Piss off. Piss on it. I’m pissed.
I’m a piss-head who’s pissed it all away. Might as well rejoice in the pisses. The best pisses. Orgasmic, long-draining releases that flow through the body. When you’ve been busting with a liquid bowling ball screeching in your low-hanging, pregnant bladder.
Then you relax.
The golden stream arches. Ah.
I used to be a reporter for weekly print newspapers. It never paid much and I never hit the dailies or the big time. So, I became a mercenary, writing for the highest bidder. For 10 years that was the British Medical Association. If you’re going to sell out might as well be for a good cause – the doctors! Health! Medicine!
Then things went digital and print died. Next thing I know everybody is telling me my stories are too long and that instead we should do top 10 lists.
Because on social media people are 26% more likely to click on a story that has a number in it.
And we got to get those clicks.
The bosses said to make the information snackable.
Then the truth died because people didn’t read anymore.
And people forgot how to be good citizens.
This is my piss-take of how I’ve pissed it all away.
In a top ten list.
E.Z. and snackable.
It aims to titillate the voyeuristic nature of the great hordes.
Everybody pisses.
I like good piss. I’ve had epic spiritual ones.
That story of The Rolling Stones getting arrested for pissing on the concrete wall of a gas station.
‘We piss anywhere, man.’
The greatest rock and roll statement ever uttered. A prophetic summation of the era we live in.
And so, dear people, without further ado:
Here they are. The Top 10 Pisses. In no particular order.
Each one is beautiful and stands on its own merit. I have not ranked them.
What do you think I’m crazy or something?
1.
(Circa February 1978)
With boy scouts in the winter. We were learning survival skills at a snowy retreat in northern Quebec.
I don’t remember the names of the other boys in the troop now but we were like temporary brothers.
On the first night we left the roaring fire inside the chalet and went out into the crisp cold.
The moonlight spilled warm silver across the snow. We were wrapped up like astronauts in thick snowsuits with heavy gloves and balaclavas. We walked down a road lined with snow banks and pine trees. We unzipped all the layers and negotiated our dicks out into the freezing air. We pissed our initials in the snow.
This one little guy, he was the shrimpiest of all of us, his piss shot like a laser straight into the woods really far. We all laughed and congratulated him. It was like a super-power. He could piss really far! It shot – I swear to God – about 20 feet. I wrote my name in the snow in cursive but didn’t have enough juice to loop the L.
The next day, one of the scout leaders, a 90-year-old Scandinavian dude named Rudy took me under his wing. Rudy had escaped the Nazis by cross-country skiing a great distance across Norway and Sweden.
We skied across a frozen lake and then we found a snowbank between trees in the woods and dug a hole. He had a tarp and we spread it out over the top of the big hole.
We chopped pine branches off trees and laid them on top of the tarp and then covered that with snow. We crawled inside the igloo and closed it off and we slept the night, me and him in this shelter. Snug as bugs.
2.
(November 1992)
With Ramon in the Thar desert. Somewhere between Jaisalmer and Delhi.
He was Hugo Chavez’s son. I shit you not. He was the son of the then vice-president of Venezuela.
We had met at the Bang Lassi shop at the foot of the Jaisalmer sand fort. It looked exactly like a giant sandcastle you would build on a beach as a child. Big blocks and high towers.
One night, I sat on a raised circular sandstone platform at the base of the fort, at the crossroads of ancient paths.
Down the cobblestoned hill walks this Hispanic dude wearing an orange turban. A grey great-coat draped over his shoulders, blue socks pulled up to his knees and turned-up Arabian curly slippers. Like he is the Sultan of all this. Like he is king of this town. And I think “who the Fuck does this guy think he is?”
He sits with us and we drink the yoghurt smoothie with the fat dollops of green-paste cannabis stirred in and we trip and talk.
He advises me that the women of Buenos Aires are the most beautiful. He said he was staying a month in Jaisalmer “because I feel like I’ve been here before, in another life.” He was convinced he had been a Moghul. We ended up hanging out for a couple of weeks.
