Bathroom Stories Performed At Galapagos

Written on 10/02/05

From what I’ve heard here the more miserable is the life of the comedian, the funnier it gets, the more you laugh.

My life right now is not miserable at all. I take note of how happy I am especially when I go home on the subway with my boyfriend, on the M line, towards Ridgewood, to my fellow Eastern Europeans. And I look to the left, and I look to the right, everywhere miserable Eastern European ladies with a smirk of superiority on their faces saying, “Look at this woman! Hugging her Nigger guy in the subway!” Sorry but this is how they speak! “Oh, my God he is nibbling at her neck! Look! He is putting his hand between her legs now! Why isn’t she like us, respectable, bedraggled middle-age mothers who haul shopping bags! We stayed in line all day long for a hulk of meat, two cans of preserves and three toilet paper rolls! We make dinner to our grumpy Borises that fuck young girls behind our backs and we are getting none! And we sacrifice ourselves and wash old folks' asses all day long and clean apartments and send money home and we have no good time, for we didn’t come here to have a good time! We came here to sacrifice!” Well then, sacrifice! I’m having the time of my life and I’ll keep at it before I get bald.

They look so pickled sour.

But I’d better get talking before my timeslot is over. From now on I’ll be telling you stories of misery about downtrodden immigrants.

I have this friend who has a Ph. D. in Philosophy and all that but for now she works at Copacabana, the once famous night club, now regrettably down-the-hill. She works in the bathroom.

The stories she tells!

She said right when Katrina hit they were having parties like there’s no tomorrow. Chocolate fountains, three-foot wide birthday cakes, all for some kids that ran around in socks on the huge dance floor! The beaming parents wouldn’t give her a tip in the bathroom. She froze there for five hours, because the bathrooms at Copa are freezers, summer, winter, it doesn’t matter. She wears her winter clothes in the summer. All bundled up, with woolen shawls and Cossack fur caps and fur boots. Her teeth clatter as she hands out paper napkins.

The management couldn’t care less. In her bathroom, four stalls all in all, the water springs from the tile floor. This is a renowned institution, but the bathroom is like a marsh. Each night she has to fight with the kitchen boys who hide the mops. If she can’t get a mop, it’s a nightmare. Water comes from the first stall, then spreads in the second, then reaches out to the third, and she tries to sweep it, dry it with paper towels galore, but she can’t keep up with it. Patrons are insulted, they think it’s urine and don’t tip the lazy bathroom attendant. So in despair she sits and reads Love and Longing in Bombay. She wants to write a mystery book.

[She is on a mystery binge. She watches Cadfel and Mrs. Bradley and Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot and Mrs. Jessica Fletcher and Inspector Morse and reads Hannibal Lectern and the police blotters in obscure neighborhood papers. When she goes by subway she sees but suspects. The woman forcing the pacifier in the crying baby’s mouth is a kidnapper. The mousy accountant comparing some figures is for sure an undercover cop or a sleuth. The guy over there in shorts and goggling eyes staring at the young blonde is a sex offender on the prey.]

Anyway, at work she has to deal with the merchandise she displays around the sink: squeegees, candy, hair mousse, slippers. Some find the $1 tip outrageous and haggle, "What? One dolla’? One dolla’ for a lollipop? Gina, listen to dis: one dolla’ fo’ the lollipop! At the dolla’ store you get a bag of them!” “Honey,”--you get away with anything, if you add a honey now and then.--“Honey, if you don’t like it, beat it! You go and get your lollipops at the dollar store now! Okay? It’s 2 a.m.! At Copa!” Some slam the candy back in the basket, some belligerently hand in the dollar. One woman took out her wad of hundreds and twenties, after she saw there was no way she could get her candy free, “Do you have change?” “Yes, honey, I have change.”

Some steal. She sells slippers for $5. By midnight all the pretty girls glammed up come staggering to the bathroom, “Give me slippers! I can’t bear these high heels anymore! My feet are killing me!” She sells slippers. The other night a girl passed out in the stall and she had to call the bouncer. As she was going out a woman asked her if she had slippers size 7. “Yes, just a minute.” She had a small stash of slippers under her chair, with sizes that sell the most, 7, 8, 9 and 10. When she came back with the security, she leaned under the chair to give the woman the slippers. The size 7 was gone. Only the empty plastic bag and a pair of worn out slippers. She turned around and saw in the first stall two feet with her new slippers on, and when the woman came out, “Hey, hey, where’s my money! You took my slippers!” “I left you those in return!” “Are you kidding me?” she is about to throw the worn out slippers after the thief, but she was shaking her bootie on the dance floor.

