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Grate | May 14 2002

I still feel bad about this. I think it happened in Dalhart, Texas or maybe Guyman, Oklahoma, some place hot and flat like that. As dusk came on, I bicycled through a residential area (some house-like shapes pass, in memory, on my left) until I came to what was probably an elementary school. Schools were often good places to sleep behind, better even than used auto parts stores and the like, for there was usually an athletic field in back. Unfortunately this particular school was surrounded on all sides by cement. I rode into a courtyard (this too was cement) and set up my tent behind a trash dumpster. It was ugly and it smelled, but at least I was hidden: one would have needed to walk halfway into the courtyard to see me there. After unloading my bags, I cooked dinner on my little camp stove (macaroni and cheese with a can of spinach stirred in) and studied my maps… the usual routine.

Soon, though, I faced a problem: where to shit. Since the idea of looking for a better place struck me as stupid (I not only doubted I would find anything, but feared being seen leaving or re-entering the courtyard), I shat into a spare plastic bag, then wrapped this in a second plastic bag and placed both under some cardboard boxes in the dumpster. (It’s strangely comforting to hold a bag of one’s shit in one’s hands, to feel the heft of it; don’t ask me why.)

Anyway this part I feel fine about: my shit was carted away with the trash and no one was harmed. But then I needed to pee.

Between my tent and the dumpster was a metal grate. Best I could tell, there was a big piece of machinery under the grate, probably an air conditioning unit. I peed through the grate.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I did this. Or do I know. It was something like: “My god do I need to pee.” I chose the grate because I didn’t want to smell my urine all night; otherwise I would have peed on the cement. Fact is, I could have found a patch of grass somewhere if I tried. Pissing in public after dark is not that difficult to pull off, particularly in a place like Dalhart, Texas or Guyman, Oklahoma or wherever I was. But I was too lazy to do it. Which means in all likelihood that a janitor had to clean up my mess, which couldn’t have been much fun.

That is, assuming he figured out where the smell was coming from.

Like I say, I’ve never been proud of this.