2. Pissing Is Weird
As I think Dostoyevsky once said, “No matter how you shake your peg, the last wee drop runs down your leg.” You could swing that thing around with the force of NASA’s Human Training Centrifuge, but—bloop—a yellow drop still squirts out the second you place it back in your underwear.
I’ve even tried faking it out and pretending I’m done shaking to see what happens, but he waits until he’s positive there’s cotton around his lips and then spitefully spits out a drop. There’s a generation gap between you and your dink at this age and he will do everything in his power to fuck up your shit.
3. You No Longer Have Game
I have run into women who I used to defile in my single days but when I talk to them now, I sound like the narrator from The Wonder Years holding in a fart. After you’re married, women become human beings for the first time ever and it’s like meeting another species. “Um, hello, do you like music?” You can try flirting but with nothing to back it up, you come across like a pugilist in a wheelchair.
This is the nature of marriage. In 1978, classmate Lee Gratton told me, “When you get married you get to see your wife’s tits whenever you want.” He was right, only it’s your best friend’s tits. You don’t have any game when you’re married because you’re in a new universe of love, and anything else feels like a preschool reunion.
4. Newspapers Make You Furious
In your twenties, you have to force yourself to read the paper. In your thirties, it finally gets interesting and each article reads like your favorite book. By your forties, you’re actually smarter and more experienced than most of the journalists and you catch yourself crumpling the sides going, “They’re blaming the coast guard for what the pirates did? Are these journalists stupid or just trying to make their fathers angry?”
5. You Care About Your Lawn
Bill Hicks had a bit where he said, “What is it about men where they wake up one day caring about their lawn?” Then he talks about dads walking around in bathrobes with their balls hanging out and yelling, “Who wants sausages? I’m makin’ sausages for breakfast!” These routines have gone from comedic banter to a documentary about my life. I care so much about my lawn, I wish it had a birthday so I could buy it presents. I even have nightmares about its bald spots. Scotts EZ Seed is way better for patches than that stupid pulp shit they sell but if you’re in an area with a lot of pines, you’re going to have to lime the shit out of it before any seeding solutions—and do it in the fall so it gets soaked in six months later when the snow melts … Hey, where’d everybody go?
6. Construction Is Fascinating
What young men consider a noisy nuisance is a giant bowl of eye candy to a forty-year-old. “Oh, they’re using those planks made out of recycled bags,” you think as you peer through the fence at the new community center. “Those are way too slippery for a deck.” You’ll also catch yourself worrying about foundations and insulation and even asking carpenters what brand of thread lock they use.
7. Country Music Sounds Cool
Twenty-five years ago, if you told me I’d get chills from hearing Willie Nelson and Toby Keith sing about feeding alcoholic beverages to a horse, I’d ask you why a time traveler was going to punk shows and talking to kids.
What used to sound like hillbillies yawning over unplugged guitars now sounds like a soothing pile of heartfelt stories I could listen to all night. I still like Southern rap and anarcho-punk, but it’s now tempered with heaping portions of Merle Haggard.
8. Hangovers Become Intense
Fuck foxholes. Try finding an atheist in an old man’s hangover. I have kneeled there with my head in the toilet for hours explaining to Jesus why I’ve never been to church and swearing to his dad I will start this Sunday. Cross my heart and hope to die, Lord, because that would be an improvement over this funeral march of head-pounding dry heaves.
When you wake up at forty with a hangover, your head feels like an inside-out Medusa. Then nausea grips your whole body like a barf snowsuit and your skin feels like a doctor accidentally gave chemotherapy to a baby on a hunger strike. This lasts, without respite, until you go to bed, and it even lingers until the following morning. I would love to party as hard as I used to, but Pavlov won’t allow it, so that’s it. I didn’t quit drugs; drugs quit me.
9. Your Perversions Advance
As the Wolf recently put it, “I went out with a girl who had droopy tits when I was twenty and I wasn’t into it, but I sure wouldn’t mind fucking with them right now!”
