How to Piss in Public

by McInnes, Gavin

  I received an alarmingly high number of submissions but eventually “chose” a kid from Oakland named Meathead Eric. Then I pretended to fly out there and get knocked out by him. Once I could pretend the fight happened as a result of a challenge, I could use the preshot footage as proof. A week after the “challenge” was accepted and several months after the original fight, I posted the footage with the following text:

  Apparently I cannot beat the living shit out of anyone in the world. In fact, if the guy is much bigger than me and knows what he’s doing, I’d be very lucky to get one punch in before the whole world turns to black.

  As is always the case, the press fell for it and The Village Voice ran a feature titled “Gavin McInnes Gets Knocked the Fuck Out,” which read in part:

  After reviewing applications sent in by everyone, McInnes settled on a character, vowing to fly to San Francisco, where he would quickly make short work of [Meathead Eric]. Except what actually happened was that McInnes got knocked the fuck out. In about 40 seconds. It turns out being a tough tattooed drunk is no substitute for actually knowing how to fight.

  The story now had an end and was ready to be told in its entirety. I may have been a little punch-drunk, but I still wasn’t a dumbass fact-checker at The Village Voice.

  The Death of Cool: Dash Snow (2009)

  Dash Snow and me at Coney Island. (2002) Photo: Maria Schoenherr

  I wasn’t close with Dash toward the end of his life but his death crushed me. He was ballsy and mischievous but also had this childlike optimism that you could only get from spending your adolescence without parents. When I first met him he was still a teenager driving around the Lower East Side on a BMX bike with a huge smile on his face as if the city was his living room, which it was.

  Dash was sent to reform school at a very young age, which is like sending someone to “I Don’t Love You Anymore So Learn to Fight” school. When he came out at sixteen, his parents didn’t seem interested in having him back, so he lived in an apartment by himself and continued life as a postpubescent grown-up.

  Dash gets flak from bitter assholes because he came from money, but I’d like to see them survive abandonment at that age. That’s your first year of high school. You barely have pubes. Dash handled it better than most. He took over New York and went from a petty vandal to an art superstar. Despite all the fanfare, he treated it all like a big joke and made fun of it every chance he got. He literally beat off on his paintings. Young kids looked up to him as a tough guy and graffiti star, but when I saw him, I still saw a directionless kid.

  What killed me about his overdose was this ethereal sense of culpability. Did putting him in the spotlight make him feel like an icon who should go out in a blaze of glory? He died at twenty-seven, just like Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and later, Amy Winehouse. How many of my own friends had fallen for this bullshit? “Live Fast, Die Young” is just fashion. It’s not real. You’re not supposed to actually do it. You’re supposed to live so fast it bruises you and then move on. Why couldn’t so many of my friends move on?

  Our fear of death unites us all. That’s why there’s religion. Heroin tricks your mind into killing yourself. It assuages the fear of death by placing you in heaven and prying you free from any awareness of your mortality. It sits on your shoulder like a little Rasputin and says, “Fuck this life. It doesn’t matter. Let’s leave,” and your fearless bliss responds with, “Why not?” But why did these people let Rasputin sit on their shoulders in the first place?

  My daughter was three when Dash died and my son was one. His daughter was two. I thought Dash was one of the guys who’d figured out there’s a whole other life after cool. The party phase is fun, but it’s a phase. If twenty years of getting wasted and fucking strangers doesn’t sow your wild oats, it’s time to give up farming.

  Parenting comes after the party phase and it’s like a second life. In fatherhood it’s no longer about you; it’s about them. Unfortunately, Dash didn’t get this and I think a part of it is because he had no context. I met Dash’s father once. He was doing cocaine with us at a loft party and babbling like a spoiled aristocrat who had no idea who his son was.

