It happens sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning: The padlock comes off, the chain is unlooped, and the big accordion gate is pushed open. After this, the restrooms at the Pike Place Sanitary Market are set to receive the democratic hordes. These facilities, with their general access and central location, just down from the tourist-attracting brass pig, will funnel a restless stream of human traffic, an endless coming and going that continues throughout the day, every day. A high percentage of the people who use these facilities are homeless; many are sick or addicted, or both. It is to this rarest of places -- a public space with a modicum of private accommodations -- that they return, again and again, to conduct all manner of personal business.

A lot of this business is simply part of the ordinary morning routine that most of us -- with our places to be and our means of being there -- take for granted as a matter both personal and private: tooth-brushing, face washing, hair combing, ass scratching, taking the first piss of the day, etc. Other activities are not quite so ordinary, or, for that matter, legal -- though really, who's to say how many among us, behind closed doors, wake up and jab a syringe full of heroin into our veins? It's only a crime if you get caught, and you'll only get caught if somebody sees you, and if you're on the streets, well, all the world's a stage.

Many of the earliest arrivals to the restroom, a high percentage of whom are Mexican immigrants, have spent the night in shelters. They use the sinks for a quick, general cleaning up before they try for a day's work at an on-the-spot labor pool. Huge, overstuffed backpacks rest against the black-and-white tile. It's cold in here; the walls exhibit the chilly geometry and loud, reverberating acoustics of a Stanley Kubrick set. When people talk or grunt, the noise is short and sharp and exaggerated, like sounds in a meat cooler. The overhead lighting is surgical: It casts an unforgiving, steady white glare on pale skin, reflected back in scratched mirrors.

A tall, Scandinavian-looking man with red hair and a mustache runs an electric shaver over his chin, smiling. He hands a Native American his tobacco-rolling kit, and wonders aloud how he'll make it until his next paycheck on Thursday. The two go on to debate the relative merits of Labor Ready and the Millionair Club. Labor Ready takes a beating. Another guy brushes his teeth rapidly, spits foam into the sink, and rushes out. Men mill around, yawning, tucking in their shirts. In one of the stalls, a kid so young it breaks your heart is shooting up. His friends wait for him to finish with a static, narcotic patience. Together, they'll circle the streets and then return to this very same bathroom to fix again.

After spending several hours a day hanging in and around this place, I've come away with a new understanding of the phrase "shit out of luck." Whatever their activity, there's a single, tragic theme that unites the interests of the dispossessed who frequent this restroom: They don't have anywhere else to go. In fact, this is exactly what I heard a roughed-up black woman in a torn parka yell at a Market security guard when he tried to usher her away from the landing outside the restrooms. To his credit, the young guard was infinitely patient with the woman. She'd been panhandling in the area for about 15 minutes, but when she started shouting at the guard -- "Why don't you just leave me fucking alone!" -- he moved her in the direction of the stairs. He said gently, "Let's go." The woman, then halfway up the flight, spun on him and screamed at the top of her lungs: "I don't have anywhere to go!"

This, of course, is the very definition of homelessness. Unfortunately, because its essential truth resides in something that's lacking, we have a difficult time fully comprehending the implications of it. Some of this difficulty can be removed by means of the following not-so-simple experiment: Try finding a legitimate place to take a shit in downtown Seattle without any money in your pocket. The options are brutally scarce. The general shrinkage of available public space, especially basic facilities, only serves to concentrate and channel Seattle's homeless population into the already overtaxed bathrooms at Pike Place Market -- to the point that, as I stood on the landing outside these bathrooms, watching people pass in and out, I had the eerie feeling that I was witnessing a symbolic procession of unwanted souls being perpetually cast out of this obscenely white, obscenely money-mad city. This was the human toll of NikeTown.

