How to Piss in Public

by McInnes, Gavin

  During the commercial break one of the clipboard people ran over and crouched next to my chair. “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said with my eyes bugged out.

  He sounded like a guidance counselor and said, “You need to talk more. It doesn’t matter what you say, just talk.” I told him I needed booze. He was thrilled my problem was so easy to solve and ran off to fill my coffee mug with Guinness. I inhaled it and asked for more and he was happy to oblige. By the time we came back, my cocaine buzz was finally under control and I was ready to fuck with this smug little dwarf.

  Bill brought up his favorite topic, religion, and everyone had something to say. I sat back and bided my time because I wanted the second thing to come out of my mouth to be perfect. When asked if he believed in God, Robert Conrad jumped out of his chair and held his hands up to the sky. “Praise Jesus,” he said. “Praise the Lord!” He wasn’t kidding. The bishop pointed out that the number of people who identify themselves as Christian has been steadily on the rise and, despite Hollywood’s disdain for it, America is still 75 percent Christian. Lisa Ann tried to get a word in edgewise about her mother but Bill wanted to get to his next question. “Good,” I thought. “I’m ready to redeem myself—through Christ.”

  “All right,” Bill said to the group, “we’ve got George Bush saying he follows the words of Jesus and even asks him for advice. Bill Clinton often said the same thing. All of a sudden, presidents are telling us they have a close relationship with Jesus—and even ask him for advice! Is this right? Should a country that promises to separate church and state have presidents that talk to Jesus?” The guests all looked at each other wondering who was going to take this on first. This is where Bill usually chooses someone. “I think what’s really important to note here is that we finally have a GAY JEW in the White House,” I said straight-faced. A stunned silence swept over the show as they all looked at each other. “He’s gay,” I added. “You saw him. Come on. Everybody knows this. It’s a fact,” I said.

  After several seconds of awkward silence Bill let out a stupefied “What?” Lisa Ann Walter turned to me and said incredulously, “He wasn’t gay.” The bishop was smiling and shaking his head. “Well he seemed pretty gay to me,” I said. “Long hair and a dress.” Bill Maher finally came up with, “Just because he had long hair doesn’t mean he’s gay. I mean, I used to have long hair.” Nobody knew what to do with this theory so I took the edge off by saying, “All I’m saying is it’s a well-accepted theory,” and Bill then zinged me back with, “So now it’s a theory? A second ago you said it was a fact,” and the crowd cheered. I stood up on my chair and chastised the crowd for cheering. “STOP ENCOURAGING HIM!” I yelled, waving my arms in the air like a lunatic. Audiences seem to like it when you acknowledge them so after this fake temper tantrum they cheered and hollered every time I did something in the hopes I’d make them part of the show again.

  The crowd was delirious and Bill Maher was bumming out. When Lisa Ann Walter finally got to mention her mother, I hollered, “She never liked me!” This threw her off a bit so I grabbed her arm and yelled, “I always loved you,” and tried to kiss her. Bill Maher suggested Robert Conrad kick my ass but he didn’t know Conrad was my nigga from backstage and Conrad said, “No. I like this guy.”

  Eventually the show was over and we said our good-byes to a screaming audience that sounded like they were getting paid per clap. The clipboard people were patting me on the back and telling me I was DEFINITELY going to be on the show again, which is basically what the principal in Taiwan said when I was fired.

  That night, back at the stunning hotel suite HBO had set us up with, Pinky and I finished off the cocaine, the scotch, and later, the minibar. As I lay on my back drifting out of consciousness I remember Pinky saying, “Remember in Montreal when we’d show up at a party and just evacuate it by doing one of our gay dance routines or just hogging the spotlight until nobody could take it anymore?” I mumbled a response that sounded like “continue” and he said, “I feel like we’re on the verge of doing that with all of television. Let’s get inside television and just fuck with it.” I drifted into the blackness at this point but his last words, “fuck with it,” stuck and I remember thinking, “Yeah.”

