How to Piss in Public (21 page)

We ran up to my building’s roof to get a better look. My apartment was above Max Fish, which is only about a mile from Ground Zero, and when we got to the roof we were gobsmacked by the carnage. “It’s just a really big fire,” I conjectured, and before Pinky could chime in we noticed another plane flying way too low. It silently disappeared into the other tower and a huge explosion engulfed the hole. “Holy shit!” we both yelled. Blobs was trying to call her mother and our roof was filling up with other tenants. No one knew what was going on. They were all walking around like catatonic zombies.

Blobs trying to get through to her mom. (2001)

After about twenty minutes of watching the towers pour smoke into the sky like a broken underwater oil pipe, we ran downstairs to watch the news. The anchors were all guessing at this point, but the consensus seemed to be it was an attack. Pinky’s brown face was ghost-white. He looked at me and asked if I thought his mom was alive. It was a rhetorical question, but I played along. “I’m sure she’s fine, dude,” I lied. “It’s just one or two floors in each building.”

It had been just over half an hour since Blobs woke us up and as we were starting to get a grip on what was happening, a plane smashed into the fucking Pentagon. Then they cut back to the WTC and we saw people holding hands and jumping to their deaths.

Construction was going on in the apartment next door and we couldn’t hear the TV. We ran back up to the roof, which was now filled with everyone in the building. People traded what few facts they had and as I spoke to my upstairs neighbor I heard a shout. I looked at the horizon and watched the first tower collapse. Pinky sat on the ground. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him his mother had plenty of time to get out. I was bluffing.

We ran downstairs and heard talk of a fourth plane. We also heard talk of the air force having to take it down. Then it crashed into a field. The construction was still going on next door, so I ran over and pounded on their door in a rage. A perplexed-looking man with a Polish accent answered and said, “Yes?”

“Do you fucking idiots know what is going on!?” I screamed.

“Yes,” he said, motioning for me to calm down while pointing to the radio he and the other workers were listening to. “Two buildings go boom.” He was making a collapsing gesture with his hands and I yelled, “QUIET!” before running back to my apartment. When I got inside, I saw he was right. It was buildings, plural. When was this going to end?

By eleven
A.M.
the terrorist attack was complete. They spent a few hundred grand separating the world into two groups and we would spend trillions trying to put it back together. We were in the center of our generation’s Pearl Harbor and didn’t know what to do. So we went to a bar.

The streets were deserted but for the occasional tank crawling down
Houston Street. Max Fish was closed so we made our way up Avenue A, where the bars were already packed and everyone was glued to the TV. The elephant in the room was Pinky’s dead mother so I kept talking and talking, hoping he wouldn’t stop to think about the odds.

“I know people are going to say we deserved this,” I said, “but that’s implying these guys are rational. They’re madmen. They’re kamikazes. What do they know about fair?” Pinky wasn’t interested, and we walked to a bar called Doc Holliday’s on Ninth Street and Avenue A.

A lot of Blobs’s friends were already there and more friends started to come in and sit with us. We watched the news with one eye and shared theories. Soon Pinky’s situation came up in the conversation and quickly made its way around the bar. People put their hands on his back to console him and I continued pretending everything was dandy.

The whole thing was very scary and sad, but the way all these strangers came together was something else. I’ve always said that people are inherently good. They may be selfish and lazy at times but when they need each other, they cooperate. Pinky kept checking his phone and making sure it was working. Reception was bad and few people could make calls, but anyone who got a few bars on their phone would hand it over to him so he could call. He was also calling his brother up in Toronto every thirty minutes from a pay phone. His brother had no news.

It was now well into the afternoon and things were looking grim. Lots of people had heard from their relatives by now and Pinky was still coming up empty. It was becoming impossible to pretend everything was okay. We could have made a “missing” poster for her but we weren’t quite that naïve. It was over. She was dead. Then, out of nowhere, he got a call. It was his brother. He had heard from his mother and she was fine.

The whole bar cheered, and everyone at our table was crying and hugging him. He was in tears, too, and after thanking everybody and hugging us back, he ran out of the bar to go be with her.

We found out later she had escaped death by minutes. She got to work in Tower One early that day and was furious to discover her secretary hadn’t done the photocopies needed for a big presentation. She
was going to have to go all the way to another building to get everything ready. She left her purse on her desk and went down with a file folder full of important documents. The first plane hit as she was doing her photocopies. Her purse, along with her desk, along with people she had worked with for almost ten years, were all obliterated. Then she watched through the window as the second plane hit. She walked outside and was covered in dust. Then she walked like a gray ghost down through the Holland Tunnel and up into Jersey, where she eventually got it together enough to call her sons.

While this was going on my friend Sprague, a photographer who did fashion shoots for Vice, was in the thick of it. Just before the towers collapsed, a firefighter grabbed him and told him to help clean up. He was happy to oblige until he started hearing these incredibly loud
pop
s and realized they were bodies exploding as they hit the ground. “Cleaning up” meant picking up body parts and throwing them on palettes that were then lifted away. He did this for twenty-four hours and has not been the same since. Every time I think about Sprague I think of what many call a “religion of peace” where a good 25 percent think suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified. Twenty-five percent of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world is 375 million. Holy shit.

