“This is how it always goes,” his brother told us. “John forgets his pills once and then starts thinking he’s better than a pill-needer. Soon enough he’s off the deep end again and can’t be convinced he needs help.” We learned his family had tried to get John into a home many times, and it had only occasionally worked. He told us John would be long gone by now and it would be impossible to find him.
We drove back to camp stupefied and helpless. When something like this happens, you wonder if your input made things worse. I was sad I hadn’t handled it better, but I was also kind of relieved I no longer had to work with the shovel-swinging alien astrophysicist who spoke to God and made atheist classical guitar operas about a German nihilist who kills a puppy that has a poster of Moses in his doghouse.
Hey, Dude, Where’s My Nose? (1992)
I was twenty-two in 1992 and my look was mostly composed of dirt. I was living in Montreal but went back to Kanata regularly to visit my family. I had also started a new band called Leatherassbuttfuk with a fat guy called Bullshitter Shane.
After an evening of visiting our respective folks, we went for a beer in downtown Ottawa. I had on rubber boots, a few homeless-man dreads that were just clumps of tangled hair, and a jacket with a hole in the back that was bigger than the jacket. Shane wore a soiled baseball hat, an old leather jacket he stole from a dead skinhead (yes, Geoff), and boots with holes in the toes. People called him Bullshitter Shane because he could talk his way into any job or woman’s pants, or in this case, band. He was playing “not guitar,” which meant he’d furiously shake the strings back and forth to play or just drag the guitar along the stage. Whenever Shane needed money he’d shave his beard and lie his way into a waiter job that paid hundreds of dollars a night. Then he’d spend it all on his friends, get laid, and go back to a life of poverty.
On this particular evening we were with a preppy contrarian named Jeff who rebelled against our rebellion by shunning our filthy ways just to spite us. While we were in rags, he wore suits and ties and even occasionally tried to pull off an ascot, which isn’t really possible. It’s like wearing a monocle. He’d recently had his entire mouth wired shut after playing devil’s advocate to the wrong guy in the wrong bar and receiving a series of skull-shattering knuckle sandwiches that left him speechless.
Ottawa is on Quebec’s border, which is like Salt Lake City playing footsie with Las Vegas. Where our town shut down around midnight, the French province over the bridge had bars that never shut and girls’ legs that did the same. You didn’t go out drinking in Ottawa without ending the night in the town of Hull half a mile away. I had borrowed my parents’ car and on our way into a parking lot to make the trip over the bridge, a stocky jock wearing his school’s sweater yelled, “Ottawa trash!” He was standing next to a customized pickup truck filled with other sports enthusiasts in finely marbled shape like a bunch of testosterone-fueled dunce statues. I laughed it off. I don’t think Shane even heard it. But Jeff decided it would be prudent to respond. “Ooooh, I’m s-o-o-o scared,” Jeff said through his wired jaw, so it sounded more like, “Vvvvh, I’m sch-o-o-o schared.” Back at the bar, Jeff had used that same strange accent to tell us how lucky he was to have a jaw at all. He said it took the surgeons thirteen hours to rebuild, and if it suffered any kind of trauma again he would basically have no face. Then again, if he had had no face, he wouldn’t have had a mouth, and we wouldn’t have been in this situation.
As his blockheaded football friends climbed out of the truck, the buffed-out heckler stormed us. Shane and I put Jeff behind us and prepared for what was sure to be a pretty serious beating. It was.
“YOU CHALLENGING ME!?” the jock yelled up into Shane’s face before adding, “YOU CHALLENGING ME!?” Shane exhaled a tired sigh, turned his hat backward, and began to roll up his sleeves. Apparently beating up jocks is tedious work. Before I could blink, the jock extinguished Shane with a cobra-fast punch that sent him crumpling to the ground like a deflated balloon. All the other frat boys were starting to surround us, and I started farting uncontrollably. Shane regained consciousness fairly quickly but was only able to make it up to doggy-style position before his assailant yanked Shane’s head back by the hair and started pounding him in the face so fucking hard and fast, it was like watching a pile driver crush a soda can. The punches were unyielding and each one shot blood out of Shane’s face and sprayed it across the parking lot. I hurled myself at the guy. It was meant to be a tackle, but the effect was more like a lemur throwing itself on a station wagon. Without even slowing down, the angry pugilist yelled, “Get this fucking guy offa me!” and kept pounding.
