DIARY OF A HOME RENO WINO
Day, “PEE-ka-boo…”
We’ve all had these people in our lives. The ones who act like taking a seat on the toilet is no different than taking a seat on the bus.
These are the college roommates, boundary-bashing boyfriends, or the “plus ones” of the long-distance relatives sleeping on your couch who unabashedly invade your bathroom with the same casual attitude as someone checking their texts while waiting for the spin cycle to finish at the laundromat.
I am not one of these people, for I am civilized.
And that means, I close the door when I pee.
Every. Damn. Time.
Not half-way. Not pretty-much. While I may stop short at hanging a “Keep Out or Die!” sign on the doorknob, the message is clear. For the next twenty seconds or so, this land, is my land.
Sometimes, I close the door even when I’m home alone. Force of habit, I suppose. I don’t simply prefer to pee in private, I insist on it. No exceptions. Well, make that two exceptions. My dogs. If you have four legs and endure my daily hovering and praise for “doing your business”, the least I can do is return the favor and allow you to stare at me cutely while I do mine.
But the buck stops there!
As far as my aversion to sharing a bathroom with other humans, the reason is obvious.
There is not a single thing about relieving yourself that is sexy or attractive or imitable, frankly, so why would anyone wish to share the process with a pal? Peeing, or “taking a leak” or “draining the dragon” or whatever other hideous slang you have for it, is, to me, strictly a private venture under every imaginable circumstance.
If we’re being really-real here, there are very few bodily functions that don’t make me want to shield my eyes and cover my ears. I’ll give you a pass on an occasional nose blow, but I’m not a fan.
Does this make me a weirdo? Or, rather, a hopeless romantic who’s partial to a bit of mystery? Perhaps I’m just completely superficial and easily grossed out. (Sidebar, I did break up with a law school boyfriend because he slurped his salad. Literally, slurped it. To this day, I don’t know how that’s even possible! Oh, and there was a boyfriend before him who got the axe because he left a little piece of food on his lip until I just couldn’t take it anymore).
Whatever. Hopeless or freakish, doesn’t matter. Bottom line is, when it comes to relationships, any relationship, I don’t need to know how the sausage is, shall we say, un-made.
Over the years, I’ve had numerous “man-friends” who’ve thought nothing of wandering into a bathroom while I’m busy using it for something G-rated — like drying my hair — and then noisily emptying their bladders as a way of saying, “Good morning, sunshine!”
“What the hell are you doing?” I’d bark to the suitor’s reflection in the mirror, as he serenaded me with the soothing hiss of urine being ferociously expelled from a great height after eight hours of build up.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” would be a typical, furrowed-brow response. Infuriating, yes, but an accurate one, since, in truth, there really is no mistaking the activity for anything else. Besides, it was a rhetorical question anyway.
I’m curious to know when, since the invention of indoor plumbing, did the act of “going number one” in the presence of others become customary, or cute, or couple-ish? Frankly, I can think of far better bonding opportunities than those occurring over the glory of waste elimination.
When watching movies, for example, depicting the new fiancé sitting on the john trying to dull the view to her crotch with unnaturally knocked knees and a panty-hammock stretched between her ankles while casually conversing with her hunky boyfriend (who’s flexing his pecs with toothbrush in hand), just three short steps away, I cringe so badly that it takes me a good five-minutes to unfold.
I also ask myself, “Whyyyyyyyyyy-ah?” What topic could possibly be so compelling that it has to be talked about OVER A STEADY STREAM OF PISS?
“Oh Brock,” the pretty blonde might say while delicately unfurling the roll of toilet paper on the wall, “What are your thoughts on world peace?” Her voice trails off as she drops a soggy wad of tissue between her legs, stands up, and flushes.
What about any of that is sexy?
No man on this planet has ever sat around with the guys gushing over his girl like, “I gotta tell you, when Carissa follows me into the bathroom, races me to the toilet, and takes a wicked leak while reminding me to take out the garbage, I mean, I feel like the luckiest man in the world!”
Once, in another life, I was hiking with my now ex-husband and his best man, when I came upon a steep embankment — a six foot drop, basically — adorned on either side by long, sinewy weeds. I grabbed onto them for support, wrapping them around my hands as if I were escaping from prison with the help of knotted up bed sheets, and repelled myself down the hill.
Turns out, the weeds were a genus known as “stinging nettle”. My hands turned beet red and immediately began to swell. The pain, the prickliness and the itch had me convulsing as if I had just licked an electric fence right there, in the middle of an otherwise bucolic pasture.
I let out a scream so guttural, it could have curdled milk. Until then, the only sound to be heard for miles was that of the tall blades of grass gently touching each other.
