Throughout 2007, we negotiated a split and by the beginning of 2008 I had sold my shares for an obscene amount of money. I never spoke to those guys again. As a Vanity Fair reporter put it, “It’s not like they had to get rid of Gavin, but they knew he would have to stop pissing on the furniture—and he just would not do it.”
With the money from the buyout, I bought a couple of apartments in Brooklyn and built my dream house upstate on a big piece of land I bought with Cross. I got my parents a Jaguar and myself a Range Rover, along with a bunch of other toys, and I stuck the rest into the stock market when it was at its lowest ebb since the Great Depression. I set up a standard estate credit shelter trust or whatever you call it and included a last will and testament that, for no reason, included the provision that my gravestone say I HEARD A RETARD SAY “CUNT” ONCE.
For the first time in thirteen years, I had the opportunity to do absolutely anything I wanted. I was a multimillionaire but to be totally honest, I never really cared about money and the vast dark infinity of it all scared the shit out of me. Leaving Viacom felt like leaving Images Interculturelles and leaving Szalwinski, but this time there was no magazine to rescue. I didn’t know what to do. I mentioned my plight to Will Ferrell while we were sitting with his manager, and my pal, Jimmy Miller at a Yankees game and he said, “You got out at the perfect time. I can’t even look at Rolling Stone anymore. It looks like a pamphlet.” I started bringing the family to Dial House every summer, where the founders of Crass lived, and they said the same thing, but they also told me to tell everyone to fuck off and drop out of society. I definitely didn’t deserve any sympathy but I was confused and lost.
I could have retired but I’d seen what happens to people who retire early—they die. After the Clash, Joe Strummer lived in a cave in Barcelona and quietly lost his mind. Looking back on it later he said, “Without people, you’re nothing.” I had a family now, but as far as creating things and making money went, I needed a new gang. Besides, I was almost positive my wife would stop fucking me if I didn’t have a job. Guys in sweatpants do not get blow jobs.
If you’re ever in a situation like this, I highly recommend getting in shape. My fitness regimen had been boxing for a while, but after signing my good-bye papers, I really went apeshit on it. Boxing isn’t only good cardio. It’s a type of Irish therapy that’s crucial to your mental health. Got an important meeting or a pitch or you’re going to be on TV? Go boxing first and you will kill. It makes you feel invincible.
I stepped up my regimen from three times a week to every single day. I even built an outside gym at my place upstate. Then one day, two blocks away from Ground Zero at Church Street Boxing Gym, it hit me. It was after a bout with a cantankerous sparring partner ten years my senior who’d kicked my ass so hard it made me mad. “I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,” I realized while taking off my headgear. “The same shit I’ve always done. And I’m gonna give ’er.” The motto at Church Street is “Fighting Solves Everything” and they’re right. As prominent NPR nerd Ira Glass says, “You’ve just gotta fight your way through. It is only by going through a volume of work that … your work will be as good as your ambitions.” I’m out to make the funniest shit possible. I’m not out to make people laugh. It’s not up to me if they laugh or not. As weird 1920s dancer Martha Graham put it, “It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”
Pinky, me, and a bunch of ex-Vice people started a company with the totally unremarkable name Street Boners and TV Carnage. Then I dove headfirst into a sea of failures and took my punches like the first half of a Rocky fight. I wrote two screenplays that didn’t go anywhere. I started a hardcore punk cover band that broke up quickly. I convinced Comedy Central and Adult Swim to commission pilots they later canned. I got a gig writing for a show Justin Theroux was doing for HBO that never got off the ground. The Travel Channel bought eight episodes of a show I created called America on Zero Dollars a Day and then killed it after the first episode. I did a documentary about a movie-watching competition for Netflix called A Million in the Morning, which they later passed on, and I made that sketch comedy movie called Gavin McInnes Is a Fucking Asshole, which few people saw outside of the cornflakes scene. I also wrote a book of DOs & DON’Ts called Street Boners that crawled off the shelves (thanks in part to that totally unmarketable name). On the bright side, I broke even on my investment in a taco truck.
