Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

  The last vending machine before the doors to the restrooms was a recent acquisition. This venturesome snack palace—designed in the era of the Centre Pompidou and of various atriums and malls in which the admittedly beautiful HVAC tubes, huge ribbed versions of vacuum-cleaner or clothes-dryer exhaust tubes, were treated architecturally as ornament—flaunted its interior mechanisms, displaying its inventory behind glass on metallic spirals that turned when you entered the appropriate two-character letter-number combination on a small keyboard. Where old candy machines (similar to cigarette machines—knobbed) might have offered you eight choices, plus a side buffet of chewing gums, this new machine offered thirty-five choices, including hard-to-vend bags of chips or pretzels. Your purchase, screwed out into space by the forwarding spiral, fell a fair distance into a low black gulley—hence the pillowy bags of chips were placed into the highest spirals, since they would suffer less damage than, say, a package of Lorna Doones or cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers if dropped from that height; although, oddly, I think I have seen (and bought) granola bars residing in the very top left spiral! The machine had two difficulties, in my experience. (1) The black triangular guard you had to reach past in order to remove your snack from the gulley was excessively heavy and clumsy and powerfully sprung, possibly to discourage pilferage with bent coat hangers, and almost demanded that you use two hands—one to hold the guard open, and one to grasp the Lorna Doones—when very often you had only one hand available, having decided that you wanted a packet of Lorna Doones after you had brewed up some thirty-five-cent coffee at the Hot Beverages machine next door; and as a result, gripping a precariously full and hot container of coffee by its rim, with no surface in the area except the floor to rest it on, you were forced to hold open the edge of the black guard with the unpadded bones and tendons of the back of your hand, seize the Lorna Doones, and then withdraw your hand, marveling in the midst of your discomfort that the veins that diagonally crossed those bones and tendons weren’t abraded or their flimsy adventitia crushed as that heavy rounded plastic edge was drawn over them. And (2) the spiral invention, though elegant, wasn’t infallible: often your last fifty-five cents bought a bag of pretzels that remained hung by one heat-crimped corner out over the drop; nor was there any way to tilt or shake so massive a machine. The next person would get a bonus bag, as the spiral edged yours off with his own.

  I didn’t think about the vending machines as I passed them, but I did acknowledge their presence in some grateful part of my consciousness, a part equivalent in function to the person in movie credits charged with “continuity,” who makes sure that if an actor is wearing a Band-Aid and sitting in front of three pancakes on one day of shooting, the pancakes and the Band-Aid look exactly the same the next day. I depended on the machines’ presence as you depend on a certain bulbously clipped corner hedge, or a certain faded poster in the window of the dry cleaner’s, as visual nourishment along the way home. And when two years later I walked down that hall and discovered that the cigarette machine—the primary trunk of original innovation from which all the rest of vendition had branched, closely allied with the clinking Newtonianism of the gumball machine and the parking meter—had been replaced by another huge heterodox box that sold yogurt, boxes of cranberry juice, tuna sandwiches, and whole apples, all rotating on a multitiered central carousel accessed through individual plastic doorlets (in compliance with a much-discussed three-phase plan intended to make my company a “smoke-free environment”), I grieved piecemeal over the loss once a day for about a week.

  Chapter Ten

  FROM THE MEN’S ROOM came the roar of a flushed urinal, followed immediately by “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” whistled with infectious cheerfulness and lots of rococo tricks—most notably the difficult yodel-trill technique, used here on the “ee” of “dandy,” in which the whistler gets his lips to flip the sound binarily between the base tone and a higher pitch that is I think somewhere between a major third and a perfect fourth above it (why it is not a true harmonic but rather perceptibly out of tune has puzzled me often—something to do with the physics of pursed lips?): a display of virtuosity forgivable only in the men’s room, and not, as some of the salesmen seemed to think, in the relative silence of working areas, where people froze, hate exuding from suspended Razor Points, as the whistler passed. Tunes sometimes lived all day in the men’s room, sustained by successive users, or remembered by a previous user as soon as he reentered the tiled liveness of the room. Once, hopped-up after several cups of coffee, I loudly whistled the bouncy opening of the tune that starts out, “All I want is a room somewhere,” and then stopped, embarrassed, because I realized that I had unknowingly interrupted someone else’s quieter and more masterly whistling of a soft-rock standard with my toneless, aerated tweets; later that day, though, I heard a stylishly embellished version of my tune whistled at the copying machine by someone who must have been in one of the stalls during my earlier roughshod interruption of the soft-rocker.

  I leaned quite hard into the men’s room door to open it, startling the Doodle Dandy man, who was on his way out, and who turned out to be Alan Pilna from International Service Marketing—his face, when the opening door revealed it, was not formed in the fruity whistler’s pout, but had a momentary flinch of surprise on it.

  He said, “Oop!”

