How to Piss in Public (12 page)

I didn’t hear from my neighbor for about a week after that. I think he was sick because I’d hear coughing from the bed and when the phone rang he wouldn’t answer it. There were endless trips to the bathroom with lots of hopeless cursing. He was obviously alone in the world. Who was going to check in on him if he died? Did this fall under my jurisdiction?

Then I heard some creaking of the floorboards and a very angry “GODDAMNIT!” It sounded like he had spilled something and I could hear him waddling over to the sink to prepare a washcloth. Then I heard creaking so near the wall it sounded like that was what he was washing. Who spills stuff on the walls after the age of one? For the next three days I heard a lot more swearing and a lot more scrubbing. Why was he skating around the room on Brillo pads and cursing like a sailor? Had senility eaten his brain alive?

Then came the worst phone call since Hitler said, “Sure, go ahead, invade Poland. You think I give a shit?”

“English! Hello? Is this Emergency?” He seemed calm but had obviously
dialed 911 because you have to choose your language first in Quebec when you call those guys. I silently crawled up to my bed and put my ear to the ceiling. “Yes, well, I’m not sure who to call but I’m at the end of my rope,” he said. “I give up. I’m throwing in the towel.” There was a pause. He gave them his name and address. Another pause. “I simply cannot hold it any longer. I don’t know what you do. You come over here and put a cork in it? You put me in a hospital? I don’t know. I can’t deal with it anymore. It’s out of my control.”

I thought he’d never beat the ticket-booth call. I was wrong. It kept going. “Up until last week I could hold it in. It wasn’t easy but I could do it. Then these past three days it’s just been getting worse and worse. It’s all over the walls and the floor. I cannot hold it in no matter what I do. The bathroom is just, well … it’s a mess.” Despite the fact that my bed was six feet off the ground, my jaw hit the floor with a plonk. “My EXCREMENT!” he yelled angrily before hanging up the phone.

I was in shock. He had an exploding rectum? Is that what happens to gays when they get old—their fucking
assholes
give out? A million questions were racing through my head. Why the fuck didn’t he just wear a diaper? I thought he wore his winter clothes in the house. Now he was dressed like Piglet and spraying feces around the room like a dying gay wood chipper who hates his landlord? “That’s it,” I decided. “I am never letting anyone fuck me in the ass.”

Three minutes later my buzzer rang. I pushed the talk button. “Hello?”

“Salut là, avez-vous appellé une ambulance?”
I buzzed them in and they banged on my door. When I opened it, I saw four adrenaline-pumped guys my age panting and wondering why I looked so healthy. Two were holding huge oxygen tanks with masks swinging off them on rubber straps, and the other two had a stretcher. “Upstairs!” I yelled, pointing straight up. They nodded and ran upstairs, but I saw one of them pause for a split second wondering how the hell I knew the problem was upstairs. Was I the murderer? He made a mental note to both remember my face and avoid me on the way back down.

I stood in the hallway waiting and ten minutes later, I saw the old man with the broken asshole get slowly lowered down the stairs. He
had an oxygen mask on his face and was strapped in the stretcher with a blanket on him. I watched them stagger across the lobby, through the front doors, and out into the merciless cold. I never saw him again.

A few weeks later, I could hear sawing and banging and drilling upstairs. When the landlord came by to collect the rent, I invited him in for a coffee. “How you doing?” I asked cautiously.

“Oh, man,” he said in his half-immigrant/half-Quebecois accent, “I been workin’ upstairs on dat apartment, la. ’Ard work. It smell so bad we ’ad to replace da drywall and everyting.” I asked him what happened and the landlord seemed reluctant to soil my virgin ears with the unimaginable.

“Did his ass explode?” I asked, breaking the ice.

The landlord was taken aback. “Ow did you know ’bout dat?” he asked.

“Because I fucking heard it, dude,” I told him. “Every word.”

The Story of Vice: Part One (1994–1999)

S
uroosh Alvi was a pretty serious heroin addict who hung out at the back of our local bar Le Biftek with sketchy guys in black sweatshirts. His habit was up to $300 a day at one point. He kept trying to quit but it never took and he’d died so many times, the paramedics would beat him up out of sheer frustration after reviving him again.

