How to Piss in Public (29 page)

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 will 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!”

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)

P
rostitutes 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 was 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.