For Dodge, who owned and lived the secret, it was something else. It wasn't so peculiar or terrible. He was comfortable with the secret and he knew that one percent understood.
Dodge's secret was his thirst. He was a golden showers guy, a man into water sports, a pee hag. During the day he was like everyone else, he ate eggs and toast and drank coffee for breakfast, and at dinnertime he drank mineral water or wine at the table, but late at night in damp pee bars he drank urine. On these nights his secret life came to full flower like a rare night-blooming jasmine under a swollen summer moon. It was wrong, he thought, to relish pee the way he did, but it was his secret which he proudly carried after midnight among the one percent who had seen a lot and hadn't blushed in fifteen years. There he was, sassy in the dark, the Dodger with a mug of gold.
Dodge truly loved urine, it wasn't just that it was fashionable in the bars he frequented, he really loved it. For him it was fluid of gods, a liquid elixir for bliss, and he couldn't get enough of it, couldn't get his fill, it was so dear. Sometimes he felt his heart would burst with love for pee.
This obsessional love he callously blamed on his mother, the battleax. She had messed him up. It was all her fault he turned out the way he did, he thought, even though most times he was not in the least unhappy with his little quirk.
His mother, Hilda Lee, had been a slob, a boozer. It was fortunate she was dead, otherwise Dodge would have had to kill her. He almost strangled her a couple of times out of sheer pissed- offedness. If she hadn't fallen drunk in an asphalt pit one night, after the bars closed, right on a busy city street, he would surely be on death row for her murder.
Dodge told the story of her death to fellow watersports people and his psychiatrist, Dr. Bernstein. He said she had probably moaned all night, and no one heard her. He said the next day when people were going to work they saw her down there covered in litter: empty beer bottles and Coke cans, potato chip bags, and candy wrappers. She was in the right place, he said, dead she was a shell, a wrapper, an empty bag, the contents were gone, the container to be discarded.
"Good thing she's gone." Dodge would shrug his shoulders. "Nasty broad was a witch. I'm this way because of her."
One has to wonder what a mother could have done to make a child so interested in urine. Does a mother wear a tasteful rubber dress and strap a toddler to a toilet seat in a bathroom that is warm and soothing and smells great? Or maybe the mother is just an innocent oddball, a weirdo, a knucklehead with a twisted take on reality that makes strange things seem perfectly normal. Certainly Hilda Lee was from white trash hillbilly stock, but so was half of the population of the United States. Being a hillbilly wasn't necessarily a factor that contributed to anyone's perversion.
"She never had an ounce of class," Dodge would tell his psychiatrist, "and if you didn't believe it all you had to do was look at her head. She always had her hair set in pink foam rollers and black crisscross bobbie pins. I never saw what her hair looked like without these things in it. I used to wonder when was that big party she was getting her hair ready for."
True there was always something mysterious about Hilda, aside from the pink foam rollers that is, something to really blame her for. Once when Dodge was little he found in her possession a book of witchcraft with one cryptic passage underlined. It said something about witches stealing the penises of God-fearing men to collect them in boxes where they would writhe like worms. After reading this he immediately knew his mother had a ton of penises in her black pocketbook. There she kept all the family's dicks ... his father's, brothers', the cousins'. Oddly enough he still had his own penis, thank God for that.
"So I looked in the pocketbook one night," Dodge explained to the quiet Dr. Bernstein, "but there were no penises there. Nothing except a wad of money, a hairbrush, lipstick, a pint of bourbon and a roll of toilet paper . . . toilet paper because she was too cheap and low-down to buy those mini-packages of Kleenex.
Dodge told the psychiatrist that he had to accept the fact that his mother hadn't really robbed anyone of his dick, not literally or physically anyway, but she had emasculated all of them just the same. She had robbed their power, and hid it from them.
"No wonder they all despised her," he added.
So Dodge blamed his mother for everything and that belief exonerated him. It wasn't him, it was her, he was a blameless victim of particulars. What he couldn't see was that she had been a victim too, just like him.
His psychiatrist listened silently for a number of long tearful years to Dodge's ranting about his poor mother and then one day, finally, after these years of being mute, years of literally not saying one thing, the doctor had something to say. Dr. Bernstein, the faithful, patient, rich, psychiatrist, told it this way: "Dodge, look, here it is. You say when your mother was carrying you she drank a lot of beer. Beer is a diuretic and everyone knows how the baby in pregnancy presses on the bladder so that the mother has to urinate more frequently. Anyway you say when she started to go into labor she was sitting at a bar stool drinking beer. By the time she got to the hospital and you started to come down the birth canal her bladder was bursting. She must have urinated on your head the minute you were born."
Dodge's mouth fell open. This doctor could not possibly be serious, could he? Was this textbook psychiatry? Was there any validity to his wacky opinion? Probably not, this doctor was just an asshole, a moron grasping at straws. He almost lost his appetite for pee right there and then. He called Dr. Bernstein an idiot and stormed out. He never went back. Later, with a, more benevolent insight, Dodge considered that maybe Bernstein intended him to lose his appetite for pee by telling him this. Well, it hadn't worked.
