How to Piss in Public

by McInnes, Gavin

  I realize now that she was furious and humiliated, but because she was also Asian, she didn’t end the date there. To them losing face is like going into debt, so before she could kick me to the curb, she needed to redeem herself. I thought things were going swimmingly. She borrowed a motorbike from one of the guys and asked me if I could ride. I lied and said yes.

  Uma helping get the bike started. I kept stalling it. (1992)

  Changing gears was clunky at first and we almost died on the highway a few times but I eventually got the hang of it and we followed a mountain road that wound up and up and ended at a beautiful restaurant overlooking a nearby bay and most of Taipei. We sat down on an outdoor patio and she ordered some vegetarian food. Real Chinese food is dogs and worms and all the horrible shit that feels xenophobic to simply list, but with vegetables there’s a ceiling of disgustingness you can’t go past. I was a vegetarian at the time, thank God. As the sun set behind the mountains, I could see strings of lights on fishing boats bobbing up and down in the bay. Taipei is a dirty city down below, but the rolling hills of forests and rock that surround it are magnificent.

  She had regained face and was talking and laughing and saying things like, “I hate when I eat at a place in Taipei and a stray dog shows up. I lose my appetite.”

  “Yeah,” I said back, “especially when you’re already eating a dog!”

  This was a make-or-break joke that could have ruined the night, but she chortled. “Well,” she said, “I wasn’t eating dog the last time I saw a stray, but I did have some dog the other day.”

  Just when I thought this date couldn’t get more perfect, the sky filled with fucking BATS! They came out of nowhere and were furiously eating insects and darting all over the place just a few feet from our table. “They’ll be gone really soon,” she said, smiling. The wall of flying mammals vanished minutes later.

  When we got back to my communal shithole, I apologized for the mess. She was going to have to climb up into my bunk and we couldn’t horse around because it would shake Alan in the bunk below. Neither of us cared, however. Just holding each other was enough. She went to the bathroom and I looked at Alan and gave him the thumbs-up. He returned the gesture.

  “Hi, Alan,” Uma said after she returned.

  “How are you?” Alan asked in his gross English accent with his pale white skin and his wet fish lips. Uma sat down on his bed and they had a quiet chat I had trouble hearing, which was weird because I was right above them.

  Some time passed and I heard her getting under the covers—his covers. WHAT? I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling with my eyes open so wide, they almost slipped out of their sockets. “HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?” I scream-thought. I was beyond confused. Was he a hypnotist? Was this her revenge for my laughing at that shitty band? Was I just a Trojan horse to get to Alan the loser? Then I felt the bunk start to move. It became impossible to ignore I was being jostled around in my own bed by their humping. “Unbelievable,” I said aloud while climbing down the ladder. I slept on the couch in the living room and went back to Canada that Monday because that’s when my ticket was for.

  Uma and Alan got a place together just before I left. I considered kicking his ass but if I started punishing men for being more attractive than me I’d have no fists left.

  I came back with three thousand bucks in my pocket, which is a lot less than I’d hoped for but a lot more than anyone I knew had. I was ready to start my own business and chose drug pusher because it sounded the easiest. Pot wasn’t cheap back then so I only got three ounces for $1,000 but the customers started to pour in and soon I had enough to buy a lot more. It was by far the easiest job I’ve ever had in my life.

  The Time I Gave Myself an STD (1993)

  Times were good in Montreal then. I had money in the bank and nowhere to spend it. In an apartment with three art-school girls my rent was only $100 a month and the beer at Le Biftek across the street was only $5 a pitcher. There was nothing to do but fuck lazy sluts so I carpet-bombed the city with my dick. By the end of the attack, every pussy in the city looked like Dresden and I had every STD known to man.

  If you’re “sexually active,” as they say at the clinic, you are going to get diseases. You can wear a condom if you want, but venereal warts and herpes will still wriggle their way around the rubber and you’re shitfaced anyway, so who cares? Fuck safe sex. I’m not going to get a girl pregnant because I know how my genitals work. I will never understand guys who cum inside of women and are surprised to see it took. Were you not paying attention in grade school when they brought this up?

