Vinny B. is a casualty of New York City's dearth of public bathrooms. Last year he was en route to a friend's house in Brooklyn and just couldn't hold it anymore. With no proper privy in reach, he did what many New Yorkers do: hid himself behind a dumpster and hoped for the best.
"This van came up with blacked out windows and these two big guys yelled, 'Hey what are you doing?' " Vinny recalls. "I thought, Oh God, are they going to mug me? One of them said 'When nature calls, huh buddy?' I said "Yeah, ha ha, that's funny!' They just replied, 'NYPD bitch!' "
Not even New York's Finest could resist another easy urine gag: "What's the matter, couldn't hold it?" one of the cops taunted him.
"No, and I really didn't want to pee my pants!" he explained to them.
Vinny, like the other subjects for this article, asked that his last name be withheld ("I don't want my Googleability marred by peeing in public," one source explained) and wanted to make two things clear.
First, he wasn't drinking. Second, he doesn't want to live in a city where people just pee wherever they want, he simply saw no other option. Vinny presumably knew that public urination is illegal, because he is an attorney.
"Most people associate public peeing with unruly drunk people," he tells me, "But it's not always the case. I travel all over the city all day, drinking water, drinking coffee, and eventually I have to pee. And there's nowhere to go!"
It's a common problem for people traversing the capital of the world: where do you go when you desperately need to use the bathroom?
For obeying his throbbing bladder instead of the law, Vinny B. was issued a ticket for a civil infraction and avoided arrest, one of 23,936 citations issued last year. He subsequently investigated the code and discovered that the charge for public urination is actually two charges. One is NYC Administrative Code 116-18(6), a civil infraction, "like a littering charge," or riding your bike on the sidewalk. The other is a violation of Health Code 153.09, "disposing of noxious chemicals." That charge is a criminal misdemeanor that can lead to arrest and a criminal record.
"There's no set guidelines for how the law can be applied," Vinny explains, "They don't say: 'Oh, he's taking a huge whiz, he ate nothing but asparagus all day, that's criminal.' "Instead, the discretion falls solely on the arresting officers." Vinny, a sharply dressed man who was polite with the police, just paid a fine and that was the end of it. Legally speaking he could have been arrested, interred for up to 72 hours, arraigned, and sent away with a criminal record that he'd have to answer for the rest of his life.
We verified the legal disparity with another lawyer, Robert Briere, who represents many public urinators facing down the possibility of a criminal record for relieving themselves.
"I have not noticed any pattern with regards to why NYPD writes the misdemeanor 153.09 instead of the 16-118(6) violation, or vice versa," he tells us. To the best of his knowledge Briere has found the assignment of one or the other charge to be arbitrary, depending on the discretion of the officer. He estimates around seventy percent of his clients are facing the more serious charge.
"Both the 153.09 and the 16-118 use arcane language such as "swill" and "brine," Briere adds. "These words better describe prohibitions against obsolete meatpacking practices than public urination."
To John P., who delivers wine with a hand-truck in Chelsea, the pitfalls of needing to pee in a public place are very real. "I had no idea that taking a piss in public was such a crazy offense until I saw an unmarked van of six cops jump out and tackle a guy for pissing in the East Village," he recounts. "Anyway, who tackles a guy who's peeing?"
John is on his feet all day, out making deliveries for hours at a time, and when nature calls, he has no simple way to answer.
"With so few public bathrooms, and just about everywhere insisting that you be a 'paying customer' and buy some expensive crap before you can take a piss, what is the other option?" John wonders. "What if you can't afford to be a paying customer?"
Sanitation workers are expected to pee during one of the three breaks during their shift—two 15 minute breaks in the morning and afternoon, and a 30 minute lunch break. "When that is not possible, Sanitation Workers can make other arrangements while on their route, i.e. Sanitation garages, police precincts, fire houses, fast food restaurants," DSNY spokeswoman Kathy Dawkins writes in an email.
However, it's clear that those amenities are not always available for use.
John may have it hard delivering on foot, but it might be even worse for delivery drivers. "Most truck drivers I know have kept a bottle with them in the truck, specifically to pee," box-truck driver Nick O. says, alluding to the notorious "trucker bomb."
For truckers seeking to avoid this nasty little practice—which this author can confirm from first-hand experience to be thoroughly unpleasant, especially for other passengers or any pedestrians hapless enough to glance into the truck—it's not as simple as just finding the right parking spot.
"The way truck driving in the city works, there are designated truck routes. Between my lot in Brooklyn and the city, about an hour drive, it's mostly just warehouses. There aren't even any bathrooms on the route." So Nick is forced to plot his daily course: which ticket to risk?
To pedestrians, he offers some advice: "My friend just gets to one knee alongside a car, like he's tying his shoe, unzips his pants, and pees like that. Works every time."
A city bus driver I met in a bathroom line at Starbucks told me they have opportunities to relieve themselves every four hours, at the end of a complete route. When I told her that I'd experienced the same end-of-shift pee policy driving a truck, she laughed and replied, "But you men have those bottles!"
In a city that has it all, why is one of the most basic human functions so difficult?
Part of the answer lies with policies aimed at ridding the city of homeless people, with consequences that echo throughout the social strata of the city. The enforcement of public urination and other minor offenses which rely so heavily on the subjective decision of the particular officer, as Vinny learned, are part of the "broken windows" policing policy, aimed at combating petty crimes like public urination, but more importantly, at displacing those who commit these crimes.
In his famous essay Guiliani Time, geographer Neil Smith charts Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's development and application of Police Strategy No. 5, an urban policing policy aimed at removing the homeless and low income residents from New York and revitalizing the city's commercial and real estate sectors.
The policy seeks to make basic life for the homeless and poor as difficult as possible in New York. If you can't afford to live or spend money in a certain area, why should you spend any time there? Public facilities, especially public bathrooms, are inimical to this strategy. And while these policies are aimed at the homeless, their impact is felt throughout the city.
Giuliani famously told a group of reporters that the removal of New York's homeless was not a hidden element of his strategy, "It is our strategy." That "proactive policing" strategy has continued in the CompStat era under Mayor Bloomberg, and as more New Yorkers are squeezed out of the middle class, the more these formerly-sheltered residents feel the sting of the city's conscious efforts to make them feel unwelcome.
"On a summer day I see maybe, ten dicks a day, just... out there," complains Jocelyn, a tutor who travels the city by bike. "I think the closing off of the city has really been much worse for women; but like most issues that effect us we're just not talked about!"
"When I want to pee, I have to wait in a long line at Starbucks, or if I'm in Brooklyn usually a bar. And going to a bar, alone, in the early afternoon, as a woman... let's just say sometimes I'd rather piss my pants."
When asked about Nick's suggestion, pretending to tie one's shoes, Jocelyn grimaces.
"Men are disgusting."
Jarrod Shanahan is a truck driver and writer in New York City.
Contact the editor responsible for this story // Submit your story to Gothamist
