The Thong Also Rises (8 page)

It was horrible. I tried another tack: Leaning into my stretch, I surreptitiously attempted to pin the protruding piece of material flat with my elbow. But it was impossible to concentrate on both this and the yoga, and the front of the pants sprang straight out again, wagging from side to side, like the tail of a dog happy to see you.

The room was as hot as a furnace by now, and soon the pants were thoroughly soaked in my sweat, turning the dark gray flannel an even darker gray—apart from the flap at the front, which, since it wasn't in contact with my body, remained free from sweat and light gray, sticking out in lewd shamelessness.

After what seemed like an eternity, the class ended. And—all credit to me—I was brave enough to stay behind and introduce myself to Nathan. But as I hadn't thought to bring a towel for the shower or any clean clothes, our date ended up too
yin and yang
for comfort: He was serene and self-aware, I was sweaty and self-conscious. I stayed for one drink, then went back to the hotel, lay on the bed, and watched
When Harry Met Sally
on TV, using biscotti as spoons to eat a tub of ice cream.

Jennifer Cox spent many years juggling two jobs, one as a BBC travel journalist and the other as head of public relations for Lonely Planet, before deciding enough was enough and traveled the world in search of
love instead. A correspondent for BBC's Holiday, co-host of BBC1's “Perfect Holiday,” and a weekly commentator for Sky News, she has written for publications including
The London Times, Marie Claire, Elle, Esquire,
and
Cosmopolitan.
This story was excerpted from
Around the World in 80 Dates.
Jennifer now happily juggles her old London life with her lovely new one in Seattle.

Because dinner didn't take as much time as we'd planned, we now had an hour to kill before the show. I'd made the mistake of buying new shoes for the trip and my feet were already hurting. Not only were the shoes brand new, they were also a size and a half too small with four-inch heels. The saleslady at BCBG, Katarina, had talked me into buying them, “They are a very sexy shoe on you and because of the length of the pant, you need the high heel.” And I needed the pants because, according to Katarina, “They make your backside look very good!” (I thought it only a matter of time before Katarina and I began dating.) Of course I couldn't tell Hank any of this. His response would simply have been, “Well then, take them off.” As if I could do that after spending $200 on the outfit. Ha! I wished.

“Hey, wanna go back to the room for a bit? I mean, since we have an hour until the show and everything,” I asked Hank, grabbing a hold of his shoulder and trying not to wobble.

“Sure,” Hank said, probably hoping this was code for “Hey, wanna go back to the room and have sex before the show?”When it was in fact code for “Hey, my feet are killing me. I need to get these shoes off.”

—Elizabeth Ellen, “Pain and Fumbling in Las Vegas”

Didn't your mother tell you to go at the very first opportunity?

I
T WAS A WARM, BRIGHT MID-MORNING AND
I
WAS
bumping down the road on a semi-deluxe bus. My fellow passengers nodded at me in a friendly manner, I had a mango Frooti drink and a roll of chocolate-chip biscuits to snack on, and the scenery of goats and huts and sari-clad women was picturesque. Exactly the sort of bus experience I had imagined when I planned my trip to India. The only problem was I wasn't entirely sure where I would end up. And I had to pee.

I was hoping to get to Gokarna, a beach town in South India which, according to an Australian girl I'd met in Delhi, was supposed to be a tranquil, relaxing place, a Goa without the rave kids. As a solo female traveler who had been overwhelmed by crowded, grimy Delhi and who had a low tolerance for trance and techno, I thought it sounded great.

The trip had seemed simple enough when I started out in Hampi. I successfully took the 7
A.M.
bus to Hospet, where I was supposed to get on the 9
A.M.
bus to Gokarna.
But in Hospet the plan crumbled. After an hour and a half of confusion and contradictory announcements, it was official: the Gokarna bus was cancelled.

A crowd gathered to discuss my options. Some thought I should take a bus to Sirsi and then transfer, and others argued for taking a bus to Kumta to transfer. A minority was against both of these plans. I was worried about getting stuck in some tiny town with no hotels and no ongoing buses, but when I asked about this either nobody understood the question, or I didn't understand the answer. Anyway, my input wasn't under consideration in the matter. What did a foreign tourist know about anything, even if she did look almost Indian? When the shouting died down, the pro-Kumtas and the fringe parties had been overruled. I was put on a bus and told to transfer at Sirsi. “Don't worry,” said the station manager, “The driver will get you to Gokarna.” So I was on a bus, at least, and I had a flimsy promise to hold onto, and hopefully there would be a bathroom stop along the way.

