The Places I’ve Gone

I have about the world’s smallest bladder. Just ask my parents or brother and they will agree. When we went on a family vacation it was always me that had to visit the restroom in the restaurant or gas station or rest stop. It was always me that was keeping an eye out for the rest areas so we could pull over and I could go. It is always me that has to get up during the movie to run to the restroom.

At one point my dad was the one who commented I should create a kind of restroom guide the way they have restaurant guides. I would call it “Places I’ve Gone” and it would be a guide just to the restrooms. I would rate them and talk in length about the nice ones. Well, that has never happened and I am doubting I will ever do that. It’s not a bad idea though.

I think the most interesting one I remember running across was in this pretentious martini bar in New York. My brother and his spouse really liked this place. You know the place. It was the kind of place where a martini could easily cost you upwards of 8 bucks. Anyway, the restrooms were upstairs and when you went up there what you saw were a bunch of clear glass booths. You could see right through the doors. Nothing was designated MEN or WOMEN. You walked in and then locked the door. As soon as you did that some space-aged voodoo technology caused the clear glass to go immediately opaque and no one could see through. It was very cool.

I do recall that the restrooms were still a tad messy, though and there was way too much chrome. A room with a door that could should have fixtures a little more comfortable than very cold metal.

The problem is I cannot even remember the name of the place where these restrooms were. This is the problem with me as a guide-writer. I don’t remember all of the places where I have been.

I remember thinking that the restrooms in the old Ruth’s Chris steakhouse in St. Louis were very nice. These were the kind of restrooms where you feel like you need to be wearing a tux just to walk in and pee. The problem is that the original Ruth’s Chris was torn down so they could build a new St. Louis County courthouse and jail. I understand they have opened a new one, but I have no idea where it is or what their restrooms were like.

I have visited a lot of rest areas on the road. I remember, back in college, talking to this snobby guy from New York. He made mention about traveling by car across the country and finding places to stop for the restroom. I made a comment about just stopping at a rest area. He snorted and said, “yeah, and get raped by some truck driver.” This made me wonder exactly what kind of rest areas they had in New York. Are rest area rapes common out that way?

I travel between Chicago and St. Louis the most. I have visited every rest stop between those two cities, both coming and going, and have never had a problem. Sure, there is nothing fancy in them, but all things considered they tend to be relatively pleasant places. Plus, they recently did some remodeling of some of them and they look even better. They even have some cool playground equipment at most of them. I wouldn’t eat something off of the floor at one of these places but I wouldn’t pass them by should the urge strike.

I remember the restrooms as most Chili’s being relatively nice. The restroom at L. Woods Tap and Pine Lodge here in Chicago is very nice. It provides something very important and that is reading material over the urinals. I think this adds something to most restrooms and should be added to many men’s rooms around the country.

I do not like the restrooms at the place where I work. I use the toilets provided in the men’s locker room in the exercise gym rather than the mass restrooms down the hall. Someone designed these without putting lights over the stalls. So, if you sit in a stall it is dark and shadowy. I imagine sinister managerial intent to prevent people from sitting there and reading. Plus, the walls are chipped. I have even seen a spider in one stall once and that automatically makes me downgrade a restroom.

One place had restrooms so infested with bugs it had to be seen to be believed. This was Marinelli Field, a minor league baseball stadium in Rockford where the Riverhawks used to play. The ‘Hawks now have a new stadium but this old one was built right next to some kind of drainage river or something. So, at night about one hundred and fifty quintillion small flying bugs would come up and start flying around every available lights. You half expected to see small children being carried away by these things. I have no idea what these bugs were, because I never found myself bitten by them. So, they weren’t mosquitoes.

Anyway, with that many flying bugs it was only inevitable to find spiders here. So, down under the stands, where the restrooms were, you would find some of the biggest, fattest spiders outside of the Amazon jungle. These had to have been the most obese spiders ever. I bet there was a kind of spider waiting list for spiders who wanted to build webs in this place. You probably had to get approval from some spider resident association to build in this place.

I am betting some of the webs were actually spider restaurants where a pretentious spider with a French accent would great them. “Ah yes, welcome to Che Web. We just had a shipment of swamp flies come eeen. These are wrapped in thay finest selk and roddy to be ee-ten.”

So, I probably will never write the book about restrooms. Now I have put the idea out to the masses, so if you are ambitious please feel free to do so. Maybe there already is a series of books and I just don’t know about it. Just give me a credit or thank you if you become a millionaire selling restroom guidebooks.

Someone once told me the sequel could have been called “Places I’ve Gone: Number Two.” That seems tasteless to me, though.