Camp Hosting at Nevada Beach: 138 Toilet Days To Go
Have you ever had the feeling that you would like to kill a lot of people? If you haven't, I know how you can get it. Become a camp host.
Camp Hosting sounds exotic and adventurous, but it is another word for janitor. Your primary occupation will be cleaning toilets. You are going to see things you have never seen before. In fact, you are going to see things that you would have thought are not possible. And, in addition, you are going to be full of rage often and want to eliminate a lot of idiots from the face of the earth.
In the opening scene of the movie Saturday Night Fever, John Revolta waltzed down the streets of Brooklyn slinging a paint can while the Bee Gees sang "Stayin' Alive." Every morning at 8 am, I would be dismounting my golf cart and strolling toward my first bank of toilets (there were 28 in toto that we cleaned at least 3x a day). swinging a rag, plunger, and toilet brush while the theme of Ghost Busters pounded out the bass notes as I approached the first door.
"Something's wrong in the neighborhood. Something's bad, and it don't look good..." That is what worried me.
Most of the toilet cleaning scene was pretty standard stuff that you will see in your own house. No big deal. A wet rag, Pine Sol, wipe everything down on the seats, toilet bowl rim, and sink, and you are all set. Move on to the next one.
But after I had done this for a while, I began to approach each bathroom with a combination of indignation mixed with dread and trembling perched right on the cusp of my emotions as I pushed the next bathroom door open. It was sort of like the TV show "Let's Make A Deal." You walk up to three toilet doors on each side of an outhouse pod. You had no idea what awaited you in each of them. But if you won, the best surprise was no surprise. Nothing out of the ordinary would be there. If you lost, you get the royal booby prize and a “Wah, Wah, Wah . . . “ The booby traps were every day, somewhere, somehow. Without fail. It was always a show-stopper that would set you off with verbal responses that are best said if you were alone.
After a few days of the 138 I endured, a sequence began to develop, prompted by the inevitable unpleasant surprises. The pattern went like this. As I approached a bathroom door, the first thing I did was inhale deeply and hold my breath as if I was going to swim the length of an Olympic pool underwater. Secondly, I kicked the portal open and stepped back to allow any intense aromas that were under pressure to escape. Thirdly, closing in slowly my eyes locked on the one spot “where the fit hits the shan”, to use part of a familiar phrase. I didn't see the sink or the handicap rails or the paper towels or toilet paper and sand on the floor. I saw the bowl. Having completed this task for nineteen weeks, I have categorized what I saw in and around that bowl into three categories.
Level 1 - The Routine. This is your daily, standard wipe down. Put on some plastic gloves. A rag, brush, water, disinfectant, and paper towels are all one needs. Just move along quickly. This is what you see 75% of the time. It is an average householder’s job. Distasteful but not revolting.
Level 2 - The Disgusting and Loathsome. About the second week I was there, one morning I was greeted with one of my first Level 2s. My camp host partner was with me at the time and breaking me in when we both strolled in to this bathroom and looked you know where. We stopped dead in our tracks. We looked at each other. No words were spoken...yet. This was a Kodak moment. We paused simultaneously trying to get our minds around this phenomenon. We both had that look on our faces that you get when you see someone throw up in a Walmart parking lot on a hot summer day. Had someone been looking at us, they would have seen the same faces pasted on Steve Martin and John Candy in the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles as they were watching some redneck clear his throat by snorting and sucking up the phlegm through the back of his head and up into his nasal cavity. My partner was the first to brake the silence by ejecting a series of epithets and the suggestion that whoever was responsible for this should visit a medical center as soon as possible.