For young men, it can be shocking to see how gigantic a woman’s ass gets in her forties, but when you reach this age you’re like, “More dessert, please.” Queefs, butt hairs, blemishes, and even a faint whiff of poo are all more grist for the fuck mill, and you finally understand why Napoleon forbade Josephine from showering the week before he got home. The previous version of you looks like a vagina-phobic metrosexual by comparison. While this is happening, scantily clad twenty-somethings go from sluts you catcall to young ladies who had better get a coat on or they are going to catch their death of cold.
10. The Party’s Over
Well, it’s not “over” per se. It’s just drastically different. With all due respect to doing coke in the basement of Lit with Paul Sevigny all night, that’s no longer my idea of a good time. I mean, it was real, it was fun, but it wasn’t real fun, and although I wouldn’t trade those days for the world, I just traded them for a whole new world.
Today, two-thirds of my roommates came out of my soul mate’s genitals and that means I feel a much stronger bond with them than with someone who has similar tattoos and the same taste in music. I still get high but it goes like this: Getting a drawing from my daughter feels like doing a bump. Hearing my son say, “Take dat, Beezo,” after punching his Bozo Bop Bag makes me laugh like I just smoked a bowl. Having a baby fall asleep on your chest feels like heroin. Seeing a little kid fly his first kite is as exciting as amphetamines, and taking all evening to build a Lego robot feels better than a Maker’s on the rocks next to a perfectly poured Guinness.
I’m not saying you should skip the party stage. Just don’t live there for the rest of your life. Take it as close to the edge as you can without jumping, then turn away and go for a walk through the flowers, because it’s all just a lark. What really matters in the long run and what your true legacy will be is the wisdom you pass on to your kids. As brilliant old guy Horace Greeley once said, “Fame is fleeting; popularity an accident; riches take wings. Only one thing endures: character.”
I’m going to pour some beer out for all my dead homies right now, but not too much, because this particular beer is delicious and I’m saving it for a toast to my dad homies. A toast! To the future! To life after the death of cool!
Toasting the future with Cerebral Ballzy at my fortieth. (2010)
Afterword
So that’s it. That’s my life. The party years at least. I didn’t put the dead stuff in here because I don’t really want my children in a book with a dozen dead junkies. I don’t have any regrets. Booze was there for all the bad decisions I ever made, but it was there for the good ones too (not so much with the mediocre ones). All these choices were crucial parts of my development, but I’m not one of these existentialist types who think you can alter your destiny. Shit, Crass’s Penny Rimbaud recently told me we have the power to physically change our own DNA. Hogwash. You are who you are from the day you are born. Look at identical twins separated at birth. They find each other twenty years later, and they have the same dog, same car, similar-looking husbands, similar jobs, and about the same annual income.
I didn’t even want to be a writer. Not at first. I wanted to be an artist, but that shit takes forever and I simply don’t have the patience. Even the work-to-reward ratio of drawing comics wasn’t satisfying enough (also, I suck at it). I write because I can’t not write. Like Bukowski said, “Unless it comes bursting out of you, in spite of everything, don’t do it.” I believe life is ab
out figuring out what you were meant to do and pursuing that, by any means necessary. True misery is the ballerina who was meant to be an accountant or the accountant who was meant to be a ballerina. My generation has been taught that creative jobs are the special ones and everyone else is living a miserable lie, but I’ve got a lot more respect for a proud grout cleaner than some douchebag photographer who uses words like “lexicon.”
It took a lot of trial and error to figure it all out. Selling drugs gave me diarrhea. Playing in punk bands gets old when you get old. I tried hard labor and enjoyed the satisfaction of a job well done, but I simply didn’t have the stamina for it over the long haul. Besides, I was itching to tell stories. Though this vocation was set in stone from day one, I still had choices. I used those choices to peel back the layers and discover exactly what the stone said. It all comes back to that conversation with Dogboy on the roof when I asked him if he really wanted to sink his teeth into something. I knew I did and set off on this path the following day. You can’t just sit on your ass and assume fate is going to tap you on the shoulder.
In high school, we chose to ignore the in-crowd hierarchy and made our own club with our own set of rules. My parents worked hard to get me and my brother away from the danger of the city, and I ran back there the day I turned eighteen. When I graduated from university, there were no jobs so I created one. When Montreal’s bureaucracy started slowing us down, we moved to New York. When my wild oats were sowed, I married the love of my life and settled down. I never complained about people not giving me opportunities. The only time I got mad was when someone stood in my way.