At some point my new best friend and I were on a bus careening through the night. It sped pell-mell and did not stop for nothing on a straight desert road built to kill the distance as best it could.
Ramon had a tattoo of a screaming American eagle on his shoulder and I asked him where he got it.
He looked morose and said: “In jail.”
He did 6 months for drunk driving.
The bus sped on and it was hours and hours and my insides were bursting with leaking liquid and I really needed to go.
I went up to the bus driver, who was surrounded by hanging garlands and postcards of various deities. I enquired nicely as to when he might expect to take a break and when the next stop was. His eyes remained fixed on the road.
Half hour, later, I approached him again and indicated if he could please just pull over for 5 minutes.
The head wobble. Yes. No. Maybe. Dunno.
The third time, and to be fair another half hour later, I threatened to unzip my fly and piss all over him and Ganesh and Vishnu. Motherfucker pull the fuck over.
And yet he sped on.
You know that point when you’re almost losing control?
Like fuck, when will my clench give way and fuck it, I piss my pants? Humiliated and stinking.
Finally, the bus (which was no more than a souped-up school bus, with those tight seats that cripple legs) pulls over in the middle of nowhere.
Out me and Ramon go, into the soft, low rolling sand dunes. Like walking over the folds of skin of an immense sleeping woman.
We walk a respectable distance. He by now is as desperate as I.
Under our feet is soft sand and there is only sand and a few shrubs as far as the eye can see into the starry night.
I unzip and hold my member. It is an active muscle. The bubble of pain is so tight.
With the unclench an orderly procession of molecules pushes and shoves. A traffic jam of patient trickling water just dying to get through that little pee-hole.
The panic is over though.
The torture is over.
All the liquid will get out into the sand.
At this point me and Ramon are just antennae, letting the life water flow through us.
Gradually the painful trickle gushed into a healthy riotous stream and I just stared up at the stars as I created a mini-oasis in the middle of the desert.
3.
(September 2020)
Last week, on the day after the full September moon, so it was still pretty full.
And there was a star so close like a little buddy and it was Mars. The moon and Mars in a tight embrace.
It was a rare night out at a bar with Dude le Chansonnier belting out Pink Floyd, Neil Young, The Beatles. It was good to be out at a bar after the Covid-19 confinement. Bars had only been open again for the past few weeks. And they might not be open for long.
You wear a mask walking or standing. But can take it off when you sit.
I cycled home through the chilled night along cracked sidewalks and under weeping street lights.
Across the bridge by the dam to home and the $16,000 new roof. Past all the beautiful flowers, the cedar hedge wall and the protective arms of the King Oak.
I walk to the middle of the garden, shielded by the giant poplar and thick-trunk-old dead trees that make an organic barrier at the back.
Under the barren apple tree. Just 5 or 6 apples this year. The garden behind the shed this summer had yielded loads of beans, 3 decent cucumbers, a sunflower that collapsed under the weight of its own head, bushes of Kale, basil and mint.
Mushrooms were slippery and crushed underfoot. I have no idea if they are safe to eat.
I need to piss after the long ride. (I had finally started to write this piece. I felt it would be Zen to make one of the best pisses oh so very recent).
Instead of going inside to the toilet of my own home I unzipped my fly right in the middle of my garden, my plot of land.
How great it felt to own it. If I own it, I can piss anywhere, man. (Provided my wife doesn’t find out).
My lump of clay was like a sleeping sparrow in my curled, cold fingers. It was a warm healing hand.
Clear, golden liquid spilled a dark shape into the moss.
Mars will not be this close to the Earth again for 15 years.
I count full moons. This was full moon 224 since my daughter was born.
4.
(November 2004)
In a back alley in South London. This was my personal best-ever for length of time holding my bladder.
