“Standing in line for something mundane is very boring.” —Andre Leon Talley

‘Where did you get those clothes? At the… toilet… shop?’ —Brick Tamland

I’m in the Intuit Dome, but I’m not in my seat. I’m in the latrine. The Weeknd plays. He feels it coming. Me, too. The toilet below me is sturdy and well built, and all the toilet paper dispensers are made by a company called Tork, a weird word to stare at when you’re dropping bombs. It encourages you a bit, makes you busy and give it your all.

Will Rogers once said, “The older we get, the fewer things seem worth queuing for.” Clippers owner Steve Ballmer agrees. He pounds his chest, his chest sweating, and he agrees.

“The thing I hate most in life,” Ballmer once said, “are arenas where you have to wait in line for the bathroom. I’ve become really obsessed with toilets. Toilets, toilets, toilets.”

So step aside, cancer. Step aside, boiling oceans. Aside, dementia and Alzheimer’s and mosquito bites and genocide and fascism and bartenders keeping their heads down. Toilets are the star of this funeral show. Ballmer hasn’t shut up about the restrooms since he first started braying about his new arena in 2021. Ballmer shouted, “Three times the NBA average.” Ballmer, op 60 minutes: “Can I show you the toilets?” He even ordered the creation of a computer modeling program to simulate trips to the restroom and concession stands during sales, to ensure fans would have time to do their business during a standard NBA timeout.

When the richest owner in the league and one of the ten richest men in the world builds a $2 billion basketball castle and shouts more about the toilets than about anything else, notice the porcelain thrones. He demanded it. They are his fixation, his love, his everything, and the Intuit Dome is specially crafted to reflect his desires. Now I’m going to crouch down in front of you to relay what I’ve seen.

There are just so many bathrooms, a fucking collection of shit houses. The place is littered with them. You walk through the main hall and they appear every 10 seconds. In one extreme case, I saw a men’s room, then a women’s room, then the entrance to section 22, then another men’s room. From door to door, from men to men, it was 12 steps. I walked it. And I wasn’t trying to be a hero. If I had really stretched the barrel and gone Gumby with it, I might have been able to do it in eight.

Speaking with all due respect, as a guy with a similar body type, you get the feeling that Ballmer may have dirty his chinos at some point while waiting in an overly long line for the restroom. Who among us hasn’t stuffed an unfortunate load into a pair of panties? Mine happened at a bar in Newport Beach. Threw the underwear in the bathroom trash and scrambled out of there, just like Michael Vick. Who’s to say where Ballmer happened? But in his wisdom and grace, he promised, “never again.” Cut to a kick breaking ground on the Intuit Dome. All together there are more than 1,400 toilets. “The architects keep bothering me,” Ballmer has said. “You should call them ‘fixtures’ instead of ‘toilets.’ But it’s the same. We install way more toilets than anyone in the NBA.”

Small decorations adorn the signs to the restrooms, small silhouettes of men and women raising their arms to the sky, foam fingers on their hands.

Inline images via Tyler Parker

I walked into every men’s room I could find to lay my eyes on these fixtures and see the fruits of all his hustling.

What I expected: mood lighting, dark wood finishes, hardwood floors, screens in the stalls, in-game audio, futuristic country club dressers that are as stylish as they are high-tech. No bidets, but maybe seat heaters. The softest two-ply money you can buy. Urinal cookies with Tim Cook’s face on them. Couches, candles, mints, that weird deodorant spray Arrid makes. Mouthwash and floss, Tylenol and BOSS. A guy in a dress hands me paper towels with logos on them.

What I have: artisanal, practical brascos. Mainly black and white, with some gray and silver in the mix. Abandoned Blue Moon and Pacifico tallboys on stainless steel shelves above the urinals, with shreds of TP on the floor. There is no in-game audio. If you want to know what’s going on in the game, zip up your pants and get back outside, buddy. Music from the speakers, a strange collection of the current and past top 40. Unfortunately ‘Party Rock’ was in the house that evening. Fortunately, that also applied to ‘Not Like Us’. There was also a new Drake song that I stopped paying attention to, and somehow 50 Cent’s “Best Friend.”

I didn’t take many photos in the bathrooms because I’m not a weirdo and public restrooms aren’t places that warrant or invite documentation. But this was a preseason game against the Kings. Some were ghostless.

From an aesthetic perspective, the bathrooms don’t win any design awards. We’re not talking about the troughs at Wrigley, but we’re not pissing on marble thrones either. They are there to get the job done, nothing more. We’re talking about pragmatic, functional losers. Some bathrooms were large, others were small. Some were so large that they contained structural pillars, but all were normal in every respect.

People watched videos on their phones while squeezing loaves of bread, noise and stench wafted over the stalls, an unknown voice shouting, “We cut it, but the army did it.” It never lasted.” They texted at the urinals. They were trying to figure out the automatic paper towel dispensers. They looked at themselves in the full-length mirrors, adjusted the drape of their Terance Mann jerseys, and answered the phone with, “What’s the right word?”

The normalcy was confusing and perhaps a little disappointing at first. A multi-billionaire who has hyped the toilet situation every time he’s been on the mic – how can the mind not be chock-full of possibilities? But when we thought about it further, the streamlined simplicity made sense.

“We don’t want people waiting in line,” Ballmer said in March 2023. “We want them to go back to their damn seats.”

He didn’t lie. In this image the Intuit Dome is built into it. The focus is on what’s happening on the field, and any added bells and whistles improve the in-seat viewing experience. “I like to think of it as a basketball palazzo,” Ballmer said. Va bene, Stefano, pompare and freni. A 38,000-square-foot wonder called the Halo Board looms over center court, a double-sided screen so colossal it can show replays from four different angles at once. It’s bright and seductive, full of stats and lineups, point spreads and shot charts. Even still, it’s not so in your face that it disrupts sight lines. I walked around the top of the dome and everywhere I stood I had a clear view all the way to the courtyard. Infrared-powered LEDs are installed in the armrests, and on big plays they flash and shine in different shades of red, white and blue. Those lights include USB-C chargers at every seat. Ballmer may have thought the iPhone was a dumb idea, but at least he wants to keep yours fully alive. Take photos, videos. Show your friends what fun time you had.

Ballmer doesn’t want you to spend a second longer in the toilet than necessary. He’s not trying to give you a comforting lounge space where you can enjoy and relieve yourself surrounded by the finer things. He doesn’t want you to take your time and extend your stay. He wants you in and out and back to your damn seat. James Harden is about to challenge the referees again. The creep is on. There’s no time to lose.