It’s summer, so they’re out. Mosquitoes, plastic beer cups, good bare legs, bad bare legs, and porta pottys. Those big, plastic shitboxes are surrounding summer festivals everywhere. I like to call them Blues. Sure some are green, or grey, but most I’ve seen are blue. I’m sure everyone has a porta potty story, whether it happened inside or outside of one. I was hit on by a drunken high school girls softball coach as we waited in line for one. And who hasn’t walked into one occupied ’cause the asshat in there forgot to turn the latch to “red?” Then again, how many of those maybe did that purposely. Lots of pervs out there. Getting away from the porta potty for a minute, but keeping within the bathroom theme, I recently walked into the men’s room of a fairly nice hotel in Northwest Indiana – I won’t say the name – but it’s the Radisson – while visiting an Irish pub that’s located there (and has no loo of its own). Anyway, some semi-permed spectacled lout was taking a shit, I assume, in a stall with the door wide open. I walked by and ignored his call out to “come here…hey come here.”
In high school there was this moron, known as Goat, who always the butt of porta potty abuse. He’d be in one of the single Blues when some of the local hooligans would start rocking it back and forth like hooligans do. And there was the time they put an M80 firecracker on top of the thing, and once, underneath it, when Goat was in there. If he hadn’t shit by then he most certainly did when the wick ran out.
There was also an acquaintance of our group at a festival not long ago who discovered a full cup of beer in a Blue and proceeded to take it out with him and drink it.
I rekindled a romance near one at Whiting’s Peirogi Fest last year when I saw Angela, an ex-girlfriend, stroll out of a Blue. It lasted until her current boyfriend strolled out of another one a minute later.
Porta pottys always seem to just “be there” suddenly. I’ve never seen them delivered, dropped off, raised, lowered, or trucked out by anybody. They’re there and they’re gone. Although a friend of mine says he knew of someone who did that work and it involved some kind of vehicle he called “the shit truck.” Some festivals now even truck in a “bathroom trailer” as a replacement or more sanitary addition to porta pottys.
There is no pic for this post. I suppose I could have arranged to have a unique porta pic. But there are plenty of ha-ha images online. A wedding couple in a Blue…one being hauled around on a bike…one exploding. There are some simply of a person posing in or next to it, almost as if they’re at the Blarney Stone. At least they’re lips aren’t pressed against one.
The Dodgy 