Manneken Pis

When I was six or seven, my father received a gag gift as a birthday present from one of his friends. A liquor decanter, it was topped with a statue of a cherubic young boy peeing, and when you pressed the button on the decanter it would fill your glass.

As a little kid, this device tickled me to no end. It was naughty and funny and educational, all at the same time. After all, I learned, the statue of the little boy really exists, and is in fact a much revered emblem of the City of Brussels, where it is known as the Manneken Pis. Located at the corner of Stoofstraat/Rue de L'Etuve and the Eikstraat/Rue du Chêne, the famous landmark has been cherished by locals for more than 400 years.

There are many legends about the Manneken. According to one of them a little boy had watered against the door of a witch who lived where the fountain now stands. The witch was so angry that she turned the little boy into a statue. Another legend says that a man had lost his little son. He found the child after two days near the place where the fountain now stands. When the father spotted his child, the latter was peeing. As a token of gratitude the father had the fountain with a statue of a peeing boy constructed.

From the mid-sixties through to the end of the seventies, this famous work of art was turned into the liquor dispenser given to my father, and sold under a number of name, including Master Piss and Little Whizzer.



As so often happens with novelty gifts, my dad's dispenser was used three or four times, garnered a few chuckles, then was consigned to the basement storage shelf. A few years later, when he built a pond with a waterfall in the backyard, he took the statue from the decanter and installed it as a fountain - a fate I always felt was a dignified resting place for the lad.

Last year, I happened across a copy of this silly gag gift in an antique store, and couldn't resist. I paid $20 for it, and after I got it home I did a bit of research and found I could have gotten an unused vintage example online for about the same price...but, while it didn't end up as an example of shrewd antique purchasing on my part, that wasn't the objective in this case anyway.

And twenty bucks is a small price to pay for that golden glow of childhood nostalgia....