Please Use Rear Exit: Chapter 6 – Mr. Sallow’s Hallow1

by Brandon Perkins

In the previous installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, who’s recently x-ed his GF, ventures out for his first major post-break up night on the tiles with the boys at the #720’s main terminal. We rejoin Mikhail as he realizes he’s reached that dreaded part of the evening when he’s forced to make use of the terminal’s cooty-laden n’ crusty public restroom…

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[Adrenalynn in Men’s Room]

Please Use Rear Exit: Chapter 6 – Mr. Sallow’s Hallow

A little reluctantly, Mikhail decided to break his seal. He knew it’d be a long night of restroom excursions the second he did, but there was no reason to delay the inevitable. There was a scale in which he rated all the paralyzing moments when piss so consumed him that his teeth swam, but this one barely made the top 100. He was thankful that it didn’t because even as early in the night as it was, there was a healthy line waiting for the #720’s sickly men’s room. Sans Jayson and Chevy – who were still too proud to pee – the wait gave him too much time to look at the dilapidated existence that surrounded him.

Small patterns of tiny tiles twirled upwards in swift patterns of swirls, but at one point in time, they were a prime example of human craftsmanship. No matter though, as the once-immaculate tiles were barely visible beneath a vile layer of filth. Tag marks were scraped by pens or fingernails into the quarter-inch of sheer disgustingness. Mikhail was sick to his stomach at the thought of someone digging their fingers through the collection of airborne urine and mildew. He might’ve thrown up in his mouth, just a little bit, at a deposit of gunk trapped under the hard dorsal surface of a digit, but he stopped himself before his imagination got there. He just stared at the muck’s depth and wondered if it was growing before his eyes. And wherever that smell was coming from, it wasn’t worth mumbling about, for fear of having to breathe it in any further.

Mikhail peered around the line and saw a slew of empty receptacles. The available options were evidently too close to other players’ property for the long line’s comfort. They were waiting for a one-urinal buffer on either side, and at such a rate, that line was never going to move. Mikhail bypassed the homophobes and went straight to an empty pisser, right next to his old friend. Straddling the far john, just as he always did, Mr. Sallow hummed and urinated.

“Mikhail, my man in mayhem, how’s the outside world ticking away?”

“You know full well there ain’t an outside world,” Mikhail said. Just to his right, opposite Mr. Sallow, a man stood angrily with a blond-dyed goatee and perforated leather jacket. Mikhail was careful not to look too hard and instead turned back towards Mr. Sallow. “You’re the only thing standing still in this entire Internet-forsaken city.”

And it was true, Mr. Sallow never moved. It was unconfirmed how long he’d been standing at the far john in the #720’s municipal men’s room, forever relieving himself, but it started well before the times of anyone that Mikhail actually knew. Legend held that they had to build the entire bus system around his urinating stance, but that seemed to be a stretch. However, one thing was for certain: Mr. Sallow was as unmovable and unfailingly flowing as a stone-cold fountain ever could be.

“The whole thing just moves too quick for my memory,” Mr. Sallow said, as healthy as he always was in his stream. “But as long as the information flows, we’re bound to ‘Net a fish or two, or so the saying goes.”

“You’d know what this whole thing is supposed to mean better than I would,” Mikhail said, finally finding the momentum to let go of the very burden that brought him to the bathroom in the first place.

“I don’t know squat-diddly-cum-quickly…other than what I do and don’t doo-doo.”

Mr. Sallow didn’t like anyone else to address his tenure, but he himself often made self-deprecating jokes about his permanent fixture. Mikhail’s bladder blotter was long, and since he’d come of age to join the drunken escapades of the #720, he’d probably spent hours and hours pissing alongside Mr. Sallow. Separated by the few inches between matching one-gallon-per-flush American Standards, as they stood on this night, the two men had grown close. Mr. Sallow’s advice was as reliable as his micturition.

“You ever wonder where all this shit-”

“-and piss goes?” Mr. Sallow interrupted.

“Yeah,” Mikhail said. “Are we just leaving a trail of excrement in The Internet as we go? Marking our territory on tracks already laid out?”

“And we wonder why the squids are coming through the walls,” Mr. Sallow said, only kind of laughing.

Mikhail stared at the sharpied graffiti sprawl staring back at him. Mostly names and years, the writing was speckled with snot and buried under the filth, fighting razor and fingernail carvings. Despite their best efforts, the vandals’ sentences fell incomplete over missing tiles. One ambitious bathroom poet had scribed a mathematical formula that allegedly had something to do with getting laid. The variables were marked “S”, “E”, and “X”, but the equation hardly looked balanced. It was the signature of some drunken fool who couldn’t afford the start-up fee to join the TSABDD.