  I said, “Oop!” and then, as he stood aside, holding the door for me to enter, “Thanks, Alan.”1

  I negotiated the quick right and left that brought me into the brightness and warmth of the bathroom. It was decorated in two tones of tile, hybrid colors I didn’t know the names for, and the sinks’ counter and the dividers between urinals and between stalls were of red lobby-marble. I checked in the mirror to be sure that while chatting with Tina I had not had some humiliating nose problem or newsprint smudge on my face—she would probably have told me about the smudge, but not about the nose. A few sinks over from me, a vice-president named Les Guster was brushing his teeth. He was staring straight at the mirror and very likely seeing there the same expression on his face, the same quick bulgings in his cheek, that he had seen while brushing his teeth since he was eight years old. He blinked frequently, each blink slightly more deliberate than a blink he would have performed while reading or talking on the phone, possibly because the large motor movements of tooth brushing interfered with the autonomic rhythms of blinking. His tap was running. As soon as I took my place at a sink, Les bowed close to his sink, holding his tie with his free hand against his stomach, even though he was clearly not ready to rinse or spit yet, in order to shield his sense of privacy against my presence in the mirror. We were not obliged to greet each other: the noise of the water from his tap, and Alan Pilna’s winding-down urinal-flush, defined us as existing in separate realms. I was impressed by people like Les who had the bravery to brush their teeth (before lunch, even!) at work, since the act was so powerfully unbusinesslike; to indicate to him that I didn’t think that his tooth-brushing was in any way notable or comic, and that in fact I was unaware of his presence, I leaned into the mirror, pretending to study a defect on my face; then I cleared my throat so unpleasantly that there could be no doubt that I was oblivious to him. I pivoted and stationed myself at a urinal.

  I was just on the point of relaxing into a state of urination when two things happened. Don Vanci swept into position two urinals over from me, and then, a moment later, Les Guster turned off his tap. In the sudden quiet you could hear a wide variety of sounds coming from the stalls: long, dejected, exhausted sighs; manipulations of toilet paper; newspapers folded and batted into place; and of course the utterly carefree noise of the main activity: mind-boggling pressurized spatterings followed by sudden urgent farts that sounded like air blown over the mouth of a beer bottle.1 The problem for me, a familiar problem, was that in this relative silence Don Vanci would hear the exact moment I began to urinate. More important, the fact that I had not yet begun to urinate was known to him as well. I had been standing at the urinal when he walk
ed into the bathroom—I should be fully in progress by now. What was my problem? Was I so timid that I was unable to take a simple piss two urinals down from another person? We stood there in the intermittent quiet, unforthcoming. Though we knew each other well, we said nothing. And then, just as I knew would happen, I heard Don Vanci begin to urinate forcefully.

  My problem intensified. I began to blush. Others did not seem to have any trouble relaxing their uriniferous tubing in corporate bathrooms. Some were obviously so at ease that they could continue conversations side by side. But until I developed my technique of pretending to urinate on the other person’s head, the barren seconds I spent staring at the word “Eljer” and waiting for something I knew was not going to happen were truly horrible: even at times when I needed to go badly, if someone else was there, my bladder’s cargo would stay locked away behind scared and stubborn little muscles. I would pretend to finish, clear my throat, zip my fly, and walk out, hating myself, sure that the other person was thinking, as his porcelain resounded from his own coursing toxins, “Wait, I don’t think I heard that guy actually going! I think he stood there for a minute, faked that he had taken a piss, and then flushed and took off! How very weird! That guy has a problem.” Later, I would sneak back in, painful with need, and crouch in a toilet stall (so that my head wasn’t visible) to urinate without risk. This happened about forty-five times—until one night in the very busy bathroom of a movie theater at the end of the movie, I discovered the trick. When someone takes his position next to you, and you hear his nose breathing and you sense his proven ability to urinate time after time in public, and at the same time you feel your own muscles closing on themselves as hermit crabs pull into their shells, imagine yourself turning and dispassionately urinating onto the side of his head. Imagine your voluminous stream making fleeting parts in his hair, like the parts that appear in the grass of a lawn when you try to water it with a too-pressurized nozzle-setting. Imagine drawing an X over his face; watch him fending the spray off with his arm, puffing and spluttering to keep it from getting in his mouth; and his protestations: “Excuse me? What are you doing? Hey! Pff, pff, pff.” It always worked. If I found myself in very difficult circumstances—flanked on both sides by colleagues, both of whom said hello to me and then began confidently to go—I might have to sharpen the image slightly, imagining myself urinating directly into one of their shock-widened eyeballs.

  And now, as the silence lengthened, I resorted to this technique with Don Vanci. After a short mechanical delay, a thick, world-conquering rope of ammonia sprung onto the white slope of porcelain. I gave it a secondary boost from my diaphragm, and it blasted out. Don Vanci and I finished at about the same time; turning from the urinals, just before we flushed in near unison, we greeted each other:

  “Don.”

  “Howie.”

  Les Guster was on his way out, his toothbrush stowed in a plastic ribbed travel container. He nodded at us. “Gentlemen.”

  Don Vanci followed Les Guster out without washing his hands.

