How to Piss in Public

by McInnes, Gavin

  I thought I was winning the intimidation game but she surprised me by getting even closer to my face and saying, “Oh, yeah? And what are you going to do if I don’t?”

  There’s a scene in The Sopranos where Tony sees a guy wearing a hat in a restaurant and it pisses him off so much, he walks over and tells the guy to take his hat off. The guy gets a little snarky, so Tony leans in close and says, “Take it off,” so intensely, the guy apologizes and quickly removes his fedora. I looked at both crusties as I thrust my hand into my pocket and said in my best Tony Soprano tone, “I will stab you both.” But Tony Soprano is a six-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound Mafia boss. I look more like Rip Taylor’s inexplicably heterosexual son. Tony had a gun. I had nothing in my pocket but some loose change.

  Immediately after I made my idle threat, the dog’s mom ripped open the front of her shirt and yelled, “Then go ahead, motherfucker. Stab me.” As her gigantic smelly boobs slapped from side to side, I started to realize I was in way over my head. I’m not an orphan or a mob boss. I don’t intimidate people and I don’t even know how to fight. As her filthy nude torso disturbed me to my core, I noticed her doggie’s daddy was pulling a motherfucking tire iron out of their large army backpack. He had a sort of “Here we go again” demeanor as he slapped the iron against his palm and walked toward me. I had nothing but a fictional knife and some previous courage to defend myself, and all I could think was how Blobs and I were going to get brained because a dog took a crap on the sidewalk. We would never have kids or a family. We had been blessed with three decades of life on this wonderful planet and it was all over in an instant because I got a bee in my bonnet about poo-poo. What was I thinking? Confronting homeless people is like saying “BOO!” to a cornered rat. Just before it all went black, everything turned upside down and I heard the most beautiful word in the English language: “Pancake.”

  Their stupid dog had become spooked by the kerfuffle and was trotting across the road dragging her frayed rope leash behind her. Both parents became petrified and dropped what they were doing to go save it. I grabbed Blobs and we speed-walked past the discarded tire iron toward safety as both punks ran in the opposite direction. I’ll never forget looking back and seeing their rags flapping in the midnight air and a guy with his arms outstretched zigzagging across Seventh Street yelling, “Pa-a-a-a-a-ancake! Pa-a-a-a-a-ncake!”

  The KKK Stag (2005)

  Prostitutes bore me. I tried it and it didn’t work. I want a woman to be gagging for my cock, not gagging if my cock isn’t wrapped in latex and attached to a $100 bill. Strip clubs are OK but there’s nothing sadder than a bachelor party with a bunch of horny men sitting on fold-out chairs in a motel room while some ditzy young girl in a K-hole dances around naked.

  For my stag, I wanted to get every bro I’ve ever had into one big house in the woods for the bender of the century. I scheduled it to be four days long because I was getting married on the fifth day and figured they’d all be so sick of booze by then we’d have a wedding without totally wasted people.

  If you’ve ever seen old footage of biker rallies you’ll see a lot of swastikas and a lot of guys making out. They weren’t gay, they were drunk and enjoyed making everyone as uncomfortable as possible. Or maybe they were gay. We rented a gigantic hunting lodge in the upstate New York village of Bovina and filled it with enough booze and drugs to justify a DEA raid. I had my brother, Kyle, there; all the Monks from high school; all the SXSW dudes from Texas; old tree-planting buddies; and Anal Chinook, including Blake Jacobs and his best friend, an equally tiny drunk man we called Geddes. We had New York pals as well as David Choe, Pinky, one of the guys from the movie FUBAR, Vice employees from all over the world, Matt Sweeney, prank-call expert Jeff Jensen, and my cousin Mark from Scotland. Even my dad showed up.

  The first night of drinking went on until the sun rose. By that morning, a group of old friends getting together to riff had transmogrified into an old-alcoholic Lord of the Flies. Nobody was allowed to wear a shirt and slapping each other as hard as you could had become the new “hello.” We had water balloon fights indoors and the owner called the police regularly. We were building huge fires, making puke jokes, and kicking each other in the nuts.

