A Friend in Peed
There's a urine jug on my windowsill. By urine jug I mean, well, a jug filled with urine. It's not a statement meant to shock; it's an immutable fact: "The sun gives light," "The earth is round" and "There's a urine jug on my windowsill."
Andrew, myself and my other roommate Cory-men in our late-20s, all with an every-other-day shaving regimen-peed in bottles because, for about a week, our bathroom lacked a toilet. Initial blame goes to our house. It's a 100-year-old Brooklyn brownstone that's witnessed better centuries. Our living room is more slanted than Fox News. Radiator heat is intermittent at best. Most integral, our leaky bathtub turned our downstairs neighbors' ceiling into a moldy swamp. Black trash bags are arranged beneath the ceiling to channel water into the bathtub. It's a tiny Niagara Falls, only with fewer Canadians.
To remedy the waterfall, our landlord enlisted a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks and a globe gut. Let's call him Albert. A man of few words besides, "Can I have a Coke?", Albert removed the bathroom tiles, sink, shower faucets and showerheads. With the lavatory stripped to its birthday suit, Albert sawed new white tiles into floor shapes. REEEEEEER! REEEEEEEEEEER! It sounded like Biohazard, a heavy metal band I pretended to adore as a teenager, my prime era of peer approval through fibbing. Escaping sawing, I skedaddled to a bar to watch football. When I returned, Albert's saw still went REEEEEEEEER! Around 10:30, I asked an important question.
"Umm? can you leave the bathroom so I can pee?"
His laugh sounded like "fuck you."
"Really, I have to pee."
He gestured to the toilet, sitting inside the bathtub.
"How am I supposed to?" pointing toward my crotch's general neighborhood.
"Go outside."
"It's 10:30 pm."
"So?"
"I'm not pissing in my front yard." Though, like any good New Yorker, I have zero problem peeing in someone else's front yard. Or doorway. Or stairwell.
"I'll be done in the morning, man," he said in an island accent thicker than grout.
I grabbed my empty Tropicana jug. Cory later followed suit with his Dr. Pepper bottle. Andrew selected his wide-mouthed, organic juice bottle, testament to an idealistic hippie past. And so, much like that magical instant when sperm and egg join and then split and then grow into something new, pee jugs were born.
If this were an isolated incident, it would be dire necessity. Like the Donner party, or killing boredom by watching "Friends." Sadly, history repeats, and so does jug urination. At 23, I was a temp, stuffing envelopes for a few bucks more than minimum wage. After paying rent, I enjoyed a can collector's spending power. To bulk up my wallet, I turned to medical experiments.
My parents, a doctor and a nurse, were opposed. "If you need money, we'll give it to you," my mother said, upon hearing I had sold a pint of plasma for $20. "Don't stick needles in your arms." I promised, and I kept my word.
And used my brains: I enrolled in MRI-testing programs and got paid $50 to provide brain-function data. This kick-started two years of submitting myself to everything from sleep-deprivation trials to electromagnetic cerebellum stimulation. Pain was unimportant. Money mattered, and especially the beer money buys.
In my medical-torture career, no experiment was stranger than that chilly March morning when a researcher offered me $150 to collect my urine.
"Every drop. For twenty-four hours," said the rubber-gloved researcher, handing me a brown, milk gallon?like container. Why? Something or another about hormones. What's important is that for 24 hours Juggy and I went wee, wee, wee, everywhere from Times Square to my Wall Street receptionist job to a Brooklyn dive bar, where I loaded up on gin and tonics. "My, that's?full," the researcher said upon my return, weighing the jug in her right hand.
I beamed with something I told myself was pride.
The morning after Albert began, my pride disappeared like the dodo. My bathroom resembled a construction-site Kosovo. The toilet remained on vacation in the bathtub, which was painted a questionable brown.
My first thought: "Oh, shit."
My second thought: "Where am I going to shit?"
I'm a chronic coffee drinker. I made black-hole-dark coffee, the kind causing bowels to march like infantrymen. Soon, far too soon, the troops did a gastrointestinal double-time. "I can hold it," I thought. "My sphincter is young. My sphincter is strong."
