Graffiti In The Toilet
John 19:22: “Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.”
He pushed open the door of the toilet, enjoying the smell of still fresh paint. Then he closed the door, locked it from the inside, and, a few moments later, standing in front of the toilet-hole, undid his pants.1 With a hiss, the liquid sprayed down into the hole, giving off an ammoniac scent. The kid smacked his lips, grinning with satisfaction. When he was done, he shook what he was holding in his hand and bathed it with a few splashes from the dipper, tossing the rest of the water down into the hole. Then buttoned up.
2 Asu (dog), translated here as “asshole,” is an Indonesian insult that doesn’t work in English, The last six words satirize the jargon of the once-radical Partai Rakjat Demokratik (People’s Democratic Party), which the Suharto regime tried harshly to suppress.
3 Gemas is the untranslatable word for the pleasure one gets from pinching a chubby baby’s bottom.
The kid, twenty years old, dressed punk-style, stood there admiring the unspotted walls of the toilet. They had just been painted a tempting cream. He gave a little laugh, revealing four bad teeth, then groped in his backpack till he found what he was looking for: a felt-tip marker. With a triumphant grin, he wrote on the wall: “Asshole! Reformasi’s a total flop, Comrade! Let’s complete the democratic revolution!”2
At seven in the morning, before the students had begun to make a racket in their classrooms, a kid had already attacked the toilet, located precisely beneath the staircase. There was something wrong with his urinary system, so he had to go all the time. Maybe because he drank too much coffee, or took too little exercise. After finishing his boring morning ritual, he stared at the graffiti on the shimmering wall with mildly sadistic pleasure.3 With a pen, he scrawled an arrow aimed away from the first sentence. But the tip of the pen was too sharp to make the arrow really visible.
Putting one hand into his bag, he fumbled around in search of something that would make the lines thicker. But he found nothing and had to make do with his pen. Someone banged on the toilet door, so he faked a groan, to let whoever it was know that the toilet was occupied and the occupant didn’t want to be disturbed. Feeling fairly sure whoever it was would be patient, he retorted, in small, but still legible letters: “Blabbermouth! Provocateur! The revolution was already dead in your grandpa’s time. Our nation loves peace, and a lunchtime nap. Let’s hunt up a wild girl and find the revolution in bed!”4
The next to show up was a tomboy girl, with a hitchhiker’s knapsack. She was wearing very tight jeans and an oversize singlet. Sometimes the neckline would drop down, once or twice showing what was bra-less inside. She hated peeing, because it was such a hassle to undo her pants. She had tried once to pee standing up, following the bad habit of boys, for convenience’s sake. But the result wasn’t at all satisfactory. The annoying liquid sprayed out all over, and some of it dribbled down on her pants. But in this world everyone is condemned to pee, so she peed in that same toilet, even though it was a hassle.
As had happened with most of the toilet’s consumers, her eye was caught by the scribbles on the wall, and she felt tempted to add her own commentary. She fumbled for a felt-tip in her bag, but all she found was her lipstick. Before adding to the graffiti, she paused for a moment’s reflection. She searched in her bag for a small mirror, but with no luck. Usually, she didn’t take a small mirror with her, even though the lipstick was always there. It didn’t matter anyway. She applied the lipstick to her lips, then kissed the toilet wall, leaving a clear print. She smiled as she stared at the kiss, but then started to feel her message wasn’t clear enough. So she wrote in lipstick: “You gotta be a henchman of the military! New Order running-dog! Feudalist, bourgeois, reactionary moron! Blabbermouth full of bullshit, get ready for the revolution!” 5
For the next two days, nothing much happened in the toilet, until another kid stopped by. He took down his pants and squatted over the hole. “Plop! Plop!” He was startled by how loud it sounded. So he opened the tap to let the whoosh of the gushing water compete with the disgusting plop-plop noise. Very embarrassing! And while enjoying these stinking moments, the kid started to read the three comments on the toilet wall. He smiled at the last of them, trying to imagine what kind of girl had written it.
After washing his behind, he stood up and pulled up his pants, while still staring at the rows of letters on the toilet wall. With a lewd smile, he leaned over and kissed the lipstick lips. Holding his own lips between two forefingers, perhaps asking himself what kind of warmth he should be feeling, the kid took out his pen and excitedly added his own contribution. “Hi, gorgeous! I like your red lips, as red and as hot as the spirit of a wild animal. Wanna trade the feel of lips with me?”
Later, and in broad daylight, another girl showed up, a different type. A hedonist, and dressy. Her backpack was really much too small and filled with the usual this-and- that small arms of a come-hither girl. Her appearance in the toilet obviously had nothing to do with peeing or conducting a “Plong! Plong! concert.” Not even with washing her hands or spitting. The reason why she entered the toilet almost every day was simply to renovate her face, which was a mess thanks to several hours’ exposure to the soot-filled air. She wasn’t very self-confident, and naturally always had to fix herself up.
The girl stood by the little tank, staring at her reflection in the little mirror in her hand. She sprinkled her face—which she would never admit was filthy—with a pretty thick layer of powder, and redid the eye-shadow around her eyes. Nor did she forget to rouge her cheeks. Then she recombed her tangled hair and fixed it in place with a ribbon and a clip. As for her ashen lips, she swabbed them over with blazing red lipstick, as red as the national flag. Just at that moment, she read over all the splenetic comments on the wall. With a flirtatious laugh, she made her own contribution, also in lipstick: “Bandit, you wanna trade feel of lips with me? Okay! Meet me at nine tonight at my grandma’s. N.B. Don’t bring along any spies!”6
7 Eka uses the semi-official word wadam (i.e. wanita adam—Adam woman) rather than the street terms banci or bencong, maybe because wadam can also mean homosexual in a general sense, not just referring to a transvestite.
