For a time I dated a guy who liked to spend his weekends filling up Instagram with city photos of himself. There he was with the bay. There with a bridge. There with a beach. There with a boy. They were fairly interchangeable, these photos. A typical one would show him in triumphant half profile in front of some much loved and colorful location — Castro Street, for example, or Dolores Park — gazing manfully toward the sunset, with a caption that read something like, “No one ever believed, not my friends, not my family, that I would someday live here. #SFlove #SFheart #sogood #homesweethome.”
I never bothered to point out that his Eastlake condo was in Oakland and that the office of the video design firm where he worked was in San Rafael. And that San Francisco was only the place he went to whenever he was in the mood for brunch and a little self-mythologizing.
I could sympathize. Everyone likes a little fantasy. And home is a feeling as much as a mailing address. But I have a hard time pretending that San Francisco is a place of wistful magic as seen through the softened filters of Instagram, even if the world does look better in Brannan. I just silently agreed with his friends’ and family’s lack of faith.
For my own life, I try to limit my “Can you believe it? #onlyhere” San Francisco stories, mostly because they’re both believable and uninteresting. And besides, I live in Berkeley and only work in the city.
Still, I don’t think anyone who knows me would ever think that I would someday sell hot urine on draft out of a men’s-room toilet in SOMA.
You see, I’m a financial opportunist, and there’s no publication I read with more attention than Craigslist. If there’s a chance to make or save an easy buck, I’ll take it. So I’m particularly a fan of the “gigs” and “free” sections. Pick something up, drop something off, lift one end of a couch and shuffle down some stairs. Nothing too challenging.
Naturally, I was very excited to see a gig promising 20 bucks for less than 10 minutes’ time. The ad was seeking only men, of any age, who had not used cannabis, methamphetamines or other psychotropic substances in the past month, preferably not even caffeine. And it was listed as “urgent.” I had a pretty good guess what this was about. I texted the response number.
“You’ve got a drug test today, don’t you?”
Two minutes later the answer came back, confirming my suspicion.
“Yes, are you available today?”
I work as a bike messenger, so I know the FIDI and SOMA pretty well and typically need some relief after my third cup of coffee — usually around 12:30 — so I told him I could probably schedule something to coincide with the release of my bladder. Though, as I explained, I do enjoy caffeine.
“That’s fine. I was just being cautious,” he texted back. “Where would be a convenient place to meet you?”
There’s an office building at 405 Howard Street I sometimes pick up from. They have a large and fairly busy lobby and publicly accessible toilets, and since I’m over there so often, the security guards know me.
“I will have a bottle or cup for you,” he texted. “You are a lifesaver.”
Bike messengers are sometimes stereotyped as mobile drug mules, a trope that the recent boom in bicycle-managed cannabis-delivery services does little to dispel. Though I’m not into that, personally, I’m not bothered by it. People can do what they want with their bodies. Hell, I like to cut loose with the occasional recreational aspirin.
Chemically altered states, though, just aren’t my thing. Which means my record is pretty clean. My kidneys have been riding easy with hardly anything more noxious than Top Ramen MSG. So there shouldn’t be a problem — nothing that would come out in the wash, so to speak. I hadn’t even eaten asparagus in the past week.
Still, posting for clean piss on Craigslist reads as either “amateur” or “desperate.” Probably some corporate stooge up for promotion who’d snorted up last week’s paycheck and couldn’t get it out of his system fast enough. I decided to fleece him. If this guy shows up in a suit, I thought, I’m asking double.
But David, when he arrived, looked like he’d just shambled out of the operating booth of a ski lift. Two weeks’ worth of beard, a natty beanie, a stained sweatshirt, skater shoes and ripped-up jeans. The kind of guy who delivers pizzas and sorts mail in Anytown, USA. Just some kid who liked a little pot. Not that much, and not every day. Maybe about as often as I enjoy bowtie pasta. So a few times a month. And even though 25 states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis in some form or another, David had applied for a job in one of those other 25 states — my home state of New York, as it turned out. Which meant that in addition to his regular dealer, he now needed a dealer of a different variety.
But I couldn’t figure out why this guy would just trust my word on it. San Francisco is a fairly substance-laden city. Maybe no more than most cities, but Save the Bay regularly runs public-service announcements asking citizens to please not flush illegal substances down the toilet, where they can seep into the local ecosystem. If there’s so much cocaine regularly flowing through the plumbing that it can hype up a migrating fish, this dude was taking a serious leap of faith.
We went into the men’s room at 405 Howard, and David passed me a glass bottle emblazoned with an enthusiastic-looking fruit and the words “Strawberry Fizz” in a cinematic font.
“I hope you washed this,” I said. “I’d hate to test positive for kombucha.”
“It’s clean,” he said.
I went into the stall, removed the cap and assumed the position with one hand. And with my other hand I clasped the bottle. A steady sensation of warmth rose upward through the glass from pinkie to ring finger to middle finger to pointer. Two ounces. Four ounces. Six ounces. I imagined one of those fundraising thermometers you see outside small-town firehouses. Eight ounces. Ten ounces. GOAL!
I had to stop myself an inch from the top, then gave the bottle a wipe just to be sure. A cold beer, an iced tea: these are improved by a moistened exterior. But there is no analog for situations like this, where it’s best not to remind the customer what he’s cradling.
“I’m surprised you posted on Craigslist,” I said, coming out of the stall. “Don’t you know anyone with children you could ask for clean piss?”
“Not any that don’t smoke weed,” he said.
“I meant the kids.”
“That doesn’t change my answer.”
David slipped a paper towel over his hand like a pastry tissue and took the bottle from me, then gave it a rinse in the sink, dried it and slapped on one of those adhesive thermometers tropical-fish enthusiasts use to monitor aquarium temperature. Then he nestled the bottle between two heat packs and wrapped it in a sweatshirt. The procedure seemed overly cautious to me, and I said so.
“That’s a lot of work,” I said.
“If it gets below 92 degrees, they won’t take it,” he said.
“They told you that?” The disclosure practically invited cheating. “I don’t think I’d want to work for a company that tried to legislate what I do with my free time,” I said.
“I don’t know. I think it’s worth it,” David said. “I’ve never lived in New York. I want to give it a try.”
He washed his hands and counted out 30 dollars in five-dollar bills. An extra 10 dollars! Three dollars per fluid ounce, roughly. Far more valuable per ounce than an espresso, say, or Bulleit Bourbon. How did I not know about this market sooner?
For decades I’ve just been flushing the stuff away, when, it turns out, my kidneys have been filling up daily with liquid gold.
A few weeks later, I got curious. I still didn’t know how the story ended. Did he get the job, or didn’t he? And I guess like any dealer I wanted to know just how good my supply was. So I texted him.
“We met up at the end of May for your drug test,” I wrote. “Just curious — how did the results come back?”
Less than a minute went by before David texted back.
“I’m in New York and start work on Monday,” he wrote. “I owe you big time, amigo!”
So it had a happy ending. For years, I’ve given my time away volunteering for nonprofits and city agencies to save trees, save elders, save you and save me, telling myself I was doing some good in the world. I just never thought that the most positive influence I could have on another’s life was pissing into a bottle. That man has a job because of me. My kidneys worked a miracle. I practically feel noble. Kinda makes me want to stand in triumphant half profile and gaze manfully at the sunset.
