Pew Puddle
BY PATRICK HUELLER
A few years ago, when I was in my early 20s, I had a girlfriend who would laugh so hard she'd literally pee her pants. Her name was Kelly, and she'd been doing this her whole life. It wasn't an everyday thing; she and her bladder were for the most part totally functional. But every once in a while, something would strike her funny bone and then keep on striking it; her muscles would clench and, finally, unclench an all-encompassing, system-wide release.
It was rarely clear to me why she thought something was that funny. Sometime before we got together, Kelly confessed she had peed while riding the octopus ride at a county fair. Her uncle had been sitting next to her and got sloshed when the tentacle tilted. Both of them departed with soaked shorts.
"So, you peed your pants because you were scared?" I asked her. I remembered a movie where a kid sees the man who attempted to kill him and stands there frozen in fear, his pant leg dripping.
"No. Because it was hilarious," she said.
"Why?"
She couldn’t answer me; not really. Something about the up and down, and the fact that they were on a sea creature, and...
"You had to be there," she said, shrugging her shoulders.
Except it turned out that being there didn't clarify much. I remember one time several of us were sitting in Kelly's car, talking about something or other (where we wanted to go eat?), when there was a clattering on the windshield. I looked up to find the source of the noise, and saw one of her friends' faces pressed upside down against the glass. The friend wore one of those colorful hats with fake dreads.
"Hey, mon," she said in a Jamaican accent. "Let me wash your windshield, mon."
She gave the windshield a long, slow, saliva-smudging lick.
The whole episode was equal parts unexpected and outrageous, and arguably politically incorrect, and all of us in the car laughed accordingly.
All of us, that is, except Kelly. She sat behind the wheel and didn't make a sound. That's because she couldn't breathe. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. When she couldn’t hold it -- her breath or her bladder -- any longer, she reached both hands up in the air. I now know that this was her customary last-ditch gesture to stop the flood gates from opening. I also know it never worked. (Why she thought it would, I'm not sure -- nor am I sure that thinking had anything to do with it. The move looked more reflexive than calculated.)
At any rate, there she was that night in the car: hands pushed up against the roof as a salty smell wafted my way.
Was this a running joke? Was that what made it so funny? Did her friend have a history of sneaking up on her, sporting a strange hat? Kelly assured me that this wasn't the case. No, it was, well, again she couldn't explain. I'm not sure she knew what was so funny about it. It just was. Like Stonehenge. Or, according to my religious friends, like God himself.
Maybe He could explain the cause of Kelly's laughter leaks.
He certainly had a good view. On Thanksgiving that year, I found myself sitting beside Kelly's family during a Catholic service. Growing up, my own family never attended church, and that was fine by me. I was maybe eight the one and only time I asked my mom why we didn’t go, and she answered my question with another question. "Would you like to?" I thought about it, then shook my head. All of my friends were jealous that I got to sleep in on Sundays.
Still, as I sat in the pew and listened to the priest, I was nervous. This was my first time meeting many of Kelly's extended relatives, and I wasn't exactly doing so on a neutral court. Until that morning, I'd thought the only people who went to church on a Thursday were priests and nuns, and that even they considered attendance to be optional rather than mandatory. I'd also assumed that the priest would do all the talking, but was once again mistaken. It seemed as though everyone had memorized a script that I hadn't even seen. Out of nowhere they would start talking in unison, and I was left to either mouth the words or say them a millisecond too late and hope no one noticed. When everyone tilted forward and began to pray, I followed suit.
I was pretend-praying with my eyes open when, in my periphery, I saw Kelly lift her arms heavenward. I suppose someone else in the congregation might have interpreted Kelly's stance as some sort of supercharged prayer -- a joyous act of thanksgiving on Thanksgiving.
But I knew better.
Kelly stood up at the end of the service, and, sure enough, there it was: a puddle on the pew.
Later, I got the whole story. How Kelly had pulled a loose thread out of her sweater, how she had set it down between herself and her younger brother, Mike, and how Mike had flicked the bunched up thread into the air and over the pew in front of us. It wasn't until the praying that Mike and Kelly realized the final resting destination of that ball of thread.
Their Aunt Lisa's butt crack.
Kelly filled me in while she sat on a mound of snow by the church parking lot. She was trying to clean herself off while her brother and parents put down church programs on the bench seat of the family car.
For once, I got the joke. Amusement park rides and Rastafarian accents were beyond me, but butt cracks are as universal as math.
And yet, I still felt for some reason outside the experience. As I stood there, listening to Kelly tell and re-tell the incident from atop her snowy perch ("Don’t say anything to Aunt Lisa, okay? She'd be mortified that her butt was showing in church"), I felt lonely. Which is to say I felt alone.
Months later, Kelly and I broke up. The reason for the split was complicated but can be summed up by distance. We went to different colleges, two and a half hours apart, and finally were unable to see how or why it was worth it.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it wasn't her peeing that did us in. Or rather, her not-peeing. Because what I remember most vividly aren't her accidents, but the times she laughed and didn't have an accident. It may sound weird, ridiculous, even selfish, but when you have a girlfriend who pees her pants from laughing, you can't help but wonder why she's never peed her pants from laughing at you.
Patrick Hueller has an MFA from the University of Minnesota. He's against instant replay in sports.
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