by Adam Carolla
BATHROOM
DOOS AND
DON’TS
This chapter is my attempt to get us all on the same sheet of toilet paper. Society runs because we have certain agreed-upon rules and standards. Red means stop, we read left to right, and with the exception of a few stoned celebrities, we don’t enter the freeway on off-ramps. But when it comes to this great nation’s bathrooms, it’s anarchy. A lawless free-for-all of urine and fecal matter. I’m gonna try to put an end to this by laying down some simple guidelines.
RULE #1: THE BATHROOM DOOR SHOULD ONLY BE SHUT WHEN THE BATHROOM IS IN USE.
I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted standing in hallways at parties waiting for someone to leave a bathroom that was empty. The problem is when the door is shut, we assume someone’s pants are around their ankles, so we wait. And after a few minutes we do that sheepish palm-toward-your-face, single-back-knuckle knock. That’s followed up by the more aggressive, multiknuckle, hope-you’re-not-mid-dump knock. When you finally enter the head and realize it’s empty, you feel violated. You stood in the hall, this close to shitting yourself, while every attractive person at the party walked past you for nothing. Why the fuck would you shut the goddamn door on the way out in the first place? It’s not like there’s a fucking raccoon in the bathtub. You’re not letting in a draft. Even if you shit the place up, why are you sealing it like Tupperware? Leave a few inches of daylight between the door and the goddamn jamb just to get some cross ventilation.
Quick anecdote: I was at a party where some wildebeest had destroyed the bathroom with his ass moments before I was to use it. I walked in the john with a lungful of party air, shut the door, and headed toward the commode. When I exhaled the party air, which smelled of sangria, and inhaled the bathroom air, which smelled of ass, I realized the shrub in the backyard would have been a much better alternative than the shit pit from Slumdog Millionaire. I immediately turned around, flung open the door, and there was a hot chick waiting to use the bathroom next. I gave her a halfhearted “It wasn’t me,” but the music was loud and we were both on the move in different directions. I’m sure when she was watching Dancing with the Stars a few seasons back she was like, “Oh, man, can that guy shit up a hallway bathroom.” The point is, this wouldn’t have happened if we could all just agree that closed door means occupied, open door means come on in, and cracked door means enter—but more like a cop entering a warehouse at the docks.
RULE #2: NO LOUD CELL-PHONE CONVERSATIONS IN PUBLIC BATHROOMS.
I was burned two times in the same week because of people ignoring this rule. First time was at a steak joint with Jimmy Kimmel. I was standing at the urinal with my back to the door when I heard a loud “How’s it going?” I, never wanting to be antisocial or one of those aloof celebrities, immediately answered back, “Going great.” Of course a second later, a guy who looked like Suge Knight’s scary older brother pulled up to the urinal next to mine and continued his cell-phone conversation. If he had been familiar with this rule, I wouldn’t have made an ass of myself interrupting the hit he was putting on his business partner. Three days later I was backstage at Dancing with the Stars when I walked into a small bathroom, with a single urinal and a single toilet, and began evacuating my bladder. Roughly about a pint and a half into the piss I heard a voice come from the stall, “How you doing?” Assuming it was one of the many people who work on the show recognizing my Capezios, I promptly answered “Good” and followed it up with a “Getting paid to take a shit. Not too shabby.” A second later a loud voice rang out from the stall, “I’m on the phone.” I know it’s a free country, but you can’t use your cell phone for the two hours you’re in a theater or the six hours you’re on a flight—how about you stay off it for the three minutes I’m taking a piss?
RULE #3: SOUNDS OBVIOUS, BUT FELLAS, LIFT THE FUCKING SEAT BEFORE YOU PISS.
