First, we went to the “Beer Store.” In Canada you can only buy beer from government-sanctioned sellers and that’s the brand name they chose for each one. We waited in the parking lot until some derelict agreed to buy us some in exchange for a few out of the box. An hour after opening that first Pandora’s beer, we were running up and down the stairs of Dogboy’s house shotgunning beers and shouting along with the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party).” First it was just the two of us, but people started streaming in around nine p.m. By ten, we had a real party worth fighting for.
The problem with parties in high school is that you have such intense blue balls after being denied for so long that when you finally get a chance, it comes rocketing out like explosive diarrhea. We were out of control. There were piggyback fights and wedgie rumbles. We were acting exactly like the jocks we hated, and the girls were huddled by the kitchen in fear. Occasionally one would emerge to say something like, “Stop! He can’t breathe,” about the guy at the bottom of the dog pile, and we’d yell back, “Who cares?”
Just when we thought the party couldn’t get any more fun, a “Hello, boys!” rang from the top of the stairs. It was Anthony, prancing around in Dogboy’s mother’s bra and panties. Seeing his lily-white fat folds protrude out of her expensive lingerie made us laugh so hard, we all died and came back to life.
“That’s it!” I yelled after finally getting some air in my lungs. “We’re going for a drive!”
Riding the momentum of Anthony’s joke, everyone followed me outside into the freezing Canada cold. I had grabbed a set of keys that had a Chevrolet logo on them and jumped into a blue car that had the same logo on it. It was Dick’s car. I was one of the drunkest people in the world.
As I rolled out of the driveway in my stolen vehicle, seven people crammed inside. Skeeter and Totti then climbed onto the hood. The snow was piled ten feet high on either side of the road, but we were laughing like hyenas. Our frontal lobes weren’t developed enough to signal important emotions such as fear.
The car was old but in good condition and it puttered out onto the street with vigor. Skeeter and Totti were in clear and present danger as they held desperately on to the hood, and we had front-row seats to view the carnage. It was like we were watching an action movie on a huge flat-screen way before there were flat-screens. Skeeter looked like a rodeo clown in his skinny blond Mohawk and shredded jean jacket; Totti looked even funnier with giant black spikes coming out of his head and a long black trench coat.
When we started on our journey through the snowy ’burbs, the “boys on the hood” were laughing, but their smiles became inversely proportional to how hard I pushed on the gas. If I floored it, they’d look petrified. When I let off the gas, they cheered up again. I enjoyed playing with their facial expressions, but eventually I slammed down the pedal full throttle and gunned it.
“He’s not slowing down,” I heard Skeeter say to Totti through the windshield. Totti wasn’t prepared to give up quite yet and kept crying at me to stop. I couldn’t stop laughing, let alone use a brake pedal. Totti finally gave up and turned to Skeeter to say, “We’re going to have to jump,” which made the entire car cheer. Skeeter and Totti looked into each other’s eyes with an expression that said, “We can do this.” Skeeter jumped first. As the car swerved violently off of Katimavik Road and onto McGibbon Drive, Skeeter leapt with all his might and instantly disappeared into a snowbank like a gopher into a hole.
Totti was next. As he crouched on the hood and surveyed the safest place to jump, I sped up and everyone in the car yelled things like, “You can do it, Totti!” He’s a much bigger guy than Skeeter, so when he finally summoned the courage to jump, he went smashing into the snowbank like a meteor and made a huge explosion of snow shoot up around him. Instead of stopping to make sure our friends were all right, we cheered louder and headed to the Kanata Town Center to do some donuts as our hapless friends disappeared into the background.
The grocery store at the back of this minimall was where many of us worked pushing shopping carts and stacking shelves. It was abandoned at this late hour, which made it the perfect place to crank the wheel to one side and force the car to spin in endless circles that jeopardized everyone’s safety. The enormous parking lot’s black ice had reduced the friction to about nothing. “Watch this,” I yelled as I opened the driver’s door, held on to the steering wheel, and leaned my entire body toward the pavement so my head was facing the tire. To this day, I can still clearly see the snowy front left tire spinning at twenty miles an hour mere inches from my face.
