The Grossest Thing You've Ever Witnessed Happening in Public

Welcome to Pissing Contest, a weekly story sharing circle for the the ass-draggiest time of the afternoon on the ass-draggiest time of the last day between you and the weekend. Every week, we’ll ask a question, you’ll share stories, and we’ll pick a winner that’s featured in the next week’s post. It’s like a pyramid scheme of outdoing each other!

When I was a baby adult living in Chicago, I once found myself waiting for a bus at an intersection that used to be adjacent to an abandoned public housing project that was in the process of being torn down. As I sat and waited for the number 8 Halsted bus, an elderly woman hobbled past, urgently, to a stretch of wooden fence across the street. She leaned back against the fence to face me, flashed a winning smile, waved, pulled down her pants, and began to take a shit while we were making eye contact. Big smile still on her face.

The reason I was thinking about that particular incident this week is because that’s the first time I realized that cities are places where there aren’t enough private spaces for all of the private things that people do. There aren’t enough places to shit. There aren’t enough places to do vomit. There aren’t enough places to sleep. There aren’t enough places for the junkies who used to live in the park down the street from my apartment every summer to do heroin. And, if the half-filled, defeated-looking condoms that accumulate near the base of the Manhattan bridge on weekends are any indicator, there aren’t enough places to fuck (another case in point: Guyism’s Chris Illuminati writing this week of how he witnessed a hand job being given on a New York City sidewalk in broad daylight.)

So, dear readers, today I want to hear from you about the time you saw private stuff being done in public. The weirder and more inappropriate, the better.