The pain and desperation and drip-torture and panic I would piss myself that got me to that moment. In the drab alley I pissed like a racehorse and the Mekong Delta rushed to the gutter.
The piss just kept on and on and on, splashing happily on the concrete.
This was on the return leg of a 24-hour round-trip to Amsterdam from London in a mini Cooper.
My mate Marwick – total legend—hatches this plan one night at the pub. Turns out the ferry across the English Channel is only 20 quid if you can return to the ferry 24 hours after you first make footfall on continental European soil.
And so therein lay the challenge. Road trip, like a Gumball Rally.
There was me, Marwick, Smiley and Jules. We left London the Saturday morning, bombed down the M2, headed to Dover.
Marwick hears on the radio about a massive traffic jam building up. At the last second, he decides to turn off the highway and take the winding country lanes.
On the radio Arsenal is playing Tottenham and it was like 1-1, 2-1, 2-2, 3-2, 3-3. 4-3, 4,4, and then 5-4 to the ARRSENAAAAAL!
We later found out that traffic jam lasted over six hours. We would have missed the ferry and the trip would have been wrecked if Marwick hadn’t made the split-second decision to exit right.
Me and the boys talked about the Large Hadron Collider that was being built under the earth. The Higgs Boson – God particle – that they were searching for. Those egghead scientists. What if they rip open a black hole?
The piss was on the way back though. I will try to stick to topic.
Suffice to say after an epic night in Amsterdam and 2 hours sleep at the youth hostel, I had some leftover grass on the ferry back.
We sank pints on the deck of the ferry. I went to the washroom and rolled a fat spliff. I should have ditched it in the trash can at Calais. I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.
Marwick was maybe a bit pissed at me for bringing it across. Technically, the car could get impounded.
Off the ferry, England is a fortress. The white cliffs of Dover are a wall to outsiders. The defenses built up over 2,000 years. We went in through a tunnel under the low teeth of an actual drawbridge grate. It was unwelcoming and fuck-off ugly. It was uphill through tunnels and then over rolling cliffs.
I loved this country, this country of my blood.
I was born in Quebec to British parents who came over on the Queen Elizabeth II boat. I lived in the colony and endured the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution. I had a Québécois spirit but would never be one of them.
I was proud to be English. All the stories about the Battle of Britain. That V2 doodlebug bomb that was headed straight for my grandparents’ house and my baby mum shoved under the dining table, only for the bomb to veer off and level 10 blocks just down the road. My mum’s cousin was a Hurricane pilot who flew 850 hours but got shot in the back as a war crime 1 month before the war ended in Europe.
I understood this island fortress. Vikings, Spaniards, French. Two fingers up yer arse! You can all fuck off! Bollocks to ya!
All the way up through these secret tunnels and over the high hills and along the highway, I had to piss.
All the way through the outskirts of London through the concrete spaghetti of twists and turns there was nowhere to pull over.
Then we were desperately spotting places.
How about Here?!
Down there!
Marwick didn’t want to stop. He kept pushing it. Wanting to get further, faster. I think he was seeing how many hours he could do the Amsterdam-London run in.
Finally, he pulls over, the motor running, and we skip down the alley.
Brilliant to piss when a car is waiting with the motor running. Like rock and roll bank robbers.
5.
(February 2009)
In Dundee, Scotland. After Jules’s funeral.
He had died of bacterial meningitis.
I took the train up from London. In the church, I took a blessing from the priest, with my arms crossed over my chest, as instructed. We could approach for a blessing if we were not necessarily religious, but agnostic. We were told to respectfully not take communion if we were not true believers.
The wake was held at a lovely home by the sea. It had a terraced garden that stretched way up a hill in three, giant-tiered plateaus. It was a long back garden.
In the night, with a glass of Scotch in my hand, I recounted the story of the tiny, miraculous sign I had witnessed following the news of his death.
The ice cubes chinked a chorus in the glass.
“I found a loonie and a dime on the tiles of the platform at Euston Square. Two Canadian coins.