Then everything went completely black.
When I woke up I was about six feet away lying on the pavement. Bart Simpson was there, running around me in circles (seriously). I was also literally seeing stars. Blood was everywhere and when I put my hand on my face to touch my nose, it was gone. I was only partly conscious but it was very clear I had been hit with a two-by-four that had lopped off my nose. I remembered reading about farmers who brought their dismembered arms to the hospital and realized I had better find my nose if I didn’t want to look like Michael Jackson for the rest of my life. As I slowly drifted back into consciousness, I realized it wasn’t a big piece of wood but a big piece of fist that had accomplished this feat. Then I saw two very athletic college students staring at me in horror. One of them yelled, “Holy shit!” and the other yelled, “Let’s go!” and they scurried back to the truck. This is how E.T. must have felt. When the guy assigned to disfiguring Shane looked up and saw my face, he dropped what he was doing and they all jumped into their vehicle before peeling out like murderers.
I touched my face again and realized the nose was still there after all. It just wasn’t in its original spot. Instead of the bridge part pointing straight down, it was now tucked under my right eye, perpendicular to its original position. I didn’t know a nose could immigrate to such a faraway part of your face. I also didn’t know I was bleeding to death. I tried plugging my nose with my fingers, but that made the blood gush down my throat like I was chugging an endless beer, so I just let it spray.
I walked over to Shane, who was trying to see where he was despite having a huge pile of baby cunts for a face. He couldn’t see and it was anyone’s guess which mounds held his eyeballs. “Let’s go to Hull,” he suggested with a blind, insane smile. This would be a great idea if there was a bar full of nymphomaniac necrophiliacs in Hull, but we were not getting into any establishment that didn’t say hospital on the front and even then, there’d be trouble.
With blood still gushing out of my sideways nose, I got in the car and drove us all to the hospital. Jeff, who started the fight and didn’t get hit, said he was in no condition to drive. When we got to the ER, it was obvious the nurses thought we were a bunch of homeless drunks who were out picking fights. I tried to convince her she was only 33.3 percent right but she still made us sit for five hours in the waiting room and another three on a gurney in the hallway. Shane and I were bored to bloody tears so we started using our faces as comedy props. The entire front of my face was caked shut with blood and every time I opened my mouth, it broke a seal that leaked a beer bottle’s worth of fluid. “Check this out,” I croaked from the gurney. “Raaar!” When I made this monster sound, my Halloween mask of a face spewed blood. Shane had a trick, too. His face was now so turgid with blood, his eyeballs were a good two inches in there, but when he pried open one of the cracks, you saw this bloody eyeball deep in the cave. “Raaaah,” he groaned as real bloody tears poured out of the crack. This hilarious game went on until our bedding and clothes were completely drenched and the doctor was ready to finally take a look.
When I got settled into the doctor’s office I complained to him that my bones had probably already set, but he informed me that that actually takes weeks, which makes sense. Then he sat me up and climbed on top of the bed like he was about to fuck my mouth. I’m not kidding. He was standing with his crotch right next
to me. “Hello?” I asked. Then he put one hand on my head and another on my nose and with all his body weight and strength went, “Rrrngh!” which brought the cartilage from under my eye back over to its old spot in the middle of my face. It took everything he had and the sound was so disgusting, I dry-heaved. I had just heard an ear-splitting squelch from INSIDE my head and as he stood there enjoying the fruits of his hard labor, the dry heave became a puke. “That’s normal,” he said, fetching me a pan. “It’s a very nauseating experience. Just lie here for a while. You’ll be all right.”