After Doc Holliday’s, Blobs and I headed over to visit a guy we sarcastically called the Wolf because he always managed to pull an “Irish good-bye” by sneaking out of parties without telling anyone at the end of the night. As a game, we’d try to keep an eye on him all night but no matter how hard we tried,
poof.
He’d be gone. The Wolf was at his apartment with his girlfriend Marcie and like most of the world, they were watching the news. The Wolf was a heavily tattooed gigantic guy who had the same life history as me. Our bands were even in the same issue of the punk zine
Maximumrocknroll
back in 1990. In 2001, he was managing bands and he worked out of our office because we were all drinking buddies. He had seen the whole thing from his roof on Avenue B and was still reeling after seeing Puerto Rican teenagers across the street cheering and yelling, “Yeah, nigga!
Bomb
that shit!” That part still makes me mad.

As we sat in the Wolf’s apartment in a state of shock, I broke the
silence by suggesting we buy a huge pile of cocaine. The Wolf was disgusted at first but came to love the idea more than I did. “Think of all the times we sat here doing lines all night and talking about stupid shit like how owls are cool,” he said to me, Blobs, and Marcie. “Well, now we finally have something to talk about!” He was right. We really had spent hours previously discussing how cool owls are. We spent the next nine hours inhaling mountains of blow, watching the news, and talking our jaws off.

The next day, the city was completely shut down. You needed a copy of your utility bill to get past the barricades to your home and the only places open were bars. Blobs was asleep but I was too jacked up to join her, so I stuffed my pockets full of mail and ID and went on a bike ride by myself. It was about nine
A.M.
on September 12 and I rode south down an empty Ludlow Street and toward the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn. The enclosed bike path above the bridge was closed and so was the main part cars go on, but I dragged my bike under a barrier and rode across the “cars only” part to Brooklyn. It feels weird to be on that bridge with no protective cage around you. At any moment I could have turned a sharp left and disappeared into the East River forever. A strong wind could have resulted in the same. I made my way past the hump and coasted toward Brooklyn. A plastic bag blew past me in a loop and then disappeared over the edge.

I turned around, went back home, and crawled into bed with Blobs.

A Faggot Kicked My Ass (2002)

I
t’s fun to joke with your coworkers, even when you’re the boss. I regularly streaked through the office, challenged employees to push-up competitions, and told people they would be fired if they didn’t dress up for Halloween. Instead of Casual Fridays we had Drunk Fridays. But as with a pack of wild dogs, you can’t be too vulnerable around employees or they will turn on you. It’s OK to joke around but you need to temper it with some retribution or you turn into a Ricky Gervais character. Sometimes I’d be too hard on people and hear petrified whispers of “Nazi boss” and sometimes it would go the other way and I’d be told to go fuck myself after asking for a bite of someone’s sandwich. I had to keep a balance. For example, in the case of the sandwich outburst, I called the guy “Last Bite” for the rest of his life. That may sound unreasonable, but ask any gang member. Today’s bitch is tomorrow’s dead man. I learned that while tree planting.

Ryan McGinley was a photographer whom Vice editor TJ and I had discovered about a year previous, but Ryan had conveniently forgotten this fact and was getting so big for his britches, they were starting to look like biker shorts. When I first met him, he was a little gay kid in photography school desperate to get noticed. When I asked for his
e-mail contact he wrote [email protected] because he didn’t have an e-mail address but didn’t want to look unprofessional. I’d go over to his tiny apartment and root through boxes trying to find images for the magazine. It’s what cheap people do when they don’t want to pay real photographers, and the kids love it because they get exposure. Besides, you get better pictures from amateurs. They’re more honest and daring and there’s no ego involved. It’s “This is my friend Mark jumping into garbage” instead of “This is an old black man’s hands as he plays the blues” or “This is a model on the toilet” (I must have seen those last two dozens of times). Unfortunately, once you turn a bitch out, she gets hungry for more and within a few years, Ryan had gone from photo intern to photo editor to darling of
The New York Times.
He used to be honored to be in my magazine and now he was blowing off my phone calls? It was time for a talk.

I was still dating Blobs and planned to meet her at a party called Smiths Night in Tribeca but told her to come late as I was going to meet Ryan across the street first. We met at a crappy Irish bar and as soon as he walked in the door, I explained to him what loyalty is and how he’d be nowhere without me. He said I was just jealous of his newfound fame and it wasn’t Vice that got his career going, it was his photo zines (handmade booklets he put together with his best photos, which he passed out to magazine editors and industry types). The truth is, we were both a little bit right but the real thing that made Ryan is what makes everyone: He worked his ass off. Everyone gets their fifteen minutes, but the secret to success is to bust your ass during that blip and establish yourself as someone worth everybody’s time. When Ryan felt the first fish nibble, he yanked the line as hard as he could and didn’t stop reeling until the entire commercial, editorial, and high-end art worlds were in his boat. When
The New York Times
asked Ryan to shoot Olympic swimmers, he rented all kinds of underwater cameras and strange lenses, staying at the pool for days on end. He shot hundreds of pictures and the dozen or so he kept are still some of his best work. He was invited back and soon had his own show at the Whitney Biennial. The pictures we used from his early days were what they call “documentary photography” and featured New York kids snorting
coke, getting laid, and puking their guts out. He even did a series of puking self-portraits that I can’t look at without dry-heaving. Almost half of his pictures were of his best friend, an orphan of sorts named Dash Snow whom we declared our unofficial mascot. Ten years later
New York
magazine put Ryan and Dash and their friends on its cover under the title “Warhol’s Children.” Eventually, however, that whole crew imploded when their hijinks landed two in jail. They stole a picture from a gallery and ran out laughing. “It was a spur-of-the-moment act, a juvenile prank, but one that had far-reaching consequences,” as
The New York Times
put it in a huge article they did on the incident entitled “Unmerry Prankster.”