This is where I was always meant to be and I’m infinitely grateful for that. If the reader has anything to glean from this book, I hope it’s “Trust your gut.” If you’re an Amish sailor but you were meant to be a straight drag queen who trains dancing dogs, you’re going to have to bid adieu to your bearded friends and be the Lessandra the Great you were always meant to be. That’s not just something that would make you feel better. It is the very definition of happiness.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my agent, Byrd Leavell, for pushing this book as hard as he pushed Sh*t My Dad Says and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. You went way beyond the call of duty and I’m forever indebted to you for that. I’d also like to thank my editor, Brant Rumble, and everyone at Scribner for their endless enthusiasm despite the raucous content. I’m confident this book will do much better than every other you’ve stood behind, including The Great Gatsby and all twenty-six Hemingways. Jim Goad inspired me to start writing back in the early nineties and has remained the gold standard ever since. Thanks for helping me punch up the manuscript, Jim. Thanks also to Patton Oswalt for taking time out of his busy schedule to give me invaluable notes on the book.
I’d also like to thank Arvind Dilawar, Benjamin Leo, and Kurt Lustgarten for their notes, as well as Matt Pisane for all those cover ideas.
From left to right: Totti, Cheese, Szabo, Skeeter (hidden), and me eating lunch in the suburbs. (1984)
Taking a photo with the cops for a scavenger hunt. (1984)
Singing “Use Your Brains Now” with my band Anal Chinook while covered in cow brains. I had a crossed-out swastika on my chest, but the X sweated off and by the end it was just a swastika. (1988)
Working on a zine with a French Canadian punk we called Spam. This was before computers. (1988)
My baby brother, Kyle, hanging out with the punks. (1989)
Bringing planters their trees as a foreman. (1991)
Teaching in Taipei. The board says “GOTTA TAKE A DUMP” with “pee pee” and “poo poo” below it. (1992)
A page from issue no. 10 of my comic book Pervert, wherein I told the “He’s Gone and Got a Bloody Tattoo” story in pictures. (1993)
Hanging out in Montreal at the peak of my philandering days. My hair is blue and that high-waisted-pants joke always did well with the ladies. (1993)
Meeting Bill Maher for the first time on his show. (2000)
New York Post article where Shane was a British soccer hooligan, I was a skinhead, and Suroosh was a recent hate crime victim holding a bloody bandage on his head. (2002)
Partying in Tokyo during the launch of Vice Japan. (2004)
From left to right: Markus, Blake, and Dogboy doing keg stands at my stag. (2005)
From left to right: Me, Trace’s brother, Blake, Markus, my dad, and Pinky dressed as klansmen at the denouement of my stag. (2005)
We went on a tour of Europe for our honeymoon. This was in Genova, Italy. (2005)
Me streaking through the Vice office. (2006)
Getting knocked out by a professional MMA fighter while shooting a pilot called The Immersionist. It got canned and I ended up in the hospital. (2008)
Signing the various contracts needed to sell my Vice shares. We re-created a famous photo of the Sex Pistols signing to A&M outside Buckingham Palace back in 1977. I played Steve Jones (signing), Sharky was Paul Cook, Pinky was Sid Vicious, and various Street Carnage staffers played the rest. (2008)
With my kids in England at Dial House, visiting the founders of Crass. (2009)
Onstage with Sebastian, representing Rooster NYC at a marketing seminar. Here I’m explaining our “How to Piss in Public” ad and showing attendees how to urinate under a car. (2011)
Wearing Pinky’s WATCHOO TALKIN’ BOUT MONDAYS?! Garfield Coleman shirt on Fox News with my homegirl Ann Coulter. (2011)
A puking view of my tattoos today. I may have overdone it. (2011) Photo: Chelsea Skidmore
* I should make clear that this offer comes from me alone and not my publishers or anyone else involved in bringing you this book. Also, this offer is subject to the terms and conditions I’ve put on my website at howtopissinpublic.com.
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