Mirror in the Bathroom

Let's see, where do I go with this? One man's trash is another man's wife's trash? Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most fucked up interior decorator of them all? Because really. I mean just really.

Just a thousand reflections of my own sweet self, self, self...

Over dinner the other night Bryan said he had something to tell me. But that I couldn't get mad. Please, please, just don't get mad. And he buried his head in his hands, one salty lock of hair perilously close to the Kraft Bunny Shaped Mac 'N Cheese I had slaved over only moments before. What? I said. What? I can't promise. Just tell me. But he wouldn't even look up at me and the bunnies had begun to congeal. It has to do with Mike's bar, he said. What? I said. Come on, what? Soon the noodles would be one big bowl of gluey lapin in the shape of a brain, unintentional macaroni art a l'orange. But he would not tell me. WHAT GODDAMN IT? WHAT? YOU'RE FREAKING ME OUT! TELL ME! Because I'm a girl, a wife, and I was imagining body shots on the napes of lithe barely legals, lines of coke done around a belly button ring even though that is not us, not him, not even that bar. WHAT??? Orange rabbits getting hard and cold. And then he lifted his head, big green starfish eyes scared and round. Mike's getting rid of the mirror in the men's bathroom at his bar. It's cool, covered in graffiti all scratched and inked with tags. I told him you said it was okay if I took it, if we hung it in our bathroom.

Cures you whisper make no sense/Drift gently into mental illness...

No, I said. Just no. No way. But you haven't even seen it! he said. And he's right. I had not ventured into the men's room at our friend Mike's bar on Haight Street, still have not even now. But still I knew. My answer was No. Did that matter? My answer? I could have been talking to a wall, a mirror covered with ink reflectionless and deaf because Mike was bringing it to Zoey's birthday party for us anyway, Bryan had already told him I was okay with it. My no echoed off glass, no no no no, until the word was nonsensical, an infinity of no getting smaller and smaller. no. Mm. Thank you, Mike. Our very own piece of gangland pissing contest for our pissoir. Happy Birthday dear Zoey, love Uncle Mike and Daddy Dearest.

And so here it is. In my bathroom. Well, not technically my bathroom per se. It is more our half bath, half because it only has a toilet and half mine because I have always referred to it as Bryan's bathroom. The poo bathroom. The one I don't use because it stinks and the 1960's linoleum depresses me (more than the 1970's linoleum of the other bathroom). I have been waiting for Oprah to do a show on America's Ugliest Bathrooms because I am sure that I would win, that Nate Berkus would come to my house and make over my bathroom into a powder room, a guest bawwth with soft pink lighting and matching towels, maybe some tiles the color of money.

Bryan says that the mirror might be worth something, that some of the graffiti is done by well-known street artists. I see junk, drunk boys who do not wash their hands before defacing public property, penis germs still on their fingers. I see anger and U.G.L.Y. you 'aint got no alibi, you Ugly! I see that Bryan will never even hang the mirror, that it will sit for a year leaning up against the wall like that. Bryan sees a Basquiat in our bathroom, cool, a question: what is art if not life left to sit in the room that sees us at our basest?

What do you see? Do you see me winning Oprah's America's Ugliest Bathrooms with this Mirror in Mine? Or do you see Stephen Sprouse? Fab 5 Freddy? Kilroy was Here, he pooped in my toilette? How do you see yourself in the marked up turf that is that mirror?