  Some even dumber people believe the myth of heterosexual AIDS but anyone with any kind of real sexual experience knows you’re only risking warts, herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and maybe crabs. They all sound a lot worse than they are. I’ve had every one but crabs and none of them were more than a minor inconvenience. And this was back then. Today it’s almost fun to get an STD.

  Venereal warts used to need a blast of liquid nitrogen (which burns like an icicle knife but only for a tenth of a second) but now you can take pills beforehand to make yourself immune. They say herpes is permanent but I had one outbreak, then another two months later, then another two years later, then—I don’t know. That was almost ten years ago now. It seems to be done. I think your immune system eventually just figures it out. When I first got chlamydia at the age of eighteen you had to take one gigantic pill a day for five days. Today the doctor gives you five little pills right there at his desk and that’s it. You’re cured. (Here’s a trick: To avoid that hideously painful swab where they put a wooden Q-tip down your dick, lie and say you definitely gave it to a virgin, which means you definitely have it. The pills are harmless, so if you don’t have it, you don’t do yourself any harm.) Same with gonorrhea. Take the pills and all you have to do is not fuck for twenty-four hours. Also, don’t let a chick blow you. Simple, right?

  The first time I got gonorrhea, I almost had a heart attack. Seeing your dick in trouble always gives a guy a soul-shaking scare. I had a strange burn in my urethra that begged me to sort of milk it out, which I did. As my thumb and forefinger traveled from the base of my gigantic shaft to my glistening, magenta, male-model-like head, a large, thick droplet of fluorescent yellow pus appeared out the top. SHIT!

  I ran to the local clinic and waited the thirty minutes it took to get an unscheduled appointment (the upside of free health care). I got the pills and was told very clearly not to have any kind of intercourse for twenty-four hours—“not even da blow job,” the doctor said in his French-Canadian accent. As a young man living amongst les filles de roi, this sounded like an eternity.

  I didn’t go out that night and by midnight, I was ready for a good old-fashioned wank. Roommates be damned. About twenty seconds after making love out of nothing at all, I was done. I soon realized I was sitting on a couch miles from any paper towels or even discarded socks. I contemplated using the handful of cum as hair gel, but I had a shaved head at the time so it would have been more like a yarmulke made of Elmer’s Glue. Getting up with my pants down was a possibility, but if the girls caught me shuffling around the house with a handful of cum I would never hear the end of it. That left one option: eating it. I did that occasionally as a young man. I think it started as a feminist thing. I make women eat it, so I oughtta be able to eat it myself. So down goes the watery oyster and I continue watching Murder, She Wrote because it’s on the only channel you get on a TV you found.

  The next morning I wake up excited to be back in the singles scene. Only there’s one problem. My throat hurts. Like, it really hurts. Each swallow burns like I’m eating fire ants. I called the doctor and left a message saying “we” had an emergency on our hands. When he called back, I asked if it was possible the infection could have crawled up the back of my dick and into my body, infecting everything all the way up to the throat. He said that’s impossible and the only way to get gonorrhea of the throat is to ingest semen. I hung up the phone. Oh my Lord. I had give
n MYSELF gonorrhea of the throat.

  Who the fuck am I to make fun of guys who get girls pregnant? I have a third of their IQ. I will literally bet you $100 I am the only person on Earth who ever gave himself an STD. This shame was magnified tenfold when I walked back into the clinic and saw the same doctor who had just treated me the day before. His face looked like someone took a shit in it. This guy went to medical school for twelve years and stayed up all night memorizing Latin terms and now his job is treating people who literally go fuck themselves.

  Shitstorm (1994)

  Selling pot was fruitful but every time I saw a cop car near my house I’d start farting so bad, it made me feel sorry for my underwear, so I gave it up. I also stopped living with the art chicks because one of them lost her mind on herbal E and the others became annoying lesbians who were always boring me to death with angry rants about the patriarchy. Montreal is like France when it comes to comics and though it sounds geeky everywhere else, it’s kind of an artsy-fartsy thing there. I had begun hanging out with French cartoonists and self-publishing an autobiographical mini-comic called Pervert, which made a tiny bit of scratch but not much. I’ve always said whatever you do should be at least a little profitable, otherwise you’re basically paying people to read your poetry. Shit was selling, but it was far from selling out, maybe a little too far. but it wasn’t exactly paying the bills. I was living in a tiny apartment off a hipster area called Le Plateau and hungry for more. My bed took up about a third of the room, so I built a loft six feet off the ground and fit my drawing board and a small bookshelf in the space beneath it.