  Chapter Eleven

  UNTIL SOMEONE EMERGED from the stalls, I had all four sinks to myself; I chose the one that wasn’t surrounded by pools of water. I set down my paperback and rested my glasses on it; then I washed my hands briefly, making the date I had stamped on my palm fade but not disappear. Without turning off the water, I used a paper towel to dry my hands. We had the finest style of paper-towel dispenser available, I think. It was a kind you saw frequently in corporate bathrooms: a six or seven-foot-high architectural element, a band of brushed steel, laid almost flush with the wall, into which was recessed a diamond-shaped opening that offered you the next paper towel, and, just below it, a waste region where you could throw the towel away. The maintenance man unlocked the front panel of this unit—perhaps using the very same key that opened the soap dispenser, or perhaps not—emptied the trash bag full of used paper towels, and loaded hundreds of just-unbound and slowly expanding new towels into a queue above the diamond cutout. The paper towels themselves were the best kind: nearly a foot wide, wavily embossed, white, folded with two flaps for easy removal—it was an honor to use them. Since the cost of paper has gone up so much in the last decade, some companies that used to use these wide towels have installed an adapter in the dispenser that allows it to handle smaller, cheaper ones. Other facilities managers have turned even more radical, installing, right beside the ghost town of the brushed-steel dispenser, a plastic Towlsaver with a little lever like a slot machine’s that you have to pull four times, advancing a large internal roll, before you get an acceptable, crumplable length of brown rough paper, which you tear off against a set of metal teeth with a satisfying sound. Another version of this replacement machine has a rotating crank with a calculatedly low gear ratio: they hope that you will tire of cranking sooner, and use less paper. At the very bottom of the range, though it once (to me as a child, at least) was an exciting symbol of futurismo progress, is the “hazards of disease” machine—the hot-air blower. You find it now not only in thruway rest stops, but in the restrooms of Friendly’s, Wendy’s, Howard Johnson’s, and other great chains. What they seem to have done, at least for a short period—the well-meaning but deluded managers responsible for overseeing bathroom cost-control in these chains, I mean, hypnotized by the sales rap of hot-air blower companies—was to rip out their paper-towel dispensers, bolt lots of hot-air blowers on the walls, and then remove all the wastebaskets. Towels were what filled the wastebaskets; the restaurants no longer provided towels; therefore they no longer needed to pay bodies to empty the wastebaskets. But in removing that wastebasket, they removed the only unpostponable reason for a staff member to glance over the bathroom at least once a shift, and the place quickly became a wasteland. Meanwhile, are people truly content to be using the hot-air blower? You hit the mushroom of metal that turns it on and, as the instructions recommend, you Rub Hands Gently under the dry blast. But to dry them even as thoroughly as a single paper towel would dry them in four seconds, you must supplicate under the droning funnel for thirty seconds, much longer than anyone has patience for; inevitably you exit flicking water from your fingers, while the blower continues to heat the room. In case you do decide to stand for the full count, the manufacturer (World Dryer Corporation) has provided a short silk-screened text to read to pass the time. I disapprove of this text now, but when I was little it bespoke the awesome oracular intentionality of prophets whose courage and confidence allowed them to scrap the old ways and start fresh: urban renewal architects; engineers of traffic flow; foretellers of monorails, paper clothing, food in capsule form, programmed learning, and domes over Hong Kong and Manhattan. I used to read it to myself as if I were reciting a quatrain from the Rubáiyát, and I read it so many times that now it holds for me some of the Urresonances of Crest’s “conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.” It says:

  To Serve you better - - - We have installed Pollution-Free Warm Air Hand Dryers to protect you from the hazards of disease which may be transmitted by towel litter, This quick sanitary method dries hands more thoroughly prevents chapping - - - and keeps washrooms free of towel waste.

  In the corner of this statement, World has printed the small Greek letter that looks like a hamburger in profile, the symbol of the environmental movement, a symbol that in seventh grade I cut out of green felt and glued to five white felt armlets, which four friends and I wore when we went out with trash bags and picked up litter on Milburn Street near the school (finding surprisingly little, and feeling the hugeness of the city, litter-filled, around us) on the first Earth Day celebration, whenever that was—1970 or 1971. But does the environmental movement have anything to do with the reason why the Wendy’s restaurant that I stood in on September 30, 1987 (copying the legend out, while I counted at MM=60 to be sure that the warm air really did blow for about thirty seconds as I had estimated) had installed this machine in its men’s room? No. Is it, in fact, an efficient, environmentally upright user o
f the electricity produced by burning fossil fuels? No—there is no off button that would allow you to curtail the thirty-second dry time—you are forced to participate in waste. Does it prevent chapping? Dry air? Is it quick? It is slow. Is it more thorough? It is less thorough. Does it protect us from the hazards of disease? You will catch a cold quicker from the warm metal public dome you press to start the blower than from plucking a sterile piece of paper that no human has ever held from a towel dispenser, clasping it in your very own hands to dry them, and throwing it away. Come to your senses, World! The tone of authority and public-spiritedness that surrounds these falsehoods is outrageous! How can you let your marketing men continue to make claims that sound like the 1890s ads for patent medicines or electroactive copper wrist bracelets that are printed on the Formica on the tables at Wendy’s? You are selling a hot-air machine that works well and lasts for decades: a simple, possibly justifiable means for the fast-food chains to save money on paper products. Say that or say nothing.