My mother, on the other hand, was not meant to be a boozer. She’s a retired teacher who loves gardening, painting, and antagonizing civil servants. She terrorizes the local museum for not having enough Scots and would probably be the next Braveheart if she wasn’t stuck in a house with assholes. Living with an alcoholic is like swimming with an anvil. Eventually you sink. Poor woman. Loving a drunk genius ain’t easy and she’s always on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
For example, he gets these lyrics from songs or commercials in his head and repeats them like Rain Man for days on end. When I met them at the airport, his broken-record mantra was from a car commercial and went, “I don’t wanna work. I just wanna bang on the drum all day.” Todd Rundgren fans will be familiar, as will anyone who has driven home listening to rush-hour classic rock radio. When a Glaswegian sings it, however, the line becomes even more grating. “Ah don wonnee wurk,” he unknowingly mumbled to himself again as we waited to board, “ah jus wonnee bang on da drum all dee day.” My exhausted mother cried, “Oh for fuck’s sake, Jimmy,” and I noticed his Chinese water torture had made her cry. How many times would you have to hear that song before it made you shed tears of sheer desperation? If you guessed once every ten minutes for three weeks straight, you just won an all-expenses-paid trip to Cuba!
The plane was filled with Canadian parents and their kids but there were a few hosers who were under the impression this family resort would be filled with horny sluts. When we arrived in Santiago de Cuba, the airline put us on an airline shuttle bus that took us through a Mad Max movie and dropped us at a sequestered resort, also owned by the airline. We checked in past the armed guards and went to our corny, pastel rooms to get depressed. The resort was on a beach and was composed of an outdoor entertainment area next to a restaurant with a large swimming pool flanked by two medium-sized hotels. There were cement paths that weaved in and out of everywhere and they were decorated with bushes, plants, and sickly palm trees. It was exactly like every resort I’ve ever been to, but shittier. My brother and I were on the outskirts of the first hotel, closer to the main road. We had our own beds and on each one was an eight-by-ten piece of paper listing our itinerary. Every guest was given a schedule for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Beer was free and it tasted like it too. Other events were announced at dinner and fun was mandatory.
Socialism sounds cool in a classroom and nobody can deny the sexiness Che Guevara emanates from each rotting pore but in reality, it sucks. Every adult knows it’s just communism lite, and that means bureaucrats with “Godlike power,” as Milton Friedman put it, and a citizenry of “childlike dependents,” as he also put it. Nobody wears Che T-shirts in Cuba and the fat man in a beard who runs the place is just a reverse Santa who takes every gift God gives and hands it to someone less deserving. Without the invisible hand of capitalism slapping overachievers on the back and spanking lazy bottoms, waiters mope around like the whole thing is below them.
My parents added an extra layer of weirdness to this already bizarre trip. When they drink, they can go from cheery-as-can-be to scary person at the drop of a drop. My mother loses her mind and behaves like someone is channel surfing her personality, whipping through moods like ecstatic, furious, Papua New Guinean, and just TV static. My father, on the other hand, goes from witty bon vivant, to slightly more cynical bon vivant, to a kind of schadenfreude grumpy, to dark satanist, to the most horrible things you’ve ever heard about Africa personified. Then he passes out.
It was our first dinner at the resort and both parents were in their final stages of drunk. Dad was sitting deflated with no lights on and Mum was chastising him for refusing to eat. “You’re not a bloody thirteen-year-old girl, Jimmy,” she yelled, referring to his alcohol-induced anorexia. Then, before she could really tear him a new ass, some mariachis showed up singing Mexican music. My mother instantly changed the channel and was now smiling ear to ear and enthusiastically dancing in her chair. This was particularly disturbing as she still had tears streaming down her face. I looked at my adolescent brother and as soon as our eyes met, this horror movie became a comedy. “This isn’t sad. It’s funny,” we both said with our eyes. It was an epiphany I was having a little too late in life and my brother was having a little too early.
