OUT OF ORDER

A few lessons from my time practicing the art of cleaning up and shutting down public bathrooms.

The other day, I was renting a car in Brooklyn. It was an out-of-the-way spot, a few fenced-in trailers and tents thrown up against a subway trench. I went into a conjoined doublewide office to get the car keys. In the back of the office was a bathroom with an OUT OF ORDER sign.

I was in a hurry with a long stop-and-start drive ahead of me. And I was a customer. I felt safe assuming I could use it. When I did, the bathroom was in good enough order.

The law

The OUT OF ORDER bathroom sign is an American institution. And I know about out-of-order bathrooms. I’ve brought disorderly bathrooms to order, I’ve declared public bathrooms off-limits, allowed for exceptions to the rule, tested and even violated the warnings of OUT OF ORDER signs.

A bathroom being in or out of order is as complex as society itself. It has to do with plumbing, hygiene, laziness, loathing, the law or the mercy residing within the often-abused heart of the person regulating access to the bathroom.

Starbucks, 1997

When I was twenty, I worked at a Starbucks on 2nd Avenue and 9th Street in Manhattan. At the time, it was a frontier outpost in a war that would price and vibe out most of the residents over the next decade. In my green apron and black ballcap, I was on the side of the bad guys.

The East Village residents, no dummies, knew it was a hostile incursion. But they couldn’t resist the coffee and the drama-free convenience of the place. I’m told I served Joey Ramone more than a few grande black drips. My mind was elsewhere.

That kind of inattention is probably what excluded me from waiting tables or tending bar. So, Starbucks it was. On my second day, a skeleton-thin woman sprinted from the back of the store with her arms full of one-pound bags of coffee beans - maybe a dozen of them - retail price ten or twelve bucks each.

My manager, the rare salaried employee, told me to chase after her and get them back. I said no way. He laughed. We went back to whatever we were doing in that first summer of Frappuccinos. The blenders never stopped. The company survived.

The battlefield

At that time in the East Village, Starbucks was an interloper. Opening at five AM, the prostitutes would come in and request a cup of water, which they’d chug down, and then fill with sugar and either milk or half-n-half, for their breakfast. Neither I nor anyone I worked with ever said a word. We were visitors in their world.

In some ways, the bathroom was corporate’s peace offering to the neighborhood. It was unisex and regularly cleaned, and it locked in a very formidable way from the inside. It was bigger than the cubicle where I work today.

We were regularly banging on the door to wake a nodding junkie. I remember one emerged accusing us of interrupting his immaculate dump, with the belt still in one hand and his trousers held up by the other. Over the course of my shifts at the place, I am sure it was home to the best and worst minutes in a few people’s lives. How do I know? I had to clean the place.

A few of the many messes stand out - blood syringe-sprayed on the walls, a watery shit deliberately dropped a foot and a half from a perfectly good toilet, and vomit tracing an arc along the wall - some eggnog latte for you, as my boss put it.

I bring this up to establish that I know a thing or two about when a bathroom is out of order.

Friendly territory

I liked that Starbucks had an open-door bathroom policy. Rambling around New York as a mostly broke young man, having to urinate was an issue. There were friendly bathrooms upstairs at Barnes & Noble, upstairs at The Strand. Otherwise, you could risk the attitude and possible obstruction of striding into a bar bathroom without buying anything.

My uncle Jim had an idea at the time to publish a map of the accessible public and semi-public bathrooms and sell it. All around the country, Starbucks had open bathrooms, though many locations have since required people to punch in a code printed on the drink receipt. Like every empire before it, Starbucks discovered that once you’re inescapable, you don’t have to be as nice.

The sign

OUT OF ORDER is always provisional. It’s handwritten or printed on a sheet of paper hastily taped up.

Maybe that’s why this particular OUT OF ORDER sign jumped out to me. It was hastily composed, but the paper was worn out, with rips by the taped corners. It had been up for a while. That’s probably why it struck me. Lately, it seems like the most powerful tricks in the world consist of calling the temporary permanent and vice versa. The day job can last decades. But the laws change month by month.

The sign is also vague. It doesn’t say broken. Maybe employees can still use the bathroom. Maybe customers could still use it in an emergency. Maybe they just think so highly of you that they’d be embarrassed for you to see the bathroom in anything but a perfect state. Maybe it’s just there to keep the riff raff out. Maybe they just don’t like you in particular. The sign doesn’t say, and the phrasing makes it clear that it doesn’t have to.

Who’s allowed

The OUT OF ORDER sign is a permeable barrier. Like many such permeable barriers, it lives in places we’re not to look at, but which tend to obsess us. It’s like how we say certain things aren’t for sale, while we fear they are (see June’s “Selling a Soul”). In the case of our democracy, for example, we’ve all come to suspect that the people with the real money know otherwise and know the price.

Obedience

One late night last December, on a long drive North, I stopped for gas in Virginia. The gas-station minimart had an OUT OF ORDER on the bathroom and I was too fried to even ask. I went around back and urinated on the wall of the building, beside a very large rat trap, in the freezing cold, wondering if the bathroom really was out of order.

Advisory services

The future is out of order. It’s a door closed for obscure reasons. It’s a toilet that doesn’t work as promised.

The door is like Jackson Pollock or Picasso. Go ahead with your own personal Rothko color-squares - see where that gets you. There’s one magic ticket and it only belongs to one owner. And the ticket can never work again. The arts - visual, filmic and literary - are crowded with advice and professionals and consultants these days. But read the fucking sign. It’s out of order.

Restoring order

During the year I worked at Starbucks, the bathroom was rarely OUT OF ORDER, despite the regular fluid and solid insults of its visitors. But sometimes, they just went too far, and the whole world had to be punished. I’d clean and then shut down the bathroom for an hour or so.

That particular bathroom was a popular destination. And shutting it down amounted to a violation of a wide spectrum of promises. A locked door with a handwritten sign would occasion a vicious outcry from people who could find no reason to understate their feelings. I was young and smug enough to chuckle when I took the brunt of their well-intuited rage at the fresh-faced tip of the spear for a corporate, suburban invasion of the faded seat of the American counterculture.

But I was myself a rascal back then and left all manner of mess in my wake across the city. So I was sympathetic. And it was usually easier to mop the tiles and leave the bathroom open.

Customers only?

An OUT OF ORDER sign in hangs the parts of life that make it life - love, art, opportunity. It’s all closed, from the looks of it. But they might make an exception if you either ask nicely, or just charge past and yank the handle.

Will you get in? Depends on how you ask and how the barista is feeling about people who look like you and the state of divine mercy at that minute and just how wrecked the loo really is - anyone’s guess.

The toilet is the government, the nation, the august institution, the corporation, the failsafe career path. Just because it ran great before doesn’t mean much today, and even less tomorrow. And maybe they will let you go in, but into what?

The order itself is out of order

Appealing to order is always a desperate gambit on shaky foundations. The politician who appeals to law and order is appealing to people who are in the throes of rage and exhaustion. Restoring order is usually the province of riot cops, who are basically cops operating under the promise that their excesses will be ignored. No one can exactly agree what order looks like, or how much of it is actually good.

Human beings are just smart enough and just dumb enough to think ourselves smart. Just smart to cook up orderly systems for how everything works, and dumb enough that those systems more often than not lead us off a cliff.

We live just long enough to have one or two profound insights and two or three bone-deep loves before being swept back into the earth. That’s the order of things. That’s why it’s right and good for human nature to be consistently out of order.

Selected bibliography

Selling a Soul