Some people in life are cursed. Granted, some curses are worse than others—“larger,” if you prefer. Or “less manageable” than what mine is. Which is this: somehow, no matter how thoroughly I check to make sure the door is locked, I am consistently walked in on while using a public bathroom. I can’t remember how far back it started, but I’m fairly certain that it began in New York—as most bad things do. 

During that period, perhaps I could have chalked it up to being drunk all the time, so maybe I wasn’t really checking well enough to ensure that the door was locked. Especially when it came to some of the sketchier stalls I was forced to use in my perennially wasted heyday. Stalls that weren’t just filled with garden-variety/often indecipherable graffiti, but also the caked-on marks of dry vomit and cum. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I was usually too blasted out of my mind to care much about things like “sanitariness”—though it is something of a small wonder that I never contracted hepatitis or whatever from one of those atrocious toilettes. Of the ilk that only a twenty-something would find themselves in (either that or someone who had gone horribly astray in life). 

So yeah, the first five or so times it happened, I figured it was somehow my fault. When one of those times resulted in me being raped, I decided, no, there was something more sinister afoot—something that was, for lack of a better phrase, “driven by the Fates.” For whatever reason, it was my lot in life to be literally caught with my pants down (though, usually, it was with a skirt or dress pulled up). More to the point, caught in one of the most compromised, vulnerable positions one can be by scandalized strangers. 

This “trend” continued well after I left New York. And well after I got sober. In fact, it happened yet again just this afternoon. I had gone to the Beacon Hill Branch of the Seattle Public Library to return an overdue book. Maybe, in this case, I “brought it on myself” as the result of invoking some sort of karmic wrath for preventing an innocent fellow library patron from reading The Year of Magical Thinking in a timely fashion. I wasn’t even really sure why I had checked that book out in the first place. Usually, it was the type of book people only want to read if someone close to them recently died…or is about to.

Maybe the only reason I decided to grab it off the shelf was because they didn’t have any other available titles from her. Joan is always very popular, after all. I guess I should have felt lucky there were any books on the shelf by Ms. D at all. Even if it was one as “self-pitying” as The Year of Magical Thinking. That’s the word that kept coming up in the book—in the form of: “the question of self-pity.” You know, after a loved one dies. Meanwhile, I was questioning how much self-pity I should allow for myself after “the curse” befell me yet again in the library bathroom. This particular bagno had only two stalls. And when one of them opened up, the college-aged girl that spilled out of it looked me directly in the eye. Something I took note of because I hate being looked at directly in the eye, especially by strangers. 

But this isn’t the only reason I bring up the subject of eye contact. It’s important to note because she watched me walk into the very stall she just came out of. Which is why I found it rather unhinged (no door pun intended) that, seconds later, after I had “securely” turned the lock, she flung the same door open again, as though expecting that, miraculously, no one would be inside. (I still have no clue why she would try to go back into the stall right after using it, unless she needed some “tissue” to dry her hands with or something.)

Her reaction to my presence was a gasp and an actual scream, which, obviously, wouldn’t make anyone feel super great about themselves. Christ, she acted like she walked in on a mutant jacking off or something. I’m the one whose privacy was so egregiously violated. Her scream conveyed such a sense of being affronted that my reflexive instinct was to actually apologize to her, shouting out as she flew off in a frenzy, “I’m sorry! I locked the door!” But it didn’t matter that I had locked the door. Not when “the curse” doomed most every lock I ever “engaged with” in a public b-room to be faulty. There was no escape or logical explanation to be had. The lock, no matter what form of egress it was attached to, simply “endeared itself” to whoever wanted to open the door from the outside and catch a glimpse of my bare lower half. 

In the library bathroom, caught in my latest “powder room perturbation,” I could hear the person in the other stall next to me titter to themselves about my humiliation before unabashedly dropping a deuce. No wonder they were in there for so long. The only reason people ever stay in bathrooms that long is because 1) they’re shitting, 2) they’re fucking or 3) they’re crafting some graffiti. I would have preferred if this bia had been fucking or graffiti’ing. Anything but taking a shit. The sound effects of that endeavor disgust me to no end, just as it does that someone can be so unabashed about doing it in a public WC without at least trying to drown out the plop-plop-plopping with the sound of a toilet flush. I mean, really, it’s the most overt courtesy one could offer. But then, that would involve actually having a sense of shame, which no one does anymore. Just me, apparently. As I’m subjected to the impromptu torture of being “spotted” in the most exposed state possible. Even though, when the girl I’ll call Library Voyeur did walk in on me, my skirt was situated in such a way so that it was covering my snatch. Mainly because I was in a squatting position.

It could have been that was what was most disturbing to her: me being a squatter. To me, though, I found people who actually sat down on public toilets—paper seat cover “boundary” or not—to be the real freakshows. Honestly, did they really think that a scanty paper cover was some kind of “ironclad protection” against the wealth of germs and disease that awaited to jump right on their ass, or any other crevice that was attainable? 

But no, somehow I’m the weirdo for squatting. Unless, of course, she was just outright horrified by the way I look. Which is something I’m not altogether prepared to process. In the past, though, the “walk-ins” would never elicit such fright in the eyes of those who saw me (apparently looking “good enough to rape” at one point—I know, I know: “that’s not what rape is about”). Then again, maybe it’s because I’m in the Pacific Northwest now. Everyone is so goddamn mild-mannered, so easily rattled…what was I to expect from a vanilla woman seeing me in the bathroom like that? Then it hit me: maybe being drunk while bearing this curse was the only way to go. Being so out of my gourd when a “pop-through” happened that I couldn’t process any reaction whatsoever on the other person’s face, let alone a bad one. 

After I finished pissing (my flow so ruinously interrupted for a minute there) and flushed the toilet, all while the person in the next stall kept squeezing one out, I checked out another book: Barbara Payton’s I Am Not Ashamed. I then took it to the nearest bar I could find—the Clock-out Lounge—and proceeded to order my first drink in two years. Afterward, I read the first sentence, taken from an assessment Margaret Sanger made of Payton: “Barbara Payton certainly could be rehabilitated. It would first require an abstinence from drink.” Yeah, sure. And then it hit me: maybe Barbara kept drinking because she was a victim of the bathroom curse too.