Hiya, folks. It's me, Ray. My schedule has become a bit of the hectic sort here lately and I'm afraid that I'm going to have to get back to you in about 2 weeks. Have no fear, though. Below please find one of my personal favorite columns. See you in 2!

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Okay, so it’s great being a man. We have cool stuff to look at like…stuff. We also have the ability to find humor in people getting hit really hard or falling down. That’s definitely a one up on our counterparts of the xx chromosome.

But most of all, one of my favorite things about being a man is I have the ability to pee anywhere that I want. See that tree over there? It’s mine. The side of my buddy’s house? Mine. The tire of an RV at a dealership? Yep. I can go anywhere, anytime that I want because I have a built in aimer.

You may be jealous of this, hell I know I would be, but I want to relate a story about one time when having this gift made me almost never want to use it again.

My Grandma, much like my parents, had a sick fascination of making me her 24 hour source of entertainment. My family knew that I was stupid as a little kid. I had yet to develop that part in your brain that makes you question if what you were doing was in fact really, really stupid. Grandma took full advantage of this-especially on one particular night.

Mom had to stop at the grocery store one night on the way back from a particularly nasty school play. I, of course, played the part of “town villager” and had no lines. Mom had made a costume for me that included a busted zipper and the entire school had been able to see my fiddle-faddle. They all seemed understanding because I was the kid who believed that he had ancient Egyptian ancestry.

So we stop at the local “Cubs Foods”. Mom says that she’ll, “be right back”, and tells me to stay in the car with my grandma. Hell, she even lets me have one of those ‘Kool-Aid Squeeze Its’ because I had made her so proud that night and she couldn’t wait to show my father the pictures. She leaves the car and my Grandma puts her plan of the night into motion.

I guess I should have been a little curious about why my mom turned to my Grandma and said, “Your turn,” before she got out of the car.

“Wow Raymond, you sure did drink that refreshing Kool-Aid gulp fast,” she said with an unsettling sparkle in her eye.

“It’s called a ‘Kool-Aid Squeeze-It’, Grandma,” I said dumb of the horror that was about to ensue, “and if I drink 6 more packages of it, I can turn in the points for a really sweet gym bag.”

“Yeah, that’s nice. I bet it is kind of making you really have to go pee-pee.”

See, I loved this because any time you hear an adult say a slang term for urination or defecation you thought you were getting away with something. Other favorite terms used by my parents and grandparents included:

-Make a yellow river
-Produce chocolate that you don’t eat (which actually I named after a rather nasty experiment)
-Use your hose to hit your toes
-And the ever popular, make a tuba sound with your butt

But I digress…

So after about 10 minutes, I start to wonder why it’s sounding like my Grandmother is encouraging me to pee. I didn’t really need to, but her power of suggestion was starting to make my bladder feel like the size of a bag of microwave popcorn. She had accomplished what she had set out to do: I had to take a leak and I needed to do it NOW.

“Grandma, I gotta go to the bathroom!”

“Oh really? Number 1 or number 2?”

“ONE! OH GOD, ONE!”

“Well, I think your mom is going to be out soon, maybe you can hold it.”

(Not true, mom was taking her own sweet-ass time)

“No, I gotta go RIGHT NOW!”

I tried to tell Grandma that I would just walk up to the store and use their facilities. She had other ideas:

“You can’t go all the way up there. Let’s find something here in the car that you can go into.”

My eyes widened as she picked up what was going to soon hold my bodily waste, a plastic grocery bag. I begged, I pleaded, I looked for a clothes pin to place around my unit to subdue the enormous strain. Unfortunately, none of this seemed to help my case as Grandma was already starting to explain the plan.

I was going to have pee in this bag. For some reason, I didn’t just have the common sense to say, “No way in hell, Grandma. I’m walking up to the store.” I took the bag from her and started to stand up in the back seat. This is where Grandma reminded me that there was to be absolutely no feet on the car seat and that I was going to have to do it OUTSIDE OF THE CAR.

