by Seth Rogen
Me: Why haven’t we gone to more tournaments?
Shawn: Oh, we’re banned.
Me: Oh, cool. Why?
Shawn: Some stupid bullshit.
Me: Cool. Anything I should know about this? Any special rules or anything?
Shawn: Nope. Just win.
My first event was a sparring competition where I was facing off against a much bigger, older, and meaner-looking dude. I could tell just from how he bowed that his technique was much better than mine. He had crisp and explosive movement. The ref yelled for us to start, and the guy extended his arms and advanced on me, at which point I did a little trick I had where I smacked my opponent’s arms out of the way with one hand and punched him in the throat as hard as I could with my other, which worked exactly as well as you’d think.
The guy dropped to the ground, gasping like he was drowning. I raised my arms in victory—only to find the ref and judges looking at me with genuine rage.
Judge: TURN YOUR BACK AND KNEEL!!!
I was being publicly shamed as they checked on the other kid, who caught his breath after a few seconds.
I got disqualified from the competition and went back to Shawn, expecting to be yelled at.
Me: I lost!
Shawn motioned to the other kid, being tended to by his sensei. He smiled. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”
* * *
I was about to start high school, and, again I’ll say, I was scared shitless. I had gone to a Jewish elementary school, which was pretty sheltered and not at all diverse, in that it was all Jewish kids. I would be going to public high school at Point Grey Secondary, which was across town and was going to be VERY different. About three thousand kids attended, and it was incredibly diverse, about 60 percent of the kids being from Asian countries.
In Vancouver, there’s no middle school, so grades eight through twelve are all together, and that feels fucking insane if you’re on the “eight” end of that spectrum. It was like going to school with full-grown adults. There were kids with beards. Like full fucking beards. There was a pregnant girl, which was sooooooo far outside what I was expecting. It’s like if a Minotaur went to school with us. I was shocked.
There were fights, stabbings, beatings, which seems odd for a high school in a lovely part of Vancouver’s west side called Kerrisdale, but it happened. A few weeks into school, a kid was making a pipe bomb in shop class and blew his hand off. All to say, compared to Jewish elementary school, it felt like a lawless free-for-all.
To add to the rough transition, like I said before, we’d always worn uniforms in grade school—blue pants and white shirts, making us all look like little abstract versions of the Israeli flag. I’m not sure making young Jews so easily identifiable is ever a great idea, but that’s what we wore. And because of the Jewish uniforms, or “Jew-niforms,” I never really had to think about how I dressed “casually,” and the few times I had were kind of disastrous.
When I was around eight, I was obsessed with Weird Al Yankovic and made my mom get me the leather jacket that he’s wearing on the cover of Even Worse, which is by default also the jacket Michael Jackson is wearing on Bad. But for the purposes of this story, let’s say I idolized Weird Al and not Michael Jackson. (Who would have thought the guy named “Weird Al” would ultimately become the less controversial figure.) I remember walking into school, black leather jacket over my blue-and-white uniform, chrome zippers and buttons shining under the fluorescent lights, everyone looking at me like I was the biggest fucking idiot in the world.
I skateboarded, so I thought, In high school, I’ll dress like a skater. Also, I was really into Nirvana, Green Day, Soundgarden, Marilyn Manson, Korn, and White Zombie, and I’d go downtown to buy band T-shirts every chance I could. I dyed my Jew-fro bright green, which kind of faded and turned a pukey yellow color, so I basically made my big entrance into Point Grey looking like a giant fucking clown.
High school meant freedom. We could essentially leave campus whenever we wanted. There was no real security at all and various kids had free periods throughout the day, so the result was a constant flow of students in and out of the school, which made it easy to skip class and explore Kerrisdale. It was like our Middle-earth, a mystical and dangerous world.
