OK, I’ve been saying I’ll post this for weeks now. My apologies, but it’s partly getting the time, partly being bothered. As I’m now on site with nothing to do until someone gets back to me, I may as well at least look busy by typing! Please note that you lot bloody asked for this, so you only have yourselves to blame.
For those who don’t know, Rios is the rock club in Bradford. It’s owned by the same… person… who owns the only rock pub in Bradford. Nothing like having a captive audience as his BMW and personalised plates show. Rios is also a bit of a dive. Never the cleanest of places and the kind of venue where violent incidents are reduced by the fact that you can’t chase someone when you’re feet are stuck fast to the floor.
As is typical in a nightclub, the toilets are grim. OK, there are exceptions – Maestros (again in Bradford) had amazing loos. Sofas, glittering clean floors, someone selling sweets, a large fishpond… I have no idea what they’re like now that this same guy’s bought it and turned it into a concert venue, however. Anyway, Rios’ are grim. Very grim. The gents’ is like a yellow swimming pool and the women’s like a rather untidy rubbish tip.
One night when I was working there, we were asked to stay behind if we could (paid – this was in the days when Steve ran the place. DOdgy as hell, but what a nice guy). A couple of hours extra work, once the punters had gone, just to do some cleaning. Yeah, OK. We were all up for that. The club was being used for a wedding reception the next day, so it had to be tidied. Yes, Rios. Wedding. The two words seem about as closely tied as “David Beckham” and “intelligent, healthy looking wife”.
It seems that it’s an ideal venue for Asian weddings (that’s British Asian rather than every other country’s definition of Asian) as the venue can be split into two parts. It seems that at Asian weddings, the men are in one place and the women in another and they’re not allowed to mix. My apologies if I’ve oversimplified that, but that’s my understanding. I assume from that that they don’t share our tradition of the best man shagging at least one of the bridesmaids. Or the bride.
Obviously, if there’s going to be a reception there then the place needs to be a little cleaner than it normally is by 9am on a Sunday. Having your wedding guests walking around in slippers on broken glass isn’t a great idea, though I appreciate at Jewish weddings it’s part of the ceremony, though only briefly. And the Greeks go for crockery rather than beer bottles.
Well, we dug out the cleaning equipment. Barry and I were alloted toilet duty. Lucky us. Although I got on with Steve, Leslie (the bar-bitch) wasn’t my greatest fan so I often got the shitty jobs. That was until she sacked me because I figured out how she was ripping money off from the tills. Over the course of the night, Leslie would work bar periodically but would never ring anything into the till, always waiting until someone else opened it before sorting out the change. As a result, the till contents were always up at the end of the evening. Leslie skimmed this out, so that the tills balanced and her pockets bulged. Allegedly. I have no proof of this, other than the fact that I saw it and when she overheard me telling someone I was told not to come back in to work again.
Anyways, Barry and I tackled the gents’ first. Armed with mops, buckets and the knowledge that we’d have to use our overtime to buy new footwear we sploshed about and soaked all the piss up. Actually, in fairness, the gents’ wasn’t that bad. Although the floor was wet, it didn’t stink too much so I think it was more water than piss. The bogs were fairly clean and just needed sprayed and wiped, while the floor only required mopping up so that it didn’t resemble the deck of the Titanic after it had sunk.
Next, into the ladies’. Another proposition entirely. For a gender who should know how to keep things clean (that’s what women are for after all – tidying up and looking after babies and stuff), they’d made a right ******* mess. Maybe nightclub loos are a way of women rebelling against historical and sociological stereotypes. Or maybe the women who use the toilets at Rios are just a bunch of scruffy bitches. Whichever, the place was vile. Stuff plastered on the mirror – used loo roll, lipstick smudges, other substances I swear we should have called in a HazMat team to deal with…
Mopping the floors was the first start, scraping stuff off the mirror and round the sinks came next. Then… the bogs.
Oh.
*******.
Hell.
*Flush* *gurgle*
Bugger.
Every loo was half-full of… stuff. FLushing basically resulted in a loo half full of stuff sat underneath 8 inches of water with some of the stuff swirling in it. There was no way a plunger would work. We’d only end up compacting the crud and causing problems later. It had to be removed. By hand.
A coin was tossed. Barry lost. Never have a felt so relieved. It wasn’t me who’d have to wear the marigolds and go poop-digging. My job was to stand behind him, holding a large bin bag as wide open as I could and make cheap jokes about him being a ****-shoveller while hoping he had a sense of humour.
With a look of trepedition, Barry snapped on the rubber gloves, bent down and started to scoop from the first loo. The stuff in there (I try not to use the word “crap” as that only made up around 25% of whatever was jamming it) came out by the handful, and showed itself to be in layers. Like some coprohiliac’s dream version of Time Squad, Barry slowly pealed away geological layers of faecal detritus, though I somehow doubt the story they’d reveal would be half as interesting as the eruption of Vesuvius,
One handful of soggy loo roll slapped into the bin bag, far too close to my uncovered fingers. I adjusted my grip and leaned back. Barry hoiked out another handful, this time a mulch of paper and *****. Splat it went, into the bag, sliding down the side to nestle festering at the bottom.
Handful three and it became obvious that at least two women would be having to disappoint anyone they went home with, unless those chaps wanted to earn their red wings. Into the black bag the sodden, inflated jam rags went.
By now, Barry was looking a very pale shadow of his former self. I could see the sweat starting to bead on his brow. He was a nice lad – I felt genuinely bad for him, though not bad enough to swap places.
His hand went in again and something bubbled. Either the toilet was fermenting or we’d hit an air/gas pocket. Barry stood bolt upright, swung round and collapsed against me, breathing heavily and starting to retch.
At this point I noticed two things:
1) Barry was about to be sick down my front
2) The hand he’d placed on my shoulder to steady himself was glove-clad and coated in ****, blood, piss, and **** knows what else
I didn’t know whether to shove him away or vomit over his shirt in return. Actually, I think I may have done both.
Amazingly, we did finish the toilets. How, I don’t know. But I had to burn the t-shirt afterwards. Barry and I never really spoke of it afterwards. I guess you never really want to chat about sharing another guy’s stomach contents.
