I Fucked My Waiter And Ended Up Peeing Blood

This is the story of how I fell in love. As is true with all good love stories: if you’re squeamish about blood, you should turn back now. 

I was living what the 25-year-old’s NYC dream looks like outside of Carrie Bradshaw’s fallacious rent-controlled fantasy. I worked as an online customer service agent while trying to “make it” as a writer alongside many other customer service agents who were all trying to “make it” as something else. I made enough money to secure a 10’x10’ room in Harlem with a tiny window that had a scenic view of a dark alleyway. The room was in an apartment with 4 other people my age who were also trying to “make it” as something in their dark, 10’x10’ rooms. We shared one bathroom with each other and whatever significant others were staying over on any given night.

One afternoon, I was “working,” but really, I was doing whatever the ‘25-year-old on a Lenovo Think Pad from the 90s’ equivalent of doodling someone’s name in your notebook is. The night before, I’d had sex with a new guy for the first time. It wasn’t just any new guy, though. He was a very hot waiter who’d slipped me his number after bringing me a glass of riesling at a restaurant one night. He was 6’4”, muscular, gorgeous, and a Broadway actor. In fact, he was so intensely all of those things that when he gave me his number, I felt almost certain I was being tricked in some way. I wasn’t, and we went on a date. Now, we’d officially had sex, and I had the UTI to prove it. But, that was, of course, worth it. I was smitten: not at all dissuaded by the improbability of this relationship or the precariousness of his insistence on summoning me to his apartment at 1 AM and having me leave early in the morning. The 5-year-old swivel chair I was perched on bore a striking resemblance to cloud nine.

As I sat daydreaming about the future we would certainly share– full of him flexing his biceps as he grabbed things off of the top shelf for me, I noticed some pain– a kind of aching where I normally feel period cramps but different. It felt just like a UTI when I’d peed earlier, but now it was much worse, aching inside, burning outside. In perfect sync with the pains coming from my pelvis, I remembered that I’d had a virtual stranger/35-year-old actor’s condomless dick in me the night before. As panic over my misjudgment began to overtake me like the tide, I whipped out my phone and texted the waiter. “You don’t have an STD; do you?” Yes, we’d had this talk before sex, but only when I was lying naked in his bed, so I thought maybe his answer was subject to some classic boner-related dishonesty. He assured me he didn’t and that my first guess was right: just a UTI.

I made my way home and grabbed lots of cranberry juice and lots of water. If this was, in fact, a UTI, I was very familiar with how this went. All I had to do was pee as much as I could. I went into the bathroom and drained my bladder as thoroughly as possible– ending with that familiar knife-like sensation. 

I returned to my room for more ritual bladder-filling. When I was ready again, I peered out of my bedroom door to see the bathroom door closed and hear the shower running. Five people to one bathroom is hard under normal circumstances, but now I didn’t have the luxury of holding it in, so I had to think fast. I grabbed a plastic grocery bag (bad for the environment; awesome for pee-related emergencies.) I held it open between my legs and peed into it. My pee was pink, which seemed… bad, but I was too distracted to freak out. I hung my pink pee bag on my closet door knob and leaned onto my bed, pantsless, my legs spread wide with a towel on the floor underneath them so that whenever any pee became available to me, I could simply drip it directly onto the floor. I knew when I fucked this guy, it was going to be hot, but wow– I’d really outdone myself.

As I stood at my makeshift urinal, my phone buzzed. “How are you feeling?” the waiter asked. Oh my God– he totally has a crush on me. I now have a very hot boyfriend who is clearly in love with me, and I am capable of enduring any amount of physical pain to solidify our love. “Not so good,” I said. He told me to get some AZO, and I said I’d never taken it before. “My ex had chronic UTIs,” he replied, and I added “ask him if his dick is poison” to my mental list of future first date topics. He sent me a screenshot of his Google search to show me the kind of AZO I needed to get, and while my brain didn’t have much capacity to process anything, it was still able to view this screenshot as the most romantic gift I’d ever received.

I mustered up one last good pee before venturing out to CVS to cash in on my last glimmer of hope. I loved my neighborhood for how busy and alive it was, but as I walked briskly down the street toward CVS, I promised myself that if a single cat caller tried me on my way, I’d pee on him in retaliation. 

I made it into CVS just in time to hear the voice over the loudspeaker announce that they were closing. I dove up and down the aisles before I found the AZO from the screenshot and managed to get it through self-checkout before I was kicked out. About one second after I stepped outside, I felt the urge to pee. Of course I’d need to pee– I’d been drinking water as fast as I could for hours. I just needed to hold it until I got home. I made it down the street, to my building, into the elevator without peeing myself. As the elevator took me to the 6th floor, I nearly surrendered to peeing on the floor, assuring myself that worse things had happened in this dirty old elevator. I ran out to my door and turned the key. When I got inside, I dropped my bag in the hallway. As soon as I saw that by some miracle, the bathroom was unoccupied, I started peeing. In the hallway. I went as fast as I could, and my sweatpants were able to absorb the pee until I got into the bathroom and it started to slosh on the tile floor. I got to the toilet and sat there until I had to go again. This time, I looked down. I was peeing a steady stream of pure blood– not great! My thoughts were so completely full of “pee as much as possible” that there was really no room to consider “what if I die from mediocre sex before I get a chance to leave this customer service job?” 

When I peeled open the AZO box, I confronted another problem. I was a horrible pill-swallower. I always had been; it was probably verging on a phobia of some sort, and these pills were larger than my maximum pill size to date. Luckily, I was willing to force a Ford Escalade down my throat if it meant I’d remember what it was like to not feel like I was balancing on a katana between my legs. I popped the pills quickly. It wasn’t long before I could comfortably nestle in bed with a heating pad on my pelvis and a big period pad acting as a diaper in case I peed myself. The waiter texted and asked if I’d gotten the AZO, and I said that it was helping. He said he’d be more careful next time. I was a little perplexed and asked what he did that wasn’t careful. “The ass play… It could transfer bacteria.” I stared blankly at my phone. I am not the type of person with a high tolerance for poop talk, but I would’ve talked to any human, living or dead, about poop before I accepted the concept of this man thinking he’d dragged poop particles into my urethra. I put my phone on my bedside table and tried to ignore that last text.

If you can believe it, the next day, I ended up getting an antibiotic that I never had to use. My body cleared the UTI from hell up all on its own, and while (big surprise) the waiter didn’t end up being a great guy, I did end up falling in love. Not with him, but with AZO– truly the best medicine in the world. Way better than laughter. Though, they did both work together to get me through the worst price I ever paid for sex.

Next Up, From Faking It To Doing It Daily: How I Hit My Orgasm Climax (So To Speak)