Pissing Man by Timothy Ralph
In Ireland in the 1970s, the streets were strewn with rivulets of fresh mustard piss. Firstly, the suburban laneways where men just couldn’t make it home from the Bookies on time, to the pathways of public parks, Shelbourne Park Greyhound Stadium, all around O’Connell Street on St. Patrick’s Day and just about anywhere else you can think of. I even recall a man standing pissing at the side of Victories Credit Union when I headed down at the age of 12 to open my first account.
Irish men were such prolific pissers it was almost laminated to the Constitution as an indelible part of their liberty and right to live. So it should come as scant surprise when I moved back to the parental home last October to write and help out for a while…that the old man was pissing all over the house without any due cause to care.
For a while my mother said nothing. This has been a kind of ostrich-head + sand tradition going back to when I first tasted Liga. It wasn’t until I walked into puddles late at night in the kitchen, or took the stairs barefoot to bed when drunk or made the mistake of whiffing the cushions on the couch in the sitting-room (what crazy instinct was this?) that I realised there was a urinary tract conspiracy in full liquid swing.
“Don’t say anything because he gets awful embarrassed about it,” the Ma said. This nugget of emotional blackmail worked for a while. He’s hitting 80 after all, his legs are gone, he can no longer make it out to the pub and he’s lost interest in almost everything apart from whiskey, war documentaries and the lotto. But like everything in an alcoholic home, avoidance strategies and colourful denials are destined to come crashing down at the first foretoken of crisis.
A few months ago my mother got cancer (well she’s had it for a good while but it’s taken at least a year to get her to own up to the four/half stone weight loss and general body-breaking-down weakness). During the haitus between smashing her denial and getting to a hospital, we started fighting about the old man’s pissing habits. One night I caught him pissing in a bucket outside the kitchen door and when I reported back [in a blind rage] to the Ma about ”how utterly disgusting” it was, she admitted quite calmly that she laced the Piss Bucket with disinfectant regularly and emptied it once a week. “You mean you’ve actually known about this!?” I barked.
Up until that point I’d taken an active part in the spare him any hurt household games, taking his piss cushions from his armchair in the dead of night and washing them, drying them on radiators and shoving them back again before he crawled down the stairs for his boiled egg the next morning.
“He just can’t make it up the stairs,” she explained, again, over breakfast. Well then get in a downstairs toilet for starters, that’s what normal people would do. “He doesn’t want to lose the cloakroom”. But he can’t go out anymore, so what’s the use in a cloakroom!? ”He says he’ll deal with it and get to the toilet quicker.” Of course he won’t! It’s just going to get worse…much worse, Jesus! He’s going to have to deal with it or I’ll contact social services!”
Three weeks ago as I cleaned the house in preparation for her return from hospital I eventually sat the old man down and attempted to talk piss politics openly. “I can’t help it!” he whinged, adding that if he had to wear ‘padded pants’ like I was suggesting, he’d rather kill himself. Another thing about alcoholics is that no matter what is going on in the world around them, it will still always be about them. I resorted to shock tactics telling him that no-one visits the house anymore because of the stench, that my brother home from the UK to visit my mum was knocked back in anger by it all (“smells like a bag of ferrets”) and had pledged to write a stern letter on his return…that fire-hose pissing on this scale was a clear and irrefutable health hazard, potentially dangerous…someone could slip and fall, there’s a cancer patient returning home with an open wound and serious infection could mean a summer picnic to Glasnevin Crematorium. Nothing but blank bulldog stares.
“I bleed five days a month and I can’t help that either,” I told him, not so subtley, ”but imagine if I didn’t stick something in my knickers and deal with it!? Imagine if I just bled on buses and in the GPO when queueing for stamps or in Beshoffs buying chips or all over the floor in Penneys shopping for cheap socks…wouldn’t that be completely and utterly INSANE!?”
The crux of the battle came (and not on dry land) when I stormed off to Finglas in search of Tenapads in a terribly hungover state two weeks ago. I left them on the kitchen table on a placemat where he sits for his dinner and just to avoid any further denial, I left a note with them: ‘You have to wear one of these when you’re drinking and at night-time in bed’.
Caldwell Family Piss Bucket Outside Kitchen
A while later he stormed into the dining room where I was watching Eastenders and pointed to a giant circus-ring type wet patch on his trousers. “Now tell me, how would your magic pads have stopped that happening?” he squealed. That’s when I realised the sheer level of compacted insanity we’re dealing with.”Of course it won’t stop it happening but the pads will at least contain it till you get to the shower!” I said, utterly gobsmacked.But it seems that decades of hard pissing has drowned out the last semblance of rationale in the paternal brain and yet another old man is destined to leave the planet happy, having asserted his full and moral rights to the Irish Constitution.
June Caldwell is a writer, who after 13 years of journalism, is finally writing a novel. She has a MA in Creative Writing and was winner of ‘Best Blog Post’ award at the 2011 Irish Blog Awards. You can read this post on her own blog here:
Jaysus, this is an amazing piece of writing. It manages to be funny and angry and heartbreaking at the same time, which is a pretty hard act to pull off. Bravo!
Ah, thank you Anna! I’m a professional ranter!
Loved this, but my god have you got a lot on your plate!
June, this is such a well put together and descriptive piece. Well done for saying it so plainly.
My very proud Dad has Alzheimer’s and refused to acknowledge it or any of the problems it creates..financial, emotional, safety/ security issues.
These are the unspoken issues for many in our generation. What do you do when very independent older people need help but won’t take it? How do you manage your parents? At what stage does the decision-making fall to you?