It was a humbling slog but sometimes the shit I threw at the wall actually stuck. I started doing stand-up and only bombed half the time. A short film I did called Asshole got into Sundance. I realized I’d need a new guy to handle the business and marketing side of things so I offered my friend Sebastian a commission on everything he brought in. Soon we had sponsors to pay for my viral comedy videos and after convincing Vans to let us urinate on their shoes for a comedy sketch called “How to Piss in Public” we got over a million hits on YouTube and a cover story in Adweek magazine. Sebastian quickly went from being my manager to my business partner. We called our new company Rooster NYC and focused on funny commercials and TV production. We did a comedy sketch with Kevin Hart and T-Pain that garnered 12 million views. This led to a series of commercials for the porn domain .XXX, where they were spending $25 million dollars to compete with .COM. Within a year, investors were offering deals reminiscent of the Viacom days.
No matter how big Rooster became I was still determined to write my incendiary political rants and was lucky enough to get a cushy job as a columnist for the eccentric Greek tycoon Taki Theodoracopulos doing exactly that. Then I got Jim Goad hired as editor, something I had been planning for a long time at Vice. The column later led to a regular spot on the Fox News show Red Eye, an uppity talk show that destroys CNN and MSNBC in the ratings despite being on at three A.M.
New York is a lot like the Lord in that it helps those who help themselves. A couple of years after ending a career where I ran a company, wrote articles, made funny videos, and pitched TV, I was running two companies where I wrote articles, made funny videos, and pitched TV. And, just like in the early days, there’s no boss. At Rooster NYC, when clients give too many notes and start to wreck the joke, we fire them. At Street Carnage, when advertisers get mad at articles like “Fuck the Muslims” and the time we filmed a guy shooting heroin for our “Wasted Pushups” show, we tell them to fuck off too. As the article in Adweek said, “Gavin McInnes doesn’t care about your product.” All I care about is all I’ve ever cared about: being able to do fun shit with my friends without anyone telling us what to do.
Will You Marry Me, Blobs? (2004)
Updating the Vice story takes us so far ahead I forgot to tell you about getting married. Smack-dab in the middle of the last story, I proposed.
My friends often ask me how you know when it’s time to pop the question but for me there was no question. When it was time I could just tell it was time and I set up the greatest proposal of all time to make sure she said yes.
I was partying so hard back then, life was still check-to-check, so I set up an interest-free payment plan at Zales where I had a year to pay it off. Then I booked two tickets to Paris and contacted some friends there about getting a French child actor to surprise Blobs.
I told her we had to go meet my parents and discuss a tax clause regarding their will. Visiting bombastic drunk Scots in the Canadian winter to discuss a death tax is the worst life has to offer so I was setting the bar low. The first time she met them, I showed her my old teddy bear and she sat in the living room staring at its mangled face as they stared at her the same way. “You like that?” my dad asked her loudly only moments after being introduced. Before she could respond he yelled, “I FUCKED Teddy!” You never know what’s going to happen in their presence but it’s never relaxing.
At the airport, we got in the Europe line instead of the Canada line. Blobs was
used to my scams and cheats and figured this was just another shortcut so she went along with it. She didn’t even check the sign on the gate to see if it said Ottawa.
At the bar, I presented her the tickets. “Thanks,” she said apathetically. Then I went, “This looks weird. They spelled Ottawa wrong.” Blobs hugged me as hard as she could and we began a weekend of nothing but ear-to-ear smiles.
Montmartre is our spot when we go to Paris. It’s got the quaint hills you saw in the movie Amélie with the huge Sacré-Coeur church at the top, and just when everything is getting too nice, the disgusting sex shops and seedy bars of Pigalle lure you to the bottom. At the border of the two worlds is an incredibly corny bar called Aux Noctambules where an old man in a pompadour and a red suit named Pierre Carré sings songs about all the places he’s been, like “dans MEXIC-O-O-O-O!” Only, he couldn’t have been to any of those places because he’s played at this bar every night of his life since he was a kid. He sings 365 nights a year there and every time we go to Paris we bask in his crazy anthems like the Catholics in Sacré-Coeur several hundred feet above us.
