Gotta Pee

A short story about a journey that we can all relate to, I'm sure.

I felt weightless. Because I was.

Spinning in space, inside the astronaut suit, I tried my best to figure out how to move, but I had no agency. Gravity’s absence left me reeling wherever the forces of physics willed me to go. Kat looked at me from across the nothingness. I could hear her through my spacesuit’s helmet.

“Smile,” she said. She snapped a photo with her phone.

What was she doing there?

More importantly, why, I struggled to answer, could I not get a proper selfie of myself? To be in space, the expanse of Earth’s green and blue orb behind me, spinning imperceptibly on its axis, required a selfie. Had I actually been to space if I didn’t secure the selfie?

My mom would expect it.

I spun more. And more. And more. Kat giggled.

The last time I saw her, on Earth at least, had been in Paris.

Right?

Yes, we were in Paris together and she, I remember, had visited the apartment I rented from her. We chatted and laughed—that giggle was so familiar—as she helped fix the leaking toilet. Kat was English. I was American. We were both in Paris fixing a toilet. It felt like some absurdist work of fiction. But now, we were in space together.

This was, well, something else.

Yes, here we both were, miles and miles above even the Eiffel Tower.

You, the reader, know that I love to travel. Getting to visit what many people consider to be the last frontier—space—was never on my radar. I hated the idea and always cursed the billionaires who built vanity projects to get there. But here I was, with Kat, doing what had once seemed so objectionable.

The space station—I assumed the international one, because are there even localized versions? The Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay Regional Space Station, perhaps? —spun nearby as well. There was no up and down, no right-side up, no north or south. Not in space.

But geeze, why couldn’t I get a selfie of myself?

The gloves—right. Astronaut gloves are big clunky things. 

But also, duh again, the helmet. Space masks have those glossy visors that you can’t really see through. Or at least I couldn’t see myself on the phone screen as I tried to take a selfie. There’s one obvious answer, I told myself: Take off the helmet.

If you were yelling that at me moments ago, my apologies for not hearing it immediately. I was, after all, in space.

When I was younger, taking off a bike helmet mid-ride also seemed risky. Edgy even. There was an allure in the danger, like wearing bacon-scented cologne on a safari. You only live once, sure, but you only die once, too. Why not make them both count? This flirtation got me excited as I reached for my spacesuit helmet.

“What are you doing?” Kat asked through the comms system. I could hear the worry in her voice. I patted at the side of my helmet. There was a growing sense of some urgency. For what, I wasn't sure, but it was there.

“I’ll just take it off for a second,” I said. I imagined the smells of space. I fantasized about sticking my nose out into it and reporting back, the first human to smell the vacuum of emptiness and living to tell the story.

“No, don’t do that,” Kat said. She snapped another photo. “These photos are good enough.”

“But I really want a selfie?” I said. I found the clasps and buckles and things that I needed to detach my helmet and fiddled with them slowly.

Kat began flailing her arms in protest, but we floated like two swimmers locked suddenly in ice, frozen in place with only our appendages free to communicate. She had no way of coming over to stop me, and I knew that.

I found the clasps. This helmet was coming off, and I’d get that selfie.

The world, all of it, spun slowly in front of me. Kat seemed to do cartwheels as reality seemed to pivot around me. I stood still, there in space, just about to take my first breath of the void, phone in hand, selfie mode primed. This was it.

But then someone punched me and I dropped my phone.

You’re wondering—as I am, dear reader—what sort of transition this is, and what I hoped to gain from it. The answer, honestly, is nothing at all, because it’s barely a transition.

It’s merely what happened.

I got punched. More like slapped, really hard, with the apparent goal that I’d drop my phone.

It worked.

But wait—you’re now shrieking, dearest reader—there is no gravity in space and you, the author, are a complete moron.

You are right about one of those things. But we’re not in space anymore. If you’d just listen to me for a moment, please, you’d realize the obviousness of it all. I was getting punched in Portugal.

Lisbon, to be more specific.

One of the dodgier parts, to be slightly vague about it.

I can hear the audible slap of your hand on your forehead as you struggle with it. I’ll let it sink in a second, because drawing a straight line from my selfie-taking ambitions in space—yes, the outer one—and getting punched in Lisbon, well it’s not the type of thing you achieve easily.

But imagine how I felt.

Be compassionate now.

I was there, on the ground, reaching for my phone, as four or five brutes, men, if I remembered correctly, were grabbing at me and throwing me into some vehicle. I had gone from not being able to move on my own free will in space to experiencing the exact same thing down on Earth, with gravity, and Portuguese speakers saying gruff, crude things all around me.

