“There’s nothing more overrated than a bad fuck, and nothing more underrated than a good shit."—Billy Childish

I’ll agree. The sense of pure relief that a good long shit brings to a body is pure pleasure (unless of course of you have a bad case of the Emma’s (Emma Freud—hemorrhoids))—but just as clothes make the man, so to does the decor of the crapper influence the quality of the going. For your pleasure, I’d like to present my “Top 8” worst places I’ve taken / had to take a dump. My apologies to all the awful lavatories whose memory has been eroded or erased by time and denial—you know who you are, and that’s the important thing isn’t it?

Hoover Dam
A marvel of engineering, concrete, steel, water and in a 90 degree sun, chemical toilets. Sadly, I had overdone myself at the Vegas “all you can eat” buffets, and now all I could do was poop. The stench of a chemical toilet at best is nasty: in such heat, and well used, even the flies were keeping their distance. But needs must. I perched myself above the seat as best I could (no way was I sitting on that), held the lock-less door closed with a third hand and tried to get this over with as quickly as possible. For the first time in my life, my evacuation was the size of a cannonball and had speed to match. I prayed to whatever gods there were that I wouldn’t get my ass… SPLASH… too late.

To add insult to injury, the tour of the inside of the dam included a prolonged visit to the internal bathroom system: gold plated throughout, clean enough that you could lick them, hand basins, a mountain of toilet paper—all it needed was a little man standing ready, hands hygienic, to perform the wipe for you and a scantily clad Brownie to cheer lead your efforts. I almost cried.

Round Table Pizza
While they may be home to The Last Honest Pizza, per current advertising, the local Round Table has another claim to fame: honestly the worst possible facilities. While the Pizza Hut undergoes a makeover every six months, it seems no-one ever stops to think, “Do we need to do anything with the bathrooms?” like, for example, clean the fuckers? Two urinals (one for short men with small dicks, one for tall men with long dicks I presume) almost always overflowing with a mix of urine, spit, water, cigarette butts, and fluids unnamed. The single stall TP’d but in a special way: with both used and unused paper. The floor awash in piss, the taps of the hand basin creating their own ecosystem. Best to go in only to pee, and even then with eyes closed and breathing through the mouth. Try not to pee on your fingers either so you can avoid the need to use the wash “facilities”.

Scout Camp
Ah, the joys of camping: shit food, shit company and shit shitters. Of course, being in the middle of nowhere, there was no other place to go. The farmhouse (of the farmer whose land we had camped on) was strictly off-limits except for use of the outside faucet. Sixty boys with tummies upset from their inability to cook anything that didn’t cause runny bottoms, and a pair of back to back chemical toilets. I didn’t even need to open the door to tell that this was a bad idea.

On the third day, I had exhausted my abilities to clench, and nature had to take it’s course. I waited till most of the camp was busy playing soccer, and wandered off to the river where I squatted and released myself. Natures way, right? A perfect plan were it not for two things: the scoutmasters wife catching you pre-nip, and the turd which should have floated harmlessly downstream instead sat solid as a rock on the bad of the river, clear for all to see. Oh the humiliation! I covered the offending piece with rocks (taken from upstream) as best I could, the scoutmasters wife laughed it off. When the troop went swimming the next day, I forwent the pleasure knowing that my doing was upstream and basically these idiots were swimming in my shit.

Greenock--Intern House
We’d found a house to rent for our 16 month outplacement to IBM. We had two rooms left open. We decided we’d get a couple to move in: that way we’d have a girl to clean up after us, including the toilet. Smart thinking, huh? This plan would have been perfect, had we not chosen Andy and Marion to be our couple. Marion, it turns out, was a complete and utterly useless housewife. We placed articles of trash in obvious places and timed how long it took her to pick them up: days becoming weeks becoming months. Slovenly. The bathroom, servicing six assholes but otherwise left to it’s own devices soon became so fetid everyone was trying to keep movements in to let them escape in the finely maintained IBM facilities.

On leaving, we asked the landlord for our furniture deposit back: he just stared at us as if we were from another planet.

To add insult to injury, we had to spend the sixteen month period listening to them have (what Marion told me) was terribly bad sex, night after night. What’s worse than terribly bad sex? No sex at all.

