“Did his ass explode?” I asked, breaking the ice.
The landlord was taken aback. “Ow did you know ’bout dat?” he asked.
“Because I fucking heard it, dude,” I told him. “Every word.”
The Story of Vice: Part One (1994–1999)
Suroosh Alvi was a pretty serious heroin addict who hung out at the back of our local bar Le Biftek with sketchy guys in black sweatshirts. His habit was up to $300 a day at one point. He kept trying to quit but it never took and he’d died so many times, the paramedics would beat him up out of sheer frustration after reviving him again.
His Pakistani parents were verklempt about it, and one day his father invited him to the mosque to pray. Suroosh was apathetic but decided to check it out. As he prayed, he saw Allah appear before him with two admonitions. One: You’re never doing heroin again. Two: You’re going to start a magazine. Allah nailed it.
There are no actual jobs in Montreal, especially if you don’t speak French without an accent (mine is 90 percent perfect, which is considered the same as 0 percent). The only work there is through government programs or grants and there was a group of Haitians who ran a free newspaper called Images Interculturelles through some fund named after the first black man to ever visit Canada, Mathieu de Costa. I guess the mandate was to promote nonwhite culture throughout the land but I’m not sure. They were very secretive. Looking back, I think they had received money to start an English version of their paper and had chosen Suroosh to head the operation. Possibly because Allah told them to. It was meant to cover multiculturalism in Montreal. Suroosh named it Voice of Montreal, ignored his instructions, and made it into a music zine so he could write about bands he liked.
As he was putting together the first issue, a slacker friend named Rufus told me I should meet up with Suroosh and do cartoons for him. I was on the tenth issue of my comic Pervert at the time and had won some irrelevant awards. The comic was evolving from simple graphic novel to more written content, including CD reviews and a long letters page where I’d make fun of other people’s shitty art. I was DJing at Le Biftek with my buddy Derrick Beckles, AKA Pinky Carnage, whom I used to deal pot with. He had also quit due to massive farting. Pinky was a lanky grunge Negro who looked like Buckwheat if Buckwheat played for the NBA, shopped at the army surplus, and was in a band. Pinky was a tree planter too and we had just returned from a brutal season up north. I bought myself an enormous Suzuki GS850 motorbike with some of the money and was looking forward to another carpet-bombing. I walked into the Interculturelles office wearing a pompadour, leather jacket, creepers, and my motorcycle helmet. Suroosh thought I was rich and very tough, though I was neither. After showing him some cartoons, we talked about writing. He was basically the only employee and was meant to write the entire first issue and sell all the ads. I told him I was only tangentially interested in journalism and then went on a tirade about how people should write the way they talk and just say whatever came to their minds instead of being so careful about everything. He offered me the job as editor and I said, “No thanks.”
A few days later, I was smoking a joint on my roof and talking about the future with Dogboy, who had recently moved to Montreal to focus on partying. He seemed happy living life in cruise control, which pissed me off. “Don’t you want to really sink your teeth into something?” I asked. After I heard myself ask that I remembered the frustration of coming back from Europe to nothing. That’s what I went to Taiwan for, to get a nest egg. Selling pot was supposed to make the nest egg big enough to get something going but all I was doing was this stupid comic book.
“The only thing I want to sink my teeth into is a fucking smoked-meat sandwich at Schwartz’s,” he replied. “You in?”
“No,” I said, looking out over a city devoted to not working hard. Then it hit me like a skinhead bat to the forehead: I’d just had the future handed to me on a silver platter and said, “No thanks.”
The next morning I jumped on my motorbike and almost crashed it into the Interculturelles building. I ran upstairs and begged Suroosh for the job I’d turned down. He seemed surprised and then explained it wasn’t possible. “I asked about it after you left and learned this whole company is entangled in all kinds of government bureaucracy,” he said. “I can only hire people on welfare because the pay is in welfare.”
“No problem,” I said, shaking his hand excitedly. “I’ll be right back.”