My sixty-seven year old partner was a diminutive soul from Chicago who had a striking resemblance to Bozo the Clown when he took his hat off. I have seen more hair on bacon than I saw on his Irish skull, and from the first day he tipped his hat I always pictured him with a red wig welded to the sides of his head and carrying a cloud of balloons. He had worked a grimy job in a Chicago union shop, and he saw no other alternative than doing what he immediately did. I would not have. It just so happened that what had taken place in that bathroom had caused the toilet bowl to block shut like a safe. In fact, it looked as if others had come in after the initial stoppage, and, rather than move on to another bathroom, decided to add more layers on top of the foul redolence that was already present. What I saw him do next repulsed both him and me. Fortunately, the bathroom door behind him did no obstruct his exit, or he would have instantly installed a new door through the brick wall as he bolted out of there gasping for air like he was having an anthrax attack.
He stuck his crown outside and siphoned in a tank of Lake Tahoe oxygen, turned back in, spread his legs wide at the base of the porcelain throne, assuming his anointed position directly in front of it, bent over the fragrantly scented load, and reached into the container. Both of his nitrile-gloved hands submerged underneath, through, and around the bowl's contents. Lifting it all up like an Aztec priest presenting a drink offering. He ladled it all into a plastic bag and then blessed the toilet seat - and those who had enthroned themselves there - with a blast of non-stop curse words for about 2 minutes without ever repeating himself.
This is when I also noticed that his Auto-Repulsive Reflex kicked in.
The Auto-Repulsive Reflex is an automatic response that abides in everyone. It is kindled by something and is involuntarily triggered when one crosses an invisible line in his nature that confronts something that is so loathsome and abhorrent that he cannot deal with it like he would normally unpleasant things. It results in temporary loss of control, and all kinds of weird, spastic phenomena result. A person may be seized with chills that race up his spine. His muscles may contract as a surge of tension rolls through his body making others think he may be having a Grand Mal seizure. He might gag. He will likely and unexpectedly shout words that can't be spelled, sort of like gibberish, or revert to language that often explodes when one lays a sledge hammer on his thumb. He may also do a little jig. Not a dance. A jig. It is not something you will see on a dance floor. I don't think I had ever seen it performed by a senior citizen male before. But I have seen it in teenager girls who are so grossed out that they are nearly beside themselves. If a person who has Ophidiophobia (the fear of snakes) violates the barrier that ophidiophobia guards him from by either touching the dry, undulating length of a snake or a serpent is unexpectedly laid across his back, you will see a technicolor display of auto-repulsive reflex demonstrated with verbal and physical manifestations.
Just as Bozo was about to drop the dripping load into the container, his auto-repulsive reflex sensed a violation deep inside him. It awakened as if someone had just yelled, "Clear!" and an electric chair of power cascaded through his entire being. His feet began to move like he was standing barefooted on hot coals. He wasn't doing the Charleston or the Mashed Potatoes. It was more like a cross between The Pony and The Watusi. I had never seen that step before. Of course, I had never seen anyone do what he was now doing before either. He had encountered a nauseous thing within him. He spoke, but his words were more like a primordial scream accompanied by another flash flood of curse words as he jettisoned through the doorway like a man exiting a West Virginia mine shaft after a cave-in, gasping for precious fresh air as if he had come from a car that vanished into a river and he had broken free and barely saved himself. The effects of this upon him lingered for some time as he, in a sort of premeditative musing, declared what he would do to these descendants of female canines who had done this if he could get his gravy-stained hands on them. I later asked him - since he had eight years of experience in the Chicago sewers doing miraculous feats like this - how this particular bathroom event rated on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest or the most unpalatable. He rated it a 5.
Level 3 - The Incredulous. These are the things that suspend belief.