When he came back fifteen minutes later, he told me I’d have to have plastic surgery. “If you don’t,” he warned me, “you’ll always have this weird C-shape to your nose.” I told him plastic surgery is for women, and today I have this weird C-shape to my nose.
Unlaid in Taiwan (1992)
When the previous generation graduated with a BA in English they’d accept some job like head of the National Poetry Commission or maybe they’d “sell out” and take a job checking the copy on corporate brochures for twice the average person’s salary. When I showed the Quebec job market my English BA in 1992 they told me to va chier, which is French for “fuck off” but translates literally as “go shit” because frogs suck at swearing.
My generation had some valid complaints about our lack of options—“No future,” as the Sex Pistols called it—but it often felt like I was the only one of my friends who tried. We were the Slacker Generation and after one no, most threw in the towel.
I wasn’t satisfied with hitting the bong and watching TV all day. I wanted adventure. So, Steve and I scraped together just enough money for return tickets to Europe, where we hitchhiked around the continent staying at punk squats and earning our keep by doing random chores. Punks considered each other family members back then and none of them hesitated giving us the shredded T-shirt off their back. We stayed in a squatted neighborhood in East Berlin at a place called Meinza Squat where punks had held back police in a three-day siege the punks eventually won. We hitched a ride with a band and ended up in an Italian squat called Forte Prenestino, which used to be soldiers’ barracks and was sunk into a hill. They got their power from exercise bikes in the basement people took turns using, including guests like us. In Germany we went to a riot where punks were shooting skinheads with fireworks and police were forced to escort the skinheads to safety. It was a fucking blast and it was all free but meeting all these creative people making stuff made me realize I was now ready to start my own thing. At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, I was also getting tired of punk. The whole movement was about never stagnating but after a decade of religious devotion, it was starting to feel more like a cult. It was time to move on and start something new.
After six months of squatting and one serious case of body lice, we were back in Montreal and flat broke. Steve returned to his job as a bike messenger where we both used to work, but I wanted to do better than check-to-check. I wanted a nest egg to start something big, like maybe my own comic book or a band that would change the world. I met a girl who had just returned from Taiwan, where she’d made a ton of money teaching English. “Trust me,” she said. “EVERYONE there wants to learn English.” I told her I had no idea how to teach and she said, “Doesn’t matter. All you have to do is speak English. There are plenty of schools that will pay for your ticket if you commit to a certain number of hours a week.”
A week later, I was on my way to Taipei thanks to the generosity of a private school for young girls, and I only had to teach there one day a week.
Being white in Taiwan is like being famous. Actually, they get mad if you say “white” because that’s politically incorrect. The term is “Western.” Everyone waves and tries to talk to you and if you have a problem, it’s their problem. There’s no crime so if you see a bike you like, pick it up and ride away. If you get stopped by a cop, start yelling and he will be so embarrassed by his poor English, he’ll let you go. The place is a bully’s paradise. I quickly got in on a communal apartment with a bunch of Australians who were sharing bunk beds to offset the rent. We’d teach English in the day and drink beers at “Western bars” in the evening.
None of the Australian guys wanted to teach kids. I don’t know why. I taught some businesswomen and their feet reeked. Also, adults belch in your face in China. So, I scooped up all the kid jobs and soon my occupation was teaching English to fourth graders all over the city. A translator had to be with me at all times because I don’t speak Chinese but nor does anyone else in the world. The language is so inexplicably complicated that the Chinese TV shows have subtitles so people who are sixty can still practice all the bizarre little idiosyncrasies. I know maybe three phrases in Mandarin and I break a sweat every time I try to say them correctly.
My only responsibility was to be cool. The school administration didn’t expect the kids to learn anything at such a young age. They just wanted them to think happy thoughts whenever anyone said “English” later on. I let them pull on my mustache and I showed them what earwax is (theirs is powdery like American Indians’). We’d also draw each other a lot. They always drew me with big hairs sticking out all over my body. They weren’t used to body hair. I drew racist caricatures of them that made them laugh.
