Stage fright

Can’t master his johnson
the more we stay the same

By Scott Kathan

While I understand that a certain segment of the population is sexually stimulated by all things urine-related, I, for one, don’t see much appeal in human liquid waste. If I hear the phrase “golden shower,” my mind’s eye conjures up an image of a fragrant springtime rain , not an over-hydrated woman squatting over my chest. I don’t want to see you pee, I don’t want you to see me pee, and, more to the point, I probably wouldn’t be able to pee if you were watching.

You see, I sometimes suffer from what we fellas call stage fright. I don’t have any issues with my penis, and I don’t have a problem with being nude. Showering or changing in front of men at the gym is no problem. But many times I am somehow unable to open the floodgates — no matter how badly I have to whiz — if there is someone in close proximity.

One of my gay male friends told me that some gay men will hover nearby when another man is urinating to try to determine, by the sound or sight of the liquid flow, the penis size of said man. I admit that I find this behavior strangely fascinating (and probably a terribly inaccurate way of determining schlong heft). But I’m not afraid that someone is sizing me up. The last time I checked, I was a fine and healthy young man “down there,” with no singularly distinguishing features, blemishes, or bends in the road. My friends would tell you that I skinny-dip with such gusto that I may just have a hint of exhibitionist in me. So why can’t I relax enough to perform the most basic of human bodily functions in public?

The answer is that I don’t have an answer. I wish I did, because this condition can be quite a pain in the ass. Now, it’s not like I need pristine isolation to be able to take a leak. If the urinals in a men’s room are divided by some sort of sightline-blocking partition, I’m fine. But especially in larger venues like the FleetCenter, where the urinals are lined up without barriers — well, the internal Dutch boy keeps his finger in the dike. By the third quarter of a Celtics game, say, after a cup of coffee and a few beers, my bladder’s reaching capacity. I hurry to the men’s room, head for the most desolate urinal, and . . . nothing. No release, no relief. Stage fright.

So what can I possibly do when the tinkle bell rings in public? Well, there are only two options: I can stall, or I can head for a stall. And neither of these options is very pretty in the “manly man’s” world.

Stalling means pretending to pee, and this is simultaneously the most comically absurd and most disheartening aspect of stage-fright dysfunction. If there are gentlemen standing shoulder-to-shoulder on either side of me, with barely processed Coors Light flowing out of them in
Niagara Falls–like volume, I’m done for.
I stand there facing the urinal, hoping that nobody notices that my bowl is as dry as the Sahara. By then my self-consciousness has compounded the problem, and there is absolutely no chance that I’ll be able to relax enough to pee. But to complete the charade, I must bluff my way through the finishing ritual: shaking off the imaginary post-pee droplets before tucking Benedict Arnold back into the boxers, and striking the flush lever with a macho flourish that says, Ahhh, what a great piss! Sometimes nobody notices. But imagine the awkwardness when somebody does notice. What would you think if you saw someone taking an imaginary pee? You’d probably think he was a perverted “pecker watcher,” hanging out in the bathroom pretending to pee but really trying to cop a peek at strangers’ weenies. Oh God.

The other option for the urinarily challenged is to try for a toilet stall. Sometimes this works wonderfully. Inside the relatively private confines of a walled-off area, my inhibition vanishes. But all bathrooms are not created equal. Since women sit down every time they go to the bathroom, I imagine their stalls are generally much tidier than what we men encounter. The typical men’s-room stall in a rock club or at a sporting venue is smeared — if you’re lucky — with feces or vomit, and not both. I cannot imagine ever sitting down in one of these chambers of hideousness — but that’s a column for another person with another set of neuroses on another day. Getting back to my problem, sometimes a public men’s-room stall is so revolting that I couldn’t pee in it even in utter privacy. In that case, my only choice is to test my powers of restraint — that is, to hold it — which in the long run is really no choice at all. You see my dilemma.

I’m sure that Freud, or even my friendly neighborhood shrink, could have a field day with my pissing problem. Does it derive from homophobia? Latent homosexuality? Self-love? Self-hate? Aside from resorting to a professional, I really don’t have anyone to talk to about this. I can’t exactly turn to someone next to me at the bar and, after asking him how the Sox are doing, blurt out, “Do you ever have any problems taking a piss?” I didn’t coin the term “stage fright” for this problem, so I can only suspect that other men, and perhaps even a few women, share my malady. But I don’t know how I’ll ever find them. Maybe the time has come to start a support group for the pissing-challenged. But until that happens, all I can do is reduce my fluid intake.

Scott Kathan is features editor of Stuff@Night magazine, where, thankfully, the urinals are isolated from view.