On our last Paris trip, we went to the Eiffel Tower at five in the morning to do cartwheels. I convinced her I could do one over a park bench and ended up unconscious on the brick with a broken collarbone. The rest of the night was spent going to various hospitals and eventually faking a seizure in order to be seen. Talk about romantic.
I had the whole proposal scheduled for the day after we got there and it was going to happen not far from the site of the collarbone incident the year before. After a pleasant brunch, it was time to take a taxi to the tower. I had scheduled a light-skinned black child (half–American Indian would have been ideal because she was supposed to represent our future kids, but this was the closest I could get) to run up to Blobs under the Eiffel Tower and hand her my ring at three p.m. We had exactly fifteen minutes and I couldn’t find a taxi for miles. I was starting to panic. About ten minutes after I needed one, we crawled into a cab and I realized we were still going to make it. My adrenaline was flowing and I started playing air drums against my will. Blobs looked confused. “You like that?” I asked like a Scottish dad thinking of something controversial to say. “You like when I play the drums? You wanna hear me play the drums for the rest of your life?” This strange bit of dialogue is the only part I regret about the whole thing. I wasn’t in control at that moment.
We got to the Eiffel Tower only a tiny bit late. I tried to act casual but knew we had to get underneath the tower where avenue Gustave Eiffel meets Parc du Champ de Mars. I held her hand and the mulatto girl started running across the grass toward us. She handed a crumpled-up paper bag to Blobs and said, “Bonjour, madame, j’ai un petit cadeau pour vous,” then she ran away. Blobs asked me what she said and I told her she said, “Hello, madam, I have a small present for you,” and added, “Open it up.” When she saw the ring, she started to cry and I managed not to cry while asking her if she’d marry me. I didn’t get on one knee because I think that sends the wrong message. She said yes and we held each other and then we made out and walked around holding hands. It was fucking heavenly.
That night we sang karaoke in Pigalle and saw Pierre Carré perform his cheesy songs and a year later, we were married. Then two small people came out of her and we gave them American Indian names.
A Dog Named Pancake Saved Our Lives (2005)
Four Brothers is a movie about some badass orphans who were all adopted by a nice old lady who got her fucking head blown off. The brothers come back to their hometown to get revenge and—holy shit—do they ever. I went to see it with my soon-to-be wife and she came up with the brilliant idea of bringing a flask of whiskey. Until then we had been following the New York tradition of sneaking beer cans into the theater, which makes for a loud pksh! every time you open one and a dozen “excuse me’s” each time you have to go pee. A flask solves both problems, though it’s not good for the Irish.
The movie is good in a bad way, packed with David-and-Goliath clichés and “doing what’s right” peppered with car crashes and explosions. The ending is especially invigorating and as we walked out of the theater onto Tenth Street and Third Avenue, I felt like a righteous vigilante. One of the biggest differences between girls and boys is the way they feel after a movie. When the credits roll, the female files the movie away in her brain and is ready to move on. When the credits roll on a superhero movie, however, the boy who just saw it will spend the next three hours with his arms stretched in front of him as he flies around the neighborhood looking for crime to fight. It takes us as long to get over a movie as it takes to watch it. After Four Brothers, I steeled myself to throw every New York gangster back in jail where he belongs, consequences be damned. “I don’t give a fuck,” I said to Blobs, to which she replied, “What?”
