The Yellow Rubicon of Corduroy Pisser

Life changing internal revelations, such as St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, can be ccompanied by potentially public events such as great claps of thunder and flashes of light.

Urinating uncontrollably inside a pair of beige corduroy trousers was not so spectacular for passers-by, especially as this took place on a crowded city street at night, but subjectively, to the corduroy trouser wearing urinator, it marked a significant aspect of lack of control, that he had not managed since completing potty training, some fifty four years ago.

Gripping part of a Victorian park railing, fashioned like an ornamental spearhead or a stylised flower; the urinator involuntarily let fly, or at least, did not resist the inception of a strong trickle. His stout beige pantaloon cloth and the urban darkness hid the micturation and nearby pedestrians were probably only able to see a fat man, possibly drunk or breathless, leaning on a fence, so they walked on by, not knowing that Corduroy Pisser was doing inside his clothes what he should have been doing behind a bush or a hedge, or in a public pissoir preferably.

Corduroy managed to bluff his way through the long bus journey back to his house somehow. Perhaps no-one was interested enough in his self-induced wetness to jeer at it. The wetland in his trousers was not a site of Special Scientific, or any other, interest. Bitterns had not yet started to breed in there.

Once he got off the bus, he had to stagger uphill along several hundred yards of suburban side roads. Every ten yards or so, something kept failing, his heart, or breath perhaps, his will-power certainly. So he stopped, leaning on plain fence posts, brown and creosoted, or square brick pillars. Each time he stopped, he pissed himself a little bit more.

This pissing was by no means was by no means unprecedented or unexpected, he had, after all, spent that evening beering in the central metropolis. This event, and the commuting that it entailed, had become increasingly common for him, and many others over the past decades as the price of housing had risen and blown localised groups of friends apart in migrations to the periphericity, leaving them atomised like lumps of debris scattered around a crater or a shell hole.

A past tactic to prevent uncontrolled pissing had been stop-offs at places like isolated garage doors, hypermarket hedges and other such locations that permitted a concealed Jimmy Riddle in the night. But tonight geography and circumstances had betrayed him. Busses and bladder had not coincided in such a way as to enable a covert al-fresco, therefore inside leg watering took place instead.

Afterwards, on drier days, Corduroy wondered if a solution might not have been carrying a collapsible portable Hansom carriage which could be whipped out and assembled at moments of need. A solution which would only work in London, assuming the truth of the urban legend that it was still legal for a male person to piss on the back wheel of such an antique vehicle

However this insight was not the one that accompanied the original pissing like an unheard thunderclap. Corduroy had realised that he could be drinking too much alcohol.

But did crossing the Yellow Rubicon of shame mean that there was no going back again? Sadly Corduroy doubted it. Arriving at this micturatory torrent had been a lifelong journey which had involved reaching, crossing and forgetting many of the tributaries of the Great Yellow One, (cradle of civilisations in beige cloth plains, home of vast hydro-electric schemes and tiny species of almost blind squeaking river dolphins). It certainly had involved a capacity to lie or at least, be diplomatically economical with the truth.

A string of counsellors and doctors had been fobbed off with unlikely estimates of how much alcohol Corduroy consumed regularly. Had any of them ever been true, his bladder control might not have worn out.

There were religious and medical people on both petty bourgeois sides of his family, so he tried, as a general principle not to lie too much, but, when it came to stating truthfully how much he drank, the truth always slipped away or perhaps a slight small cloud of mist drifted over it.

Education and literature were false friends here. If someone is taught a little bit about making philosophical evaluations of truth claims, a bit might rub off, in Corduroy’s case, this meant suspecting that all truth was debatable.

Also adolescent admiration for the work of William Burroughs did not encourage veracity in the presence of Doctor Foster or any other medical practitioner or pseudo-professional. The centipedal carapace of Burroughs’ slime-pile of work had been the necessity of doing the necessary to feed a habit and therefore telling a doctor whatever.

Doctors were inconsistent anyway, a possible co relation seemed to exist between their head scarf wearingness and propensity to issue absolute prohibitions against alcohol, rather than saying; “You’d better cut back a bit, old chap.” when the latter could mean five as opposed to six cans of strong cider a night.

With their close allies, the symptoms of age, the symptoms of alcoholism spread slowly, like a guerrilla army that controls most of the countryside at night, retreats in the day, but controls one square inch more territory every day. On a computer in a General’s office, one pixel lost might not look too bad, but territory once lost, was never given back.

Occasionally Corduroy Pisser had, as it were, “announced” things to himself and if really pushed or determined, he might make an “announcement” in the presence of witnesses; these “announcements” sometimes involved “turning over a new leaf” in some way, usually ineffectively.

About the most determined Corduroy had ever got was to attend some alcohol counselling interviews for about three months. But more often he devised some magic formula, known only to himself, whereby some types of alcoholic drink could be classified as “not really counting” as being alcoholic. He ratified such decisions by referring them to the SCPCP (Special Committee of Personas of Corduroy Pisser) and they had the satisfying consequence of enabling him to buy and consume alcoholic drink whilst, at the same time, giving it up. However adept though he was at self deception, it did become clear to him that when he drank the “not-drink” was actually what it was.

He had beaten an addiction once, almost by accident he had become unhooked from tobacco. He had got hold of little plastic dummies which could have nicotine cartridges put inside them and be sucked instead of cigarettes. These devices worked, for CP, because they looked, quite, but not very stupid. Had they been fashioned to look as though the device-user was, say, blowing up the arse or sucking the backside of a Little Grebe, not many people would have used them. However they just looked like someone had a short plastic tube in their mouth and in middle-class English society that was sufficient to cause conversation, which was embarrassing enough in and of itself. To avoid giving brief talks to strangers, friends and acquaintances about the short white plastic tube, tactics such as concealing it in a furled palm, furtively and rapidly whipping it out of a pocket , into the gob, and returning it , could be used. Eventually to was simpler not to use it at all.

So tobacco unaddiction had not involved declarations, decisions and rubicons, just a way of making the addict look silly to continue with the addiction. But if publically pissing yourself in a street would not do it, what would? Trouserlessness perhaps.