One morning - after I had been hardened to the same sights over and over and thought I had seen it all by now - I tore open a bathroom door and stood back to quickly evaluate the situation. My eyes flicked to the bowl. Immediately, there were telltale signs and speckled hints that something had gone awry here. I lifted my eyes to follow what looked like a blast path across and above the face of the toilet. It appeared as if a shotgun blast had been fired off and sprayed the tank, walls, and corner. Someone had been in a very big hurry but had obviously exploded before he could get into position. I followed the splattered discharge on up the walls as if I was in Humboldt County, California, in the midst of the Avenue of the Giants and following a redwood up into the sky. Now here is where incredulity reaches its zenith. ON THE CEILING were kernels of undigested corn. Corn, mind you. Where was a cell phone camera when I needed it? As we drove up and down the beach every day, we saw amazing amounts of corn husks roasted on the grills and consumed. There are always strands of husks and cobs strewn from one end of the beach to the next. Corn goes through here like cocaine goes up US 191 through Utah from Mexico. It lies all over the picnic tables, at the feet of the grills, and sticks its green arms up out the sand and tumbles across the landscape everywhere. But this was the first time I had ever seen it on the ceiling. Now when you first behold this, you step back like you do in a museum when you want to get perspective on a work of art. And there is only one thing that goes through your mind: How in the h _ _ _ did corn get on the ceiling? The degree of angle needed for such a feat - even for someone in dire emergency - does not support corn sprayed on and stuck to an 8' ceiling.
So I tried to figure what kind of situation could account for this? Maybe somebody had scheduled a colonoscopy for later that afternoon and thought he would relax at the beach for a while before drinking down a watering can of high pressure inducement that would remind the beachcomber of a fire hydrant just before he went home for a shower. A Fleet enema is a powerful potion, and one had better have facilities readily available when it is administered. That might explain some of what I saw. But not all of it. No, there had to be something else to explain a blast path all the way up the white walls with corn firmly platted onto the roof. Perhaps the person who drank the juice tried to wait beyond the three minute mark. Of course, pressure would be intensifying as the seconds ticked away. No, let's say that his insides were boiling like a witch's cauldron. In addition, he had been standing in front of his TV for months bouncing up and down in his living room and building up his backside into buns of steel. By now, he was able to clamp his glutes together like a hydraulic vice as if they had been sealed by Crazy Glue and taped shut with duct tape.
Nevertheless, in spite of all that, the inevitable blast that always takes place on the day of the colonoscopy, especially at the five minute mark, was at the door and signaling that at any moment it was coming through the gun barrel like a 32 pound ball through a cannon. But just before the guy fell back on the toilet seat, he unexpectedly had one more inspirational thought pass through his brain. Something that he had always wanted to do occurred to him for some strange reason at this very moment in this late hour. He had always wanted to - yea, it had been his life-long dream - do a handstand completely naked in a beach bathroom. His fantasy had not imagined the kind of duress he was now under, but why not? Here he was, completely naked and in a beach bathroom. Lo and behold, now was as good a time as any. In fact, if he could do a handstand in these closing seconds, he just might be able to delay the big event inevitably coursing through him like a runaway locomotive for another 15 seconds since he would be upside down rather than upright! So he went for it. Down he went on two hands. His feet flew over his head, and the bottom of his feet pointed to the ceiling. It was the perfect moment. Completely buff. At the beach. In the bathroom. It didn't get any better than this.
That is when it happened.
So here is the question some of you might be pondering. Here are the facts of my time there. The temperatures at Tahoe were like Camelot and idyllic for summertime. The people I worked with were humorous, easy-going, and pleasant. Beyond the disgusting bathrooms, the work was simple and without pressure. The scenery I spent hours studying was serene. The vanilla fragrance of resin between the plates of the bark on the towering Jeffrey Pines was sweet. On motorcycle rides, Highway 88 lifted me over the Sierras, Kit Carson Pass, and along the Pony Express and emigrant trails to the Gold Rush fields of 1849.
Allowing these impressions in spite of thousands of toilet washings, wouldn’t I probably spend another summer on the shores of the lake voted as America's most beautiful? After cleaning toilets for 138 days so that in a way not a single toilet really phases me anymore no matter what it throws at me, am I not likely to come to grips with it for another summer like Bozo did for eight years? Having seen some strange sights like I have described, am I not inclined to come back again and continue further comedic observations of human nature? Like a woman who endures the birth of a child, many unpleasant memories soon fade into the joys that decorate Memory Lane like flowers along the road where one lingers. Won’t I probably take all this in as part of a new career in retirement and return next summer to revisit all the wonderful friends, colleagues and campers, and lazily spend my days along the lake in the woods and mountains of the Sierras that Mark Twain said was "the fairest picture the whole earth affords?”