I’d been boning French chicks for a while now and was always shocked to see how many able-bodied young white women had no qualms about being on welfare. They’d give me protips such as “Act crazy and retarded,” and I’d huff and tell them I’d never consider such a thing in a million years. But an hour after shaking Suroosh’s hand I was sitting in front of a social worker with my eyes crossed pretending I didn’t speak any languages sufficiently. When she handed me some forms to fill out, I used my left hand and not one letter was between the lines. By the time I walked out of that office I had the best-paying welfare available and an envelope with $100 tucked in it to tide me over.
I got straight to work writing record reviews such as, “The first song is all ‘dfffh dffh dffh’ but after that it’s nothing but guitars going ‘neer neer n’neer.’” Suroosh grew up listening to punk, too, and our naïve arrogance and fuck-off attitudes quickly separated us from the pack. In a city with only a handful of Anglophones to entertain, we were getting noticed.
Our bosses gave us government pamphlets on upcoming ethnic parades and we threw them in the garbage while writing about prostitutes and rap. Suroosh’s heroin withdrawals had put his mind in a dark place, and we both got into what was called “hate literature” back then, which was more about death and suffering than anything racial. A Danish magazine called Sewer Cunt seared our eyeballs with its graphic depictions of murder, and an American zine called FUCK was so harsh it gave our brains third-degree burns, but nothing charbroiled our souls like Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! He didn’t give a shit what anyone thought and wrote about the upside of rape as if he was contributing to Reader’s Digest.
My Scottish roots were also taking over. When the Scots settled upstate New York they gave places names like Cunt Creek and Fuck Mountain because the Scots are funny dicks. They weren’t trying to be edgy. They were just a bunch of fucking assholes. The core of my humor was this same old Scottish “fuck off, you cunt.” Scotland also has this obsession with justice where they grab people for butting in line and get annoyed when people are weak. I was walking through Glasgow with my ninety-year-old grandmother one afternoon and there was a couple in front of us dressed the same. They both had denim overalls and cable-knit turtleneck sweaters and my gran was incensed. “Look at that wee jesse,” she said, because “jesse” means “wimp.” “She’s laid that out on the bed for him this morning and he’s gone and put it all on without a second thought.” After she said that I thought, “Oh, so that’s where I get the [Vice street fashion satire column] ‘DOs and DON’Ts’ from.”
Despite the shocking content, we felt there was a future in this—mostly because we had no intention of giving up, ever. Our bosses didn’t seem to share this enthusiasm and wanted us to stay their tiny golden goose. Every time we talked about getting serious with the business and making a real go of it, they’d come up with a reason why it couldn’t be done. We were their welfare-state cash cow, and the last thing they wanted was to let the real world fuck it up.
We had a black saleswoman who I suspect was mentally ill. After a year of not really making money, I decided I would take over and start selling ads. I asked crazy lady what I should do to help, and she suggested selling a page of florists’ business cards since it was almost Valentine’s Day. I don’t know if you’ve ever cold-called fags and tried to bullshit them into giving you money for nothing, but after the thirty-first hang up punctuated by “Whatever!” I was ready to go to jail for manslaughter. I couldn’t handle it. So, I wrote a plea to my Leatherassbuttfuk bandmate Bullshitter Shane. We needed him to ta
ke over sales.
Shane had fucked off to Europe too and had talked his way into an opulent lifestyle teaching English in Budapest. I’d been sending him every issue as it came out and he’d defend it to the other expats over there who called it trite. Luckily, the trip had run its course and he was ready to come back. A few days after landing in Montreal, he pulled the same cross-eyed welfare scam at my behest and started as our head of sales right after our first-year anniversary. Our saleswoman realized this made her obsolete. She handled it by running out onto the street and shrieking at cars. Shane wasn’t a good salesman—he was a great salesman, and he did it beautifully every day until taking over the magazine’s editorial content when I abdicated the throne thirteen years later.
