How to Piss in Public (17 page)

Lisa Ann was still on the phone, and religious people are boring, so we both gravitated to the handsomely gray-haired Robert Conrad. Pinky is a TV junkie and has been all his life.

Feeling his oats, Pinky strutted up to Conrad and sang the chorus of “Wild Wild West,” a terrible Will Smith title theme song to a terrible Will Smith movie, which was based on the Western TV show that made Conrad famous. Conrad smiled politely and Pinky’s shitfaced face lit up. “Have you heard that song?” he asked way too quickly.

“No,” Conrad replied, unamused.

Then Pinky sniffed the coke snot off his lip and brought his A-game by pulling an old episode of Conrad’s show out of his ass. “Man,” Pinky said, leaning into Conrad with a weird grin, “‘Night of the Vicious Valentine’ … when that crossbow was rigged into the piano and that pompous prick gets shot right as he’s patronizing you? Golden.”

Robert Conrad immediately came to life and leapt up out of his chair to talk about the old days. “You wouldn’t see that today,” he lamented enthusiastically, which was weird because I didn’t know you could do those two things at the same time. “People don’t put the same kind of thought into scripts,” Conrad said. We agreed, though I personally had no idea what anyone was talking about. Conrad led us over to the other end of the room to get down to some real talk. We were now back near the fridge where the cocaining took place. I wondered if he was going to ask us for a bump. Isn’t that how all old movie stars
die? Robert didn’t want to take any drugs, but he did take a shine to us and seemed determined to pass on some words of wisdom before he left this earth. David remained on the couch, lost in a magazine, and couldn’t have cared less what he was missing out on.

“Look, guys,” Conrad said while peering back to make sure his child bride couldn’t hear him. “When I was your age I screwed everything that moved. I didn’t care what they looked like.”

I love conversations like this and had a million questions for our new mentor. “But if hot chicks see you fucking dogs you’re done, right?”

Robert Conrad looked at me like I had just pulled my dick out and asked him to count the veins. “What?” he said. Then he came back in, unfazed, with, “Heck no. You have to get every single girl you can. If a woman’s not interested, that’s not your problem. Wait for the next bus.” This was some of the soundest advice I’ve ever received and today, as a much older man, I can only begin to wrap my head around its wisdom. You see, when you’re married, you have nothing to beat off to but your memories. If you’ve only fucked, say, ten women, you have to keep recycling those same memories again and again like a dog-eared porn mag with the staples falling out. However, if you fill up that wank Rolodex with as many business cards as it can hold, Old You will go back in time and kiss Young You on the mouth.

“But you aren’t like that anymore?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” he responded. “I found Jesus Christ and I’m madly in love with my wife. Look at her.” He looked back at the stunning young lady before adding, “She’s perfection. Eventually, you have to settle down.”

“When?” I asked.

“How old are you?” he replied. I told him I was thirty and he laughed and slapped me on the back. “You have another good ten years, buddy. Enjoy.” Then he walked off smiling. Three years later he careened into another car while wasted out of his mind and has been fucked-up ever since. Three years after that, I proposed.

By the time we were called out to the show, I couldn’t help but notice I had become completely fucking shithoused. I was too high
and felt more out of place than a Japanese break-dancer. Cocaine is a difficult thing to regulate when you’re sneaking it up your nose behind appliances and the odds of your accidentally inhaling a huge chunk are even higher than you. Couple this with the realization I was going to be on national television and I started to panic. My parents were going to be watching this. What the fuck was I doing? You see, people think they’re better when they’re high but they’re actually way worse. You’re High You for about 0.000000001 percent of your life. You’re You You for the other 99.9999999999 percent. Which You do you think you’re going to be more comfortable being?