  Nothing makes you appreciate your father more than becoming one yourself, and every day I deal with my kids, I can remember what my dad did when he was in that situation. I’d seen my dad deal with my broken wrist. He was there when I decided to move to Montreal. When I started my first business. When I got in trouble with the police and when I totally changed my mind about what I wanted to do with my life. He was always there. Both my parents were. Dash didn’t have those examples, so fatherhood didn’t have the same checklist. I’m not apologizing for him. I still think it’s unforgivable to let heroin peel you away from your daughter, but I see how you can get lost without parents. He already built a life from scratch. Maybe he wasn’t prepared to do it again.

  My attitude when someone OD’s is usually, “Way to go, asshole.” Heroin is Russian roulette for retards. You can get plenty high from other booze/drug combinations that aren’t fatal, so why risk it? For example, if I put you in a room with two girls, a 10 who had AIDS and a 9 who didn’t, which would you fuck? I keep telling these junkies to fuck the 9, but they keep fucking the 10 and dying. This has been happening since I graduated university.

  In March of 1995, a punk kid named Jonathan found out he got hep C from sharing needles and hanged himself. Soon after that, Melissa Auf der Maur found out her ex-boyfriend Phil had OD’d. In October of 1995, our friend Colleen died from AIDS after sharing needles. A caustic old punk named Chris who always called me out on my bullshit in college OD’d in 1995 too. A year later Melissa’s roommate Sanjay, guitarist of the Montreal band the Nils, OD’d. Charles was a hilarious old queer who was never sober and always funny. He OD’d in 1997 after getting dumped by his boyfriend. That same year, a young film student named Gordon got clean but OD’d after a relapse. That’s what always happens. After junkies quit, their tolerance goes down, then they get drunk and carelessly snort a line as big as the ones they did back in their junkie days. The new body can’t handle the old body’s habits and they die.

  All the deaths I listed were in Montreal but a few years after moving to New York, my friend Ben, a bartender at Max Fish, OD’d after a relapse. Two years later, 2 Hip from a street gang called DMS died the same way. In 2008 we were going to get a kid named Jamie to play in our band but he was found dead of an overdose in his practice space. I’ve seen about one heroin death a year since my early twenties and almost all these kids were the same age. I’ve lived twenty years twice now and feel like I’ve barely begun living. I tried not to feel sympathy for any of them because I was mad, but Dash was the last straw. I was out of apathy.

  I started drinking and getting high the second I found out he was dead and I stayed up all night crying my eyes out while writing this …

  The best part of living in New York is the feeling that you’re in the center of everything. This feeling is like hard drugs and soon you want more. Eventually, Brooklyn isn’t enough. Then certain parts of Manhattan aren’t enough. You feel like you’re visiting your parents when you’re in SoHo or you’re on a road trip when you’re in Chelsea. St. Mark’s is a minimall and even the East Village feels like a pale imitation of the Lower East Side.

  You never felt like that when you were partying with Dash Snow. You felt like you were at the Ground Zero of Fun. Every night with Dash felt like The Night. He was why people move to New York. He was the first guy my wife met when she moved here and the one person who defined the city when I arrived. It was like he invited you here from your small town and felt responsible if you had a bad time. I remember coming from a club called Black & White and everyone being mildly bummed at what a mediocre evening it had been. Without warning, Dash lit a discarded Christmas tree on fire, which exploded into flames that brought down a white Range Rover before spreading onto a building. This led to an all-nighter of vandalism that we all stil
l talk about in awe. Dash had to escape to Texas until the heat died down.

  He wrote, “All Europeans must leave now,” dozens of times all over the Lower East Side. He invented Hamster Parties, where you rip up phone books of paper for so long, the room looks like a hamster cage, and then you party in it. He had a tattoo of a spider with Saddam Hussein’s head on it. I never met a guy with a stupid tattoo whom I didn’t instantly love. It shows they get it. Dash Snow is also the only guy I’ve ever seen get into a fight with a cigarette still in his mouth. He was fearless.