Sure, dropped by a tourist. But why the 10 and 1 combination? The digits make 11.
Now when we went to Amsterdam, Jules had this business card. It was pure white and had the number 11 punched out in military numbers. It was a see-through 11.
It was the coolest club in Amsterdam and his buddy had given him this card and we were going to go there.
“We finally find a taxi cab after buying supplies and hitting a few pubs. We show the driver the card with the address and he takes us there. Down by the docks. We see a 12-storey concrete building that is gutted and abandoned. But on the 10th floor we see disco lights and small figures in the windows, dancing.
We get to the club and there’s a line-up of around eight very sexy and sophisticated people and we are four dudes.
There is a Wrestlemania-sized bouncer and a supermodel with a clipboard at the door, behind the velvet rope. It is early and still light. The line is moving and we are chatting with the blond babes in front of us. Casual-like.
“A couple of people arrive from behind us and waltz right past and get ticked off the list on the clipboard and go right in. It’s that type of club. A pecking order, hierarchy. Club politics.
And me, I kinda got a chip on my shoulder about waiting in lines outside clubs. In the freezing cold sometimes for hours in the dead of winter. To a shitty dive tavern: Like a Shawn’s or Cheer’s or a McWhatever’s.
As Canadian men of modest means – often without dates – we all had a complex about lining up for clubs in sneakers or not the right jeans.
“And all the sexy girls swoosh right in. Right past us.
“So. Jules turns to me and says, ‘Mike, go tell them you’re a Rock Star.”
To which I say, “I am a Rock Star.”
“And I turn and walk straight up to the woman with the clipboard:
“Excuse me, is there going to be a problem here with us boys getting into the club tonight? Because we just drove seven hours from London. We heard this was the coolest club in Amsterdam and the place to be. But we only have 24 hours. So, if we ain’t gonna get in, please tell me now ‘cause we’ll go party somewhere else.”
And she bats her big beautiful lashes and flicks her jet-black eyes up and down at me:
“How many are you?”
“Four,” I say and wave my hand at Jules, Smiley and Marwick, gesturing at them to step forward and look like fucking gentlemen. And they do and she says “OK” and the bouncer unclips the velvet rope and the four of us are suddenly walking down this long white tunnel. The walls were billowing white linen. Like one of those flexible corridors that get you to the door of the airplane.
A tall man in a wide-brimmed hat and long coat walks past us and I swear to God to this day it was Michael Stipe from REM.
“And we partied and danced all night as we looked out over the canals and felt the North Sea.
‘It was high up and felt like a party outside Saint Peter’s Gates. At the altar of the dance floor there were huge swooping white curtains.
“It was a heavenly night. So, to find the $1 plus the .10 cents. In coins. Made me think of 11. Jules was laying breadcrumbs.”
“Also, on the dime, there’s the tiny Bluenose sailboat.
“When I was a boy, I had wicked ear infections. To deal with the pain, I often visualized myself on a tiny sailboat, floating on the sea. And today, after feeling the weight of his ashes in the plastic urn, I watched as his wife and friend sailed out into the calm waters of the harbour until the sailboat looked just as tiny as the one on the dime, as they spilled his ashes on the sea in the form of a J.”
Following that soliloquy (I am a storyteller and could bullshit for England in the Olympics, mate) me and Smiley walk down to the harbour. We walk to the end of the high, stone wharf that stretches out to the sea.
The full moon spilled silver wisdom, enlightening several layers of clouds. The clouds were a shimmering archipelago.
We walked to the edge of the high storm wall. The lapping waters were 50-feet below.
We pissed off the edge. My stream fell and fell the greatest distance, dispersing to droplets off the cliff.
A photo of that full moon and that scene is now trapped inside my ancient Erikson 3300 flip-slide phone.
Maybe it is better to just have the memory.
Maybe some AI robot will discover it in the rubble one day and access its beauty.
6.
