How to Piss in Public (13 page)

Interculturelles
threatened to sue us for leaving so we paid them off via a payment plan that took forever. Two months after the drive with
Markus we were on our own, working and sleeping in a loft together and loving it. We were finally free and the new direction was even better than the old one.
Voice
was an okay name because we let people speak for themselves and would often allow a prostitute to write an article instead of interviewing her, but
Vice
implies offensiveness and that made more sense. We liked to push buttons until our fingers bled.

We went national in 1996 by offering radio stations and record stores free ads if they stuck us in cafés and record shops. Soon we were using the same technique across the border to get
Vice
into New York and L.A. This was exactly the kind of project I was talking about on the roof with Dogboy, not fake welfare scams. I get really annoyed when people say
Vice
was started by a government program. It started
despite
a government program. The only way we could get a business going in Quebec was to sneak in the bureaucracy’s asshole and then bust out of their stomach like aliens. The rest was by dint of hard work. If the bureaucrats had their way, we’d still be noodling away in their rectum distributing ten thousand copies of ethnic parade information around office lobbies.

Leaving
Interculturelles
was like being unchained. Things started to get exciting. I worked my ass off every waking moment and cut costs to the point where we were doing the whole thing for free. Paying a designer was expensive so I learned desktop publishing and took over that job. I shot the pictures myself, wrote the articles, edited them, and laid them out. When people said we needed more women or minorities, I made up ethnic-sounding or female aliases for myself. Suroosh helped with editorial and focused on music. He had this incredible ear and could foresee the future of bands. He was almost never wrong and later predicted the indie success of Chromeo, Death from Above 1979, the Streets, Bloc Party, the Stills, Fucked Up, and the Black Lips, to name a few. Shane always had a better work ethic than us but being independent really put things into overdrive. He traveled by bus to other cities and had meetings with corporate heads who had no idea how he got in there. We couldn’t afford lawyers so deals were done with handshakes and if someone fucked us over, they were dead. We were banned and sued and threatened and ripped off, but the only
thing that could have stopped us was murder. We sent drugs to clients in the mail and got violent with competition and regularly fucked the gross old cougars in charge of buying ad space. Rival magazines often accused us of “eating our way to the top.” My old lesbian roommates liked to bitch about the patriarchy but the matriarchy’s a bitch too.

While Suroosh remained clean, the rest of us sank ourselves into drugs. We regularly OD’d on mescaline (which in Montreal was probably just horse tranquilizers). I don’t have many stories from this time because life outside of work was just sitting on couches in club basements and listening to dance music that was so shitty, you had to be off your head to enjoy it. I spent every weekend high on ecstasy or GHB, Frenching with my friend Mireille all night, and returning home in the early morning to fuck my lesbo girlfriend Alex in the ass.

We had our difficulties, too. Our computers were refurbished pieces of shit we were hustled into buying and they contained so many defects, it wasn’t unusual for me to lose a ten-page layout I’d spent all night assembling. Every time something like that happened, I’d get up off the floor, sweep away all the pieces of the chair I just smashed to bits, and focus on the fact that most people would have quit at this point, and that I wouldn’t. I was also happy not to be planting trees anymore.

For the most part, our lives became a mirror image of the Sex Pistols movie
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.
We wrote about our drug trips, got in fights, and documented every moment. We hired an ex-con loan shark as our editor and he wrote about murder. In a city where everyone was polite and shy, our fearless gonzo journalism stuck out like a thumb covered in shit. When we were fingered for being “sexist” after featuring nude porn stars in the magazine, Shane, Suroosh, and I posed buck naked for a photo and slapped it in the front of the magazine. We started a record label and put out all our friends’ bands. We were making the most money we’d ever made in our lives doing what we loved, and it kept going because every time we got some extra cash, we put it right back in the company.

As the buzz snowballed, we started getting interviewed by the same uptight, starchy old-person media we’d been lampooning. We sabotaged every interview with bullshit. When asked about
Vice
’s future,
Shane told the reporter we had just been bought by local dot-com billionaire Richard Szalwinski.

