How to Piss in Public (15 page)

The detective was adamant about getting everyone who was in Cuba involved in the case and that meant I had to call up Sonya. I still hadn’t come clean about my mother’s life and realized it would be prudent to combine that confession with the news because she was now an integral part of a criminal investigation.

I called, and, after some niceties, she asked me what was going on
with the stepfather. I told her what had happened and she agreed to talk to the detective as soon as possible.

In high school we used to make up words. You know when you almost have a car accident and the adrenaline makes you feel itchy across your shoulders like a shawl? That’s called a Mink Prickly. You know when you get butterflies in your stomach so intense it feels like there’s an inner tube around your stomach and the air valve is poking through your belly button? That’s called a Tube. In a sick way I think I like giving myself them. I had both when these words came out of my mouth: “There’s one more thing, Sonya,” I said with a Mink Prickly and a Tube, in a roller coaster, at the very top of a huge hill, about to plummet downward into the darkness …

“My mother’s not dead.”

Silence.

“It was a silly prank that kind of spiraled out of control. I was going to tell you but I wanted to do it in person so we could laugh about it.” Silence. “And yeah, I regret it. But the molestation shit is true. And yes, our conversations in Cuba have become part of the case.” She hung up. I called her back and she didn’t pick up so I gave it a day. I felt terrible but I also felt good and that made me feel like a dick, which also felt pretty good.

The next day, after the detective told me he had spoken with Sonya, I called her up and spent a good three hours convincing her the whole thing was a wild ride and it made the trip a lot more interesting. I got the feeling she was embarrassed by how easily she was duped and was actually turned on by my ability to fuck with her mind. I’m serious. She even told me she’d be in New York the next week and we should “meet for some drinks.” “Yeah,” I thought, “you drink vodka and I’ll drink your pussy.”

I went back to New York to wait for my Indian bride and the trial went forward with the momentum of a tornado. As is often the case with these instances, the mother went from accusing Tammy of lying to resenting her for being such a little tart to dropping to her knees, bawling her eyes out, and begging for forgiveness. This part kind of makes me sick but it came out that the mother ultimately sensed something was
up because Tammy was going to bed wearing multiple pairs of pajamas and a bathrobe tied extra tight around her waist. The mother admitted she had repressed this vision because she wanted the relationship to work so bad. Now, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. What happens when you try to molest a bear’s daughter? The bear rips your head off and hurls it into the woods like a softball, right? What about a duck’s daughter? A seal’s? I’m not positive but I’m willing to wager you’d have to stoop down to the insect world to find a mother who doesn’t have a problem with your raping her offspring. Nice peers, lady.

While the worst adults alive were being punished for their perversions, Sonya and I were united in New York and ready to celebrate. I had a boner the size of Mars the second she called me from the airport. I saw drinks and dinner as an annoying obstacle in the way of what really needed to be done. Fucking. Unfortunately, women are not as horny as men and after forty thousand years of post-Neanderthal evolution, they’ve learned the importance of drawing out a courtship. I managed to keep the date down to beers and maybe a slice of pizza by saying, “Let’s meet at a bar and then we can go out for Italian.” I was a ticking cum bomb.

This was not going to be a quickie on the couch. This was going to be an ordeal, a punishment if you will. I asked her if she brought high heels and she said she did so I emptied her suitcase all over the floor. I settled on turquoise socks, the heels (which were a little too strappy-sandal for me but the socks took care of that), and a white wife beater. She obliged and got into the costume. I then tied her wrists behind her back with a long-sleeved shirt and used a pair of scissors to cut tit holes out of her undershirt. I surveyed my creation for a while and the alchemy turned my dick from wood into diamond. When she was ready, I walked her over to my bed, lay her on her stomach, and prepared the leg-binding. This involved bringing her ankles up to her ass and keeping them there by fastening belts where her thighs met her calves. Then I put a fucking ball gag in her mouth. That’s right, a ball gag. Here’s a tip if you have stuff like butt plugs and dildos lying around your house: Always wash the shit out of them after every encounter and always keep them in the same box they came in. No
woman is going to go near a used sex toy so you always have to pretend this is its first time out of the box.