The 7-Eleven was the main hub of social life. To get there, you had to cross the railroad tracks, which had only a few entrance points because of the thick blackberry bushes that ran alongside them. On that side of the boulevard, there was Paul’s Boutique, the skate shop, and two video stores, a Blockbuster and Rogers, which was a Canadian chain. Then there was Subway, where a girl was rumored to have blown six guys in the bathroom. Right up from Subway on a side street was a Chinese convenience store where they’d sell cigarettes to kids of any age. You’d cross back over the train tracks to get to McDonald’s. Then, heading back to the school, you’d pass an ice rink, which connected to the back of the school.
My main priority was not getting killed, followed by making friends and having fun.
I asked my karate teacher what the best way to deal with high school fights was.
Shawn: Don’t get in any! There’s almost never a fight you can’t avoid if you’re smart. But if you do find yourself in a confrontation, just knee ’em in the balls, then smash your forehead into their nose as hard as you can.
The two places violence would mostly break out were behind 7-Eleven and at house parties, which you’d think would mean I’d just avoid those things, but I did not. In fact, they were probably the two destinations I was aiming for the most—behind 7-Eleven because I could smoke weed there, and house parties because I could get drunk there.
After school, everyone would go to the 7-Eleven and hang out on the loading dock behind it. It’s where everything happened—fights, drug deals, kisses, thefts, treaties. It was an intimidating and exhilarating place to be. I didn’t even have the nerve to go there for the first few weeks of high school. And the first time I did go, someone stole my hat. It was like the scary bar in Western movies—no matter how terrifying it was, people still always hung out there. I used to watch Westerns and be like, “Why are people at this bar?! You know there’s gonna be a shoot-out. Go hang out somewhere else!”
But, like the bars in those movies, there was no other option, so you HAD to hang out there. Those cowboys just wanted to see their other cowboy friends and maybe get one of those drinks that made the bar sizzle when the cup overflowed. Sure, they knew there was a chance they’d get shot and fall off a balcony onto a table, but it was worth it. That’s how it was behind 7-Eleven. You wanted to smoke a bowl before lunch and prayed you didn’t get hit by some errant fist as you did.
We would also shoplift, a lot, which might be an inherited trait. Once I faked a seizure on the floor, distracting the staff, allowing around seventy kids to fill their pockets with everything they could grab before the manager realized I was fucking with him. That got me banned for a week, which, in retrospect, was a pretty light punishment.
I don’t drink now, but from when I was around thirteen to twenty-three, I’d drink as often as I could without derailing my life in a meaningful way. And even though parties were dangerous, they were the best place to actually ingest your alcohol with shelter from the elements.
It wasn’t that hard to get alcohol, but we had to get creative.
We’d get a “Boot,” which is when you ask someone outside the liquor store to buy it for you, or we’d ask an older sibling or cousin or something, which worked fairly reliably.
You could raid your parents’ liquor cabinet and make a “shit-mix” of little bits of booze from each bottle, which works when you’re younger, but once you’re drinking significant amounts, it doesn’t really do the trick. Or, you could steal a whole bottle, but that’s dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight, which IS a quote from Tim Burton’s Batman.
There
was a liquor delivery service, “Dial-a-Bottle,” but you needed a house without parents to receive the goods, which wasn’t always available, and you didn’t want to order to the party itself, because they’d take hours sometimes.
At some point, we noticed that a lot of bars stored kegs of beer on the loading dock in the back, so one day we hatched a plan to steal one. We grabbed it, rolling it away under the cover of night. Then we realized we didn’t have a pump, so we used a hammer and screwdriver to knock the little pressure ball out of the top. We couldn’t keep the keg in any of our homes, because it was just too big to hide, so we poured the beer into as many containers as we could find—Tupperware, old yogurt containers, detergent bottles, two-liter soda bottles, empty jars, shit like that—and we kept the beer, unrefrigerated, in our bedrooms as we drank it over the next few weeks.
