;"We don't need people tonight," I swing open the Sushi Hatsu door with some divine sense of chopstick authority, one probably not appropriate for my own personal Ultimate Yellowtail. "We need bathrooms."
;; And it's a good thing. Our just-completed cruise down Orange Avenue with our shirts up and non-tits flying out the window, accompanied by unearthly cries of "WooOOOOoooh" pulled nary a frat-boy turtle head from its Gone Wild shell. It's Wednesday night, and nobody's home. Life, typically, is shit.
;;So Taylor and I got to thinking — as Taylor and I are known to do without thinking at all — about bathrooms. At some point in that double-Dutch, tail-chasing process, I realized that perhaps the oldest form of publishing doesn't involve rubber stamps or chiseled cave walls at all, but rather the flights of fancy produced by flights of feces from the lowest caverns of the body. Nothing screams "for a good time call" like a solid stool, after all. Mmmm, doodie. I smell free love.
;;To that end (or this one), Taylor and I have set out on a scavenger hunt with a terrorist angle, hoping to procure as many interesting numbers as the seven quarters in my back right pocket will allow us to call without being traced. Sure, our covert stall surveillance may give the outward appearance of nervous noses with pixie dust inclinations, but that's all the better to throw off our scent, my dear.
;;As a caveat, Taylor's overextended groin (he did it "working" at GayDays) has been fingered, prodded and iced this morning, and now burns like a sack of Cajun-spiced boiled peanuts. So we already have our apparent venereal issues, we just need the means by which to justify his ends. If there were ever a reason to survey bathroom walls for digits, this is clearly it.
;;Our first stop, The Lodge, we took on a tip from my bathroom-friendly hairdresser, Joel. It seems the perfect locale for some trucker (hat) numerology, especially when you consider the proximity of taxidermied deer eyes to wall-hanging bearskin rugs. Sadly, tonight it's something of an underage golf-course lounge, with polo shirts only slightly untucked. But we don't need people, just bathrooms, right? A hot bartender slings out some top-shelf toxins, and in moments I'm running for the can.
;;"Some people wait for their dreams and aspirations to find them, like a dead duck clawing its way to the bloodhound or the cross nailing itself to Christ," reads one scribble. "Not me. If she's my cross, I'm going to find out."
;;It's the stuff of jean-pocket journals, typically attached to the asses of boys who consider themselves too "complex" to actually commit. While there's some poignance, there's no number — just the empty smell of a receding hairline and a video game addiction.
;;But I need a number. A crotch-paining walk down to The Matador only produces a "Love Billy" across an air vent (duh), and a foray into the Blue Room — supposedly gay on Wednesday night but currently only as gay as the granola Goo Goo Doll throat-stretching through an open mic — offers nothing on the bathroom walls. Outside, some failed attempts at drag-queening queue for precisely no reason, sneering with dirty teeth that might have telephone numbers on them, but I don't want to find out. Somebody scratches his crotch.
;;"I hate chiggers," I itch.
;;"Yeah," Taylor groins.
;;By the time we reach Bar-BQ-Bar, which is — for all intents and purposes — just one large bathroom wall, we're slightly amused by the tableside Sharpie prose "Jim Jackson is a one man sausage fest." That's only funny because, only minutes before, I mentioned that downtown Orlando smells like fetid kielbasa.
;;Finally, at a ViMi 7-Eleven, Taylor procures a bathroom number and hobbles toward the pay phone. "Call (407) 497-**69 for BJ," it read, so Taylor leaves a Sling Blade grumble on an answering machine about said "BJ, mmmhmmm," and we're more disappointed than Billy Bob Thornton right now. We are Shi-low.
;;A couple of blocks over at Will's Pub, our potty humor gets the shit-kick it needs, when bartendress Sarah reveals that their photo booth is full of possibility, and not just the kind that we inevitably explore by pulling our shirts up for another mini-porn moment of exposed teeth/nipples. ("WoooOOOOoooh," etc.) On the wall are all sorts of indie paeans, from the surreal ("Please give me my fucking Billy Joel records back. You don't even like him anymore") to the direct ("For a good time call: 407-399-**32"). Taylor takes direction and gets the answer, "You've got the wrong number, honey," which is arguably better than not getting any response at all.
;;But a fortuitous dial to one pint-swigger who makes it clear that "I'm not going to sleep with you" and that he/she just wants you to call late at night and pretend that you're either Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, brings just what the ass-doctor ordered.
;;"I'm calling you to talk dirty to you like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt," Taylor stifles a giggle and a fart. "You have to choose one," the feisty phonee — male, mind you — clips back.
;;"OK, Tom Cruise."
;;"Well, start talkin', you dirty little Scientologist!"
;; "Yeah, I'm going to eat your placenta!" Taylor eats placenta.
;;"But I'm just a little Baptist girl. I'm gonna need to charm your snake. You got a nice snake?" Indeed. And some Cajun-spiced boiled peanuts, if you're interested.
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