While working as a consultant for Home Depot, developing theft prevention strategies, I contracted a gastrointestinal virus from lunch at the food concession in front of the store. The virus led to a short-term panic disorder triggered by having to run down the claustrophobic aisles to get to the restroom. This condition drastically changed my working conditions, forcing me to spend an unfortunate amount of time in the restroom working on my computer.
The following conversations are the embellished accounts I overheard while guests talked on the phone or amongst themselves. While I heard what I thought were coded conversations about theft, I could not identify them as having criminal intent. The restroom conversations were not included in the report I delivered to Home Depot.
S6 (Subject in stall six) eats a handful of edibles at sunrise before doing yoga in his room, then drives to Home Depot to buy a paintbrush. He is unable to decide between a one-and-a-half-inch and a two-inch brush. Needing a moment, he finds refuge in a restroom stall, a stop before moving on to Starbucks where he will hang out until he is confident his clients have gone to work. The collective S6 lives in has directed him to confront his clients after he is paid, then denounce them. Now that he is high, the stall feels safe. The proposed confrontation is inappropriate, even laughable. He sits on the lid and watches a Swedish detective show on his phone.
Yellow Submarine is playing. The song is absurd, like the writing on the wall that makes the timeless promise of a good time. S6 wants a good time, so he dials the number in an antic moment. A phone rings in another stall. He begins a laughing jag, thinking no one can hear him.
S1 is on his phone, arguing with a client while trying to unbuckle his belt with his free hand. The belt constricts his legs, so he can’t sprawl on the toilet. His legs are tired from powerlifting in his garage gym. A C/W song plays through ceiling speakers in what he hears as a story of wife-swapping in Nashville, although that seems implausibly risqué. He is ready to join the party with his pants bunched around his ankles.
The client wants S1 to walk through the job with his pointy nose leading the way before he makes the final payment. They’ve done walkthroughs. S1 needs to pay his crew. The client will make drinks, schmooze (they have nothing in common), then walk around the house with his lover’s sketchbook. In the middle of the night, the lover made drawings of the perceived distortions he saw on the walls, doors, and moldings. Page after page of fleshed-out stick figures pointing in horror. They agree to meet at five.
S2 hurries into the stall for an eruptive yet unfinished bowel movement. His daughter gave him a homeopathic treatment that is not doing what it is supposed to do, whatever that is. His daughter calls, not to check on his digestion, but to badger him about tuition for design school on the East Coast. He tells her he needs money for a new truck. We are not “design” people, he says definitively, holding the phone overhead so she can’t hear the next expulsion. She squawks above his head. I need a new truck, he pleads, so I can get to work and make money to pay for your school. Until then, you can take classes at a community college. She abandons the conversation.
S6 fantasizes about a threesome with his young and appealing clients, missing important evidence in the show. Subtitles are hard to follow. The couple made suggestive remarks while they were sunbathing. They rolled over and looked at him while he was on a ladder painting siding above them. If he has a sexual encounter, he would have to confess to the collective. Abusing white supremacists would be a way of justifying such involvement, but more drama would result, more than he wanted to engage in. He does not know if sleeping with clients is a mortal or venial infraction of the collective’s moral code.
The restroom is filled with a distracting and mournful song about the need for love. S6 imagines the song directed at him by the collective, dressing him down for bourgeois drives. But they need his money to meet the rent. Couldn’t he have a little R&R like a soldier flying out of a war zone to a city with whorehouses?
S2 gets a second call from his daughter. She informs him that his nephew, Kiki, is getting out of jail in a few days and needs a ride home and a job. He is in Redding, a five-hour drive to the north end of the valley. The daughter repeats her request for her father to find a job for Kiki. He’s not working for me again. Last time, he was nothing but trouble. He’s family, and he needs a job to stay out of trouble, said the daughter. He can work for a scaffolding or roofing company. They take jailbirds and druggies. He’s afraid of heights, said the daughter. Afraid of heights? All the seated S’s hear S2’s angry response; his stall is out of toilet paper. He’s high all the time, said S2. What’s wrong with working on scaffolding? S2 is satisfied with his closing argument. I’ll get him, she said. Don’t make a meth stop, for crying out loud, said S2. If you get busted, you’ll be going to beauty school. The daughter swears and ends the phone call again.