No.
Camp Hosting sounds exotic and adventurous, but it is another word for janitor. Your primary occupation will be cleaning toilets. You are going to see things you have never seen before. In fact, you are going to see things that you would have thought are not possible. And, in addition, you are going to be full of rage often and want to eliminate a lot of idiots from the face of the earth.
In the opening scene of the movie Saturday Night Fever, John Revolta waltzed down the streets of Brooklyn slinging a paint can while the Bee Gees sang "Stayin' Alive." Every morning at 8 am, I would be dismounting my golf cart and strolling toward my first bank of toilets (there were 28 in toto that we cleaned at least 3x a day). swinging a rag, plunger, and toilet brush while the theme of Ghost Busters pounded out the bass notes as I approached the first door.
"Something's wrong in the neighborhood. Something's bad, and it don't look good..." That is what worried me.
Most of the toilet cleaning scene was pretty standard stuff that you will see in your own house. No big deal. A wet rag, Pine Sol, wipe everything down on the seats, toilet bowl rim, and sink, and you are all set. Move on to the next one.
But after I had done this for a while, I began to approach each bathroom with a combination of indignation mixed with dread and trembling perched right on the cusp of my emotions as I pushed the next bathroom door open. It was sort of like the TV show "Let's Make A Deal." You walk up to three toilet doors on each side of an outhouse pod. You had no idea what awaited you in each of them. But if you won, the best surprise was no surprise. Nothing out of the ordinary would be there. If you lost, you get the royal booby prize and a “Wah, Wah, Wah . . . “ The booby traps were every day, somewhere, somehow. Without fail. It was always a show-stopper that would set you off with verbal responses that are best said if you were alone.
After a few days of the 138 I endured, a sequence began to develop, prompted by the inevitable unpleasant surprises. The pattern went like this. As I approached a bathroom door, the first thing I did was inhale deeply and hold my breath as if I was going to swim the length of an Olympic pool underwater. Secondly, I kicked the portal open and stepped back to allow any intense aromas that were under pressure to escape. Thirdly, closing in slowly my eyes locked on the one spot “where the fit hits the shan”, to use part of a familiar phrase. I didn't see the sink or the handicap rails or the paper towels or toilet paper and sand on the floor. I saw the bowl. Having completed this task for nineteen weeks, I have categorized what I saw in and around that bowl into three categories.
Level 1 - The Routine. This is your daily, standard wipe down. Put on some plastic gloves. A rag, brush, water, disinfectant, and paper towels are all one needs. Just move along quickly. This is what you see 75% of the time. It is an average householder’s job. Distasteful but not revolting.
Level 2 - The Disgusting and Loathsome. About the second week I was there, one morning I was greeted with one of my first Level 2s. My camp host partner was with me at the time and breaking me in when we both strolled in to this bathroom and looked you know where. We stopped dead in our tracks. We looked at each other. No words were spoken...yet. This was a Kodak moment. We paused simultaneously trying to get our minds around this phenomenon. We both had that look on our faces that you get when you see someone throw up in a Walmart parking lot on a hot summer day. Had someone been looking at us, they would have seen the same faces pasted on Steve Martin and John Candy in the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles as they were watching some redneck clear his throat by snorting and sucking up the phlegm through the back of his head and up into his nasal cavity. My partner was the first to brake the silence by ejecting a series of epithets and the suggestion that whoever was responsible for this should visit a medical center as soon as possible.
My sixty-seven year old partner was a diminutive soul from Chicago who had a striking resemblance to Bozo the Clown when he took his hat off. I have seen more hair on bacon than I saw on his Irish skull, and from the first day he tipped his hat I always pictured him with a red wig welded to the sides of his head and carrying a cloud of balloons. He had worked a grimy job in a Chicago union shop, and he saw no other alternative than doing what he immediately did. I would not have. It just so happened that what had taken place in that bathroom had caused the toilet bowl to block shut like a safe. In fact, it looked as if others had come in after the initial stoppage, and, rather than move on to another bathroom, decided to add more layers on top of the foul redolence that was already present. What I saw him do next repulsed both him and me. Fortunately, the bathroom door behind him did no obstruct his exit, or he would have instantly installed a new door through the brick wall as he bolted out of there gasping for air like he was having an anthrax attack.
