“See you in Portland,” G said before they parted ways.
“I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Jake said with sincerity.
Once at their waystation home (as Jake liked to call it), they each had another glass of wine and then retired to the bedroom for some enthusiastic marital fucking (Laura had been hanging out with Neesh all night, and this had the usual effect on her libido) and then they drifted off to sleep just past midnight. The alarm clock woke them up at seven o’clock. They showered and then headed for Whiteman Airport.
The wheels of Jake’s plane left the ground at 7:55 AM. He flew overland until they passed out beyond Vandenberg Air Force Base’s restricted airspace and then he went offshore and followed the coastline to Bodega Bay, just north of the San Francisco area. They landed there at 10:05 AM and had breakfast in the airport’s restaurant. Laura enjoyed two bloody Marys with her eggs benedict, which mellowed her out considerably for the next leg of the flight, but she soon regretted it because by the time they were passing Fort Bragg, her bladder was sending her messages. By the time they were approaching the Oregon state line, those messages became insistent.
“No, I’m not going to land at Crescent City so you can pee,” Jake told her. “We’ll be on the ground at North Bend in another twenty minutes.”
“I can’t wait that long,” she hissed at him.
“Then use the urinal,” he suggested. “That’s why we have them.”
“I have never peed in this airplane a single time,” she said, “and I’m not going to start now.”
“Then I guess you’re going to have to hold it,” Jake said.
“Fine,” she hissed, gritting her teeth and praying to the time gods for quicker passage of the seconds and minutes.
Two minutes later, they hit a nasty little patch of clear air turbulence and the plane lurched and bounced a few times.
“Oh God,” Laura moaned. “I guess I am going to start now. Where’s that urinal?”
“In the first aid compartment,” Jake said, nodding to the cabin inset panel just behind her seat.
She unbuckled and turned in her seat, opening the cabinet with the red cross on it. Next to the first aid kit were several standard urinals for use by those who had a schlong, and one specially designed female urinal for those who did not have a schlong. It had a wide, C-curved mouth on it, designed to fit over the entire female genitalia region. She took it out, looked it over for a few moments, as if puzzling over how it worked, and then reached up under her summer dress and pulled off her panties.
“Hold these,” she told Jake, tossing them onto his lap. She then began hiking up the dress.
Jake picked up the panties and looked at them. They were bikini style, lime green with white polka dots. He put the crotch to his face and took a large sniff, inhaling his wife’s essence.
“Don’t be a pervert,” she barked as she fussed around, trying to position the urinal where it needed to be.
“Oh, now you don’t want me to be a pervert?”
“This is undignified enough without you smelling my panties,” she said. “God, why did you let me drink that second bloody Mary?”
He didn’t answer her, figuring it was a rhetorical question. Instead, he watched with concealed amusement as she squirmed and contorted and finally managed to seal the mouth of the urinal against her heavenly gate. The sound of urine under high pressure hitting the side of a plastic container followed.
“Ohhhh, God, relief,” Laura sighed as she emptied her bladder.
“Did it occur to you,” Jake asked, “to do that in the rear facing seat where there’s more room instead of in the cramped cockpit seat?”
“No,” she said dangerously. “It did not. Did it occur to you before I actually started peeing?”
“Uh ... no,” Jake said. “Of course not.”
She finished up her business and then began looking for a place to put the urinal. No such place presented itself.
“You’ll just have to hang onto it until we land,” Jake advised.
“Wonderful,” she grunted. And then something else seemed to occur to her. “And then what?” she asked. “Do I have to carry this thing into the office building so I can dump it?”
“Uh ... well ... yeah,” he said. “That is the post-urinal use procedure.”
She was appalled by this thought. “Everyone in that building will know I had to pee in the plane!”
Jake nodded. “Most likely,” he agreed. “But remember, anyone in that building is either a pilot or is associated with one. They’ll understand.”
This did not make Laura feel any better. Jake even offered to dump the urinal for her, but she would not agree to this either. “No way,” she told him. “I peed in it; I’ll take care of it. Besides, it’s a female urinal. They’ll know it was me that had to use it anyway.”
“True,” Jake acknowledged.
They flew on for a few minutes. Laura held the urinal by the handle, treating it like it was an unexploded bomb that might go off at any moment. Jake punched in a new altitude and throttled back so they could begin their descent. He then checked in with the Center and told them they could discontinue flight following.
“You know,” Laura finally said. “We’re making more money these days, aren’t we?”
“An assload,” Jake agreed. “Brainwash was one of the best things we ever did. They just hit triple Platinum last week.”
“And ... now that you and Celia are releasing new CDs soon, and Celia is going back on tour ... we’ll be making even more in the next few quarters, right?”
“Right,” Jake said. “What are you getting at, hon?”
“Have you ever thought about upgrading this plane to something that has a fucking bathroom in it?”
Jake looked over at her and smiled. “I really do love you,” he told her.
Five days later, Jake, Celia, Nerdly and Sharon climbed into Jake’s plane at North Bend Municipal and flew to Hillsborough Airport just outside of Portland. Kelvin stayed behind, with Laura volunteering to be the babysitter for him while they were gone. This was to be the Nerdlys first trip away from their child and both were nervous wrecks about it.
“We should probably remind her again to heat the milk to precisely thirty-seven degrees Celsius,” Nerdly said as he pulled out his cellular phone while they were riding in the back of the limousine heading for the hotel.
“Right,” Sharon said. “To simulate my body temperature at the time of lactation. Also, I want to remind her one more time about his bathwater temperature and the acid-base balance of it. She needs to know to check the Ph level before she puts him into the tub.”
“Guys,” Jake said, rolling his eyes a little. “You wrote all this down for her, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” Nerdly said, “but we just want to reiterate the importance of these measurements.”
“She understands the importance,” Jake assured them. “She’s a teacher, remember? She’s been to college and everything. She knows how to read and follow directions.”
“But...” Sharon started.
“No buts,” Jake said. “If little Kelvin is damaged by improper milk temperature or some sort of acid-base bathwater imbalance when we get back, Laura and I will assume care of him as our own and give you our own firstborn to replace him, okay?”
They looked shocked at this suggestion.
“I was joking,” he told them. “Kelvin will be fine.”
“I don’t think that was very funny at all, Jake,” Nerdly admonished.
They loosened up a little at the hotel, thanks to Jake feeding them a few whiskey sours. They loosened up even more when they got to Memorial Coliseum at 5:00 PM, just in time for Bigg G and his band’s soundcheck. G allowed them to participate in the ritual and they immersed themselves fully into this, actually forgetting about little Kelvin for perhaps the first time since he had poked his little head out into the world. Of course, the sound check took twice as long as usual, and more than one of G’s sound people threatened to kill the Nerdlys, but, all in all, the experience was worth it. And the sound came out pretty damn impressive as well.