  The second day got more intense. Nudity had become de rigueur and fag jokes were no longer kidding. “Look at his scrumptious ass,” I’d yell at the ballerina-tiny Blake before shoving my tongue down his throat. “I’ve never been this horny for a dwarf before!” Groping each other’s buttocks slowly and passionately was perfectly normal. Grabbing a guy’s crotch and holding on until he punched you in the face was also common. When a pizza guy finally brought food (I forgot to include food in this grand scheme) he told us the whole town was talking about a bunch of gays who took over the hunting lodge and were trying to kill each other.

  By the third day, we were completely off the rails. My dad was bad at the keg-stands but he was the only one who didn’t projectile-vomit, so maybe he wasn’t. I got mad at him for not doing cocaine with us and that’s something that still makes me cringe. We were filthy and grubby, with vomit in our hair and piss stains on our pants. Some tried to bow out and snuck off to their beds but as soon as one of us noticed, we all stampeded up to his room to pound him awake. Late-night sing-alongs around the piano sounded like crazed soccer chants and I remember something about locking Geddes in the oven and turning it on.

  On the last night, everyone seemed particularly quiet and reluctant to explain why. I was hoping my plan had worked and the wedding was going to be a serene collection of hungover nice guys. When I walked into a room wearing nothing but rubber boots and underwear, people stopped talking. I did a line, rolled a joint, and took a sip from a bottle of warm whiskey by the piano. I asked why everyone was being so weird. Nobody answered so I passed out in my chair.

  I woke up to a handful of guys partying their asses off. This was the fourth day. How were they still going? Someone found a saddle and everyone was taking turns riding li’l Blake around the living room but the majority of people were MIA. Then a voice yelled, “It’s time!” and the stragglers with the saddle snapped to attention. TJ picked me up and handed me some pants. Cheese gave me a T-shirt, but it was wet so I refused.

  I was marched out of the lodge down the back steps and into the darkness. From out of nowhere a bandana was wrapped around my eyes and I was marched even farther away from the lodge. I could tell from the twigs snapping beneath my feet that we were going into the forest. About a minute later we stopped and my blindfold was removed.

  Pinky was standing in front of me with a gigantic watermelon slice in his hand. He was wearing a fluorescent orange jumpsuit with the Hooters logo on the front. “Do you,” he said like a very loud James Earl Jones, “accept this new level of manhood?”

  My heart was pounding because I knew whatever was about to happen might just be the most towering experience of my life. “Yes!” I yelled dutifully.

  “And,” Pinky continued, “do you understand that no matter what happens from this day forth, you will always stay true to the brotherhood and the values it holds dear?”

  “Yes!” I said again.

  “Repeat it!” he screamed in my face.

  I repeated it word for word and Pinky plunged my face into the watermelon while yelling, “Eat!”

  With my face covered in watermelon juice, Pinky and TJ flung me through the bushes and into a clearing, where I tripped over some roots. I looked up and in the moonlight saw ten Klansmen standing over me—hoods and all. I stood up, said, “Holy shit!” and a fifteen-foot-high wooden cross burst into flames as everyone yelled, “Hooray!” The hoods came off and everyone else leapt out from the bushes and started jumping all over each other like we’d won the Stanley Cup. The “Klansmen” were friends from the stag dressed up in authentic-looking uniforms Chin’s then-wife had spent weeks making by hand.

  Guys poured beer on each other and David Choe fell into the trees while trying to put Blake on his shoulders. Soon everyone w
as kissing. Pinky was French-kissing my dad and every other Klansman was locked in a tongue embrace. It was offensive to every possible group in the world, including gay, black Nazis. This is what I’d been shooting for since I became a teenager in 1983—no-holds-barred, asshole mayhem. This wasn’t just balls-to-the-wall—we were taking our balls and lifting them up over the wall.

  My eyes welled with tears and I looked up at the sky before quietly saying, “Thank you, God. Thank you for everything.” God didn’t reply. He was pissed. (So were the cofounders of Vice, incidentally. They refused to participate.)

  The wedding the next day was beautiful and a sharp contrast to the mayhem that had come before. It was outdoors and my friend Jim Krewson’s band played beautiful bluegrass music. The speeches were great despite Pinky saying something about prostitutes and my dad doing his whole insult-me shtick.

