Everyone went completely fucking berserk. The fact that those genius cops let us doubt the party and then TKO’d us with that fucking song made our heads explode. As the cop drove off to hysterical applause, the music kicked back in ten times louder than before and the dancing and yelling was so delirious, we were acting more like deranged savages than partiers. I looked over at Blobs and we both shook our heads in awe of what we had just witnessed. I grabbed her wet hair and started kissing her, and it became very clear she would one day be my wife and this would always be my city.
Lord of the Botflies (2003)
Racing around our property on my rice rocket while nude. (2003)
The place we had in Costa Rica was called Montezuma but the locals referred to it as MonteFUMA, COCA Rica because it was known for smoking pot and snorting cocaine. The neighboring town is called Malpais, which translates as “Bad Land,” and Montezuma should have been called “Worse.” Doing a shot and a small line of blow in that town was like having an espresso in any other town. Everyone was wasted. We had a caretaker named Richie who was a six-foot-four surfer with half his body covered in tattoos. He was on the lam for drug charges and called the town his “Tropical Prison.” Every vacation I’d go down, get him drunk, and catch up on all the gossip. It was always over the top.
“Remember that German dude who was always hanging out with the guys from Granola Funk?” he’d tell me. “He died of a hangover.” Apparently being wasted for 365 days straight means the withdrawal symptoms are fatal. River Phoenix’s dad, Juan, lives down there and there’s the story about the little kid who died in his car during the six-hour drive to the hospital in San José. The hippies down there are weird about blood transfusions and there are rumors it was their bullshit beliefs that led to the kid’s death. Juan was trying to save him but it was too late and they had to continue half the journey with a small dead child wrapped in blankets in the back. The rest of the town is just as disturbing. There’s the Midwestern crackhead who got his mother addicted too by convincing her she’d lose weight. They both became paranoid lunatics who scared the father so bad he had a heart attack and died. He had been telling locals his family was trying to kill him but they assumed he was just as paranoid as they were. You’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you. One year a Nicaraguan worker (Costa Rica’s Mexicans) got in a fight with his brother and chopped the guy’s hands off. I get one hand, but two? How does that work exactly? I always had so many questions during my catch-up sessions with Richie but he always had more to tell me. Infanticide, patricide, and fratricide are about as heavy as stories get but they were always being trumped by something more insane. It is a twisted and scary and decadent town but it’s also beautiful and I love it there.
Before Richie we had an amazing caretaker named Robert Dean. This funny little British man was best known as guitarist of the New Wave band Japan, but he also played with everyone from Sinéad O’Connor to Gary Numan. I loved to get drunk with him and hear his amazing rock stories, like when Gary Numan insisted that his brother join the band and fake-play the saxophone on tour, or the time Numan got scurvy on tour after exclusively eating McDonald’s plain hamburgers every day. Robert saw the Sonics play when they first started and even went to a Beatles concert when he was twelve. I could talk to that guy for days.
After Japan peaked and played Budokan, Robert looked down and realized he had become a total cokehead with zero grasp of reality. Not one for half measures, he chucked that entire life into the toilet and moved to Montezuma, where he became a world-renowned bird expert almost overnight. The dude is extreme. Bird-watchers write down every bird they see and try to outdo each other by discovering rarer and rarer birds, and Robert made short shrift of becoming the best.
One day, Robert decided he was going to break all records by spotting a keel-billed motmot. This required lying motionless in a swamp for twenty-four hours and staring at the same tree with binoculars. Within a week of coming up with this goal, he had pulled it off. He called whatever bird society you call and after tough questions like, “Are you sure it wasn’t a blue-crowned motmot?” Robert Dean was in the history books as one of the few people to see the Electron carinatum in its ever-shrinking natural habitat.
