Don’t Touch The Floor, Don’t Pee In The Shower, And Hide Your Blood
“Given the nature and reach of our enemies, we will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose.”
The unspoken rule of any bathroom shared by a dozen or more women is that nothing must ever come in contact with the floor of the bathroom. The bathroom in Berthing Five, the ship’s Ops and Combat female berthing, was no different. Anything that fell on the floor was considered contaminated and immediately disposed of. The trash can was a constant graveyard of toothbrushes, tubes of toothpaste, disposable razors and blades, washcloths, bars of barely used soap, and hair ties and bobby pins. Dozens of hair ties and bobby pins. It didn’t matter that because of its perceived dirtiness, the bathroom floor was meticulously cleaned so often that, had it been tested, it likely would have been deemed safe to eat off of. Safe, if not for the deadly chemicals they used on it every day to counteract said “dirtiness.”
It was taboo to be seen walking across the bathroom floor in bare feet, and anyone caught doing so would be branded a scumbag in the hearts and minds of anyone who heard about the incident. There was no circumstance under which it would have been deemed acceptable. It would be brought up at social gatherings years later…Remember when so-and-so went barefoot in the bathroom?
Like all taboos, it could be ignored when there were no witnesses. Say if someone was just hanging out in the lounge and spilled something, they might be tempted to just pop into the bathroom for a paper towel…didn’t wanna go all the way back to their locker to get flip-flops on, perfectly understandable. But they had to be sure, REAL SURE, no one was laying in their racks waiting for them to do something stupid. It was a good idea to listen for anyone coming down the ladder-well, too.
Everyone peed in the shower. Anyone suspected of peeing in the shower would be ridiculed as surely as if they were caught showering without shower shoes. If you had a lot of asparagus the day before, you were better off holding it. No amount of perfumed soap or fruity shampoo could cover hot, steamy asparagus pee as one infamous gunner’s mate seaman apprentice had learned and whose story continued to be passed down in the berthing lore years after she’d moved on to a new command.
A common rookie mistake in the shower was letting the shampoo, or conditioner, or lathered soap rest anywhere on your person for any length of time. The water could be and was secured without notice and without concern for anyone’s state of soapiness, so it was important to get it on, rub it around and get it off as quickly as possible. If you felt like you needed more time, extra precautions could be taken. There was one woman, Ops Specialist Second Class Harrison, who had been caught mid-lather so often, she learned never to shower without a bucket full of water on standby. True story.
There were really only two options for shaving your legs in the shower. The shower was a three by three foot box, six feet two inches high, with an off-white plastic curtain on one side that you wanted to avoid touching unless you liked the idea of coming into contact with whatever spore it was that caused the bottom of the curtain to turn salmon pink every day, no matter how often it was scrubbed. There was no knee-high ledge or spigot to prop a foot on, so that left you either having to bend over at the waist, which threw off your center of gravity and if the ship took an unexpected roll could put you face deep into the shower curtain, or worse, right down on the floor. Or you could do what Sonar Technician Second Class Barrone eventually started doing after the bend at the waist technique had failed her a time or two: she leaned against the wall opposite the shower head and propped the foot of whatever leg she was shaving on the opposing wall, wedging herself into the shower so that no matter how the ship pitched, she’d stay upright.
The way she figured it, her ass and all her berthing-mates’s asses were already sharing toilet surfaces and she hadn’t suffered any terrible disease or disfigurement on account of it yet. Whereas, she’d seen the shin gouge Information Technician First Class Marciano (a self-proclaimed waist bender) had received when she fell in the shower that time the ship took a roll in the rough seas in the Northern Atlantic on the way back from Ireland.
