Mary & I rented a house out in Bothell, WA, for a year to see how we liked suburbia and whether we were going to kill each other if we cohabitated. A paperperson in a beater car pulled into the cul-de-sac every night at 3:00 am, and I awoke from my drifting-off state every time to hear him/her hurl a wad of newspaper and junk mail at our neighbor's porch. One night, I heard the beater vanish into the distance, and then I heard something different; a second car's engine being shut off. I sleepily looked out the window just in time to see a pair of headlights wink out across the street. The driver of the car got out and walked slowly across the street to my sleeper '65 GMC pickup truck. He began checking out the rusting tire-iron, gas can, and other bits of debris in the truck's rotting bed, and I knew that something bad was up.

I scrambled to yank a pair of sweats on. Adrenaline poured into my brain, confounding my efforts to get my feet stuffed into the correct holes. I knew that a malfunction of my sweats seconds from now, tripping my feet up, could cost me my life. Mary said "mmph?" from under the covers, as I took a second glance out the window. I saw a man hiked up on his tiptoes, leaning against my truck. "He's pissing in my gas tank!" I declared. "What?" said Mary, not quite awake. I ran downstairs.

I opened the front door quickly and quietly, and ran outside. I was about 30 feet away when he heard my feet slapping up the street, spun around, and started hopping up and down, trying to keep from peeing all over himself. "What's going on here?" I roared, trying to sound authoritative. "Were you taking a piss in my gas tank?"

"Uh... oh, god, uh... god, I'm really sorry! Please don't call the cops!" he said. "Explain yourself!" I yelled. "Why were you pissing in my truck?" As soon as I said this, I realized that the situation was never going to make any sense. Nothing this guy could possibly offer in the way of an explanation would make me say "Oh, yeah, of course. I'd have to piss into someone's gas tank too under such circumstances."

The guy was alone and stone cold sober. He was the most embarrassed person I had ever seen. He pulled out his wallet with shaking hands and offered his driver's license to me. "I work at McDonalds" he said. I stared at him, trying to fit this information into my brain somewhere. "I had a rough day" he added. I had to agree with him on that point.

"I've been to Bible College" he said. He indicated some sort of patch on the left front of his sweater. I thought of Falwell and Bakker, and this kind of made sense. I scratched my head, wondering what to do next. I didn't know much about the chemical composition of urine and whether it was damaging to internal combustion engines or not, and I was feeling vaguely disoriented by the whole thing. "What am I supposed to do here?" I asked him. He had no suggestions. "Well, I need to drive to work tomorrow, and I sure as hell ain't gonna start my truck up with your piss in the tank, so I want the tank drained by eight in the morning!" He nodded in agreement, edging back to his car. He skedaddled and I walked back to the house in a surrealistic daze, not fully convinced that what I had just experienced had actually happened. Mary had seen and heard the whole thing, and concurred that the situation's weirdness level had topped all previous marks. I figured I'd never see the tank pisser again, so I went to bed and stared at the ceiling.

Twenty minutes later, the guy pulls up across the street again. He gets out with a roll of garden hose and a bunch of green plastic buckets, walks over to the truck, feeds the hose in, gets down on his hands and knees, and starts sucking gasoline and urine out of the truck and spitting and blowing it out into the buckets and all over the neighbor's yard. Reluctantly, I go back outside to take in this spectacle, and foolishly ignore my inner voice, which is suggesting that I command him to leave. The guy clearly doesn't understand the principle behind the siphon. He's moving the gas out of the truck mouthful by mouthful. I get the sense that justice has long since been served and that his debt to society has been paid in full. Alas, the neighbor's bedroom window light blinks on, and I hear a sleepy, frightened voice ask "What's going on out there?"

My attempts to explain the situation to the neighbors make, not surprisingly, absolutely no sense at all, and they are unconvinced that everything is under control. These poor compulsive yard-trimming people have been woken up at 3:30 in the morning to find their scary-truck neighbor standing over someone on his hands and knees who is gagging and coughing gasoline all over their lawn. These people are deathly afraid of the unknown. Three weeks after Mary and I moved in, we received an anonymous letter from "a friend" that asked us to hide our trucks in our garage because "people who live here like the neighborhood to look its best". It was the most delicate form of cross-burning I'd ever seen. Even Ghandi would have gotten pissed off. I had even been very conscientous about shutting my truck's blown and injected 350 V8 down at the top of the hill and coasting into the driveway at night so as not to wake all of their little yapper poodles up. Besides, our garage had other cars in it: Mary and I are both gearheads. The trucks were staying outside.

Obviously, the wimps are going to call the police. I walk back to the house and call the police myself, figuring I'd better do some more explaining to try to keep Bothell's finest from coming out and shooting the tank-pisser guy, and probably me as well for owning a vehicle that would attract such behaviour. My neighbors are still talking to the dispatcher when I call. The dispatcher can't wait to hear this one, and after a few sentences from me is audibly having difficulty remaining professional. "So, let me get this straight... he wasn't stealing anything?" "Right. He was making a deposit." The dispatcher is having a hard time keeping herself from laughing out loud.

One by one, every patrol car in Bothell rolls into our cul-de-sac, spotlights ablaze, to see the tank-pisser. The K-9 unit is there, and all of the neighbor's poodles are wide awake, yapping maniacally. Half a dozen porchlights come on, and pink and blue housecoats appear in every doorway. The tank-pisser stands in the middle of the street, fully illuminated, redefining "miserable". He would make a great bronze statue with that title. It has gone well beyond far enough, but still the cops take turns keeping the peace by telling the guy how worthless they think he is. This goes on until, somehow, I convince a couple of the suspicious detective types that the absurd story is not covering up anything more heinous. They want to know if I want to press charges. Apparently, Bothell has a law that prohibits peeing in someone's gas tank.

If the tank-pisser guy ever reads this, all I can say is that I'm truly sorry the humiliation went as far as it did. You deserved the siphoning for pissing in my truck, but you sure didn't deserve the spotlights.

Thankfully, they let the guy go. The next morning, I disconnected the carburetor and ran the fuel line into a 5-gallon glass carboy. The electric fuel pump drained tank #1 in about two minutes. Nothing but gas was visible, assuming urine has a higher specific gravity than gasoline. I drove to work on tank #2. The neighbors didn't bother us much after that.

Disclaimer: The above is a true story, it's mine, and I can tell it if I want to, so please feel free to waste all of your own money on your lawyers' Armani collection.

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