Stage Fright

When I was a kid in the 80’s, we used to go to ballgames at Fenway Park. And when you had to piss, it was– there were no urinals.  There was one toilet and it always looked like a Dinty Moore™ beef stew grenade had exploded in it.  No– you had to piss in a long communal  cast-iron trough shaped like a bath tub with rusty, tetanus-y looking pipes feeding a trickle of water into it.  I was like 8, and you had to stand around this thing with no less than a dozen middle aged men, all drunk, with their schlongs all out right near 8 year old eye level.  And something about Boston– these were old world schlongs. The ungroomed old country schlongs of rough and brutal men.  Somehow no man born of pure immigrant stock ever has anything less than a giant winking sea worm, ascending back into a tangle of salt and pepper pubes that have never once been trimmed.  Men of this time and place never fucked with their pubes once, in their entire lifetime.  Irish guys with flame orange thickets.  Swarthy, suspicious men, with Bin Laden dickbeards and brown snakey uncut sausage three shades darker than the rest of them.

I don’t know if you’ve seen a lot of underage wang, but the penis of an 8 year old white child is like a doll’s pinky finger, and beholding these veiny, hideous anacondas was terrifying.  I couldn’t pee.

Anyway, cut to five minutes ago and a dude is fixing his blackberry in our multi-office bathroom.  Why the fuck is he doing this there?  And this bathroom, designed by horrible sadists, is such that anyone who is not in the stall taking a shit is no more than five feet away from whoever’s at the urinal with no structural blockage of any kind between them.  I walk in, curiously notice him, think- “this guy doing something weird intimately close to me is going to give me stage fright.”  And of course, once you think the words “stage fright,” you have stage fright. Once you think “I hope I can get a boner,” you can’t get a boner. Your dick is just too evil, and has too great a sense of irony.  But at this point I’m committed to walking over to the urinal and trying to take a piss.  I zip down and hold my dick for several seconds while this guy over my shoulder casually studies his blackberry. Nothing. I start to push.  As is often the case in this situation, I have a fart chambered, and pushing is going to force it out.  But here’s the thing– he deserves to smell my fart.  When another man is standing at a urinal in silence for several seconds with you standing right behind him– when you don’t hear that fluid hissing– you are giving him stage fright. Back the fuck off.  Do not acknowledge what you’re doing, just silently, courteously walk away.

This guy must be from a background so fucking manly that he has no concept of what stage fright is. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing because any time he’s ever had to take a piss– like, he could piss behind the person singing the goddamn national anthem at Fenway and a clear golden stream would come out instantly.  His dad taught him to change the oil when he was five. He has eaten mammals that he killed himself, maybe with a bow.  Basically he is Burt Reynolds and I am Ned Beatty and the architect of this bathroom is the hillbilly laughing hilariously while he rapes me and refers to my underwear as “panties.”  If the blackberry dude knew what I was going through he would probably say “go piss sittin’ down, Susie.”

Anyway.  Point being– if you are near a dude standing at a pisser and you don’t hear the sound of piss, leave immediately.  Common courtesy.