Inside the basin, the neon yellow was turning feverish with every drop. The piss of many men was intermingling and chemically reacting for an other-worldly glow. The stench of its ammonia was harsh and violent, wafting nearly to the point of visibility, perhaps boiling into a gaseous compound of airborne waste.

“You still with that fine little thing you snuck in here a few weeks ago?”

“No sir. It’s been a year since that happened,” Mikhail said. “Wild fucking night, though. I’m not sure I could muster up one like that again. That adventurousness has left my blood. But, no, no. No, we’re not together. Just this week in fact, I had to dead it.”

“Mayhem got to be too much?”

“Something like that,” Mikhail said. The ammonia, without so much as a flush for nearly an hour, suddenly overtook him. It almost put him flat on his back in mid-stream. He wanted to steady himself, but he didn’t dare to touch the wall. “If it wasn’t for you, brother, I’d feel like a complete candidate for the adult diaper. I piss way too much.”

Mikhail finished his process with a firm shake. He was careful not to dip his eyesight too far below the horizon, as such looks often got confused for invitations (to fight or fuck, typically). Out of habit-and maybe because he hadn’t used a high-traffic toilet in several months – he flushed, cursing himself the second he did. In the #720’s municipal men’s room, it was best not to touch anything but one’s own dick. And had Mikhail managed that, he would’ve been morally okay with not washing his hands before leaving.

As he walked away from the urinal, he could feel the grimy floor’s sticky attempts to keep him flat-footed. The off-white linoleum was littered with browned and yellowed footprints, sprinkled with pieces of trash, grasping out at anything that had a better life than it did. After a few noisy steps, Mikhail could no longer hear the basin-filling pour-one that made Mr. Sallow infamous-rise against his porcelain pisser. At the sink, and with a disinterested level of grief, he discovered an empty soap dispenser. He let the lukewarm water run over his hands. Leaning in towards the mirror, he debated the shade of red in his eyes. Everything behind him looked green and his entire color reference was off. A TV screen in the left corner of the room flashed the BTN logo and its founder’s smiling face.

Eyeing a few-hours-old five o’clock shadow in his reflection, a lone pimple peaked out. Perhaps the result of an in-grown hair, it was nothing that’d ever be spotted in the dim lights of whatever club he was about to explore. The faucet’s splash was hardly above room temperature and, against better judgment, he slurped several palmfuls, already thirsty for post-booze water. Regardless of color, it was soothing, and so he let it run into a sink spotted with tobacco-stained loogies and crusted toothpaste. Glancing back up in the mirror, he saw the man with the perforated leather jacket and dyed goatee take off that perforated leather jacket, and then his shirt, stuffing the black tee into the beat-up coat’s sleeve. Mikhail cautiously watched the stripping man, but it was quickly apparent that his sole intention was just some old fashioned freshening up.

“Whatchu drinking on tonight, Mr. Sallow?” Mikhail yelled. It was the loudest he had spoken in a long time. So rare for him to raise his voice, it gave him a little spook. He pulled down a neatly folded towel from the stand to his right. Entire sections of the fabric scratched his face, but he did as the Public Health Inspector (PHI) recommended, and found the softer, cleaner parts of the towel. He avoided the coagulates of cloth that no one wanted to talk about.

“Would love a White Russian, if you could spare it.”

“Are you trying to be funny, brother? Is that some sort of dig at my name?”

“No, son, I could just really use the calcium.”

Nodding and drying his hands, Mikhail leaned back against the sink. The shirtless man next to him at the urinal was now next to him at the sink. Both his hot and cold knobs were on full blast and the steam rose louder than the faucet’s deafening thunder. Behind them, while the Party Kids continued to move in and out without washing their hands, another man began to shave in the round communal sink at the center of the bathroom. His foot was steady on the pedal, pushing water through the circular spigot. Its pressure was meager and his shavings floated in the murky water at the base. He was bleeding in a few places and large drips blotted the soapy mix in slow-motion cannonballs.

After giving himself one last reassuring glance, Mikhail handed the PHI-approved towel to the shirtless man at the adjacent sink. With it, the man squeeze-dried his sopping wet armpit hair. He wiped his face and then around his waist and under his belt. He dipped deeper and dried his balls with the cloth when he thought no one was looking. He put on his black t-shirt and then his perforated leather jacket, before folding the towel and placing it back on the stand. By that point, however, Mikhail had long walked out of the room.

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Please Use Rear Exit is an online novel set in a futuristic facsimile of Los Angeles literally set inside The Internet on a mysterious public transportation system. You can read about it on author Brandon Perkins’ SG Contributor page and find additional chapters and related media at PleaseUseRearExit.net.