  My wife looked so beautiful I was in awe. After the ceremony, everyone went to the after-party, where Chromeo played, and Blobs and I drove off in a yellow Rolls complete with just married on the back and bouncing cans tied to the bumper.

  After tying the knot, I drastically cut down the partying, especially after the kids were born, but I never forgot my vows to the brotherhood: Never stop believing—and by “believing,” we mean “being a retard.”

  Hunting for Injuns (2005)

  After the marriage, my wife felt compelled to learn about my heritage. Though we did invent the modern world by creating the industrial revolution and separating church and state, all you need to know about modern Scottish culture is beer and yelling.

  Learning about her people was a bit more complex. American Indians remain a mystery to most people, including me, and I was surprised to see how similar they are to my own peeps. For one, I never expected them to be so funny. Like with the Scots, riffing is an integral part of almost every tribe’s culture and even in the grimmest situation, someone in the room is going to bust out a gag.

  What else? Their earwax is as powdery as that of the Taiwanese; they need all their body parts when they’re buried, so if they have a thumb amputated they have to keep it in a jar until they die; they say “aaayyy” after every joke; and they have bigger big toes than the rest of us. You should see the big toes on these people. Nike tried to make them a special shoe to fit it but it pissed them off because they hate stereotypes—even the true ones.

  It kills the white man to learn that Indians aren’t looking for friends. The trusting Injuns are now extinct and the ones who have managed to stick it out tend to be dubious grumps, at least when it comes to bro-ing down with Caucasians.

  My father-in-law suggested I present Blobs’s tribe with a deer I killed myself. He said that the tribe would then accept our marriage as real. Thanks for telling me this after the marriage, Pops.

  I hopped on a plane and headed to hunting hot spot Winnipeg, Manitoba, to give it a shot. I decided to go with a bow because I thought it would be more badass. After three hours at the practice range with no progress, my hosts rolled their eyes and said we had to get on with it. I was with an awesome hoser dad named Paul and a young Cree Indian named Reg.

  My shirt says COMMIES AREN’T COOL with Che Guevara crossed out. That’s Hoser Paul giving the thumbs-up, and Reg is taking the picture. (2005)

  We were all covered in camo gear from our feet to our heads. Even our faces had camo mesh on them. Smelling like anything in the bush will frighten away the deer, so food, beer, and pissing are banned. We wished each other luck, grabbed our bows, and went to different spots along a creek. I would kill a deer, present it to my mother-in-law’s family, receive some amazing gifts I’d never heard of, and be accepted into the tribe. I had already decided on my Indian name—Whistling Cheeks.

  I was told I had to stay perfectly still for the rest of the day and not even breathe heavy if I wanted to bag a deer. This sounds really fucking boring but I did it for several hours and it was awesome. Sitting perfectly still as you await your prey feels like you’re on opiates. It’s no different from meditating, and you get into this serene zone where you’re so at one with nature you feel like you could—FUCK! A deer!

  The opium was gone and now I was on meth. My heart was pounding as loud as a boxing bell. I raised my bow as slowly as I could and the deer lifted his head for a moment with a “What the fuck was that?” expression. My eyeballs were protruding out of my face like a hot-rod cartoon. The whole thing lasted about three seconds. Before I knew it, my arrow had shot into the ground underneath the deer, and the animal was off like a springy rocket.

  White man miss deer.

  That night we went back to Paul’s and told stories. They made fun of me for getting “Moose Fright.”

  Reminiscing about the hunt is almost as fun as the hunt itself. We were in Paul’s backyard smoking pot and drinking beer when the whole—I’m talking the entire—sky lit up and turned into an infinitely large, undulating blanket of changing colors. I’d seen the Northern Lights, AKA Aurora Borealis, before, but not this intense. It went from slow, glowing lights to a flashing storm of lights, to huge blasts of color zipping through the cosmos like they were being controlled by a galaxy-sized kid with a flashlight. Then it went back to the undulating color blanket. Even the locals were going nuts.

  “Dese are your wife’s fuckin’ ancestors sayin’ it’s OK,” Paul told me, channeling the Native American spirit world through a hoser’s slang. “It’s like de’re sayin’ ‘give ’er.’”