But these people aren't symbols, of course; they are a very real population we simultaneously fear, romanticize, and ignore -- people who exist on the streets, and whose basic needs are met by a remarkably small number of public facilities and agencies. Overall, Seattle suffers from a chronic case of denial -- smugness and amnesia, deriving in large part from our own economic prosperity -- regarding its position and, arguably, its obligations, as a growing, developing city. These masses who pass through the restrooms are the men and women who are "disappeared" when President Clinton comes to town.

"It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions," George Orwell wrote after spending time on the streets of Paris and London. "But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor." Disregarding, for the moment, the implication that there is a deep connection between financial well-being and liberal lip service (which might as well be the definition of Seattle politics), Orwell's observations are still dead-on. The division between rich and poor, the class-related alienation suffered most acutely by those on the extreme fringes of society, the loneliness of being too old, hooked on junk, stuck on the streets -- these things were made clear to me as I loitered around the restrooms.

Loitering, though, is really the last thing that goes on here. The attention I drew just standing around surprised me, at first: The cops looked at me like I was a dealer, and the dealers eyed me like heat. (Or nearly all the dealers -- my first day hanging out, a clean-cut guy rushed up to me as I stood by the phones, and asked if I wanted "that dime bag of weed." When I shook my head no, he hopped back up the stairs, and I heard him yell in disgust, "Man, it smells like piss." After a while, you don't smell the piss anymore.)

Constant movement is the modus operandi of anyone consigned to life on the streets. Most everyone who uses the market bathrooms gets their business done quickly (especially the smartly dressed tourists, who practically run in and out of the cans with their noses wrinkled and their paranoid eyes agog). The people I witnessed moving slowly or uncertainly had a chemical reason for doing so -- heroin, alcohol, crack, inhalants, and a frightening amount of mental illness were obvious causes of the sentient oblivion that sometimes gave the restrooms the aspect of a living hell, an urban limbo. (One afternoon, a tall woman in a purple satin jacket, hopelessly addled on who knows what, walked out of the bathroom, came right up to me on the landing, and with her face not six inches from mine, stared directly through my eyes to some other side of reality, not seeing me at all -- after which she took a good 10 minutes getting up the half-flight of stairs to the street.)

Heroin -- due to the user's requirements in the way of space and time -- seems to have a particularly heavy presence here, though intermittent patrols by the Market's "Security Ambassadors" and beat cops from Seattle's West Precinct are meant to discourage it.

The structure of the men's bathroom is meant to discourage it as well. To counterbalance the probability of an illegal event's occurrence (such as shooting up), we have the architecture of surveillance: stall doors lopped off at the top. Their design is an even split, with law and order removing the top half in order to peer over at potential reprobates -- in practice or in theory, it doesn't matter -- leaving just the bottom half to cover your ass.

Maybe in a totalitarian regime, there wouldn't be any door on the stall at all. Maybe the half-door represents the tensions inherent to the maintenance of a free-wheelin' democracy: public space versus individual privacy, the upholding of the law versus the preservation of individual rights. As usual, though, these rather ethereal democratic considerations become inconsequential when their ballasts give way under the weight of immediate, practical reality. All the missing half of the door means when you're on the business side of it is that there's a continuous stream of people looking down at you with eager eyes, to see if the toilet is truly occupied. The first time I entered one of the stalls -- shutting the door, dropping my pants, and plopping down on the porcelain rim in my long underwear -- I had to duck my head between my knees to avoid the procession of bobbing heads peeking at me from over the top of the door.

There's a certain, unmistakable stench that lingers after smack has been mainlined. It's a hot, sweet, meaty smell of toxic sweat squeezed through sickly pores in sickly skin, and in tight spaces, it hangs in the air like the vapors of some intolerably foul sauna. If you're familiar with the odor, you immediately know what else to look for: matches and blood. Sure enough, there were two or three burnt matches crumpled against the back wall behind the toilet bowl where I sat, and to my left, whipped like a Jackson Pollack brush-splash against the square black-and-white ceramic tiles, was a thin, scrabbled arc of bright red blood. It was a crime scene, recently administered and recently fled.