Donuts are a great way to make driving a car scary because you’re not in control of where the car goes. The wheels are spinning in a direction you’re not steering toward, and a huge lamppost is right around the corner. This circular dance with the devil went on for so long I was about to throw up. We had performed a half-dozen 360-degree turns by now, so I pulled myself up, straightened out the car, and went screeching out of the parking lot to rejoin Dogboy’s house party.
BWUP! BWUP!
“What the fuck was that?” I yelled, praying to God I didn’t just hear a police siren.
“COPS!” yelled everyone in the car. Of course it was the cops. What else were they going to be doing, arresting cows? I was shitting my pants but kept driving anyway.
“Quick, is anyone in the car not wasted?” I squawked like a crazy woman. Everyone looked at each other shaking their heads no. “Alan!” I yelled to a guy in the passenger’s seat I barely knew. “Get in the driver’s seat right now.”
“Fuck you!” he replied. I needed another plan.
I clearly was in big trouble and I didn’t want to make it worse by speeding or breaking any other laws so I came up with this unbelievably stupid idea: a perfectly legal police chase. I was going to drive at the speed limit, stop at stop signs, and even indicate before I turned, BUT I was going to do my turns at the very last second. That way they wouldn’t be able to add any charges, but I’d still get away. This plan would have worked perfectly if the two police officers had been drinking all day and could barely drive. As luck would have it, they were both sober as the judge I was soon to be in front of.
After about one minute of this strange charade, they quietly pulled in front of me and forced me to park. We were now pretty close to the party and as I got out, farmer’s-son Dick walked up and yelled, “That guy stole my fucking car!” to the cops. Thanks, Dick. As the cop pulled out the Breathalyzer, I came up with an even stupider plan than the “creeping escape” that had just failed. “I know,” I thought while trying to not see two of everything, “I’ll act like I’m inhaling while I exhale, and then I’ll act like I’m exhaling when I inhale.” The officer told me to take a deep breath and blow into the machine. As I surreptitiously blew air out of my nose, I puffed up my chest and pointed at it as if to say, “This guy is getting as much air in those lungs as he possibly can,” even though I was doing the opposite. Then I put my lips on the machine and gestured with my arms like I was exhaling while I secretly inhaled. My reading was pretty good—negative 10, which means I was driving at two hundred times less than the legal limit. The cop told me to do it again and after two more pathetic attempts, he shouted, “Don’t suck! Blow!”
I blew, and it sucked. I was twice the legal limit and on my way to jail.
The fifteenth stupid idea I had that night was to smile for the mug shot. I spent the rest of the night in jail, and my dad picked me up early the next morning, at which point he was treated to the said photograph. Seeing the black-and-white photo of his son in a studded leather jacket with a flippant smirk made him so fucking mad he didn’t say one word to me for an entire year (seriously) and referred to me only in the third person as “that asshole.”
During this time, I was expected to go to court and plead guilty to driving under the influence, so I did. What an eye-opener. Criminals are fucking losers. I wore a suit to the proceedings as any sane person would, but I turned out to be t
he only sane person in the courtroom. Ahead of me was a kid, charged with criminal negligence, who had no problem standing in front of the judge with his headphones on. When he was told this is unacceptable, he pulled them out of his ears and said to the judge, “OK, OK—fu-u-u-uck.”
Just when I thought that couldn’t be topped, a bum giggled his way up to the stand while looking back at his buddy and giving the thumbs-up. He had on a baseball hat with two foam tits on it that said i love tits in felt.
Both these guys got charged, but when I showed up looking like a model citizen, justice proved it was indeed blind and charged me, too. My license was revoked and I had a criminal record.
