Posted by Terry on December 30, 1998 at 11:36
This won't be the hottest watersports story you've read in 1998, but in reply to J's promptings (see the thread on "Murphy's Pub," Dec. 27-29) I'd like to tell about a delightfully perverse little coterie of straight/bi women and men I hung with briefly in the early 1970s. They still make me smile when I remember them, and I guess they go to show that there were some fairly sophisticated people running around back then. More sophisticated than me, anyway. They were among my mentors, I suppose, and helped me become a happy gay adult instead of killing myself.
I got to know them at Murphy's, sometime between 1972 and 1977. Just how we went from being strangers to being friends, I don't recall, but if you showed up every night like I did, you eventually drank with all the other regulars. As a familiar face, you could sidle into any table with an open seat and be welcome, and if a circle with an opening at their table saw you standing with your beer by the jukebox, they'd wave you over and tell you to join them. We all loosely identified with that vague entity "the People," as in "Power to . . . ," and if we were going to share the land, we might as well start with the beer.
Looking back on it, I wonder if they hadn't noticed me with a wet crotch or butt on a few occasions and weren't screening me for membership in their group. If so, the fact that we never really came out to each other and never got in the sack in any of the possible combinations may be owing to my never having shown any sexual interest in the female members of the group -- and never having betrayed sexual interest in the males. I was very closeted and very defensive. But a number of incidents and remarks made me think I might be on the fringes of a watersports club.
There was a core group of eight or ten, evenly divided as to gender, and two or three others shading off into other sets. The charismatic leader was a really handsome guy named Bob, a little taller than average, "buff," with dark hair and mustache, sometimes a beard. Of the women, the two I remember best were smallish, pixyish numbers who seemed to travel as a pair and to be sharing some "inside joke" as they sat together behind one of the long, picnic-style tables against the wall. They often leaned their heads together and whispered and giggled, their eyes darting here and there as though they were sizing people up. They often acted "antsy," nervously fidgeting in their seats, in a way that stirred my imagination. And there were remarks, little quips that were hard to pick up and even harder to pin down. Murphy's was a noisy bar, the jukebox always blarring, often SRO with two or three hundred people talking at once, a smoke-filled bedlam -- or perhaps pandemonium is the right word. But one line I would swear to in court, sans Clintonian equivocation, was perfectly audible across the table the night one of the pixies turned to the other and said of an absent third, "Well, she finally wet her pants, and then she was happy." This had been preceded by something vague about how bad somebody had to go and what did somebody do, but the line I've quoted is verbatim.
My suspicions had been growing because of their fidgeting and because they waited so long between trips to the john, not to mention the rather careless toileting that was common at Murphy's, and that remark simply made me more vigilant. Evenings at Murphy's were often followed by after-hours parties where the beer flowed free (we'd say, "There's a 15-kegger at 507 Sixth Street," and all head that way at closing), and I kept a close eye on that pair every chance I got. They often wore very short cut-offs with little cuffs that taped up into their crotches, and there wasn't much fabric to wet. (Jeans are so much more satisfying!) But there were times, at the bar and at parties, when that bit of denim sure looked wet, front and back, including the lighter-colored cuff. I have some experience in wetting myself, and it looked to me as though they had simply peed standing up, spreading their legs slightly, so that it spilled out in a stream onto the ground or floor. The floor at Murphy's was often wet, as I've said before, especially around the johns, and they might have done it while waiting in line without attracting attention. (I know, because I had.) At back yard parties, of course, they could just let it spill in the grass.
There were times when I thought I saw a trickle down a thigh or a few drops falling free in the light of someone's bonfire, all of us gathered 'round with our plastic cups, but the problem with observation back then was that we were all drunk and/or stoned and the light was uncertain. That's how I got away with so much at Murphy's, and how others got away with so much there and at the parties. Even if we were morally certain that someone had pissed him/herself, we had trouble forming words.