  Lying to the Press (1999–)

  When hiring writers I noticed the least interesting ones were those with journalism degrees. Their incompetence really hit me when the more experienced ones started interviewing us for features in other publications. They had no idea who we were and why they were writing about us, so fucking with them was irresistible.

  Quebec’s answer to The New York Times is Le Devoir and they wanted to interview us because someone else did. That’s how it works in media. One writer has the balls to dig up a new story and the others cling to it like lampreys on a shark. The original story that got us into this print assembly line was based on a prank. The truth was, we changed the name from Voice of Montreal to Vice so the old owners couldn’t sue us, but that’s boring, so we changed the narrative to “The big, ugly, American corporate newspaper Village Voice threatened to shut us down so we had to change the name.” Once this caught on, it was in every newspaper in the country and not one person fact-checked it or even called The Village Voice. Canadians love David-and-Goliath stories about American bullying, and they weren’t about to let facts ruin the fun.

  The woman from Le Devoir showed up late wearing a fur coat and had notebooks and pens flopping all over the place like a drunk aristocrat. It seemed to me that she didn’t care about her job and was in it for the galas and luncheons, so when she pulled out the same old, “How did you guys meet?” I decided to intercept that football and run with it. I don’t suffer fools gladly, but I will gladly make fools suffer.

  “It’s actually a pretty amazing story,” I told her with a shit-eating grin. “Shane and I were best friends from a very young age but as we got older, we noticed some changes. We couldn’t quite place it, but there seemed to be some kind of urge growing within us.” She nodded her head very thoughtfully and jotted down my prevarications. “Anyway,” I added as if it was An Evening at the Improv, “we were about eighteen and I was tickling him … just messing around and being crazy. I ended up on top of him and our faces were about an inch from each other when, whoops, we just started kissing.” She was scribbling away like her pen was on fire. “The second our lips touched,” I told her, “a million questions were answered. You know what I mean?” She said she knew exactly what I meant, which I thought was weird because I didn’t. I added another twenty tons of perjury to my name and she devoured every morsel. When the photographer came in an hour later, Shane and I posed locked in an embrace and that’s how the feature ran: two lovers find their voice in print. From that point on, almost every interview I did was a stream-of-consciousness, free-association swirling turd ribbon that was mainly a test of the writer’s incompetence.

  Pranking the media went from a lark to a lifelong commitment. If the reporters had done their homework and asked us something that wasn’t easily answered with a tiny bit of research (like reading the previous article about us), I’d give them honest answers, but it almost never worked out like that. I told journalists we all met in rehab. I said I was an ex–gang member who had been scared straight by my homie’s death. The less research they were willing to do, the crazier the story I was willing to concoct.

  Then we moved to America, where journalists are even less interested in truth.

  Where French v. English was the big deal in Montreal, America was all about race. So when the New York Press came to interview us, I dressed up as a Nazi skinhead and had Shane dress as a British soccer hooligan. Suroosh wore a suit and we put a bandage on his head covered in fake blood. He was our hate-crime victim. We played our roles to a T, and when the reporter asked us if we get annoyed by all the hipsters in Brooklyn I said, “Well, at least they’re not fucking niggers or Puerto Ricans.” This caused a minor earthquake in the local media because you
’re not supposed to use that horrible, horrible word but I’m sorry. Whenever people say “African-American,” all I hear is “Black people freak me out.” Eventually all this niggermarole brought The New York Times to our door. When they prodded me for a similar quote, my self-destructive instincts kicked in and I told them, “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.” In a culture where “racist” includes anything but white self-flagellation, this quote ballooned into a gigantic Super Ghost that has haunted me ever since—and maybe it should. It definitely wasn’t complete bullshit like the other pranks. I don’t think being white is anything to be ashamed of. Hell, we didn’t start slavery, we ended it. I was well aware the poo-bahs at the Times would turn my Western chauvinism into “Nazi hipster wants to kill Mexicans,” and I threw gas on the fire anyway. I’ll always be one Google search away from being fired from a normal job but I’d rather it be like that than have to search for the proper words every time I open my big mouth.