The people with the headsets shuffled all of us to the right of a big curtain that was just out of the audience’s line of vision. When I heard Bill Maher say, “and the editor of
Vice
magazine and Viceland.com, Mr. Gavin MuhGuinness, everybody,” I ran out to the stage and proudly showed the crowd how underdressed I was. I had on a V-neck T-shirt covered in beer stains, ratty cords, and my dad’s old Wallabees. I thrust my hands into the air like a champion, which made the crowd cheer even louder, and I could see the inversely proportional enthusiasm on Maher’s face. He could instantly tell I wasn’t there to have a serious discussion. The surprisingly diminutive Bill came over and shook our hands as we sat down on chairs that were positioned in a circle. Video cameras on big cranes swooped around the stage and stared at us like curious robots. There were maybe two thousand people surrounding us in a semicircle but they were at least fifty feet away so the cameras could swivel with ease. As Bill led into the first question I started to feel my teeth grind back and forth. Too much cocaine has a way of making your hands turn cold and clammy, giving you Mink Pricklies. Bill looked at his cue cards and then looked up at us and said, “So JonBenét Ramsey’s parents are writing a book about everything they’ve been through. Do we think this is acceptable, for someone to be profiting off of this story when they’re still a suspect? Gavin, let’s start with you.”

Oh yeah, I seem to remember being warned about this topic. I had some loose ideas about American justice and how ridiculous it is to judge a person’s facial expressions in the aftermath of some horrible event. They’ll say, “The suspect didn’t flinch during the trial and
looked at the victim’s parents with a blank stare.” Who cares? It’s a weird situation. Why do you care how they behave? How would you behave? Shit, if I was the bus driver who went off the road and killed all those kids like in that Atom Egoyan movie I’d probably be a catatonic robot during the trial. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be in that situation, so why are you treating him like a kid who chopped down a cherry tree?

That’s what I wanted to say. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in control and what came out of my mouth was, “I don’t know. People talking. Always talking. You know. Who cares? I mean, if I had the bus and killed all the kids I’d be like …” Then I started feigning a seizure on my chair. Bill tapped his card on his knee and quickly moved over to the next question. I resigned to keep my mouth shut until shit cooled down a bit.

During the commercial break one of the clipboard people ran over and crouched next to my chair. “Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said with my eyes bugged out.

He sounded like a guidance counselor and said, “You need to talk more. It doesn’t matter what you say, just talk.” I told him I needed booze. He was thrilled my problem was so easy to solve and ran off to fill my coffee mug with Guinness. I inhaled it and asked for more and he was happy to oblige. By the time we came back, my cocaine buzz was finally under control and I was ready to fuck with this smug little dwarf.

Bill brought up his favorite topic, religion, and everyone had something to say. I sat back and bided my time because I wanted the second thing to come out of my mouth to be perfect. When asked if he believed in God, Robert Conrad jumped out of his chair and held his hands up to the sky. “Praise Jesus,” he said. “Praise the Lord!” He wasn’t kidding. The bishop pointed out that the number of people who identify themselves as Christian has been steadily on the rise and, despite Hollywood’s disdain for it, America is still 75 percent Christian. Lisa Ann tried to get a word in edgewise about her mother but Bill wanted to get to his next question. “Good,” I thought. “I’m ready to redeem myself—through Christ.”

“All right,” Bill said to the group, “we’ve got George Bush saying he follows the words of Jesus and even asks him for advice. Bill Clinton often said the same thing. All of a sudden, presidents are telling us they have a close relationship with Jesus—and even ask him for advice! Is this right? Should a country that promises to separate church and state have presidents that talk to Jesus?” The guests all looked at each other wondering who was going to take this on first. This is where Bill usually chooses someone. “I think what’s really important to note here is that we finally have a GAY JEW in the White House,” I said straight-faced. A stunned silence swept over the show as they all looked at each other. “He’s gay,” I added. “You saw him. Come on. Everybody knows this. It’s a fact,” I said.

After several seconds of awkward silence Bill let out a stupefied “What?” Lisa Ann Walter turned to me and said incredulously, “He wasn’t gay.” The bishop was smiling and shaking his head. “Well he seemed pretty gay to me,” I said. “Long hair and a dress.” Bill Maher finally came up with, “Just because he had long hair doesn’t mean he’s gay. I mean, I used to have long hair.” Nobody knew what to do with this theory so I took the edge off by saying, “All I’m saying is it’s a well-accepted theory,” and Bill then zinged me back with, “So now it’s a theory? A second ago you said it was a fact,” and the crowd cheered. I stood up on my chair and chastised the crowd for cheering. “STOP ENCOURAGING HIM!” I yelled, waving my arms in the air like a lunatic. Audiences seem to like it when you acknowledge them so after this fake temper tantrum they cheered and hollered every time I did something in the hopes I’d make them part of the show again.

