It was now well into the afternoon and things were looking grim. Lots of people had heard from their relatives by now and Pinky was still coming up empty. It was becoming impossible to pretend everything was okay. We could have made a “missing” poster for her but we weren’t quite that naïve. It was over. She was dead. Then, out of nowhere, he got a call. It was his brother. He had heard from his mother and she was fine.
The whole bar cheered, and everyone at our table was crying and hugging him. He was in tears, too, and after thanking everybody and hugging us back, he ran out of the bar to go be with her.
We found out later she had escaped death by minutes. She got to work in Tower One early that day and was furious to discover her secretary hadn’t done the photocopies needed for a big presentation. She was going to have to go all the way to another building to get everything ready. She left her purse on her desk and went down with a file folder full of important documents. The first plane hit as she was doing her photocopies. Her purse, along with her desk, along with people she had worked with for almost ten years, were all obliterated. Then she watched through the window as the second plane hit. She walked outside and was covered in dust. Then she walked like a gray ghost down through the Holland Tunnel and up into Jersey, where she eventually got it together enough to call her sons.
While this was going on my friend Sprague, a photographer who did fashion shoots for Vice, was in the thick of it. Just before the towers collapsed, a firefighter grabbed him and told him to help clean up. He was happy to oblige until he started hearing these incredibly loud pops and realized they were bodies exploding as they hit the ground. “Cleaning up” meant picking up body parts and throwing them on palettes that were then lifted away. He did this for twenty-four hours and has not been the same since. Every time I think about Sprague I think of what many call a “religion of peace” where a good 25 percent think suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified. Twenty-five percent of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world is 375 million. Holy shit.
After Doc Holliday’s, Blobs and I headed over to visit a guy we sarcastically called the Wolf because he always managed to pull an “Irish good-bye” by sneaking out of parties without telling anyone at the end of the night. As a game, we’d try to keep an eye on him all night but no matter how hard we tried, poof. He’d be gone. The Wolf was at his apartment with his girlfriend Marcie and like most of the world, they were watching the news. The Wolf was a heavily tattooed gigantic guy who had the same life history as me. Our bands were even in the same issue of the punk zine Maximumrocknroll back in 1990. In 2001, he was managing bands and he worked out of our office because we were all drinking buddies. He had seen the whole thing from his roof on Avenue B and was still reeling after seeing Puerto Rican teenagers across the street cheering and yelling, “Yeah, nigga! Bomb that shit!” That part still makes me mad.
As we sat in the Wolf’s apartment in a state of shock, I broke the silence by suggesting we buy a huge pile of cocaine. The Wolf was disgusted at first but came to love the idea more than I did. “Think of all the times we sat here doing lines all night and talking about stupid shit like how owls are cool,” he said to me, Blobs, and Marcie. “Well, now we finally have something to talk about!” He was right. We really had spent hours previously discussing how cool owls are. We spent the next nine hours inhaling mountains of blow, watching the news, and talking our jaws off.
The next day, the city was completely shut down. You needed a copy of your utility bill to get past the barricades to your home and the only places open were bars. Blobs was asleep but I was too jacked up to join her, so I stuffed my pockets full of mail and ID and went on a bike ride by myself. It was about nine A.M. on September 12 and I rode south down an empty Ludlow Street and toward the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn. The enclosed bike path above the bridge was closed and so was the main part cars go on, but I dragged my bike under a barrier and rode across the “cars only” part to Brooklyn. It feels weird to be on that bridge with no protective cage around you. At any moment I could have turned a sharp left and disappeared into the East River forever. A strong wind could have resulted in the same. I made my way past the hump and coasted toward Brooklyn. A plastic bag blew past me in a loop and then disappeared over the edge.
I turned around, went back home, and crawled into bed with Blobs.
