Never urinate in public.
My father’s words stuck with me for all these years because he was not normally a didactic man. I had no memories of sitting on his knee by the fire as he passed down the commandments of his own father, his father’s father, his father before him…He was a more subtle parent than that. Or at least not so eager to interfere.
Once, when I was sixteen and it was twilight, my father and I were walking back from a ball game when I suggested, with a grin, that I find a hidden corner to relieve myself: I had to piss real bad. I thought he would appreciate my daring. While my father was not adventurous in the sense that most people might mean it, he was exploratory and intelligent, good at maneuvering, quick to identify plain truths about his environment that he used to get where he wanted to go. By example he had taught me that you can go anywhere you act like you’re meant to be.
“The worst that can happen is they’ll ask you to leave,” is what he said.
“Nobody cares,” is also what he said.
But when I pitched the idea of public urination to my father, he replied, “No,” so quickly it was as if he’d been waiting for me to ask this exact question. His head shook with a pointed slowness so that there was no chance of misunderstanding him. “Just wait. We’ll stop at a gas station.”
“But look!” I gestured to the thin brush we walked along, beyond which was a guardrail and the interstate. Headlights, timid in the half-light, barreled by every few seconds, accompanied by an engine’s roar. A steady breeze rolled in from the ocean, carrying with it an invigorating sweet and salty scent. The brush provided, I thought, just enough coverage in its foliage and shadows.
“No,” my father repeated. “It’s not worth it. You can get away with it nine times out of ten, but that tenth time…” He shook his head again, this time quicker, more like a shudder.
Obviously his mention of a “tenth time” activated my imagination. I imagined what might’ve happened to my father. Maybe it happened the summer he turned sixteen. Maybe he’d been walking home with his friends after baseball practice under a similar twilight, strolling down the sidewalk of his quiet hometown. For a while he’d been complaining about how badly he needed to piss and how irresponsible it was for their town to have no public restrooms. That’s when one of his friends suggested that my father piss in a nearby alleyway, a slender passage separating the Quik Convenience Store and Dean’s barbershop, the barbershop my father’s father had been taking him since there was hair on his head to cut. Dean even had a nickname for my father, “Buddy.”
There was no dumpster or anything else sizable enough to hide behind–my father would be completely exposed as he pissed. As with most “suggestions” made by sixteen-year-old boys, his friend had actually tossed out a thinly veiled ultimatum. My father understood that he was in the colosseum now. He looked down the alleyway.
“No way. Someone’ll see me!”
“We’ll watch out for you. Just do it.”
My father looked up and down the street nervously. There were few pedestrians and no cars going down the main street. Most everyone was home.
“Okay, okay. But you have to tell me if someone’s coming.”
My father scampered to the dead end of the alleyway where silver trash cans overflowed with hair trimmings and expired food. He looked over his shoulder one more time to see his friends snickering and urging him on. Quick as he could he undid his zipper to reveal himself and began to urinate. He applied tension to all the appropriate muscles in his midsection so that the contents of his bladder were released at full force upon the garbage and asphalt. Muffled cackles disturbed the otherwise settled atmosphere. Emboldened by his own bravery, my father joined his friends’ laughter. He mimicked the motions of a firefighter, waving his spray methodically left to right, right to left. Then the spray reduced to a trickle and then to nothing. With a skip in his step he returned to his friends, relief and triumph crowding his skinny chest. New life spread out before him, ready to be conquered.
“Wait, I gotta go too!”
One of my father’s friends rushed to the back of the alleyway and proceeded to piss as well. The boys’ laughter spilled out, more confident now, like a particularly pleased murder of crows. Then the back door to the barbershop opened and there stood Dean himself, carrying a trash bag. When he saw what was happening in the alleyway, he froze and stared at the three boys. Dean was a towering old man with slumped shoulders and gray eyes that were adept at either encompassing or penetrating any subject before him. The pissing friend was stuck where he was, cowering under Dean’s icy gaze.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Dean asked, appalled. His long face hung heavy with disgust. He turned to look at my father, whose stomach had curdled in shame, and his expression imperceptibly donned a shade of pity. “Jesus Christ, Buddy.” Then a wider indictment: “Is this what your fathers’ taught you?”
After a few more excruciating seconds, the pissing friend finally finished and all three boys fled down the street and into the darkening night.
Sitting next to my father in the car, only able to make out his silhouette, I suddenly got an impression of my father that I’d never had before, that his solid exterior was a betrayal of a more troubled, churning interior. If there had been enough light for him to cast a shadow, I couldn’t have guessed at its shape.
“Don’t disappoint me, please,” he said, succinctly wrapping up the discussion.
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