The crowd was delirious and Bill Maher was bumming out. When Lisa Ann Walter finally got to mention her mother, I hollered, “She never liked me!” This threw her off a bit so I grabbed her arm and yelled, “I always loved you,” and tried to kiss her. Bill Maher suggested Robert Conrad kick my ass but he didn’t know Conrad was my nigga from backstage and Conrad said, “No. I like this guy.”

Eventually the show was over and we said our good-byes to a screaming audience that sounded like they were getting paid per clap. The clipboard people were patting me on the back and telling me I was
DEFINITELY going to be on the show again, which is basically what the principal in Taiwan said when I was fired.

That night, back at the stunning hotel suite HBO had set us up with, Pinky and I finished off the cocaine, the scotch, and later, the minibar. As I lay on my back drifting out of consciousness I remember Pinky saying, “Remember in Montreal when we’d show up at a party and just evacuate it by doing one of our gay dance routines or just hogging the spotlight until nobody could take it anymore?” I mumbled a response that sounded like “continue” and he said, “I feel like we’re on the verge of doing that with all of television. Let’s get inside television and just fuck with it.” I drifted into the blackness at this point but his last words, “fuck with it,” stuck and I remember thinking, “Yeah.”

Lying to the Press (1999–)

W
hen hiring writers I noticed the least interesting ones were those with journalism degrees. Their incompetence really hit me when the more experienced ones started interviewing us for features in other publications. They had no idea who we were and why they were writing about us, so fucking with them was irresistible.

Quebec’s answer to
The New York Times
is
Le Devoir
and they wanted to interview us because someone else did. That’s how it works in media. One writer has the balls to dig up a new story and the others cling to it like lampreys on a shark. The original story that got us into this print assembly line was based on a prank. The truth was, we changed the name from
Voice of Montreal
to
Vice
so the old owners couldn’t sue us, but that’s boring, so we changed the narrative to “The big, ugly, American corporate newspaper
Village Voice
threatened to shut us down so we had to change the name.” Once this caught on, it was in every newspaper in the country and not one person fact-checked it or even called
The Village Voice.
Canadians love David-and-Goliath stories about American bullying, and they weren’t about to let facts ruin the fun.

The woman from
Le Devoir
showed up late wearing a fur coat and had notebooks and pens flopping all over the place like a drunk aristocrat.
It seemed to me that she didn’t care about her job and was in it for the galas and luncheons, so when she pulled out the same old, “How did you guys meet?” I decided to intercept that football and run with it. I don’t suffer fools gladly, but I will gladly make fools suffer.

“It’s actually a pretty amazing story,” I told her with a shit-eating grin. “Shane and I were best friends from a very young age but as we got older, we noticed some changes. We couldn’t quite place it, but there seemed to be some kind of urge growing within us.” She nodded her head very thoughtfully and jotted down my prevarications. “Anyway,” I added as if it was
An Evening at the Improv,
“we were about eighteen and I was tickling him … just messing around and being crazy. I ended up on top of him and our faces were about an inch from each other when, whoops, we just started kissing.” She was scribbling away like her pen was on fire. “The second our lips touched,” I told her, “a million questions were answered. You know what I mean?” She said she knew exactly what I meant, which I thought was weird because I didn’t. I added another twenty tons of perjury to my name and she devoured every morsel. When the photographer came in an hour later, Shane and I posed locked in an embrace and that’s how the feature ran:
two lovers find their voice in print.
From that point on, almost every interview I did was a stream-of-consciousness, free-association swirling turd ribbon that was mainly a test of the writer’s incompetence.

Pranking the media went from a lark to a lifelong commitment. If the reporters had done their homework and asked us something that wasn’t easily answered with a tiny bit of research (like reading the previous article about us), I’d give them honest answers, but it almost never worked out like that. I told journalists we all met in rehab. I said I was an ex–gang member who had been scared straight by my homie’s death. The less research they were willing to do, the crazier the story I was willing to concoct.