A Faggot Kicked My Ass (2002)
It’s fun to joke with your coworkers, even when you’re the boss. I regularly streaked through the office, challenged employees to push-up competitions, and told people they would be fired if they didn’t dress up for Halloween. Instead of Casual Fridays we had Drunk Fridays. But as with a pack of wild dogs, you can’t be too vulnerable around employees or they will turn on you. It’s OK to joke around but you need to temper it with some retribution or you turn into a Ricky Gervais character. Sometimes I’d be too hard on people and hear petrified whispers of “Nazi boss” and sometimes it would go the other way and I’d be told to go fuck myself after asking for a bite of someone’s sandwich. I had to keep a balance. For example, in the case of the sandwich outburst, I called the guy “Last Bite” for the rest of his life. That may sound unreasonable, but ask any gang member. Today’s bitch is tomorrow’s dead man. I learned that while tree planting.
Ryan McGinley was a photographer whom Vice editor TJ and I had discovered about a year previous, but Ryan had conveniently forgotten this fact and was getting so big for his britches, they were starting to look like biker shorts. When I first met him, he was a little gay kid in photography school desperate to get noticed. When I asked for his e-mail contact he wrote [email protected] because he didn’t have an e-mail address but didn’t want to look unprofessional. I’d go over to his tiny apartment and root through boxes trying to find images for the magazine. It’s what cheap people do when they don’t want to pay real photographers, and the kids love it because they get exposure. Besides, you get better pictures from amateurs. They’re more honest and daring and there’s no ego involved. It’s “This is my friend Mark jumping into garbage” instead of “This is an old black man’s hands as he plays the blues” or “This is a model on the toilet” (I must have seen those last two dozens of times). Unfortunately, once you turn a bitch out, she gets hungry for more and within a few years, Ryan had gone from photo intern to photo editor to darling of The New York Times. He used to be honored to be in my magazine and now he was blowing off my phone calls? It was time for a talk.
I was still dating Blobs and planned to meet her at a party called Smiths Night in Tribeca but told her to come late as I was going to meet Ryan across the street first. We met at a crappy Irish bar and as soon as he walked in the door, I explained to him what loyalty is and how he’d be nowhere without me. He said I was just jealous of his newfound fame and it wasn’t Vice that got his career going, it was his photo zines (handmade booklets he put together with his best photos, which he passed out to magazine editors and industry types). The truth is, we were both a little bit right but the real thing that made Ryan is what makes everyone: He worked his ass off. Everyone gets their fifteen minutes, but the secret to success is to bust your ass during that blip and establish yourself as someone worth everybody’s time. When Ryan felt the first fish nibble, he yanked the line as hard as he could and didn’t stop reeling until the entire commercial, editorial, and high-end art worlds were in his boat. When The New York Times asked Ryan to shoot Olympic swimmers, he rented all kinds of underwater cameras and strange lenses, staying at the pool for days on end. He shot hundreds of pictures and the dozen or so he kept are still some of his best work. He was invited back and soon had his own show at the Whitney Biennial. The pictures we used from his early days were what they call “documentary photography” and featured New York kids snorting coke, getting laid, and puking their guts out. He even did a series of puking self-portraits that I can’t look at without dry-heaving. Almost half of his pictures were of his best friend, an orphan of sorts named Dash Snow whom we declared
our unofficial mascot. Ten years later New York magazine put Ryan and Dash and their friends on its cover under the title “Warhol’s Children.” Eventually, however, that whole crew imploded when their hijinks landed two in jail. They stole a picture from a gallery and ran out laughing. “It was a spur-of-the-moment act, a juvenile prank, but one that had far-reaching consequences,” as The New York Times put it in a huge article they did on the incident entitled “Unmerry Prankster.”
Ryan survived the prank and didn’t go to jail. Instead, he grew up fast and continued to grab his career by the balls. As I write this, he is finishing a Levi’s campaign, which, in the world of photography, is like becoming president. It pays something like seven million dollars. You see? That’s how you do New York. People say it’s like riding the bull, but it’s more like riding the bullshit. You gotta do the hustle and work hard for the money and don’t stop ’til you get enough and a bunch of other disco lyrics.