Kyle and I burst into that silent, bouncy laugh you do in class when your teacher tells you to stop laughing or else. (Remember those laughs? Talk about putting out the fire with gasoline.) As gravity slowly pulled slightly chewed food from my brother’s incapacitated lips, I was forced to put both hands on the table to help me inhale. It was the most intense laugh session I’ve ever had because it was pure catharsis. Why were we trying to decipher this insanity and make it work? Insanity is insane. He’s not anorexic. He’s just not hungry because he drank beer all day. She’s not sad. She’s just crying. As Charlton Heston said in Planet of the Apes, “This is a madhouse, A MADHOUSE!”
My brother and I got up to get refreshments and silently agreed to stop trying to translate our parents’ drunken gibberish into some kind of English. “You know what’s great about hanging out with Dad?” I asked my brother as we walked toward the buffet. “We get to see what we’d look like if we had AIDS.” As we laughed, we passed a table of scowling hosers and they gave our chortles an extra boost. They were beginning to come to terms with the notion that family resorts are not known for their abundance of poon tang and this whole vacation was a huge mistake. I was coming to terms with the notion that a little brother can also be a little friend and this vacation was going to be fun. Just then, a motherfucking Indian goddess walked by and smiled.
I’m not talking about one of those stupid Hindu gods where an elephant with eighty arms is dragging a panda man through the ocean on a flying carpet made of sousaphone-playing cobras. I mean an incredibly pretty East Indian twentysomething with perfect tits and a face so cute, it made Bambi look like an abortion who got thrown in the garbage during a heat wave. You see, I’m not into “handsome” when it comes to beauty. Michelle Pfeiffer can keep her enormous cow-catcher chin. She looks like Dick Tracy to me. I like cute chicks who look like cartoons. This girl was a brown Sandra Bullock without the man chin. She had eyelashes drawn by Disney, a ski-jump nose, blow-job lips, and a big, huge smile that looked like its sole purpose was to baffle Alice during her stay in Wonderland.
Being the suave motherfucker that I am, I responded to her furtive glance by dashing my eyes to the floor and not looking up until she was gone. I had just disowned my parents and “switching my mind back into freak mode,” as Nate Dogg put it, was too difficult. My brother and I brought our drinks back to our estranged family members and I sat there furiously trying to think of a way to get out of the wimp hole I’d dug for myself. As my brother stared at my now-sleeping father, my disgusted mother threw down her napkin and went back to her room. A curiously enthusiastic voice came over the loudspeakers and told us to adjourn to the Fiesta Club, which was a huge parking lot made of paving stones and filled with lawn furniture and a fake stream. It was actually kind of nice and the gentle breeze on the tiki torches was making this seem like a classy resort. I was also drunk.
Kyle and I dragged our Weekend at Bernie’s dad over to a table at the Fiesta Club and watched with bated breath as the camp counselors assembled on a makeshift bamboo stage to begin what turned out to be a cruel, racist pantomime. Hard-hitting house music was pounding in the background and it became very clear, very fast that these entertainers were about half a century out of date. The counselors went into the audience and began dragging up volunteers for a competition. They managed to get half a dozen Canadians up onstage and began blindfolding them. Then they said it was a banana-eating competition. But wait, there’s a twist. While they brought a banana to the first guy, they unblindfolded the others and quietly walked them off the stage. He had no idea he was now all alone. At the shout of “Go!” our hero devoured the banana in a few embarrassing bites. When the blindfold came off, I couldn’t help but notice he was Asian. “You w
in, China!” exclaimed the host. Then he turned to the uncomfortable audience and said, “But he also loses.” He was expecting a huge round of applause but Canadians are way too polite to enjoy public humiliations so they chose to writhe in their seats instead. My dad’s sense of justice startled him awake and he yelled, “Oh for fucksakes. At least give him a bottle of rum or some’ing!” before falling back asleep. I noticed the huge can of beer he was holding was full of warm vodka, and so did my brother. Then I realized something even more bizarre. The dance music they were playing was a very family-unfriendly song called “Fuck U in the Ass” by the aptly named Outhere Brothers. My brother and I had already gone into our heads and flicked the switch from “terrible” to “awesome” so all the trash being flung into our faces was just more grist for the mill and we were ecstatic. Could this night get any better?