Shane’s work ethic was inspiring too and his marketing talents were peerless. He’d call me from a pay phone late at night and say, “We are going to be rich,” into the receiver again and again like a financial pervert with OCD. We were publishing one issue a month and we based the print run on how much income we had, so we never went into debt. It was the perfect business model but the bosses didn’t seem happy with it, and they didn’t like the new direction, either. When Shane tried to send the magazine to potential clients, our bosses told him the stamps were too expensive.
In the summer of 1996 my old tree-planting boss Markus was making the two-hour drive from Montreal to Ottawa, so I hitched a ride to go visit the folks. On the trip I explained to him how we were prepared to give Interculturelles an ultimatum: Get serious or we’re doing it ourselves. Markus is an entrepreneur and didn’t understand why we’d even bother with an ultimatum. “Just leave,” he said. He was right. What were we waiting for? I called Shane and Suroosh the second I got to my parents’ house. “Let’s start it from scratch and change the name from Voice to Vice! They won’t have a case.”
Interculturelles threatened to sue us for leaving so we paid them off via a payment plan that took forever. Two months after the drive with Markus we were on our own, working and sleeping in a loft together and loving it. We were finally free and the new direction was even better than the old one. Voice was an okay name because we let people speak for themselves and would often allow a prostitute to write an article instead of interviewing her, but Vice implies offensiveness and that made more sense. We liked to push buttons until our fingers bled.
We went national in 1996 by offering radio stations and record stores free ads if they stuck us in cafés and record shops. Soon we were using the same technique across the border to get Vice into New York and L.A. This was exactly the kind of project I was talking about on the roof with Dogboy, not fake welfare scams. I get really annoyed when people say Vice was started by a government program. It started despite a government program. The only way we could get a business going in Quebec was to sneak in the bureaucracy’s asshole and then bust out of their stomach like aliens. The rest was by dint of hard work. If the bureaucrats had their way, we’d still be noodling away in their rectum distributing ten thousand copies of ethnic parade information around office lobbies.
Leaving Interculturelles was like being unchained. Things started to get exciting. I worked my ass off every waking moment and cut costs to the point where we were doing the whole thing for free. Paying a designer was expensive so I learned desktop publishing and took over that job. I shot the pictures myself, wrote the articles, edited them, and laid them out. When people said we needed more women or minorities, I made up ethnic-sounding or female aliases for myself. Suroosh helped with editorial and focused on music. He had this incredible ear and could foresee the future of bands. He was almost never wrong and later predicted the indie success of Chromeo, Death from Above 1979, the Streets, Bloc Party, the Stills, Fucked Up, and the Black Lips, to name a few. Shane always had a better work ethic than us but being independent really put things into overdrive. He traveled by bus to other cities and had meetings with corporate heads who had no idea how he got in there. We couldn’t afford lawyers so deals were done with handshakes and if someone fucked us over, they were dead. We were banned and sued and threatened and ripped off, but the only thing that could have stopped us was murder. We sent drugs to clients in the mail and got violent with competition and regularly fucked the gross old cougars in charge of buying ad space. Rival magazines often accused us of “eating our way to the top.” My old lesbian roommates liked to bitch about the patriarchy but the matriarchy’s a bitch too.
While Suroosh remained clean, the rest of us sank ourselves into drugs. We regularly OD’d on mescaline (which in Montreal was probably just horse tranquilizers). I don’t have many stories from this time because life outside of work was just sitting on couches in club basements and listening to dance music that was so shitty, you had to be off your head to enjoy it. I spent every weekend high on ecstasy or GHB, Frenching with my friend Mireille all night, and returning home in the early morning to fuck my lesbo girlfriend Alex in the ass.
We had our difficulties, too. Our computers were refurbished pieces of shit we were hustled into buying and they contained so many defects, it wasn’t unusual for me to lose a ten-page layout I’d spent all night assembling. Every time something like that happened, I’d get up off the floor, sweep away all the pieces of the chair I just smashed to bits, and focus on the fact that most people would have quit at this point, and that I wouldn’t. I was also happy not to be planting trees anymore.