Kirkmichael Arms
Built in a time when the public bar was split into two parts: the bar for the men, the lounge for the ladies, the men’s bathroom was conveniently placed at the end of the game room (where the strange wedge shape of the building required different-length pool cues depending upon where you were shooting from) the bathroom was purely functional, but really not much worse than that. The builder had though things out quite well: a shelf above the urinal allowed one to take their drinks in with them, and not stop imbibing just because one was pissing. The sit-down was located at the very back, where the wedge ended. Nothing wrong still. The problem was if you were entertaining a member of the opposite sex, she would have to go through the bar, outside, in the lounge door, and to the rear of that to find the female john. Clearly, this trip wasn’t worth the candle, so often we’d be asked to watch the door as a lady made her doing. We did as we were told, we watched the door. Intently. We didn’t stop anyone going in of course. Many a promising relationship ended with “You bastard, I saw his fucking penis!” and a punch in the head from a guy who had just lost control and pissed all over his “date trousers.”

Glasgow Public Lavatory, St. Vincent Square
Another example of a town planner thinking ahead: the public lavatories are located underneath the main cross streets, with quaint steps down (and fuck the wheelchair people). For some reason however they quickly became the space to be for the homeless and the people who, while they were in a city, were looking for a little “cottage.” Adonis-like, as myself and my 20-something friends were, the latter seemed to take a special interest in us. Which was by and large unwanted. The local council, having discovered the “problem” decided to fix it by removing the doors to the stalls. Sadly, this measure failed and instead of there being less sodomy going on, everyone who wanted to simply make use of the facilities as intended would have to walk past a display of what evangelist Christians would call unholy behaviour, and often would be interrupted mid-movement by a semi-erect penis being shoved through a glory hole with the query of “Do you want to suck it, I’ll give you a tenner.” from the adjacent stall.

For bonus points, whoever crafted the glory holes had been very precise: it was possible to see from one end of the stalls to the other (but not a recommended practice, for a penis in the eye smarts.)

Oddly enough, I never really saw many toilets in Scotland that resembled the “worst toilet in the world” as shown in Trainspotting. Perhaps I didn’t get out much.

Muir Woods
Just north of San Francisco is a beautiful parkland/woodland area—the Muir Woods of the title (d’uh). A wonderful place to walk, hike, stroll, jog, do whatever you want in except, that is, go to the lavatory. At first, I was impressed to see that the needs of the walker had been taken care of: atop a small rising next to the cliffs stood a nice little wooden hut, unmarked for sexual preference. From the outside, all seemed fine. One basked in the knowledge that even out here, the genius of American Plumbing had overtaken the seemingly impassable aspects of nature and provided a quiet, well lit place to take a shit.

Upon entering however, you realize this is not a a quaint little hut/cabin lavatory: it is, instead, quite possibly the eighth level of hell. The floor: an uneven layer of off-color cement, the walls pitch black (at least I hope it was pitch). The handbasin: missing. Toilet paper? Beside the bowl, on the floor, soggy. For the first time in my life I’d have used one of those ass-gaskets, provided by management for your convenience: needless to say those were not in supply either.

The solitary lavatory looked like it had been built in the 70’s, and from a mold that had been broken just before this one was made. The seat made of wood, the pedestal white--but there’s something missing: the back, the tank. Is this another chemical warfare experiment? No, a much more “efficient” method is used to clean here: the toilet base opening up to a 10 to 20 foot drop onto rocks below, cleaned by the tides. What will they do, I wondered, if Space:1999 comes true and the tides stop. From above it was possible to make out the vague shapes of those who had gone before you. The delightful odor of raw sewage wafted up and through the bottomless bowl to hit you full in the face. This was awfulness as spectacle. It’s only good aspect: upon viewing it, my sphincter clenched itself shut so fast and hard that I wouldn’t actually need to take a dump for at least three days.

Staggering out into the light, the beauty of trees, the smells of a different nature. I strongly advise if you visit: make like a bear.

Celine’s Toilets
Fictional as they may be, the toilets as described by L.F. Celine in Journey to the End of the Night are probably one of the hardest things to read: as a landlord, our hero, a doctor, is called upon when his tenants have a problem with a blockage. No big deal? Lets just say the tenants take leaving it to the last minute to the extreme and only call upon our dear doctor when their stools refuse to join the mountain of prior shits on the mini-mountain growing out of the bowl. To these mini-mountains we go, and in detail, we are informed of how it takes a stick, a brick and sometimes a hand to undo what these filthy creatures have done. Everyone has a book they struggle with, at least in parts: these passages took me weeks to navigate through.

So, feel free to share with us your worst lavatorial experiences. A small plaque will be offered to the lowest of the low: “Fat Jerry didn’t shit here.”