I had a large terrace when I lived in J. I had the apartment across from where Golda used to live.
It was a ritzy area peopled by respectable, professional people–and then there was me. There were large, rectangular cement flower pots on the terrace. My house stood out, because there were no flowers. I never planted any. I didn’t care about flowers.
This horrified the residents. For the people of this country had turned deserts to colour and food. Everyone had flowers in their pots. When S. visited me we sat on the terrace. He looked around then grabbed a hose. He shook his head and said, ‘give them some water.’ He sprayed water into the pots. Maybe he thought there were seeds or bulbs inside, but there were none.
I liked the bars and the girls more than flowers.
Each night (for I seemed to be in the bar every night) when I came home, sometimes alone and sometimes not, I would open the door to the terrace, step outside the study the stars. It was usually about 2 or 3 am. I would go to the flower pot right in the center of the terrace and take a huge pee–on and on, so long that I wondered if I was still somehow connected to the draft beer barrel at the bar.
One day I ventured out to the terrace and saw something strange. There was a small plant or weed growing in the pot I peed in. It had a thin, yellow stock topped by a fuzzy gossamer bulb. I knelt. I touched the stock, pushed it. I heard, ‘pee on me!’
I fled inside the house. I threw out anything I had that could be used to take me to new realities. I peeked out at the plant from behind the curtains.
‘Ha!’ I said reassuring myself, ‘plants can’t talk.’
Months went by, maybe only weeks. I continued to pee there every night emptying the bar stuff into my plant. The growth rate was astonishing. It was now as high as me and drifted back and forth when there was a light breeze.
One night, whilst peeing on it, I giggled. You see I’d become a proud father, of the plant. I felt like I’d brought it into this world, that without me it would have languished in non-existence. I’d discovered a hitherto unknown species. I gave it a name:
The Pee Plant
I’ve never seen anything like it before. Now the stock was thick and the bulb was huge.
‘This plant must contain my DNA,’ I thought.
It came to me that if I shook the plant and the spores on top dispersed they could get a woman on a nude beach in Brazil pregnant.
Could they?
What’s in urine that could fuel such explosive growth? I knew the Romans used it to wash their white clothes.
One night I was in bad shape. I knew this as when I entered the apartment I was missing a boot (and the next day I found my BMW car door open and a heap of Chinese food on the front seat). I went out to the plant and did it again. But this time when I finished, I gave it a good shake, the stalk of the plant I mean. And the spores dispersed up towards the stars.