We didn’t think anything of this stupid lie as it was just one of many, but a few hours after the article was published, we got a call from the man himself. Szalwinski appreciated our bravado and wanted to meet. The next day we were sitting in his gigantic office and telling him about our company. Richard was an ex-nerd in designer glasses, a St. Barts tan, and a floral Gucci suit. He had made $500 million by getting in early with the CGI guys who did
Jurassic Park.
We saw a really loud Letterman-looking guy with a very nasal voice who kept saying, “The most important thing is we have fun. That’s number one.” I liked him. At the end of the meeting, he said, “Come back tomorrow with a one-page business plan and if you don’t try to fuck my ass, I’ll invest.” We ran home and spent the next twenty-four hours trying to fit three hundred pounds of bullshit onto one piece of paper.

The second time we were in Richard’s office he had the sheet in his hand and was impressed. He brought in a greasy, corpulent Frenchman who was his bus-dev guy and they read it aloud together. The bottom line was about a million dollars for 25 percent of the company, and after a few easy questions he said, “Let’s do it!” We shook his hand and the fat guy’s hand and I respectfully said, “You won’t regret it, Mr. Szalwinski.”

“Call me Richard, you fuck!” he yelled back in his nasal voice. “And only assholes shake hands.”

We calmly walked out of the building, across the front lawn, and when we were out of sight, we went from mild-mannered businessmen to frantic teenagers who’d just won the lottery. We ran in circles shouting, “AAAAAAHHH!” and occasionally stopped to hug the living shit out of each other. By the time we were done, we had grass stains all over our pants and were speechless. After getting our checks, Richard said the first order of business was moving the whole operation to New York. “That is, if you have the balls,” he said. We did.

The Cuban Penis Crisis (2000)

S
hortly after I moved to Brooklyn, my parents invited me to join them on a trip to Cuba. It seemed like a good idea at the time because I tend not to think about things the way a smart person does. Besides, I had just become rich.

Canadians love going to Cuba because it’s difficult for Americans to do and Canadians love anything un-American. My parents love Cuba because they’re Scottish and all Scots care about is saving money and drinking alcohol. Cuba combines the two in a generic resort setting surrounded by razor wire, beyond which is an environment that goes way past cookie-cutter and into wrist-slitter.

I flew up to Ottawa and met my mom, dad, and then-thirteen-year-old brother at the airport a couple of hours before we were booked to leave. Within about five minutes of meeting my folks, I remembered how deranged they are. My father is cursed with an abnormally high IQ. He’s a certified genius—a physicist and engineer whose groundbreaking work with sonar called Russia’s nuclear submarine bluff and eventually led to the fall of communism. He’s responsible for the world’s fastest tank and once got out of a drunk driving charge by doing math problems so complex, the officer needed a calculator to keep up (he
barely remembers this as he was black-out drunk at the time). People with these kinds of minds either go mad like Dr. John, become workaholics, or lobotomize themselves with alcohol. My dad chose all three. He has a sense of humor about it though. I once accused him of a drinking problem and he said, “The only
‘problem’
I have is that I’m addicted to it and I let it affect my life detrimentally.”

My mother, on the other hand, was not meant to be a boozer. She’s a retired teacher who loves gardening, painting, and antagonizing civil servants. She terrorizes the local museum for not having enough Scots and would probably be the next Braveheart if she wasn’t stuck in a house with assholes. Living with an alcoholic is like swimming with an anvil. Eventually you sink. Poor woman. Loving a drunk genius ain’t easy and she’s always on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

For example, he gets these lyrics from songs or commercials in his head and repeats them like Rain Man for days on end. When I met them at the airport, his broken-record mantra was from a car commercial and went, “I don’t wanna work. I just wanna bang on the drum all day.” Todd Rundgren fans will be familiar, as will anyone who has driven home listening to rush-hour classic rock radio. When a Glaswegian sings it, however, the line becomes even more grating. “Ah don wonnee wurk,” he unknowingly mumbled to himself again as we waited to board, “ah jus wonnee bang on da drum all dee day.” My exhausted mother cried, “Oh for fuck’s sake, Jimmy,” and I noticed his Chinese water torture had made her cry. How many times would you have to hear that song before it made you shed tears of sheer desperation? If you guessed once every ten minutes for three weeks straight, you just won an all-expenses-paid trip to Cuba!