Barrone would have felt differently about touching the shower walls if there had been a co-ed set up for the ship’s showers, like they had on the Australian and UK navy ships. It was one of the few things she appreciated about the strict gender segregation in the US armed forces. She’d seen her share of shower babies and wayward pubes when she’d been made to clean out the men’s bathrooms in Chief’s and Officer’s country when she’d been assigned to the wardroom for her special cranking duty as a junior petty officer. She still shuddered when she remembered the state of Commander Rhodes’ toilet. He’d been the Commanding Officer at the time of her special duty and she’d been amazed that anyone in charge of keeping everything in order on the ship could be so disgustingly unkempt in his own quarters. She’d heard that the current CO didn’t let anyone else clean his bathroom or make his bed which, considering the way Barrone still felt about Commander Rhodes, was probably a smart move. It’s hard to salute a man with anything approaching real respect after you’ve seen his pubes on a toilet rim.
There were explicit rules governing use of the heads, or toilets, in the bathroom in berthing five. It was the berthing lead petty officer prior to Marciano, a Torpedoman’s Mate First Class Coker, who had instituted a “leave no trace” policy and used her own money to purchase the toilet brushes for each of the two stalls which were still in use. When one of the inspecting officers had commented to Coker that the toilet brushes were not secured for sea, Coker put in a job order to have two bracketed stanchions installed to hold the brushes in place. She would not be deterred in her campaign against other people’s shit streaks.
What TM1 Coker did for crap, IT1 Marciano did for blood. It may be uncommon knowledge that a group of women trapped in close quarters over an extended length of time will eventually sync up in their menstrual cycle. It actually happens, and when it does, the last thing most women want to see when they’re bleeding and bloated and crabby is a piled up collection of other ladies’ uteral guts in the tiny trash can some, probably male, engineer decided was adequate to contain the daily biological load of twenty or so menstruating women.
Not long after she had assumed the role of berthing lead petty officer, IT1 Marciano had been forced to conduct training on the best practices for disposing of used tampons and maxi-pads which consisted of two cardinal rules: 1 - DO NOT FLUSH TAMPONS AND MAXI PADS. 2 - NO OTHER PERSON SHOULD HAVE TO SEE YOUR UN-FLUSHED TAMPONS AND MAXI PADS. Flushed tampons, or “White Mice” as the Hull Techs called them, would block up the vacuum plumbing system and could cause the heads to be secured for hours on end while the “mouse” was tracked down and fished from whatever pipe or filter it was stuck in.
Marciano, who had been raised by her father in a house full of older brothers, had learned at the early age of thirteen that no one wanted to think about the things that were happening in her lady bits, let alone see evidence of it. So her approach to disposal emphasized a complete camouflaging of the offending materials, requiring ample toilet paper wrapping and careful placement in the trash can so that it was hard to distinguish the used pad or tampon from the leavings of a blown nose.
Marciano had been surprised and disgusted when she discovered that some of her berthing mates had much more cavalier attitudes about disposal, sometimes not bothering with the toilet paper, they just threw the used tampon right into the trash can, bloody string and all. Then one day, she reached her limit. She got off a mid-watch on a Sunday before the ship was scheduled to return to port after it had passed the Combat Systems Assessment off the coast of Virginia. She’d gone in to use the head and saw that the trash can in each stall was overflowing. It was the sight of a particularly well-used maxi-pad that did it. It was one of the cheap pink ones without any kind of special pattern or “protective barrier” feminine hygiene TV commercials are always promoting. It was just laying there, unrolled and bloody-side up, across the top of one of the piles of trash.
Even though it was a scheduled holiday routine day—the only day people were allowed to sleep in underway—she turned on all the white lights in berthing and made everyone get out of their racks. She conducted training on disposal practices, and put in place a trash watch rotation schedule that would have a different person assigned to it every week. She also added at the end of training that next time she saw anyone else’s menstrual blood, she would track down the brand of the offending tampon or napkin, and that every person with that brand in their locker would be assigned an extra week of special cleaning duties.
After that, Berthing Five went through toilet paper faster than any other berthing but things were generally tidier. Until someone started shitting in the sinks.