THE NY OBSERVER

Urine

(Wo)men Wimp Out!

September 9, 2000

J.D. Salinger liked to take the piss out of himself … literally.

Margaret Salinger’s memoir of her father, Dream Catcher (published Sept. 6 by Pocket Books), catalogs many of reclusive J.D.’s less-than-savory eccentricities, including the fact that he drank his own urine. It’s not really such a shockeroony; after all, he did it decades ago, when everyone who was anyone sat in an orgone box and employed his own yogi.

But guess what? Quelle horreur! It’s back and it’s flooding the nation! Taboo-busting renegade New Yorkers are partaking of golden gargles, and they’re loving it! Eeeeuw! The extra ‘e’ is for extra eeeeeeeuuuw!

Convinced of the health and beauty benefits of this verboten activity, these "open-minded" urbanites are enthusiastically partaking of their own piddle on a daily basis. But prominent urine guzzlers are–quelle surprise–less than enthusiastic when it comes to making it public. "I’m a devotee," a magazine editor told me on condition of the strictest anonymity, "and I never get colds. My Japanese uncle taught me how, but it’s not the subject of dinner-party chat. It’s between me and my pee."

"It’s healing and cleansing and, yes, I think it’s really catching on," said a fashion consultant and stylist. "If you do drugs or booze, you can taste it the next day. I’m very careful about who I tell. If word got out, I could never show my face at the Four Seasons again."

Others know no such reticence. "What’s the big deal?" said New York photographer Johnny Rozsa. "Urine therapy has been around for so long and the benefits are so well documented. I’m not a golden-shower queen: I started doing it to help my psoriasis. During that period I noticed my skin was like a baby’s bottom–a clean one, I might add. People think of piss as dirty, they associate it with poop. What I’ve discovered, along with many others–including Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri–is the pure magic of pee. It’s mostly urea, which has so many gorgeous properties!"

Mr. Rozsa is currently not partaking. "My psoriasis is better. Plus the whole thing is a bit of a palaver," he said. "You see, you have to drink the middle pee when you wake up."

Middle pee?

"You pee out the first bit, then clench, then pee into a glass, clench again and pee the rest down the toilet. I add apple juice to the ‘middle’ urine and gulp it down."

Mr. Rozsa, like many of the adherents I spoke to, became a convert after reading The Golden Fountain: The Complete Guide to Urine Therapy, by Coen van der Kroon, and Your Own Perfect Medicine, by Martha Christy. Both contain a steady stream of tepidly convincing historical and anecdotal data from Indian yogis, plus the alleged cure rate on everything from baldness to cancer and AIDS. Mr. van der Kroon insists that drinking your pee is less harmful than canned soda and "less distasteful than gelatin made from hooves and tendons." Coen, darling, ever heard the expression "two wrongs don’t make a right"?

If you are contemplating a golden guzzle, then please, before you unzip, please, do me a favor and read the "urine therapy" entry on www.skepdic.com. Robert Todd Carroll writes fascinatingly of the pros and cons, ultimately labeling it a fairly harmless practice. Pee is, after all, 95 percent water; the rest is nitrogenous waste from the liver, including a few excess minerals and nutrients that might get absorbed if you gave them a second chance. However, he writes, "as a daily tonic, there are much tastier ways to introduce healthful products into one’s blood stream." Mr. Carroll does highly recommend drinking pee "for those rare occasions when one is buried beneath a building or lost at sea for a week or two."

P.S.: Gandhi notwithstanding, the only person approximating a urine-therapy celebrity proponent would appear to be Dame Edna Everage. In her Coffee Table Book, she talks buoyantly about "the Cinderella of secretions." According to her Dameship, it’s great for corns: "Place one and a half pints of fresh fluid"–Australian trannies must have large bladders–"in a spotlessly clean enamel bowl and soak your feet in it–taking care of course to remove your shoes and stockings first!" After a week, corns will "loosen their grip and fall out." Re: freckle removal–one memorable summer, Dame Edna’s grandmother successfully banished "a mass of hideous freckles" from her little face by anointing it with the young Edna’s own "little jobs" every morning.

Dame Edna, like my prissy self, comes out strongly against "some authorities who recommend the drinking of ‘little jobs’ to cure you of various ailments. These folk tend in the main to be ratbags."

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