His Pakistani parents were
verklempt
about it, and one day his father invited him to the mosque to pray. Suroosh was apathetic but decided to check it out. As he prayed, he saw Allah appear before him with two admonitions.
One: You’re never doing heroin again. Two: You’re going to start a magazine.
Allah nailed it.

There are no actual jobs in Montreal, especially if you don’t speak French without an accent (mine is 90 percent perfect, which is considered the same as 0 percent). The only work there is through government programs or grants and there was a group of Haitians who ran a free newspaper called
Images Interculturelles
through some fund named after the first black man to ever visit Canada, Mathieu de Costa. I guess the mandate was to promote nonwhite culture throughout the
land but I’m not sure. They were very secretive. Looking back, I think they had received money to start an English version of their paper and had chosen Suroosh to head the operation. Possibly because Allah told them to. It was meant to cover multiculturalism in Montreal. Suroosh named it
Voice of Montreal,
ignored his instructions, and made it into a music zine so he could write about bands he liked.

As he was putting together the first issue, a slacker friend named Rufus told me I should meet up with Suroosh and do cartoons for him. I was on the tenth issue of my comic
Pervert
at the time and had won some irrelevant awards. The comic was evolving from simple graphic novel to more written content, including CD reviews and a long letters page where I’d make fun of other people’s shitty art. I was DJing at Le Biftek with my buddy Derrick Beckles, AKA Pinky Carnage, whom I used to deal pot with. He had also quit due to massive farting. Pinky was a lanky grunge Negro who looked like Buckwheat if Buckwheat played for the NBA, shopped at the army surplus, and was in a band. Pinky was a tree planter too and we had just returned from a brutal season up north. I bought myself an enormous Suzuki GS850 motorbike with some of the money and was looking forward to another carpet-bombing. I walked into the
Interculturelles
office wearing a pompadour, leather jacket, creepers, and my motorcycle helmet. Suroosh thought I was rich and very tough, though I was neither. After showing him some cartoons, we talked about writing. He was basically the only employee and was meant to write the entire first issue and sell all the ads. I told him I was only tangentially interested in journalism and then went on a tirade about how people should write the way they talk and just say whatever came to their minds instead of being so careful about everything. He offered me the job as editor and I said, “No thanks.”

A few days later, I was smoking a joint on my roof and talking about the future with Dogboy, who had recently moved to Montreal to focus on partying. He seemed happy living life in cruise control, which pissed me off. “Don’t you want to really sink your teeth into something?” I asked. After I heard myself ask that I remembered the frustration of coming back from Europe to nothing. That’s what I went to Taiwan for, to get a nest egg. Selling pot was supposed to make the
nest egg big enough to get something going but all I was doing was this stupid comic book.

“The only thing I want to sink my teeth into is a fucking smoked-meat sandwich at Schwartz’s,” he replied. “You in?”

“No,” I said, looking out over a city devoted to not working hard. Then it hit me like a skinhead bat to the forehead: I’d just had the future handed to me on a silver platter and said, “No thanks.”

The next morning I jumped on my motorbike and almost crashed it into the
Interculturelles
building. I ran upstairs and begged Suroosh for the job I’d turned down. He seemed surprised and then explained it wasn’t possible. “I asked about it after you left and learned this whole company is entangled in all kinds of government bureaucracy,” he said. “I can only hire people on welfare because the pay is in welfare.”

“No problem,” I said, shaking his hand excitedly. “I’ll be right back.”

I’d been boning French chicks for a while now and was always shocked to see how many able-bodied young white women had no qualms about being on welfare. They’d give me protips such as “Act crazy and retarded,” and I’d huff and tell them I’d never consider such a thing in a million years. But an hour after shaking Suroosh’s hand I was sitting in front of a social worker with my eyes crossed pretending I didn’t speak any languages sufficiently. When she handed me some forms to fill out, I used my left hand and not one letter was between the lines. By the time I walked out of that office I had the best-paying welfare available and an envelope with $100 tucked in it to tide me over.

I got straight to work writing record reviews such as, “The first song is all ‘dfffh dffh dffh’ but after that it’s nothing but guitars going ‘neer neer n’neer.’” Suroosh grew up listening to punk, too, and our naïve arrogance and fuck-off attitudes quickly separated us from the pack. In a city with only a handful of Anglophones to entertain, we were getting noticed.