We loved to play Edward Fortyhands, wherein everyone at the party had to duct-tape forty-ounce bottles of beer to each hand and not remove them until they were empty. We’d do the Century, where everyone took one shot of beer a minute for one hundred minutes in a row, which equals about eight beers in an hour and forty minutes. Either way, there were too many fucked-up kids in one place, and shit got real crazy quite regularly.
At one party, some kids stole the entire washer and dryer from a house. They had a dolly and everything, so it seemed weirdly premeditated. I have no idea why they did it or what they ended up doing with them, but I sure as hell wasn’t gonna stop them. They couldn’t have needed the appliances for themselves—they were high school kids. Even if their parents needed a new washer and dryer, it’s hard to imagine they’d be psyched if a set showed up late one night after their son returned from a house party.
Cocaine wasn’t a very big part of our scene, but at one party over winter break, we got a bunch. I had never done it before, and I didn’t love it, thank god. Things got super out of control, as they tend to when a bunch of people are coked up, and the cops came.
I was standing on the front porch, watching in horror as one of the officers walked up to the door.
Cop 1: What’s going on in there? Mind if we look around before we send you home?
I glanced back over my shoulder to see the kids inside starting to clean up the cokey mess, but it didn’t seem like it would happen in time.
The cop was walking into the party when suddenly his partner called out from the street.
Cop 2: Hey! You’re not gonna believe this—we’re fucking stuck!
The other cop stopped, and we all looked toward the street, where their cruiser was, in fact, stuck in the snow in front of the house. The cop in the car was jamming the gas, spinning the wheels, not moving an inch.
Cop 1: Fuck.
Cop 2: Do we call it in?
Cop 1: No! Absolutely not! We’ll never fucking hear the end of this!
The cop looked at me and some other kids standing by the front door, then back at the car.
Cop 1: I’ll tell you what, kids. You help us push our cruiser out of the snow, we won’t break up your party. We’ll just leave.
I looked at the kids around me.
Me: Fucking DEAL!!!!
Our young bodies fueled by cocaine, we pushed the cruiser out of the snow and watched as it drove off, which is a very Canadian way for that story to have ended. Also, I’ll add that cocaine is a fucked-up drug and I don’t recommend that people get into it. On top of being terrible for you, it makes you not fun to hang out with for anyone who is not also on cocaine. I’ve been to so many bachelor parties where the shroom people are constantly coming up with ways to herd all the cocaine people into one little area so they can just bother each other with their dark rants instead of the rest of us.
But as far as giant shitshows involving young people getting super-duper fucked up, there was no bigger party than Arts County Fair. It was a fundraiser put on by undergrads at the University of British Columbia and was THE biggest student-run event in Canada. It was essentially a giant beer garden in an outdoor field hockey stadium. Although you were supposed to be nineteen or older to attend, it was VERY quickly discovered that the hand stamps they used at the entrance were really easily transferable from one hand to another if you wet them a little bit. And since the only people manning the door were the undergrads themselves, it was basically a complete free-for-all. Pretty much every kid from every high school would skip class and go to Arts County Fair, press their hand against someone’s to transfer a stamp, and get shitfaced all day. And we couldn’t be more psyched for our first year, 1997.
Me, Evan, and Fogell went early in the morning, skipping our first class and taking the bus to UBC. We licked our hands and pressed them against the hands of the first of-age kids we saw, and that was it, the floodgates were open. We were in a giant beer garden. And we fucking went for it. Beer after beer after beer after beer. If you could physically make it up to the counter and show your stamped hand, they would give you beer.
About an hour into the day, I ran into a counselor I had from summer camp, who gave me a weed cookie, which I devoured. Around noon, we were all incredibly fucked up and I lost Fogell and Evan in the crowd. I tripped and stumbled around looking for them for a couple hours, and at around 2 p.m. most of the other kids from our school started to arrive. A huge line formed at the entrance to the beer garden, and that’s where I saw Evan, sitting in a chair right outside the front gate. He had been removed from the premises. He was holding his head in his hand, puking all over the place, as dozens of kids from our school waited in line, watching and laughing their asses off. It was playing out in slow motion. Pointing, hysterics, BLARRCH, Evan puking again.
