When I was little I used to get these pains in my side every couple of months to a year. I would be thinking at the time; “Man, I really have to pee.” And my kidneys would feel like they seized up and my body would turn a paler shade of white and my mouth would start salivating large balls of drool for my body to deal with swallowing. I would pee, then find a place to lay down and within an hour or two I’d be fine. The doctors never found out what was wrong with me. They speculated that possibly I had “kidney pebbles.” “Kidney Pebbles” was the cute, tongue-in-cheek, name that they came up with for my distress.

It’s Saturday night in Brooklyn. It’s about five minutes ago. The sounds of people excited for the weekend surround and infiltrate my space because the walls separating my space from their’s only obstruct the visions of what are on the other side and not the sounds. I work most on the weekends. I closed shop today and will open shop tomorrow. I party on Tuesdays.

Every bus ride was scary for me. Every bus ride meant that I would have to hold my bladder closed for a very long time. Nobody takes bus-rides for short amounts of time. On multiple occasions I had made the entire bus pull over on the side of the highway so that I could pee in the bush on the side of the road. They always told me that what they were doing was “very unsafe.” We were in Maine. In Maine there are barely any cars on the highway. There is never enough traffic for pulling over to be “very unsafe.” We were very safe. And we didn’t have pee sloshing around on the floor of the school bus, so that’s good too.

My roommate was in the shower. I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but now I realized I had to pee. I realzed that because I had opened my window and was on the verge of opening my fly. There is a padlock, a gate and a window to get through before I can crawl out onto my fire escape. I did all the tasks, shaking wildly below the waste because now the pee wants to come out.

I had to pee so badly, but I was embarrassed. People would hate me if I admitted I had drank liquids earlier that day, right? I sat down on the bench of the mini-golf course and could hold my embarrassment any longer. I peed, left to change clothes, and did not acknowledge that the first had happened. Obviously I had saved myself from embarrassment.

With toes dangling off the edge of the fire-escape, I let fly a golden stream of my extended manhood unraveling its way all the way down three stories of a building to the ground. I felt relief in a way I hadn’t thought possible since the last time I peed. Fear of pain had led to a fear of embarrassment, had led to shame. None of those emotions are fun, so I won’t have them. I will have relief instead – this involves peeing all the time, anywhere.

My friend once pushed me against the wall when I tried to pee on the library because it was the closest building.