  New York has a reputation as a melting pot, but it’s not. It’s several totally different New Yorks piled on top of each other with people coexisting on different planes and never saying hi. I don’t know any Puerto Ricans nor do I know anyone who knows any Puerto Ricans. There’s an entire city of jocks who go to Irish bars up by Thirty-fourth Street. I don’t know any of them but they probably have their own legends they pour some of their beer out to and do a line in memory of—which is what I just did for Dash. Then there are the born-and-raised New Yorkers who hate our guts and wear their thick accents as a badge of honor.

  I don’t give a shit about any of those scenes. The New York that interests me is these strange ten-year waves of pop-culture enthusiasts who come here from all over the world and party hard enough to define an epoch. I love the fifties beatniks who hung out with scary Negroes and got high in Greenwich Village while Jack Kerouac wrote it all down. I love the speed-freak sixties art-fag weirdoes who went to an abandoned SoHo and turned it into Philip Glass songs and Chuck Close paintings. I love the seventies CBGB’s nihilist assholes with Lou Reed and Debbie Harry telling everyone to fuck off. To me, Dash Snow defines New York from 2000 to 2010. I was lucky enough to watch that unfold.

  When I used to run around with a camera and a notepad following Irak and documenting all the mayhem, Dash asked, “Why are you always reporting on shit and reviewing other people’s shit? Why don’t you do your own shit?” I couldn’t get it out of my head. I still can’t. And neither should you. Do your own shit.

  The Excess of Success (2010)

  My parents are happy that I have money but they’re also weird about it. I recently brought it up with Monk veteran Skeeter, who married a Paki and adopted a couple of black kids.

  “Do you think they’re racist?” I asked him on the phone.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Our parents. You married an Indian (dot) and I married an Indian (feather), and our parents both seem uncomfortable at our houses. Is it racial?” Skeeter had been thinking about this, too. He’d noticed when his Liverpool dad flew off the handle after being scoffed at for not liking Brie.

  “Dude,” he said, bracing me for a cold slap of seriousness, “it’s class. They can’t help but identify us as the same rich assholes who looked down on them when they were young.” He was right. British people are consumed with class and no matter where the poor move or how much money they make, they’ll always be paranoid about where they are perceived to be in the hierarchy. This burden is alien to those of us who were imported to a new country where nobody belonged to any class and the national anthem didn’t exist.

  After building my place upstate, I invited my parents down regularly to partake in its fruits and play with the kids. They did both and I was happy to see them. Despite all the mockery on both ends, I really dig my parents. They are nuts. For Christmas my mom bought my son a broken bicycle from a charity shop (he was still a baby) and she got my daughter a used Cabbage Patch doll with threadbare clothes. For me she brought a pile of Vice magazines several years after the split. Thanks. At the house, my father devotes his spare time to important activities like reorganizing our kitchen cupboards. The first time he did it, he couldn’t believe how much food we had. “It’s a bloody waste,” he’d sneer while amalgamating our cheeses.

  After completely overhauling every shelf in the kitchen and the entire fridge, he commanded me to stop watching movies with my mother downstairs and come upstairs for a discussion. “Look at this,” he said incredulously, pointing to three large piles he had made on the counter. “You’ve got a huge bloody pile of these fucking corn chips,” he said, “then there’s this endless pile of cheese,” he grumbled while pointing to two normal-sized things of cheese, “and this,” he said accusingly while holding two jars of salsa. “What is salzzzza?” I told him it’s a Mexican sauce and he shushed me, saying, “If only they’d invent a dish that combined cheese, corn chips, and salzzzza.” I tried to tell him there is and it’s called “nachos” and he acted like I was telling him pigs have blond hair, which they do.

  I decided to prove my point and prepared a plate of nachos on an oven dish. As I laid the corn chips down and covered them with salsa and grated cheese, my dad started freaking as if I were burning $100 bills. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shrieked. “STOP!” he added, almost crying. I tried to convince him I was preparing a snack that exists and is often consumed, but he didn’t believe me. As far as he was concerned I was pouring ice cream on spaghetti and covering it with mayonnaise to spite him. “STOP!” he yowled again like Grounds–keeper Willie in drag. I kept going because I don’t give a shit about his made-up world, and he reached his breaking point.