There was only one problem. While he was lying in that festering bog, a fucking botfly laid eggs in his forehead. This is not unusual. In Costa Rica, everything is alive. If you get the tiniest cut in your finger it will instantly get infected because the very air around you is jam-packed with living organisms. And they aren’t fucking around. I was stung by an army of fire ants once and it felt like riot police were rapid-firing rubber bullets at my legs. Being stung by a scorpion is also a wild ride. The sting itself feels like someone sinking a hot poker into your foot and for two days afterward, your lips are numb and your hands have pins and needles. The botfly is more evil and disgusting than all its rivals combined, and that’s saying something. It reproduces by sneaking eggs onto a mammal’s skin (usually cattle) until a larva gets strong enough to crawl deeper inside through the nearest pore. Are you puking yet? The larva then lives there for about a month, eating the fat around it and getting strong enough to turn into a bug and bust out through its host’s skin.
When Robert came back and explained to me what the lump on his forehead was, I roared so loud the jungle exploded with scared birds. I was delirious. “How are you standing there telling me this?” I yelled incredulously. “If I had a fly fetus in my head I would carve it out immediately and then take ten thousand showers.”
But Robert was blasé and muttered, “I don’t really notice it.” The only time he remembered he was harboring a motherfucking baby in his head was when it would wriggle around every few hours. He’d hold his head and wince for a second and then happily get back to work.
“R-Robert,” I’d stammer, “it hurts because it just ate the area it was in and it’s moving over to a new spot. You are being eaten by a parasite, you asshole. Do something!” I don’t know if he enjoyed seeing me squirm or enjoyed feeling his own head squirm, but I was determined to solve this revolting problem. Blobs was coming in a few days and I knew I wasn’t going to get laid if my friends were pregnant with insects. She was already very dubious of our on-again-off-again relationship and I needed to make this work. I took Robert to the local bar and broke it down after a few tequilas. “Robert,” I told him calmly, “do you realize if you let this thing incubate and fly out of your head, YOU WILL BE ITS MOTHER!?” This gave him pause. “Your only progeny on this earth will be a hairy fly,” I added, because he has no kids. While this tiny moment of sanity gripped my friend, I got a local farmer to convince him to suffocate the thing by covering the whole area with Vaseline—that’s what farmers do to their cows. “All right, why not?” Robert conceded as if I was suggesting he give Diet Coke a whirl.
Robert went to bed with a big dollop of Vaseline on his head and woke up with a dead abortion hanging out of his forehead. (I just gagged remembering this.) After no longer getting enough oxygen, the larva had tried to make a break for it but suffocated halfway out of Robert’s head. It was huge and fluorescent pink with thick, black, coarse hairs jutting out of its back. Seeing it made me do hollering dry heaves that went, “HwooooACH! Huuuh. Huuuh. Whoooo. WuuuuuACH!” As I stumbled around the room trying not to faint, Robert smiled and pulled the larva out. It made a quiet schlooop sound that was so nauseating, I ran out to the lawn and retched my last meal out of my stomach and onto the grass, where it was instantly covered in insects. Then, without looking back, I ran from the house like it was haunted and didn’t come back until very late that night.
The next morning I got in the shower and was beyond horrified to discover Robert’s dead child lying on the shower floor. I leapt out and ran over to Robert. I was completely naked and soaking wet with my eyes bulging out of my head. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” I asked. “How could you not BURN that thing? It’s lying on the shower floor. What were you thinking?”
R
obert didn’t understand what I was so freaked out about and answered the question literally. “I don’t know,” he said casually, “when I saw it, I looked down and just thought, ‘There you are. You’re there.’” That’s what he said: “There you are. You’re there.” I exhaled, shook my head, and got a towel. Then I opened a beer and went out to the porch to try to digest the fact that I had two aliens in my house: one dead, one living.
I’ve met a lot of eccentrics over the years, but Robert’s botfly apathy is something I will never even begin to comprehend. Soon after this, he moved to the nearby town of Monteverde because it was better for bird-watching. Last I heard he got into bodybuilding and had become gargantuan. Like I said, the dude is extreme.
Partying with Mötley Crüe (2004)
I had heard from a few people that one of my favorite bands, Mötley Crüe, were big fans of my DOs & DON’Ts book. Apparently their manager brought it on tour and they all passed it around the plane laughing their asses off and looking forward to the day we could all be best friends. The guy who wrote The Dirt, the band’s life story, told me my book was a huge help because every time drummer Tommy Lee would get reluctant to tell a raunchy story he’d say, “Don’t be a pussy. Remember that DOs & DON’Ts book you liked? He went way farther.”