The good news is that I was made president of SAS. The better news is that I dismantled the organization immediately. Canadian law is pretty easy on minors, so the day I turned eighteen, the whole thing was flushed down the toilet and erased from the history books—which sort of sucked, because I really wanted that mug shot.
I’d like to say I never drove drunk again, but c’mon. The legal limit in New York is two beers, and if you can’t command your vehicle after two beers you shouldn’t be commanding a vehicle in the first place.
I can tell you that I never drove THAT drunk again.
Desperately Saving Foreskin (1987)
My high school ID from this year is the only ID I own where I don’t have crossed eyes. (1987)
Prohibition taught society that banning alcohol makes drinkers tenacious. My crew, the Monks, fought the ageist laws of the 1980s by pouring a teeny bit from every bottle in our parents’ liquor cabinets into a communal jar and calling the concoction “Jungle Juice.”
This gasoline-flavored poison would get you so plastered so fast, the night quickly devolved into fistfights, puking, and tears. House parties were rare in Kanata, so we held “Bush Bashes” deep in the forest where cops and parents couldn’t find us. The way home was very confusing and many of us got lost for hours. (A few years ago, some kid died making his way home, so Bush Bashes are now forbidden.)
After stumbling across the highway overpass with my friend’s girlfriend Sarah, I told her to hang on a second then walked into a pile of bushes for a nap. She thought this was really romantic, so she pulled my flaccid schvanz out of my passed-out pants and started flopping it around. Wanking is a bit of an art form with us uncircumcised types. If you clutch the penis too low, the skin doesn’t move up and down enough to feel good, but if you hold it too high, you can tear the frenulum on the downstroke. What the fuck’s a frenulum? It’s the penile version of that thing under your tongue that stops you from swallowing it. Here, grab the neck of your T-shirt and hold a tiny piece of the front collar between your teeth. That’s how a foreskin is attached to a penis. It’s a very small tag of skin and when it tears, it feels like someone ripped your tongue out.
I was so drunk and numb I kept saying, “Harder,” as she beat me off and I remember something feeling really warm before falling asleep. I woke up alone at dawn in the bush and made my way over to Steve’s house, where I broke into his room, stripped down to my underwear, and slept for another three hours.
“Hey, man,” Steve said, waking me up at ten a.m., “what’s with your underwear?” I looked down and was shocked to see I was getting my period. My tighty-whiteys were now crimson, and when I pulled out the waistband to peer inside, it looked like an old bowl of raspberry cornflakes.
Steve and I barked, “HOLY SHIT!” so loud, his immigrant mom banged on the door and asked if we were OK in Italian. “Sì, Mamma. We’re fine,” Steve yelled back. I calmed down enough to get into a hot shower with my underwear on. Thirty minutes later, I was able to slowly remove my undies and gently soap off the dried blood. I didn’t have the courage to peel back my foreskin and check the damage, but I could tell it was severe.
I wanted whatever was in there to heal, so I didn’t even touch my dick for two weeks. This led to overwhelming horniness, so while Steve was over one sunny Saturday afternoon a fortnight after the incident, I suggested we go over to Jules’s house and fuck her brains out of her ears.
When we got to Jules’s place, she didn’t seem very into our plan. I went up to her room first and every time she protested, I’d put my hand on her crotch because she’d forget what she was saying and emit this ecstatic guttural moan. I’ve never seen another girl where you can shut her up just by touching her area. I call this rare phenomenon “Cunt Button.” Five minutes after her first “no,” I was fucking her from behind and enjoying the panoramic view of her breathtaking ass. She was wearing ankle socks with lace cuffs, and her big tits were swinging back and forth like bouncy balloons. I was the Chief Swine in Hog Heaven, but then I looked down and saw blood shooting out all over my pubes.
What?
I couldn’t stop pumping her, but every time I pushed in, a ringed jet of furiously dark blood sprayed back into my crotch with showerhead force. After trying to ignore it for a few seconds, I pulled my dick out and was horrified to see a bucket’s worth of blood on both of us and a puddle in the center of the mattress that was easily three liters. It was as if a shark had eaten her vagina while we were fucking.
