CARBONDALE - There is a technical term for bathroom graffiti: latrinalia.

It first was coined by the late Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California in Berkeley, to refer to writings found in bathrooms.

Sally Carter, owner of Hangar 9, Wright thinks it's quaint that there is a proper name for the bathroom writings, but she just calls it vandalism.

She calls her bar bathroom collection of graffiti "the best of the worst" in Carbondale. Behind the "W" door of the women's bathroom is an explosion of latrinalia.

The Hangar 9 women's bathroom has hundreds of messages, everywhere, among the five stalls. Hundreds is a guess, as the compounded layers of permanent marker and pen are at times hard to differentiate and the remnants of past prose still evident even after they've been cleaned with industrial chemicals, which strip the sheen off the finish but can't erase the writings on the wall.

"It's like a magnet," Carter said. "It starts slowly, but then people just add on to it until you get what's in there."

But the matriarch of the Strip's music scene won't stand by and let you get away with defacing her john. She'll hunt you down.

It wasn't long ago that Carter staked out her commode. She spotted a notoriously unruly patron, known for her fondness of defacing property, enter the bar. Carter headed her off.

"I watched her feet from the other stall," Carter said. "When she took the cap off the marker, you could just smell it."

That's when Carter jumped up on an adjacent toilet seat, looked down over the stall and screamed, something to the effect, of "BUSTED!"

Carter seems to revel in the memory.

"Then I called the cops and they took her away," she smiles wide as she finished her story.

It's all there in the most public of private places: A little doodle. A declaration of love, the bad mouthing of an ex-lover or the great debate about the tastiness of Bagel Bites v. the scrumptiousness of Pizza Pockets. A lot of what is scrawled in bathrooms is conversational - anything written on the wall is vulnerable to a response, rebuttal or reassurance. Chains of banter stack on top of each other and make for addictive reading.

The men's bathroom at Hangar 9 doesn't have the same mass of graffiti - it literally has five scribble marks - the most impressive being the word "speech" written in fat, black magic marker.

Maybe it's because women have different bathroom habits than men.

Maybe it's the sitting.

Maybe it's the extra time, but for whatever reason, women write the most vulgar things on restroom walls.

"The men are more political - they seem to put a little more thought into it," said Karen McNichols, who has been bartending at PK's for 21 years.

But for the most part, about every two weeks, the bathrooms at PK's get whitewashed to control the graffiti. Everyone's handiwork gets covered over, everyone's except for the message left by Joan Baez - the legendary folk singer who toured with Bob Dylan and performed at Woodstock.

After performing a show at Shryock in June 1994, Baez headed to PK's in search of a tavern. The story goes that she was hit by a bicycle before she made it into the bar, but even after the collision, she was undeterred and made it inside. At some point in the evening, Baez scribbled: "One cool bar! All the best," onto the wall. Since then the sacred spot has been covered in Plexiglas and framed.

Mark Schneider, an associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, knows quite a bit about human behavior, but wasn't sure how to address the bathroom graffiti phenomenon.

"I'm not really sure because it is leaves the addressee and the writer unknown," Schneider said. "I suppose someone who wanted to speculate in some way can say it is similar to animals who mark their territories - but without leaving your identity, it makes no sense to mark a territory. So I have no idea what's going on with it."

Chris Wildrick, assistant professor at the SIUC School of Art and Design, said bathroom graffiti borders on artistic expression, but to him the end result is not as interesting as the preparation. The conversation with Wildrick got deep, fast:

"I guess what I think is interesting; are people thinking about this ahead of time and bringing in a pen or whatever it they need to the bathroom, or is it something that they are sitting there doing?" Wildrick pondered aloud. "And once they do it, is it something that is really original or are they tapping into that whole genre of bathroom graffiti jokes that people use over and over again? So do people think they are so funny that they have to write it again? Why would you want to do that? Because it's not like people think you're funny for doing it - because it's anonymous."

Wildrick, a reformed bathroom doodler himself, offered a golden nugget of insight on the issue, which is where we will leave.

"I think it's an opportunity to do something a little bit naughty while we're not being watched," he said.

nicole.sack@thesouthern.com

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