Echoes in the Park
Written and Narrated by: Andrew Couch
A public toilet is a lovely venue for all types of music.
Name that tune! It’s Latin, for sure. It sweeps, dips, and trills from major to minor and back, bouncing around with a little more reverb than you might expect, even from such an excellent whistler. You can thank the subway tiles and porcelain of this public restroom for all the extra reverb. The whistler, however, is a mystery man; a performer behind a stall, sitting on a toilet, whistling from both ends.
You are there on what you hoped would be a very brief mission; to simply relieve a pressure which has been insisting itself upon your bladder for the last hundred yards of your walk. You expect to have done your business and washed the place from your hands in less than two minutes. What you have not accounted for is this whistler. You hear him as you approach the toilet. The magic of the music ever so slightly dims the blinding madness of piss-panic. His tone is perfect, resonant, melodic, captivating and strangely amplified in that curious venue. The tune is so familiar, you only manage to stop yourself from whistling along after half a bar of involuntary notes. The stream of relief, leaving your body in a hurry, provides a fine rhythm. If only you could remember the name of the song!
Suddenly the whistler stops at the beginning of the chorus, mid-phrase, the very hook your memory needed to catch this elusive fish! The following silence is the meatiest in recent memory, but short lived. The heavy hush is replaced suddenly by the undeniable sound of a grown man, violently flatulating into a toilet bowl. It turns out, the same surfaces, so recently reverberating with the sweet notes of a talented whistler, are equally adept at handling the terrible flapping and thunderous echo of what the Spanish delicately call “un pedo”. You know it by another name, one which practically sounds like what it is; a fart.
Fortunately, you are far enough away from the uniquely musical stall that only your hearing registers the experience. The same hearing, as you zip your fly and turn towards the sink, is once again regaled by the whistler. Skilled in many ways, he picks up exactly where he left off - the next sweet, blue note in the chorus - before he stopped the show and released the foul, brown one.
But you have already approached the sink when the notes reach you, and The faucet is one of those automatic ones. The kind which occasionally refuse to recognize your hands, even as you wag them furiously, soap covered, in front of the sensor. This one, of course, works perfectly and won’t shut off even when you retract your hands. You find yourself wishing you could turn down the volume on this recalcitrant fixture, as you feel certain you could identify the tune if only could hear a few more bars. But the thing insists on blasting water into the sink, and onto the front of your trousers.
Finally the deluge stops, but the chorus has given way to the verse you’ve already heard. You are torn. If you leave now, it may be a lifetime before you remember the name of the tune. Are you bold enough to ask him what he’s whistling through the door of the stall, behind which he has so recently blasted out more than just nice notes? Of course you’re not, that is both rude and too weird, even by your own questionable standards. Your limited options are laid bare before you – leave in permanent wonder, or hang around by the sink like a weirdo, waiting for the chorus to come around again.
What will you choose in this moment; your wet hands, clean and ready to wipe on your pants, as you have no trust in or need for public hand towels? Will you stay, or will you go?
Should you go, with a sad lament, your dreams will have faded like a fart-broken melody, while the gods of music, stuck in your brain, look down and laugh at what hopelessly distracted fools we mortals be… ‘Wait!’ You say to yourself. ‘Those are bastardized song lyrics! That’s it…’ ‘Perfidia!’ You shout. You then remember, you’re still standing there, all done for quite some time now, yet pointlessly and strangely hanging around a public toilet. Not only are you lingering in the john, but you’ve just blurted out the name of a song, like some ridiculous contestant in the filthiest gameshow ever, where the host is a stranger, shitting in a stall. A stranger who’s identity you hope will remain mysterious for the rest of your days.
The whistler once again pauses his lovely rendition, echoing so beautifully off the same surfaces so regularly assaulted by the most repugnant of human sounds. But his voice doesn’t match the whistle or the fart. At first you think he’s doing a gravely and high-pitched voice for comedic effect, but once the meaning of the words hits your brain, you are struck by a familiar bolt of shame and panic. The compound weirdness of your experience takes on a whole new tenor as the voice barks out an indignant yet curious response to your idiotic interruption – “Oh, God Damnit, am I in the men’s room, or are you in the ladies?”