  My most involved prank was prompted in late 2009 after I had left Vice, and the media website Gawker encouraged readers to send in votes to decide who was the Hipster of the Decade. The finalists were myself, a woman who went to jail for fraud and was known as the Hipster Grifter, a group of promoters called Misshapes, American Apparel founder Dov Charney, and the anonymous creator of the website and radio show Hipster Runoff. I had some footage lying around of myself eating cornflakes soaked in piss to see if the expression “Who pissed in your cornflakes?” has any basis in fact. It was for a sketch comedy DVD I did called Gavin McInnes Is a Fucking Asshole but we couldn’t use it because it was so fucking gross, it dominated the whole movie and ruined all the jokes that followed it (kind of like when Sinéad O’Connor ripped up that picture of the pope on SNL). I decided to pretend it hadn’t been shot yet and used it as evidence of a prank where I had been tricked into eating it after losing a bet.

  While posing as my buddy Arvind Dilawar, I invented this whole complicated challenge to the Gawker readers that said I’d convinced Gavin to eat a bowl of piss-soaked cornflakes if he won the competition. This brought in a ton of extra votes but not enough to win. When “Gavin” didn’t win, “Arvind” tricked “Gavin” into thinking he DID win by Photoshopping the results. As far as the public was concerned, Gavin foolishly believed the lie and thought he was the Hipster of the Decade. Meanwhile, I was both guys and knew full well I hadn’t won. Posing as Arvind, I posted the footage of Gavin eating the bowl of cornflakes. Are you with “me”? I know. It’s involved. Basically I duped Gawker into thinking someone had duped me into eating a bowl of piss. They ate it up like untainted breakfast cereal and reveled in my humiliation.

  The headline read hipster of the decade loser gavin mcinnes accepts “award” by eating bowl of pissed-in cereal and the article went on to say, “Dying. No, seriously. Okay: Street Carnage impresario Gavin McInnes told his blogger he’d piss in Corn Flakes and eat them if he won our Hipster of the Decade contest. He lost. So … why’s he pissing in Corn Flakes and eating them? Well, the answer: he was pranked.”

  There’s something really satisfying about reading someone who is pranked say, “he was pranked.” It felt great but nothing will ever top the one I played on our hometown’s leading paper, the Ottawa Citizen, ten years earlier in 1999. Besides being useless at their jobs, journalists are also sycophants looking to mingle with the “tastemakers.” After talking to the kid who was flying down from Ottawa to interview us, it seemed abundantly clear he was just looking to have fun in New York. I explained I was trying to get a show on TV with the help of Tom Green’s old producer and the reporter suggested he come to the pitch. “Fuck no,” I thought to myself. “Of course,” I said aloud.

  I decided we were going to create an entire universe for this reporter à la The Truman Show. I wasn’t only pitching shows to MTV—we were merging with them (a concoction that ironically ended up becoming somewhat true a decade later). I enlisted my friend Matt Sweeney to be the network exec and he brought in his cousin Spencer as their Next Big Thing. Matt suggested we all meet at an incredibly expensive restaurant in SoHo called Canteen.

  When we got there, the reporter nervously pulled out his tape recorder and repeatedly thanked everyone for the privilege of being there. Matt is a tall, skinny musician with a funny mustache and his cousin Spencer is a stoned-looking young artist who was squatting in Tompkins Square Park at the time. They were both acting very serious and self-important, the way their characters should be. As my bill mounted, I realized Matt had stuffed a scam within a scam and was actually hustling a pricey lunch out of me in the process. After a bit of small talk, Matt got down to brass tacks. “Spencer is my eyes and ears,” he told the table before looking at Shane, Suroosh, and me and adding, “He says you guys are it.” Before we could interject he added, “I think it’s time to merge.” Someone at the table suggested we change the name from MTV to ViceTV, but Matt was good at his job and called the guy a cretin.

  The reporter was blown away. This was a real-deal New York meeting with the city’s biggest players and he was in the thick of it. By the end of the meeting, we were all millionaires and I was stuck with the biggest lunch bill I’d ever had, $350.