Mags
June, I salute you for looking after your parents first of all. Not many would do it. Secondly, I salute you actually confronting your Da about it. That must have been so hard and infuriating too by the sounds of it.
I’ve been keeping up with your story on Facebook and love the way you put it all together, with humour and rage.
Keep the chin up. You’re a great writer. N x
Well written and difficult to live through.
May the Force be with you!
Margaret, when they stop making sense, you take over. Role reversal hurts, but it has to be done. Methinks.
Fantastic piece – really well written, and brutally honest.
Crikey, thanks so much for all the positive feedback! I was [genuinely] expecting the opposite. We’re so brainwashed by the ‘dont tell anyone’ Irish family code that it did feel awkward writing about this but I had to, it’s been driving me bonkers! Margaret coins it in her reply: ‘unspoken issues’ – health articles always seem to concentrate on diagnostics and not on how people cope. I cannot fathom the denial from such an intelligent man and the wives that jump on these merry-go-rounds of denial and yet here I am, taking part in it as well! Appreciate the comments more than you can know. J x
Ah jeepers, bravo, bravo. Fabulous read. Very obviously a complicated situation, your words convey not only the frustration and determination to tackle the problems but also the light humour is a hint at your strength that helps you deal. The disappointment and reluctance to be too hard on your mother is also very poignant. Just brilliant reading. My son went through a phase of peeing in washing piles and waste -paper baskets and the shock, followed by disgust, is a strange cross to bear. Old habits die hard…I hope you do manage toilet training, for the sake of your own sanity. Good luck!
Brilliant piece June! I do hope your dad doesn’t have the internet lol.
This is brilliant. Have been there. The softly, softly approach, followed by the serious chat, and then the inevitable shouting and crying on both sides. You have to laugh, even if only in disbelief. Good luck with it all and do let me know if you ever have a breakthrough!
Oh I am so glad you are writing on here…your Facebook/twitter updates always leave me hankering for more….and I was never sure if I should be amused or saddened by them…still not sure…heh…
I think the gift of being able to make something untenable just humorous enough for palatability is also Irish.
I find a real truth in your assertion about the Irish male attitude towards pissing. It’s self-evident in Temple Bar after a certain hour. On holidays, or event-days, the radius of this permission seems to expand widely, and the appropriate hour shifts back in tandem. I am not as shocked/irritated by it as I was when I arrived here ten years ago, but I still vaguely dream of a live-wire system to discourage people using the face of the building I work in as a urinal.
I’ve always admired the bravery of your twitter stream, I admire the bravery and talent of this essay more.
Ah Manuel! The man who gave me a ‘kangaroo outside a Belfast restaurant’ snippet for Sunday Times last year! I forget that my Facebook rants are actually public. Silly really as I’ve obviously rendered myself unemployable being so navigable with the neurosis. But the lovely ladies at Anti-Room let me in. Ta for dropping by. X
Fill the whiskey bottles with piss, that’ll clean his act.
There were the usual latent-revenge dogfood days and I think (though can’t be sure if this is wishful thinking in my skewed imagination) another substance put in his stew one time in the mid 80s but I won’t elaborate here. Point is: it’s incredible he is still alive. Fifty years on the piss and at this late stage, his eyeballs sometimes bleed in the morning and he suffers heroin-esque cold turkey symptoms if he goes even one day without booze. The whiskey is, at this stage, a type of morphine and he needs to go, for his own good. Alcoholism is a disease of the soul, although in Ireland it’s still tolerated culturally (especially in men) or even worse, seen as something semi-hilarious.
That was a brilliant read. My dad’s an alcoholic too but has stopped drinking for the last 4 years. I know the “compacted insanity” you speak of! They’ll tell you black is white.
This is a brave and brilliant piece. I’ve not read anything that’s really made me sit up in so long. This is what I wish I could read in daily columns of our national newspapers. Searingly honest and touching. Thank you June, you’ve really shaken me up today (in a good way!)
Loved your post, June.
You are a brave woman and I salute your ability to pitch in and care for your folks.
Oh God, no! It makes me sound nicer than I am! They weren’t that sick when I moved back but then got sick. I am the most intolerant bag in the world, though it’s a weird call when the folks who spawned you turn back into tadpoles. I’m just glad I am here [but also dreaming of a luscious escape at some stage] – it suits everyone for the time being. It’s incredible how much you ‘forget’ what a pain in the arse alcoholism as a ‘disease’ is. My mother fell in love with a bright-eyed intelligent man who didn’t drink a drop and who laughed and joked and played cards in the evening time when he got home from his decent safe job. These stories are everywhere in Ireland…how the woman holds on with her fingernails hoping the man she first knew will return, when in fact he’s gone for good. It’s awfully sad. But it’s made me an anti-marriage terrorist all the same and a grumpy feminist and a cynic and full-moon insane for long bouts of time. That’s not all that good either!
Of course you’re even nicer than you sound! My mother was ill for many years too, and it really does make for arm wringing sometimes. There’s a saying in the Bemba language “… Mother, carry me on your back and I’ll carry you on mine one day…” Redard it as good fortune on both yours and their part, nothing happens ‘by coincidence’. Here’s me preaching to you again!?!
Ah you are being your lovely Bhuddist self Mutale, you are not preaching! I had a strong compulsion to come back, glad I did but the situation is a tad mad and worsening as the weeks go by. C’est la vie. Give us a bell soon: I’d love to meet up in the Botanics some Sunday for too much coffee! Hope you’re OK.