Dirty Old Man
It was the day after a party at one of my friend’s houses here in Ballarat. Most people had risen, blurry-eyed and furry-tongued, to an uncharacteristically lovely day. We composed ourselves and settle in to the standard morning-after grunts and mumbled conversations that usually follow a night of drinking, before dosing ourselves up on caffeine and developing an irrepressible urge to go outside and bask in the sun.
Our wanderings took us to the bottom of Sturt St. in the same way a black hole draws in everything not nailed to the fabric of space and time. The particular friends that I was with thought that it might be a nice idea to go and have a 2pm breakfast at Sebastiaans. Having no real objections to filling my stomach with food that might not kill me, we went along our merry way. At about the time we reached the Information Centre my body kicked in and realised that it was awake and jumped up and down and screamed like a hyperactive child that I needed to do a poo. It must have sensed the toilets in the vicinity. I told my friends that I would meet them at the restaurant before ducking around the back of the Info Centre and entering the public toilets.
I walked in, stopped, and assessed the situation. One urinal with enough space for maybe three people. Two stalls. The first stall had the door ripped off, the toilet flooded, the seat snapped off and broken in half, and water (presumably) splashed all over the floor. The second stall had nothing wrong with it, except on a bacterial level. This was a no-brainer. I entered the second stall, locked myself in and too a seat.
I was about half way through my business when someone entered the toilets and sat down in the first stall. I remember wondering what the hell he could have been doing; after all, there was no door (among other things). After sitting there for about thirty seconds he stood up and left before re-entering about ten seconds later and retaking his seat. By this point I had held off what I was doing and focused on wondering what the hell this numb-nut was doing. It was sometime during these wonderings that he put his hand on the floor, knelt down and stuck his head between the gap under the walls, and said (in a tone I’m pretty sure a lot of girls who frequent nightclubs will be able to recognise) “Hey, how’s it goin’?” It was an ugly, filthy, middle-aged man (another thing clubbing girls will understand).
I was horrified. My brain shut down and my mouth went into auto-pilot and responded with “Good. How are you?”
“What’cha doin’?” He asked. Was he fucking stupid? I’m sitting on the toilet, what else would I be doing? Evidently he was a bit confused about the concept of using a toilet.
“I’m trying to take a shit.” I replied, not liking where this conversation was going. Or how it started. Or maybe just the whole fact that some dirty old man was looking at me when I was sitting on the toilet.
“Oh.” He started, sounding a little disappointed. “I heard this is the place guys go to get their dicks sucked.” He sounded a bit hopeful about this last pro.
Oh God. Someone kill me or him. Preferably him. “ErâÂ?¦ That’s good. UmâÂ?¦ No! No! No!” I would have liked to have kicked him in the face, but seeing as how I was locked in a stall and half way though taking a shit, I thought it might not be such a good idea.
He eventually left with the comment, “Enjoy your shit.” Well there wasn’t much chance of that happening now. I finished up as quickly as I could, wiped, washed my hands and ran from that place as quickly as my spindly little legs would carry me. When I finally made it to the restaurant my friends asked what was wrong as my face had turned a rather nasty shade of pale. I related my encounter to them and they found it incredibly funny. I’ve been rather wary of public toilets ever since.
