How to Piss in Public (22 page)

Ryan survived the prank and didn’t go to jail. Instead, he grew up fast and continued to grab his career by the balls. As I write this, he is finishing a Levi’s campaign, which, in the world of photography, is like becoming president. It pays something like seven million dollars. You see? That’s how you do New York. People say it’s like riding the bull, but it’s more like riding the bullshit. You gotta do the hustle and work hard for the money and don’t stop ’til you get enough and a bunch of other disco lyrics.

When I had my sit-down with Ryan, all this was yet to happen and I was under the impression I could keep him under my wing like a baby chick and never let him leave the nest. As he scoffed at my allegations, I noticed he looks exactly like Sid Vicious and I started to doubt myself. He dressed like all New York kids at the time, in a Travis Bickle army coat and huge sneakers, but his face was pure Irish trash, and those people don’t take too kindly to being told what to do. I know. I’m one of them.

After about an hour, I realized it was very difficult trying to convince someone of something that isn’t true so I threw up my hands and walked out of the bar. Ryan asked me where I was going and as I told him to fuc—
WHAM!
I felt a thuddening punch to the back of my head. This was the worst punch in the dictionary of punches—a sucker punch. I turned around and pointed to a parking lot without saying a word. Ryan obliged, and we met by the cars to have it out like real men.

What followed looked more like real
old
men. We had our hands up the way boxers did in the 1920s and were sizing each other up like two geriatrics standing over a broken shuffleboard pole. Have you ever been in a fight? It’s surprisingly hard to actually hit the guy in the face. Wrestling is one thing and head-butting someone in a bar is another, but actually going toe-to-toe is about as easy as that medieval carnival game where you throw a beanbag through the hole in the wood thingie. Every time I sent one of my Thor-like fists of fury at his head, I’d hit some hair or a sleeve or nothing at all. Then he’d deliver a knockout punch that probably would have broken my nose if my shoulder hadn’t blocked it. We were both fighting like we were in the back of an empty eighteen-wheeler that kept hitting potholes. Toward the end, there must have been a dozen blows delivered by both sides and all we had to show for it were one red ear and a cramp. How do you end this type of fight? It’s like one of those poos where after about a hundred wipes you say to your asshole, “All right, buddy, shit or get off the pot. I have a life to get back to.” In this case, my asshole was Ryan and I told him to stop by putting my hands on my knees and panting. He was also too exhausted to go on and just nodded while patting me on the back.

A small crowd had gathered to witness the brawl and I was mortified to discover Blobs was included in this mess. This pathetic display would surely set me back several weeks of courtship. Instead, the opposite happened. Blobs came over and kissed my lips off before saying, “Oh my God, seeing you fight makes me so hot.” That’s right, gentlemen, you don’t have to win or even get one good punch in to impress the ladies. Simply stepping into the ring gives women a wide-on.

The three of us got in a cab and headed to Max Fish. While Blobs molested me in the cab, Ryan and I continued to pat each other on the back and say, “I love you, man,” to each other. But Ryan kept adding, “And I’ve always wanted to fuck you,” which was weird.

It was a perfect autumn night and about half of Max Fish was on the street smoking cigarettes and telling jokes. This was our
Cheers
bar and Ryan immediately struck up a conversation with a very pretty girl who hoped he wasn’t gay.

I was about fifteen feet away and couldn’t help but notice he was sitting on a car hood, laughing the same way he had laughed at me back at the bar. I never got him back for that sucker punch. So, I marched toward him with every molecule of force I could possibly summon from all the gods of Hades and delivered an earth-shattering blow to his face that sent him sprawling off the hood and into the street. Ryan was down for the count and I felt kind of bad but that’s what you get when you sucker-punch dudes—a sucker punch.

A few seconds later, Ryan was still slumped over and just as I was about to ask him if he was OK, he looked up with a huge smile that went from ear to ear and was filled with blood. His face would have made Batman go to the restroom on himself. He also had a gigantic hole in his cheek where one of my rings had punctured his skin. Jaguar McGinley then leapt at my chest with so much agility, it sent me flying through the air like an anorexic who just stepped on a land mine. They say you’re not supposed to let bull terriers fight because they’ll learn how fun it is and never want to stop. It’s the same with pet rats. You can never let them try meat or they’ll get bloodlust and start biting their owners. Ryan’s bleeding face was like a breath of fresh air to his pugilist instincts and the old man with his dukes up in the parking lot was now someone you click on after hitting the two-player button in
Street Fighter.
As I scrambled to get up from the first toss, he picked me up and hurled me into a pile of garbage cans. Where did all this strength come from? One of the best descriptions of the fight was from a guy we called Fatboy, who said, “Man, he threw you around like a rag doll.” I careened off metal gates and bounced into parked cars. At one point, he wrestled me to the ground and sat on my chest, setting my face up for a bashing of Elephant Man proportions. I barked out, “Ryan, I’m in love with you!” to distract him, and his confusion bought me the tenth of a second I needed to scurry out from under him. This got huge laughs from the crowd that had gathered. I was kind of hoping someone would break it up, but this wasn’t that kind of crowd. They were frantically taking pictures and shouting out advice, like “Kick his face!” and “Bite!”

We used one of the photos for our table of contents. That’s Ryan with the hole in his face, me buried under his arm, and a guy named Steve who popped in to pose for the photo. (2002)

I’ve been in a lot of fights over the years and they usually go like this one. I will take on any motherfucker who has a problem and I will almost definitely lose. I will, however, get at least one good punch in, and that’s all you need.

