Speaking of Urine

It's Mardi Gras time here on the bayou.

This weekend is the second of the two largest local parades. People start lining their RVs and pick-up trucks along the parade route a few days before. I never did understand the appeal of these parades. How much plastic crap can one person collect? But I do think that Mardi Gras in New Orleans is something that everyone should do once in his or her life.

Once was enough for me.

When my husband was in flight school, a group of us decided on a whim to drive to New Orleans for the weekend before Fat Tuesday. I managed to find a room in a hotel that was connected to a hospital, just a short cab ride from the Quarter.

There were maybe 12 of us in that room. There were married couples, dating couples, single guys, and a couple of married men whose wives refused to go on the trip.

We headed over to Bourbon Street fairly early in the day. My friends, after being inspired by some obviously professional strippers, started flashing anyone and everyone who would offer beads. The guys used their wives as bead whores.

Our closest friends had decided to bring cheap white jackets for everyone to wear. And everyone got a Sharpie. The idea was to see who could get the most signatures during the weekend.

Now let me state for the record that my husband and I do some wild and crazy things (in bed) and we're up for anything new (in bed), but when it comes to showing our goods and interacting with complete strangers...well..it is not our cup of tea.

So we drank. We ate Chinese Food. We conned our way into a series of non-public restrooms. We drank some more. Even I, the modest one, had so many beads that my neck hurt.

We watched one of the big parades and than tried to get through the wall of mass humanity to head home. Even our most gung-ho friends could only take so much. Once you've seen a few hundred boobs and dicks, you've seen them all.

The 12 of us were all in a line, holding onto each other as tight as we could, and snaking our way toward an area that might have cabs. At one point, on Bourbon Street, I was stuck right in a big pile of sewage in the sewer. New Orleans is not the cleanest city anyway, but considering the drunkenness of the crowd, the sewers were just overflowing with human waste.

It was at this point, being crushed by people on all sides, that the man beside me started having an argument with a man standing on a balcony overhead. The argument escalated and the balcony man had a brilliant idea.

He whipped it out and started to pee on the man that was angering him. I know it is hard to believe that you really can't move enough to escape a stream of urine, but me and the man next to me bore the brunt of it.

I didn't want to yell, because I didn't want to open my mouth, but I did push against my husband to try and get him to move. "Tell them to move out from under the balconies," I was finally able to say. And slowly but surely, we were more toward the middle of the street.

My hair was pee-soaked. My neck hurt. I hadn't drunk near enough to get drunk (Hurricanes-Schmuricanes). And I wanted to fucking go home.

After our friend who was a former SP physically threatened a cabby into taking us home, I went back to the hotel for the longest shower of my life.

We did get to soak in a hot tub that night. We were all in our undies. (What? We're straight. That's kinky for us.) And I managed to make an inappropriate comment about by best friend's husband's calves. I couldn't help it. They were hot.

Saying, "I got peed on at Mardi Gras," is a good conversational starter. But if I ever go again I think I'll stick to the *dramatic whisper* gay section. And if I'm going to get peed on again, I want it to be by choice.