I yelped, “WHAT THE SHIT!?” then pulled on my pants and ran the three blocks to my house, where I dashed straight to my room and hid under my bed. That’s right, I hid under my bed like a fucking tiny dog during a thunderstorm. As I lay there shaking with fear and confusion, Jules and Steve took her mattress into the basement of her house, where they scrubbed the blood off with a small hose in silence. He said it was one of the weirdest moments of his life. I was confused by menstruation and didn’t understand why her vagina did that to me. She was confused by my foreskin and didn’t understand why my penis would do that to her. Her confusion was warranted; mine was not, or not for the right reason at least. Sarah had torn a hole in my frenulum, and getting an erection was now like opening a Transylvanian fire hydrant. I tried to look at it but every time I pulled back my foreskin, I felt an electric shock of pain resonate through my entire body.
A week later, I was sitting with a Muslim urologist who told me I had to be circumcised. “It’s like a hole in your jeans,” he admonished me. “You can sew it up but it will just rip again.” He made an appointment at the hospital for the next month, and I gulped.
I sat in the bath that night and thought very hard about what was going to be done. I was going to have a vastly different penis for the rest of my life, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Then I stomped my foot down like a Birkenstock-wearing feminist in a porn shop and said, “No! This is my body and I’ll handle who does what to it. My body, my foreskin, myself.” The next few weeks involved scalding-hot bath after scalding-hot bath and gently pulling back my submerged penis to allow soap to attend to the wound. Each bath was less painful than the previous one and soon I was ready to almost start masturbating again.
I let the operation date pass and, after a few very careful wanks, was ready to get back on the sex horse. Three months after Sarah’s clumsy hands shredded my precious foreskin, my dick was sliding into a fifteen-year-old soccer star named Jen. I made sure the hole was sopping wet first, and it worked. I fucked her for the usual teenage minute and pulled out a blood-free dink at the end.
I had ignored the doctor’s orders and successfully taken my foreskin back from the Man. Don’t ever let anyone chop the end of your dick off.
“He’s Gone and Got a Bloody Tattoo!” (1988)
When my dad was growing up, Britain didn’t really have a middle class. You were either a dockworker covered in shitty tattoos or an aristocrat who sipped tea and told someone to tell someone to tell someone what the dockworkers should be doing. My grandfather was a bookie who was determined to avoid this fate and changed our name from McGuinness to the much less Irish-sounding McInnes.
My father looks like a turtle with cancer. If he wore his hood up, he’d look like Darth Vader’s boss. He’s been in so many fights, his nose is flattened and his huge lips make him
look like an albino KRS-One covered in gray stubble.
Though he seemed destined for blue-collar nothingness like his brothers, he got scholarships and a degree in physics and became a middle-class immigrant with middle-class kids. “The best thing about Glasgow,” he once told me in an affected accent that sounded more like Sean Connery than a kid who grew up with ill-fitting shoes, “is you never get homesick.” He has no intention of going back but it’s still in him. When some carefree vandals were giggling their way through our backyard in Kanata one night, my dad leapt from his bed, jumped out the window, and kicked the living shit out of them—NUDE. My dad was charged with assault but the vision of his pendulous penis swinging back and forth while his bloody fists wrought endless carnage is an image those poor boys will likely never forget.
For the most part, however, his conversion to gentleman was complete and he projected his class ascendance onto my little brother, Kyle, and me. For one of us to do something trashy like get a tattoo would have erased his lifetime of hard work. To him tattoos were something you get in prison, and I’m pretty sure the only time he saw them was as a very young man when he briefly went to jail for trying to steal a car. (He’s so arrogant, he and his friends opened the hood and assumed they could figure out hot-wiring from scratch. After about an hour of scratching their chins and staring at the electrical system, a neighbor called the cops.)
How to Piss in Public Page 3