Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing

5. Only Dogs Are Free to Pee: New York Cabbies’ Search for Civility

93 5 Only Dogs Are Free to Pee New York City Cabbies’ Search for Civility Laura Norén F O R N E W YO R K E R S whose work sites are unplumbed, and mobile taxi drivers in particular, having no place to go presents a daily struggle to maintain health, dignity, and a clean criminal record. The diminishing number of public restrooms in the city is a failure of provisioning whose consequences are strengthened by prohibition policies—being without a bathroom is bad enough, but what’s worse is being summoned to court and fined for resorting to public relief. Five city departments (the Department of Sanitation, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Metro Transit Authority, the New York City Police Department, and the Department of Environmental Protection) are authorized to levy fines for public urination and defecation . A telling wrinkle in state and city legal code is that canine excretion is subject to fewer restrictions than human public excretion is. Dogs are free to pee; people risk legal sanction for the same behavior. Is the problem the pee or the people? Most New York City residents rely, willingly or otherwise, on their workplaces and their homes for the majority of their bathroom needs. Tourists face greater difficulty, being outside the daily routine of home and work and in an unfamiliar city. Spending vacation time hunting down a restroom is a temporary burden; workers whose workspace is on the street search for relief every day.1 Fruit-stand, food-cart, and street-fair vendors, bike messengers, construction workers, newsstand operators, and dog walkers, as well as taxi drivers, have the nowhereto -go problem. They hope small retailers and restaurant managers are 94 Laura Norén willing to overlook “employees only” bathroom policies (fig. 5.1); they surreptitiously use makeshift urinals out of plastic bottles and jugs. A rare, strictly emergency solution is to find a place to go on the street. Joining the free-peeing dogs risks not only legal sanction and a fine but also an uncomfortable recognition of oneself as out of order. Recognizing oneself as the source of symbolic disorder can be liberating and empowering—social activists breaching gender binaries and fighting for unisex bathrooms may be exhilarated, proud of having stepped across an exclusionary boundary even as they fear retaliation . But New York’s street-based workers have a different project; they are trying to steer clear of official sanction and make a living. Many are new immigrants working to construct themselves as regular folks and hardly in a position to readily engage in public protest on behalf of access to “rights” that are only ambiguously present in the first place. They contend with post-9/11 xenophobia, racism, and the difficulty of being near the bottom of the economic hierarchy. The whole subject of restrooms is not voiced with ease by these workers, and this includes speaking with a white, female graduate student like me. I was able to interview fifteen New York cab drivers, who, after some reassuring gestures on my part, openly complained about having no place to go. But none confessed to the widely known practices of compensation, such as peeing in a bottle or taking some other undignified act in desperation. Many interviewees enthusiastically faulted the lack of public provisions as a direct cause for expensive parking tickets, dehydration, high rates of diabetes, poor relationships Figure 5.1a. Bar sign: “Restrooms Are for Customers Only.” 95 Figure 5.1c. Residential sign: “Do Not Urinate in This Area! People Live Here! It Is Punishable by Law!” Figure 5.1b. Restaurant sign: “Restrooms Are for Patrons Only.” 96 Laura Norén with hotel valets, and the occasional preference for night shifts, when parking-reliant bathroom breaks are easier, even though day shifts are more lucrative. Interviewees did speak of “friends” who had resorted to peeing in bottles or even on the street. The number of bottles full of urine near parking spots frequented by cab drivers indicates a more widespread practice than the interviewees led me to believe. An NYU student-researcher, Hillary Marcovici, found a gas-station manager whose close contact with drivers revealed a well-articulated strategy for hiding urine collected during a shift. Clear water bottles and coffee cups were not first rate, her informant told her, because empty detergent bottles have better qualities. They have wider openings, and “the smell of the detergent...