When you’re in a public men’s room and you don’t lift the seat, you’re essentially peeing on some stranger’s ass. It almost makes you gay. The only reason the seat’s there in the first place is for those unlucky souls who have to take a dump in unfamiliar surroundings, and you’ve now compounded their problems by making them have to mop up your piss before they can off-load. Part of the blame falls on the manufacturer of the toilet seat: A) All the toilet seats used for commercial applications are wishbone shaped. They’re not shaped like a doughnut like the one you’re sitting on right now. They have a two-inch gap in the front that gives guys false confidence. “I don’t have to lift this seat. I can thread the needle. I’m a regular Lee Harvey Oswald. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if my cock had rifling.” And it’s true, 96 percent of the stream finds its target. But that doesn’t mean there’s still not some collateral whiz damage from the final rogue burst or the drizzle created by the Fosbury Flop you do with your cock before you holster it. Now I’d be more, pardon the pun, pissed at you people, but it’s not entirely your fault. This gets us to part B of my beef with the toilet-seat manufacturers: There needs to be a handle to lift the toilet seat. Preferably one that could be operated by foot, like the kick pedal on a drum kit. Do you jerk-offs really expect people at a gas station to blindly reach down between the bowl and the bottom of the toilet seat to lift it? People as a rule will do the right thing, but not at the risk of getting a stranger’s piss on their fingers. Everyone I know recycles, but that percentage would go down quite a bit if the lid of the blue barrel was covered in trucker piss.
RULE #4: AND SPEAKING OF THE SEAT, LADIES, QUIT BITCHING ABOUT US LEAVING THE SEAT UP.
A) We take eight pisses to your one; B) It takes more energy to lift the seat than it does to put it down. Hell, you just have to get it started. Once you get past 90 degrees, gravity kicks in and does the rest of the work for you; and C) Guys don’t like exiting the bathroom with the seat down because it makes the next person who enters think you just took a shit. In the fecal game, it’s what we call a tell. I know what your argument is, ladies. When you use the toilet at night and it’s dark you’ve sat down, felt the cold bowl, and almost fallen into the toilet. I have two things to say about this. One, if you almost fell into the toilet, congratulations on not having a fat ass. Nobody from the cast of Precious would be in danger of falling into the toilet. And two, how about you suss it out before you plop down. I’ve gone into plenty of bathrooms at night that had the lid down, but I didn’t shit all over the top of it. No wonder you guys are only making seventy cents to our dollar.
RULE #5: KEEP YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND.
A lot of guys I know, when in a public restroom, admit to flushing toilets and urinals and opening doors with their bottom of their foot. This is great for you, Jackie Chan of the Can, but horrible for me, who uses his hands to do things like flush urinals and open doors. I know what your plan is, but in an effort to realize your retarded goal of not touching anything, you’ve managed to destroy my simple goal of not touching things that have piss on them. You see, the piss was not on the door or the urinal handle until your fucking Reebok put it there, you asshole. And it’s not like you’re a fucking surgeon, douchebag. You’re not transplanting a goddamn liver. The next thing you touch is gonna be your computer’s keyboard, which I guarantee is filthier than the push plate on the bathroom door. And are you finished, or perhaps you’d like to rub your balls on my car’s door handle or wipe your ass on my son’s Buzz Lightyear pajamas?
RULE #6: THE COURTESY FLUSH.
This is something that should be taught in schools. First you learn the courtesy flush, and if we have time left over, we can work on the Pledge of Allegiance. Not enough people employ this simple, nostril-saving technique. You simply flush the toilet as the first load of rubber meets the road. Now I’m not gonna lie to you and say it gets rid of the entire funk problem, but when timed properly it could get rid of up to 40 percent of it (your asshole may vary).
RULE #7: TIMING IS EVERYTHING.
When I was doing morning radio, I can’t tell you the number of times I walked into the b
athroom at six thirty in the morning only to realize some coworker had pulled the pin on an ass grenade moments earlier. And I would think to myself, Jesus Christ, you showed up to work ten minutes ago and you already shit up the bathroom? People do this routinely in the workplace. Could you imagine doing this anywhere else? It’s not like you pull up at church and take a dump before the morning sermon or go to the movie theater—“Honey, get me a Diet Coke and some Junior Mints. I’m gonna go shit up a stall.” No, you time it. You do your off-loading at home. Look, I understand if you’re pulling a double shift and you ate dinner off the roach coach, but these are people who’ve worked at the same place, on the same schedule, for years and they refuse to dial their asses in. If I owned a business I’d give all new employees a two-week grace period for their asses to acclimate, and then after that if they shat up my bathroom, they’d be getting a pink slip—except this one would have a brown stripe running down the middle of it. And right next to the sign in the warehouse that said DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT, I’d have a DAYS SINCE SOMEONE SHIT UP THE COMMUNITY HEAD sign.
