Men's Versus the Wimen's

Why is it awkward when another man walks into a public bathroom while you're pooping?

That isn’t so awkward: everybody shits - you’re just another guy shitting. What’s awkward is having women come in while you’re shitting. Just such a scene happened to me when I was attending a large faith-healing show at the International Amphitheater in Chicago about forty years ago. The star of the show was the famous faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman. I witnessed some very unChristian-like behavior - for example, ushers diving for spilled money baskets and ladies invading the men’s rooms because their shorter urethras couldn’t stand waiting in lines at the women’s rooms.

I was sitting on a terlet in a stall in one of the men’s rooms when a mess of angry women came in and told all the men to get out. Since I was only about halfway through with my business, I wasn’t going to make a hasty move - it would have been too dangerous. So I put my feet up on the door to prevent anyone from opening it on me. Yes, I put my feet up and braced myself against the female tide.

The gals went from stall to stall throwing the men out, but when they got to my place, no one could budge the door. Somebody even looked under the door to see if anyone was in there. Of course, my feet were against the door, so they didn’t see any feet. The woman called out, “This one’s stuck!”
I simply relaxed and took my time with the job at hand.

When I finished I got up, opened the door, and walked out through the crowd of women. Then I walked out of the men’s room into another crowd of astonished men. I never got saved that day, but I saved my own ass from those women.

Spence Spring

About twenty years ago, I was traveling in New Mexico, and I was trying to stay at some of the lowest-rent places, like a hostel in Albuquerque and another one up a mountain outside of Albuquerque. This trip was a sequel to one I had taken years before that in which I stayed at the House of Jesus in ABQ for three days. I couldn’t stay there longer unless I became committed to Jesus, and then I could stay as long as I liked.

At that time I was more into Hinduism and mescaline and not so much into Jesus. This time I was going purposely to visit the site of a former Trappist monastery and the present site of Pecos Benedictine Monastery. Besides the religious scene and the Santa Fe scene, I was going to Taos, Los Alamos, Bandelier National Monument, and Jimez Springs, the site of an interesting entry in my guide to hot springs (Spence Spring). I found the following description on TripAdvisor, written by “Dr Dude 777”:

This was my very first time in a hot spring. There were three of us...a good friend of mine, my wife, and myself. When we arrived, tourists from Austin, Texas, were there...two guys and two gals, all in their twenties and all naked. My wife had worn her bikini under her clothes, but my friend and I found separate areas right in the woods and changed into our trunks.

When I first got in, I almost slipped on the slimy rock I stepped on. Beware that it is very slippery. Another step and I was in gravel that didn't seem slimy at all. Then my friend got in. He had no troubles, now that I had warned them of the slimy rocks. My wife took one step in and got grossed out from the slime. She decided not to get in, and she sat on a nearby rock outside of the spring for the remainder of the time.

The couples from Austin got out, dressed, and left. The hot water felt awesome in the twenty degree temps. The view was amazing!

The next day, only my friend and I went back and hopped into the hot water. There was an older couple there from Minnesota...both totally nude. They were very friendly, and we talked with them for awhile. When they were ready to leave, my friend was sitting right next to the only exit. As the woman was stepping up to get out, her privates were very close to his face. It was kind of awkward, but not a huge deal.

We stayed in there for hours, drinking beer, laughing, and talking. It was comfortable and very peaceful. Lots of different people came in and left. 90% of them would go completely naked, though we kept our trunks on at all times.

I share this experience in detail because it's a great place to go, but probably not a real "family" place where you would want to bring your children. They also have other hot springs in the area that we did not visit, but I hear they are more family friendly.

If you're a college guy looking to get naked with some girls, this is the perfect place to go. Or if you just want to enjoy nature naturally, this the place to go. My wife and I are going back there this month. I have two goals...to get my wife to actually get in and ignore the slime and to get my courage together and get in there nude.

By the way, there are numerous microorganisms inside hot springs, including the brain eating amoeba. They can't hurt you unless you sniff water up your nose or drink the water untreated. So keep your head and face out of the water. Source: Hot Springs, Jemez Springs, NM - TripAdvisor.