(Circa 1975 – month unknown)
Now this one is hilarious because it wasn’t an actual piss. It was me hearing my dad bash his thump with a hammer while building the downstairs bathroom.
One night, as I lay under the covers getting to sleep in my basement room on the captain’s bed, I hear Bang! AAAAAHHHGRRRRRR!
Now keep in mind my dad, being British in those days, did not swear. (Can you fathom how times have changed?)
Even saying CRAP or DAMN or PISS or ASS or FART was forbidden. You couldn’t even say BLOODY.
Especially not BLOODY…That was very bad. BLOODY FOOL! was the worst insult that could ever be hurled by an Englishman back in the day. They were gentlemen. Not like us Yobs now calling each other FUCKING CUNTS! gratuitously every night down the pub.
Then I hear another bang. And a thump, followed by a clatter.
Then comes the second BANG! And the long AAAARRGGHHFFFF!!
OH, PISS ON IT!
He shouts and I crack up in uncontrollable laughter under the covers.
7.
(December 2001)
On the London Underground Metropolitan line. One dark, cold night it got stuck between stations in the middle of a sprawling expanse of tangled railway lines.
This line ran west to east across London from Uxbridge to King’s Cross to Aldgate. It was long and lumbering.
I spent weeks of my life on that train travelling to and from my job as a reporter at the Uxbridge Gazette. First, all the way from Camden Road, taking the Number 10 bus to King’s Cross before the epic clickety-clack journey. All told, it took 1.5 hours one way.
The Metropolitan line had a purple theme. It had these plush upholstered booths with zig-zag jazzy patterns. It was like sitting in a diner, facing strangers.
Back in those days, it was not uncommon to sink 3 pints at lunch and then continue down the pub after work. Hard drinking was an occupational hazard and a job requirement for print reporters.
Usually I would piss before heading to the train and then get out to piss at the public urinals at Finchley Road. Clockwork timing was crucial.
The thing is, once you break the seal, the beer just runs right through you. Pissed to the gills, literally. Most nights I’m just a walking sip-sack.
This December night after the work Christmas party I was on the last Metropolitan train heading east. It was nearly midnight. I was the only person in the entire carriage. The water was already leaking quickly into my bladder. I was eager to hit Finchley Road.
The train lumbered slowly and then lurched to a stop, the engine straining. Then the engine stopped and silence.
I clenched and clenched and got up to pace to ease the pressure.
The train was dead. I was trapped. I looked out of the window of the double doors. All I could see was row after row of long silver bars of tracks. Layer after layer, some rusted and dirty. Intertwined. And there were graffitied parked trains on some tracks, resting.
There were signal lights sticking up.
It was just like being in the train set that I used to play with as a kid. It had been my father’s. It came in a huge box of heavy metal tracks.
My dad gave it to me and we connected them all on the floor of the basement. We made a huge loop or a figure eight, with switches to get the train to change tracks and directions, looping around.
The set had huge metal stations that connected in pieces, and a pedestrian bridge and a few little people. I would like to put my mini soldiers all around the tracks, and set up blocks as barriers to derail the train.
It was powered by this bulky transformer. It had a shell of dull grey metal, like a primeval horseshoe crab. And a silver knob on top.
When you plugged it in you felt the surge of the voltage and you could feel the power humming. And then you would turn the knob and the train would start moving.
The train itself was amazing. It had wheels that spun and a mechanical arm that pushed them, just like an old steam engine. And it had a coal car, that I would attach to its hitch.
The wheels had a singular groove on the metal. It fit perfectly on the rail but you had to put them on just so.
The train also had passenger carriages and a flat-bed carriage and a caboose and an oil tank.
I keep pacing and pinching the head of my dick. I sit down some more but my bladder was ready to burst.
The train wasn’t moving and by now I am resigned to the fact I will have to piss on this train.
There are probably cameras and I could get arrested and fined.
But Fuck IT!
A little piss squirts out and a tiny wet stain on my underwear.