This is how he will be remembered throughout the rest of high school, I thought. A puking loser. Already done by the time everyone else showed up. What a bummer for him and, by proxy, me.
Then two paramedics appeared, holding a stretcher, and walked toward Evan. This was going from bad to worse. How humiliating. He was literally gonna be carried out in front of everyone.
But then, right when it seemed like his high school reputation was being publicly burned at the stake, Evan Goldberg flipped the fucking script and did the stuff of legend.
He was loaded onto the stretcher in a daze, and as he was being carried away, he snapped out of it, looked around, and screamed, “NOOO!! I. NEED. MORE. BEEEEEEERRRRR!!!!!!!!!”
He jumped off the stretcher, shoved aside a paramedic, and RAN. Everyone in the huge line cheered as he bolted past them! He grabbed a beer mug from someone’s hand and leapt over the barrier leading into the beer garden. Then he disappeared into the crowd, chugging his beer as he went. If they made commemorative stamps for amazing achievements in getting fucked up, Evan’s Arts County Fair rally would be one of them.
* * *
During the first few years of high school, some of the other kids heard I did karate, which had the complete opposite effect than I hoped it would. It kinda made everyone want to fight me. It just seemed unlikely that I was able to defend myself, so the instinct was to test my abilities.
It’s like when you see a puffer fish at the aquarium. You’re like, “That goofy fucking thing can really make itself dangerous? Bullshit! I gotta see this for myself!” Your instinct is to agitate it to see if it’ll actually do its thing. That was me. I was a puffer fish. Goofy-looking in the first place, and when trying to defend myself, somehow even goofier-looking.
My quest to not get my ass kicked out in the wild was probably never put to the test more than in the case of “Smokey” McPherson.
Smokey was not his real name. His real name was Eric, but Eric had an obsession with the movie Friday. It came out in 1995, and if you were a thirteen-year-old pothead named Seth, you and everyone you knew were pretty fucking into that shit.
Friday is about a recently fired dude named Craig (Ice Cube, let’s not get into him for now), who lives in Com
pton with his parents. His best friend, Smokey, in a truly amazing performance from Chris Tucker, is a pot dealer who works for a dangerous upper-level dealer, Big Worm. Smokey wants to cheer up Craig, so they smoke all of Smokey’s weed, which he’s supposed to sell. Big Worm finds out and the two have till the end of the day to pay him back. It’s fantastic, and Pineapple Express wouldn’t exist without it.
Eric McPherson was so into it, he dressed like Smokey every day, in khakis, a black T-shirt, a gold chain, and a black baseball hat, which was objectively nuts to begin with, but this motherfucker then went so far as to ask people to call him “Smokey.” Giving yourself a nickname is almost always incredibly whack, and nobody called Eric “Smokey” unless they were making fun of him, which was sad because it all stemmed from the fact that he just desperately wanted to be cool. Out of respect, I’ll call him Smokey for the rest of the story…
At a party the previous week, Smokey had hooked up with a girl in our grade, Yael, who had an older brother in twelfth grade, Harris, who was intent on kicking the living fuck out of Smokey. Smokey was on high alert, and whenever you were with him, you knew you were hanging out with a marked man, so I for one tried to avoid him at all costs.
One day, me and Fogell had eaten lunch at McDonald’s and were about to head back to school. Smokey was at McDonald’s, too, and saw us heading back.
Smokey: Hey, I’ll walk with you guys!
Me and Fogell knew he was just looking for cover, but it was hard to come up with a reason to say no.
Me: Uh…sure.
We were walking along the railroad tracks when we looked up and saw the worst possible sight: Harris and about five of his friends coming toward us.