The Other Side of the Bathroom Door

by Andrew Morabito, SUNY Cortland, May 5, 2008

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Since we had moved in, the inner workings of the bathroom doorknob in our apartment had been gradually seizing up and making it harder and harder to turn the knob. Having to coax and finagle with the door knob to get it to concede our right to egress had become commonplace to us. Though many times our unwarned guests would become hysterical when a slight twist of the knob, as they’re accustomed to, wouldn’t do the job and get them out, and they’d pound on the door and yell for me or Kristin. Our friend Brian became instantly furious the first time he couldn’t get out. From the living room we first heard him clamorously rattling the knob, and then he roared. What the fuck is wrong with your door! He let out a deep, guttural sound as he muscled the knob and finally got it to turn and open.

We coached many of our greenhorn friends out of that bathroom the first year that we lived there. Plant your feet! Get a good grip on the knob! Turn it hard in one direction and then even harder in the other direction! After being freed from their brief incarceration, they mostly wore the same look of downplayed relief, feigning calm as if we hadn’t just heard them panting and panicking on the other side of the bathroom, frantically shaking the knob and banging for our help. As hosts, we felt an ambivalence of mild guilt for forgetting to warn them about the doorknob and a small chuckle of schadenfreude because we are, after all, human, and laughing at others’ expense is a natural and sometimes irrepressible inclination.

On the whole though, for almost that entire first year of living in that apartment, we always managed to get ourselves and our guests out of the bathroom. Escape always required varying degrees of shaking and hard turning of the knob, but we always got out so we didn’t give the door knob much thought and we certainly never once thought of replacing it.

I had just gotten home from a morning of classes, consumed my daily dosage of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and was raptly watching a rerun of "Ed" on TBS, as was my routine at noon on a weekday, when nature called. I held off going to the bathroom until a commercial, not wanting to miss one glorious minute of Ed, the saga of a bowling alley lawyer who moves back to his hometown, Stuckeyville, from a big city and ventures to buy a bowling alley, Stuckey Bowl, practice law from the office located within, and win the heart of his seemingly unattainable childhood crush. Every day that I was home at noon to eat lunch and watch Ed was a red-letter day. Everything else, including the bathroom business, was secondary, or tertiary, or if there are fancy words for things that are ranked fourth, fifth, and so on, then those would be applicable here as well, because "Ed" was my favorite show.

In time with the commercial break, I trotted through the hallway into the bathroom hoping to make it out before Ed came back on. My bowel movement came quickly, effortlessly, and with little clean-up necessary, as gratifying a defecation as one could imagine. It was looking like I’d surely be back on the couch right in step with the return of Ed. Yet, when I reached to my left to grab for toilet paper, I found the roll reduced to its cardboard inner roll with only that half-piece of one-ply paper that always stays stuck to the cardboard at the end of the roll. I knew I was the culprit, probably using the last of the roll the previous day and lazily walking away without replacing it. Even though the dropping was a clean going and a wipe might not have been necessary at all, I’m a creature of habit and hold myself to adopted (and what should be universal) standards of personal hygiene. The last scrap of paper was inadequate and we kept new rolls of toilet paper in the hallway closet. I’d already been in the bathroom for over a minute and it wasn’t looking good for me getting back to the couch in time for "Ed".

As I often do when the toilet paper in hand is in scant supply, I reached for the doorknob to peak my head out and bellow down the hall for Kristin to please bring a new roll, as she often does and saves me the depantsed walk down the hall. But, when I went to call her, out of habit, I turned the knob to the right with excessive force and something inside the door knob popped and the knob then spun around endlessly as I turned. The door knob had suffered an audible and fatal fracture. I panicked. Oh, shit! "Ed" just came back on and I’m trapped in the bathroom and I haven’t wiped!

When I was five I locked myself in the bathroom. It doesn’t seem possible, and it makes it sound like I was a grossly obtuse five-year old, but I must not have understood the mechanics of locking doors yet. After dinner I went up to the bathroom and I must’ve unknowingly grazed the lock with my hand enough to turn it into the vertical locked position. Minutes later, after washing my hands thoroughly—remembering to lock my hands together and rub the insides of my fingers clean as my grandmother’s beloved friend Molly taught me to do—I tried to turn the knob and it wouldn’t budge. Instead of employing rational thought or pondering an ingeniously and ridiculously concocted escape tool like one of my-then heroes, MacGyver, my five-year old self immediately crumbled. The onset of claustrophobia and crying and pounding the door for mom was instant.

My mom beckoned me to turn the lock myself, but I was far too hysterical and stubborn to stop crying and learn how the lock worked. She eventually found the old key and unlocked the door, delivering my soggy cheeks into her soothing pant legs as my grandfather laughed at me from down the hall.

My 23-year old self reacted in much the same way. The on set of claustrophobia and panic was just as instant. I pounded the door and yelled for Kristin. I cursed myself. Why did I have to close the bathroom door all the way anyway? I’m so stupid. She was at first irritated for my having called her away from Ed, then alarmed by my situation. The lock was broken from the inside, I was missing my favorite show, and my girlfriend couldn’t get me out. She tugged on the door knob and even found some tools, but there weren’t any screws on the outside of the knob. She did slide toilet paper under the door for me though, along with some of the small tools so I could try to get the door open. The space underneath the door was small, but the carpeting in the hallway made it even smaller by almost closing off the space entirely. There was just enough room for her to unroll the toilet paper and slide it through by the end, which I then used to pull more paper under the door. The Phillips-head screwdriver and pliers fit because they were miniature-sized, probably part of a gift set from a bank giveaway.