For the most part, our lives became a mirror image of the Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. We wrote about our drug trips, got in fights, and documented every moment. We hired an ex-con loan shark as our editor and he wrote about murder. In a city where everyone was polite and shy, our fearless gonzo journalism stuck out like a thumb covered in shit. When we were fingered for being “sexist” after featuring nude porn stars in the magazine, Shane, Suroosh, and I posed buck naked for a photo and slapped it in the front of the magazine. We started a record label and put out all our friends’ bands. We were making the most money we’d ever made in our lives doing what we loved, and it kept going because every time we got some extra cash, we put it right back in the company.
As the buzz snowballed, we started getting interviewed by the same uptight, starchy old-person media we’d been lampooning. We sabotaged every interview with bullshit. When asked about Vice’s future, Shane told the reporter we had just been bought by local dot-com billionaire Richard Szalwinski.
We didn’t think anything of this stupid lie as it was just one of many, but a few hours after the article was published, we got a call from the man himself. Szalwinski appreciated our bravado and wanted to meet. The next day we were sitting in his gigantic office and telling him about our company. Richard was an ex-nerd in designer glasses, a St. Barts tan, and a floral Gucci suit. He had made $500 million by getting in early with the CGI guys who did Jurassic Park. We saw a really loud Letterman-looking guy with a very nasal voice who kept saying, “The most important thing is we have fun. That’s number one.” I liked him. At the end of the meeting, he said, “Come back tomorrow with a one-page business plan and if you don’t try to fuck my ass, I’ll invest.” We ran home and spent the next twenty-four hours trying to fit three hundred pounds of bullshit onto one piece of paper.
The second time we were in Richard’s office he had the sheet in his hand and was impressed. He brought in a greasy, corpulent Frenchman who was his bus-dev guy and they read it aloud together. The bottom line was about a million dollars for 25 percent of the company, and after a few easy questions he said, “Let’s do it!” We shook his hand and the fat guy’s hand and I respectfully said, “You won’t regret it, Mr. Szalwinski.”
“Call me Richard, you fuck!” he yelled back in his nasal voice. “And only assholes shake hands.”
We calmly walked out of the building, across the front lawn, and when we were out of sight, we went from mild-mannered businessmen to frantic teenagers who’d just won the lottery. We ran in circles shouting, “AAAAAAHHH!” and occasionally stopped to
hug the living shit out of each other. By the time we were done, we had grass stains all over our pants and were speechless. After getting our checks, Richard said the first order of business was moving the whole operation to New York. “That is, if you have the balls,” he said. We did.
The Cuban Penis Crisis (2000)
Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn, my parents invited me to join them on a trip to Cuba. It seemed like a good idea at the time because I tend not to think about things the way a smart person does. Besides, I had just become rich.
Canadians love going to Cuba because it’s difficult for Americans to do and Canadians love anything un-American. My parents love Cuba because they’re Scottish and all Scots care about is saving money and drinking alcohol. Cuba combines the two in a generic resort setting surrounded by razor wire, beyond which is an environment that goes way past cookie-cutter and into wrist-slitter.
I flew up to Ottawa and met my mom, dad, and then-thirteen-year-old brother at the airport a couple of hours before we were booked to leave. Within about five minutes of meeting my folks, I remembered how deranged they are. My father is cursed with an abnormally high IQ. He’s a certified genius—a physicist and engineer whose groundbreaking work with sonar called Russia’s nuclear submarine bluff and eventually led to the fall of communism. He’s responsible for the world’s fastest tank and once got out of a drunk driving charge by doing math problems so complex, the officer needed a calculator to keep up (he barely remembers this as he was black-out drunk at the time). People with these kinds of minds either go mad like Dr. John, become workaholics, or lobotomize themselves with alcohol. My dad chose all three. He has a sense of humor about it though. I once accused him of a drinking problem and he said, “The only ‘problem’ I have is that I’m addicted to it and I let it affect my life detrimentally.”
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