RULE #8: NOT ALL URINALS HAVE THE MAGIC EYE.
We’ve fucked ourselves up as a society by retrofitting half the nation’s urinals with the automatic-flush infrared eye and leaving the other half manual. It’s why at least half the time when I hit a public urinal, there’s a nice frothy effervescent pot of gold waiting for me. Whoever took that piss was used to the urinal that flushed itself. It’s like if the ATM you normally use spits your card out before the money, you’ll never lose your card. But if you’re on the road and you use a machine that spits your card out thirty seconds after the cash, you’ll be in your car by the time the card comes out. This only excuses half of you. The other half of you know exactly what you’re doing but are too lazy or inconsiderate to flush. And for you gents I’d like to say the following: What the fuck is wrong with you Purell pussies? I know you look at yourself as royalty and your policy is His Highness can’t soil the royal cuticles with a handle. Great, so all us knaves can stare at your piss and have to flush the toilet twice? I know in your world other human beings don’t exist, but I wish a group of these imaginary people would beat the shit out of you.
RULE #9: URINAL PARTITIONS.
This is less a rule of thumb and more a building code. I was at American Airlines’s multimillion-dollar, brand-new, state-of-the-art terminal at JFK. Went in to use the bathroom with the polished nickel-plated fixtures and extensive granite and marble only to realize they’d skimped on the most important piece of equipment in a public bathroom: the divider between the urinals. The thin sheet of vinyl-coated plywood that protects my cock from judgmental prying eyes and protects my slacks from the scourge known as secondhand whiz. For basically what it costs to build a birdhouse, I don’t have to look at another guy’s wang or worry about the “dick-ochet” when a guy built like John Candy sidles up next to me to unload the seven Heinekens he had at the bar.
RULE #10: NO DESECRATING THE BATHROOM.
No pissing on the toilet-paper roll, no boogers on top of the urinal, no carving your gang tag into the toilet seat, no kicking in the stall door. (Ladies, I know you’re all appalled right now, but this is commonplace.) You know when you’re driving and you’re eight miles from your house and you have to shit so bad your teeth hurt and you screech into a gas station and ask the guy if you can use the bathroom and he says it’s for employees only? Do you think that’s the policy they started out with, or the one they put into place after all the dickheads treated their bathroom like an enemy village their platoon had overrun? Thanks to you assholes, my asshole’s gonna have to wait until we get home.
BONUS JOKE
On one of the construction job sites I worked on, there was a Porta Potti. On the outside, written in Magic Marker, it said MEXICAN SPACE SHUTTLE. On the inside, above the toilet-seat liners with the same Magic Marker, it said FREE COWBOY HATS.
WOMEN,
HEAR ME
ROAR
I get labeled a misogynist all the time. But I’m simply pointing out that men and women are different. Or at least they used to be.
WOMEN ARE BECOMING MEN
We’ve done away with gender roles. As a culture we decided the smaller the chasm between male and female, the more evolved our society would be. But there’s a reason you have cooters and we have peckaroos. We’re different, and that’s a good thing. Why is it that the same people who beat the celebrate-differences drum when it comes to cultures refuse to acknowledge the biggest cultural difference on the planet? Men and women. I guarantee you Japanese men, German men, and black men have a fuck lot more in common than your average dude and chick. Let’s face it. Women are better with the kids when they get a boo-boo, but when it comes time to disarm the roadside bomb, that’s where the fellas come in.