Just then I looked over and saw my Paki was still smiling. She too had a brother who was about thirteen and she was sitting with him, alone. I came up with a plan that only a drunk man could come up with and headed over, brother in tow.
“Can we sit here?” I asked like a good buddy not trying to get laid.
“Sure,” she responded with that Cheshire smile. “I’m Sonya,” she said.
“I wanna fuck you in the ass,” I said, realizing how risky an intro it was. She seemed concerned but I pointed out the background music and she burst out laughing. So did her brother, Rajiv. I was in.
Onstage, our oriental countryman was still being abused. “Where are you from?” asked the host. The victim replied, “Toronto,” and the host came back with, “I donnnn’t thiiiiink soooooo,” to the crowd. He was making his Cuban eyes all Chinesey by pulling them sideways with his forefingers. We were in awe.
Sonya didn’t care that I had avoided her gaze earlier but I was consumed with it and needed redemption. While Kyle and Rajiv considered trying cigarettes, I took Sonya aside. “I have to tell you something,” I said with a face so serious I couldn’t believe it. “You know earlier when I walked by you?” She didn’t really know what I was talking about. “Well, I ignored you over by the buffet table,” I said. She did one of those drawn-out “OKs” that means, “Where are you going with this?” and then I said, “My mother’s dead.”
“What?” Sonya and my brain said in unison.
“Yeah,” I began like a blind man in a drag race, “that woman you saw with my dad is not my mother. It’s his new girlfriend. She’s real overbearing and wants to replace our mother even though it’s barely been a year. It’s driving me crazy. She even invents stories and tries to write herself into our family history. When I saw you earlier she had just insisted I call her ‘Mom’ and I was so fucking mad. Besides, it’s ‘Mum’ in Canada.” Sonya put a consoling hand on my leg as I told her about my mother’s abrupt passing and what a wonderful woman she was. We later went for a walk along the beach to talk about it. Our cockblocking brothers followed us into the dark.
As we walked along the white sand, the moon lit up my bullshit like a giant lie detector in the sky. Sonya pointed out that my brother was surprisingly carefree for someone who recently lost his mother. I came up with this …
“He didn’t react at all when the doctors told us there was nothing more they could do,” I told her while blinking slowly. “At the funeral he was the same way—stoic, stone-faced, emotionless. This went on for weeks. He barely spoke. Never got angry. Never complained but more importantly never cried.” Dramatic pause. Glance at the moon.
“A big part of mourning is going through the pain,” I told her knowingly, despite not knowing what I was talking about. “And I knew he could never move forward unless he confronted his pain.” Sonya gave an understanding nod. “Then, one day, we went bowling. He asked me if I wanted a drink because he was getting one and I told him to get me a Coke. When he came back, he had two Diet Cokes in his hand and he gave me one.” Yet another dramatic pause. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Kyle, what are you doing? I don’t drink Diet Coke. I’ve never had a Diet Coke in my life.’ Well, you know what he did? He collapsed and began crying his eyes out. He cried and he cried and he didn’t stop—for three days.” At this point, Sonya was also about to cry despite the fact that, to this day, I’ve never gone bowling with my brother. I like bowling about as much as I like Coke, which is not much.
Sonya stopped and let our brothers catch up. She kissed Kyle on his forehead and he gave her a “What the fuck?” look. “Come on, Rajiv,” she said to her brother before turning to me and saying, “We’ll see you guys tomorrow. I had a really great time tonight. Thank you.” As they walked away my brother asked me what all that was about. I brought him up to speed and he said it made him feel nauseous.
Wait, wait, wait. Stop the book …
At this point, you might be thinking, “This guy is obviously a liar, so who’s to say this whole book isn’t full of lies?” This accusation is very serious because the whole book is based on the idea of the stories being true.
Therefore: I hereby swear that every story told by me in this book happened. I am offering a $1,000 reward to anyone who proves otherwise. That obviously doesn’t include “Oh, there were five guys there, not four” or “It was a redhead named Lola, not a blonde named Lisa.” You get $1,000 if a story told by me in this book is made up, not if I get an irrelevant detail wrong.*
I never lie. I may pull the occasional prank but I always make it clear it was a prank within the week. Otherwise it’s a lie and as I said, I don’t lie.