I was being kidnapped, or something like that.

There was little time to react to my reentry, to think about the journey that got me there. I forgot immediately about Kat floating above.

Sweat formed on my neck as I breathed not inside a helmet, but with a pillowcase or some other similar cloth over my face. 

Vision impaired, I could only feel the ground racing underneath me as we drove somewhere.

Without my phone in hand, I didn’t have any way to call for help. Somewhere in the city, my travel companion was waiting for me, but he would be sorely disappointed. No one could hear me screaming, as if I’d even try. Fearful, yes, but dignified still, I awaited my fate, whatever it may be. These young hooligans, however, hardly sounded like the violent type.

But I wasn’t stupid.

I never trusted a kidnaper.

When the car finally stopped, they pushed me, four or five of them still, into a house that may very well have been in Scottsdale, Arizona, for all of its generic suburbaness. Inside, down to the basement, where plush carpeting reigned, they took the cloth from my head and I breathed at last.

One of them took my phone from me. He held up a small hammer and, as daintily as a sculptor finishing a marble bust of a lover, he tapped it with a hammer, cracking the screen.

“What are you doing?” I asked. The courage to speak had alway been there. The need for it, however, only just appeared as I realized he was chiseling away at my only connection to the world.

They all huddled around closely, like cavemen around an elder who struck flint and stone. What was fascinating them so ardently?

“We want your data,” one of them said.

“Why?” I asked. Imagining I deserved some sort of explanation, it seemed far from gutsy. Another one of them opened a closet nearby. Piles and piles of cellphones were stacked up inside.

“We want your data,” he repeated.

“Those are iPhones,” I said.

“We know,” they said.

“I have a Google phone, it’s not the same,” I said.

Their eyes raised in awe, as if the caveman finally produced a flame.

I continued by telling them that Google phones were not present in Portugal. It was an obvious lie, but they seemed clueless to my fib. I knew people were waiting for me somewhere, and I grew impatient, an urgent tugging somewhere in my body pushing me to get out of here.

“So how do we get your data?” one of them asked.

“What do you want it for?” I asked again. Suddenly I was Prometheus and they appeared submissive to me, the holder of the knowledge.

“We are starting a YouTube channel. We need subscribers. Your data will help us,” they said.

“You’re not spamming my contacts with your YouTube channel,” I said.

“Yes we are. Or we will,” one of them said. All faceless. All the same.

The one with the hammer smacked at the phone again, as if data and emails would leak out of the screen like some stream of binary coded crude oil.

“No you’re not,” I said.

Soon, they all fell asleep, and I, unbound and free, made my escape.

My big escape.

Back to my college dorm.

Again, you’re furrowing your brow as readers so often do. Stop it, please. It’s annoying and quite frankly unsettling. I’m on this journey, too, and I also don’t love it. I, however, did not choose to be on it. You did, so cost up into your bed, which you made yourself, and deal, please.

But how did you go from Lisbon to your college dorm? you’re asking, aren’t you? How dare you presume I didn’t go to college in Lisbon? Who are you, a humble reader, to project your realities onto my narrative.

I went to school in New York, so your questioning, while presumptuous, is valid.

But how I made it to New York isn’t important. Just trust that I was there.

You’re with me?

I’m there, alongside my old roommate, doing the one thing that I learned to do for the first time in college: drinking spirits.

Well, beer, liquor, and all of it really. That night, however, freed from the confines of my data-squeezing Portuguese captors, I was celebrating with a vodka and Red Bull concoction.

Please do take a moment to excuse yourself from reading and vomiting as appropriate. The drink truly was—is, and always will be—a horrid creation.

I was drinking it because there was nothing left in our meager stores, and we were all celebrating. There were rarely reasons to celebrate in college. Simply being in college was always reason enough.

But as I drank and drank and drank, I got drunker and drunker and less aware of what was to happen next.

Because she was there.

Oh was she ever.

Cat—no, not Kat, who by this point, I hoped, was enjoying some astronaut ice cream or other delicacy many miles above me—but Cat, a girl from high school who had quite the crush on me at one stage in life. At a stage in life when girl’s crushes still seemed like enviable accomplishments.

But I knew better.

By college, even, I knew.

And you, dear reader, know me well enough to understand her folly.

But Cat was there, and I was seeing three of her through my Red Bull potions, and as the world spun, so did some sort of spell spin over me. To say I forgot what happened would be an understatement. The memories were never imprinted, not even a poor carbon copy existed to tell the tale that something had happened at all. Zilch. All I remembered was she left that morning, and my roommate asked how I was.