  Over the next few days, we stuffed that reporter so full of horseshit he smelled like an ass. We were buying a building in midtown for ViceCo. We set up franchises across Europe, China, and the Middle East. I collected antique cars. The list was endless. When the feature finally came out, it took up three entire newspaper pages carrying the headline tom green wannabes want their mtv. (My father still keeps this article in his office and regularly brings it out to show guests. “They usually cringe when I read it,” he once told me proudly, “until they find out the whole thing’s fake. Then they love it.”)

  I showed the piece to the Tom Green producer and was surprised to see her go beet-red with rage. “You can’t do this!” she screeched, apparently having never heard of hijinks before. “It’s unethical.” Then she called the Ottawa Citizen and ratted us out. Thanks, lady. When he realized what happened, the reporter completely lost his shit and spent the next few days calling everyone in the feature and babbling about ethics and honesty and yadda yadda yadda. I think he was drinking. He was especially mad at Matt Sweeney, a person he hadn’t noticed was phenomenally easy to look up.

  In response to the first few calls, Matt told him to calm down, but Matt eventually became annoyed and gave a line that I have used maybe ten thousand times since. “Relax, guy,” he said flatly. “It’s New York City. You got hustled.”

  New Wave Hookers (2000)

  Passerby was an art gallery in the West Village with a fun bar and a dance floor that lit up like Saturday Night Fever. A hilariously eccentric group of designers called As Four would often be there dressed in mummy rags and stilettos with their circular purses and pointy beards and tits hanging out, but it was also kind of scuzzy. You’d see junkies among the artists and it wasn’t unusual to see a drag queen beating the shit out of someone who was trying to steal his handbag.

  Pinky had come to visit New York from Montreal and he was dressed like a grunge B-boy in basketball shoes and dirty jeans. Vice was still in the throes of the dot-com boom at this point and I was not spending my money wisely. I was rocking a Eurotrash velour tracksuit with no pockets and spotless $200 kicks. I was also buying way too much gold and had a huge ring on every finger. One said “Love,” another said, “Hate,” and there was also “Brooklyn Lager,” “NYPD,” and, of course, “Vice.” I had gold teeth and had blown almost $1,000 on a huge gold rope chain around my neck.

  Pinky was smoking a cigarette outside Passerby and I was with him. Then a cab pulled up and three of the hottest women I’d ever seen climbed out. I also remember a dry-ice haze all around, but that’s probably just in my head. They were all dressed like those girls in the ZZ Top video
s they call “the Eliminator Girls.” They had fingerless gloves on and huge hair with tutus and weird plastic jewelry. They looked like slutty versions of early Madonna but the last one to get out made my whole body ache with lust. Her name was Blobs and she stepped out of the cab with skintight yellow jeans and white ankle socks with kiss marks all over them stuffed into stilettos. When she stood outside the cab she was tall with Chinky raccoon eyes and lips bigger than an inner tube (turns out she wasn’t a Chink—they were American Indian eyes). Pinky and I turned into Lenny and Squiggy and bit our fists. They looked back at us like the snobby cunts they were and marched into the club with their noses in the air.

  “I have to have her,” I said to Pinky.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The last one.”

  Inside, the girls danced and made fun of people, and I chugged beer trying to summon the courage to talk to the last one but it took way too long. About three hours later, when my buzz was sufficiently strong, I headed toward her but just before I got there, she started screaming like snakes were shooting out of the floor. She was holding her hand in the air like it had been badly burned and her friend Annabel was screaming, too. Both ran to the bathroom and Blobs left her purse on the floor as everyone stared at it. I assumed she pricked her finger with a syringe but it was much worse. It was poo. Someone had taken a shit in her purse.

  “Are you serious?” I said to a guy who called himself A-Ron the Downtown Don.

  “Yes!” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “Old New York is back.” I was told later that some junkie fashion designer from As Four was having his monthly shit and the bathrooms were full of people doing blow so he squatted on a handbag and pushed out the constipated loaf into the only place he could hide. That was the end of Blobs going to Passerby and I didn’t see her again until months later.