  “That’s it!” he yelled while running to the guest room next to the kitchen and taking off his clothes. “I’m going to bed!” Europeans sleep in the nude so I had to watch his weird little ass bunny-hop under the covers as he tore into bedtime with a vengeance.

  “You’re not seriously going to bed because I made my own nachos with my own groceries, are you?” I asked while noticing old men’s asses look like shaved vaginas.

  “I HATE EXCESS!” my dad screamed as he threw the covers over his head.

  I rolled my eyes and brought the cooked nachos downstairs, where my mother and I were watching an action movie about murder. “Mmm,” she said, consuming two handfuls at a time, “these are delicious.”

  The next day I discovered the hater-of-excess had devoured the $60 bottle of wine my wife was saving for a girls’ night with her friends. She was mad, but the thought of a cheap-ass Scotsman pissed about excess while piss-drunk on excess gives me a smile I will take to my grave.

  Turning Forty (2010)

  I threw my fortieth-birthday party at my place upstate. The theme was the Great Gavsby and I invited everyone from Steve and Dogboy to a bunch of new dad friends who lived nearby. Everyone dressed like they were rich people from the 1920s, as was the rule.

  The party went well and we drank and played badminton, but my wife is the greatest wife in the world so after she hoodwinked me into going to David Cross’s next door to check on something, I returned to see she had booked the hardcore band Cerebral Ballzy to play in our backyard.

  All the dads started moshing, so like any other forty-year-old man, I took off all my clothes and jumped in. Then we did keg-stands as the band played classics like “Puke Song” and “Shitrag.”

  At the end of the night, we all sat around a bonfire and one of the kids in the band asked me what it’s like to be forty. I said, “Well, mirrors make you look old,” and he laughed so I added, “I used to sing for Anal Chinook and Leathersassbuttfuk. Now I yell stuff like, ‘The next person who says something is ‘stupid’ or calls it ‘poo-poo’ is getting a time-out!’” and he laughed a little less. Then I told him how pretty girls say, “Oh, excuse me, sir,” when they bump into me and if I ever get caught ogling them, they shoot back a sharp, cold look that says, “You’re kidding, right?” He said he got it and tried to change the subject, but I was on a roll. “I may be an old fart,” I told him, “but farts feel good and they only stink for a minute. The best part of turning forty is you can finally stop pretending to like Radiohead.” I had a good ten more in me …

  1. You Don’t Give a Shit What People Think

  In my late twenties, I asked a cab driver what it was like to be forty because that’s what he was and I was getting annoyed with his talking to his frie
nd on the phone for so long. (Why do they do that, by the way? What are they, thirteen-year-old girls?) “It’s real mellow, buddy,” he responded in his East Indian accent. “You don’t vorry so much.”

  As an angry young man, I had a lot of trouble understanding how you could not give a shit what people think. “What if someone came up to your window right now and called you an asshole?” I asked.

  “I vould say, ‘Oh my,’” he said, “then vind up the vindow and drive off.” Before I could question his manhood, he added, “Now, if it vas ten or twenty years ago I vould get out of this cab and say, ‘Vat did you say, moderfucker?’ and stuff like these—but now, nothing. It’s not vorth it.”

  I finally get what he was talking about. I’m precious cargo. I can’t be endangering my kids’ father because some irrelevant psycho is in a bad mood. Sticks and stones still break your bones when you’re forty but unless it’s a peer giving constructive criticism, you honestly don’t give a hamster’s testicle what people think.

  You also become a lot less critical of other people’s work when you’ve actually done some of your own. Friends was on for ten years. I never got a show on the air so who am I to criticize? Cox does not suck. OAR makes music that sounds queer to me but they sell eighty thousand tickets a night and I can’t even play the guitar. Good for them. Not to get all Baz Luhrmann commencement speech on your ass, but the more you accomplish, the less you trivialize others’ accomplishments. Besides, reveling in others’ failures is for losers.