True story…no kidding at all.

The princesses, now aged 6 and 8, are playing soccer this season. The younger girl plays at 6 and the older girl follows with a 7pm game. The season started in August, with us sweltering in a melting central Florida hellscape and stretched into late October, bringing jackets and quilts to the sidelines so parents could survive the Nordic, 65 degree wastes of suburbia.

A coworker also had daughters on the same teams, so we christened a tradition of trading weeks of “hosting duty,” with the “host” bringing a six pack to the game in a cooler. We played our own game within the context of our girls’ soccer games, finding reasons to sneak off to the car to down a couple of bottles of brew. The only downside was the limited and filthy nature of the facilities, which motivated us more than once to deposit our warm outflow into still-cool, freshly emptied beer bottles. At least we used our own bottles.

One cool Friday night, my friend (we’ll call him “Bob”) decided we had cheered enough to earn a break and told our wives that we were going to make a quick trip to the parking lot. “Wait, wait, wait,” Bob’s wife said, hopping up from her blanket. “The little one needs to go to the bathroom.” With Bob’s youngest daughter in tow, she scooted around the soccer field towards the distant port-a-lets.

Bob and I continued our cheering for seemed an eternity before his wife returned, towing his little toddler by the hand. We were headed to the cars before their butts hit the blanket. Passing the port-a-potties, an unsanitary sourness tingled our noses. “There’s no way my wife went used those things,” Bob said, shaking his head. “I bet that’s why it took so long. She must have taken the kid over to the Mall.”

We hopped in the minivan and Bob reached behind the seats for his cooler. “We ought-a drive over to Hoot…” Bob snatched his hand back like a snake bit it and something splashed behind the seat. “Shit!” He shook his hand and something wet kissed my forehead.

“What is it?” I asked, curling my nose against an emerging acrid odor.

“Don’t know.” Bob leaned over the seat. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. It’s urine, man! It’s urine!”

Turning to the source of the excitement, I saw Bob struggling to right a tipped-over campsite potty, which had been cleverly set up in the back of the minivan. That solved the mystery about where Bob’s wife took the toddler to tinkle. It also solved the riddle concerning my damp forehead, which I now scrubbed enthusiastically with my sleeve.

A splash sounded from the back. “I tipped it over,” Bob yelled. “It’s soaking into the carpet!”
We jumped out of the van and pulled the side doors open. There was just enough light left in the evening to see the darkening stain spreading across the rear floorboard. Much more distinct, the now-identified odor was wafting out of the van like a thick fog.

Bob grabbed some t-shirts and started sopping up piss. “I guess using the camp crapper was a good idea,” he muttered. Possibly, I thought, but it seemed like a logistical endeavor which required some manner of team communications to prevent catastrophe.

“Oh, here,” Bob said, holding a bottle up. “You might as well have a beer. I brought some microbrews from the new gas station downtown.” What the hell, I thought. Just as the bottle touched my lips, I caught a whiff of beer/urine cocktail mixing in the air. Not pleasant, but I toughed it out with a long swig. Bob jumped back out of the van with his own bottle and started rooting through the van’s rear in search of a garbage bag for the piss-soaked shirts.

With Bob’s head out of the way, I noticed something we had missed in the excrement-induced excitement. “Hey, man,” I called to him, “this isn’t the carpet that’s soaked. It’s just the little floor mats.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, here.” I rolled one, then the other, into tight cylinders, which Bob tucked under the back seat so that they wouldn’t unfold and spread urine across even more of the van. With a sense of accomplishment, we climbed back into the front seats. Bob rooted around the seats until he located a container of handywipes. “I knew we wouldn’t leave the driveway without some of these,” he said, handing me a fistful.

We sat in blissful silence, cleaning urine from our faces and hands while sipping fresh beers, for all of twenty seconds before Bob’s phone rang. He pressed the phone to his ear, but I could still hear his wife’s voice, asking where the hell we were, why we were taking so long, and how we felt our daughters would feel if we skipped the whole game to drink beer in the car.
“Sorry, love,” he said. “We’re on the way now.”

“Why didn’t you tell her that we just sat down?”

“I don’t want her to know I spilled piss in the van, idiot.”

Sure, I thought, shaking my head to clear the smell as I climbed out. That secret’s safe until you get in the car to go home. I thought about telling Bob to open a window so the van could air out, but I didn’t want to delay our return to the soccer field.