I have a theory that I think will put things into perspective. Look at society as a giant X. Women on one bottom leg, men on the other bottom leg. The date: 1950. Women cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids, and mended torn dungarees. Men provided, fixed the car, patched the roof, and warded off intruders with a baseball bat. Then the sixties arrived. Each gender moved a little higher up the leg of the X. Women stopped shaving their armpits and men grew their hair out. Women started going to work and men started taking their car to the mechanic. Now we get into the eighties. Figure we’re about halfway up the X leg before the cross. Men start applying mousse and eyeliner, women are more worried about having rock-hard abs than they are about their kids. Now the nineties. School districts are being sued for girls’ rights to play on the boys’ football team, and being a woman trapped inside of a man’s body is as real a medical diagnosis as Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In the 2000s, we officially hit the intersection of the X. Men are “metrosexuals” getting mani-pedis while their wives drive a jeep to their job as an NFL sideline reporter. If you go to a store today you can find unisex fragrances. This idea would have never worked in the fifties. Women’s perfume came in a glass slipper and smelled like baby powder and lilacs; men’s cologne came in a ship or a football and smelled like a pine cone.
I grew up in the seventies with a steady diet of “the reason girls play with dolls and boys play with trains is because of the Man’s homophobic agenda.” Bullshit. My son loves trains. All boys love trains. They can’t help it, it’s in their blood. It’s amazing that the train wasn’t invented earlier, considering that young boys have been around for millions of years. It’s heroin for them—they go berserk for it. If you put a boy alone in a room with some Thomas the Tank Engine toys and some Barbies and don’t say a word, I guarantee that he’ll go right for the trains.
What the fuck were my mom and her angry hippie friends thinking? And why haven’t they apologized?
CHICKS ARE DUMB/EVIL
We’re constantly talking about the Man and how the worst people on the planet are Republican sixty-year-old white guys. The Dick Cheney type. I’m now sure the worst people on the planet are twenty something white chicks. Like the chicks from The Hills or Hugh Hefner’s ladies from The Girls Next Door. At least the evil white guy in his fifties punches a time clock every day. These chicks aren’t even doing anything. They contribute nothing to society except, if we’re lucky, a bootleg sex tape. If anything, they’re making us dumber. I’m not saying every girl needs to aspire to be Hillary Clinton, but let’s aim a bit higher than Khloe Kardashian.
Chicks, especially hot ones, have learned that by looking good they can get guys to do the work for them and thus never learn anything. They’re dumb and they don’t need to get smarter. I had the blondes who currently play the Doublemint twins in the commercials on my podcast last year. At some point in the conversation, the movie Young Frankenstein came up. I asked the Doublemint twins if they liked Mel Brooks and, I shit you not, they asked if Mel Brooks was a dude or a chick. At that point I wanted to commit a double murder. “Yeah, that’s Mel B’s full name. Scary Spice also directed Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs.”
This happens consta
ntly with young women. They don’t know shit, and when you try to correct them you become Weirdo Grandpa: “I wasn’t even born when Spaceballs came out.” And I wasn’t born when Citizen Kane came out either, but I’ve still heard of Orson fucking Welles. (Not that Citizen Kane is half the film that Spaceballs is.)
Here’s why guys are smarter than women. We’re curious. We want to know shit. Men stared at the moon for twenty thousand years and thought, “What is that? How do we get there?” It came out every night, hung over us, and mocked us. “You think you can make it here? You’re not man enough. How are you gonna land on me? What about the gravitational pull and the Earth’s rotation? You ain’t making it. You don’t have what it takes.” So guys were like, “Fuck you, we’re going to the moon.” And we’re competitive. It’s not like we were racing the Russian women to the moon. There’s no chick that stares at the moon and thinks, I need to hit a golf ball off that thing. I’m not saying the curiosity gene is always practical, but I am saying it’s what motivates us. It gets guys killed, but it also gets the sound barrier broken.
It’s not just intelligence, it’s communication. Women do not have different tones. Everything is an emergency. Men have different vocal qualities for “Hey sweetie, I’m calling because you forgot your purse” and “There’s a guy with a machete in the house.” I’ve gotten the call where my wife is like, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” “What?!” “We’re out of Sunny D.” I thought one of my kids had been dragged off by a mountain lion. This is why chicks would make horrible air-traffic controllers. With them there’s no difference between “A bag has been lost in Newark” and “Your wing is on fire.” Or you’ll hear them talking to their other hysterical friends: “Oh my God, Sheila. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. That’s horrible.” “What happened? Did Greg die?” “No, she forgot to TiVo Ellen.”