When I had my sit-down with Ryan, all this was yet to happen and I was under the impression I could keep him under my wing like a baby chick and never let him leave the nest. As he scoffed at my allegations, I noticed he looks exactly like Sid Vicious and I started to doubt myself. He dressed like all New York kids at the time, in a Travis Bickle army coat and huge sneakers, but his face was pure Irish trash, and those people don’t take too kindly to being told what to do. I know. I’m one of them.
After about an hour, I realized it was very difficult trying to convince someone of something that isn’t true so I threw up my hands and walked out of the bar. Ryan asked me where I was going and as I told him to fuc—WHAM! I felt a thuddening punch to the back of my head. This was the worst punch in the dictionary of punches—a sucker punch. I turned around and pointed to a parking lot without saying a word. Ryan obliged, and we met by the cars to have it out like real men.
What followed looked more like real old men. We had our hands up the way boxers did in the 1920s and were sizing each other up like two geriatrics standing over a broken shuffleboard pole. Have you ever been in a fight? It’s surprisingly hard to actually hit the guy in the face. Wrestling is one thing and head-butting someone in a bar is another, but actually going toe-to-toe is about as easy as that medieval carnival game where you throw a beanbag through the hole in the wood thingie. Every time I sent one of my Thor-like fists of fury at his head, I’d hit some hair or a sleeve or nothing at all. Then he’d deliver a knockout punch that probably would have broken my nose if my shoulder hadn’t blocked it. We were both fighting like we were in the back of an empty eighteen-wheeler that kept hitting potholes. Toward the end, there must have been a dozen blows delivered by both sides and all we had to show for it were one red ear and a cramp. How do you end this type of fight? It’s like one of those poos where after about a hundred wipes you say to your asshole, “All right, buddy, shit or get off the pot. I have a life to get back to.” In this case, my asshole was Ryan and I told him to stop by putting my hands on my knees and panting. He was also too exhausted to go on and just nodded while patting me on the back.
A small crowd had gathered to witness the brawl and I was mortified to discover Blobs was included in this mess. This pathetic display would surely set me back several weeks of courtship. Instead, the opposite happened. Blobs came over and kissed my lips off before saying, “Oh my God, seeing you fight makes me so hot.” That’s right, gentlemen, you don’t have to win or even get one good punch in to impress the ladies. Simply stepping into the ring gives women a wide-on.
The three of us got in a cab and headed to Max Fish. While Blobs molested me in the cab, Ryan and I continued to pat each other on the back and say, “I love you, man,” to each other. But Ryan kept adding, “And I’ve always wanted to fuck you,” which was weird.
It was a perfect autumn night and about half of Max Fish was on the street smoking cigarettes and telling jokes. This was our Cheers bar and Ryan immediately struck up a conversation with a very pretty girl who hoped he wasn’t gay.
I was about fifteen feet away and couldn’t help but notice he was sitting on a car hood, laughing the same way he had laughed at me back at the bar. I never got him back for that sucker punch. So, I marched toward him with every molecule of force I could possibly summon from all the gods of Hades and delivered an earth-shattering blow to his face that sent him sprawling off the hood and into the street. Ryan was down for the count and I felt kind of bad but that’s what you get when you sucker-punch dudes—a sucker punch.