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Jimez Springs was not only the first pace I visited, but the last place I visited before departing New Mexico. I had a rental car that I picked up in ABQ and drove to Jimez, some 75 miles north of Albuquerque off Highway 550. There was a youth hostel there - now gone, I believe - as well as a biker bar that sold Fat Tire beer. Jimez has probably grown up and spread out a little since I was there. There was also a retreat center for Catholic priests in trouble - St. John the Paraclete: “A Pennsylvania grand jury found that a center run by the Servants of the Paraclete was a ‘laundry’ that allowed sexually abusive priests to return to their parishes to abuse children again. (Rose Palmisano/Albuquerque Journal)” Source: Pedophile priests and Servants of the Paraclete That certainly wasn’t my destination; I was headed for the hostel.

Once at the hostel I met a young kid who had recently driven himself and his girlfriend from the East Coast to California. He had then chosen to drive back to continue his own vision quest, but he was stopping off in New Mexico. This guy was pretty impressive for a kid: very humble and saintly, he carried a copy of The Return of the Bird Tribes:

Southwest Chief

About thirty years ago, I was taking the Amtrak (the Southwest Chief) to Albuquerque when I met a beautiful woman in the dining car. It was a 24-hour ride from Illinois, and I was bleary-eyed from a night of very restless sleep in a coach car. I had tried to help a gentleman who didn’t know where he was, and that question wasn’t resolved by morning, so I really needed a cup of coffee. I went into a ritzy part of the dining car and the waitress served me a delicious cup of coffee, then told me that breakfast would start at twenty dollars. I said that I couldn’t afford that much, and she instantly turned from sweet to hot, saying I didn’t belong in that part of the dining car. Everybody at the table laughed and said, “Aw, let him have his cup of coffee!” The waitress was mad, but I finished my coffee before going back to the plebeian part of the car.

Once there I sat down across from the beautiful woman I mentioned, and she didn’t seem to take a liking to me either. But I noticed she was reading The Perennial Philosophy, by Aldous Huxley. That immediately interested me, and I said, “Oh, Huxley - do you like what you’re reading?” She looked at me in shock and said, “Oh yes!” and then smiled. And her attitude changed into one of acceptance. We discussed Huxley and Jung and several other authors.

We got on famously, and it turned out that she had been in another coach car during the night and hadn’t gotten any sleep either. She was heading to California to see a friend who was dying of cancer. It turned out she was Dutch, and she told me an extraordinary tale of being on a trolley car that was stopped by a group of German soldiers in World War II. They ordered all the passengers off, then gunned them down. The little girl was saved because the bodies of other passengers fell on her. We talked about the other people on the train. She said she didn’t understand how the other women on the train could make themselves up so well in the cramped ladies room, but she excused herself at one point and came back with fresh lipstick and makeup. I felt that she really liked me.

As we approached Albuquerque we went down to a platform where we could see the red rock of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains go rushing by. I took a picture of her which I still have.





We got to Albuquerque and came into the station. I ran to an apple vendor and got an apple to clear my breath. Then I turned around to see her deboard the train. I went to her and asked if she would stay in Albuquerque with me. She said, “My friend, in California.” She had a higher purpose. So I kissed her and we parted ways. Thinking back, maybe I should have continued with her. Or maybe not. I figure she would be about 83 now, in 2021.

Crosstown Blues: Robert Johnson's Secret Hideaway

Robert Johnson was reputed to have sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads in or near Clarksdale, Mississippi to gain his amazing abilities on the guitar. One time I was in Clarksdale for the annual Sunflower Festival, and I stopped in the Gitchee Gummo Art Gallery to look at some paintings of Robert Johnson that hung in the window. The proprietor, John Fewkes, was a Johnson fan, and he had painted an accurate portrait of Johnson based on a famous photograph - one of the few images of Johnson available.

