How to Piss in Public (2 page)

Bigger Than Texas (2003)

Don’t Let Your Mom Get Stoned (2003)

That’s What I Get for Teasing Junkies (2003)

Yet Another Asian Threesome (2003)

Funnest Blackout Ever, You Guys! (2003)

Lord of the Botflies (2003)

Partying with Mötley Crüe (2004)

The Story of Vice: Part Three (2001–2008)

Will You Marry Me, Blobs? (2004)

A Dog Named Pancake Saved Our Lives (2005)

The KKK Stag (2005)

Hunting for Injuns (2005)

Underwater Pussy (2006)

I Got Knocked the Fuck Out (2008)

The Death of Cool: Dash Snow (2009)

The Excess of Success (2010)

Turning Forty (2010)

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Photos

HOW TO PISS
IN PUBLIC

Where No Man Has Gone Before (1984)

“M
y girlfriend has no vagina,” said the voice behind me. I was fixing my shitty Mohawk in the reflective windows by the principal’s office and turned around. It was my friend Lawrence McCallister, a big-nosed geek covered in zits who always had some kind of catastrophe on his hands.

“How can she have no vagina?” I asked, continuing to preen.

“I know, I know,” he responded, “but trust me. I’m positive.”

I consoled him with a pat on his shoulder and said, “That sucks, man,” but I was secretly thrilled. I thought I was the only one in school who had felt around down there and got nothing. I was worried it was some kind of
Sword in the Stone
thing where if you don’t feel an opening, it means you’re gay.

I went to the Earl of March High School in a rural Canadian suburb called Kanata. In 1984, I was a punk fourteen-year-old and knew as much about sex as you know about the early eighties Kanata punk scene. This was before the Internet but after
Playboy,
so everything we understood about naked ladies came from
Hustler,
an almost medical
porn mag that always featured women with their slutty high heels up by their slutty ears and their pink pussies splayed wide open. They held their legs up so high and so spread, a generation of young men grew up assuming the vagina was a bazooka-sized hole located right below the belly button.

To make matters worse, girls in the eighties wore jeans so tight, they had to use a bent coat hanger to pull up the zipper. Heavy petting back then involved cramming your hand into a vacuum-sealed denim space and desperately writhing around in search of an opening. You’d force your fingers across some sparse pubes, go right, then left, go farther down than humanly possible, and if you didn’t feel an opening, you’d assume it wasn’t there. It didn’t help that teenage boys are too horny to do anything properly.

Girls didn’t share this libidinous curse but really enjoyed kissing, so we made an unspoken truce that involved lying around in a negligent parent’s basement listening to Led Zeppelin. The boys would oblige the girls with hours and hours of Frenching and the girls would oblige the boys with maybe a third of the underside of one tit.

A few months after hearing of Lawrence’s lost hole and resigning myself to the fact that I might never find one, I found one. I was kissing a half-black girl named Megan Franklyn in Mark Donnelly’s basement listening to “Stairway to Heaven” and I’d been rooting around in her skintight drawers for so long, my wrist felt broken. Out of nowhere, I had a huge surge of frustrated confidence and thought, “Let’s just fucking give ’er and go where no man has gone before.” (The phrase “give ’er” is a Canadian’s way of saying “Git-R-Done.”) I plunged my aching hand so deep into the abyss I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had popped out in China. Then I went even farther. Finally, about half a foot lower than I could have ever imagined, my virgin fingers finally touched beef curtains. “What the what?” I thought. “It’s basically in the asshole.”

After discovering pussy, I dropped acid, started a band, got beat up, ripped my foreskin, went to jail, planted trees, dealt drugs, got tattoos, squatted Europe, got hustled, had some threesomes, farted, watched my friends die, lived in China, played some pranks, started a multimedia global empire, got on TV, gave myself gonorrhea, got beat up again,
invented hipsters, went broke, got rich, got married, got knocked out, and had some kids. If I could go back in time and tell Young Me one thing, it would be the same thing I’d tell all young men.

Sincerely,

Your Pal,

Me

Zapped by Space Guns into a Shit Hole on Acid (1985)

I
would never do acid in New York City—it’s too dirty and claustrophobic—but when you’re stuck way out in Buttfuck, Ontario, it’s your only escape.

First, let me tell you how Buttfuck this place was. Canadian developers back then were busy creating cookie-cutter housing communities in the middle of nowhere. They had slogans such as “Tomorrow’s city … today” and names such as New Granada and Bridlewood. They were far from the city and had no drugs, bars, gangs, sluts, or crime—just trees, houses, and the local school.

My parents were educated but working-class Scots who wanted to get as far away from their shitty past as possible. Like all ex–poor people they wanted a better life for their kids and this seemed like a great opportunity. They tried England but it wasn’t working. Canada was brand-new back then. It had just settled on a flag in 1965 and was yet to choose a national anthem (they chose “O Canada” in 1980). In the 1970s, they were building their lower middle class from scratch and pouring British immigrants into the mold like pancake mix.

In 1975, five years after a breathtakingly gorgeous baby Me was born, the Glaswegians who created me gave up on their new home in England and stuck the whole family in a mass-produced Canadian suburb surrounded by farmers’ fields. Kanata is a half hour from Canada’s tiny capital, Ottawa, and had houses that were so prefab and generic, I would often get lost trying to figure out which one was mine.