I leap up and head to the double doors. There is a little gap at the bottom where the doors meet. I aim for that.
I unzip the suit trousers and piss focussed into that hole, trying not to splatter.
Luckily there was no one around.
I did sway from side to side but think I did a pretty good job getting most of the piss under the doors.
8.
(September 1984)
Here again, not one of my pisses but then again maybe it will be in the future.
After high school I went to a two-year college known as a CEGEP. As a West Island boy, it meant I had to take two buses, the 68 down grotty Gouin Boulevard following the river and past the Belmont Fun Park, and then the 64.
I changed buses at the Salon des Quilles, a nine-pin bowling alley in Cartierville. The place was full of retired old people smoking.
One day after stepping off the bus I smelled the stank of piss, booze and human body odour.
A dead-drunk ragged bum was swaying from side to side with his pants half pulled down and his dick out and then a small arch of piss spurted up like a fountain right on the sidewalk in front of everyone and he collapsed back to a sitting position on the park bench behind him.
He pissed all over his filthy jeans as he grizzled and grumbled incoherently. Passersby including myself just gave him a wide berth. Jeez, how pissed can you be to not even bother finding a bush or an alleyway?
When I emerged from the bowling alley, having emptied my bladder like a civilized gent, the bum was passed out drunk on the park bench. The head of his dick was caught in the elastic waistband of his underwear, peeking out like a shrivelled turtle head.
I’ve always had a romanticized soft spot for the hobos, the bums, the itinerants. Indeed, passing by, if they ever catch my eye, they see I will be one of them one day and cackle recognition.
9.
(November 2013)
It was my first day on the job back in Canada after 14 years in England. There was a snowstorm.
Of fucking course.
It had taken me seven months of job-searching to be a reporter or writer after 10 years as a senior writer for the British Medical Association.
And there are no weekly newspapers anymore.
I got a bit desperate to do something so I joined a temp agency and they got me job in the Lee Valley warehouse. And that was a good hour’s drive, booting it from our house. I would leave early to skip the traffic at the curve and through Ottawa.
Then after a week of $10 an hour, pulling all manner of tools onto the shipping carts and shipping them out. I got the phone call from the University in the warehouse locker room.
They did want to hire me as a writer on a six-month contract. And the pay is $68,900. And you get a six per cent top-up in lieu of any holiday. Woo-hoo! I did some fist pumps and glory, glory hallelujah! I can escape the warehouse!
My wife, too, thank goodness, was working at temp jobs and had been supporting me (although to be fair I had just walked away with a juicy redundancy package. The first and only one of my life but sweet Jesus I had waited so long and deserved it. My pals in IT had had a few such packages and I was like SHIT I am in the wrong business, man).
My wife had wrapped presents at Christmas on Parliament Hill, and been a receptionist, and for two days in the jewellery department at The Bay. She was a fighter.
After cleaning the thick snow off the 2001 Jetta, we were driving in together to Ottawa. I was going to drop her off at the reception job and then go for my first day at the University.
We make our way past the huge graveyard in the centre of town and on to Autoroute 50. Mad Max time. Speeders in a rush on the left. No concept of braking distance. Either floor it or get into the right lane. Me, I’m no stress. Nice and smooth and steady. Zen-like.
Then we get to the outskirts of what is known as La courbe – the curve. Red tail lights glow in front of us as the blood cells congeal quickly and I hit the brakes and slow and then we are all bumper to bumper.
You know it is bad when the traffic jam starts above the hill. Traffic jammed up for a good 5 kilometres. A long strand, under four bridges, before the hump over de la Gappe and the river and then another raised hump that splits and you choose another bridge over the Ottawa River and there are the Houses of Parliament on the cliff.
And here we were stuck. I was going to be late for work on my first day on the job. And the 4 cups of alongé expresso from the Italian Berletti were now weeping tears into my lower guts.
Here we go again.
It is manageable. First there is the anticipation. The pangs and dribbles.
