Short Stories: Bathroom
After my blissful freshman year of living in one of the new dorm buildings on campus, I was shuffled along to where the upperclassmen left on campus lived: buildings from the 60’s that had to have been designed by MC Escher (thanks 30Rock!) This building had four main towers A,B,C,D all of which had suites in them labeled in to 100s followed by another A,B,C or D. I lived in A200B. None of this makes and I am not sure how any of us managed to find our dorm room after stumbling back from a party, or the bathroom even.
After moving in a finding my parents wandering around other towers with my TV in hand in a failed attempt to find my room, I shared a suite with three of my best friends and we all shared one bathroom. The bathroom was lovely painted concreted, an extremely old shower, a sink that smelled like vomit (in the sink’s defense, it only smelled like vomit after someone vomited in it) and a lighting fixture filled with bugs. Never the less countless hours were spent in that bathroom between the four or us showering, getting ready or, you know, vomiting.
The Shower Stand
Since there were four girls sharing one shower, there was a lot of shower products that needed a resting place. Our suite area was private, and you would only have to walk through it if you lived there, or if you eventually figured out that girls were running around in their underwear yelling and drinking each weekend. But, because of this privacy, we were able to leave all of our items in the shower without fear of being stolen, so long as we had somewhere to put them. Enter the tension rod shower caddy. It was a big tension rod with 4 little shelves on it. The rod was placed between the tub and the ceiling and we loaded it up with countless bottles of shampoo and shower gels. It was the perfect solution, and perfect warning system.
The first time it warned of us something, my roommate Christina was showering, drunk. Across the hall we heard a huge crashing sound in the bathroom. She had accidentally kicked the tension rod out of place sending everything crashing down. We all thought it was hilarious. Soon Val kicked down the rod under similar drunken circumstances. Hilarious. Then, it just became a thing. If you were drunk and showering, kicking the rod out of place was the thing to do. It let people know you were ready to party or going to be the girl who need to be carried home that night with her shoes on the wrong feet.
Watching your suite-mates run in to scoop up their shampoos and soaps was an added bonus.
Urine Overhead
This dorm building was old and not without its problems. One problem was that a group of guys who lived above us and loved to flood their bathroom. We have no idea how they managed to do it so frequently, but they were pros. When they would flood their bathroom, a nice trickle of urine water would come down our wall. Sometimes we would be around, others not. We knew it had happened by our soaking wet bath mat in front of the toilet. It was always pleasant on bare feet. One particular flood totally flooded our bathroom and the room below us, also soaking the hallway carpet and adding to the ambiance of the whole place. The university actually had someone clean up after this flood and it looked like they had done a good job, until the day I started staring at the light above the toilet. It was a square plastic fixture bolted to the ceiling that had its share of bugs, and now, I noticed, it was filled with water. Why would it be filled with…oh dear god! It’s urine water!!
For the rest of the year we took our lives in our hands everytime we used the toilet and prayed that today would not be the day that the plastic gave way and urine water soaked our hair with our pants around our ankles. We probably should’ve been afraid that an electrical light socket was filled with water, but hey, urine water seemed like a more direct threat.
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