My ex, a tree hugger and avid hiker, assessed the situation. “Quick! You need to pee on your hands to stop the reaction! Urine has a chemical that neutralizes the poison. Do it! Do it now! Wait, are you…foaming at the mouth? Hurry!!!”
Processing his words under the threat of imminent death, I did my own assessment. Juxtaposing the need to drop my shorts, pee on demand and then give myself some abbreviated “golden shower” with my new husband taking notes, against the risk of permanent nerve damage, I raised my hands — which were now the size of catcher’s mitts, throbbing, and as red as a freshly butchered cow — held them limply in front of my face like a surgeon awaiting rubber gloves, and sputtered, “Nah. I’m good.”
I don’t hike anymore, by the way.
We live in America, land of the free and home of the public restroom where, as a practical necessity, strangers are corralled and forced to urinate en masse — be it at a baseball game, movie theater, hotel bar, etcetera, but that doesn’t mean we all approve of it.
My opposition to urinating near others manifests itself so strenuously at times, that I literally seize up and can’t actually “go” no matter how badly my bladder is reminding me that it is, beyond all else, a vital organ with finite storage capacity and, when full, will cause enough discomfort to prevent me from being able to speak in complete sentences or, for that matter, breathe.
This hang-up is a real thing. It even has a name. “Shy bladder syndrome” it’s called, or “paruresis” if you really want to impress your friends at parties.
Coy moniker aside, according to the Google, I definitely have it.
While its cause is unclear, I’m certain my condition is related to the fact that I was raised an only child, and therefore never had the pleasure of siblings barging through the bathroom door to take their turn at the toilet, or a brother with friends who would challenge each other to, “who can write the longest word in the snow” contests.
Me and my shy bladder have found a way to cope, save the rare but occasional situation where I REALLY gotta go in public, and she’s insisting on a private suite and a pep talk before coming out of her shell.
There are tips and tricks you can employ in such a pinch. Background noise is essential, since it masks the ugly-sounding splash of urine pouring from your body into an awaiting bowl of toilet water.
Things like running the faucets, help. As does waiting for the precise moment the person in the stall next to you creates a noisy distraction by flushing, or even having a friend make loud, innocuous conversation while you’re hovering hopelessly in those precious few minutes of intermission as a long line of ladies hold their pitchforks and scowls wondering what could possibly be taking you so long.
I was on set recently in a small, make-shift television studio which was, a few hours earlier, just a simple hotel meeting room.
The conference table had been pushed up against a small wet-bar which housed an empty wine refrigerator. Standard issue chairs, floor vases and such had been pushed to one corner as if a big, rude wind had come by, and dark swaths of black, raw-edged material were stretched over the windows with the same care and flare employed by many a college freshman when needing to dry a towel.
The improvised décor, coupled with the lack of the permanent studio lighting, monitors and other components to which I’ve become accustomed, didn’t bother me. Over the last couple of years, thanks to a certain pandemic you may have heard about, I’ve made frequent national television appearances from far less optimal conditions — like, with shitty wifi on my laptop, propped up on the poker table in my living room after I’ve painstakingly removed my entire wine collection from the shot.
In other words, I’m a pro. So, the scissor-cut curtains which looked as though they had been swiped off a porno set were definitely not the problem.
The bathroom, oh wait, I’m sorry, I mean “water closet”, was the problem!
After arriving slightly early for my call time and engaging in the usual small talk and cursory introductions with the crew — all of them men — I realized the sugar-free iced-teas I consumed earlier in the day were coming home to roost.
This was a dilemma, since the show I was hired to help narrate would have me sitting in front of a camera for at least an hour, maybe more. I needed to be undistracted by the prospect of my bladder exploding like a water-filled balloon being dropped from the 17th story of a downtown office building.
Notice, I did not say I needed to be undistracted by the prospect of “peeing my pants” because that, you see, would never happen.
With my version of self-diagnosed “shy bladder syndrome”, the real threat is not that my bladder will spring a dainty leak. Oh, no, no. no. That’s for amateurs. My bladder would hold on as if it were in some sort of competition. A fight to the death that could only resolve with a bursting of my bladder so forceful, I’d end up fire-hosing everyone within five feet, a combination of urine and tissue and dignity bursting through my bellybutton or eyeballs or wherever with the same velocity as a pent-up city hydrant.
Do you remember the scene from the iconic Ridley Scott film, “Alien” where an alien — hence, the name — somehow gets inside a crew member’s body, incubates, and then…surprise! It bursts forth out of his chest cavity with all the blood and guts you can imagine, as the rest of the crew looks on, paralyzed with wide-eyed panic? They have no clue what to do with this deadly (although mildly cute) worm-like creature sticking its head out of their now dead crew-mate’s body, but you just know they had to be thinking, collectively, “Fuck me!”
