Recollections of a Wrigley Field Restroom

Chicago used to be famous for its slaughterhouses. Thousands of cattle a day would be shipped in boxcars from ranches in the West to be killed, dismembered and repackaged for consumption in cities and states to the East. It was a feat of applied scientific management and it was beautiful.

The bathrooms at Wrigley Field operate very much like the stockyards and slaughterhouses of yesteryear, except without the beauty. Men are herded in like cattle through two sets of swinging doors from which they cannot leave, their fate being sealed. Once inside the restroom men with the hands on their flies trudge drunkenly down the trough-lined gauntlet. As soon as a space at the trough is vacated a pissful man stumbles to fill it whipping out his manhood in the process. The odd thing is the writhing sea of men never stops moving toward the exit at the opposite end of the room. Men in mid-stream side-stepping toward the door, businessmen with cellphones in one hand and their manhood in the other moving to the exit, sunburned behemoths pissing and walking, drunkards errantly spraying and stumbling toward the light at the end of room, mulleted tourists Kentuck Waterfalling in the trough and trudging toward the door.