Bash Compactor: Taking The Piss

“You should poop in it,” my pal Azriel, sage as always, told me. I ran into him on Graham Avenue on my way to snap a picture of Mayor Bloomberg peeing in the city’s oldest urinal. “Poop in it?” I thought on the L. “Why not? Didn’t we do that in high school? Duchamp would be proud.”

Explanation: The 100th birthday of the Old Hinsdale Urinals at Old Town Bar on East 18th Street, with a big-ass party to celebrate.

The place was packed. The only way to move through the crowd without confrontation was to lamprey a waitress. I immediately felt underdressed in a crowd of NYU professors, regulars and politicos. But by the time I met “Rose, or bitch, whatever you want,” a regular to the bar for 33 years, I realized this crowd was a little more laidback than met the eye.

Steve Rushin, Sports Illustrated columnist and book author, read an address that got the crowd roaring—yes, with laughter. But also people were yelling at each other to shut up and I hadn’t been so annoyed with groupthink since McCarthyism. But it was all good-natured in the end.

The bar’s owner in lineage, Gerard Meagher, introduced Bill Cummingham, a Bloomberg political dude. “And this letter’s a lot shorter than that introduction,” Cunningham said. And then he read an address from the mayor, a glowing stream of epithets.

I asked Meagher: Wasn’t the mayor actually supposed to be here? “Nobody’s perfect. I was never anywhere I was supposed to be,” Meagher said. And then he toasted to another 100 years of service by filling glasses with $75-a-bottle champagne and handing out the flutes.

Father Michael Tueth PhD and Father Barry, Jesuit priests who teach at Fordham, ended up next to me at the bar. And before you knew it, we were splitting a plate of chicken wings and talking about the politics of art film. Meagher came over and waved bartender Patrick Lydon away when Tueth started to pay. One of those $75 champagne bottles ended up in front of us and was soon enough gone.

I was finally swoll’nuff to use the porcelain masterpiece. And the ice in the bottom wasn’t the only thing that made this cool—the legacy of the commode reeks with importance.