I want to say I was 16, maybe. My family went to Florida. I was—and still am—a passionate SCUBA diver. The water is the only place I feel graceful. I went by myself on a dive boat. There was me and maybe six other divers—all big, brawny men. I felt very small and hairless.
You have to understand dive culture. Some people like the fish. Some people like the quiet. Some people—dudes with bad fathers—like to pretend they’re NAVY Seals. They strap knives to their legs and wear huge watches and get all big-balled about how little air they use.
This boat was filled with those meatheads. On our way out to the dive site, I was like, Are we invading Bermuda? They were all strapped and wearing four-foot fins, telling tales about how they routinely dived to 300 feet and fought sharks. Several confessed underwater murders.
Today I’d be like, Sorry about your shitty childhoods. But being a teenage boy is hard in some ways. I was sort of intimidated and wanted badly to belong. I did not belong. My mummy and daddy had driven me to the boat and were waiting on shore for me with ice cream.
Anyway, we dived, and the biggest Chet of the bunch got a wicked jellyfish sting on his face, like he’d been slashed with broken glass. Whether any of his other stories were true, I had no idea. But now he had a true story about the time a jellyfish turned his lips into sausages.
We scrambled back onto the boat. The guy was screaming through his gritted teeth, so pretty quickly, he was laid out flat on the deck. Back then, the theory was that ammonia helped treat jellyfish stings. (Apparently it does not.) A good source of ammonia is… urine.
Out of nowhere, these big hairy bros started pissing on his face, like dogs fighting over a fire hydrant. I’d never seen anything like it. (I mean, where would I have?) But I still had a lot to learn about diving and manhood. I was like, Okay, I guess we’re doing this.
I shouldered into the circle and peed on him, too. I didn’t just take a tinkle on this dude, either. If you’ve ever gone diving, you know that you absorb or swallow half the ocean. You have to piss like a racehorse. It was like I was a bilge pump. I emptied a bucket on this guy.
I was reminded, years earlier, of going to Cleveland Municipal Stadium, maybe? Some ballpark that had circular urinals. I had to stand there in this circle of bikers and longshoremen and take out my tiny peen and hang one. The boat was like that, but at least I’d hit puberty.
We doused that guy like he was on fire—there was more urine on that boat deck than in the ball pit at IKEA. And then we all acted like the biggest fucking heroes in the world, giving each other high fives and shit. It was the weirdest thing. These guys were JACKED.
We headed back to shore. Pissboy sat alone, staring out to sea. I remember thinking, He doesn’t look okay. It wasn’t just the jellyfish sting. That trip changed him. He’d gone out a man who’d never been peed on. He was coming back knowing that he could never say that again.
Everybody else was quiet, too, until one of the other guys piped up: “We shoulda pissed into cups or something, and then poured them on you. That woulda been better.” And the guy just looked over, like a man who wished everything was different, and whispered: “Yeah.”
We got back and said goodbye: six strangers brought together by fate to urinate all over another stranger’s face. My parents asked me how my dive had gone. “Great,” I said. I didn’t tell them I had peed on a man for the first time. I just ate my ice cream. It was reward enough.
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