On the umpteenth day after the toilet was freshly painted, a guy showed up at the toilet. A big and tall guy, his scalp was covered with the stubble of a recent full shave. A moustache and a thin beard adorned his fair-skinned face. A silver earring hung from his left lobe, and he had four or five necklaces around his throat. The floppy shirt he wore was made of tie-dyed cloth, while his pants were baggy. Anyone looking at him would certainly suspect him of being queer, though this could be hard to prove.7
Even from what he would later write on the wall, which expressed his deepest feelings, it would still be tough to decide on his sexual leanings. He had gone into the toilet in search of a quiet place for a chat, away from the usual racket, and now pulled out his cell phone, which had been ringing for a while in his pants pocket. Using his right hand to hold the cell phone to his left ear, while his mouth kept up a steady chatter, he used his left hand to hunt for a pencil, and found one while his brain was still busy scanning the graffiti on the wall. This is what he eventually wrote: “Coward! Revolutionary in bed! Beaten up just once by the military and you run to mummy’s crotch. Hey, if you guys really wanna be revolutionaries, just show up here! Big mouths! Agitators! PKI maggots!”8
9 Seorang oknum, pasti bangsat keparat jang kurang moral.
10 … yang menumpuk saling berpelukan di lubang kakus. A sarcastic-lyrical formulation typical of Eka’s style.
For a week thereafter, nobody could bear to enter the toilet, thanks to a frustrating development. Some bastard, for sure a goddamn shit without morals,9 and cursed by almost every faithful customer of the toilet’s services, did something revolting. God knows on what day and at what hour he entered the toilet and immediately showered the bowl with a stream of rockets from out his ass. The idiot then went off without cleaning up his damned wastes, piled up around the hole in each other’s arms.10
You could be sure that from then on anyone entering the toilet after that lost the appetite for doing anything there. Everyone avoided the room. Everyone? Not quite! It turned out that there was one nutty kid who went in on purpose. It happened during a class period, and this kid tore out of the classroom clutching the front of his pants, scared he wouldn’t make it. He went to the first toilet on the top floor. Occupied. The second, also occupied. So was the first toilet on the ground floor. His legs began to tremble, and he leapt from side to side, struggling to prevent a disaster at the wrong time and in the wrong place. But because he couldn’t stand it a second longer, he entered the fatal toilet. In a single blind movement, he stood there, gave in to his need, and whoosh …
All this time, he held his breath and kept his eyes tight shut. But when he was done, he decided on an act of heroism, to put an end to the horror in the toilet. With his eyes still tight shut, and holding his nose, he sloshed water into the bowl, attacking the now almost shapeless piles, till they all came free and disappeared down the hole, even though he felt nauseous.
Now the kid felt better, and he started to read the messages on the wall, with what was left of his fury at the tragedy that had just occurred. He took out his blue-ink felt- tip pen and immediately wrote: “A real reactionary jerk, dropping a load of bombs without cleaning up afterward! Probably never even wipes his ass! Hey, shithead, yeah, I’m a Commie, a fan of Indonesian Comics! Wanna make something of it, ha?”11
Everyone knew that the toilet had been painted to make it look clean and pleasant. Before that, it had showed its real face: a small, marginal room where lots of people liked to babble. The walls were completely covered with comical graffiti responding to one another—radical-progressive ideas, obscene sexual invitations, and the complete works of poets whose masterpieces had been rejected by publishers. In addition, amateur cartoonists embellished the walls with sketches for “toilet comedies.” As a result, the toilet’s walls were thickly covered with mischievous graffiti, some sharp as nails, others idiotic, just like the walls of public toilets everywhere—in bus terminals, stations, schools, stadiums, and even government offices.
Eventually, the toilet walls became such a dirty mess that the Dean decided to have the toilet repainted once again. Thus the communal public diary was erased. But, as everyone knew, a first piece of graffiti then appeared, followed by someone’s commentary, and sure enough the toilet walls ended up once again covered with representations that tried to emulate the reliefs on the walls of ancient temples. This situation troubled the pious students, who loved beauty, loved harmony, and upheld the highest moral values.
One such student eventually entered the toilet and was immediately irritated to see that the walls, only a few days earlier nice and clean, were again full of the idiot fantasies of troublemaking babblers.12 This guy wasn’t a vandal and had never before damaged public property, but on this occasion he felt extraordinarily provoked. Out of irritation, of course. So he too started to write, even though in his heart he felt like crying. “Friends, please don’t scribble on the toilet walls. Keep them clean, for cleanliness is part of morality. The toilet is not the place to let off steam. Please channel your aspirations to the members of parliament …”13
13 A parody of the condescending New Order cliché: salurkan saja aspirasi Anda ke bapak-ibu anggota dewan, please … “Parliament” as such is not specified, but the context makes it plain that dewan is a reference to the Dewan Perwakilan Rakjat (Parliament).
As it turned out, within a single week, dozens of comments were scrawled below the words of this pious student. By the end of a month, the number had reached almost one hundred. No way to tell who had pitched in to return the walls of the toilet to their natural filth. The comments on the pious student’s proposal were scribbled with every kind of tool: pens, felt-tips, lipstick, pencils, blood, nail-scratchings into the concrete, and even bits of brick and charcoal. The urge to comment was so great that the old proverb was perfectly exemplified: if there’s no rattan handy, any root will do. The first graffiti read: “Blabbermouth, I don’t have any faith in our members of parliament. I have more trust in the walls of toilets.” The second went: “Asshole, I agree!” All the remaining one hundred and thirteen graffiti simply said: “Me too.”
Introduction to “Grafitti In The Toilet” by Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, read here.
Great!!!
Congratulations! Looking forward to the published translation of the entire collection.
Cool hot damn awesone! What else I could shit say for?