Our bosses gave us government pamphlets on upcoming ethnic parades and we threw them in the garbage while writing about prostitutes and rap. Suroosh’s heroin withdrawals had put his mind in a dark place, and we both got into what was called “hate literature”
back then, which was more about death and suffering than anything racial. A Danish magazine called
Sewer Cunt
seared our eyeballs with its graphic depictions of murder, and an American zine called
FUCK
was so harsh it gave our brains third-degree burns, but nothing charbroiled our souls like Jim Goad’s
ANSWER Me!
He didn’t give a shit what anyone thought and wrote about the upside of rape as if he was contributing to
Reader’s Digest.

My Scottish roots were also taking over. When the Scots settled upstate New York they gave places names like Cunt Creek and Fuck Mountain because the Scots are funny dicks. They weren’t trying to be edgy. They were just a bunch of fucking assholes. The core of my humor was this same old Scottish “fuck off, you cunt.” Scotland also has this obsession with justice where they grab people for butting in line and get annoyed when people are weak. I was walking through Glasgow with my ninety-year-old grandmother one afternoon and there was a couple in front of us dressed the same. They both had denim overalls and cable-knit turtleneck sweaters and my gran was incensed. “Look at that wee jesse,” she said, because “jesse” means “wimp.” “She’s laid that out on the bed for him this morning and he’s gone and put it all on without a second thought.” After she said that I thought, “Oh, so
that’s
where I get the [
Vice
street fashion satire column] ‘DOs and DON’Ts’ from.”

Despite the shocking content, we felt there was a future in this—mostly because we had no intention of giving up, ever. Our bosses didn’t seem to share this enthusiasm and wanted us to stay their tiny golden goose. Every time we talked about getting serious with the business and making a real go of it, they’d come up with a reason why it couldn’t be done. We were their welfare-state cash cow, and the last thing they wanted was to let the real world fuck it up.

We had a black saleswoman who I suspect was mentally ill. After a year of not really making money, I decided I would take over and start selling ads. I asked crazy lady what I should do to help, and she suggested selling a page of florists’ business cards since it was almost Valentine’s Day. I don’t know if you’ve ever cold-called fags and tried to bullshit them into giving you money for nothing, but after the thirty-first
hang up punctuated by “Whatever!” I was ready to go to jail for manslaughter. I couldn’t handle it. So, I wrote a plea to my Leatherassbuttfuk bandmate Bullshitter Shane. We needed him to take over sales.

Shane had fucked off to Europe too and had talked his way into an opulent lifestyle teaching English in Budapest. I’d been sending him every issue as it came out and he’d defend it to the other expats over there who called it trite. Luckily, the trip had run its course and he was ready to come back. A few days after landing in Montreal, he pulled the same cross-eyed welfare scam at my behest and started as our head of sales right after our first-year anniversary. Our saleswoman realized this made her obsolete. She handled it by running out onto the street and shrieking at cars. Shane wasn’t a good salesman—he was a
great
salesman, and he did it beautifully every day until taking over the magazine’s editorial content when I abdicated the throne thirteen years later.

Shane’s work ethic was inspiring too and his marketing talents were peerless. He’d call me from a pay phone late at night and say, “We are going to be rich,” into the receiver again and again like a financial pervert with OCD. We were publishing one issue a month and we based the print run on how much income we had, so we never went into debt. It was the perfect business model but the bosses didn’t seem happy with it, and they didn’t like the new direction, either. When Shane tried to send the magazine to potential clients, our bosses told him the stamps were too expensive.

In the summer of 1996 my old tree-planting boss Markus was making the two-hour drive from Montreal to Ottawa, so I hitched a ride to go visit the folks. On the trip I explained to him how we were prepared to give
Interculturelles
an ultimatum: Get serious or we’re doing it ourselves. Markus is an entrepreneur and didn’t understand why we’d even bother with an ultimatum. “Just leave,” he said. He was right. What were we waiting for? I called Shane and Suroosh the second I got to my parents’ house. “Let’s start it from scratch and change the name from
Voice
to
Vice
! They won’t have a case.”