The Best Time My Name Appeared on a Bathroom Wall
by Amanda Oliver
So, I sort of (totally) used to be the type of person who believed the stuff they read on the bathroom walls at bars. “Sandy is an oranged-faced whore,” “Kate loves Mike 4 life,” and “this stall is for doing coke ONLY” were complete facts to me.
And then one night I walked into a bathroom at a local dive bar and found my full name followed by “is a syphilitic whore” on pretty much every surface possible.
Whoa.
We’re talking mirrors, blow dryers, walls. Everything. Just, like, covered in what a total whore I was.
I had been out that night celebrating because I was moving to New York City in the morning. I was moving on up, leaving the city I had always lived in. You know … doing things. People had come to my going away party. And not just five or six people, but, like, ten people. I was feeling pretty good and then this. I was a whore. With syphilis. I mean, people were going to see this shit. People who knew me, or kind of knew me, or who were going to look me up on Facebook because they’d never known anyone with an STD were going to think I had syphilis because I was a whore.
I cried. I brought one of my guy friends into the women’s bathroom to show him what had happened to me. I slammed a beer. I DEMANDED a permanent marker from a bartender to cross it all off. I talked endlessly about how nothing written in a bar bathroom is accurate because people who do that suck, and people who believe it suck even worse. I swore I would never go back to that bar. Ever.
But the truth is I sort of deserved it.
I dated a dude who had dated a girl, another girl, and another girl, and we all sort of knew each other. And when that dude dumped me (hey, super inevitable thing that everyone warned me about) I might have totally lost my shit. And when one of these girls commiserated with me shortly after this breakup, she confided in me that she and her own boyfriend had split. And I definitely thought it was cool to sleep with that ex-boyfriend about a week later.
I want to interject something lame here like “he pursued me” or “the girl was a real jerk,” but neither makes up for it.
I don’t believe in unspoken girl pacts, and I don’t think it’s wrong to have sex with someone to try to get over someone else (it’s almost always a fucking terrible idea, though), but what you should do is pick the dude with the cool penis who no one knows and who you probably won’t fall for. Not your ex’s ex’s ex. Who just so happened to have recently dumped an equally vulnerable chick who was trying to be super cool toward you. I can’t even begin to follow my logic there. Honestly, it took writing this to fully realize how much I deserved it.
No one should be allowed to act like a syphilitic whore and not get called one all over a bar’s bathroom wall. You know? Because those are totally the type of people who believe shit written on a bar’s bathroom wall in the first place.
Amanda Oliver doesn’t have syphilis or any other STDs.
Photo via Flickr