How Not to Pee for Fourteen Hours

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During my sophomore year of college, I set a land-distance record for not peeing for fourteen hours, in Cambridge, Massachusetts (U.S.A.).

Three friends and I had roadtripped to Boston for the weekend. DEDBG and I were going to look at a house to rent a room in that summer and HEBD and her roommate, whose name currently slips my mind let's call her Jen, wanted to go to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for an art class.

Early Saturday morning, like maybe at eight, I arose, peed, showered, inserted my contact lenses, dressed, and set out. Somehow we got from campus to Charenton, though I have no idea how. I think I might have blocked it out because the one really worthwhile memorable thing that happened while we were still in Connecticut was DEDBG's mother coming up from the basement freezer with a leg of lamb. And I don't mean a sanitized plasticked leg of lamb like you buy in the supermarket. I mean a leg of lamb: the whole leg, hip to hoof (hoof still attached) butchered off the animal, skinned but with stray wisps of wool clinging down around the hoof. DEDBG would have taken it in stride except for wondering how the rest of us would take it. I think we might have giggled after we stopped being taken aback.

Anyway, we managed to get to Cambridge in one piece. I'd classify DEDBG as I do myself driver-wise: we think we're fine and secretly we drive much better alone than we do with other people, because alone we don't notice the scary things we do that leave other people gripping belts and handles with both hands and simultaneously biting all their nails. And it can't have been too scary a drive because HEBD, never a willing early riser (or an early riser at all in my memory), swapped glasses for lenses just as we left the Mass Pike for whatever road went to Cambridge, in the moving car, and without a mirror. She had never done it without a mirror before and to have managed that feat in a car was something she was quite proud of.

In Cambridge, DEDBG found Radcliffe and her sister's dorm. Ominous chimes here: I should have paid more attention to how we navigated there from Harvard Square, but I didn't. I don't remember what we did, except probably our tasks o' the day: HEBD and Jen set off for MFA and DEDBG and I for MIT.

I must have wondered how HEBD found the MFA, it being in a different town and all (Boston, not Cambridge), and that I hoped that Jen had a better sense of direction than she. All they'd have to do is switch T lines at Park (I think) from Red to Green, but still. Sometimes I wonder how HEBD was born, finding her way down even that short straight (if narrow) line to the outside with the rest of us.

DEDBG and I found the house of Sigma Chi, an MIT fraternity at which one of her sister's roommates had rented a room the previous summer. We were leery of a frat house; we knew nothing good of them from UConn. But anyway, we found it, a beautiful house on Beacon Street; we liked it and agreed to their conditions of rent and contributing to housework. That fraternity is a story (or several) unto itself.

I don't know what else happened that day. Eating, maybe, and window-shopping, and I don't know what else. Nowhere along the line did peeing occur to me as a worthwhile thing to do.

In the evening we split up. The Radcliffe contingent went to a movie ("Wall Street," if my memory for trivia holds) and I went to Boston to see my sister. I had a key to the hall where Alixe's suite was; they had the suite key. CLH was waiting tables in a restaurant on Newbery with a downstairs bar and there she fed me a milkshake. (It might have been a Sprite. I might not have liked milkshakes then.) I hadn't given her any notice that I was coming, having called her only that morning from Radcliffe, and she couldn't get off. I didn't stay very long but soon wended my way back to Cambridge. I hadn't peed at the restaurant, either.

I might have walked five blocks to Mass Ave and taken the bus into Harvard Square; I might have walked less distance to take a longer T ride from the Boylston station. That would depend on how lazy I felt, but now, years later considering the situation, I wonder if I chose the train as less jarring to a full bladder. For now that is exactly what I finally became aware that I possessed, in abundance.

Arriving in Harvard Square either above or below ground, I decided my best course of action would be to find Cabot House first. I didn't scarper into the Au Bon Pain to use its lav; why? Was it closed (unlikely at nine on a Saturday night at Harvard), did I have no money to buy even a 35¢ hearth bun to gain entry? (In the upcoming summer in Boston, those buns were frequently all I ate if DEDBG was not available to cook for me.) At any rate, I began to walk to where I thought Radcliffe was. Or maybe I was cocky and thought that peeing was for wimps and I'd be home in ten minutes and could pee whenever I wanted.

Cocky. That is what, in not very long, I really wished I were, because then I could pee where ever I wanted. I wouldn't have to worry (as much) about being arrested for exposing my pearly white tush and wouldn't have to worry (very much at all) about being assaulted, either for walking around lost in a city or for making myself even more vulnerable than lost by the posture and act of peeing in some poor sucker's front yard. My sole consolation, and a poor one it was, was that if I was attacked, I would have my pee as a weapon.

In the meantime, I was lost. Where was my sense of direction, that indomitable built-in compass our father made sure both of us had very early on by losing us, each on her own, in the woods? (Either he was making sure we had it already it or he was determined we would develop one right quick.)

I wandered. I passed a store called Arsenic and Old Lace, small little houses that I pictured associate professors living in, and a lot of tempting yards, both with and without shrubbery, single and bi-level. And I wandered. I was doing the kind of thing I also did at UConn, which was to wend wherever I damn well liked no matter the hour or number of chaperones, but now I was arguably in more dangerous circumstances. It wasn't East L.A., anyway. And I wandered some more.

Finally I saw the quad I wanted, several large houses encircling a central yard. I knew which one was Cabot; once I was in the quad the territory was familiar though I had only seen it once and from the back that morning (see, Dad?). I let myself into the hall with my trusty hall key and managed, despite my bladder, the two flights of stairs to the suite in question.

It was locked. Everyone was still at the movie. I must have been in a very Ayn Rand kind of mood, because I hadn't cheated by going into a restaurant without buying something and I hadn't exposed (ahem) myself as weak by peeing in public in someone's yard, and now I didn't knock at the door of any other suite. Why would anyone at Radcliffe let me in, a stranger going to a public university who hadn't had the sense to pee since eight o'clock that morning?

I thought I might find something downstairs where even Radcliffe students might do laundry. Three flights down and I scuttled gingerly along a corridor, peering into alcoves where bike racks, laundry facilities, and vending machines resided, and then, finally, joy of joys! a door with an icon indicating a bathroom. Hooray! But that icon represented a men's room, and I, so very socialized, did glance at the other side of the alcove before I crossed that gender line, saw the other half of the matched set, and even in my desperation turned around to go into the women's room.

That was the punchline, but there's more. Once in the lav the certainty of a safe receptacle lessened my urgency some, but not much, and I knew if I had the visual signal of the commode while I unzipped, I wouldn't be able to contain myself. So I unzipped and peeled off my lower garments before I even entered a stall, and if I do say so myself, peed fourteen hours' worth after that much trauma and urgency without splattering a single drop.

Then I went upstairs to hang out in the wonderful lounge waiting for my friends to return. I sat down with a book for not very many minutes until I had to go again. I grinned as I scampered down the stairs, remembering tenth-grade biology.

Well, that's it, and it shouldn't have taken three pages, but I'm going to make it still longer by mentioning the awe that my half-hour bladdered friend expressed when I told her I'd just kind of forgotten to pee for thirteen hours and then managed an hour more until I could find a proper toilet.

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Last modified 23 November 1997

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