How to Piss in Public (33 page)

After completely overhauling every shelf in the kitchen and the entire fridge, he commanded me to stop watching movies with my mother downstairs and come upstairs for a discussion. “Look at this,” he said incredulously, pointing to three large piles he had made on the counter. “You’ve got a huge bloody pile of these fucking corn chips,” he said, “then there’s this endless pile of cheese,” he grumbled while pointing to two normal-sized things of cheese, “and this,” he said accusingly while holding two jars of salsa. “What is salzzzza?” I told him it’s a Mexican sauce and he shushed me, saying, “If only they’d invent a dish that combined cheese, corn chips, and salzzzza.” I tried to tell him there is and it’s called “nachos” and he acted like I was telling him pigs have blond hair, which they do.

I decided to prove my point and prepared a plate of nachos on an oven dish. As I laid the corn chips down and covered them with salsa and grated cheese, my dad started freaking as if I were burning $100 bills. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shrieked. “STOP!” he added, almost crying. I tried to convince him I was preparing a snack that exists and is often consumed, but he didn’t believe me. As far as he was concerned I was pouring ice cream on spaghetti and covering it with mayonnaise to spite him. “STOP!” he yowled again like Grounds–keeper Willie in drag. I kept going because I don’t give a shit about his made-up world, and he reached his breaking point.

“That’s it!” he yelled while running to the guest room next to the kitchen and taking off his clothes. “I’m going to bed!” Europeans sleep in the nude so I had to watch his weird little ass bunny-hop under the covers as he tore into bedtime with a vengeance.

“You’re not seriously going to bed because I made my own nachos with my own groceries, are you?” I asked while noticing old men’s asses look like shaved vaginas.

“I HATE EXCESS!” my dad screamed as he threw the covers over his head.

I rolled my eyes and brought the cooked nachos downstairs, where my mother and I were watching an action movie about murder. “Mmm,” she said, consuming two handfuls at a time, “these are delicious.”

The next day I discovered the hater-of-excess had devoured the $60 bottle of wine my wife was saving for a girls’ night with her friends. She was mad, but the thought of a cheap-ass Scotsman pissed
about
excess while piss-drunk
on
excess gives me a smile I will take to my grave.

Turning Forty (2010)

I
threw my fortieth-birthday party at my place upstate. The theme was the Great
Gavsby
and I invited everyone from Steve and Dogboy to a bunch of new dad friends who lived nearby. Everyone dressed like they were rich people from the 1920s, as was the rule.

The party went well and we drank and played badminton, but my wife is the greatest wife in the world so after she hoodwinked me into going to David Cross’s next door to check on something, I returned to see she had booked the hardcore band Cerebral Ballzy to play in our backyard.

All the dads started moshing, so like any other forty-year-old man, I took off all my clothes and jumped in. Then we did keg-stands as the band played classics like “Puke Song” and “Shitrag.”

At the end of the night, we all sat around a bonfire and one of the kids in the band asked me what it’s like to be forty. I said, “Well, mirrors make you look old,” and he laughed so I added, “I used to sing for Anal Chinook and Leathersassbuttfuk. Now I yell stuff like, ‘The next person who says something is ‘stupid’ or calls it ‘poo-poo’ is getting a time-out!’” and he laughed a little less. Then I told him how pretty girls say, “Oh, excuse me, sir,” when they bump into me and if
I ever get caught ogling them, they shoot back a sharp, cold look that says, “You’re kidding, right?” He said he got it and tried to change the subject, but I was on a roll. “I may be an old fart,” I told him, “but farts feel good and they only stink for a minute. The best part of turning forty is you can finally stop pretending to like Radiohead.” I had a good ten more in me …

In my late twenties, I asked a cab driver what it was like to be forty because that’s what he was and I was getting annoyed with his talking to his friend on the phone for so long. (Why do they do that, by the way? What are they, thirteen-year-old girls?) “It’s real mellow, buddy,” he responded in his East Indian accent. “You don’t vorry so much.”

As an angry young man, I had a lot of trouble understanding how you could not give a shit what people think. “What if someone came up to your window right now and called you an asshole?” I asked.

“I vould say, ‘Oh my,’” he said, “then vind up the vindow and drive off.” Before I could question his manhood, he added, “Now, if it vas ten or twenty years ago I vould get out of this cab and say, ‘Vat did you say, moderfucker?’ and stuff like these—but now, nothing. It’s not vorth it.”

I finally get what he was talking about. I’m precious cargo. I can’t be endangering my kids’ father because some irrelevant psycho is in a bad mood. Sticks and stones still break your bones when you’re forty but unless it’s a peer giving constructive criticism, you honestly don’t give a hamster’s testicle what people think.

You also become a lot less critical of other people’s work when you’ve actually done some of your own.
Friends
was on for ten years. I never got a show on the air so who am I to criticize? Cox does not suck. OAR makes music that sounds queer to me but they sell eighty thousand tickets a night and I can’t even play the guitar. Good for them. Not to get all Baz Luhrmann commencement speech on your ass, but the more you accomplish, the less you trivialize others’ accomplishments. Besides, reveling in others’ failures is for losers.

As I think Dostoyevsky once said, “No matter how you shake your peg, the last wee drop runs down your leg.” You could swing that thing around with the force of NASA’s Human Training Centrifuge, but—
bloop
—a yellow drop still squirts out the second you place it back in your underwear.

I’ve even tried faking it out and pretending I’m done shaking to see what happens, but he waits until he’s positive there’s cotton around his lips and then spitefully spits out a drop. There’s a generation gap between you and your dink at this age and he will do everything in his power to fuck up your shit.