During a pummeling, your adrenaline pumps so hard, you can afford to have dual thoughts. While half of me tried to avoid getting swollen shut, the other half calmly wondered what the hell a grown man was thinking punching a teenager in the face. Ryan was barely twenty at the time. He had a rough childhood and grew up in a house full of brothers, a Jersey kid who had been fighting his siblings since the day he was born. In fact, he’s still fighting right now. Whoops, there I go over another car and into some boxes.

Finally, Ryan too was running out of steam and when I finally managed to not be flying through the air, I grabbed his coat, pulled it over his head, and gasped, “Please. We’re done.” For the second time
that night, Ryan agreed. Then he smiled and roared, “Yeaaah!” as a kid called Kid America held Ryan’s arm in the air and yelled, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!”

I stumbled upstairs to my apartment, where Blobs ravaged me so vigorously I now know what it’s like to be food. I may have lost the battle but I won the war against not getting laid.

The fight became the talk of our tiny circle and photos of it were everywhere, including my magazine, where I used one for our table of contents.

A few days later at a different bar, Dash and his friend Earsnot took me aside to ask a few questions. Earsnot was a homeless black graffiti writer who grew up on New York’s streets and used his gigantic arms to hospitalize anyone who made fun of him for being gay. Dash came from money, but his parents gave up on him at fourteen and sent him to a boarding school for bad kids. He got out two years later and never moved back home. He was alone in the world from a very early age and took fighting way too seriously. They both did. “The thing I don’t get,” Dash said like we were in a juvenile detention center together and this fight had lost us both our TV privileges, “is why his face is all fucked up and you look all right.” I explained that Ryan’s facial hole was my only good punch and the rest of the fight was nothing but me flying into things. Dash eventually accepted my explanation and was no longer dubious of his friend’s victory. “Just one more question,” he asked with his arms around my shoulders. “What’s it like to get your ass kicked by a faggot?”

Bigger Than Texas (2003)

V
ice started making trips to South by Southwest back when we were still
Voice of Montreal.
We instantly fell in love with Austin. Austinites were rednecks because they lived in Texas but they were smart because it’s a university town. That’s what our favorite kind of hosers are: educated drunks. We were a match made in heaven. The city’s motto is “Keep Austin weird,” and our hosts regularly drove up and down the street yelling, “Don’t move here!” at the music journalists who were visiting their lovely town for the festival.

We started going there to meet fellow publishers and get to know which bands were going to be big next year, but after one or two visits the party subsumed all other activities and the whole trip became devoted to getting really, really fucked-up.

Trace was the first guy we met there. He’s one of those preppy-looking dudes with a side part and an argyle sweater who grew up going to punk shows and starting fights. He often wore knee-length tweed golf pants from the 1920s and fought so often he once got shot through the femur and now has a steel bar holding up that part of his leg.

By 2003, we had been going to SXSW for almost a decade and had the art of alcohol poisoning down to a science that Trace summed up in an acronym: DOWNER. It’s broken down like this …

D
on’t cockblock: It’s obvious when she likes one more than the other so back off if you notice you’re number two.

O
nly fifteen hours: If you start as early as nine
A.M.
, you’re going to have to pack it in by midnight.

W
ater aplenty: It takes real discipline but almost every time it occurs to you, order a glass of water. If you forget this one too many times in a row, you need to get Roman on your ass and make yourself puke.

N
ever after four
A.M.
: This supersedes the fifteen-hours rule so if you start at midnight, you only get four hours of partying in.

E
at your dinner: Even if cocaine shits out your appetite. Force yourself to eat at least a burger an evening.

R
egulate your bumps: If you get too greedy with a line, you’re going to ruin your drunk buzz, so before you do a bump, take a step back and ask yourself, “Am I not already wasted enough?”

Blobs and I were on the rocks after I went on a particularly long bender so I booked a six
A.M.
flight with my booze partner Sharky and we started the trip by partying all night in New York. We liked to go to the worst strip clubs in Queens rather than fancy ones in the city because trash is more colorful. That night we went to a now-defunct club in Long Island City called Foxes and the first thing I noticed was a Puerto Rican single mom with deliciously droopy tits in black dad socks.

“I like your socks,” I said sincerely over the very loud R & B.

“They’re for medicinal purposes,” she answered back, assuming I was making fun of her. Soon we were sitting with a girl named Maria who knew we were too cheap for lap dances but hung out with us anyway. “This nigga’s
better-looking,” she said, pointing to Sharky before switching her pointing finger over to me and adding, “But this nigga’s balls-out.” An hour later she was giving me a free lap dance, which in New York entails a woman taking you to a private booth where she removes her neon-pink underwear to reveal … a matching pair of the same underwear. Nude dancing is illegal in New York and this panties ritual is a totally ineffectual way around it. “How come you ain’t hard?” Maria said angrily, hitting me in the chest.

“I don’t know,” I said, and then asked, “Coke?” The bar stayed open until five
A.M.
and if we had been a few seconds later, we would have missed our flight.

“I have some bad news,” I told the stewardess while panting after a long run to the gate. “My friend here is petrified of flying so I was wondering if we could just grab a drink from you before we take off.” She hesitated and I told her it would make everything easier for everyone. She said she couldn’t and Sharky thanked me for distracting her while he grabbed two tiny bottles of gin.

By the time we got to our connection in Houston, we were at a level of drunk that was poetic. It was too early for bars so I told him to wait around the corner and join me in exactly one minute. Then I walked over to the VIP Gentleman’s Club and said, “Hello, I’m Chris Isaak’s manager—has he shown up yet?” Then Sharky, who looks a little bit like Chris Isaak, turned the corner and I yelled, “Chris!” He was familiar with this gag and began following me into the VIP room when a black lady from the counter stopped and asked for our membership cards. Her white coworker then rolled her eyes and said, “I’ve got this, Cheryl,” while waving us in. How culturally ignorant of that African-American woman not to know she was talking to country music royalty.