So Dodge decided to stop trying to analyze his obsession and just enjoy it. He let the past go, it was too dark, he gave up thinking about the future, it was too obscure. He concentrated only on the present, and this he found clear. He found bliss in this. Finally he decided to come out of the closet and openly admit to the world his love of pee. He shared his secret with everyone, thus he lost a lot of old friends, but made some new ones.
He found to his surprise that the majority of pee lovers weren't sleazy at all - in fact, they were much like him, they held down respectable jobs, had loving families and were generally wholesome types. He had always had a prejudice against and felt superior to the people he used to call the "piss reptiles," the people who he believed were the worthless, soulless types, the kind that hung around in sex and pee bars waiting for urine to flow and not seeing the beauty of it. He also used to feel superior or to the people he called the "wee-wee hobbyists," those people who were weekend urine enthusiasts. He wasn't at all those types, he wasn't a sleazo and he wasn't a mere weekender, he was a first-class guy and pee was his life.
After he eliminated his prejudicial judgments by opening his mind and the closet door, he became a happier person. New Year's Eve 1978 he even made a resolution to stop blaming his mother for everything.
So Dodge went along peacefully and normally enough, going to his job as a design consultant for a major international architectural firm and at night frequenting the bars. He was a polite man, and not too wild. He wasn't the type that would sit naked in the back- room piss tub accepting just anyone's fluids and he certainly had never waited in shadows at toilet bowls. He always went home at a reasonable hour, usually three A.M. He had a few long-term flings with leather men or guys that wore yellow handkerchiefs in the left-hand-side back pocket of their jeans. He had good and loyal friends, male and female. One winter he even attempted to settle down with a busty Irish fag hag who had admired his collection of blown-glass vases.
Everything was fine until one spring night when he heard about this disease called GRID and how it wafted through the air at gay discos. At first only handfuls of people were concerned about it, but after all kinds of people started coming down with it, and the name was changed from GRID to AIDS, and it was discovered that it was a virus contracted through body fluids, naturally Dodge got really scared. He worried constantly. It ate him up. Finally he got a test and unfortunately the results were positive for the virus. A few months later he got angry magenta-colored lesions on his thighs and went to the hospital to die. What else was there to do?
He was so confused. How could the beautiful golden fluid, the pure honest liquid, have been so bad, so evil, so unsafe? To him it had not only been an obsession but his sanity. Everything meant nothing now. Suddenly there were no footholds on reality for Dodge. He saw all the important things of his life become like the leaves on a tree after the summer. Those plump, green leaves turned brown, became shrunken and flimsy, and fell in October. By December, the leaves were no longer existent, they had just disintegrated and totally disappeared.
He was ready to die as soon as possible. No one blamed him. Feeble despairing, and brokenhearted he decided to get prepared so he could meet death with everything in order. Along with drawing up his will, planning a big furniture and clothes giveaway, and deciding on cremation, he also wanted to do some spiritual studying so he could greet God having done his homework.
As if the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead were required reading to pass the grade, he pored over these pages of ancient texts and memorized the high points. The last book on his list was the Bhagavada Gita. He read it but didn't get it. Too many gods and goddesses.
He was told by someone that he ought to read the biography of Gandhi instead, because Gandhi was a Janist and pretty well embodied the spirit of the Hindu scriptures. It was while reading this biography that everything changed for Dodge. This book became his real salvation. Actually it wasn't the book itself but a fact about Gandhi that it revealed. If Dodge hadn't found out this fact, this secret, he would have died within the month. He had almost lost it all, his hope, his pride, his sense of humor, and his life, but he instead fell right into a pit of miracles.
To his wild delight, Dodge discovered that Gandhi, to maintain optimum health, drank his own urine every day. He discovered that many people, prime ministers and religious leaders in India, did likewise. Then he found out that lots of healthy people all over the world, including people in the United States, were drinking their own urine. It was a homeopathic remedy; it worked the same way vaccines work.
Well, Dodge couldn't believe it. It was a miracle! It was exciting! Mind-boggling! A new adventure! It made such perfect sense. He was a new man immediately. The minute he read the passage on Gandhi's urine-drinking he grabbed his urinal bottle and downed it with gusto. He was back on his feet in three days. As long as he drank his own urine he was going to be well.
He threw away his prescription pills. He ripped up doctors' phone numbers. He tossed away the aluminum walker.
He was happy with his own urine. It tasted really great. And what a cheap cure! Free in fact! And he'd certainly never misplace his medicine! It was all right there in his handy bladder!
Years later, after the discovery of Gandhi's secret, Dodge was healthy and happy. He even discovered a medical facility; an institute in New York City that was exclusively for "Life Fluids" drinkers. They held meetings and he decided to attend.
It took a lot of courage to walk into that meeting room the first time. He had been terrified until he finally lifted his downcast eyes and looked around. Lo and behold, all his old buddies from the pee bars were there, smiling at him, happy to see him, clapping for him. He felt like he had somehow, suddenly returned home. His joy cup ran over. He was once again where he belonged ... among the one percent.
