Kill Whitey

A young black girl hurried out onto the stage. Unlike the other dancers, she was fully clothed, as if caught unawares backstage. She seemed bewildered, and it was easy to tell that she wasn’t used to dancing to this song. But she recovered soon enough and writhed around, losing more clothing with every verse.

Tonya walked by us, on her way to give a lap dance to a customer two booths away. I stopped her as she passed.

“How you doing, guys?”

“Okay,” I said. “But what’s up with Sondra? She sick or something?”

“Awww,” Jesse teased. “Larry misses his girlfriend. Ain’t that cute?”

He and Darryl elbowed each other, snickering.

Tonya ignored them. “Don’t know. She was here earlier. But I haven’t been in the back all night. Maybe she’s in the bathroom or something.”

I nodded. It sounded reasonable enough.

“Got to go,” Tonya said, and then hurried away. The guys at the other booth whistled as she approached them. I turned back to Darryl and Jesse.

“Maybe she got her period,” Jesse said. “Can’t dance if she’s bleeding.”

I didn’t respond. Instead, I got up and started to walk away. Darryl tugged my elbow.

“Where you going?”

“To piss. Be right back. Save me a beer.”

Nodding, he turned his attention back to Lakita, who’d managed to win over the crowd. I headed for the bathroom.

The men’s room at the Odessa was filthy, and I hated it. After the first time I’d used it, it was easy to understand why we’d seen guys pissing in the parking lot. The parking lot was much nicer. Cleaner, too. The restroom had three urinals, three commode stalls, and two sinks. All of them were covered with grime and stains. The toilet seats were pitted and loose. They wobbled when you sat on them. One of the urinals had a leaky pipe, and there was usually a pool of water on the floor beneath it. A paper towel dispenser and a condom machine hung on the wall, along with a cracked mirror. The linoleum floor was pea-green and my shoes stuck to it. The toilet stalls and the walls were the same sickly color as the floor.

There was an old guy using the urinal on the left. He leaned against the wall with one hand, drunkenly swaying back and forth. About every fourth drop of piss hit the floor, rather than his intended target. His nose whistled when he breathed. Ignoring him, I picked the urinal on the right, putting one between us for distance, and hurried to do my business. I tried not to step in the puddle beneath the urinal. I wondered again where Sondra was, and why she’d missed her set.

The wall was covered in graffiti. People had etched it into the paint with keys and knives or written on the wall in everything from black marker to shit. Some of it looked very old—ancient hieroglyphics from the late-Nineties. Other missives looked fresh. None of them had ever been painted over, as far as I could tell. They’d been left for posterity, I guess.

The old man flushed and walked out of the restroom without washing his hands. I didn’t blame him. The urinals were probably cleaner than the sinks.

As I pissed, I read the wall. Some of the graffiti looked like Russian. A few of the letters were written backwards. ‘Chobo Meptbbin’. I wondered what it meant. ‘Ctopoha cnhrk aeno 555-0673’. Gibberish. I read the English graffiti instead. ‘This is shit’. ‘I got the Aids’. ‘Legalize it’. ‘Who farted?’ ‘What are you looking at?’ ‘Tony was here’. ‘For good head, call 555-9081’. And the ever popular ‘Here I sit, broken hearted. Tried to shit but only farted’. Then there was an entire exchange between different people: ‘I love them hoes’. ‘Your Mom is a ho’. ‘So is your mom, fucker’. ‘You fucked his mom, too?’ ‘This is his Mom’. There were several that were either cryptic or crude—or sometimes both: ‘Have you seen Teddy and Frankie…call 555-6667…ask for Kaine…Cash Reward’. ‘My pussy ate my thong’. ‘My crabs have crabs.’ ‘Jesus saves, but Ob rulz’. And then there were doodles—a big-nosed Kilroy looking over a wall, the President with a gap-toothed grin and enormous ears, a smiling dog, weird occult symbols like you’d see on a Slayer disc, a smoking bong, and lots of male and female genitalia, all of them larger than life. Some of them made me laugh. Others made me cringe. Some made me do both.

Finished, I shook myself off, zipped up, and turned the sink on with my elbow. I was afraid to touch the knob with my hand. There was a layer of black scum and pink hand soap on top of it. I rinsed my hands off under the water, and then used my elbow to work the lever on the paper towel dispenser. It was empty, so I wiped my hands on my pants.