Would you like partial nudity with that?

Perhaps I am a prude. Okay, now that you’ve wiped away your tears of laughter, let me assert again that it is true: there are some things that I consider to be acceptable behavior and some things that are not. Today, gentle reader, you are going to get an example of not appropriate behavior (honestly, how interesting would it be if I wrote “All the good little Christian children in the world bowed their heads and prayed to their beloved lord Jesus and he made the rainbows shine just for them.”).
Anyway, my story begins today with an infrequent visit up to my lair by mom and dad. One of my objections to having a “holiday tree” forced mercilessly upon me was that there was no one to see it and therefore why the hell should I bother. So, mom decided it would be a sop to my protestations if she and dad came up to visit me and behold the wonder that is my holiday decoration. Woo.
Of course, one of her other motives was to pop on over to the quilt store that is but a stone’s throw from my abode. That left dad and me to our own devices for a little more than an hour until we were going to skip merrily down for lunch at one of the delightful cafés in my neighborhood. Amazingly enough, dad was not the source of the inappropriate behavior. No: that incident didn’t occur until we reached the café.
Mom was lagging (she had another encounter with the gang of motorcycles that seem to plague her on the roads), so dad and I headed to the café by ourselves. It’s one of my favorites, as their greek omelet is just delish, although it always makes me experience a feta of regret. It was sort of mizzly (you know, a combination of misty and drizzly) outside, so we hustled on in to the café. We ordered for mom, she arrived, we ate, and all was right with the world. Except, except… well, you remember that feta of regret? Yeah, I guess it had sort of decided to “kick it up a notch” above my usual feta foibles. To wit: I was about to release a ham blast of epic magnitude. Also, I strongly suspected that two of my friends (whom I like to call Crap Master Flush and Stooly D) wanted to visit the pool, if you catch my meaning. So I excused myself to visit the facilities.
This was unusual for me, because I don’t like to conduct that sort of business in a public bathroom (not that I like to conduct any other sort of business in there either, you understand. No t-room tricks for me, thank you very much. I do my hoin’ on the corner like everyone else). Besides, when I am visiting the little downtown area, I am really close enough to whisk home, “make a deposit”, and whisk right back, sixpence none the wiser. But doodie called quite urgently in this case, so I made my way inside.
Fortunately, there was no one else in the bathroom. Well, you know: nothing is more embarrassing than giving someone you don’t know a toot serenade. So was able to take care of business in sweet solitude. Then the trouble began. As I was completing the paperwork for my little transaction, the door opened and someone else came in. Now, the etiquette involved in signifying to a mysterious bathroom stranger that someone is already in flagrante depoop-o is simple: you tap a foot, make a little cough, something audible so that whoever has entered the room is aware that your shit is going down. I had hardly had time to contemplate which polite notification I was going to choose when all thought was drowned out by some of the loudest nose-blowing I have heard since, well, since my dad. And it wasn’t just loud: oh no my friend, mere loudness (while certainly of a special quality of its own) isn’t enough to really warrant mention unless you are running thin on conversation. This was also persistent nose-blowing. I found myself having to time the rhythm of the blasts so I could know when to work in my announcement. Of course, this did not prepare me for what awaited me outside the safety of the stall door.
You know how, while you are attracted to the same sex (or the opposite, but that so crazy), you aren’t necessarily attracted to ALL of them? You know how, sometimes you want to see someone naked, but then there are some people who you sort of mentally dress? Yeah. I open the door to the stall, expecting possibly one of the archangels (because of all the trumpeting he had done) but that is not what I see. No, what I see is this piece of old man flap, shirt off, man-titties a-jiggle, vigorously toweling himself off. The back hair was not a big whoop to me (I am a bear, after all), but the pallid grey of his skin was more than a bit disconcerting. It was like seeing withered old Dracula washing up before a big blood feast. I suppose, if I had to come up with a reason (and the nature of the trauma is such that I must) I would say the mizzly weather had gone rainy and that he wished to dry himself as much as possible. Of course, he also had chosen to occupy the sink with his shirt. Why it couldn’t be casually draped over the paper towel rack as his sweater had been is simply beyond me. Perhaps it is a fundamental law of physics, like the explosive reaction between matter and anti-matter: your sweater and your t-shirt shall not touch when they are off of your body and casually arrayed in a public restroom. Perhaps he was just a dick. Either way, his sartorial selfishness left me unable to wash my hands without having an interaction.
I hate having interactions with strangers in public situations. Now, I am not saying I am averse to meeting people. However, I absolutely despise it when people speak to me in a store or in line; anywhere no one knows your name. It’s just a thing I have. That despite is increased a thousand-fold when the interaction takes place in the bathroom. The rule is: don’t speak. Ever. It doesn’t matter if your stall neighbor is puking his guts out, if your urinal buddy is on fire with actual flames licking at his clothing, nothing is sufficient cause to break the single most important rule. You simply don’t speak in a bathroom. Not ever. Now, here I am, in a bathroom with a partially clothed old man and I have to talk to him or he has to talk to me. Walking out without washing my hands is simply not an option.
He looks surprised, not quite like a deer caught in the headlights, but as though I haven’t been tapping and harrumphing, flushing even, while he was occupying the same space. I suppose he could have imagined that I had dropped down from the sky, like the old man that drove around with the homeless guy in his windshield. I have one goal in all of this: make the interaction as limited as possible. I make a simple nod of acknowledgement, and move to the sink to wash my hands. He does nothing beyond what he is doing (i.e. wiping his sagging flesh with paper towels) until I begin to turn the sink on. Then he says “Let me get that” and yanks it away, as though I had intended to douse the material in the sink like it was some kind of Kafka-esque Woolite commercial. I wash my hands, grab a paper towel to dry them with, keep it in my hand to open the door, and drop in the waste container as I walk back out into the café, free at last from the tyranny of a poor mannered man. Although, I can’t help but suppress a small smile back at the table. Crap Master Flush and Stooly D. Heh, I am so clever.