  Shooting a giant teddy bear on said bed while friends visit. (1994)

  The only problem was that the space above the bed was now only about three feet. If I was fucking a girl, there was no way she could ride me without wearing a helmet, and doggie style was replaced with “froggy style,” where I’d lie facedown on her back and wiggle up and down like a horny toad.

  Another unfortunate side effect of this extremely tall bed was being able to hear the old man upstairs in stereophonic clarity. “Hello?” I’d hear through the ceiling like he was sitting on my chest. “Oh, I’m fine,” he’d add in his geriatric voice. I wasn’t convinced. “No, I don’t have the heat on. I can’t afford it. You know that.” I concluded that he was talking to his estranged daughter. Then I heard, “I sleep with my goddamned jacket on!” and the bang of an old-fashioned phone slamming down on the receiver.

  I’d seen this old man in the building a few times. He was English (not “British” but “Anglophone”), wore a long green army coat that almost touched the ground, and had some sad-looking medals surrounding a plastic poppy. He also had a green beret and cheap boots and was obviously a World War II vet with nothing left but apocalyptic memories of a war that left seventy-two million people dead. That’s twelve million more than the second-biggest war ever, the Mongol conquests.

  I had just started a new magazine with a sullen ex-junkie named Suroosh Alvi, and we’ll get to that shortly. I had no money but was living a pretty good life. I’d work at the magazine in the day and then work on my comic at night. I was still getting pretty laid too, though I tried to avoid cramming girls into my bed space because it was like squeezing two people into a midget’s coffin. I also didn’t like the idea of an old man in winter clothes beating his soft gray hard-on to the rhythm of my pumps. So I’d usually fuck girls on a chair by the fridge and shush them if the whimpering got too loud.

  It was winter in Montreal, which is like saying it was hot in hell. “Montreal” comes from “Mount Royal,” as in “Royal Mountain,” as in the snow reaches thirteen feet high after the roads are plowed. If you can make it through the ubiquitous fortresses of packed white powder, the freezing wind gets so severe, it seals your nostrils shut. Being old in those conditions must feel like being an anorexic in a mosh pit. I have no idea how the old man survived as long as he did.

  “Hello?” I heard on a chilly February night as I lay in my bed reading a graphic novel by a guy named Henriette Valium. “Yes, ahem, well, I was in the theater today … ,” he added, beginning a long explanation. He was obviously calling a stranger who had no idea why he was calling. “No … I know you sell the tickets. That’s why I’m calling.” More pauses and stuttering. “Hello?” he said, undaunted. “Yes, no … I know. I realize that. I was there today at the three o’clock?” He seemed to be talking to the right person. “Exactly, yes. I had the dark green coat on. Older gentleman.” I exhaled a sigh of relief. Now we could get down to business. “At any rate. All I wanted to say is that I think you’re very attractive and well, that’s it. I don’t expect anything to come of it. I just have to get that off my chest. That’s the kind of person I am. I say what I feel and I get on with it.”

  “What the hell is he doing?” I thought. “Of course she’s attractive. She’s probably nineteen and they stuck her in the window because it’s good for business. Dude, the war ended half a century ago. You must be at least eighty.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable,” he said. “That was not what I wanted to do.”

  He seemed frantic, but how did he expect it to go? Was she going to say, “Ooh, Gramps! Eighty-year-old veterans make me wet. Come by my place and put your weird, old face all over my body”?

  “Look,” he said, trying to stem the tension. “I just wanted to say, you’re a very attractive young man. You have a very beautiful face and I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable … No. Yes. And for that I’m sorry. Good day and again, I apologize.”

