Peeing on Your Boyfriend, Part II
MY CAT WON’T pee just anywhere.
He doesn’t want to pee in a box, like a normal cat, though he has a nice litter box with nice organic litter; he only uses it a couple of times a month. Thomas wants to pee outside, and he wants to poop outside, too, and he doesn’t want to do either just anywhere. I put him in a little harness on a leash, and he roams, slowly, sniffing every blade of grass or corner of parked cars, a snail’s pace. When he lands in digable earth, a pile of wood chips or garden-loose soil, he still won’t deposit waste until he’s sniffed and sauntered around it thoroughly. Sometimes he digs a hole, then changes his mind and moves on, then digs another. And so on. I imagine this experience is familiar to many adults with dogs, standing in the rain or the snow too early or too late, tired or hungover or in a hurry and watching their beloved pet thinking: Just fucking GO already.
There’s a ten-year-old I occasionally pay to walk Thomas here in Washington, and as she put it the first time she brought him back, talking unnecessarily loudly in the way ten-year-olds often do, “IT WAS BOTH UTTERLY BORING AND FASCINATING AT THE SAME TIME.”
Yesterday, when I was watching Thomas dig and then reject his third hole in a row—he frequently takes so long to figure out where to poop that I have to poop before the end of it—I suddenly felt validated about my own discernment. Every single day, this cat makes an operatic fuss about where he’ll take a piss, and I have to believe that his emotional stakes aren’t that high. Me, I’ve tried to pee on two boyfriends, one who eagerly encouraged it a couple of years ago while saying the right things, another, more recently, who also welcomed it when I said, as he carefully worked his fist into me, “I could probably come, but it would definitely involve peeing.”
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Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
I didn’t want to deal with the laundry. The next time, we prepared. We laid down puppy pads—I’d bought them at a box store for the purpose, grabbing them off the shelf and hugging them to my chest, practically skipping through the parking lot back to my house. I was surprised I was so stoked. But when it came down to it, the two of us in my bed on disposable absorbent fibers, I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t even close.
We were going to break up soon. Though I didn’t know it, there were things I did know: I did not feel welcome to express my full breadth of feelings. I was explicitly unwelcome to express myself in a myriad of ways, and for me, I guess that’s what peeing on another person is about. If it ever does happen, it’ll be—it’ll have to be—in a dynamic where I feel, finally, adequately held in my fullness.
Maybe that’s what Thomas is looking for, among the hundreds of patches of earth I’ve watched him scratch and scour in our short time together. He starts to sit to pee, or he does sit, all the way down sometimes before realizing, the moment he lands, that it isn’t the right spot. He pops right back up, trying again a couple of inches to the left, or setting off in search of different terrain entirely. 🖤
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