Pee Bottle

Early Saturday evening, a man driving an old Buick parked in the Eastmont neighborhood of Oakland. When I hear something as innocuous as this, I think, “There was parking?” That’s how my mind works. I like the particulars. I know, I know.

He got out of his car and quietly closed the door, his left hand pushing the face of the door while the right created resistance by pulling back on the handle. With the click of the lock, he turned and used his bum to slowly finish the job. This is how you silently close a door. He was a pro.

Scanning the neighborhood, his head swinging left to right, he walked behind his car, paused, looked around again, and walked quickly toward an unkempt hedge that demarcated two properties. Pressing his body closely against the hedge, he unzipped his pants and pee’d - his hips thrusting forward in a concave position.  After one last look, he zipped up, walked back to his car and took off.

Across the street, a person looked out the bay window of their house and saw the man get out of his Buick and pee on the neighbor’s hedge. Instead of flashing their porch light, yelling an inaudible noise or just doing nothing, they got their phone and filmed the incident. For posterity? I don’t think so. They went straight to nextdoor.com, a Facebook-like app for neighbors to discuss neighborly issues.  In this case, the issue was public urination.

Instead of erasing the video or keeping it as a, uh, keepsake, they posted it on nextdoor.com with three questions marks (???) as the title. No context is given, just the question marks.

When I stumbled upon the post, wading through “gunfire or fireworks?” and “lost dog” posts, it had racked up 97 comments. Yep, 97. This wasn’t unusual for the Boomer and late Gen X users who dominated the app. They were angry and wanted their neighborhoods to miraculously change overnight. When it didn’t, they took their frustrations out on NextDoor, which meant posting about cars that don’t use their blinkers to lone people walking by their house that looked suspicious. Hard hitting stuff.

Comments varied, as you may have guessed, from indignant (“Why is he doing to this in our neighborhood?”) to descriptive (“Gross bastard”) to punitive (“You can end up on the Sex Offender Registry for that. It’s like flashing someone”) to the thoughtful and extremely liberal (“Maybe he has prostate problems”). Even though the aforementioned is sweet but misguided,  the truth was probably simple: he had a few drinks – soda, water or alcohol – and needed to pee. Simple as that. Yes, he should’ve found a park,  or even pee’d in a large mouth plastic bottle, clandestinely,  but he didn’t. It’s not the end of the world.

A few days later, I’m parked in front of a QuikStop on 14^th Avenue. An old concrete trashcan and a poorly functioning air/water machine stand next to the entrance. Walking through the front door, you notice a new roll-up door, installed to combat the rash of cars that recently drove through the front door. Two in one week. 

I go there every day after dropping my son off at school. The owner calls me babu, which I like a lot, and their 44-ounce sodas are always plentiful and the soda to carbonated water is perfect. That’s important.  Between babu and the free-flowing soda, I see a lot of this place.

Placing my soda in the cup holder, I attached my charger to my phone and search for a suitable playlist on Spotify. There needs to be a soundtrack for my 10-minute ride home. A man passes the front of the car holding a half-gallon plastic water bottle that’s half full with pee. It catches my attention. He stops in front of the garbage can and tosses it in. That’s what I expected him to do. Oh, no. In actuality, he twists the lid and pours the pee in the trashcan, taking at least 10 seconds to drain.  Mouth agape, I watch every drip flow into the trashcan. I’m astonished. This trashcan has just become the grossest trashcan in all of Oakland.

 I watch as he walks back past the car — empty bottle in-hand — following him until he disappears behind the building. Even for me, a person that regularly pees outside and who keeps a large mouth plastic bottle in his car for these types of occasions, I’m aghast. He’s breaking all the rules of the unofficial pee bottle community. You don’t pour pee in a trashcan nor do you leave an errant bottle full of pee on the side of a freeway on-ramp for men in orange vests, who are working off tickets or DUIs, to pick up.  You just don’t. You secretly dispose of the urine in drain or gutters for the rand to dilute and clean or for the sun to evaporate. We have rules. Follow them.

When I got home, I checked NextDoor to see if anyone posted a video of him.