At this point, I had already taken pictures of the two places in Clarksdale considered to be the famous crossroads: one at the intersection of Old U.S. Hwy 61 and Old U.S. Hwy 49, where an official monument was placed. The other spot was elsewhere in town near a nondescript railroad crossing.

In talking with Mr. Fewkes I found that there was another crossroads that in his estimation was much more likely to be the one where Robert Johnson practiced guitar. Back in 1931 Johnson left Clarksdale and moved back to his birthplace of Hazelhurst, Mississippi. “He met a guitar player named Ike Zimmerman there. He ended up moving in with Ike and his family and stayed for about a year. Ike became Robert’s instructor and Robert practiced religiously. Late at night they would go to a local cemetery and play while sitting atop tombstones in the graveyard so that they didn’t disturb anyone else while playing in the middle of the night.” Source: The Truth about Robert Johnson Johnson returned to Clarksdale a year or two later and astonished people with his command of the guitar.

Now this is where John Fewkes’s story comes in. John lived in Chicago in his younger days, but he moved down to Clarksdale after he visited the town just like I did, for the Sunflower Festival. As an outsider John looked on local language and customs with great interest, and he eventually blended in with the populace. He was also greatly interested in the Robert Johnson story.

At the moment I’m looking at an Army Corps of Engineers map of Coahoma County, Mississippi, of which Clarksdale is the county seat. East of Clarksdale there are the remains of the Bonnie Blue plantation, and there is a crossroads at the intersection of Crosstown Road (north-south) and the east-west road from Clarksdale. There’s also the standard symbol for a cemetery at the northeast corner of the intersection, a small cross within a a dashed-line box. John told me that the cemetery was on the site of the original Crosstown, a very small town set up near the site of the old slave cemetery on the Bonnie Blue plantation.

John related that he drove his pickup truck to the crossroads one night, and once he had parked, looked around, and was ready to leave, the truck would not start. He had a dead battery. Since there was nobody around he went to the side of the road and tried to “”flag a ride.” A county truck with the number 27 on it just zoomed by him. Now, Robert Johnson died at the age of twenty-seven. And compare John’s experience with the county truck with these lyrics from “Cross Road Blues”:

Yeoo, standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride

Ooo eee, I tried to flag a ride

Didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by.

Snotnose

I usually say nothing because I give everybody the benefit of the doubt - that is, I expect that if they make an annoying sound they can’t help themselves. I once lived with a guy who made the most annoying sound that went something like “NYYECK NYECK NYYECK” - yeah, that was it. He tended to pull a screwy face when he was making the sound too. I always figured he had a sinus condition and he was swallowing snot or something.

Then we ended up getting on each other’s nerves and I moved out and got my own place. Upon visiting him one night, I found him entertaining some chickie he was having a fling with, and sure enough he made the NYECK NYECK NYYECK sound again. She turned to him and said, “What are you *doing*?” “Oh,” he said,, “I was just scratching my throat - all of us in our family do that.” At that moment I realized that he had *full* control of the sounds he was making - it was a *voluntary* thing. I said, “Well, if I’d known *that*, I would have told you to shut up!”

Flophouse

During one of the coldest winters of the early seventies, I lived in a steam-heated flophouse in Ottawa, Illinois that was situated over a pawn shop and was next door to a bar. One day the self-appointed overseer of the bums who lived there took it upon himself to open the door to a room in which lived a big fat guy. The guy was a part-time bartender at the saloon downstairs, and he hadn’t showed up to work for a few days.

“Well, he’s dead and he’s as cold as a cucumber!” shouted the overseer after he went inside the room. I had never touched a freshly dead person, so I went down the hall and entered the room, actually a two-room apartment unlike my own. Both rooms were littered with crumpled cigarette packs, beer cans, and whiskey bottles. And in the bedroom the 350-pound occupant was indeed dead, sitting stupidly on a bed that was pushed up against a wall - just sitting there with his mouth open and his tongue sticking out. I reached out and touched his arm, and he was indeed cold as a cucumber. It was an eerie feeling, but there was no better way of telling that a body was dead. If I had to guess I’d say the cause of death was a heart attack.