  But after returning from Winnipeg with no deer carcass in tow, I knew I had to do something big to curry the Indian side of my family’s favor (and these kinds of Indians don’t even like curry). So when my wife invited me to her aunt’s house for a sweat-lodge ceremony in January, I leapt at the chance.

  The house was just outside Madison, Wisconsin, in a rural area, but it wasn’t on a reservation. I was with my wife and her brother and the aunts happily introduced us to everyone in the room, which was mostly huge Indian men. The walls were filled with framed pictures of the men in the family wearing their military uniforms. Indians get a lot of flak for distancing themselves from America but they sure take the army seriously. I don’t think I met a guy there who wasn’t enlisted.

  They asked me if I was truly prepared for the sweat lodge and I asked them why they were getting so heavy all of a sudden. “Oh, he’ll be fine,” the aunt said, interrupting our discussion. “We had kids in there the other day who were four years old. They loved it.”

  The sweat lodge was a dome made of bent branches about ten feet in diameter. The center had a small pit filled with large hot rocks that glowed red. The heat was kept in by a series of wet blankets surrounding the outside.

  Blobs, her brother, me, and three Indian men crawled inside and sat cross-legged around the fire. Within seconds, I knew I was in trouble. Scottish is about as white as white gets. We invented redheads. To us, people from Wales are Southerners. I’m designed to be standing on a craggy mountain in the highlands wearing nothing but a tartan cloth as freezing rain blows sideways through my hairy beard. I’m not designed for heat. It makes me claustrophobic.

  The door was a flap made by folding a blanket up, and when our host closed it he closed the door on hope. Goddamnit, it’s hot in there. It’s not hot like a sauna where you go, “Jeesh! Hot enough for ya?” It’s hot like a live lobster being dropped into boiling water and realizing he is being prepared as food. “Has anyone died from this?” I asked nervously after introductions were made (the answer is “yes” followed by “plenty”). The Indian man leading the ceremony told me about a chief from another tribe who was in a one-person sweat lodge for so long, he cooked himself. “When they went to pull him out,” our host said, “the meat came off the bone like a Christmas turkey.” He was probably fucking with me, but the fact that I was putting my life into a stranger’s hands made me very uncomfortable. Being burned alive wasn’t helping.

  White man scared.

  I looked over at Blobs and she was completely drenched in sweat. E
veryone was. I decided I was going to say, “Fuck this,” and march out of the tent. As this tempting thought raced through my head they opened the flap and cold air rushed in. O Great Spirit, it felt like every pore in my body was chugging a glass of ice-cold water. But they quickly shut the flap again.

  We were told to pray for family members who were fellow war vets suffering from various postwar maladies. One of them had some kind of lung infection and we all had to concentrate to get the poison out. This is an easy concept to grasp when you’re saying grace, but I was having a bad acid trip. “We can control toxins in other people’s bodies,” I rambled silently, “so is it possible there are waves of energy going through the cosmos we can then manipulate and coerce into making real changes in the real world? No, it isn’t! It can’t be!” I was losing it. As they began their traditional songs, I started bobbing back and forth like an autistic orphan.

  They could tell I was not coping so the host assured me we would open the flap after one more song. This didn’t help because it wasn’t a specific time. White people can take almost endless amounts of suffering; they just need to know exactly when it’s going to end. Indian songs go on forever. It’s not like “Louie Louie” where you get three choruses, then a guitar solo, then one more chorus and you’re done. The chanting they were doing in the tent, though beautiful and haunting, kept going and going and going. Every time I thought we were done and things were coming to a close, someone else would come in with a “Hay-ay-aya-hey I hey-a-a” and we were off on a whole other part.

  They opened the flap for what felt like a fraction of a second and then put on three more red-hot rocks for what they called the Final Round. Now I was mad. “Are they fucking with me?” I thought. “Is this some kind of joke?” The host noticed he was murdering me and he said I could put my hands behind my back and reach for some cold air outside the bottom of the tent. I did so and it was heavenly. I haven’t been that jealous of my fingers since they touched Megan’s beef curtains back in 1984.