While in Provo, Utah, preparing to be a Mormon missionary, I came across my favorite piece of bathroom graffiti. It was not an anatomically exaggerated drawing of naked parts, nor was it a jumble of cuss words. Among the bare and immaculate walls of the Missionary Training Center, hidden slightly beneath the toilet paper dispenser, there was an inscription: Jeremiah 4:19.
I am a little embarrassed to admit that I sometimes carried my scriptures into the bathroom in those days. There was nothing else to read. We couldn't have magazines. We couldn't have Life's Little Instruction Book. We couldn't even have The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, though it was written by a Mormon. There were only scriptures, and a tiny canon of religious literature.
I opened up to the passage (King James version, of course) and read: "My bowels! My bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war."
On the inside door of the Fischer Fine Arts Library building, there is stained glass that bears this message: "Read not to contradict nor to believe and take for granted nor to find talk and discourse but to weigh and consider." To the left of that door and up the stairs is the bathroom, and in the second stall to the left, the following was written above the toilet paper: TO SHIT IS HUMAN. I returned a day later to contemplate this, only to find that it had been painted over.
Before my time as a missionary, the time I spent sitting on toilets was only a means to an end. There was only the ornery tedium of emptying out my bowels. As a missionary, bathroom minutes were my only minutes alone. I had to go everywhere with a companion (eat, drink, sleep, knock on doors). For once, even diarrhea could be pleasant, because I could breathe, think and ponder. There is an unsaid understanding among missionaries that one is not to be disturbed, rushed or questioned when behind the closed door of a toilet stall.
Somehow, sitting there, pants around my ankles, hands on my scriptures, the toilet was a place for revelation. I never prayed on the toilet though. That seemed like a little much.
The men's restroom on the fifth floor of Van Pelt is the sine qua non of Penn bathroom graffiti. It's the complete package. There is frat bashing, gay sex references, lewd stick-figures with scribbles for pubic hair, polls, statistical formulas, Earth Liberation Front advertising, pro- and anti-U.S. propaganda, neocolonialism and writing on the walls decrying wall writing. Of the more laconic anti-fraternity remarks is this special equation: "Ancient Studies 101: Greek = Butt Fucker." Additionally, there are two poll questions. One is the harmless, "Who likes Motown?" to which seven answered yes and six no. The other is "Who's the best [country] in philosophy?" which initially only included the United States (one vote) and Germany (seven votes). It was expanded, however, to include Fiji (eight votes) and Scotland (one vote).
On top of that, there is an inscription that is difficult to make out, but from which one can extract the following treatise: "We should colonize the entire planet. We'd have cheaper gas and more room on the nightly news for other shit. Go Texas!"
Truth be told, the flush toilet was not really invented by Thomas John Crapper. He was a real person, however: a prominent plumber, inventor and industrialist in the early world of toilets. Among his nine patents were three improvements for "water closets," four for drains, one for pipe joints and the last for manhole covers. He owned and sold many water closets, however, and his name began to be associated with toilets after World War I, when American soldiers returned from England using the catch phrase "crapper." The most scholarly work to date on Crapper's life is Wallace Reyburn's Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper.
In the Biomedical Library, a friend and I asked a girl heading to the bathroom if she could check the stalls for graffiti. A few seconds later, a different girl came out and asked with a mix of wariness and suspicion, "You were looking for bathroom graffiti?"
"Did you see anything in there?" I asked. She started walking away before she said, over her shoulder, "No, there isn't any."
"How do you know?" I asked after her. "Hey," I said more loudly, "Did you check all the stalls?"
In all the libraries we checked, there were only two incidences of writing in the women's bathrooms. On the third floor of Van Pelt, a typed sheet of paper taped to the wall said, "Gender Equity Quiz. Q: 80% of The Daily Pennsylvanian Editorial Board is Male. What percentage of the DP Editorial Board is female?" The answer, below all this, is upside down: "A: Not Enough." The flyer claimed to be a message from Which Women, "a proud cultural conscience."
However, in David Rittenhouse Laboratory a women's bathroom has a vibrant and poetic debate about oral sex and love, from five different contributors:
Give good head and be loved.
Be loved whether you give good head or not.
Be loved whether you give good head or not, but give good head anyway.
Be loved whether you give good head or not, and you will receive a good many things.
Give head.
In 1999, two University of Miami fraternity brothers began publishing CrappersQuarterly.com. The magazine aims to "continuously examine and review the best and worst places to take a crap around the country and the world," according to it's editors, who sign their e-mail "The Mystery Crappers."
To introduce the oddest of public bathrooms in Paris, the Mystery Crappers say, "One of the most unique things about Paris is [the] famous street toilets. Gone are the days of the open urinal..." The Kiosk got an overall rating of two out of five, based on user friendliness, cleanliness, privacy and facilities.
The revenue for the magazine, which became monthly in January of last year, comes partially from ads for penis enlargement pills. The Mystery Crappers say that they "constantly try to find ridiculous or interesting banners to put on the site in an attempt to entertain [their] audience."
A stall in the fourth floor men's bathroom at Van Pelt contains one of the few pensive and literate musings. In a dark, print style with no particular neatness, the door reads, "Culture is aggressive and masculine; it craves conquest and vaunts victory." Surrounding the phrase is a flat, beige blankness, leaving the words alien and significant compared to the rest of the scribbling. No one has written a response.
