My parents' haunted bathroom

When my sister and I were little, we were little bitches.  Always trying to mess with the other one, always succeeding in doing little more than pissing the other one off.  In some ways I idolized my sister...but she was the enemy and I never forgot that.  It was me against her, and I was going to win or die trying.  Sometimes I came very near to death: I'd poke her in the side, causing a tickle-seizure, laugh at her, and then she would punch, kick, or slap me.  I probably still have battle scares.

Of course, then she'd be sent to time out, but that was okay with her.  You see, our mother didn't really understand how punishments worked.  Putting my sister in time out for ten minutes for hitting me was like sending a murderer to jail for a year; yeah, you got in trouble for it, but the bitch was dead and you'd be free soon.

Still, she didn't usually beat me.  I was a professional little brother--yes, professional.  Which essentially means that I was WAY more skilled at annoying my sister than she was at getting back at me.

There was only one way for her to win, and she knew it.  The only trouble was that getting back at me caused her just as much trauma and fear, so she only resorted to it when completely necessary.

I've already told you one scary bathroom story, but I think it's definitely time for another. In our house, we had two bathrooms: one upstairs, one downstairs.  The downstairs bathroom was the most likely to have sewer snakes (because it was closer to the ground), so that would make the upstairs bathroom superior, right?  If only such things were true...

The upstairs bathroom at my parents' house has this creepy shelf/wall thing that is actually a door to the "attic."  I use the term attic loosely here, because the attic is not a real attic (much as the basement is not a real basement, but a cement-covered hole in the ground; I like to call the basement "spider hell" because that's all you find down there).  We can't store things in the attic, much like we can't store things in the basement, because it doesn't really have a floor.  Whoever designed this house was a moron and an asshole, but they're probably already dead so I can't go about threatening their life.

Anyway, this "door" to the "attic" terrified my sister and I.  We knew that there were bats and vampires and probably some zombies and spider demons up in the attic, and being in the same room as the door that lead there was so so so scary.  Thank GOD the door was actually in a bathroom, because the very thought of it now makes me want to piss myself.

The only thing that saved us from the monsters upstairs, oddly enough, was the bathtub.  We would get terrified, flail madly, and somehow end up cowering inside that porcelain fortress.  Of course, once we were in the tub, I would inevitably start panicking about sewer snakes climbing out of the drain because the water wasn't on shoving them back downstairs where they belonged.  I have no idea how much water I wasted trying to drown those goddamned snakes, but I'm sure my parents hated paying for it.

By now I'm sure you have some idea of what my sister's evil plan was.  It was always the same basic thing: I would be in the bathroom with the door closed, pants around my ankles because I couldn't be bothered to use the zipper on my jeans, peeing away and probably humming the theme to Barney.  She would sneak (I also use sneak loosely; my sister has all the subtlety of a five-ton gorilla with down syndrome...if you've ever seen the mumakil from Lord of the Kings, she sounds like one of them when she walks) across the hall to the door of the bathroom, press her face up against the crack in the door, and hiss:

"The bats are coming to get you! I can hear them; they know you're there. Oh my god, they're going to kill you!"

And of course, every single time, I would panic.  I would flail madly in a circle, remember that the bathtub could protect me, and race across the room, tripping over my pants I still had around my ankles like shackles.  Her plan was perfect...too perfect. As soon as she heard me screaming and flailing in terror, she would flee downstairs where the bats couldn't go, and all the while, I would be peeing all over the bathroom.

My mother would hear the commotion, come to see what the problem was, and find me huddling in the bathtub, pants around my ankles, soaked in my own urine. But I was safe.  Safe from the bats, and safe from the monsters.  And that was all that mattered.

Sewer snakes

Bathrooms are evil. I have huge issues with them and I just can't help it.  Public restrooms are the worst, especially if other people are in there at the same time.  When I'm standing up at a urinal, if there's someone else standing next to me?  I CANNOT PEE.  I could stand there all day, but as long as someone else is there, no pee is coming out.  I'm pretty sure my bladder would explode before I could pee.

But that's just a fun fact.  What I really want to stress is how my fear of bathrooms came into being.  This is the first of two posts which will explore the utter terror I felt as a child simply by walking into a bathroom.

One day, I was innocently eating a bowl of Grape Nuts because I thought they were cool for some retarded reason that escapes me. Perhaps I believed they would actually taste like a combination of grapes and peanuts, and I imagined it being like a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, just with milk instead of bread.

In any case, I was chewing a mouthful of milk-soaked dog food and sitting at the kitchen table, kicking my little legs back and forth and resembling a cherub.  My sister was sitting as far from me as she could while still being considered "at the table" and kept eying my cereal suspiciously.  From the looks she gave the bowl, it was as if she thought the milk might spring from the bowl at any moment and try to force itself upon her, or somehow sneak down her throat via some kind of anti-gravity osmosis.  She's allergic to milk, and back in those early days her tiny brain couldn't comprehend that being NEAR milk wouldn't kill her.  

While she stayed alert for milk terrorists, my father came into the kitchen holding the newspaper and started telling us about some story that he had read.  Normally I didn't pay attention when he talked about the news.  News was for lesser beings and it was boooooring.  If only I had ignored this story, all else might have been prevented.  Maybe I could have been a normal human being and retained my ability to pee in public...but it wasn't to be.

My father sat down at the table with us and, ignoring his food, launched into the scariest story ever.  It started out boring like any normal news article--"Apparently, there was some woman"--some woman indeed.  I began to turn on my ignore-powers when the news story took a drastic (and horrifying) turn.  "She was sitting on the toilet, minding her own business (lol!pun) when suddenly, she felt something poking her...from beneath!"  

That was it.  I was enraptured.  Had this woman accidentally given birth into a toilet? Was her feces seeking revenge?  My mind danced with all the hilarious things that could have been in her toilet.  How naive I was...

My father continued.  "So she stood up and looked down"--it was the moment of truth--"and there was"--I stared at him, cereal mush slowly sliding down my chin.  The suspense was killing me!  I had to know.

"A snake!"

Oh fucking Christ, no.  I hated snakes.  I'd seen one in the yard once; that was pretty much the last time I'd been able to walk in our backyard without fear.

And of course, as if it had been waiting for just the right moment, my body told me that it was time for me to use the bathroom.  And from that moment on, until my late teens, every time I sat on a toilet I was certain that snakes were going to come shooting out of it like machine gun fire.  The snakes would rip me apart, starting with my poor, exposed buttocks, and then move on to kill the rest of my family, all because I didn't flush the damn toilet quickly enough.

And thus it was that my childhood belief that bathrooms were safe, innocent places was shattered.  I knew then (as I know now) that bathrooms are evil. And that if you didn't flush the toilet quickly enough?  You. Would. Die.