to the lavatory, my chauffeur and I shall settle our debts and return
to life’s lachrymose and lonesome, but often lovely highway.”
It had been a long while since Harvey had spoken such flowery
nonsense, but as previously mentioned, he was starting to feel a little
better about things. Being reminded that love is real and not just
some crazy, irrational dream manufactured to get us out of bed in the
morning always helps to raise one’s spirits as well.
“The bathrooms are down the aisle, make a left at the corridor,
second door on your right,” she said, saluting them playfully. Harvey
left the table to pee.
“Say, by the way,” Milo suddenly remembered, “Do you know
where this famous shaman Dreamwalker lives? I’ve been driving
around for hours and I can’t find his place.”
Shiva bit her lip and said, “This used to be his house before we
remodeled. He was my uncle. The one who made the fortune-tacos.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Milo frowned, “Hope you don’t mind me asking,
but I don’t suppose he left any peyote behind? Or mushrooms?
Anything?”
“Sorry. Just the fortune-tacos.”
Perhaps it was because of the fact that so few new customers visited
Pangaea that the problem had never been remedied, but the
bathrooms were marked so confusingly that it might have taken even
the most astute ethnologist to decipher which was for boys and which
for girls. Assorted ideograms and alphabets on each door depicted
symbols from all kinds of cultures intended to make the distinction
plain, but attempting to pander to a wide range of world-views only
exacerbated the confusion of the clench-bladdered patron. Harvey
vainly searched for the familiar circle-with-an-arrow symbol for
Mars that in the west signified “human with penis.” When he could
hold it no longer, he decided that since no one else was in the
restaurant anyway, it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Traditionally, bathrooms hadn’t been thought of as a place where
turning points in people’s lives are staged. Fateful decisions were
hashed out at the breakfast table, intellectual breakthroughs
pounded out in the study, family histrionics acted out during dinner,
and sexual peaks mounted in the bedroom. But few claimed crucial
recollections from the can—that was only the place where mundane
bodily maintenance took place. But how wrong this was. A toddler’s
H O L Y S H I T !
72
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