Which also makes her miserable. Night after night people copulate on the dance floor, rub against each other all night long, the girl’s ass up and down the guy’s crotch all night long. After awhile she can’t bear seeing people anymore. Each time she comes from work she is so disgusted that she tells her boyfriend to slow down with his sexual turn ons, and slaps his fingers when he plays radio buttons with her nipples. Then she is even more depressed that she can’t leave work at work. He has no fault, but she is sick of people. How could she be otherwise? They all get drunk, take drugs, cigarettes, weed, pour chemicals down their bodies calling it fun, and she can’t understand this kind of fun, she is happy when she dreams about her mystery book.

She has some experience with crime, like everybody. How many of you stole cell phones? Nobody. Well, what about not returning the ones you found? Well, in the bathroom, drunk as they are they always forget their cell phones. Some come looking for them in despair, some don’t. At the beginning she made sure they got the phone back, because she had one stolen and then lost a few and she sympathied with the victim. She’d call, even go out of her way to return the cell phone, but after awhile since the dames didn’t even bother to offer a coffee or give her a tip, one night she just put the phone in her bag and ran to the kitchen.

She looked at it, it was a camera phone, exactly like the one a padlock peddler stole from her while she was working as a bar tender at a watering hole. She was perusing his merchandise while he vanished her phone. She cried but the phone was gone. It took her a week’s wage to buy a new one, without a camera.

Anyway, she looked at this lost one’s picture gallery: a bottle blonde with her fatso girls, then same blonde showing off her boobs, then her buttocks, various angles. She, with an equally naked booby girlfriend; then the happy husband, a fatso trucker; more buttocks. Decidedly, this was not a bedraggled mom on her first day out in a year. She resolved not to give the phone back, but sell it. It was providence. Make a bit of money to pay the passport renewal fee, go to see her old parents back in the old country.

When the staggering desperate came to look for it she said, “I don’t know. I was in the kitchen on my coffee break. Look around in the stalls.” She was glad she turned off the phone, so that in case the bitch calls her cell, its ring doesn’t give her away.

The phone stayed around the house for a few days, to the amusement of the entire family, watching cell phone porn, but then they realized they couldn’t sell it, didn’t have the connections, the device was worthless, so it just got forgotten in a corner. At times she wanted to call the booby and give her the phone, but she was snooty to her anyway, and so on…

Now she returns the phones back. Still, they don’t tip.

Anyway, by the end of the night she has to deal with more drunk women vomiting on the floor, spilling their beer cups around, and there is no mop. If you tell the floor managers,--assorted distraught females who go around like they are under bombardment, as if they were not doing this floor management since 1957!--They half listen to you talking about the wet floor and scarcity of mops, but don’t do anything about it. It’s Copa! Copa Cabana, where music is la-la-la Copa! Copa Cabanaaaaa! She lost her beauty and she lost her mind!

By 4 a.m. her boss comes to check on her. Her boss is another sour Eastern European. She is a dedicated church-goer. When by the end of the party they all grab the flowers to take them home, my friend always gets her boss a bouquet too, and her boss, Miss Voica, always plucks my friend’s bouquet for the best stems, saying she takes them for the church altar.

Miss Voica always finds fault. “The bathroom is not clean! Look at the water on the floor.” “Well, it’s been like this for the last half a year. They don’t fix the plumbing, no matter what!” Famous Copa!

Now my friend has to sit thru another recounting of how Miss Voica wants to slim down. She is a small woman, who in her black and white uniform resembles a penguin, and walks like one. She looked at herself in the mirror the other day and was disgusted with herself, “I’m a slob! A slob! Look at all these bellies I acquired since I came here! They mess up the food with all those hormones. I used to have 60 kilos, now I have 99! I read in Aura, I like Aura very much! Good magazine! I started their diet yesterday. I ate just apples. I feel so light. I never thought I’ll be able to live on apples. Today I can eat also a bit of cheese.”

All this is fine, but my friend heard this story several times already. “I had to start the diet all over again because last Sunday I went to a birthday party for the priest’s little one and I ate fish. But look at all these layers of lard! Slob! They say you should give up coffee, but that I can’t! I work 20 hours a day, sleep 4 hours a night.” She is greedy, Miss Voica. Instead of letting others too to work, she has a day job anyway, she keeps all the party slots and disco and everything she can for herself.

Anyway, my time is gone, but this friend’s tribulations compared with Katrina misery stories are nothing, but maybe some of the comedians here will be able to entertain you with that.

I was told to stick with what I know: heroic stories of immigrations.