In my mind, the end result of sucking it up would be kind of like that, were you to replace the belly-bursting alien with my iced-tea soaked bladder.
So, I bit the bullet.
“Before we get started, um, is there a ladies room,” I asked, faking my way through the question as if I were about to go pee like a normal person.
I was hoping beyond hope that the answer would be something like, “Yea, it’s down the hall, past the elevators, first door on your right. Here’s the key.”
Instead, I got, “Yea, it’s right there,” pointing to a black, glass door next to the coat closet, about, I’d say, a full six inches from everyone’s eyes and ears.
What struck me, initially, about the bathroom, was that the door was devoid of an actual knob. There was no latch. There was no lock. Basically, it was a swinging door, ill-fitting to boot, that didn’t quite rest inside the jam. It got stuck on a piece of trim, leaving a millimeter of space between the door itself, and the curious outside world.
“Okay, well, fuck me!” was my first thought, not sure whether that was my brain talking to my bladder, or my bladder talking to my brain.
At that moment, it didn’t really matter. Because at that moment, NOTHING mattered other than figuring out a way to pee without either (1) dying of embarrassment, or (2) just plain dying.
I instinctively employed my go-to moves, turning on both the hot and cold faucets as high as they would go while faking a coughing fit, followed by a louder than necessary throat clearing. I continued with a few false sneezes, deep breathing exercises, and some sternly whispered self-talk into the mirror that went something like, “Hey, hey, hey! Now you listen to me! You have built too good a reputation to ruin it by having your bladder explode right out of your belly mid-script! You are going to do whatcha gotta do, see? Then you are gonna march out there, smooth your bangs, ignore the goddamn porno curtains, and get it done!”
It worked.
Until…
I finished the shoot, and re-entered the bathroom-slash-water-closet to throw away another iced-tea bottle when…
OH.
MY.
GOD.
The door to the bathroom, as mentioned, was black. And glass. Since I was only stepping in to dispose of trash, I sort of held the ill-fitting door open by squeezing the pane between my thumb, on one side, and my four other fingers on the other.
It was then I noticed something that had completely eluded me just a couple of hours earlier.
I COULD SEE MY FINGERS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR!
I wiggled them. I also slid my hand up and down a few times to be sure I was seeing what I saw.
Are you following?
This weirdly-modern bathroom door was not opaque. It was transparent. Not, like, totally transparent. More translucent, like, “Hey-check-out-this-super-hip-design-element-where-people-get-a-blurry-version-of-what-you’re-doing-in-here-because-it-was-featured-on-some-episode-of-HGTV-by-a-designer-who-doubles-as-a-pervert” kind of see-through, you could say.
Panic was futile. The damage had been done.
What will they think of me now? I mean, it’s bad enough if everyone saw me pee, but what about the pacing, and the fake coughing and the forced sneezes? Did they see that too?
When I am doing anything on camera in a studio, I over-prepare, often traveling with two small duffel bags of makeup, curling irons, a change of clothes, three different hair sprays, rose water, a picture of my dogs, my deceased grandmother’s rosary beads, safety pins, an extra bra, a pen, an empty ziplock bag and several phone chargers, but NOW I GOTTA BRING MY OWN TARP AND TWO-WAY TAPE TOO? Oh, I know! Why stop there? I’ll just hire a personal assistant whose job is to follow me around with spray paint, heavy duty duct tape…and a bugle. That’s bound to get a lot of attention on Craig’s List!
There is a bright side, I suppose.
Imagine if, one day, I am kidnaped, and my abductors are holding me in a remote desert where the only place to pee is in a shallow hole behind a lone, long-dead saguaro. They miscalculate how long it will take for someone to pay the hefty ransom, because, everyone they hit up, including my own parents, is like, “You said how much? Ooohhh, yea, um…I’ll have to get back to you.”
Days, maybe weeks, go by, and we’ve eaten all the beetles or camel dung or whatever we need to survive in the world’s dumbest kidnapping location until my kidnapers’ only means of survival is to take a page out of Bear Gryllis’ playbook and not only drink their own pee, but mine too…
They’ll retrieve some sort of receptacle from their kidnapper’s toolkit, and direct me to go do my business since, naturally, I will have been holding it all this time. Then they’ll dismissively point or flap their wrists into the starlit barren-ness of it all, while kicking themselves for not kidnapping a victim in higher demand.
Just then, I’ll realize the moment is mine.
I’ll look ’em right in the eyes, cross my arms, and with an unmatched defiance, ask but one question.
“Tell me, fellas, are you familiar with the movie ‘Alien’?”
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