The Beast in the Bathroom

I’ve had my life threatened by some random angry stranger while waiting for a bus in L.A. I’ve been stranded in a foreign country for a while with no way to contact my family at home. I’ve told a guy twice my size that I thought he should leave a certain much smaller friend of mine alone. I love turbulence and fast roller coasters. I love rides that suddenly drop you when you least expect it. I used to let my friend hit me with his car, just to shock and amuse passersby. I used to run a couple miles nightly through the bad parts of town for my exercise. I have no qualms about performing in front of many people. I am fine with inevitable death. I’m not arachnophobia, acrophobia, or claustrophobic. I seem pretty fearless, but there’s always been one thing in particular that scares me like nothing else. Strange bathrooms.

I don’t understand where this fear comes from. I’m not afraid of small spaces. I’ve had to share changing rooms, so being seen naked isn’t the problem. Though I dislike that bathrooms are often cold, that’s hardly a reason to fear them. Even so, I am frightened of them. Modern bathroom arrangement, especially in public bathrooms, seems designed to terrify. Sound echoes from the tile to the toilet. Every gasp, grunt, or cough reverberates until it returns to my ears with an intimidating ethereal quality it lacked when it left my lips. The eternally dripping faucet drives me mad as the water splashes like the sound of blood in the creepy caverns and haunted houses of bad horror movies. The florescent lights are in a state of perpetual flicker, washing the room in the eerie gritty blue of films like Saw and Pulse, the blue I’ve come to associate with horrible death. The mirror is always cracked, causing my reflection to line up just a little off. My disconnected face stares back at me fragmented like a scar that wasn’t sewn up properly. The corroded faucets spew blood-rust water that freezes my hands with its arctic cold and fills my mouth with the vile taste of unwashed pennies. Though I dare not even bring it remotely close to my head, the taste is there just the same, making me want to gag, to throw the door open and breathe once more the fresh air of freedom and feel the warm yellows and greens of a safer world. It does not matter if the bathroom I enter is the world’s nicest and cleanest. Once the door locks, they all turn into these intimidating septic pits.

I'm not sure why I have this irrational fear of unfamiliar restrooms. From the moment I step in and lock the door, there’s a terrible sense of foreboding breeding in the back of my skull, the anticipation of some cataclysmic event that for some reason can and will only happen within the confines of this eight-by-ten room of tile and porcelain. It’s never a plausible fear either. I’m don’t fear some angry trucker will come in and stab me for taking to long. I don’t fear serial rapists will kick in the doors. That would be at least possible, if not probable. When I enter that tomb of the unknown bowel movement, my fear is ghosts. Someone could be watching me and I would never know it. There could be some strange entity observing me at my most private of moments.

Perhaps this fear stems from childhood experience. I suspected my own bathroom was haunted. When showering, the hot water would frequently cut off suddenly and unexpectedly. Some may say that it was simply bad plumbing. A faucet runs hot in the kitchen and a shower turns cold in the bathroom, like Butterfly Effect: The Home Game. If that were so, the hot water knob would not have been rotated to the off position. Perhaps its because I once used the bathroom only to see a person-shaped shadow dart across the room while I was home alone. My privacy felt very violated. Either way, the result was the same. Locked or not, alone or not, I was never alone in a bathroom.

After many years of forced acquaintance, I’ve made peace with my parents’ bathroom. I use it without fear. Whatever is there has not hurt me aside from the severe neural shock that comes from rapid temperature changes. After a year and a half of constant use, I’ve finally ok with my current bathroom. I cannot say the same for other bathrooms. I haven’t had time to acquaint myself with their idiosyncrasies. Until I’ve spent years with every rest stop and Texaco in the world, I fear I shall always fear my Achilles heel: The bathroom.