Essentially Expendable

It’s hard to evacuate your bowels in a busy public restroom.You try to do it in those precious moments after men have left and before new men arrive–you are a thief waiting for the security guards to change shifts. You wait in silence, peeping out of the crack in the stall door. Now’s your chance!

But somebody comes in and, the horror, takes up residence next to you. Shit! You’re now in a stand off, listening while simultaneously trying not to make those noises. He is doing the same. His LV belt buckle is resting in a thin pool of liquid, you can see. Sometimes you bend all the way down to investigate the kind of pants the guy next to you is wearing because you have nothing better to do with your time because you didn’t buy an iPhone.

You cough. You figure that will mask the sounds of evacuation, like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when the guy waits until the thunder claps to hit the sewage pipe with his big rock. You also roll the toilet paper thing around and around and around.

Now more men have come in. Shift change over. You missed your chance.