I told my kids this story and it made them laugh. They encouraged me to write it down. While I was thinking of how to tell it to an audience, I realized it wasn’t just a funny story it was a symptom of a bigger problem.
When I was going to high school in the 70s and 80s you were allowed to smoke cigarettes in school. Not at my school, but every other school in the area. Those other schools even had smoking lounges.
I’m not an advocate of anyone smoking cigarettes, though I’m a smoker myself. It’s a rude habit that violates the space of anyone near you. And it’s simply not healthy.
When you got off the bus in the morning the parking lot would be littered with people huddled in circles, passing around a single cigarette, as if it were illegal. Like marijuana. Because smoking was not tolerated students had to be creative in how they got their fix.
One person would light a cigarette and pass it around. The reason was deniability.
Some members of a firing squad had blanks in their rifles so they wouldn’t know until they were face to face with saint Peter whether or not they had broken the sixth commandment and would be forced to spend eternity in a lake of fire. The employee of the school system would have no clue who was smoking the cigarette, nor who owned it or flicked it away.
Deniability.
And by employee, I mean someone with the title of teacher. Someone who went around busting young adults for doing something that was legal, socially acceptable and even accommodated at other high schools should not be honored with the title of teacher. They weren’t there to teach, they were there to police.
Some teachers would announce they were entering a restroom, giving smokers a chance to put out a cigarette if one was being smoked. Some teachers didn’t want to punish people when all they wanted to do was void their bladder.
High school restrooms were so popular for smoking cigarettes that there was a hit song called, “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room.”
I smoked at school from time to time, but it wasn’t something I did on a regular basis. For one thing I was a hermit so standing in a circle with friends wouldn’t have happened.
And I didn’t want to get caught. I don’t remember the consequences, but the thought of ‘getting caught’ was unbearable. Besides, I was driving to school. If I needed a smoke I could go sit in my car or even leave the campus and drive around.
I could drive my car to school, as if I were a grown up, yet I couldn’t smoke at school, like the grown ups who worked at the school. It was such an odd contradiction.
Years after I finished high school I was at an open house for one of my kids’ middle schools and listened to the administrators talk about what was expected of our kids. The principal of the middle school, who told us he was a strict disciplinarian, had shortened the length of time students had between classes.
I have no idea how long we had between classes when I was in high school. I had never given it a thought. The bell rang, everyone left and went to the next class. It never occurred to me that someone had control over the length of time between classes.
The principal said, “I got on my hands and knees and crawled from one end of the building to the other, so I know they have enough time to get to their next class.”
This was new to me. That a student should be limited in how much time it takes to get from one class to the next. I didn’t know what to say. Did it bother me? I wasn’t sure.
The principal was a steam-roller in his presentation, but I held up my hand. When he wouldn’t stop I started saying, “Hey! Hey!”
He wasn’t happy but he stopped and acknowledged me. “Yes?”
“Why did you shorten the length of time a person has between classes?” I said.
“Because they don’t need that much time between classes,” he said.
“What if they need to use the restroom?” I said.
“They can be excused from class,” he said.
“So now they have to swallow their pride and ask for permission to leave class to do something private; something they could have done without needing permission before, when they had more time between classes.”
Why was this prison warden behavior being tolerated? Why was the dignity of middle school students being compromised to satisfy a disciplinarian’s fetish?
My high school removed the stall walls in the boy’s restrooms to discourage young men from smoking. Did they do this in the girl’s restrooms? I don’t think they did. I think they would have had a flood of parents in the principal’s office if their daughters weren’t given some semblance of privacy while doing their business. Even with stall walls you could see the shoes of someone struggling to get a little relief in the next stall.
They left the metal wall between the urinals and the toilets. The toilet next to that wall was the most popular because there was the tiniest bit of privacy if you leaned in towards it. And it had the toilet paper roll attached to it . . . a roll that would only let you have a few squares at a time, causing you to have to push a handful of squares through the backside over and over again until you have enough to prevent your finger from tearing through the paper and touching your netherest of regions.
You didn’t want to get your finger any dirtier than it needed to be considering the faucet taps had to be held in place or they would spring closed cutting off the flow of water, the way I imagine a faucet tap in prison would work.
One day during class I got permission to use the restroom. My need was of a higher number than one, so I chose to make my move during class thinking the chances of someone witnessing my business would be less than if I chose to do it during the few minutes we had between classes.
On that day my plan was thwarted by a school employee; aka a teacher. He was situated on the toilet next to the metal wall with the toilet paper dispenser and was leaning towards it with his head down.
He knew I was there but I stood in such a way that he wouldn’t be able to see me. Since my need wasn’t urgent the two naked toilets next to him were not a temptation.
Not true of the young man who breezed past me and on past the teacher hunched next to the wall, desperately willing his physical body to shimmer out of existence and jump to another dimension.
The young man stopped in front of the middle unit, dropped his drawers and sat down sitting nearly knee to naked knee with his neighbor.
The young man’s flatulence was loud and fruity, followed by multiple splashes. When the first round seemed to be over he looked at the teacher and said, “Hell of a day!”
I was frozen. I was as embarrassed as I’ve ever been and I wasn’t sitting next to someone noisily relishing a bowel movement.
I hadn’t thought the teacher could be more embarrassed than he already was, but the young man sitting next to him had no access to the toilet paper roll. As was inevitable, the student asked the teacher, “could you pass me some toilet paper?”
The teacher had to push a few squares at a time through the back of the mounted roll until he thought he had enough for the student to clean his backside. After handing off a fistful of paper the teacher closed his eyes and prayed for spontaneous human combustion.
After a few moments in which I imagined the student wiped himself; at this point I’d closed my eyes, he asked the teacher for more paper.
I left. I needed to use the toilet, but I felt like if it were possible to die of embarrassment I might die on behalf of the man sitting next to the toilet paper roll.
In a world that makes sense, the embarrassed teacher was one of those who pushed to remove the stall walls in the boy’s restrooms while sitting in the teacher’s lounge enjoying the rich full taste of a Lucky Strike cigarette between classes, never imagining the day when his dignity might be in jeopardy due to the narrow minded decision of a handful of bureaucrats.
