#3 You peed on the toilet seats

The delicious irony when a man complains to a woman about urine on the toilet seat.

On better days, we were friends.  I rode along with you in the golf cart as you lit up a cigarette and drove across the quad.  You’d tell me to slow down, relax and then launch into one of your stories about campus.  You knew which laborers took advantage of the system by running up overtime hours, the super who gave priority to work requests for the staff he liked, the IT guy who was fired only to be rehired because no one else understood the convoluted telecommunications cabling system.  You knew who cheated on their wives or broke up with their girlfriends, which secretaries ran their departments and the professors who grew pot in their labs in the name of research.

 

You’d tell stories about day-to-day events in your life too, of your stamp collecting hobby, exterminating bedbugs in your in-laws’ apartment, calling the repairman to fix your washing machine, or building toilets in Ukraine.  You could turn anything into a story and you always had a story to tell.

 

On that unfortunate day, we were not friends. You shouted at me in your KGB voice that someone peed on the toilets in the locker room, as if I was the one who did it.  Contractors from my project shared the toilets with your laborers but my contractors were the ones who cleaned it.  They also fixed the piping so that the room could be used in the first place. I wish I could’ve enjoyed the delicious irony of this moment when a man complains to a woman about urine on toilet seats but I’m the project manager so it’s my fault.

 

I could’ve responded with grace.  I could’ve quietly renegotiated a cleaning schedule and followed up by installing “bullseye toilet targets” into the bowl for the men to focus their aim.  Instead, I suggested that you were the one who peed on the toilets, and to clean up your own mess.  And by the way I said, tell your laborers to move that post-apocalyptic bin of steel studs from the doorway.  You didn’t like hearing that so you spun around and slapped the bin, and sent a cascade of metal tumbling toward me.  The sharp edges caught my skin and I bled, deep crimson over the concrete floor below the dented yellow lockers, blending in with the college colors of crimson and yellow.

 

Since then, the college yearbook photos of the football players and cheerleaders always included a faint image silhouetted behind them, a figure in a crimson and yellow jersey. That ghost is me, who cursed the home team to a losing season every year.

 

You promptly stuffed my body in a locker filled with discarded wrestling uniforms and went about cleaning the blood from the floor as if it were another job, carefully applying the cleaning fluid to the floors, mopping it and then buffing it with the machine to give it a brilliant shine.  You were proud how there were no stains left behind, and spoke of my demise in an amused way by making a story of it. You laughed and said it was a tragedy, then pause for dramatic effect, before telling the story again to anyone who’d listen.