The Horror of Public Bathrooms - Not-So-Private Hell Part 6

One of the recurring NSPH topic requests from FD readers was to write about the challenges of a public bathroom. Being a man who rarely sees the inside of a stall, I was sure I could not do this issue justice. So I asked Susan who writes the Crazy Woman Inside Me blog. She is an author outside of blog world, so my request was a bit like inviting your neighbor the electrician over to watch the game and hitting him up to help you solve an issue with a breaker that keeps tripping.

I was sure she'd turn me down, as busy as she is writing. I hoped not because she has climbed a lot of the mountains still ahead of the Fat Daddy. Her writing is impactful and full of empathy. So I was both surprised and grateful when she accepted. She did not disappoint. Thank you Susan!


I write romance novels and women’s fiction under a pseudonym, so when Fat Daddy emailed me, inviting me to write a guest post for his “Not-So-Private Hell of Being Really Really Fat” series, I naturally imagined he sought my eloquent, literary elucidation on the dilemmas and injustices of being a fat woman.

Instead, a couple of paragraphs later I discovered that he wanted me to write about the plight of fat women in public bathrooms. The realization that I’d be reduced to writing toilet humor had me barking laughter.

I love reading Fat Daddy’s tell-it-like-it-is blog and am honored to have this prestigious opportunity to expose the hazards fat women face when peeing in a public facility.

More than halfway to my weight loss goal, I no longer have to face many of the trials and tribulations I’m about to detail here. But I sure as hell remember with crystal clarity the misery involved.

Like most little girls, I went through Public Restroom Safety 101, with my mother cautioning me on the health hazards of public toilets. I learned that if I sat on a filthy, dirty, disgusting public toilet seat my little private parts would become diseased, deformed, and eventually fall off. I was taught to wad up toilet paper and wipe the seat before gathering more paper and lining the surface. (This was a time before the toilet seat liners you see above the tanks now, which are really of no use to fat women anyway because our sizeable butts tend to tear the thin tissue liners, defeating the sanitary purpose.) The toilet-paper-lined seat wasn’t actually for sitting, but for insurance--in the cataclysmic event that I might fail to hold my balance while hovering and find myself plopping down on the bacteria-ridden surface.

I followed Mom’s instructions for years, doing my best to balance over the seat without any of my flesh coming into contact with the every-germ-known-to-mankind-infested surface. I had great respect for my mother’s ability to pull off this praiseworthy feat because when I did it pee never failed to dribble down my legs. And that’s when I was thin.

Once I became fat I encountered genuine public toilet trauma, beginning with trying to maneuver in a narrow bathroom stall, which is kind of like trying to perform a circus act. Just getting inside the stall can leave you bruised and battered. There’s not enough room to squeeze in and close the door behind you without major abrasion.

That’s why fat women prefer the roomier handicapped bathroom stalls, even if they feel slightly guilty using them. Usually, those bigger stalls are already occupied, or uninhabitable because they’re tainted with a previous user’s creeping crud, or the door latch is broken and the door swings wide and the toilet is too far from it to hold it closed with your hand or foot. So into the standard stall the dejected fat woman goes, fully aware of the difficulty that awaits.

Once inside the skinny space there’s no way in hell a fat woman is going to be able to hover her big weighty butt over the toilet seat with any semblance of grace, or be able to zero in on where she should be peeing, because her thighs are too damn big to be able to look through the nonexistent space between them to see the intended target. Unlike the toilet in the handicapped stall, the toilet is close enough to the floor to have been designed for munchkins. That’s a helluva a long way down to have to squat while holding up all that extra poundage.

Then there’s the purse. Growing up in Chicago I learned never to drape the strap of your purse on the purse hook of a public bathroom stall because that’s what thieves wait for. When you’re busy peeing, they’ll reach their hand over the top of the door, snatch your purse and hightail it out of there. Women are left with no alternative other than to drape their purse strap over their head and neck, or if the strap’s too short, hold the strap in the mouth. Alternately, she could rest the purse atop the toilet paper dispenser but one false move could have the purse sliding off and tumbling to the bacteria-encrusted floor, where a bazillion toilet germs will quickly crawl into the handbag, infesting everything in the purse. The owner of the purse would, of course, be dead in a matter of hours.

