Common House Magazine

I was there in the gym when Peter Belisle lost control of his bladder.

I was there bench pressing.

I was bench pressing with my back to Peter Belisle.

I wasn’t the only one there. Kyper was there, some others were there, but we weren’t there together. I was there, and Kyper was there, and of course Peter Belisle was there. But I don’t even know if I knew at the time that Peter Belisle was there, too.

That is to say, until he lost control of his bladder.

He had his back to me, too.

Peter Belisle was on the erg, way across the gym, and both of us were facing the wall with our backs to each other. I had my wall and he had his wall. There were other people there who I wasn’t there with whose names I don’t remember now, but I remember that I was there, and Kyper was there, and of course there was Peter Belisle with the other guys from crew.

We were back to back, across the gym, when Peter Belisle lost control of his bladder.

He pissed himself, really.

The plain way of saying that Peter Belisle lost control of his bladder is to say that he pissed himself.

I noticed them bringing him towels.

That’s what I saw first.

I sat up on the bench when a few of the crew guys hurried past me carrying stacks of towels. They were hurrying them to Peter Belisle.

I didn’t know that yet, of course.

I turned to see where they were going, and recognized him, Peter Belisle, his back to me, on the erg across the gym.

I already knew him from soccer.

In soccer that fall, Peter Belisle complained to the coach that we weren’t doing enough running.

He’d just transferred in.

At his old team, he said they ran more. It helped them, running more. He’d expected more running when he transferred in.

He said this to the coach.

Peter Belisle said maybe he’d switch to cross country if our coach wouldn’t run us as much as another coach had run him before he transferred in.

He said this, and he told us he said this.

Watch, said Peter Belisle, and after the coach ran us more he said, See?

Peter Belisle was the only guy bold enough to complain to the coach, and he complained about not enough running. Which is to say, he made us run.

He made us run fast.

We had to run more, and to keep up with him, we had to run faster, and it still wasn’t enough for Peter Belisle.

He ran in the mornings, too. We saw him in the mornings, running. While we slouched towards breakfast, he was running. He saw us see him, and so he knew that we knew he was running. He wanted us to see him running. He made us run more, and even then he ran more than us, and he wanted us to know that he knew he could outrun us.

So when Peter Belisle lost control of his bladder, my first thought was that maybe all that running had finally caught up.

Actually, at first I didn’t know what had happened.

The crew guys ran over with towels.

I saw them with the towels, wondering where they were running. Then I saw Peter Belisle, recognized him, with his back to me on an erg across the gym.

The guys on the ergs next to him were unstrapping and standing up.

Those same guys later, they said, He lost control of his bladder, and as they said it they would hold their fists in front of their mouths like they were stifling a burp. Each of them did this the same exact way, every time we asked them what happened.

He lost control of his bladder.

Which is to say, he pissed himself.

In front of everyone he pissed himself.

Standing next to Kyper, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing until the other guys on the ergs unstrapped and stood up on their ergs and leapt like they were trapped up high in burning towers to land beyond the reach of something on the floor.

That’s when I saw the puddle.

The first stack of towels went straight onto the puddle.

Those towels – we all used those towels.

We grabbed them from the desk at the front. We all used those towels, the ones that they threw onto the puddle, and you never knew after that if the towel you were using was one of Peter Belisle’s piss towels. His lost-control-of-his-bladder towels.

Of course we all knew the towels were used to wipe up sweat and spit and loogies and probably cum – probably at some point in every towel’s history of use it had been cummed on – but still, to see it in person was eye opening.

I never looked at those towels the same way after that.

Then they laid towels over Peter Belisle.

It was like papier mâché.

They laid towels onto Peter Belisle’s head, and then his shoulders. They worked their way down his legs until he was a shuddering mass of towels.

In sophomore year art, we had to do a self sculpture in papier mâché. That’s what he looked like, but like a life-sized, shittier version of that. Probably shittier even than Peter Belisle’s own papier mâché of himself, which was shit because he spent all his time running and erging and had nothing inside himself to bring into his art.

Towels on the floor and, in the middle, a man-sized mass of towel mâché.

He sat on his erg beneath the mass of towels, and shuddered, and after a while someone brought a much bigger towel, like a beach towel but all white, and draped this over all of him, and then Peter Belisle unstrapped from the erg and stood behind the towel and tucked it around himself like a toga and shuffled gingerly out of the gym with a crew guy on either side of him helping to hold the toga towel in place.

Who knows where they got that towel from.

Towels like those weren’t just there for the taking.

It was only later that one of the crew guys stifled a burp and told us that Peter Belisle had lost control of his bladder.

Lost control of his bladder, he said, after we pecked him all over.

He raised a fist over his mouth while he said this, like he was stifling a burp.

So he pissed himself?

Peter Belisle shuffled past us out of the gym and then past us a second time as he passed along the row of windows looking from the gym out onto the hallway.

Then one of the cleaning guys came in with a big laundry basket and threw all of the towels into the laundry. He stood the ergs on their ends and mopped, then used fresh towels to clean up the water, then sprayed something on the floor from a bottle, then used more fresh towels to clean up the something from a bottle, and when he was done, he wheeled all of the towels, the piss towels and the cleaning towels, out of the gym and straight down to the laundry room where they were mixed in with all the other towels, and from that day on, you were never sure if the towel you grabbed at the front desk was one of those towels or if it was just a regular towel that had been sweated and bled and probably cummed on but you could ignore that because you hadn’t seen it in person.

Peter Belisle came and went.

That summer, he transferred out.

At some other school, he transferred in, and maybe he ran them and pissed on their floor and spoiled their towels, too.

We didn’t even know he was gone until he never came back.

Look, we were different people then.

Before we became ourselves, we were different people.

The things we said were the things we heard other people say.

We owe those people, the people who we were, for the people we’ve become. They are the frames on which we stretched ourselves.

But they don’t owe us anything.

Each day, the world creates itself anew.