I have run into women who I used to defile in my single days but when I talk to them now, I sound like the narrator from
The Wonder Years
holding in a fart. After you’re married, women become human beings for the first time ever and it’s like meeting another species. “Um, hello, do you like music?” You can try flirting but with nothing to back it up, you come across like a pugilist in a wheelchair.

This is the nature of marriage. In 1978, classmate Lee Gratton told me, “When you get married you get to see your wife’s tits whenever you want.” He was right, only it’s your best friend’s tits. You don’t have any game when you’re married because you’re in a new universe of love, and anything else feels like a preschool reunion.

In your twenties, you have to force yourself to read the paper. In your thirties, it finally gets interesting and each article reads like your favorite book. By your forties, you’re actually smarter and more experienced than most of the journalists and you catch yourself crumpling
the sides going, “They’re blaming the coast guard for what the pirates did? Are these journalists stupid or just trying to make their fathers angry?”

Bill Hicks had a bit where he said, “What is it about men where they wake up one day caring about their lawn?” Then he talks about dads walking around in bathrobes with their balls hanging out and yelling, “Who wants sausages? I’m makin’ sausages for breakfast!” These routines have gone from comedic banter to a documentary about my life. I care so much about my lawn, I wish it had a birthday so I could buy it presents. I even have nightmares about its bald spots. Scotts EZ Seed is way better for patches than that stupid pulp shit they sell but if you’re in an area with a lot of pines, you’re going to have to lime the shit out of it before any seeding solutions—and do it in the fall so it gets soaked in six months later when the snow melts … Hey, where’d everybody go?

What young men consider a noisy nuisance is a giant bowl of eye candy to a forty-year-old. “Oh, they’re using those planks made out of recycled bags,” you think as you peer through the fence at the new community center. “Those are way too slippery for a deck.” You’ll also catch yourself worrying about foundations and insulation and even asking carpenters what brand of thread lock they use.

Twenty-five years ago, if you told me I’d get chills from hearing Willie Nelson and Toby Keith sing about feeding alcoholic beverages to
a horse, I’d ask you why a time traveler was going to punk shows and talking to kids.

What used to sound like hillbillies yawning over unplugged guitars now sounds like a soothing pile of heartfelt stories I could listen to all night. I still like Southern rap and anarcho-punk, but it’s now tempered with heaping portions of Merle Haggard.

Fuck foxholes. Try finding an atheist in an old man’s hangover. I have kneeled there with my head in the toilet for hours explaining to Jesus why I’ve never been to church and swearing to his dad I will start this Sunday. Cross my heart and hope to die, Lord, because that would be an improvement over this funeral march of head-pounding dry heaves.

When you wake up at forty with a hangover, your head feels like an inside-out Medusa. Then nausea grips your whole body like a barf snowsuit and your skin feels like a doctor accidentally gave chemotherapy to a baby on a hunger strike. This lasts, without respite, until you go to bed, and it even lingers until the following morning. I would love to party as hard as I used to, but Pavlov won’t allow it, so that’s it. I didn’t quit drugs; drugs quit me.

As the Wolf recently put it, “I went out with a girl who had droopy tits when I was twenty and I wasn’t into it, but I sure wouldn’t mind fucking with them right now!”

For young men, it can be shocking to see how gigantic a woman’s ass gets in her forties, but when you reach this age you’re like, “More dessert, please.” Queefs, butt hairs, blemishes, and even a faint whiff of poo are all more grist for the fuck mill, and you finally understand why Napoleon forbade Josephine from showering the week before he got
home. The previous version of you looks like a vagina-phobic metrosexual by comparison. While this is happening, scantily clad twenty-somethings go from sluts you catcall to young ladies who had better get a coat on or they are going to catch their death of cold.

Well, it’s not “over” per se. It’s just drastically different. With all due respect to doing coke in the basement of Lit with Paul Sevigny all night, that’s no longer my idea of a good time. I mean, it was real, it was fun, but it wasn’t real fun, and although I wouldn’t trade those days for the world, I just traded them for a whole new world.

Today, two-thirds of my roommates came out of my soul mate’s genitals and that means I feel a much stronger bond with them than with someone who has similar tattoos and the same taste in music. I still get high but it goes like this: Getting a drawing from my daughter feels like doing a bump. Hearing my son say, “Take dat, Beezo,” after punching his Bozo Bop Bag makes me laugh like I just smoked a bowl. Having a baby fall asleep on your chest feels like heroin. Seeing a little kid fly his first kite is as exciting as amphetamines, and taking all evening to build a Lego robot feels better than a Maker’s on the rocks next to a perfectly poured Guinness.

I’m not saying you should skip the party stage. Just don’t live there for the rest of your life. Take it as close to the edge as you can without jumping, then turn away and go for a walk through the flowers, because it’s all just a lark. What really matters in the long run and what your true legacy will be is the wisdom you pass on to your kids. As brilliant old guy Horace Greeley once said, “Fame is fleeting; popularity an accident; riches take wings. Only one thing endures: character.”

I’m going to pour some beer out for all my dead homies right now, but not too much, because this particular beer is delicious and I’m saving it for a toast to my dad homies. A
toast
! To the future! To life after the death of cool!

Toasting the future with Cerebral Ballzy at my fortieth. (2010)

Afterword

S
o that’s it. That’s my life. The party years at least. I didn’t put the dead stuff in here because I don’t really want my children in a book with a dozen dead junkies. I don’t have any regrets. Booze was there for all the bad decisions I ever made, but it was there for the good ones too (not so much with the mediocre ones). All these choices were crucial parts of my development, but I’m not one of these existentialist types who think you can alter your destiny. Shit, Crass’s Penny Rimbaud recently told me we have the power to physically change our own DNA. Hogwash. You are who you are from the day you are born. Look at identical twins separated at birth. They find each other twenty years later, and they have the same dog, same car, similar-looking husbands, similar jobs, and about the same annual income.