S3 arrives with a pizza in a box and plans to go surfing later in the morning. There is a surprise in the stalls that someone would bring a pizza into the restroom before nine in the morning. Where did he get the pizza? S3 carefully opens the box and wiggles a slice out of the pie. Then he starts talking loudly about corporate politics at YouTube. As the restroom auteur and researcher, the sense of being watched made me nervous. S3 won’t gossip about a coworker if he thinks he is being watched. Yet he’ll share a dick pic with someone before he changes into sweats and flip-flops, careful not to knock the pizza to the floor. Now don’t get me fired, he says, because I’m a “doer who gets things done.” Listen, he shouts, holding his phone up toward the ceiling speaker. Good Vibrations is playing. What are the chances of that happening?
S4 unfolds a color chart against the stall partition and studies the colors. He’s bored, yet he needs a color sample to put on the wall to make his wife happy. He asks the guest in S5 to look at Designer White and give an opinion on it as the color for the walls and/or ceiling of a kitchen with black cabinets. He passes the chart under the partition. At first, S5 thinks it’s a come-on for public sex. Is this guy going to drill a hole in the partition and expect service? But nothing happens, so he looks at the color chart. He says the color is too clinical for him. I’m a DJ, he says, so I can’t see anything in the daylight. No, I don’t like it. He passes the chart under the partition. S4 leaves.
S5 saw a shooting victim at a party in a white tile restroom. He is not a fan of white interiors. They seem to demand blood. Unfortunately, that’s the DJ work he’s been getting. His name is passed around among people who find themselves partying with criminals in rented Airbnbs. The color question is a distraction. He texts his girlfriend. He wants to see her. He begins changing clothes, because he thinks someone from the party is following him, but he can’t be sure. And he is also worried about the safety of his gear in his van. His girlfriend texts that she didn’t want to ride a bus into the city. It’s already 90 degrees. I’ll sweat like a pig. S5 responds. I’m working a bar mitzvah tonight. They put me up in a classy hotel for the event. There’s a spa and no guns. The girlfriend agrees to take the bus into the city and meet him at the hotel.
S6 calls his client, worrying that she is phobic about smells. The smell could end their date before they have a chance to shower, unless she likes smells. He thinks he’s too high to know and wants to discontinue the call, but her voice interrupts his burgeoning fantasy. She invites him to lunch and asks him if he eats meat. Yes, I eat meat, he says excitedly. I have to make a few stops. The collective is vegan, but S6 wants some meat and doesn’t plan on a confession, even though they occasionally sniff his breath when he returns from work. He will buy baby wipes and bathe himself in Target’s restroom. He needs condoms, too. Using the husband’s condoms would require another confession if the collective broke him down, although it might be to his advantage if they believed he had been meting out punishment. He flushes to make it seem like he belongs in a stall and returns to his show. The female detective looks a lot like his client.
S2 is ready to leave when he gets a collect call from the Redding Jail. He takes the call and tells Kiki preemptively that he can not help him with a job. The unexpected and sanctimonious sound of Kiki’s voice is a trigger warning; he has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Kiki pauses. S2 does not feel obliged to fill the space with a response. His bowels are empty, and he can go to work knowing that his troubled nephew is in the hands of the Lord, whatever that means. Where are you going when you get out? he finally asks. I’m going to a Christian halfway house in Fresno to learn how to live in Christ. S2 realizes he is in a public restroom and needs to leave. He regrets that he did not have more to offer to Kiki than the banality of good luck.
S1 is about to leave, but has another call from the client. He has the absurd hope that this call will settle everything. The client will admit that he is neurotic and has the check ready. The boyfriend can sketch the interiors and his intrusive complaints will not be used in the punch list. Instead, the client wants to invite the crew over for Thai food. His boyfriend learned to cook Thai in Phuket. S1 has no choice but to agree. His crew will like the free meal and drinks.
A new S4 enters the stall singing. He is wearing a rifle coat with a leafy pattern. Baby blue paw prints step out of the foliage. S5 recognizes the coat as it flutters under the stall partition before S4 hangs it on the metal clothes hook. S4 was at the party where S5 DJ’d. S4 followed him to Home Depot, as he feared. S5 finally drops his pants and begins defecating in a fight-or-flight response while S4 continues singing in an absurdly loud and untrained voice. He was out of place at the party in his coat, comically prowling around the room, checking out the young women, who were not amused. When he stopped in front of the DJ, S5 told him to be more respectful and lose his male gaze. S4 was annoyed, but the music was too loud to protest. When he tried to dance, his coat tails whipped about the dancers like flaps at a car wash. He finally left the dance floor and hung out in the foyer, where he engaged in conversation with anyone willing to listen.
