In my earlier youth I had a friend named Lassie. That’s what we’ll call her because, well because it’s more fitting than I can accurately describe. Lassie lived in a house across the street from two sisters, christian slut #1 and christian slut #2 (who lived next door to homophobic, mormon Ian). Our mothers were (and are) divorcees and great friends. Naturally, Lassie and I spent a lot of time together. We were really good friends until high school, when she started crying because she was so grateful to her lord and savior for blessing her. Blessing her with what I don’t know. Lassie has serious body hair and the odor you expect to accompany it. By 8 she was bleaching her arm hair. She was also born without a chin. I guess medically speaking she has one, but it is not clearly visible to the human eye.
It was 1993, the summer of Heidi Fliess, Lorena Bobbit and Jurassic Park. A beautiful summer in San Diego. Our moms were single and worked full time. Which I guess influenced their decision that at 10 years old Lassie and I could take care of ourselves and Lassies 6 year old sister. I was dropped off in the morning and picked up at night. Every waking moment was spent together, sometimes the Christian sluts from across the street hung out. They weren’t sluts yet, but then again they weren’t 13 yet.
We grew restless in the summer heat. By August, our imaginations had waned. We’d mixed every permutation of house potion we could think of. We’d broken one of at least every thing in the house. Lassies little sister had cut her foot on glass that we broke no less than twice. We actually caused her mom to cry when we made Indian shoes out of her old Boston fern. We were out of ideas, until…
One morning I walked into Lassies house, waiting for her mom to leave. I innocently sat at the kitchen table reading Goosebumps or some such nonsense, looking light years away from the holy terror I would become once the garage door closed. Lassie met me downstairs with a crazy look in her eye. When her mom left she motioned me into the garage. She showed me a glass bottle that had once held Juicy Juice. It was almost full with liquid in a very familiar shade of yellow. She couldn’t stop grinning. She held it up like she won an award she wanted me to admire. She didn’t say a word the whole time.
I asked her what it was. She didn’t tell me. But she did say that last night she and the christian sluts from across the street became paranoid with the possibility of a burglar. Ok… So they devised an ingenious solution: They would all pee in this jar. And if anyone ever entered their house they would throw it in his face. The assumption was that it would be just so foul the intruder would immediately give up and retreat in shame. I saw some flaws in this plan. 1) The jar was kept at Lassies house, what if someone was in the christian sluts house? Were they supposed to run over, pound on the door and ask her mom for the jar of pee? 2) The fact that the jar was kept in the garage was the most reasonable part of the plan. However, what if the victims didn’t have access to the garage in the intruders presence? 3) Who has the fucking wits about them to fetch a jar of pee, unscrew it and get aim at a burglars face? 4) After all is said and done, how are you going to feel now that you’ve gotten stale pee all over yourself and your house?
None of this reasoning stopped me from peeing in the jar. Lassie handed me a pale blue thingy to pee into and then pour in the jar. Looking back, I peed in what could only have been an Easy Bake Oven measuring cup. My pee was in that jar, I was as dumb as them. We were bored and it passed the time.
Fast forward to the summer of 2001. Lassie and I were getting ready to move to college which is a natural time to get rid of a bunch of shit. Working on the last shelf in the garage there it was, eight years old. Still as yellow as ever. Never having fulfilled its destiny. It was a nasty remnant of a reckless summer. Now it was staring back at us. Lassie and I locked eyes. We knew what it was and did not want to touch it. Finally her mom came over and picked it up. We stopped everything, our hearts thumping. We did not want to explain if questioned. Her mom asked, What is this, is this juice? We said nothing. Her mom began to unscrew the cap. Silence. Should we save her from what she was about to experience? But if we did that, we would have to explain that eight years ago, 4 girls peed into the jar she was holding and left it to stew in relentless Southern California heat. She brought the jar to her nose. Why? Why would anyone bring an unknown substance closer to their face? Lassie and I didn’t move, we wanted no part of it. She caught a wiff and jerked her hand away, spilling eight year old pee onto her hand and sleeve. It splashed onto her shoes and dribbled onto her pants. We couldn’t move. She immediately screwed the cap back on and said, Well whatever it is, it’s old, and threw it away. She never changed her clothes, we said nothing. We were off the hook. No embarrassing explanations of how we went into the bath tub with no pants and squatted over an Easy Bake Oven measuring cup and then poured our pee into a collective jar. No explaining the genius theory of house burglars don’t like pee on their faces. Just like that, the summer of 1993 was simultaneously taken away and seared into my memory.
[tags]1993, childhood, Lorena Bobbit, Heidi Fliess, pee[/tags]