  My face now resembled an owl that just snorted an eight ball of cocaine.

  Did I just hear “young man”? They had homosexuality back then? There were homos in World War II? I thought the Village People invented fags and then they all died in the eighties.

  I sat up and hit my head on the ceiling. I needed a drink. I slid off the bed, landed on the floor, and walked over to the fridge. “What is it with gays?” I thought. “Don’t they have mirrors? He’s a little kid and you’re at death’s door. Ever heard of ‘one’s league’?”

  I didn’t hear from my neighbor for about a week after that. I think he was sick because I’d hear coughing from the bed and when the phone rang he wouldn’t answer it. There were endless trips to the bathroom with lots of hopeless cursing. He was obviously alone in the world. Who was going to check in on him if he died? Did this fall under my jurisdiction?

  Then I heard some creaking of the floorboards and a very angry “GODDAMNIT!” It sounded like he had spilled something and I could hear him waddling over to the sink to prepare a washcloth. Then I heard creaking so near the wall it sounded like that was what he was washing. Who spills stuff on the walls after the age of one? For the next three days I heard a lot more swearing and a lot more scrubbing. Why was he skating around the room on Brillo pads and cursing like a sailor? Had senility eaten his brain alive?

  Then came the worst phone call since Hitler said, “Sure, go ahead, invade Poland. You think I give a shit?”

  “English! Hello? Is this Emergency?” He seemed calm but had obviously dialed 911 because you have to choose your language first in Quebec when you call those guys. I silently crawled up to my bed and put my ear to the ceiling. “Yes, well, I’m not sure who to call but I’m at the end of my rope,” he said. “I give up. I’m throwing in the towel.” There was a pause. He gave them his name and address. Another pause. “I simply cannot hold it any longer. I don’t know what you do. You come over here and put a cork in it? You put me in a hospital? I don’t know. I can’t deal with it anymore. It’s out of my control.”

  I thought he’d never beat the ticket-booth call. I was wrong. It kept going. “Up until last week I could hold it in. It wasn’t easy but I could do it. Then these past three days it’s just been getting worse and worse. It’s all over the walls and the floor. I cannot hold it in no matter what I do. The bathroom is just, well … it’s a mess.” Despite the fact that my bed was six feet off the ground, my
jaw hit the floor with a plonk. “My EXCREMENT!” he yelled angrily before hanging up the phone.

  I was in shock. He had an exploding rectum? Is that what happens to gays when they get old—their fucking assholes give out? A million questions were racing through my head. Why the fuck didn’t he just wear a diaper? I thought he wore his winter clothes in the house. Now he was dressed like Piglet and spraying feces around the room like a dying gay wood chipper who hates his landlord? “That’s it,” I decided. “I am never letting anyone fuck me in the ass.”

  Three minutes later my buzzer rang. I pushed the talk button. “Hello?”

  “Salut là, avez-vous appellé une ambulance?” I buzzed them in and they banged on my door. When I opened it, I saw four adrenaline-pumped guys my age panting and wondering why I looked so healthy. Two were holding huge oxygen tanks with masks swinging off them on rubber straps, and the other two had a stretcher. “Upstairs!” I yelled, pointing straight up. They nodded and ran upstairs, but I saw one of them pause for a split second wondering how the hell I knew the problem was upstairs. Was I the murderer? He made a mental note to both remember my face and avoid me on the way back down.

  I stood in the hallway waiting and ten minutes later, I saw the old man with the broken asshole get slowly lowered down the stairs. He had an oxygen mask on his face and was strapped in the stretcher with a blanket on him. I watched them stagger across the lobby, through the front doors, and out into the merciless cold. I never saw him again.

  A few weeks later, I could hear sawing and banging and drilling upstairs. When the landlord came by to collect the rent, I invited him in for a coffee. “How you doing?” I asked cautiously.

  “Oh, man,” he said in his half-immigrant/half-Quebecois accent, “I been workin’ upstairs on dat apartment, la. ’Ard work. It smell so bad we ’ad to replace da drywall and everyting.” I asked him what happened and the landlord seemed reluctant to soil my virgin ears with the unimaginable.