After I flushed, I frantically tried to pick at the knob myself, to pry it off, to scrape fifty years’ worth of white paint over white paint off the hinges in order to just get at them, to pry the pin out of the hinge and take off the door. Our apartment was in a complex, and they had at least twenty-five coats of white paint on those walls and on the door. I couldn’t loosen the door knob or the hinges. After exhausting myself trying to escape for half-an-hour, I finally gave up. There was no immediately foreseeable way out. The shower window was too small for me to fit through and anyway we were on a high second-floor.

Kristin called the emergency maintenance line that the apartment complex supplied for us, which we had only used once previously when Kristin ran the microwave and toaster oven simultaneously and blew a fuse. I couldn’t make out what she was telling them through the bathroom door, but I didn’t care if they were laughing about my situation on the phone anyway, as long as someone came to get me out. I had my ear pressed to the door, and when I no longer heard her talking, I immediately yelled for information. They said they’ll send someone over as soon as they can. It took them three hours to “send someone over” that time Kristin blew a fuse, so I prepared for an extended stay in the bathroom. Kristin sat on the hallway floor outside the door and talked to me, flaunting the fact that she could still watch "Ed" on the living room television from where she sat. She could be a really loveable jerk like that.

My sequestration in our small, tomb-like bathroom was an emotional rollercoaster. At first I was furious, pounding and hacking away at the door’s hinges with the kiddie-sized screwdriver, on the verge of tears. Then I settled down a bit and realized I had taken a lifetime of unencumbered defecation for granted. I had come and gone and done my business probably hundreds of thousands of times, all thoughtless of how lucky I’ve always been to have the luxury of going behind closed doors, indoors, not having to use leaves to wipe and dig holes in the woods like a cub scout.

I was trapped in a 5x7 room with the toilet as chair and nothing to read except a back-issue of The New Yorker, only it was the annual fashion issue, strategically placed in a hanging basket on the bathroom wall next to the toilet because Kristin liked the yellow cover art which matched her bathroom décor. The issue was never read and I wasn’t about to stoop to reading it then.

I had to admit, though, as I sat there on the toilet lid, that our bathroom, as small as it was, really was great, and I had taken it for granted. If the bathroom was left to me, it would be bare except for bathroom products. But for the first time, I found myself admiring Kristin’s attention to detail. The golden chiffon shower curtain, the one high, one low hand towel hooks and accompanying white hand towels with H A N D inscribed in the cotton in block lettering, the fake flowers that I don’t know the name of on the back of the toilet, the vintage bath sign, the yellow candles, the gold frames with hand-cut designs made meticulously from paper of different shades of yellows, browns, and gold: this assiduous décor was my very antithesis. But, at that moment I wished I’d had the money to buy a ring and propose to her from within those bathroom walls. She may not appreciate the American underground and sub-culture like I’d always fantasized my soul-mate would, and she may be more interested in scrap books than literature, but she was sitting on the other side of the bathroom door and she made me feel at home, always.

After I calmed down, I spent over an hour standing in the tub happily perching my chin on the shower window, looking out over the back parking lot and lawn from two floors up. Kristin periodically called in to make sure I was all right. I thought of that old Kinks song, “Waterloo Sunset,” and hummed it as I gazed out at the empty, inactive lot behind our building. I pretended I was Ray Davies. Every day I look at the world from my window, something something something, I never could decipher the next lines. Then: But I don’t need no friends. As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset I am in paradise. The large black-topped parking lot and the surrounding buildings were no Waterloo sunset. In fact, I couldn’t even see the sun through the trees, but I was in a sort of paradise at that moment. Despite being trapped in the bathroom, I was happy to be there in my cozy, little apartment, with Kristin on the other side of the door.

My maudlin tub reflection and internal sing-a-long ended finally, after about two hours, when the two maintenance guys showed up and Kristin debriefed them of the situation. They had a good laugh at my situational expense, and then proceeded to fiddle with the door knob. I was told to stand back, so I stepped back into the tub, and with one swift hack of a mallet, the door knob was gone and they pulled out the broken metal innards. One of them then pushed the door open and, with Kristin standing behind them, they had another hearty laugh when they saw me standing in the tub still, and I laughed along with them.

Lucky enough to never be self-reliant or cool, as soon as the maintenance guys walked out of our apartment and closed the door, I was thankfully in Kristin’s embrace. After being trapped in the bathroom for two hours, walking freely through the apartment didn’t feel good enough. We were soon out the door and off through the black-topped lot to the nearby high-school’s tennis courts. We volleyed back and forth effortlessly in the warm sun. I didn’t pound her with my serve or backspin any cruel drop shots as I would invariably try to hit against anyone else and as I usually did to her when I got bored. We were probably mirroring the quintessence of mediocre neighborhood tennis, but to me it was euphoria, one of those rare instances when you recognize that you are alive, you remember that you have a pretty good life, and that is enough. And I may not have overcome my dependence on the woman in my life, as a child or as I am now, supposedly an adult, but at least I’ve stopped crying as much.

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