The plane was filled with Canadian parents and their kids but there were a few hosers who were under the impression this family resort would be filled with horny sluts. When we arrived in Santiago de Cuba, the airline put us on an airline shuttle bus that took us through a Mad Max movie and dropped us at a sequestered resort, also owned by the airline. We checked in past the armed guards and went to our corny, pastel rooms to get depressed. The resort was on a beach and was composed of an outdoor entertainment area next to a restaurant with a
large swimming pool flanked by two medium-sized hotels. There were cement paths that weaved in and out of everywhere and they were decorated with bushes, plants, and sickly palm trees. It was exactly like every resort I’ve ever been to, but shittier. My brother and I were on the outskirts of the first hotel, closer to the main road. We had our own beds and on each one was an eight-by-ten piece of paper listing our itinerary. Every guest was given a schedule for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Beer was free and it tasted like it too. Other events were announced at dinner and fun was mandatory.

Socialism sounds cool in a classroom and nobody can deny the sexiness Che Guevara emanates from each rotting pore but in reality, it sucks. Every adult knows it’s just communism lite, and that means bureaucrats with “Godlike power,” as Milton Friedman put it, and a citizenry of “childlike dependents,” as he also put it. Nobody wears Che T-shirts in Cuba and the fat man in a beard who runs the place is just a reverse Santa who takes every gift God gives and hands it to someone less deserving. Without the invisible hand of capitalism slapping overachievers on the back and spanking lazy bottoms, waiters mope around like the whole thing is below them.

My parents added an extra layer of weirdness to this already bizarre trip. When they drink, they can go from cheery-as-can-be to scary person at the drop of a drop. My mother loses her mind and behaves like someone is channel surfing her personality, whipping through moods like ecstatic, furious, Papua New Guinean, and just TV static. My father, on the other hand, goes from witty bon vivant, to slightly more cynical bon vivant, to a kind of schadenfreude grumpy, to dark satanist, to the most horrible things you’ve ever heard about Africa personified. Then he passes out.

It was our first dinner at the resort and both parents were in their final stages of drunk. Dad was sitting deflated with no lights on and Mum was chastising him for refusing to eat. “You’re not a bloody thirteen-year-old girl, Jimmy,” she yelled, referring to his alcohol-induced anorexia. Then, before she could really tear him a new ass, some mariachis showed up singing Mexican music. My mother instantly changed the channel and was now smiling ear to ear and
enthusiastically dancing in her chair. This was particularly disturbing as she still had tears streaming down her face. I looked at my adolescent brother and as soon as our eyes met, this horror movie became a comedy. “This isn’t sad. It’s funny,” we both said with our eyes. It was an epiphany I was having a little too late in life and my brother was having a little too early.

Kyle and I burst into that silent, bouncy laugh you do in class when your teacher tells you to stop laughing or else. (Remember those laughs? Talk about putting out the fire with gasoline.) As gravity slowly pulled slightly chewed food from my brother’s incapacitated lips, I was forced to put both hands on the table to help me inhale. It was the most intense laugh session I’ve ever had because it was pure catharsis. Why were we trying to decipher this insanity and make it work? Insanity is insane. He’s not anorexic. He’s just not hungry because he drank beer all day. She’s not sad. She’s just crying. As Charlton Heston said in
Planet of the Apes,
“This is a madhouse, A MADHOUSE!”

My brother and I got up to get refreshments and silently agreed to stop trying to translate our parents’ drunken gibberish into some kind of English. “You know what’s great about hanging out with Dad?” I asked my brother as we walked toward the buffet. “We get to see what we’d look like if we had AIDS.” As we laughed, we passed a table of scowling hosers and they gave our chortles an extra boost. They were beginning to come to terms with the notion that family resorts are not known for their abundance of poon tang and this whole vacation was a huge mistake. I was coming to terms with the notion that a little brother can also be a little friend and this vacation was going to be fun. Just then, a motherfucking Indian goddess walked by and smiled.