Sonya was lying on her stomach literally bound and gagged. The belts were forcing her high heels to poke her ass cheeks and her pussy was sopping. This is what you get when you make a guy wait this long for sex. You get a ritual sacrifice. I took out my video camera and filmed her from the top of her head to the bottom of her knees then back up her calves to her feet. I ate her ass for so long I almost got E. coli and after a few slurps of her beaver juice, I pounded that bitch all the way back to Cuba. After fucking her for so long she was about to get a UTI, I pulled out and turned her face into a spilled milkshake.

Sonya stayed for three days. She’d go shopping while I was at work and then she’d model for me when I got home. I don’t think I ever saw her without high-heeled shoes on. That’s the great thing about visits like these. Just when you’re getting bored, she leaves and your life is back to normal. It’s somewhere between a girlfriend and a person you jerk off into, and it’s pretty much the best possible scenario for a single man.

Back in Ottawa, Tammy was freed from her perverted stepfather and the family became obsessed with my brother. Mum said Tammy’s mother was even pushing for the kids to become a couple and eventually marry. The sex offender didn’t do any jail time but was sentenced to community service and sexual rehab and all the governmental programs with which Canada loves to reward its criminals. I ran into Sonya a few times after that and it was always an instant three-day relationship that never went anywhere.

Ten years later I called my brother for updates on Tammy, and being the B-29 bomber that he is, he dropped another Hiroshima on my ass. Ready?
The mother got back with that dude and now they were living together
. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. What kind of person does that? Lady, you are officially no longer a member of the mammal kingdom. Welcome to the ephemera that is a bug’s life. Your existence is irrelevant and your time on this planet has been a complete waste. Thankfully, Tammy is a fairly normal human being who told her mother to fuck off when she said, “Trust me, he’s changed.”
Tammy’s living in Ottawa now and getting on with her life, somehow able to cope with the fact that her mother’s actions pretty clearly said, “I don’t care about you.” Sometimes it takes the worst parents alive to make you realize how lucky you are to have yours. While Tammy has a mother who deserves to die, my brother and I are blessed with a mother who, despite her love of boxed wine and occasional bouts of dementia, would die for us.

The Story of Vice: Part Two (1999–2001)

A
fter we got our checks from Richard Szalwinski, Shane and I bought a solar-powered hippie house on a Costa Rican mountain where we spent most of our summers. Suroosh put his check in the bank. Szalwinski moved us into a gigantic office on Twenty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue near the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. We were well paid and the magazine finally had a budget where I didn’t have to do the whole thing myself, but something wasn’t right. We were hemorrhaging cash and were encouraged to do so. Ironically, it was like life back at
Images Interculturelles.

Every budget was ten times what it needed to be. For example, Richard and his people, who called the shots, wanted us to start selling things online. Fine. I said I could photograph some stuff with my digital camera and put up an ad, but instead they shelled out $350,000 for a camera that takes a picture at 360 degrees. We used it once. They liked that we had a record label and were very interested in Vice being more than a magazine—that’s why I stopped italicizing it. “Let’s do stores!” Richard yelled, and we rolled out some of the most embarrassing retail spaces I’d ever seen. Our clothing line was even worse and I
couldn’t stay on top of the sprawl. Every day there were new people in the office whom I didn’t recognize. This wasn’t our company anymore.

The turning point for me was during a meeting about some French homo who had begun choosing products for us to buy en masse and sell on the site. He was a chubby man with corny streetwear, but I liked him enough. “Now, Gavin,” the stranger leading the board meeting said, “you’re going to be working with him so we want to make sure you guys get along.”

“Sure,” I said, shrugging. “I love faggots.”

The conference room was full of faces I didn’t recognize, and those were the faces that didn’t laugh. The next day I got pulled aside by some office-manager type who told me I was going to have to do sensitivity training. I thought he was kidding.

The training consisted of my sitting with a lawyer uptown who thought the whole thing was as stupid as I did. “I know,” she said, “it doesn’t make any sense. You said you love them. I’m just telling you what the law is.” She went on to tell me that saying anything personal about a coworker is grounds for a lawsuit.