So, when Tommy Lee was in New York back in 2004, Matt Sweeney called me up and said he was with Lee and I should meet him. I hadn’t read The Dirt and he wasn’t a big reality star yet, so all I knew about him was that he fucked Pamela Anderson and played drums on Too Fast for Love, an album so metal it was punk. Tommy was staying at a hotel on Forty-second Street and drinking with his entourage in the hotel bar. Matt had to leave before I got there but he knew about Tommy’s infatuation with my book so he set it up before leaving.
I hopped in a cab and headed to midtown. It’s a strange place, Times Square. You always feel like you’ve been transported to a minimall in Cleveland. The hotel’s bar was in the basement and it was way too fancy to be a fun drinking spot. Tommy was easy to pick out. He was sitting at a table of dudes who were broken into two categories. There were the balding rock dudes dressed like pubescent pop stars but with way more tattoos. And there were the music industry guys who wore pressed shirts and corny leather jackets. Tommy had on a sideways baseball hat, a shredded jean jacket covered in bric-a-brac, and pants that looked like bondage pants for kids into metal rap. There was a lot going on with his look but anyone who’s a friend of my jokes is a friend of mine so I was happy to see him.
As I walked toward the table Tommy stood up and opened his arms for a big hug. “My MAN!” he yelled from twenty feet away while waiting for an embrace like we were long-lost brothers. Now, if you act like a good buddy, I’m going to treat you like a good buddy and that’s going to include fucking around, no? So, as I walk into his arms and we’re pressed together like a panini sandwich, I holler to the table, “Hey! This guy’s got a boner!” expecting a big wave of laughter, which I would then surf into and assume my usual position as big kahuna.
Only, nobody laughed. They were mortified. The whole entourage stared at me like I was a homeless man who had strayed into the hotel looking for discarded food. Their faces said, “How dare you call our boy a fag?” and my eyes said, “It’s called a joke, fags.”
Tommy unwrapped his arms and stared back at me speechless, like I’d just farted on his balls. For some strange reason, I involuntarily said, “Hey-oh!” with my fingers pointing down at my chair and sat at the table. Tommy didn’t sit with us and instead walked over to a completely separate booth all by himself. All right. I looked over for a minute, wondering if he expected me to follow him but he clearly did not. When a waitress came to ask him what he wanted he pulled her into the booth and started chatting her up.
I sat down with people who didn’t want me there and told our waitress I’d like a Bud. I had just lost one after all. The rest of the guys spoke to each other and continued to ignore me. I tried to make a few jokes but I may as well have been a Goth chick trying to join a frat. After a short while, I looked over at Tommy, who was holding the waitress’s hand and leading her out of the bar and, presumably, up to his room. It was pretty clear this was not going to be another episode of the Get Along Gang, so I took a big swig of my beer, said a purposely obtuse “BYE! BYE!” and walked away.
In the cab on the way back, I got a text from Matt: “U guys still there- May come back.” I responded with a “nope” and when he asked, “U already left, y?” I replied, “Made a boner joke he didn’t like and he left.” Matt texted back, “Can’t tell if ur kidding or not,” and I didn’t get back to him.
The Story of Vice: Part Three (2001–2008)
After the dot-com collapse we were fucked. Actually, we were more than fucked. Unbeknownst to us, things had gone way past broke and into millions of dollars of debt. We had bills we never heard of, like $300,000 to trademark our logo globally. This wasn’t owed to drunk teenagers but to lawyers well versed in litigation. All the suppliers that sold clothes in our shitty stores also wanted to be paid. Vice was deep in the hole but it was so bad, it was good. That contract Shane made Richard sign didn’t have time constraints, so now that we were ready to put our money back in, “book value” had a whole new meaning. We emptied our bank accounts into the company and bought it back for a song. We had everything back but we were broker than we were in the welfare days.
