A Pilgrimage Through Texas in Search of the Prophet of the Porcelain
By Rex Matheson Wilkens III
The first one I found was scrawled in blue Sharpie on the stall beside the men’s toilet at a Shell station outside of Sealy:
“Our butt cheeks have touched the same porcelain throne. We are bound like brothers, forever bonded.”
I chuckled and was a little amused. I was somewhere between a beef jerky craving and a panic attack when I read those lines. And they soothed my troubled mind like a tonic. Looking around the bathroom, there were pithy lines scrawled around the room in unsuspecting places, ready to be found. The handwriting was jagged but certain. The voice had that Twain-ian edge, but with the stank of Waffle House enlightenment. Crude, sure, but wise all the same. Like the first sip of whiskey after a funeral.
It wasn’t just bathroom graffiti. It was something deeper. Something… sacred.
Over the next few months, I started noticing the same handwriting everywhere – at Buc-ee’s stalls, in roadside bars, ice houses, in the weathered stalls of honky tonk dives from Huntsville to Harlingen. Always the same style: bathroom beat poetry, etched with conviction and chili-scented wisdom. The words weren’t random. They had cadence. Rhythm. Truth. They made me laugh, think, sometimes gag a little, and, on more than one occasion, cry quietly into a urinal cake.
Thus began my journey on the backroads of this great state. I put 4,200 miles on my 2002 Ford Ranger. I drank 118 cups of gas station coffee. I contracted what I can only describe as a philosophical rash. But I found him. Or at least… pieces of him. The man, the myth, the musky messiah known only as…
Johnny Commode.
The Oracle of Odorous Reflection.
The Prophet of Poo.
Saint John the Unflushable.
The Road to Revelation
Outside a Love’s Truckstop in Temple:
“ Tex, I gotta warn you… this new lady you just met may be running her fingers through your hair, whispering sweet nothings but I swear to you that someone somewhere is happy that she ain’t coming home tonight”
At a Whataburger in Corpus Christi:
“You may repaint this sacred stall,
Hide the dongs upon the wall.
But lo, the scribe will return again,
With wit galore and gas station pen.”
In a Port-o-Potty outside a Union Carbide in Corpus Cristi:
OSHA Regulation 13.145.3.a: All waste weighing more than .5 pounds or greater than 6 inches in length must be hand lowered to avoid chemical splash.
It wasn’t just humor. These were teachings. Like Poor Richard had grown up on pork rinds and rodeo injuries.
The deeper I followed the trail, the more I realized Johnny was more than a man—he was an American, no, a Texan Hero. A blue-collar Buddha with one foot in the pickup and the other on the sticky tile of enlightenment.
In Lubbock, I found a stall signed:
“Vidi, Vici, Weewee, I came. I saw. I peed a bit down my leg.”
In Beaumont, near the warehouses:
“If her ex drives a lifted truck and owns nunchucks, let her go. It weren’t meant to be.”
And in a gender neutral bathroom in a Kerrville BBQ, scribbled in elegant cursive (which I now believe to be his disguise font):
“Ladies, forgive the seat I left up—love is hard, and so is aim.”
The Myth Takes Shape
Some say he’s a retired rodeo clown turned septic technician.
Others claim he’s a preacher who lost his flock but found his gospel in the stalls of the damned.
One waitress in Goliad swears he’s her ex-husband. “He never could express himself out loud,” she said. “But boy, give him a Sharpie and a bathroom stall? Poet laureate.”
I started to believe that maybe, just maybe, Johnny was all of us. A piece of every man who’s ever sat on a cold seat and thought deep thoughts between grunts.
The Teachings
I gathered what I could. Some were brief and brutal:
“Debt, like a fart in church, gets harder to ignore the longer you sit in it.”
“Everybody hates a racist but racists only hate certain people… think about that justice.”“If whiskey was water and I was a duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up. But whiskey ain’t water and I ain’t a duck so pass me that bottle and shut the fuck up”
“The path to wisdom is paved with bad decisions and worse tequila.”
Some were practically religious:
“There are no atheists in Buc-ee’s at midnight.”
“If you gotta lie about the size of the fish, you weren’t meant to eat meat anyway.”“Never mix brown liquor with clear intentions.”
Some made me question my own beliefs:
“Do not throw toothpicks into the urinals, as the crabs have learned to pole vault.”
”True love is finding someone who still talks to you after they’ve seen your drunk cry.”
What I Learned
I never found Johnny. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe he’s like all prophets—meant to speak through porcelain and plastic, not podiums or pulpits. Maybe he’s still out there, riding from town to town with a Sharpie in his pocket and a gallon of unsweet tea on the dash.
Or maybe, in a way, he’s inside all of us. Like a chili dog at 2 a.m.
All I know is, next time you take a road trip, don’t just stop to relieve yourself. Take a moment. Read the wall. Hear the voice.
Because sometimes, the greatest wisdom doesn’t come from books, sermons, or motivational speakers.
Sometimes… it comes from Stall #3.
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