I Can Pee For Miles

I owe my ability to urinate in public restrooms to The Who.

It’s true. When I was much younger, two of my least favorite things about attending arena-rock concerts were the assumption that I must have joints to share because I had long hair, and the presumption that I could just pee and get out of the way with a long line of guys waiting for my spot at the urinal.

The joint thing mostly ended when I finally cut my shoulder-length locks sometime during college, therefore no longer visually misrepresenting myself as a guy who even knew how to inhale, let alone as the kind of pharmaceutical sophisticate who recognized the street slang for all manner of other illegal narcotics.

Then, on July 13, 1980, 10 days past my 22nd birthday, I was standing in a long line outside the Greensboro (NC) Coliseum, mostly psyched to be seeing my favorite rock band for the second time. (Though The Who's manically brilliant drummer, Keith Moon, had gotten his seeming death wish by overdose two years earlier, and had been replaced by Kenney Jones.) But I also was feeling more than a little nervous about the bathroom situation, given my serious case of Shy Bladder Syndrome.

I’d devised various strategies over the years to answer nature’s call, in such situations, somewhere other than in my jeans. Sometimes I’d simply seek the privacy of a stall. Other times I limited my beer intake, hoping I might avoid altogether the need to go. (That never worked, because then and now, I likely could shun all beverages for 24 hours and still need to drain at least hourly.) Like that old joke about voting in Chicago, I tried going early and often, while the concert or sports-event crowd still was arriving. (Front-loading,—or, rather, front unloading—I discovered, had limited value. And sometimes, as during The Who’s 1976 American tour, when warm-up act Toots & the Maytals was getting booed off the stage in those not-ready-for-reggae times, the bathrooms could get pretty packed even after the music had started.)

Youth is fraught with enough frustrations—untamable acne, unattainable women, etc—without the ultimate, ridiculous frustration of simultaneously needing to pee like a racehorse and being reined in by the psychological pressure of all the guys behind you awaiting your place at the porcelain. I would try closing my eyes and envisioning myself alone—not that easy a task amongst shouts of “Daltrey’s a god!” and “Puke somewhere else, asshole!” I felt as if all eyes were on me as I lingered there, even though the guys with whom I’d been waiting in line already had conducted their business at one of the other urinals and moved on.

In time, I usually could break through the dam, if not always completely empty the reservoir. Sometimes, though, I’d have to zip up and move over to the line for the stalls—where privacy was assured, but often at the cost of unspeakable sights and smells.

All that was to change, however, on that fateful July night. Eight months earlier, 11 Who fans had died of “compressive asphyxia” in Cincinnati—trampled to death in a mad rush for the doors. Many venues—including the scene of the tragedy, Riverfront Stadium—abandoned unassigned seating after that. I can’t remember if I had an assigned seat for the 1980 Who show in Greensboro, or, if not, why thousands of us had elected to stand on line outside the doors. Regardless—whether in tribute to this new round of dead kids in O-hi-o, or because assigned seating had removed any incentive to storm the gates, or simply because “Greensboring,” as we young wits used to call it, never was big on drama—the crowd was orderly and patient.

God knows what was on my mind as I waited to get into the building. I’d started my first job out of college, as Davidson County reporter for the High Point Enterprise, only a couple of months before, so I likely was wondering how soon people would realize I was an idiot and I would be fired. Maybe I was thinking about how much I disliked both the clueless Ronald Reagan and the ineffectual yet strangely haughty President Carter, and whether I might rather go third-party with John Anderson in the November balloting. But most likely, as I stood there I was hoping the band would sample liberally from Tommy and Quadrophenia, and I also was praying I wouldn’t need to pee anytime soon, an hour or more before the doors were to open.

At some point, though, I was roused from my internal monologue by the whoops and hollers of my queue-mates, who were tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing to three guys who were—no, were they really?—urinating in near-synchronous yellow arcs against the venue we were about to enter.

Granted, I’d lived a pretty sheltered life to that point, but I’d never seen anything like this. I honestly don’t remember what the Tinkling Trio looked like—whether they were short or tall, shaggy or trim, T-shirted or tank-topped—but what I do starkly, searingly recall, to this day, is how much they cared what anyone thought about their performance, which was not one iota of a damn. They had to go, so they went. Period. If that meant whipping their johnsons out in front of hundreds of strangers of both sexes, defacing municipal property, and risking a misdemeanor if spotted by law enforcement, so be it. Relief was its own reward.

As it happened, there were no repercussions. Except, that is, for the game-changing impact on me. Ever since that day, whenever I stand facing a urinal in a rock club or sports-stadium restroom, all I need do if I start to freeze is invoke the words “Who concert 1980”—sometimes I even say it aloud—and picture those three glorious, disgusting guys darkening the bricks outside the Greensboro Coliseum with their devil-may-care whiz. “If they could do that,” goes my internal mantra, “I can do this.” There have been very few times over the years when that hasn’t worked. (At such times, it’s back to the stalls.)

So, all right, I really owe my ability to pee in public restrooms to those three anonymous young men who never will know what their appallingly crude display meant to me. Still, neither they nor I would’ve been at the Greensboro Coliseum in the first place on that summer day 33 years ago had it not been for The Who. A band that, it should be noted, had selected as the cover of its 1971 LP Who’s Next a photo of the quartet zipping their trousers after evidently having just marked their territory, so to speak, on a concrete monolith in the middle of a slag heap.

Interesting, too, is this bit of back story from a Google search on the making of that album:

“According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the [band] members were unable to urinate, so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect.”

Is it any wonder why I’ve always felt such an affinity for that band?