The frustrated fat woman with a huge butt and thunder thighs struggles with her purse, trying to prepare the toilet seat for sitting because she’s given up on hovering. When she attempts to pull her pants down over her big belly and wide-load ass, her elbows bang against the sides of the stall leaving the women in the stalls next to her wondering what the hell that fat woman is doing in there.

Finally, the fat woman’s butt is situated on the paper-lined toilet seat and she pees before her bladder bursts. Wiping herself entails reaching really low or really high to get to the dispenser holding the rolls of super-thin toilet paper which comes off 1 to 2 squares at a time because the cheap bastards who own the public bathroom won’t spend the money to buy some decent tissue.

Sometimes the toilet paper roll is empty, which means she has to fish through her purse to find a tissue, shopping list, candy bar wrapper, or anything that would suffice in a pee-wiping emergency. There are times when one roll is empty and the second is full, but fails to lower into position. The fat woman has to snake her chubby hand way up inside the dispenser, clawing at the paper in hopes of snagging enough to get the job done. It comes off in feathery little chunks, which aren’t much good for anything. The process of securing toilet paper leaves the fat woman’s plump hand and forearm scratched and bruised.

This is about the time two rambunctious kids crawl under the bathroom stall, look up and giggle at the big, twisted, doughy, human pretzel woman trying to wipe herself. The door starts to open because the latch is faulty and the fat woman lurches forward to slam it shut. She’s aware that the kids are now tainted with public-toilet-floor germs that will one day make their private parts fall off, but at this point she doesn’t give a damn. Mortified, she clutches the torn chunks of cheap toilet paper to her breast and, with the purse strap secured in her teeth, yells, “Get out!” only to have the kids start bawling and their mother yelling at the fat woman through the stall door, chastising her for scaring her precious babies.

Once that humiliation is over, the fat woman gets back to the task at hand. Wiping between her legs involves a contortion act because her thighs are oversized. When she spreads her legs to try to wipe her private parts, her fleshy knees bang both sides of the narrow stall, making the women in the next stalls even more curious about what’s going on in there. At the same time, the fat woman is terrified her slacks are in danger of sliding to the floor, so she spreads her feet and they end up beneath the sides of the stall, encroaching on the floor of the stalls on either side of her. She desperately hopes this isn’t taken as some sort of private club signal that she’s interested in a little same-sex bathroom mambo.

She does her utmost to get her hand under the little space between her billowing flesh and the toilet seat, inevitably scraping her hand against the front edge of the toilet seat and erupting into a horrified silent scream with the realization that she’s now tainted with toilet germs. Shit! She doesn’t stop to think about how she’ll explain to her husband about her private parts falling off when that happens because right now she just wants to get the hell out of the goddamn skinny stall.

It’s another struggle to stand and hike up her pants. Then the fat woman steps forward so the automatic flushing mechanism can detect that she’s off the seat, but her big fat butt protrudes far enough to fool the sensor and the toilet won’t flush. So she has to maneuver her way to turn around and do a manual flush. Her mobility limited by her girth, the fat woman can’t lift her foot high enough to hit the flush button. She secures more toilet paper to keep her fingers from coming in contact with the button’s contaminated surface and flushes.

By the time she exits the stall, the fat woman, who took extra time that morning to nicely style her hair and artfully apply makeup so that everyone would look at her prettily-painted face and never even notice that she’s fat, is a sweaty mess from all the struggle and contortionism in the stall.

She waddles over to the sink where there’s an enormous expanse of lighted mirror, glances at herself and sees a fat body topped with a flushed, clammy, make-up-smudged moon-shaped face staring back and, sonuvabitch, she wants to cry because she looks nothing at all the way she thought she did in her own bathroom mirror just that morning. She can’t bear to glimpse the line of slender women washing their hands and reapplying makeup because she doesn’t want to be reminded that she’s the fattest damn woman in the john, so she washes her hands and waddles out of there as fast as her chubby little legs will carry her.

After her harrowing ordeal, the fat woman battles the powerful urge to drown memories of her wretched public bathroom ordeal by self-medicating with copious amounts of chocolate.

Crazy Woman out
www.TheCrazyWomanInsideMe.com