The events tainted by so much vodka and Red Bull, being what they were, were by this point irrelevant in as much as they were nonexistent.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Are you feeling OK?” he asked.

“I think I’m very drunk, and my old girlfriend just left, but did we—”

“I don’t know, but I’m sorry to see you’re drinking again,” he said. He hugged me.

I was sorry, too, and very afraid that my current partner—the one awaiting me in Portugal still, presumably—would be very cross to learn about this incident. Even at its most innocent, it appeared bad. I knew that.

And then, further still, there was my newfound alcoholism that I hadn’t been aware of—though perhaps that’s how it crept up on its victims.

That’s when I went home, to my parents’ home to be exact, where my mother, in her infinite ability to provide comfort in the very worst way possible, had stocked up on box after box of spirits—small bottles, just larger than airplane versions—including tequila, rum, and gin. All of my friends.

She had not heard about my alcoholism, it seemed.

The idea of drinking more liquor turned my stomach. It felt the way I probably looked, green in the face. This was good, no? For an alcoholic to be repulsed by the very thing he could theoretically not rebuff was a good sign. But then I saw a friendly face arrive. Austin Butler showed up—you know, the actor who played Elvis? —and I offered him a drink. That’s what you do when someone like Austin Butler visits. Obviously.

“Want me to teach you how to do a proper spit take?” he said.

“Yes, sure, that’ll be fun,” I said. In all honesty, I didn’t know what Austin Butler could teach me about comedy. I had seen him recently on set at the recording of a late night talk show, which perhaps explained his arrival, and his demeanor was a dull shade of vanilla. He may have been a great actor, but he didn’t seem like the type to win laughs. Or chuckles, for that matter. But who was I to turn down an acting lesson with the guy who will probably forever be known as “the actor who played Elvis”?

Elvis!

Instead of doing it with tequila, though, we found two bottles of Champagne among my mother’s stash of drinks for me. Some mothers baked cookies, others brownies, my mother raided a liquid store when she heard I was coming home.

We took swigs of the stuff, the taste not at all unpleasant.

It just seemed natural to do spit takes with alcohol. Nothing else would do. Not with Austin Butler, at least. If it were a lesser actor, perhaps apple juice. Cheap beer for a Kardashian. Ginger ale for Jessica Alba.

But we were doing this right, we told ourselves.

“Now just spit it and spray it like this,” Austin Butler said. He did a spit take, without any comedic prompting, and blew out the Champagne like some pot-smoking dragon, huge puffs of the stuff radiating into the air. This is why he won a Golden Globe, I thought.

I tried next.

I took a mouthful of the Champagne—it was Veuve, I recalled, because of the orange label—and tried to spit it out at the tail-end of some nonexistent joke.

Nothing.

I took another mouthful. So did Austin. Austin Butler, the actor who played Elvis.

“Like this,” he said. He did his perfectly.

I tried once more. My lips fizzled as if I were making raspberries to a baby’s tummy. No spit take. No misting of Champagne.

Instead, much of the liquid fell back down my throat, feeding what was, apparently, my unquenchable thirst for alcohol. I tried again, pushed by some urgency, to make the spit take work but ended up just drinking the Champagne, feeling it fill me up to the brim. 

Austin Butler must have left at that moment when I imagined what Kat was doing, and what my partner would do without me in Portugal, and what had happened between me and Cat in my dorm, and if Austin Butler—of Elvis fame—would still be my friend because I couldn’t do a spit take?

But really, I could only then think of one thing. The one thing that had eluded me this entire trip, from space and Lisbon to the dorm and my family home. The one thing I absolutely needed at that moment. The one thing that man, woman, and beast alike cannot avoid, despite our best efforts to fight it.

I tried.

This whole trip I tried to fight the urgency of it all.

But no.

I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, feeling between my legs like an all-too-aware child who had fallen victim in the past, who had been unable to wake up in time. Thankfully it was still dry.

I pulled myself slowly out of bed, trying not to wake my partner—who was not in Portugal, after all, and who was, without much difficulty, far more comedic than Austin Butler—and I headed to the bathroom.

For the next twenty-seven seconds, I relieved myself.

Like you never counted?

It was one of the more roundabout ways for my body to wake me to pee, but it was charming to see some old friends along the way. And to make a few new ones.

I slipped back under the covers again, thinking I should really stop drinking so much chamomile tea before bed.

But I love traveling too much to stop.

Tomorrow night, I decided we’d see where a pot of jasmine would take me.