Urine Trouble!

On Saturday, I had just gotten home from the gym and the grocery store. I parked in my garage and was closing the garage door when a car pulled up next to me in the alley.  A woman rolled down the passenger-side window and said, “Sir, can we please ask you a question?” 

 

The car was kind of old and crappy. I knew this encounter was going to be odd.

 

She continued, “It’s a pretty weird question, is that OK?”

 

Standing there in my gym shorts I was like, are they going to ask me why my legs are so white? According to 23 And Me, I am 99.7% European. The .03 % of me that is Mongolian just does not lend itself to tanning.  I’m sorry my legs are so white, people. Please stop asking me about this!  God!

 

I pulled myself out of my self-shaming-leg-color-spiral and looked into the car. There was a man in the driver’s seat, the woman in the passenger’s seat, and several very small children not sitting in child seats.  Maybe this wasn’t going to be about the color of my legs.

 

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

 

“Do you take drugs?” the man asked me.

 

I laughed as the image of Nancy Reagan in a little red dress popped into my head.  Then I wondered if the $45 bottle of Pouilly-Fumé in my shopping bag counted as drugs.

 

“No?” I said.

 

“Great.  We didn’t think so.” The woman continued, not looking at my legs. “My husband here has a chance to get a job in construction that we really need.  He smoked some pot recently and it’s still in his system.  He has to get a drug test to be able to get the job. My nephew was not able to produce very much clean pee.”  She held up a condom.  There is a little bit of pee in the condom. 

 

Not used to condoms being held up to me in car windows, I thought about turning around and running right then.  But I looked at the kids in the car.  Smiley, happy little kids, without car seats.

 

“I don’t really have to pee right now.” I said.

 

“Please sir.  We really need your help.  We really need this job. We need your clean pee!” The woman pleaded.

 

I looked around for the camera crew and the microphones.  There were none to be seen. I looked at the little kids again, without car seats.

 

Oh man, I could see the headline: URINE TROUBLE.  Local man jailed for supplying clean pee.

 

But then I looked at the little kids. Shit.

 

“This is liberalism gone mad,” I mumbled to myself. 

 

“OK, let me go get a big glass of water and see what I can do,” I said, not quite believing that had just come out of my mouth.

 

Pretty freaked out, both at this the situation, and myself, I went into my house and drank a big glass of water.  Then I search the cupboard for a container.  I found and old pickle jar with a lid that I sometimes use to make salad dressing. 

 

So I did it.  I peed into the pickle jar.  It was that post-morning-vitamin pee that is fluorescent green.

 

Still very sure this was being filmed, I walked back out to the alley.  They had pulled over to the side and were waiting with the engine running. The little kids were still smiling and laughing.

 

“You are right, this is the weirdest thing I am going to be asked for today, but here you go.” 

 

I handed over the pickle jar with its florescent green contents, my hand kind of shaking as I wondered if I would go to jail for this.

 

The woman kind of teared up, the man reached over and shook my hand, the kids just smiled at me and waved.  I closed my back gate and they drove away. 

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