The overseer bum, himself a frequent flier at the saloon, notified the kindly woman proprietor and she called a mortician. (Why she didn’t call the police is beyond me.) Two gentlemen in somber suits and overcoats showed up outside the pawn shop sure enough, and they climbed the steep stairway to the second floor with a gurney in tow. Together we got the big body into a body bag and onto the gurney, which just wasn’t going to make it down the front staircase. Instead we took it out the back door and down the rickety outside wooden stairway, all while bundled up against the cold. We had a hysterical moment at one point when the body started to slide off the gurney, but we got down to the bottom O.K.

About a year later, I moved out of the flophouse, and my friend Jim moved in. I was astonished to find that he had rented the same deluxe room as the fat guy. It had been a while since I helped move the body, but my friend had been there a few weeks and what gave me pause was the place was littered with *Jim's* discarded cigarette packs, beer cans, and whiskey bottles. He must have been all of twenty-five.

Delphi to Myrtle Beach

In the summer of 1976, I hitch-hiked from Delphi, Indiana, to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This is the story of the first leg of that journey.

I had recently left a job as a concrete technician with A&H Engineering for the glamorous job of a grain bin erector with the Pride Steel Erection Company, located just outside of my home town of Streator, Illinois. The company erected grain bins in Illinois and adjoining states, and there was a fair amount of traveling involved as well as a great deal of outdoor physical work to be done. It sounded like just the place to be instead of sitting in a stifling hot, noisy inspection room at a nuclear power plant.

My employer - Mr. Pride, as I knew him - picked me up in Streator in a big pickup truck that was hauling a goose-neck trailer full of steel panels, and we headed east out of town on Route 18.

Now, Delphi is a small town (pop. about 3,000) close to the Wabash River in northern Indiana. The town was named for the famous oracular site of Delphi, Greece, and I’d say that if I divined anything at Delphi, it would be that grain bin erection was something that wasn’t quite up my alley.

To start with, I left a day and a half's work on a grain bin and got a series of rides with a born-again Christian who gave me a New Testament that I read during my trip, a young trucker excited about being a trucker and eating Lemon Snap speed, and a young guy in a Volkswagen who was driving across the country with a bag of dope in his glove box. Those rides got me as far as Corbin, KY, the home of Kentucky Fried Chicken, with a memorial to Colonel Sanders to boot (but no KFC outlet). There I camped out with the guy and we played chess on a small board he had. I did well until I'd drunk too much whiskey sour in a can, then I didn't care and I lost the game.

After that we hit the sack in a two-man tent, but I was pretty antzy and I got up to walk over to a gas station, where I stayed up talking and joking with another young guy and his much older partner. . . . yeah yeah yeah. Around 4 a.m. a guy in a hot car came roaring into the gas station and quickly filled his tank. He was excited and told us he was driving across country, then he jumped back in and roared off. When he was gone, the older gentleman turned to me and said, "Nuts - ain't he?" Here's another fragment from the end of the trip (published separately on Quora):

In the summer of 1976, I hitch-hiked from Delphi, Indiana to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was a leisurely trip and it took two days to complete the trip - almost. At the end of the second day, toward the evening, I came to a town that was about fifteen miles from Myrtle Beach. When two local boys in a big muscle car pulled over to pick me up, I figured I’d get to Myrtle Beach that day for sure. I gleefully hopped into the back seat.

These guys were nice enough, cheerful and jolly, though they didn't behave like two of Santa's elves. They were more into the performance of their car, and we went racing through the little town, either running red lights or screeching to a shuddering halt, then peeling out and laying rubber like a drag racer when the lights changed.

By the time we got to the edge of town and were actually stopped for a change, I leaned over the front seat and said, "Fellas, I appreciate the ride, but I've got a bad heart and the doctor told me to avoid excitement."

They were immediately apologetic - "Oh man, sorry about that!" - and they let me out. The short ride *had* gotten my heart a-beating and my pulse a-pounding. That night I checked into a motel and got started on the last small leg of the journey the next morning.