I opened the car door, rolled my way out and proceeded to place the bag below me. It was kind of nice that the bag had handles, because I already had something to hang it on and that meant that I could still aim and not have to get my hands wet in the process.

Now picture this, you’ve had to make an emergency run to the store to get say, a gallon of milk. Lucky you, it’s on sale this week! With the money you save, you’re even able to pick up that ‘Seek and Find’ book at the check out lane. You walk out to a parking lot and there is a KID WITH A PLASTIC BAG HANGING FROM HIS WANG PEEING INTO IT BY YOUR CAR. Seriously, you’d have to get in through your passenger side just to avoid the whole ordeal.

Now Grandma was nice enough to not watch me while doing this. She was, of course, busy laughing her ass off in the front seat, and she was the ONLY PERSON in the parking lot giving me privacy. You’d think that this was the hottest ticket in town with the number of people who were stopping with their carts to watch this nine year old kid delicately balance himself to piss in a bag.

Now here’s the good part-

I’m done peeing in the bag. I now have in my hands a plastic bag full of my liquid waste. I look around for a place to throw this (hoping that maybe there’s something that I can use as a target such as a rock, tree or kid who’s laughing at me). Grandma sees me looking around and asks what I’m doing,

“Looking for someplace to put this. Here, the ground looks good.”

“Oh no, you can’t just throw it on the ground, you’re going to need to take it up to the store and throw it away in the trash.”

…Okay, now get this-I couldn’t go up to the store when I had to pee, I had to pee in a bag. Now, with the bag full of my piss, I have to take it up to the store that I couldn’t go to in the first place and throw it away. Sure it makes no sense whatsoever, but remember-all adults in my childhood life enjoyed exploiting my stupidity and my willingness to do anything that they put me up to.

So I’m taking this bag up to the store (which by now I am noticing has a hole in the bottom and is leading some sick “Hansel and Gretel” trail leading back to the car) and people are definitely starting to notice:

“Is that retarded kid carrying his own pee in a bag?”

“It’s bad they let him out.”

I get back to the car. THREE FREAKING MINUTES LATER MOM RETURNS. We go home. I go to bed immediately, eager to sleep off my night of awkward urination.

Fortunately, Grandma doesn’t say a word about me peeing in the bag. I thought I was off the hook because I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone. My night of making a plastic bag somewhat of a water balloon would never be talked about…hopefully.

Now the even better part-

My mom wakes me up the next morning with this news:

“Raymond, I just heard on the radio that someone threw a bag filled with human waste away last night in the Cubs foods trashcan. Police are going to test it and arrest whoever it belongs to.”

I FREAKING BELIEVE THIS!!!

I start picturing myself on death row, I’m picking my last meal of ‘Kids Choice’ Fish sticks, I’m getting a tattoo of a drop of urine by my wee wee.

Me: Hey, what are you in here for?

Some Convict Dude: Killed some nun with a cardboard box. What about you?

Me: Peed in a bag.

Some Convict Dude: Ooh, you’re the serial pisser I heard about! Dude, you’re crazy! I’m glad they’re killing you!

I decide to fess up to my mom hoping that maybe she can hide me from the police. Put me under the floor or something, feed me chips every now and then…

“Mom…I need to tell you something…”

And she starts LAUGHING HER ASS OFF. Grandma had told her everything, the peeing, the hanging from the penis, the carrying, EVERYTHING and they decide to do this to me.

I’ve told you that I was stupid as a kid, and I was. When did I start wising up that my elders were exploiting this? That day. I decided to get smarter right then and there. Sure my folks were disappointed that I suddenly wasn’t falling for their trickery, but at least they went out with a bang.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pee in a ba…okay, I’m not into that…anymore.

Copyright © 2007 Ray Tice
Please do not remove the copyright from this work.

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