Two hours later, my sphincter was weak. I contemplated fashioning a makeshift toilet out of newspaper. Appropriately, I grabbed some New York Posts. I even unbuckled. And then the common-sense worm wiggled inside my head. I was 27 years old and preparing to poop on newsprint.
"You should've used your trashcan," my friend Emily said later on. "That's what I did when my toilet broke."
No. I've scheduled such degeneracy for after my inevitable downfall, when cirrhosis will have hardened my liver. I will dabble in heroin and bend over, somewhere near Port Authority, trading pleasure for degradation cut with pleasure.
I buckled up and waddled downstairs to my first-floor neighbor.
The next two days saw a continuing toilet deficit. "Construction's taking a bit longer," the handyman said. I called the housing department, or, rather, I thought about calling the housing department. Like a cranky Jewish-grandpa-in-training, I found it more fulfilling to bitch and moan to coworkers and friends. "It's like I'm at the doctor's office, and he won't stop asking me to pee in a cup," I explained.
"I hate the doctor's office," said one coworker.
"Me, too," another chimed in.
"Really, a jug?" one asked.
Oh, yes.
"Why don't you do something about it?" asked the doctor's-office hater.
Because when life crushes me with situations seemingly outside my control, I drink beer. That night, I downed buck-fifty Pabst at Welcome to the Johnsons, a LES dive. I stepped outside to smoke.
"Josh, what are you doing here?" shouted Margie. When we meet, inevitably at a bar, we get you're-my-best-buddy drunk, making plans smashed beneath sobriety's harsh, rational microscope.
What was I doing here? I motioned to my PBR inside. "Blowing off steam, and I can't pee in my toilet."
Her reply reminded me why I worship serendipity, that patron saint of You Lucky, Lazy Motherfucker. "I work for a housing nonprofit," she said, her pupils widening. "I deal with these violations all the time." By law, Margie explained, 24 hours was the no-toilet limit. Any longer, and we could report our landlord. I smiled with happiness unattainable even via beer, thanked Margie and made plans that we eventually broke. Then I emptied my bladder and headed home to what would now certainly be a life of indoor plumbing.
The next morning, the fourth, revealed a still-kaput crapper.
"Twenty ounces is not enough," Corey proclaimed, "for the first pee in the morning."
"Thirty-two is too easy to top," Andrew said.
I grabbed my SUV-ish jug, one-third full, and sloshed it around: "Step up to the plate."
Like a bottle rocket blasting into a puddle of gas, Andrew shouted, "I've had it up to here." He motioned to the top of his buzz-cut head, which, at five-feet-six, was hardly an impressive height to be fed up to. "I'm calling the landlord. If we don't have the toilet fixed by 8 p.m., we're staying at a hotel."
I told him about Margie. Equipped with that info, Andrew called. Our landlord listened. He felt guilty, a guilt amplified by our threat to stay in three, $300 hotel rooms. And order room service. It was ballsy. Obviously, we needed a functioning toilet. Not so obviously, we lack rent control. If we complain copiously, we risk incurring the wrath of our landlord, who can raise our rent to Empire State Building heights. It's a Catch-22. Yet like Yossarian's life-saving, change-of-heart leap, we made the right call: That night, our toilet flushed. The rushing water sounded as the first songbirds of spring.
Drama solved. Case closed. But several weeks later, why does my Tropicana remain on my windowsill, filling up, then evaporating, a flushing toilet's low-rent doppelgänger? Perhaps, like sniffing my thumbs or blowing snot into dirty socks, the urine jug has become part of my darker identity. Another quirk acceptable to few people-and even fewer girlfriends. It's a hazard of ignoring a social more. Once you tap into public pot smoking, armpit sniffing and aloud outbreaks of Britney songs, returning to the old you is all but impossible. A brave, new universe cracks open like a chestnut. Possibilities are as endless as Dick Clark, and twice as scary. For my jug and me, it's a marvelous world. A little smelly, sure, and less than hygienic, perhaps, but even roses have thorns. Now when my bladder bulges, I no longer curse a locked bathroom. Instead, I turn to my new friend, who accepts me completely.