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A Trip Down Memory Lane!
AS regular readers of this blog know, back in my matriculating days, I was an accounting major at Valley Vocational College (Winnetka campus). My nickname was Mouse CPA – “CPA” for my chosen career and “Mouse” because I eschewed the standard dorm-issue bed and instead slept in a nest fashioned from bits of string I’d collected and cedar shavings that I bought by the bale from PetCo. (Hey, give me a break: I was only 38, I was on my own for the first time in my life – I wanted to be different.)
My best pal was Beto Nuñez-Waldemar – “Copy BNW” we called him – and he worked the graveyard shift at Kinko’s in that old bank building with the mural on Victory in Woodland Hills, yes, making copies. Hence his nickname!
Man, knowing someone who works at Kinkos – whoa. Let me tell you, we all exploited that connection whenever one of us had to make a xerox of a receipt to send in for an oil filter rebate!
Post-class, when we were often fired up by a particularly provocative lecture on Pre-Revolution French Bookkeepers by Prof. Morris Detzer (“Detz” we affectionately called him), some of us guys would head over to Baja Fresh for a “rap session” where we’d hold court in the back booth, cocks-of-the-walk, all of us, still sporting our green visors and elastic arm bands.
One day me and Beto, full of piss and vinegar, and – this being Baja Fresh – fire-roasted salsa negra, decided to leave our mark there at our favorite eatery: we scraped our names into the toilet seat in the men’s room with the edge of my all-metal Pickett N902-AF Bookkeeping slide rule. (I still have it! I use it to pick my feet now!)
That was, of course, years ago.
Well, I can’t tell you how stunned I was when I was in the neighborhood last week and find out that not only is the Baja Fresh still standing, but it’s obviously the same toilet seat, because, yes – our names are still there!
Can we get a closeup of the seat? We can?! Excellent!
I’d have thought the friction caused by innumerable gluteus maximi flopped on the seat would have worn away our inscriptions, yet it’s quite the opposite: Years of ass sweat, dried skin, miscellaneous butt-dander, and, yes, let’s not forget feces (plus other bodily effluvia) have worked themselves into the grooves and in fact made our names stand out all the more on this stark white background of molded polystyrene.
Sadly, I never realized my dream of becoming a certified public accountant – Father threatened to cut me out of the will unless I entered a field with a solid future. At his suggestion (read: demand), I “chose” the lucrative world of freelance writing for the robust and exploding magazine industry.
But to see that this horseshoe-shaped monument to our carefree college days has stood the test of time – well, it kind of brings a tear to my eye. Ah.
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…Or, I guess the shorter, bullshit-free version of all this would be “Who the hell carves their initials in toilet seats?”
Ted Parsnips
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