Word: rests
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...home market is glamorous, and consumers spend a lot of money on it," says Kira, about to embark on a tour of unhomey rest rooms at National Airport. The public rest room has no such constituency, just a lot of people "who may be there once for three minutes, never to return." Since most people avoid commenting on the facilities, or subscribe to the polite fiction that they haven't visited them, any establishment can safely relegate public rest rooms to a dank and mingy corner. They double as storerooms or janitors' closets...
...fussy, though. At least the airport has rest rooms. Many gas stations, especially self-service, cashier-booth pumpers, no longer do. Visitors who wait till they're in the city's elegant subway system are also reduced to toe-tapping: "There are no public rest rooms, and there haven't been as long as I've been here," an employee declares indignantly, when a patron begins to beg. A Metro spokesman avers that rest rooms would be an invitation to "crime, vandalism and all kinds of other things you wouldn't want to discuss in mixed company...
...Metro system does, however, have elevators, which at least smell like rest rooms. Urine has rusted out the steel floors in many of them, says a man with the unfortunate job of maintaining the elevators, and management is now installing cameras to catch people in the act. "It's not just homeless people. Everybody's doing...
...tour adjourns to the Martin Luther King Memorial Library downtown, a large, gloomy building in the soul-crushing modernist style. Here the search for a rest room takes on a literary character, mainly Kafkaesque: a visitor finds the men's room down a darkened corridor on the third floor, just past the security cameras, but it's locked and a sign on the door says AFTER 5:30 USE MEN'S ROOM ON A-LEVEL...
...uninitiated to an underground garage. Back up one flight, through a vast, empty room, into another room containing only a security desk (unattended), just in time to see the ostensibly broken elevator arrive (let's call it Kira's law: cosmic jokers all come out when you need a rest room). The stalls in the men's room have no doors, half the lights are out, and there are too many people hanging around doing nothing in particular. Upstairs, the guards explain that the men's room is a favorite spot for sexual assignations. Another men's room...