Wednesday, August 24, 2011
The Old Man and the Pee
The Sunset is a homebody neighborhood - hundreds of regular blocks of single family dwellings with tiny yards and basement garages. It boasts no real tourist attractions but embraces an endearing mix of ethnicities and heritages. Russians, Irish, Italians, Chinese - there are a lot of different kinds of people in the Sunset, and they’re all pretty much the same. The air there is fresh, if often foggy, and the playgrounds and senior centers are well-used. In one case these two kinds of facilities cohabitate in a single space - the South Sunset Senior Center and Playground. This propinquity gives rise to the occasional entertaining little vignette. Would you believe it, Ima tell you one right now.
It was back aways in the waning of last autumn, when mornings started cool but days warmed up nicely. It was past the height of the hot season for the central valley, so the famous Sunset District fogbanks were at bay and the morning sun shone with glaring clarity. I was in the SSSC&PG with Li’l J, killing a few hours while Z-Bot attended his Saturday classes. The playing fields were full of kiddy soccer teams chaotically swarming and shrieking; basketballs clanked against rusty rims as small groups of young men honed their sweaty skills on the blacktop courts.
I had planted myself near the play structures and sandpits, to keep an eye on J as he romped. In front of me stood the Senior Center’s spartan digs, a utilitarian little structure that was entered through a door that faced the street to my left. The SSSC&PG’s single unisex restroom occupied one corner of that building and could not be entered from the clubhouse itself. Rather, it was accessed through a separate door around the corner, on the wall that faced the baby swings and the smaller sandpit. Perched as I was opposite that wall, I had an unobstructed view of what occurred there, and it was this:
She was an urban mom from Frisco’s west side, tall and slim with powerful glutes. This I could tell because of her spandex running tights, red with black glute-accentuating stripes, beneath her white long-sleeve spandex pullover. With her gleaming white cross-trainers and her color-controlled hair pulled back in a simple athletic coif, she struck me as someone used to giving orders and having them promptly followed.
But at that particular moment she was both giving the order and taking it: her clenched jaw, furrowed brow, and anxious little trot in front of the door with the blue unisex icon all spoke eloquently of her pressing need to tap one if not both kidneys. And just to dispel any ambiguity, this message was underscored by her increasingly impatient rattling of the restroom door handle every thirty seconds or so, punctuated by an escalating series of imprecations along the line of, “Is someone in there?” and “There are people waiting here!” and the ever-popular and all-purpose “Oh for god’s sake!”
I watched her for a period of around ten minutes as J played in the sandbox. By that point she was sweating and highly agitated, dancing en pointe with knees locked together and begging pretty much non-stop for entry and relief. Then came the shift change, as it were:
With magisterial slowness, the industrial handle of the green door descended and the door itself began to swing lugubriously inward. The woman in spandex leaped forward, powering her way through even before the current occupant had so much as cleared the portal. She snapped at him, exasperated, but he shuffled on out showing no more concern for her than had she been a scrap of intimate tissue stuck to the jamb. With a tangible huff she galumphed into the facility, making no effort to moderate the heavy door’s loud slam.
He, meanwhile, stood blinking on the warm sunny walkway, black chinos securely belted well above his waist, windbreaker properly snapped up to the collar. He methodically re-folded his newspaper once or twice before deliberately slipping it under an arm and walking back around to the clubhouse door at the front of the building. From the grim set of his jaw and his age-bent posture I couldn’t tell if he was feeling any better, or well at all, in a physical sense. But from the way his eyeglasses glinted in the sunlight, it seemed to me that he was cognizant of having made a point, clearly and definitively: he knew he stood as living proof that nobody, nohow, whoever you are or think you are, and whatever your walk of life, nobody rushes an old Chinese man out of his own senior center’s restroom. It’s like a law of nature,and the more you try to break the laws of nature, the worse they make you pay for it.
As far as I go, myself: lesson learned, old Chinese man. I’m just glad I got to learn from someone else’s mistake.