The day after returning from Szalwinski’s house, we rented a truck and emptied our old office into it. We even stole the mirrors from the bathroom. The clothing company Triple 5 Soul had been a client for a long time and they let us set up shop in the back of their storage warehouse. We dragged all our old junk from our deluxe spot on Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan into the crack-infested, glass-strewn alleyways of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Today this area is known as the “hipster mecca” but it wasn’t pretty back then. You’re welcome for the conversion, or maybe I apologize.
Shane and Suroosh were stuck with putting out a lot of fires and I was happy to be left alone to focus on content again without having to worry about answering to strangers. All I had to do was keep costs down to zero and I did that by doing the whole magazine myself. I should mention that I’d been trying to get them to contribute writing since day one but it was like pulling teeth. Alas, our first Greatest Hits book had about one article from each of them and almost all the other bylines were mine (or a pseudonym of mine). I’m sure they resented me during this post-dot-com phase, and the fact that I took a ton of freelancing gigs to pay the bills didn’t help. I always sensed Shane resented my being the star of the show and wanted to be there himself one day. Suroosh didn’t seem to care about popularity as long as nobody embarrassed him. I didn’t mind the way things had turned out because I always dreaded the idea of salesmen taking over the company, but I had no time to discuss any of this with either of them. A big part of my job was going out and meeting freaks at all hours of the night. To generate interesting content I needed disposable income, and the British press had deep pockets. So if it paid the bills to be England’s New York rep the way Lester “Last of the White Niggers” Bangs had been three decades earlier, well, I had no choice. While I wrote cover stories about getting wasted with musicians, Shane and Suroosh ripped up invoices and got screamed at by debt collectors.
After a two-year grind, we got things going again and it felt great. It felt like the pre-Richard days in Montreal. I was letting people with Down syndrome guest-edit the magazine, and we had a cover that was a mirror with a line on it for cocaine users. This version of Vice was about Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley and getting wasted and having fun. Dash Snow’s gang Irak was in every issue and it felt like the magazine I had always wanted to make. My “DOs & DON’Ts” column had become so popular it was defining a new subculture that people were calling hipsters. A British television show emerged as a parody of us: Vice was called SugarApe and I was an irritating prick named Nathan Barley.
At our ten-year anniversary party I
felt like we’d reached our peak. We had ten of our favorite bands play and gave everyone free Sparks, which was an alcoholized energy drink that is now banned (though a caffeine-free version is still available). I dressed as a Nazi skinhead and oversaw a midget-tossing (also now banned) while an enormous screen behind me played Japanese puke porn that was so graphic it made everyone puke.
This high continued for another five years. I started a TV division and sold a pilot to Showtime with David Cross. Suroosh used his golden-goose ear to run a record label, and Shane had us in seventeen countries with hundreds of employees and a film production company. Every year we were doubling in size and soon we were way bigger than we were during the dot-com days, and most important, it was ours again.
Things started changing around 2006 when Shane began discussing a merger with Viacom. The stakes got very high very fast and soon lawyers had to be consulted and releases had to be signed for every move we made. The show I had been pitching with Johnny Knoxville was morphing into a whole other MTV thing that I wasn’t in control of. For a travel DVD we did with Viacom, Cross and I set up an elaborate prank where we went to China and used the cheap labor there to outsource apple pies that came with an American flag in the center and played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This ended up on the DVD extras. I was flabbergasted. There are times when you do something that you think is funny but you understand if others disagree. Our China footage was not one of those things. As David put it, “I know for a fact that shit was great and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.” I did a web series with Eva Mendes that was canned. I shot bits with Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, and dozens more but nothing took. It became pretty clear this was no longer the old Vice, or what Shane called “The Gavin Show.” Pinky sees the world through TV metaphors and describes the Viacom merger as Les Nessman and Herb Tarlek taking over WKRP from Dr. Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap, but I see it as a band that woke up one day and realized they don’t like each other anymore or, more important, they don’t respect what the other members do. “It’s a different company,” the head of human resources told me, to which I replied, “We have a human resources?” I always hated the term “human resources.” It reminds me of Soylent Green. Fuck it.
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