This kind of behavior is exactly why most downtown business owners protect their investments with the following phrase: "Restrooms are for customer use only." But considering the volume and kinds of use the Market restrooms receive, they are surprisingly clean. "It's a burden," says Bob Squalia, Director of Operations at the city's Preservation and Development Authority (PDA), which, since the '70s, has had the unenviable responsibility of maintaining and regulating this incredibly beleaguered public space. He says the paucity of public bathrooms downtown means that the Market almost single-handedly services an entire population. "It puts a lot of pressure on us," he says. "What it boils right down to is that we're the largest property holder down here. We try to keep them clean. We try to patrol them. We're not shirking from the responsibility."

Despite recent renovations to the bathrooms (which totaled around $100,000), and with even more "major renovations" scheduled (which will push the cost up another $50,000 or $60,000), Squalia says the market restrooms are still "very, very tough to maintain." Until recently, the custodial staff found themselves "cleaning up defecation all around the market." Because of this, the operational hours of the restrooms were modified. While they still close at 6:00 p.m., they now open as early as 6:00 a.m. to accommodate the high volume of early-morning users.

When asked about the prevalence of illegal activity and whether he's looking to step up security or surveillance in the future -- say, by posting someone all-hours at the restroom entrance -- Squalia is blunt: "We don't have the resources." The Seattle Police Department is responsible for patrolling the area in and around the Pike Place Market; the PDA has petitioned for a higher SPD presence and a higher frequency of cops on Market-area beats. When the police shift their focus to other parts of the city, says Squalia, it is the PDA that "fields the burden of that." He adds, "I've strongly recommended that it not be the PDA alone that does that."

For the most part, Squalia doesn't disparage the people who use the restrooms; he seems keenly aware of how important the facilities are to a large, disenfranchised population of downtown dwellers. "The Market is what the Market is," he says. What seems to bother him more is that there are so few agencies -- be they governmental or private -- willing to provide and maintain public facilities, especially when it would behoove them to do so. He likens the situation to the general public's paradoxical opinions regarding the building of prisons: Everyone thinks it's a good idea until that brand-new penitentiary is scheduled to go up in their own neighborhood. The analogy is apt in more ways than one. Apt, and disturbing.

The range of ages, the ethnic diversity, and the often startling examples of mental and physical illness that characterize the not-so-well-off men and women who regularly frequent the Market's bathrooms is telling: old, old men lugging plastic sacks overflowing with scavenged paper and cans; unbelievably young and fucked-up street kids; prostitutes; American Indians; Mexicans; blacks. There's a sick kind of irony in a 20-year-old kid shooting smack at 7:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, in a stall located only a half-floor down from the largest tourist attraction in economically booming Seattle. Our deepest hypocrisies are laid bare by the yuppified buying and selling of Native American knickknacks upstairs in the Market, while right downstairs the big drunk Sioux at the urinal reels into the wall with his cheap pint clasped through a grimy paper bag. Here we have a dichotomy that gets at the unmentionable mechanics of class, in collision with that most basic concept of supply and demand, and all revolving around touchy issues of privacy and need. The right to privacy, in this instance, and as with so many of our rights, looks like a bit of a con.

Squalia cites recent efforts by the city to place "automated toilets" -- an expensive, effective type of self-sanitizing, mechanically monitored facility used in Europe -- in certain locations around downtown, but wrangling over cost and placement have made any sort of advancement in this arena very slow going. Besides the typical stinginess over the funding of social services, nobody seems to want to accommodate the public for fear of attracting just the sort of disheveled, drug-addicted poor who flock to the Market. Squalia finds this kind of "there goes the neighborhood" logic specious and shortsighted; he believes that any improvements and increases in the availability of public facilities would benefit the city overall. "We've gotten so concentrated on our own personal well-being," he says. "The city needs to open itself up to the fact that it's not meeting certain obligations that it needs to."

As for the current state of the restrooms at Pike Place Market -- and their rather lonely position as one of the last bastions of public space in this growing metropolis -- Squalia makes the following plea: "Somebody else has to step up to bat."