On my first day of school, I was asked to say a few words and after using my posh English accent to say, “Well, hellowe, I simply cannot tell you how chuffed I am to be here in Canad-er and have brought along my park-er for the occasion,” I got the shit pounded out of me so badly, I was saying, “Maggie Longclaws is pregnant, eh?” like Bob and Doug McKenzie within the week. This began my life role as a misfit always adapting to uncomfortable situations. Whether it’s an Englishman in Ontario, an English speaker in French Canada, a Canadian in New York, or the only dad at the family resort covered in tattoos, I’ve always been most comfortable when I’m out of place.

Can you blame them for kicking my ass? (1975)

It was fun, though. Rural seclusion is great when you’re a little kid. We shot at each other with BB guns, chased cows, and would make jumps for our bikes that were so intense, anyone who landed wrong was guaranteed a broken wrist. This was in the pre-safety days when not only did we not wear helmets, we didn’t even wear shoes, and if your bike didn’t have brakes, you’d have to stop the front tire with your bare foot. We swung off tire ropes into swimming holes in the summer and had snowball fights in the winter, but when the testosterone kicks in, so does the need for more. The seclusion goes from “groovy times” to a pressure cooker that makes you want to start a nuclear war. So, the day our teenage years began, we took our cold, bleak, lame environment and magically converted it into Funtown by using drugs. We also started a club that we pretended was a gang.

Steve (hat), Dogboy (curly hair), and me in a photo booth where we’d try to not laugh for as long as possible. (1986)

Half the students at my high school were the children of British expats, and the other half were Canadian farmers’ kids. Our crew consisted of about a dozen ornery misfits from both sides. We called ourselves the Monks because we were loosely divided into mods (a now-esoteric subculture that was like punk but based more on neatly dressed, working-class 1960s British soul fans) and punks, though there were quite a few hosers (Canadian rednecks). Our crew ran the gamut. There was a huge basketball player with a harelip named Marty, a male-model-looking kid we thought was ugly so we called him Dogboy, and the Fonzarelli of the group, Steve Durand. Lawrence McCallister was a mod and so was his buddy John. We called John Pukey Stallion because he always threw up at parties and never got laid. We weren’t part of the school’s social hierarchy and had carved our own niche as the weird kids.

Being fucking idiots was very important to us. If anyone farted or burped without saying “safety” before someone else called “slut,” everyone in the gang got to beat the poo-stuffings out of him until he could name five breakfast cereals. Unfortunately, guys started memorizing cereal lists, so we were forced to switch it to chocolate bars to keep things interesting. This was the early stages of a career devoted to troublemaking. Our motto was, “It ain’t shit ’til it hits the fan” but the bully from
The Simpsons
later said it much better when he asked Bart, “If no one gets mad, are you really being bad?”

Drugs enhanced this lifestyle, especially acid. We’d drop a tab around eight o’clock at night and go walk around a boring landscape that had blissfully transformed into a place worth visiting. I acquired X-ray vision to see through houses and observe how people lived when they didn’t know they were being watched. We stole hovercrafts and walked through trees. One time, Pukey’s head was a chicken.

My favorite LSD trip happened when I was fifteen. It was me, Steve, Dogboy, and Marty. We met after dinner behind our high school, and Steve pulled a sheet of about ten tabs from his wallet. As we each put one of the tiny square papers on our tongues, Dogboy said to Steve, “Let me see your driver’s license.” Steve pulled it out and Dogboy fell to the ground laughing. Steve always went cross-eyed in
his ID pictures and eventually we made it a tradition—even for the yearbook. Soon we were all sharing our driver’s licenses and laughing at them, but I noticed something strange about Marty when he saw his. He looked disturbed. Marty’s harelip was obvious, but we’d known him for so long we couldn’t see it. Now I was seeing it. It was more than a single harelip; it was a full, lustrous, head-of-harelip. “That’s kind of a bad trip,” Marty said after quietly looking at the picture on his license. Then he put it back in his wallet and decided to move on.

We wandered over to a big hill by the football field where we used to punch each other in the nuts and we lay down to stare up at the night sky. It was a beautiful spring night, and the moon was so bright, we could see all the clouds perfectly. I realized I was tripping balls. “Holy shit,” I said to Marty as Steve and Dogboy continued to laugh at their licenses. “Do you see octagons?” The entire sky was made up of eight-sided geometry-defying shapes all turning in the same direction like cogs. It was a mosaic honeycomb of shapes that seamlessly rotated in unison, and I wanted to know if it was just me.

“Yes!” Marty said. “I see it, too.”

Now I was really confused. “Whoa,” I said. “Now, that is a fucking trip and a half. I get how I can be hallucinating something, but how can
you
be seeing the same thing? That’s like us having the same dream.”

Then he asked, “You know those weird desk toys where there’s a plastic board made up of steel pins, like a bed of nails kind of but they move?”

“Er, kind of?” I replied.

“You push your hand on one side,” he explained further, “and then your hand imprint is on the other side.”

I finally got what he was talking about. “I think it’s called Pin Art,” I said.