In addition to the rather extensive history of the water closet, the background of the toilet has also been embellished with the verses of a 16th century poet. Sir John Harrington, the godson of Queen Elizabeth, wrote "A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax" in 1596. "Ajax" was a bit of verbal mischief, punning "a jakes," British slang for an outhouse.
Harrington filled the poem with salacious puns and dirty jokes about the "privie in perfection" he had built for his godmother in Richmond Palace. As a result of his poetic praise, he was mocked and vilified for the rest of his life. He never built another "perfect" toilet.
The bathroom in Rosengarten has a few normal comments. There is gay longing ("where's the man on man act on campus?"); Spanish love pledges ("Joaquin, te quiero"); frat-bashing ("AEPi sucks Rhino Dick") and Wharton-bashing ("Wharton is full of shit"). The unlikely addition, though, adds a peppy color:
Have the opportunity
to open
your hearts!
Shalom, Shanti, Ya Fetah
Despite the modern-era's claims to the toilet's invention, King Minos, the 15th century B.C. ruler of Minoa, was probably the first person to flush away his waste. His palace is a landmark in plumbing history. Minoan sanitary engineers used the hilly land to construct lavatories, sinks and manholes, which flowed through huge underground pipes into the Kairatos river. Their flushing devices used water from rain and cisterns that was kept in conduits in the wall.
There are a number of sites on the Internet devoted to bathroom graffiti. Perhaps the best of them, though not because of anything quantifiable, is Steve Gardner's "My Highbrow Folklore Project" at www.topsoil.net/litoileture.htm. It is connected to a radio show, Topsoil, on the Duke University station. At the helm of his journey as a folklorist, he wrote this commemorative poem:
I will boldly set foot out into America, risking the dank oppression of the neighborhood loo.
Wherever there is a crapper with a chapter. I'll be there.
If there is a memoir in Lenoir. I'll be there.
If there is a message of thanks, amidst the stank. I'll be there.
The site, though short, has a list of links to other bathroom graffiti collections. One of the links has a series of quotes, many made before or since into cheap T-shirts to be sold at souvenir shops. Among them is a quote from a North Carolina men's room: "If Jesus was Jewish, why does he have a Spanish name?" and followed further down with wisdom from an all-girls Catholic school in Lakewood, Ohio: "What moron writes on bathroom walls?"
Near the third floor Lippincott stacks is a bare-walled men's room with a screw-mounted wooden board covered in script. Starting from left to right, there is first the urging, "Y2K Soon Pray Now," which is repeated later on about mid-board. Following is a lengthy inscription, "My declaration of war against the University of Pennsylvania is now in effect, starting NOW." Someone seconded with, "Me too" and an arrow, while someone else apparently disagreeing, writing, "To the person who wrote this, Go hump your mama." Beneath the argument is another poem with a Haiku-like cadence:
because Nature (God)
favored you over me
you people can laugh
all you want however
I WILL
teach Penn a lesson
which it will never forget.
Between the men's and the women's rooms at these stacks is a handicapped bathroom, with no graffiti, equipped with a toilet, sink and paper towel dispenser. Directly across from the toilet is a huge full-body mirror. While you sit, all your most unpleasant accouterments are right in front of your face. One has to wonder what the builders were thinking to do this to someone who's already met with misfortune.
The origin of associating crap with excrement, is evidently a subject of heated debate among these "Crap" scholars. Some say it's from the Dutch Krappe, the German krape, Middle English crappy, or the Anglo-Saxon word crappe. The modern gloss of "crap" as excrement originates in 1898, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which takes the reference from the English Dialect Dictionary, dating it conveniently before WW I when American soldiers would bring the term back home.
In the basement of the Fine Arts Library, one stall supremely outdoes the other. The conversation, as with most bathroom graffiti, is like a chat room, except with more anonymity. It is like a party of ids. The conversation begins with the first insight, "Good sex requires, 1) Friendship, 2) Physical Attraction." Under this fledgling list, there has been added, "3) Tantra," and "4) woodland creatures."
A few inches over, the discussion moves on: "I want sex." A "gay" has been spliced between "want" and "sex," but this hasn't stopped the discussion. The first response is, "you won't get any here at Penn, or any East Coast Ivy for that matter. Better try U.C. Berkley. The ho's here are too uptight." Then, a new paragraph, a new writer: "Yeah, but we'll get 'em in corporate America. Have patience." A few inches over, yet another writer asks, "Why all the misogyny? Women are our mothers, our sisters and our friends." Under that, there is a clandestine addition: "and our ho's and our bitches."
My last stop for this missive was the Moravian Cafes. The food court was full of bohemian stuff -- to be expected -- and the first stall didn't have anything. The door to the second was closed, so I went outside and sat on the gray steps outside the bathroom hallway, waiting for someone to emerge. After half an hour, seven people had come and gone, and I thought to ask the mysterious occupant of the second stall, "Sir, did you know that you just spent 30 minutes in a public bathroom stall?" I thought about what the second question could be. "What were you doing?"
When I went into the bathroom, a chubby man with a hat was pulling on the top corner of the stall door. I asked him the obvious question, "Is it locked?"
The man glared at me, exasperated, and said, pouting. "Yes. This one is locked and this one," he said, gesturing at the other stall, "this one has no toilet paper. I don't know what I'm going to do."
"Oh," I mumbled as I turned, biting my knuckle.
When I got home I sat down in the bathroom. I took out a pen and some sticky notes my roommate had given me a year ago. I posted one onto the wall, above the toilet paper, and quoted Dead Poet's Society: "That the powerful play goes on, and you can contribute a verse"