The classes at the private girls’ school were particularly easy. I decided my only goal there was to teach them the theme song to the Transformers cartoon. Unfortunately, these kids were so scared of sticking out, they didn’t really try, and that made for some frustrating sing-alongs. No matter how often I told them the correct pronunciation, they’d all mush the words together into a robotic, “Dee Transforma. Mo dan mee da ah.” They knew how to say, “More than meets the eye”; they just didn’t want to show off.
This trait is one of the thousands of strange quirks the Chinese have but I am most annoyed by their crippling fear of dust. It’s a country of 1.3 billion dustophobes. They don’t wear those face masks because of germs. It’s dirt particles. Hey, Taiwan, there’s no such thing as a dusty tongue. You, too, mainland China.
During every break, the girls would put their chairs on their desks and start washing both with a bucket of soapy water. They’d mop the floors and Windex the windows. They were like Stepford daughters. The girl who was assigned the hideous task of cleaning my dusty chalkboard erasers wore protective glasses, gloves that went up past her elbows, and a special mask with a breathing filter on it. She then went outside and banged them together like she was holding two nuclear weapons.
I took the brushes off her when she got back and got some dust on my pants. God forbid. When the class started again the kids were pointing at me and making these guttural sounds like they were watching a beheading. I asked the translator what was going on and she pointed to my pants. “Oh, this,” I said, pointing to the white handprint on my leg. “You mean THIS?” I asked, hitting two erasers together so a white cloud appeared in front of me. The girls were caterwauling now and I decided it was time for the entire nation to get over this stupid phobia once and for all. “La la la,” I said, rubbing chalk all over my clothes and face like Pee-wee Herman in a trance, “I love dust. It’s the best. I’m getting it all over me because dust is the best. La la la. Dust-dust-dust …” By the time I finished my ceremonial dust dance, I looked like a hardworking baker, and when I faced the class I saw terrified kids standing on their chairs completely spasmodic. It was like I had eviscerated myself and was about to throw my entrails in their hair. I was getting even angrier, which is the opposite of what I was being paid to do. At the peak of this earsplitting mania, I bit into a piece of chalk, yelled, “IT’S JUST CHALK!” and chewed it really loud with my mouth open. The girls shrieked so hysterically the principal stormed in and dismissed the class. That’s when I realized I had totally lost my temper.
They don’t like confrontation in China so the principal shook my hand with a huge smile, saying, “Thank you very much.” He patted me on the back and told me I was a very good teacher. That’s how they
say “You’re fired” in China.
Outside of the chalk incident, I did pretty well over there. One problem that was starting to hurt my feelings was how totally repulsive I was to Chinese women. Facial hair was unheard-of and the fact that I combined it with dirty sweatshirts and old sneakers made the idea of sleeping with me tantamount to rubbing shit on your cunt. There were some upsides. All the clean-shaven handsome dudes were busy fucking rice balls, so I had my pick of the white-girl litter. I found an Australian who thought my dick was “gorgeous” and I boned a Jewish girl whose whole body broke out into goose pimples every time she climaxed. I still rub one out occasionally to those two.
After four months it was time to head back. Unfortunately, I was going to leave without having banged the epicanthic folds off a local, and that’s one souvenir short of a complete trip.
A few nights before I left, a stunning Chinese (Taiwan is technically still Chinese; the word “Taiwanese” is usually reserved for the natives) woman who had given herself the English name Uma asked me if I wanted to go see a metal band at a bar called Man Dog Ant. She looked kind of punky and I knew her through my roommate Alan, who was also her teacher. He was a boyish-looking British guy who wasn’t interested in her for some (possibly gay) reason. When we got to the club, she introduced me to the band and after an Engrish introduction they got onstage and started doing a parody of heavy metal. The guitar solos were over-the-top hilarious and the way they were pretending to be scary was so funny I spent half the time with my head on my knees dying laughing. It was comic genius until the very end, when I realized they weren’t kidding.
How to Piss in Public Page 7