A few seconds later, Ryan was still slumped over and just as I was about to ask him if he was OK, he looked up with a huge smile that went from ear to ear and was filled with blood. His face would have made Batman go to the restroom on himself. He also had a gigantic hole in his cheek where one of my rings had punctured his skin. Jaguar McGinley then leapt at my chest with so much agility, it sent me flying through the air like an anorexic who just stepped on a land mine. They say you’re not supposed to let bull terriers fight because they’ll learn how fun it is and never want to stop. It’s the same with pet rats. You can never let them try meat or they’ll get bloodlust and start biting their owners. Ryan’s bleeding face was like a breath of fresh air to his pugilist instincts and the old man with his dukes up in the parking lot was now someone you click on after hitting the two-player button in Street Fighter. As I scrambled to get up from the first toss, he picked me up and hurled me into a pile of garbage cans. Where did all this strength come from? One of the best descriptions of the fight was from a guy we called Fatboy, who said, “Man, he threw you around like a rag doll.” I careened off metal gates and bounced into parked cars. At one point, he wrestled me to the ground and sat on my chest, setting my face up for a bashing of Elephant Man proportions. I barked out, “Ryan, I’m in love with you!” to distract him, and his confusion bought me the tenth of a second I needed to scurry out from under him. This got huge laughs from the crowd that had gathered. I was kind of hoping someone would break it up, but this wasn’t that kind of crowd. They were frantically taking pictures and shouting out advice, like “Kick his face!” and “Bite!”
We used one of the photos for our table of contents. That’s Ryan with the hole in his face, me buried under his arm, and a guy named Steve who popped in to pose for the photo. (2002)
I’ve been in a lot of fights over the years and they usually go like this one. I will take on any motherfucker who has a problem and I will almost definitely lose. I will, however, get at least one good punch in, and that’s all you need.
During a pummeling, your adrenaline pumps so hard, you can afford to have dual thoughts. While half of me tried to avoid getting swollen shut, the other half calmly wondered what the hell a grown man was thinking punching a teenager in the face. Ryan was barely twenty at the time. He had a rough childhood and grew up in a house full of brothers, a Jersey kid who had been fighting his siblings since the day he was born. In fact, he’s still fighting right now. Whoops, there I go over another car and into some boxes.
Finally, Ryan too was running out of steam and when I finally managed to not be flying through the air, I grabbed his coat, pulled it over his head, and gasped, “Please. We’re done.” For the second time that night, Ryan agreed. Then he smiled and roared, “Yeaaah!” as a kid called Kid America held Ryan’s arm in the air and yelled, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!”
I stumbled upstairs to my apartment, where Blobs ravaged me so vigorously I now know what it’s like to be food. I may have lost the battle but I won the war against not getting laid.
The fight became the talk of our tiny circle and photos of it were everywhere, including my magazine, where I used one for our table of contents.
A few days later at a different bar, Dash and his friend Earsnot took me aside to ask a few questions. Earsnot was a homeless black graffiti writer who grew up on New York’s streets and used his gigantic arms to hospitalize anyone who made fun of him for being gay. Dash came from money, but his parents gave up on him at fourteen and sent
him to a boarding school for bad kids. He got out two years later and never moved back home. He was alone in the world from a very early age and took fighting way too seriously. They both did. “The thing I don’t get,” Dash said like we were in a juvenile detention center together and this fight had lost us both our TV privileges, “is why his face is all fucked up and you look all right.” I explained that Ryan’s facial hole was my only good punch and the rest of the fight was nothing but me flying into things. Dash eventually accepted my explanation and was no longer dubious of his friend’s victory. “Just one more question,” he asked with his arms around my shoulders. “What’s it like to get your ass kicked by a faggot?”
Bigger Than Texas (2003)
Vice started making trips to South by Southwest back when we were still Voice of Montreal. We instantly fell in love with Austin. Austinites were rednecks because they lived in Texas but they were smart because it’s a university town. That’s what our favorite kind of hosers are: educated drunks. We were a match made in heaven. The city’s motto is “Keep Austin weird,” and our hosts regularly drove up and down the street yelling, “Don’t move here!” at the music journalists who were visiting their lovely town for the festival.
We started going there to meet fellow publishers and get to know which bands were going to be big next year, but after one or two visits the party subsumed all other activities and the whole trip became devoted to getting really, really fucked-up.
Trace was the first guy we met there. He’s one of those preppy-looking dudes with a side part and an argyle sweater who grew up going to punk shows and starting fights. He often wore knee-length tweed golf pants from the 1920s and fought so often he once got shot through the femur and now has a steel bar holding up that part of his leg.
How to Piss in Public Page 16