Confessions of a Disingenuous Urinator

I’ve told this particular story a number of times, in various contexts. Mostly under the influence. Although I wouldn’t call it a story. It’s more of a verbal essay, really – a narrative with an agenda. I may as well tell it again though – now – sober and full of candor. It’s a story about how I pee, how I used to pee, and what that process says about me. And I guess what it says about all of us.

You see, it all started in late high school. I had a lovely and wonderful girlfriend with whom I spent the vast majority of my time. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t as much her coming to see me at my house, but more me going over there. Not that she was lazy, and not that she didn’t have a rather flammable desire to see me, it’s just that her house was bigger, nicer, and the guy at her town’s video store was funnier. I spent countless nights over there, tugging resentfully at my curfew as she kissed at my neck and told me just a few more minutes. Lots of time on the couch all tangled up in each other’s (clothed) limbs, watching Cheers reruns. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s any connection with sexual arousal and the need to urinate, but I did frequently have to use the bathroom. (Maybe it was the half-gallon of milk I drank every time I was over. Could be.) In this house, the bathroom was right next to the master bedroom, where her parents lay nightly, watching a movie or drifting off with their glasses still resting on the bridge of their noses. I never really knew what was going on in there; I never looked in.

The confession comes in my habitual urinary behavior. You see, I knew they could hear, from their bedroom, what was going on in the bathroom. So I took a course of action, which, on the surface, might seem a bit strange. I would always aim my stream of pee at the side of the toilet, i.e. never at the water. This minimizes the noise of the pee. Noble of me, you think. He is making as little noise as possible so as to not wake the sleeping parents. Well, there’s that. But waking them was not my concern. My concern was this: I did not want my girlfriend’s parents to know that I had a dick. Well, I wanted them, I guess, to know that I had a dick, but I did not want them to be conscious of it. Because what happens, cerebrally, inside their little paternal brains? 1. Oh I hear Dave peeing. 2. It’s coming out of his dick. 3. Dave has a dick. 4. He probably wants to put it in or around my attractive young daughter. 5. I’d better not let that happen. So what do I do? I pee on the side. No noise, no first domino, no impetus, no 21-neuron salute.

Sometimes, though, this was very hard to achieve, this degree of accuracy which allowed for covert urination. Sometimes – in fact maybe more often than not – I would encounter other “problems,” in which case I would have to use one outstretched left arm to support myself on the back of the toilet seat while using the right hand to wrench the shit downward enough so that I could piss straight ahead instead of right back up in my own face. And in doing this, I had to be so far, physically, away from the actual bowl that I had to push really hard at the stream and hope that it was powerful enough to avoid a “leaky rainbow,” something which I could not always avoid, and something which I often had to wipe up with several squares of toilet paper and flush. I never did have the guts to try a high-arc “Joe Dumars Threeball” stream where I wouldn’t have to wrench much, and where I wouldn’t have to support my entire weight with an outstretched non-dominant arm, because I was afraid of hitting the ceiling, and there’s just nothing you can say for yourself if that happens. You’re busted.

So, point is, I was a deceptive little horny knave in late high school, with a hot girlfriend and severe paranoia.

Have I outgrown it? 'Fraid not. Just today, I walked into the 7th-floor men’s bathroom in my building and noticed that someone was in the stall crapping. (You can tell because the door hangs open if it isn’t occupied.) Luckily, I didn’t have to take a crap. But I did have to pee. So I approached the urinal, zipped down, and took aim for the dead center of the little bit of water standing in the bottom. Then I began to use pneumatic pressure from my chest, holding my breath and pushing, turning all red in the face and clenching my jaw, to make my morning Mountain Dew drain from me with as much force as possible. You see, the more noise you make with the stream, the larger the implied girth of the unseen conduit. Think of a hose pouring into a lake. It makes a deeper, louder sound than the high tinkle of a crow-beaked plant-feeder. So, reversing that, the lower and louder the sound, the more thunderous, if you will, the wider the dick (also, by simple geometrical similarity, the longer), and I’ve learned over the years that you can maximize the lowness of your sound by peeing into the precise middle of the standing liquid available.

Now, the man never emerged from the stall to see who I was, but let me tell you, if he had, there would have been no lack of respect in that wall mirror above the sink. Unless he knows the trick too. There is always that possibility. We all deal with these issues, we men. Am I so special in my bathroom roguishness? Please tell me I’m not.