He stuck his crown outside and siphoned in a tank of Lake Tahoe oxygen, turned back in, spread his legs wide at the base of the porcelain throne, assuming his anointed position directly in front of it, bent over the fragrantly scented load, and reached into the container. Both of his nitrile-gloved hands submerged underneath, through, and around the bowl's contents. Lifting it all up like an Aztec priest presenting a drink offering. He ladled it all into a plastic bag and then blessed the toilet seat - and those who had enthroned themselves there - with a blast of non-stop curse words for about 2 minutes without ever repeating himself.
This is when I also noticed that his Auto-Repulsive Reflex kicked in.
The Auto-Repulsive Reflex is an automatic response that abides in everyone. It is kindled by something and is involuntarily triggered when one crosses an invisible line in his nature that confronts something that is so loathsome and abhorrent that he cannot deal with it like he would normally unpleasant things. It results in temporary loss of control, and all kinds of weird, spastic phenomena result. A person may be seized with chills that race up his spine. His muscles may contract as a surge of tension rolls through his body making others think he may be having a Grand Mal seizure. He might gag. He will likely and unexpectedly shout words that can't be spelled, sort of like gibberish, or revert to language that often explodes when one lays a sledge hammer on his thumb. He may also do a little jig. Not a dance. A jig. It is not something you will see on a dance floor. I don't think I had ever seen it performed by a senior citizen male before. But I have seen it in teenager girls who are so grossed out that they are nearly beside themselves. If a person who has Ophidiophobia (the fear of snakes) violates the barrier that ophidiophobia guards him from by either touching the dry, undulating length of a snake or a serpent is unexpectedly laid across his back, you will see a technicolor display of auto-repulsive reflex demonstrated with verbal and physical manifestations.
Just as Bozo was about to drop the dripping load into the container, his auto-repulsive reflex sensed a violation deep inside him. It awakened as if someone had just yelled, "Clear!" and an electric chair of power cascaded through his entire being. His feet began to move like he was standing barefooted on hot coals. He wasn't doing the Charleston or the Mashed Potatoes. It was more like a cross between The Pony and The Watusi. I had never seen that step before. Of course, I had never seen anyone do what he was now doing before either. He had encountered a nauseous thing within him. He spoke, but his words were more like a primordial scream accompanied by another flash flood of curse words as he jettisoned through the doorway like a man exiting a West Virginia mine shaft after a cave-in, gasping for precious fresh air as if he had come from a car that vanished into a river and he had broken free and barely saved himself. The effects of this upon him lingered for some time as he, in a sort of premeditative musing, declared what he would do to these descendants of female canines who had done this if he could get his gravy-stained hands on them. I later asked him - since he had eight years of experience in the Chicago sewers doing miraculous feats like this - how this particular bathroom event rated on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest or the most unpalatable. He rated it a 5.
Level 3 - The Incredulous. These are the things that suspend belief.
One morning - after I had been hardened to the same sights over and over and thought I had seen it all by now - I tore open a bathroom door and stood back to quickly evaluate the situation. My eyes flicked to the bowl. Immediately, there were telltale signs and speckled hints that something had gone awry here. I lifted my eyes to follow what looked like a blast path across and above the face of the toilet. It appeared as if a shotgun blast had been fired off and sprayed the tank, walls, and corner. Someone had been in a very big hurry but had obviously exploded before he could get into position. I followed the splattered discharge on up the walls as if I was in Humboldt County, California, in the midst of the Avenue of the Giants and following a redwood up into the sky. Now here is where incredulity reaches its zenith. ON THE CEILING were kernels of undigested corn. Corn, mind you. Where was a cell phone camera when I needed it? As we drove up and down the beach every day, we saw amazing amounts of corn husks roasted on the grills and consumed. There are always strands of husks and cobs strewn from one end of the beach to the next. Corn goes through here like cocaine goes up US 191 through Utah from Mexico. It lies all over the picnic tables, at the feet of the grills, and sticks its green arms up out the sand and tumbles across the landscape everywhere. But this was the first time I had ever seen it on the ceiling. Now when you first behold this, you step back like you do in a museum when you want to get perspective on a work of art. And there is only one thing that goes through your mind: How in the h _ _ _ did corn get on the ceiling? The degree of angle needed for such a feat - even for someone in dire emergency - does not support corn sprayed on and stuck to an 8' ceiling.