A few blocks later we were walking on the south side of Tompkins Square Park, which is more than just a place Blobs and I meet during emergencies. It’s also where junkies meet. There were two crusty punks in front of us walking a dog with a rope for a leash. Crusties are a punk subculture that takes the music and douses it in speed metal, puts everything in a backpack, then mangles the hippies’ “dirty and smelly” aesthetic into “so unbelievably filthy you can smell my foreskin from across the street.” Their clothes are just punk rags but they throw in some facial tattoos, dreadlocks, and vegan boots, then smear smegma and poop over everything to make it all their own. It’s homeless chic with a big shot of heroin and it’s such a bummer, it’s a big part of why I gave up on punk back in 1992.
This couple was a slightly shorter version of Blobs and me if we’d bathed in manure for ten years and panhandled under a cemetery. They annoyed me but they weren’t doing anything wrong, so I figured I’d let them be. Then the dog stopped to take a shit. Oh, HELL no. I became the Fifth Brother about to wreak some street justice.
“I assume you’re going to pick that up,” I told the guy with the Maori tribal tattoos on his chin (which, I’m pretty sure, meant “wife”).
“What?” he asked.
“The shit,” I said.
“It’s not shit,” his equally facially tattooed mate yelled with her floppy tits wobbling around inside her stained-brown white T-shirt. “She’s taking a piss.”
They got me. Stopping dog piss in New York City is a beautiful notion, but you might as well try to rid the city of the word “fuggedaboudit.” I said, “All right, all right” and walked ahead. Blobs looked concerned and suggested we go home immediately.
The crusties followed behind us yelling things like, “Way to go, buddy!” and “It’s the piss police!” I didn’t let down my guard. One thing about growing up in an orphanage and having your mother’s head blown off is your street smarts get polished to superhero levels. My Spidey Senses told me some shit was about to go down. It would only be a matter of time before a neglected turd was sitting on the sidewalk so I stuck around to take care of it.
About thirty seconds later, I turned around, and what did my eyes behold? The exact same scenario as before, only out the butt. The bitch’s stinky parents were cooing and smiling as the turd oozed out, saying things such as, “Good girl,” and “There you go.” (I’ve seen other dog owners do this, and it’s revolting.) They didn’t notice me and I stood there giving them the benefit of the doubt until there could be no doubt the shit was going to be abandoned like the Four Brothers were. As Blobs sank her face into her hands, I walked over to make my first citizen’s arrest.
“You’re kidding, right?” I said as I got within punching distance. “You’re laughing about my accusing you of leaving shit on the street and two minutes later, you do exactly that?” I pointed to the hot brown mound on the ground. This was shit, Sherlock. They knew I was right and walked off with all of their tails between all of their legs. I wasn’t done with them yet. “Well?” I asked as they tried to move on by doing a strange walk that was curiously snobby. “What are you going to do about it?” I demanded.
“People wi
ll get it eventual … ly,” the more male of the two mumbled. I insisted he speak up so he stopped walking and said, “People will pick it up. It’s a job. Cleaning up the park. We’re actually providing jobs.” He was indulging in a bastardization of what economists call the Broken Window Theory and it made me shit a brick of rage.
“Oh, great,” I said, like an angry teacher. “THAT’s your contribution to society. You’re the Shit Easter Bunny who leaves treats everywhere so we can all spend our tax dollars cleaning it up!” I couldn’t stop. “Fantastic. Thanks for coming out. Hey, everybody! The people who leave shit everywhere are here. Who wants a job?” The crusties shook their heads and walked off, but I had a lot more work to do. I needed them to be as mad as I was.
Then I blurted out, “You got fucked by your dad.” I’m not exactly sure where it came from, but it worked.
He stopped and turned around before asking, “What the fuck did you just say?”
I was happy to get his attention and leaned into his face, saying, “Everyone who has facial tattoos was molested. It’s a well-known fact.” It’s actually not a well-known fact but a theory I’ve had for decades.
His lady friend then stepped to me. “You saying I was fucked by my dad, too?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, unfazed, “that’s what it means. It says, ‘Stay away from me,’ as in ‘Stop raping me … Dad.’” Then I pointed at her tattooed face and said, “Now. Go. Pick. Up. That. SHIT!”
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