4.2 Toilet
The French struck gold with the bidet, but now it's time to move on.
Show a hetero American male a bidet and he'll laugh or try to shit in it.
Enter a typical French café and the toilet is likely to be down among the catacombs.
Where it's not the squatting-on-your heels contraption, miserably close to your dung and the dung of those who squatted before you, it is a toilet without a seat and likely without toilet paper.
I am a claustrophobe.
Unlike Sarko, je suis grand.
In one of the old cafes near République, I squeezed my way down into the basement toilet which was about the size of the coffin in the 1988 Dutch-French film The Vanishing.
As I was using the clownishly loud dryer to blow my hands dry, I heard a sptttt, the dryer shorted, suddenly it was black as Hades.
The space was so tight I could scarcely turn around.
Moreover I forgot where on the door the lock was, which I spasmodically felt around for with both hands.
Next I was violently shaking and kicking the door, shouting, swearing, not in English but in "American" -- as the French put it.
Finally I more or less pulled myself together.
Remembered that the lock was a sliding bolt close to the top of the door.
Slid it open, bent my head, left.
Parisians make a point of being too smooth to acknowledge deviation, but the patrons turned to me questioningly as I climbed the stairs.
They had to have heard the racket I was making.
Under my breath I muttered: You're lucky.
I could be one of those American mass murderers -- in which case your Parisian asses would be escargot.
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