Then the realization, followed by the resignation to discomfort.
Sure. Been here before. I have the bladder of a horse. Not to worry.
The legs mechanically shift the clutch and gas and my righthand wrestles the phallus between first and second gear.
The bladder turns to ice.
Crystalizing.
The legs mechanically moving. Shifting the waters to ease the pressure.
The excruciating helplessness. Inch by inch, foot by foot, crawling along the asphalt like a bug.
The bladder is fit to burst and I am plotting options.
Maybe I could piss in that water bottle?
Nah better not. How could I do that against gravity while driving? It’s bound to make a mess.
Ok, it’s gotta be that Tim Hortons on the corner behind the United Arab Emirates Embassy on Saint Andrew. I will buy a donut and use the washroom there.
It becomes my Shangri La, my simple Nirvana. The palace of dreams and enlightenment.
I had the faith to hold on and get to the white porcelain goddess, just in the nick of time.
On and on we crawl. The snow is falling wet and it is clumped up and slippery on the road.
Hum-drum. Torture. Dead time.
Then finally, I get to pull in to the right on Saint Andrew. We are there! I park and run inside.
Now let’s get this straight. I hate Tim Hortons. I never understood it as a necessary part of Canadiana. Somehow these fucking corporate weasels had wormed it to be like Main Street Canada. The coffee is piss flavoured with brown crayon shavings. Harsh, vile. And the food, forget it.
I leave Canada alone for 14 years and when I get back everybody is addicted to Timmies.
Like it is in the culture. Every soccer dad, and hockey mum with their Tim Hortons cups and PLASTIC lids. At 5 p.m. even! How do they sleep after chugging that massive coffee? Who are these people? Nothing more depressing than a line-up of 10 pick-up trucks on a Monday morning at the Timmies.
I go in the door and there is no bathroom at all. It is a service counter only. WTF! Where do the employees piss? Can’t ya break the rules and let me piss? There must be somewhere back there?
No.
So out I go into the snow. I walk to the snowy back edge of the parking lot where all the snow has been pushed, right next to the wall.
And I whip my dick out in broad daylight and go ahead and piss. I piss on you Tim Hortons. Ah, the sheer rebelliousness of it. I am proud human. I have achieved full Brian Jones.
No toilet? There ought to be a law.
(A little subscript here: To be fair, this was the only time Tim Hortons let me down as far as toilets are concerned. In the winter of 2015, our water pipe froze for six days. We got a big 10-foot hole dug in front of our house to unfreeze it. We melted snow off the roof in the bathtub. We took showers by driving early in the morning to the swimming pool. And when I needed to take a shit in the morning, I drove to the Tim Hortons, at the entrance to the 50. I hate their coffee but the donuts are pretty good.)
10.
(Easter-ish, 2017)
I drastically miscalculated where the Mallorytown rest stop was. With 2 kids in the 2001 Jetta, I pulled over on to the shoulder of the 401. I left the car running with the hazard lights and handbrake on.
Very tense, feeling those 18-wheelers roaring past, just feet away from the Jetta. But I was busting. All that coffee and plus the booze from the night before putting my kidneys into overdrive.
Shamelessly, I wandered down into the bent reeds in the mushy ditch. I thought I could make it to Mallorytown. I thought the rest stop with its multiple urinals was right where the 416 touches the 401 after that 80 kilometre-stretch South. But it was another 38 kms to go and I was not going to make it.
Fuck it. I was discreet as I could be, my back to the kids and the whizzing cars and trucks. I relinquished all control. What if a truck careened into the idling Jetta with the kids in it?
Nah, it will be ok.
The piss stream was a meditation. There was nothing I could do to speed it up anyway. Just sink into the defeat and wait. The flow would take as long as it was going to take. I soaked the reeds and thistles and hid my indecent exposure with slumped shoulders. It was all I could do.
I wonder how my children will remember that time their dad had to piss on the side of the highway.
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