank and marveled at this beautiful city.  After a couple of hours the bottle was empty and we were hammered.  Lona stood up and announced that she was going to get another bottle at the shop at the far end of the piazza.  Are you sure I said?  I'll get it.  But no, she insisted and said she would be right back.

Off she went with enough Italian Lira for a bottle of wine and I sat there listening to the band, looking around and marveling at the fact that I was in freaking Italy...this was so much better than working.  I waited.  And I waited.  After about 20 minutes I stood up and looked around.  She was nowhere to be seen.  I sat back down and waited another 5 minutes.  This was getting ridiculous.  I jumped back up and decided I had better go to the shop and see what is taking her so long.  I hated to leave in case she came back another way and I wasn't where she had left me.  But what other way?  The shop was just around the corner on the far end of the large square we were in.  I ran over to the shop and she was not there.  I looked around, getting more and more worried by the minute.  Then I ran back to where we had been sitting, expecting her to be sitting there with the wine wondering where I was.  But no...she wasn't there either.  What the f*ck?  What do I do??

I waited another 15 minutes and decided to head to the hotel.  I knew she didn't know where it was though...we had only been there for about 5 minutes...just long enough to check in and head out to explore the city.  But I was hoping maybe she remembered the name, or the address or at least the street it was on so she could ask someone for help finding it.  So I ran there, but no...she was not anywhere to be seen.  I waited there for a half hour and then headed back to the piazza where the band had been.  They were gone by now and there was no sign of Lona.  I was really starting to freak out now.  No way of contacting her, thousands of miles from home in a foreign country with a language we didn't know.  Should I call her parents in the states?  Give them the address of our hotel and if she calls them they can give it to her?  No...a call like that from me would totally freak them out.  That will be my last resort.  I started running up and down the streets...block by block...fanning out from the piazza.  I pictured her alone, drunk, scared, crying...my heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was going to fall out of my chest as I ran frantically up and down the streets of Florence with people staring at me as I was calling out her name.

Suddenly I ran by 2 girls and a guy sitting at the bottom of a doorstep on a dark street.  I got about 20 feet past and stopped.  Wait a minute...was that?  No way...it couldn't have been.  Lona??  I ran back and sure enough...there she was sitting on the steps with an Italian couple, clutching a bottle of wine and laughing her ass off.  Seriously?  She wasn't alone.  She wasn't scared.  She wasn't crying.  She was having a great time partying with this couple who were also drunk and laughing.  From what I could gather they found her lost and were trying to get her to go back and stay at their place for the night.  Are you f*cking kidding me?  Like if I hadn't found her I was just going to go back to the hotel and go to sleep?!  I was relieved to see that she was alive and well, but that relief quickly turned to anger and I flipped out.  I grabbed Lona by the shoulder and started yelling in her face, telling her what my last 3 hours had been like combing the entire city for her while she was hanging out and partying without a care in the world.  She was too far gone though...just wobbly and continuing to laugh, not paying any attention to me which just made me angrier.  The dude stepped in and told me to back off, but I told HIM to back off and I gave him a look like that made him realize I was going to beat the sh*t out of him if he came one step closer to me.  I thanked them for taking care of her and then I walked her back to the hotel.

From then on I made Lona memorize and repeat back to me the name and address of every hotel and hostel that we stayed at for the rest of our time in Europe...I was never going to go through that again.  We stayed in Florence for a couple of days and then took a train up to Venice.  Our third and final stop in Italy before heading to Switzerland.  We still had no guidebooks and were basically winging it, but of course we had to stop in Venice and see this wondrous romantic city with all of its canals and gondolas and history.  We were so excited as we looked out the train window at the city growing larger and larger while we crossed the bridge over the Mediterranean to this incredible water-city.  The hotel was a little more expensive then we wanted to pay, but what the hell.  We got a nice little room overlooking a quaint canal right in the heart of the city.

We spent a couple of days there walking around, wondering at the marvel of this seemingly floating Oz, going to the large piazza on the waterfront and watching the waves lapping at the concrete walkways that are sometimes under water, sometimes not.  We took a lot of pictures on the little bridges over the canals with locals looking on in feigned amusement.  We went to a Van Gogh exhibit/sale at one of the museums and stupidly did not buy anything.  They had relatively cheap plates that he had painted, but I did not want to spend the money and weigh my backpack down with anything more than I had to.  (Little did I know that I would soon be filling my pack with concrete once we got to the Berlin Wall that had recently started to come down).  And in the end we did not spend the $80 or so dollars it cost to go on a gondola ride.  I know...how can you go to Venice and not take a gondola ride...but we decided it was a rip off, plus upon closer inspection the canals were not exactly pristine.  You could see a lot of garbage and what even looked like floating sewage drifting along past the buildings.  Gross.

Overall it was still an amazing city and we had a lot of fun there, but all too soon it was time to cash in our Italian Lira for Swiss Francs as we needed to forge on to our next country.  We realized that it was most economical to take overnight train rides from city to city, sleeping on the train and saving a night's hotel fare.  So we decided to take an overnight from Venice to Zurich, Switzerland.  I will write about Zurich and Lucerne and our scary night in 'Needle Park' in a future blog entry...