“What if I give someone shit for being late?” I asked.

“That’s fine because it’s work related,” she said, “but if you asked if someone was single or even what sign they are, that’s a no-no.” We both laughed at this joke of a law, but I went back to work grumpy.

Suroosh and I had a long talk about the way things were going. It didn’t feel good to bleed money. Our office rent was $17,000 a month but deep down we were still the same
Vice
magazine that was selling ads from a Montreal loft and calling bullshit on liars.

Companies that made tens of thousands were being valued in the hundreds of millions during the dot-com boom. It wasn’t real. Richard wasn’t interested in reality, however, and during the peak of this hubris, he said we should take the money he gave us and put it back in the company. “I’ll give you good bang for your buck,” he promised, “book value.” Shane realized the magnitude of what Richard had just said so he grabbed a pen and made him put it in writing. Richard signed it without a second thought. That was the dot-com mentality: “We may be rich now but this is only the beginning.”

A year later, in 2000, I noticed the Con Ed guy coming around a lot. He’d ask for the office manager, who would then try to find Richard, but nobody had seen him in weeks. Then our Internet went down. We tried to get a straight answer out of people, but nobody would talk to us. So we rented a car and drove to Richard’s house.

We arrived in Nantucket and banged on his door. “Hey, guys!” he yelled in his unusually effusive way. His girlfriend looked like a kidnap victim dying to get out. He asked if we wanted steaks and she happily wrenched them out of the freezer to thaw. You could tell they didn’t get a lot of guests. We told him we weren’t there for pleasure and he looked disheartened. “You want to talk about
work
?” he said, like we’d said “homework.”

“Yes,” Suroosh said.

Richard brought us out back and we sat on huge lawn chairs. We wanted to know how much money the company had and how long it was going to last. “Hard to say,” Richard said playfully.

“All right,” Shane said, “a year?” Richard shook his head.

“Six months?” I asked. Richard shook his head.

“A day?” Suroosh asked, almost kidding. When we finally realized Richard was completely out of money and the lease was already way past eviction, we went, “Whoooooaaaaa,” the way they did in
Animal House
after they killed that horse, and we continued howling with fear all the way back to New York. We’d have to begin all over again.

Dinner with the Clash (1999)

W
ait, before the bubble burst with Szalwinski and we had to start again from scratch, a few things happened that I still gotta stick in.

I’ve known a lot of celebrities over the years but it’s not because we all met in Monaco during Brigitte Bardot’s birthday party. I know them because I published a magazine for a long time and we needed each other to survive. I know celebrities the way a hairdresser knows supermodels or a sound engineer knows rock stars. It’s work. The two things I’ve learned about fame are (1) it sucks, and (2) anyone who ever uses the words “my fans” is a douche.

Outside of that, they’re all pretty much what you’d expect. Zach Galifianakis is weird, Curtis Mayfield is (was) a sweetheart, Chloë Sevigny is quiet and horny, Rufus Wainwright is a baby megalomaniac, Rip Taylor is high-maintenance, Jimmy Kimmel is hilarious and mean, Jennifer Aniston is kind and normal, Patton Oswalt is smart, Debbie Harry is a cunt, Lou Reed’s an asshole, Cameron Diaz is dumb, Selma Blair is insecure, Kristen Schaal is quick, Jason Bateman is a douche, Fred Armisen is shy, David Duke is a health nut, Louis C.K. is concerned about your kids, Paul Stanley thinks he can paint, Steven Seagal is grumpy, Aziz Ansari is all over the place, America Ferrera is small, Janeane Garofalo
is smaller, Sarah Silverman is as funny as you think she is but gets pissy when there’s no pot, and Ghostface Killah is exactly like your best friend.

Johnny Knoxville and I were pitching a TV version of
Vice
magazine we called
Jackass 60 Minutes
for a few years. While staying at his house I got so high on speed, I crashed his daughter’s birthday party and invented a game where anyone who doesn’t catch the ball is going to die of AIDS. He chased me out of his house with a Taser gun and we haven’t really spoken since. I believe “Even Steve-O knows kids are off-limits” were the last words he said to me, and they were via text.