The first stop was a lonely roadside restaurant full of scowling men. Around back, in the middle of a field, a decidedly non-picturesque concrete wall shielded three door-less toilet stalls from view of the restaurant. I stepped behind the wall.

Shit.

There was shit everywhere. In the squat toilets, on the footrests, around the toilets, on the concrete floor between the wall and the stalls. Shit, in globs and heaps and puddles and mounds, every color of the shit rainbow. I stared for a while, thinking longingly of the restroom at Hospet, where an old woman was employed to pour a can of water over the concrete toilets after every use. “I'll just wait for the next stop,” I thought.

The next stop was an hour later at a similarly lonely location. The toilets there were free of fecal matter, but had instead been taken over by spiders. Webs festooned the rafters, stretched across the stalls, blocked the doorways, and crowded the corners, each presided over by a plump, black, jellybean-sized spider. Unlike their apathetic daddy-longlegs cousins who hang motionless for weeks at a time, these spiders were busy. Industrious. Moving. Even someone without a spider-phobia as strong as mine would have been freaked out. I kicked myself for being too picky to use the last toilet. I mean, what's a little shit?

If it had been dark, or if I had been wearing a long skirt, or if I had a travel buddy, or if I were a man, I would have just gone in the field behind the bathrooms, but none of those things was the case, so I got back on the bus. No matter what confronted me, I promised myself, I would use the bathroom at the next stop.

Another hour passed jouncing over potholes and wishing I hadn't had that mango Frooti.Tree branches scraped past the open windows and sifted a fine dust onto me as I wiggled and worried. What would be worse, I wondered, being stranded overnight or wetting myself? I wished there was a toilet on the bus. Semi-deluxe, I decided, must be a euphemism for not deluxe at all.

At last we drove into an actual town, with a real bus station like the one at Hospet. I had high hopes for this station's facilities, hopes that rose even higher when I saw that said facilities were actually indoors and that people were actually going in and out of them. In fact, the area positively boiled with activity. Vendors hawked bananas and nuts and newspaper cones of puffed rice, bottles of Thums Up and Limca, strings of the tiny white flowers that South Indian women
affix to their glossy dark braids. One problem solved, I thought as I galloped off the bus and across the lot.

Inside the women's end I found three stalls with doors on the far side of the room and three doorless squat toilets on the near side, separated from each other by low walls. A baby girl squatted in the toilet closest to the door, displaying remarkable balance for such a tiny thing. Two older girls, maybe eight and ten, dark-eyed and pretty, exchanged smiles with me. I headed to the stalls with doors first, but found them inhabited by more of those spiders.The middle toilet even had some shit floating in it for good measure. It didn't occur to this privacy-loving American girl to use one of the open toilets, so I was reduced to an uncertain shuffling.

As I stood there, a woman in a gold-shot sari entered the restroom. Regally, elegantly, she squatted over the drain in the middle of the floor and urinated into it, her sari providing a remarkable amount of privacy for
someone peeing in the middle of the room. She fixed a gaze of disdain on a point in the middle of the wall like someone undergoing a disgusting but necessary medical examination. Finished, she stalked back out the door without acknowledging anyone's presence. Even the jewel in her nose glittered a little sneer. I should do that too, I thought, impressed. But how could I? Seeing my hesitation, the older girl poured some water over the muddy footrests of one of the open toilets near the door and indicated that I should use it.

Just then a big gray pig walked in the door. I don't know how big pigs are supposed to get so I can't say for sure where this one stood in the spectrum, but if it had been a dog it would have been a pretty huge dog. The pig made straight for the baby and started snuffling around her, eliciting a shriek of terror and nearly knocking her into the toilet before one of the girls scooped her to safety. Apparently disappointed, the pig veered off to the stalls on the other side of the room and poked its head into the first stall, and then the second. Now, I had heard rumors about certain porcine dining proclivities, but I was still shocked by what I saw next. “What is it doing…it's not going to eat the…oh yuck…” I watched for a while in disgusted fascination as the pig gobbled down the contents of the toilet.