One time, though, when we were partying in somebody's back yard, Bob came down the back steps and sat on the edge of the chaise longue beside the one where I was reclining, having just cut loose and pissed my levis. Most of my piss had run through the plastic webbing to wet the earth, but my ass was good and wet, and so was my lap. We chatted amicably, he with a cheesy grin most of the time, and then he toasted me and went back inside. Even in the uncertain light from the back porch, he would have to have been blind -- or blind-drunk -- not to have had confirmed any suspicions he may have harbored about my toileting habits. And very shortly thereafter, maybe a week or so at another party, he came into the dining room where I was standing near the food table, carrying a full pitcher of something amber. He and another guy had been out in the back yard, I think with the pixie pair. The kegs were on the front porch. Bob smiled and came around the table to me, almost as though he had a towel over his arm. "Do you like warm beer?" he asked. I half-guessed what he meant but couldn't quite believe it, and recently another friend and I (the son of one of our state representatives, he was) had been discussing the proper way to drink Guinness and other imports. So I played dumb and said, "Sure, that's the way good beer should be." He handed me the pitcher, I took a hearty quaff of something a little flat and fruity, with perhaps a hint of tomato, and I handed it back to him with an appreciative smile into which he could read what he liked. He poured a little into a couple of his buddies' plastic cups and kept drinking from the pitcher himself as he made his way through the house among the drunks and potheads. In my gut, I knew that he and the pixies and God knows who else had filled that pitcher in some dark corner of the back yard, and now I was digesting their second-hand beer.
Another night when six of us were driving across the state line to a late-night bar, me in the middle in front, Bob in back between the pixie sisters, I overhead something that made my ears perk up, not to mention my dick. There was some giggling back there, and one of the women said "Are you doing it now?" Bob muttered something, and a minute later he called up to the driver: "I have to piss, you'd better pull over." Another minute, perhaps, and "I mean it, man, if you don't stop right now I'm going to piss my pants." My pulse shot up, my mouth went dry. When we pulled over, I hopped out, too, and tried to cop a look at the crotch of Bob's tan shorts as we hosed down a barbed-wire fence, but couldn't without blowing my damned cover. Didn't want him thinkin' I was queer nor nothin'. God, the opportunites missed! Anyway, much as I wanted to, I didn't get to see Bob piss himself that night. Never did see him really soak himself, in fact, although there were times at parties, when he was wearing fatigues or chinos, that I saw wet stains, much bigger than the proverbial "last drop," extending three or four inches down from his fly on the left where his dick hung.
The last of those times was in the late 70s, when I was finally coming out as gay and was at a party with my partner. The two of us were sitting on a sofa, and Bob came through the house in tan "bush pants," which were like cargo pants, and stood right in front of me, looking down on us as he wished us the best. His basket looked freshly wet, in that medium-brown shade that tan fabric turns when you pee in it. The wet spot arched down from the stitching of his fly and curved into his upper thigh, covering an area bigger than my hand, and I knew exactly what it would feel like if I raised my left hand from my knee and cupped that wet basket in my palm. I also wondered how he would react. Nothing he'd said or done since my coming out to him had suggested that he was open to sexual contact with me or my partner, but he knew I loved wetting and knew I wanted him (he must have seen it in my eyes many a time) and there was something taunting in his smile as he stood over us, hands on his hips, practically shoving his wet crotch in my face, as if to say "You'd love it, wouldn't you? Think you'll ever get it?"
So I left my hand on my knee, and Bob wandered off to the dining room, and a few weeks later he moved to San Francisco, where I heard he had landed a waiter's job someplace. Gee, that really narrows it down. Anyway, that was around the time AIDS started spreading, and since I think Bob had a lot of potential as a hustler, he may not be alive now. "But that was in another country, and besides . . . ," besides we're both twenty years older now, if he isn't dead, so there's no point in wondering whether he's still flaunting it somewhere in this city. It's like wondering if the pixie sisters have a house in Oakland now. They're just people I knew once and wish I could have leveled with.
Email: terry@wetjeans.com