Light Switch

by Billy Irving

Watching the bubbles rise weirdly through the fouled Yuengling and thinking about piss, and how I need to piss, and how I just pissed. As I’m wont on this kind of night. There is white ash in each of the outdoor-grade Bakelite ash trays and Steely Dan is playing over the PA and I’m wondering why I can never just have a good time. George has just sliced the fat of his hand open because he carelessly rested it against the tuck & roll of the booth cushion, and there was broken glass in the fold or something. Clumsy joker should’ve known there’d be broken glass in the crevices of a bar like this. Glass or maybe a blade, I’m not really sure, but the boys are all fussing over the bleeding hand and I’m just watching the bubbles rise and needing to piss, and also thinking about ash trays and wondering how we got so many of them on our table. Six, count them up.

I turn to Henry next to me because I want to ask him how we got so many ash trays, but he won’t look at me so instead I just say “The Shilling of a Flagrant Smear” into his shoulder. How’s that for a movie? The words hit his scapula and fall away, and I try to imagine what that’s like, having someone talk into your shoulder without you noticing. Maybe it’ll come to him in bed tonight as his own thought. The Shilling of a Flagrant Smear. Did I leave the refrigerator door open? 

The ash trays are round and black and flare out. They have deep notches in the lip. I realize what they remind me of. Spaceship engines. The resemblance is uncanny, especially with the wispy spunk ropes of smoke rising off them. T-minus ten seconds and they’re still pumping fuel through the umbilical and it’s cold, such that there’s ice frosting at the ports and steam is falling downwards. All systems are go, godspeed, my little soldier, and white hot flames erupt from each tray and the table barrels down into the Earth, and I really do have to piss now thinking about rockets and fuel and little soldiers, so I stagger to the back of the bar. 

The bathroom’s a tight two-urinaler and there’s a step down into the whole floor being a centimeter-high puddle over the hexagonal tiles reflecting the dim red bulbs because there are just too many Zyns stuck in the floor drain. Why always red? And my mouth feels weird. It gets that way when you drink so much piss beer, like your mouth is swollen and the sourness just lingers there. It’ll be well into the next day, no amount of water or smoke will rid it.

I go to the left-hand urinal and unzip, and even though I have to go so bad it’s just not coming out. Just reading the stickers and wondering if anyone ever calls the number to have weed delivered to their home, or if I’m a communist who should get organized, and noticing now how the stickers are plastered around a suspicious light switch that is placed just above the centerline of my urinal. It’s a completely normal light switch, but the fact of it being right here seems to imply some sort of causal relationship with the plumbing, though I’m not sure in which direction.

In general, it’s the kind of bathroom where you’re better off not washing your hands. And of course, remembering that night at the Lexington in London, when the man said, “We’re the only two guys washing our hands in here, bloody disgusting,” so I high fived him. It was a nice bathroom with a trough. I’m always fond of troughs because they remind me of Veterans Stadium, even though most guys just pissed in the sink there. Which brings me back to trying to piss and still, it’s just nothing coming out. 

Little light switch taunting me now, and I’m noticing the shape of him, his rectangular appendage jutting up at a familiar angle. Cruel little bastard. Until the door flies opens and another guy walks in and takes the urinal next to me and finally it all starts gushing out, which is the opposite of how it should happen, so I’m trying to figure out what that means for me. But it feels so goddamned good. 

I’m trying hard not to look at my neighbor’s lights switch, so I keep my eyes trained directly at the one on my wall instead, so I’m just watching as a finger enters my field of vision. The fingertip comes to a stop and rests gently against the tip of my light switch, the one on the wall I mean, and the guy says to me, “What do you think this switch does?”

And I just say, “Do it.” It comes out of me like it’s not even me, and now I’m terrified. I have no idea what’s going to happen. I begin to worry that the switch might trigger a razor thin wire to whip out from the urinal and slice through my meatus, like maybe this is some kind of prick bifurcating device. And he’s just pushing his finger against the rectangular appendage, which clicks into the sad-looking down position, and the lights go off just like that.

“Whoa,” we both say in unison, now just the two of us in the dark here with the stench of urea and Zyn and urinal cakes, and I turn to him and say, “Today is my birthday.”

Billy Irving (@oneshoeistoobig) is a writer from Delaware County, Pennsylvania.