Cooties

The moment I peed myself in a wagon at Humpty Dumpty preschool was the best day of my life at the time. A teacher sent me inside to change, and I came back out to a magical sight. My classmates were all pitching in to rinse out the wagon with buckets of water—filling, dumping, then heading back to the spigot. It looked like an industrial mural commissioned by Roosevelt during the New Deal come to life, but with four-year-olds.
            Watching their collaborative dance of shared labor, I knew I’d really made something happen. I’d given them jobs. Which basically meant I was their boss? The whole scene filled me with a deep sense of pride. I’d created . . . opportunity.
            Full confession: at the time, I was a little weird about pee. Everyone assumed the wagon thing was an accident. The teachers didn’t even ask me, which is probably for the best, because I doubt I could’ve adequately explained. The truth is this: it was a courageous act of daring performance.
            Every day at Humpty Dumpty we followed the same dull schedule. Its highlight was a turn riding in the Radio Flyer wagon. Waiting in the wagon line was okay. The anticipation made you feel alive. But when my turn finally came, when I’d sit down and get pulled across the grass at a speed slower than normal walking, it felt like a false apex to me.
            And one day, a voice inside me said, “No. This cannot be the top of the mountain. This still feels like nothing is happening.” Looking around at the other kids, I could tell they were basically blue-pilled, to use a term from The Matrix. I was the only one who understood this was a fucking emergency. The grown-ups were phoning it in. If we wanted something exciting to happen, one of us kidshad to do it, and I was the lone wolf among sheep. The onus was on me. I could either silently fill the wagon with urine during my ride, or I could keep wasting my one precious life. Those were the options. So I stepped up to the goddamn plate.
            What sucked is I couldn’t tell anyone this was a staged victory. Though we’d never discussed it as a family, I sensed my parents had a hard line against intentional public urination. On the ride home from school, I had to nod along like an incontinent rube as my mother chastised me. “Even if you don’t feel like you have to go,” she said, “you gotta sit on the toilet after lunch and try.” You’re too dumb to understand your own body, was her takeaway; let your animal orifices be in charge from here on out because your holes are probably smarter than your unfortunate brain. I just nodded.
            I had to keep almost everything about me a secret growing up. Especially that when I humped my stuffed animals, I thought about human girls. My parents are very Catholic and very closed-minded, and I knew that out of all my secrets, lesbianism was the one I could never admit to, a dreamy wish I simply had to forget. I’m not sure how much this fact informed my feeling that I was weird and different from the other kids. But since I couldn’t practice being gay, I thought I’d at least practice being weird. And I guess I felt like pee was a useful collaborator to bring along on this journey.
            At home, one secret I liked to have was that I’d pee in my shorts a little when I played outside. Then I’d let it dry before I went into the house, keep the shorts on, and wear them the next day. I have no idea why I felt such greatness on the bus to school, having the thought: I peed in these shorts yesterday, and nobody else will ever know.
            It was a real confidence booster. Until one day when someone said, “Who smells like pee?” Before they said this, I’d smelled it too, but I’d been hoping general decorum would prevent a direct address. Luckily, after a few minutes of general speculation, olfactory fatigue set in before any true witch hunt started.
            But this was a wake-up call. There was too much heat in the pee-shorts kitchen. I had to switch up my pee secret to something that stayed behind closed doors.
            This was the `80s, and where I lived in rural Michigan, environmentalism had not been invented yet. We had a giant trash pile in the backyard, mostly plastic. Once a month, we’d sit down and watch it burn as though we were watching television. I stole an empty mayo container from this pile, and decided I’d pee into it, then secretly keep the pee, like a pet. I could name it and enjoy its companionship when I felt alone.
            I hid my pee in the same place I kept my sexuality—in the closet. The jar didn’t have a lid, and I kept peeing in it until it was almost full, more full than I’d intended actually, so taking it out each day for a visit was a risky endeavor.
            I knew very little about the fungal kingdom. When furry dots began appearing on its surface, then growing, I felt this was dire medical evidence about the state of my body. I watched the fungus get worse and worse and was sure that if my pee was doing that, it meant I was dying. I started to feel really sick. The worst part was, I couldn’t even tell anyone I only had a few days left to live, especially my parents, because the first thing they’d ask is, “How do you know?” and then I’d have to tell them about the secret pee container.
            And at this point, I believed my health and the pee container were so inextricably linked that if my parents found it and threw it out, I’d instantly drop dead, even sooner than I was about to drop dead from whatever disease I must have to make my pee grow spots, which was clearly fatal. Soon tears for my imminent mortality began to overtake me at all hours of the day; sometimes I could hide them, other times I had to make an excuse. Once I told my parents I was crying because a friend’s pet died. To which my dad said, “Animals don’t live that long.” In my head I replied, Neither will your daughter . . . and you have no idea.
            Eventually, the odor of the container began to risk its discovery. It seemed really cruel that I had to spend my last days on earth worrying about the pee container instead of putting my affairs in order. I knew that when I died, the pee wouldn’t be my problem anymore, but death wasn’t coming fast enough. Finally, though, a diabolical plot to both restore my health and get rid of the pee dawned on me. In my household, there was only one fix for any problem, the same fix I was using to deal with my terminal illness: pretend everything was fine.
            And if the pee was fine, where would it usually go? Into the toilet. Maybe if I flushed the diseased pee, my illness would flush away, too. I dumped it and returned the container to the burn pile. I pictured the grim reaper watching me doing this and laughing, saying, “Nice try! You think it’s that easy to fool me?”
            Then that night, my dad asked if I’d help him burn trash. I figured this obviously meant that he knew everything, including how much trouble I was in healthwise, but he was willing to help me in a last-ditch effort to save my life. The container was like a murder weapon, a future murder weapon indicating I was about to die. If we got rid of it, if it no longer existed, maybe the crime didn’t have to occur. Maybe I could avoid the death penalty.
           I watched the pee container burn and prayed to be cured, but I figured it was probably too late. Until after the fire, when my father stood and surveyed the smoldering ashes, then said, “Look away.” I turned my head, but when I heard the sound my jaw dropped in shock. He was peeing on the embers to put them out. With pee! Which seemed like a sign I was going to live.