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Dedication

For my family.

I blame them for everything.

EVERYTHING IS AWFUL, AND OTHER EMBARRASSMENTS

I was six years old when I last peed my pants.

I say this not to brag—although making it over twenty years without pissing my pants is actually quite an accomplishment, to be perfectly honest—but to bare my shame.

I was at my best friend Kenny’s house after school, drinking juice boxes and waging war with toy soldiers. You know, six-year-old stuff. As our battle wore on, my body slowly devolved into the cross-legged dance of the six-year-old in distress, writhing to console the mounting pressure of my bladder. As my soldiers fell in the heat of battle, I crept painfully closer to my limit.

I was dressed in my finest outfit for a school assembly earlier that day, some hideous combination of red, black, and white my mother thought was stylish in 1996. In retrospect, that outfit probably deserved to be pissed on. You can’t put a budding homosexual in an ill-conceived pattern and expect him not to urinate all over it. Regardless, there I was, standing in front of the toilet (I’d managed, at least, to make it to the bathroom), furiously struggling with the buttons of my fancy six-year-old pants. And yes, my mother chose not only a hideous pattern, but dress pants with buttons instead of a zipper, yet another choice that begged for this very outcome. I’d held my composure for as long as I could.

My hands helplessly fumbling at the buttons, I finally succumbed to sweet relief, soaking the plush rug beneath my feet, along with my socks, underwear, and those wretched pants, still buckled around my waist. Some days, when I'm standing in front of a toilet, I can still feel that rug beneath my feet, a moist phantom of my earliest humiliation.

I spent the next twenty minutes silently brooding in that bathroom. They were black pants, after all. Maybe I could get away with acting like this hadn’t happened. All I needed to do was spend the next two to three hours in damp agony, and as long as nobody looked too closely or inhaled too deeply, I could escape undetected.

But I spent too long plotting this out, and Kenny’s mom knocked on the door.

“Is everything all right in there?” (A question that someone only asks when everything is not all right in there.)