Using the jean

In the summer of 1999, I took my first trip out of the country ever. My mom decided that before her illness progressed any further, she wanted to take our family to Europe. My parents had gone there when they were newlyweds, and my mom wanted us to see the places she had been. So now to the not-so-serious part of my trip.

The venue: a French truck stop. Truck stops in France are significantly nicer than in the United States. This one was two stories and had copious amounts of alcoholic refreshment. The other weird thing is that you have to pay money to use the bathrooms. There was an old lady sitting at what looked like a card table handing out tokens that cost some dog-shit amount of money - you needed the tokens to open the can. I'm not sure if I like this or not. Charging people to take a dump is a very strange concept to me. You gotta figure I could just take a dump on their doorstep for free, and they couldn't do anything about it because they're French. They'd probably seek a UN resolution before deciding to scrape my fly-encrusted logs off the pavement.

I could make fun of the French all day, but then again, who couldn't. So enough of that. I got my poopy token and braved the crowd of smelly French truckers, only to find myself in another crowd of smelly Frenchmen in the bathroom itself. There are conventional, as-American-as-apple-pie urinals in the bathroom, but there are people huddled around as if they were fountains of fucking Bordeau wine or something. Plus, I have to take a level 4 dump here, so urinals are out of the question.

I wait patiently for a stall. One opens up and I immediately jump into it. I close the door, look for a toilet... and there's no toilet. Imagine me looking at just the plain tile on the wall, then my gaze falls downward... to a porcelain fixture which basically amounts to a porcelain-framed hole in the ground. Keep in mind, I am fifteen, with a minimal knowledge of French, and I've never been to a foreign country before. So what's the logical conclusion? To a 15-year old American kid who has a minimal knowledge of French, and for a kid who has never been out of the country before, the conclusion is that this is how toilets are in France. I had used the facilities in hotels and things, but this was a friggin truck stop in the middle of Bomblefuque, France. It didn't even cross my mind that this could be anything but a toilet.

Reasons why I was sure this was a toilet.
1) There were two indentations on the side of the porcelain fixture with grooves in them, indicating some kind of foothold. Why would you stand on top of the toilet and piss down? Has to be a pooper.
2) It's a stall - what kind of crazy person puts a urinal in a completely isolated, four-walls-a-floor-and-a-ceiling, little cell right in line with all the other stalls in a public restroom?
3) There was toilet paper. What could this possibly be for? In retrospect, maybe crotch-stuffing, I mean, they are French, but seriously, what the hell?
4) It's fucking France! Nothing they do makes sense. They eat frogs, lose wars, and work 35-hour weeks. Who would expect anything but some kind of crazy French version of the good old American shitter?

Anyhow, I ended up propping my back up against the back wall of the stall, putting my feet over the gripper-grooves, and letting loose my steaming pile of America on their crazy French retard urinal. I flushed, it whooshed, my hamstrings hurt from supporting my own weight against the wall of the stall, and I was sure that I had just completed some feat of cultural open-mindedness. Then I found my dad. I said, "Man, those are some weird toilets, huh?" "What do you mean," he asked. "It was just a hole in the ground, that's weird, right?" "Um, I think that might have been a urinal."

Yeah. Six years later, this is one of my favorite childhood stories. And I have still yet to see another uri-toilet like the one at the French truck stop.