When the party was over, S5 took his time packing and talking with people before he rolled his gear toward his van. S4 followed at his side, discussing the “male gaze” reprimand in a voice both matter-of-fact and menacing. S5 had to wait until S4 removed his hand from the door before he could close it and drive to Home Depot to buy an extension cord.
S4 finally urinates with a loud result. When he finishes, he leaves the restroom without washing his hands. S5 is relieved.
An S3 replacement enters the stall. He is an old and thick plumber, with a body segmented like sausages. His aftershave smells like pipe tobacco from the 1950s. His phone is small in his hand as he calls for a doctor’s appointment, thinking he can just drive to the medical center and be seen. He is breathing heavily and swearing as his call moves slowly through the phone tree to the pediatric unit. He doesn’t understand what is happening and ends the call. He tries to peel a Rolaid, but it falls and rolls across the floor out of reach.
S6 gets texts from the collective. Everyone is going to send messages that call for the firing of a community college dean. The offense is promising but vague. Boilerplate themes of outrage are in the works. S6 is informed that he needs to be ready to tweet all night when he comes home from work. Bring three loaves of sourdough.
Unexpectedly, S6 hears a body thud, and the stall partitions wobble forcefully. Something is wrong.
The replacement S1 has not yet dropped his pants when he calls for Joe by name (the plumber in S3) and leaves his stall to see what’s happening. The collapsed plumber blocks the door to his stall. S1 calls for help. The stalls empty, and the men drag the unresponsive plumber up and out of the stall. They lay him down on the pungent mop-wet floor. S1 talks to his friend as if that will rouse him. S6 starts CPR compression on the plumber’s chest, pushing through a stained MAGA t-shirt. His hands obscure a word that robs the message of its intent. The plumber looks like the boozy uncle S6 liked a lot as a boy.
Soon, the plumber opens his eyes but doesn’t seem to know what’s happening. A Home Depot employee steps into the restroom and says an ambulance has been called. Eventually, the plumber regains his bearings and stands with the help of the stallmates. That was a doozy, he says. He bends over and retrieves the lost Rolaid from under the sink and swallows it like a war criminal with cyanide. S1 insists that the plumber go to the hospital and see a doctor. Eventually, the plumber acquiesces when ambulance attendants arrive with a gurney and take him away. One attendant is an attractive young woman, and he likes her attention. He even tries to flirt with her, but she tells him to remain still on the gurney.
S6 looks at his watch. There is enough time to make it to lunch and finish the painting. He wonders if he should tell his client that he revived a guy in the restroom at Home Depot. The lingering sensation in his hands of the old flesh is unpleasant. He looks at his phone and sees the Swedish detective pressing a pillow against her partner’s wound to stop the bleeding. “Stay with me,” she says earnestly as his eyes flutter.
S5 is relieved that the plumber is OK, but he is still anxious and wants to get to his van, where he has some tequila. He follows the gurney like it’s a float in a parade, until he realizes that he’s left his DJ costume in the restroom. When he sees the animal-print coat ahead in the aisle, looking at BBQ grills, he moves quickly to the other side of the store. He walks behind a moving forklift as cover to return to the bathroom and get his costume.
After the plumber is on his way to the emergency room, I leave for the day, walking behind S4, who is pushing a stainless steel BBQ grill. I recognize his coat, flapping all the way to his minivan, which is parked next to my car. He is friendly and asks me to help lift the grill into the back of his van. It’s light. He is going to grill hot dogs for his son’s birthday party. Eight-year-olds are home in a tent, making fart sounds. I see paint brushes hidden in the grill’s drawer.
Before we lift the grill, S4 climbs into his van and moves what has to be an assault rifle, casually lying in the bed of the van. It does not look like a replica for the boys to play with. S4 crawls inside and shoves the rifle into a sleeping bag that is lying in a wad behind the seats. We get the barbecue into the van by turning it on its side. S4 thanks me and leaves.
After Home Depot read my report, they offered me another assignment if I was willing to relocate for six months. I took the job. I use a directional mic to study the communications between employees and guests. I’ve recovered from the virus. When I need to use a restroom, I walk to the nearby Target or the Bagel Barn.
