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Sweet Caroline was here
story Mindy Moreland | photo Ashley Baer | interactive media Simon Boas
Some are remarkably concise: make turds not bombs. Others wax mysterious and vaguely philosophical: shadowboxing the apocalypse yet again.
In most places, demands are plentiful: Go vegan. Go ducks. For a good time call. The sexually overt is common, but metapoetics aren’t unknown. Sitting on the bar’s toilet, listening to the door-muffled thump of bass-heavy classic rock and contemplating the universe, you look to your right and see thick black letters scrawled on the wall: Clever Bathroom Graffiti.
There’s something remarkably mysterious and appealing about bar bathroom graffiti. It’s a form of self-expression borne of a particular combination of ownership, inebriation, and disrespect;
an alchemy that inspires writing your boyfriend’s name in 4-inch-high purple Sharpie letters on the wall next to the toilet paper holder. With a big heart around it, of course.
On doors and walls, paper towel dispensers and the occasional mirror, you’ll find them. There are the requisite “I heart” constructions, drawings of trees, flowers, swastikas. There are snatches of poetry — you may be repressed but you’re remarkably dressed — song lyrics, pop culture references. Someone has written I’ve got a Chuck Norris haircut, and one has to wonder if it’s a boast or a complaint.
Some walls have a high school yearbook vibe, plastered with farewell messages from regulars who have moved away. One patron even penned a sentimental farewell to the bar itself: You shall be in my thoughts & my heart with every beer. Love, Sweet Caroline. Whenever I visit that toilet, I wonder where Sweet Caroline is sipping her microbrew these days, and if she has pledged her heart to a younger, more glamorous tavern.
There are other places where all the tags have been painted over. Thick swirls of black paint ooze across every message in one bathroom. I imagine the bartenders have a ritual of restoring the walls’ anonymity every day, another chore like changing out the IPA kegs and making sure there are enough thrift-store-bizarro prizes for Monday night bingo. I peer closely at these black scribbles, trying desperately to read what’s written beneath. An F? Some red ink? The unrealized voyeuristic thrill is simply agonizing.
When 32,000-year-old paintings were discovered on the walls of French caves in the forties, scientists scratched their heads over the meaning of the pictures. These were not domestic decorations; no evidence was found indicating anyone lived in the caves. Theories about the paintings range from shamanic magic to a record of tribal history to the artistic representation of fantasies of the prehistoric teenage male. (My personal theory holds with that last one: after all, this was before PlayStation.)
has to wonder if it’s a boast or a complaint.
If explorers from another era were to stumble upon the cultural records being kept on our bathroom walls, I wonder what they might conclude about the time and space that we inhabit. Imagine the lectures given at Alpha Centauri Community College about this odd cult of Chuck Norris-worshiping, frantically sexual life forms who searched for meaningful existence in their toilet-shrines where love and poo were of equal significance.
Writing on a bathroom wall can be easily dismissed as simple drunken vandalism. But the privacy and anonymity of the space, combined with the oh-so-twenty-first-century urge to comment, often makes for some low-brow collaborative brilliance. Someone has scrawled I heart to poop! in green ink on the wall of one stall where the toilet won’t stop running, to which someone else has added a small black sniff, just between poop and to.
Despite my fascination, I haven’t yet joined in and added to the collective unconscious of the bathroom walls. Apart from the fact that I don’t commonly visit the toilet with a concealed arsenal of permanent markers strapped to my thigh, what would I write? My hair-trigger writer’s block is never more active than when I find myself staring at a promising blank space on a wall: I understand the overwhelmed sheepishness of the guy who wrote I thought I would have something clever to say.
Instead, I remain a happy reader. It’s a highly satisfying hobby. Discovering a particularly fantastic message (Must not sleep. Must warn others.) fills me with a delight only slightly less profound than if I had stumbled upon the Holy Grail sitting there beside the soap dispenser. I exit the bathroom humming the theme from Indiana Jones.
My greatest discovery? Only the single greatest piece of bathroom graffiti ever, residing inconspicuously in a certain Eugene bathroom. It’s just three words long, and you have to look carefully or you’ll miss it. It’s written very small, in all capital letters, on the wall directly above the dispenser for the toilet seat covers.
FREE COWBOY HATS.