I Hate Everyone, Except You(5)

Jodi said she didn’t, which was unusual because she had a strange affinity for public restrooms. Clearly, she had peed in the wave pool until her bladder was empty.

“I guess I’ll go,” I said.

The men’s room at Action Park was one of those places where you never want to find yourself. I mean, if some sort of sadistic genie ever forces you to choose between spending time in a Ugandan prison or a similar amount of time in the Action Park men’s room during a heat wave, choose the men’s room. Otherwise, avoid it at all cost. There are just too many wet, hairy guys in drippy suits and bare feet mingling with all the smells of humanity.

Back in 1982, there weren’t dividers between urinals. If you had to pee, you would do it shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger, in this case a shirtless stranger. I chose the far-right urinal, so there was a wall to my right and a man to my left. Men’s room etiquette dictates that you don’t look too closely at other men, but I could tell he was a big-boned, New Jersey dad type.

So, I get ready to pee, but before anything comes out, I realize I have to . . . well . . . fart. So, I fart.

Except this fart doesn’t make the usual pfft sound. It makes a splash on the concrete floor.

I stood frozen in pure terror. Holding my penis, looking straight ahead at the wall, I could see with my peripheral vision that the man next to me has glanced down at the floor and now he was staring at me. I turned my head slowly to the left and upward to meet his gaze.

We were two strangers looking into each other’s eyes in a hot, wet men’s room. This man, with the bulbous nose and a smattering of acne scars across his cheeks, has the power to make this the worst day of my life or to provide a glimmer of sympathy. I steeled myself for a laugh or a snide remark, but mostly I was hoping for a kind word or two. Say it, buddy. Whatever you’re going to say, say it now.

Without the slightest change in his facial expression—not even a raised eyebrow—he turned to face forward and continued his pee. He said nothing. Nothing.

I looked down to the small, thankfully clear, puddle between my feet. I felt like something needed to be said, if only to prove this was actually happening. To prove that I am in this men’s room right now, that I haven’t died on the waterslide and my soul isn’t floating aimlessly from urinal to urinal in search of The Light.

“Kamikaze,” I whispered.

Still expressionless, he shook his penis, flushed, and left. I would never see him again.

*

The ride back to Long Island was pretty quiet. None of us was in the mood for Kenny Rogers or Donna Summer. At some point, around Nassau County, Jodi fell asleep in the car.

“Something tells me that wasn’t the day you were expecting,” Mike said.

“Nah, not really.”

“You’re being really quiet. Is everything OK?” he asked.

“I guess.”

My mother knew I was lying. “What’s wrong?”

“Water came out of my butt,” I said.

Mike and Terri looked at each other, startled.

Terri craned her neck around to look at me in the backseat. “Did it come out of your butt right now?” she asked.

“No!” I barked. “In the bathroom. At Action Park.”

“In the toilet?”

“Standing up.”

Mike looked at me through the rearview mirror. I could tell he was wide-eyed, even through his dark aviators. “Was it just . . . water?” he asked.

“Yes, it was just water! Oh my God, I knew I shouldn’t have told you! Can we please not talk about this anymore? I wish I was dead.”

“Aw, don’t say that,” Terri said, then I wished I hadn’t.

“So, you got a little water up your ass. There are worse things in the world,” Mike offered. “You rode Kamikaze, man! You couldn’t pay me to do that.” He was smiling, which made my eyes well up, because my embarrassment was giving way to the realization that Mike was proud of me on some level, and that we were becoming a little family, with another member on the way.





BRILLIANT IDEAS


Jennifer’s new sofa had been delivered that morning, so she invited me to her apartment to see it, and presumably to sit on it.

A purchase of furniture neither disposable nor secondhand was company-worthy at this point in our lives. We were in our late twenties, living paycheck-to-paycheck, the vast majority of those paychecks going toward the rent for our Upper East Side apartments. I lived in a small rent-stabilized one-bedroom, located precisely a mop’s-length away from the uptown exit ramp of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Because the car exhaust would regularly cover the living room’s two windows with a semiopaque layer of grime, once a week I would stand on my fire escape and clean them with a sponge-head mop I had purchased specifically for this task.

Most drivers inching along in the ceaseless traffic of the exit ramp would pretend not to see me standing outside in my boxer shorts and an oversized T-shirt, leaning over the second-floor railing, mop outstretched and a plastic bucket overflowing with suds at my side. But I could sense their vague suspicion. Is he trying to make money by mopping stopped cars? Don’t make eye contact. Don’t make eye contact. Keep your mop off my Toyota Corolla.

Occasionally, on a really hot morning, a driver with all his windows down, most likely because his car’s AC wasn’t functioning, would attempt to strike up a conversation with me.