This one time, I was working at a psychedelic mushroom farm and I got trapped.
This was some decades ago, when I was not as old as I am now but wasn’t as young as all that anymore.
When one is unintentionally shiftless, intentionally displaced, and in no way part of any system anymore or yet, one must needs accept varied forms of employment. This was one of the funner jobs I’ve had, although, like many of them, the manual labor factor was high.
This had been a long day. We’d unloaded the van, which meant climbing up several sets of twisty, narrow stairs carrying 30-kilo sacks of substrate a number of times (I normally took one on each shoulder, a trick I learned working in animal feed warehouses). After that we’d done the day’s work, a long process of lugging bags and sifting growth medium and washing psychedelic truffles, stacking trays and scrubbing tubs, hauling out trash. There was music, there were jokes, it was a good time, but it was a long day.
I was the last one out.
Sometimes, when we’re tired, we make stupid decisions. I mean really stupid ones. Here was mine: I knew I was alone in the building, but when I went into the bathroom before walking home, I locked the door. Why? Habit, I guess. This was a typical multiple-stall women’s room and, well, when you use those you lock the door, right? So anyway I locked the door. I peed. I stood up. I unlocked the door.
Only I didn’t.
The lock jammed. It jammed with great finality. It was not budging at all, not even to rattle infuriatingly back and forth but never quite open. That mechanism wasn’t going anywhere. I took stock. I was alone at two o'clock in the morning on the ground floor of a huge, condemned, unheated building in the middle of January in a very cold climate without my coat, that being out on the counter with my bag (and there you go – I knew I was alone so I could safely leave my stuff out there. But still I locked that damn door). My husband would not be worried about me yet; things often went very late at the mushroom farm. He would in all likelihood go to bed without worrying about me. I might be here until morning.
Of course I shouted and pounded and kicked and raised a general fuss for a while. Sure, I was alone in the building, but you never know – maybe someone from one of the other squatted sections hadn’t left after all, maybe someone had some in for a late-night… whatever they did in there. But no, no such luck. Shoulders and hips bruised from all the slamming, I sat on the toilet a while again to think things over.
The door and sides were too tall to climb over. Obviously I tried anyway, standing on the toilet seat (the tank was one of those up-on-the-wall jobs with a chain to pull), but the space was barely large enough for my arm, let alone my thick head. I sat on the toilet a while shivering and panicking a bit. I debated my options. Could I fit under the door? I really thought so.
It was a very tight fit, but if I took off my shirts and bra I would make it for sure! Spirits soaring with confidence – I would be out of here standing under a very hot shower in no time now! – I wormed my way under that door. My chest was uncomfortably compressed at first but then my upper body was through! I kept going. This was going to work!
It wasn’t, though. What couldn’t make it under the door? My tailbone. No matter how hard I tried I just could not get my pelvic region
flat enough to get my damned coccyx under that door. I could tell I’d bruised myself up reasonably badly trying but oh well, all in the course of a day, right? It was obvious that I would have to
go back in and try something else.
That’s when I found out I was stuck. That’s right, now I wasn’t trapped in a freezing bathroom stall in an empty building. Now I was pinned two-thirds naked to a frigid marble floor set straight
into the frozen ground in the dead of winter in an empty building. To say that I cried would be an understatement. After a set of panicked caterwauling which still failed to produce the
nonexistent rescuers I craved, I just started forcing myself back under that door. At first I thought it wasn’t going to work but it did. It peeled up some pretty good sections of skin on top of
those bruises, but I did make it, as you can tell by my not being dead and all that.
So now what? Well, all I could think of was to pull out my Swiss Army knife and see what could be accomplished.
The hinges didn’t have pins and were useless to me, but the lock was held on by screws. I started taking it apart. Eventually, I had the faceplate off and screws out all over the place and the entire inner mechanism displayed before me – but it still would not move. I could see now where the jam was, but no amount of pulling, scrabbling, prying, or shouting could get the bolt to move even a fraction of a millimeter. By this time I was as in as many hysterics as I could have while still being able to do stuff, but I sure as hell was glad I wasn’t still pinned to that floor.
And here’s where it gets anticlimactic. Sorry folks, but this isn’t fiction so
there is no amazing ingenuous escape to relate, and no attractive rescuing party with blankets and rum-laced hot chocolate. I just decided it was time to return to the pounding and shouting, so I backed up next to the shitter and charged the door
with my shoulder and hip again. And this time, I guess thanks to it missing most of its screws and
plates and all by this time, that lock just fell apart. A shower of machined
parts clanged, pinged, and tinkled onto the marble floor and I was standing in the middle of the room, gasping and a bit disoriented.
And the next day we invested in mobile phones (yes, this was before everyone had one; those days aren’t myth).