So I tried to figure what kind of situation could account for this? Maybe somebody had scheduled a colonoscopy for later that afternoon and thought he would relax at the beach for a while before drinking down a watering can of high pressure inducement that would remind the beachcomber of a fire hydrant just before he went home for a shower. A Fleet enema is a powerful potion, and one had better have facilities readily available when it is administered. That might explain some of what I saw. But not all of it. No, there had to be something else to explain a blast path all the way up the white walls with corn firmly platted onto the roof. Perhaps the person who drank the juice tried to wait beyond the three minute mark. Of course, pressure would be intensifying as the seconds ticked away. No, let's say that his insides were boiling like a witch's cauldron. In addition, he had been standing in front of his TV for months bouncing up and down in his living room and building up his backside into buns of steel. By now, he was able to clamp his glutes together like a hydraulic vice as if they had been sealed by Crazy Glue and taped shut with duct tape.
Nevertheless, in spite of all that, the inevitable blast that always takes place on the day of the colonoscopy, especially at the five minute mark, was at the door and signaling that at any moment it was coming through the gun barrel like a 32 pound ball through a cannon. But just before the guy fell back on the toilet seat, he unexpectedly had one more inspirational thought pass through his brain. Something that he had always wanted to do occurred to him for some strange reason at this very moment in this late hour. He had always wanted to - yea, it had been his life-long dream - do a handstand completely naked in a beach bathroom. His fantasy had not imagined the kind of duress he was now under, but why not? Here he was, completely naked and in a beach bathroom. Lo and behold, now was as good a time as any. In fact, if he could do a handstand in these closing seconds, he just might be able to delay the big event inevitably coursing through him like a runaway locomotive for another 15 seconds since he would be upside down rather than upright! So he went for it. Down he went on two hands. His feet flew over his head, and the bottom of his feet pointed to the ceiling. It was the perfect moment. Completely buff. At the beach. In the bathroom. It didn't get any better than this.
That is when it happened.
So here is the question some of you might be pondering. Here are the facts of my time there. The temperatures at Tahoe were like Camelot and idyllic for summertime. The people I worked with were humorous, easy-going, and pleasant. Beyond the disgusting bathrooms, the work was simple and without pressure. The scenery I spent hours studying was serene. The vanilla fragrance of resin between the plates of the bark on the towering Jeffrey Pines was sweet. On motorcycle rides, Highway 88 lifted me over the Sierras, Kit Carson Pass, and along the Pony Express and emigrant trails to the Gold Rush fields of 1849.
Allowing these impressions in spite of thousands of toilet washings, wouldn’t I probably spend another summer on the shores of the lake voted as America's most beautiful? After cleaning toilets for 138 days so that in a way not a single toilet really phases me anymore no matter what it throws at me, am I not likely to come to grips with it for another summer like Bozo did for eight years? Having seen some strange sights like I have described, am I not inclined to come back again and continue further comedic observations of human nature? Like a woman who endures the birth of a child, many unpleasant memories soon fade into the joys that decorate Memory Lane like flowers along the road where one lingers. Won’t I probably take all this in as part of a new career in retirement and return next summer to revisit all the wonderful friends, colleagues and campers, and lazily spend my days along the lake in the woods and mountains of the Sierras that Mark Twain said was "the fairest picture the whole earth affords?”
No.