Stress and the Bryant Park Urine Collectors

I drove into Manhattan a couple of mornings this week, parked on the West Side and walked through the Theater District to meetings on the East Side. Travel across town is glacial, while up and down town is relatively swift.

For the first time since I visited as a twenty-something rube, I found the city exciting rather than stressful. The noise, the soot, the hullabaloo didn’t really bother me. On the contrary, I thought about how nice it would be to come into the city more often and take in some shows and such like.

I reckon that my trick of parking (in a lot) and making my way across town on foot rather than fighting impossible cross town traffic allowed me to experience the city without being in my usual fog of seething homicidal rage. Also, I had allowed myself ample time to get where I was going and to meander through the streets, and I had set it up so that I would not be desperate to find a bathroom, something which can be a challenge in NYC.

On Wednesday, I passed by Bryant Park outside the Library to and from my meeting where one of the few public restrooms can be found. I recalled a few years ago when I used those facilities as being one of the strangest moments of my life in le Pomme Grande. As I used a urinal, a man to my left was pissing into a gallon jug and eating a sandwich from a container resting on the flushing mechanism of his urinal. When I got outside, I noticed a group of rough looking men sitting around one of the tables in the park. Each of them had a plastic gallon jug filled to some level with what I figured, based on recent observations, was their own urine. They were all smoking cigarettes and drinking Big Gulps or the NYC equivalent monster sodas. I didn’t ask them why they were collecting massive quantities of their own urine, and I have regretted it ever since.