So, enjoy my dead mother while she’s gone because she will rise again in a few days.
The next day our newly formed foursome snuck around the compound making fun of people. The horny hosers had bombed with Sonya and we spied on them as they tried to figure out a way to actually meet someone who was going to fuck them. Later, we ran into my parents by the pool. It was early afternoon but they were already pretty gone. I was worried my mum was going to blow the whole part where she’s not alive anymore but her attorney Mr. Booze had advised her to speak gibberish. After being introduced to Sonya and her brother, Mum went off on a bizarre tirade that involved me, “or was it Kyle,” smearing shit all over my crib and saying, “Look at me, Mommy.” I’ve never heard that story before or since and not knowing which kid it was really sealed Mum’s fate as someone only pretending to be my mother. I looked at Sonya and she looked back at me consolingly.
Later on, in our room, my brother begged me to stop the charade. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “Today Mum asked me to do something and I caught myself thinking, ‘Who the fuck are you to talk to me like that? You’re not my mother.’” I assured him the cat would be out of the bag as soon as it started to get boring, which it showed no signs of becoming, so he should hang in there.
We spent the better part of the trip hanging out with the Pakis but no matter how well I played my cards, I could not get in her pants. I don’t know if it was because her father kept checking in on us or our brothers kept botching the deal, but I didn’t even get a kiss on the lips. Talk about bros before hos. Then my brother really blew any chances of my getting a blow job. He told us about a rape that was happening right then.
We were all lounging in the pool, riffing and shooting the shit as I stole glances at Sonya’s unbelievable body. We joked about how stupid the word “restroom” is. Someone is so ashamed of going to the bathroom they pretend they’re just going there for a break. “What a spot for a time out,” I said. Then Sonya told us about a reality show where some junkie said, “And when I awoke, I saw I had gone to the restroom all over myself.” We all died laughing. This inspired a recurring joke that I continue to deploy, using the word “restroom” in a stupid context, like, “No matter how well you shake your dick, a little drop always goes to the restroom in your underwear.”
Kyle’s confidence was up after all our bonding and he was starting to talk about his life back home. He told us about his girlfriend Tammy and how hot she was. It’s weird hearing this kind of stuff f
rom a sibling fourteen years younger than you because as much as he’s your brother, you’re also kind of his dad. Even today I carefully enjoy his drinking stories only after I’m sure nobody in the story was driving.
“Has she got big tits?” Rajiv asked.
Sonya and I said, “Ew,” and my brother proudly said, “Oh yeah. Huge ones. She’s really developed for her age.” We heard about what it’s like to be a kid, which I had totally forgotten about, and then he accidentally dropped a Hiroshima-sized bomb on the whole pool. “Her stepfather’s a total dick though,” he said.
“Aren’t they all?” I added, referring to our fake mom.
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s always telling her what to do and bossing her around.” I rolled my eyes but didn’t really care because that’s adolescence, right? “Yeah,” he said before adding, “then at night he’ll come into her room and grab her tits and shit. He’s an asshole.” I nodded knowingly until I realized what I’d just heard. I leapt off my inflatable chaise lounge and stood in the shallow end dripping with incredulity. “WHAT!?” I said at him so loud he immediately regretted saying anything. It was too late. The cat was out of the bag. Kyle’s girlfriend was getting molested. That’s called rape. She had a live-in rapist. That’s a felony. We had to do something. We told Kyle he had better handle it the second we got back or we would. He was bummed.
The trip back was relatively uneventful until the hosers, who were rumored to have been taking cabs back and forth to the city to fuck prostitutes, started drinking heavily on the plane. “Who hates Cuba?” hollered the drunkest one, expecting a huge chorus of “Hell yeahs” from the Canadian families around him. He was forced to settle for his friend halfheartedly yelling, “Cuba sucks,” and that was that.
How to Piss in Public Page 10