How to Piss in Public (3 page)

“That’s it!” he said excitedly. “And if you put your face on one side, the pins appear on the other side as an imprint of your face.” I didn’t know where he was going with this and I was getting nervous. Then he said, “That’s what I see in the sky. Only it’s God doing the impressions of your face.” Then he fucking turns to me and says, about a foot away
from my ear hole, “Whatever face comes out the other end, that’s your face. Do you understand?”

I was desperate to get off this topic and nervously said, “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Hey! That cloud looks like Garfield taking a shit. You see that?”

He wasn’t having it, and he got up on one elbow so we were face-to-face. “No, man, I’m serious,” he said. “I’m going to ask you tomorrow if you really do get it, because it’s important.” I could feel a bad trip starting to bubble from my toes and surge up my body, so I sprang upright and said, “Let’s sneak onto the golf course,” to which Steve and Dogboy yelled,
“Yeah!”

Those guys usually got all Beavis and Butthead on acid, and I envied that. For me, acid was like having a thousand eyes and twenty million ears that could hear every conversation in the world at once. I think that’s God’s Pin Art way of saying, “Stick to booze,” but every time God spoke, I put my fingers in my ears and said, “La la la. I can’t hear you. Doo dee dee. Not listening to you.”

I was rattled by Marty’s provocations for the rest of the night, but I had shaken the bad trip and was able to file his heavy vibes away under No Fucking Way Are We Ever Going There Again for as Long as We Shall Live.

The Kanata Golf and Country Club was in the upper-class section of Nowhere and we were well-known by the security staff. Tonight it was beautifully lit up by the moon and we all felt fearless. We were all such old hats at sneaking into stuff, we actually preferred it when they chased us. Steve would do karate moves and run in circles like he was training to be a Keystone Kop. We were bored brats who were desperate to get back to all the danger and excitement our immigrant parents had rescued us from. Adding acid to this game was like colorizing a black-and-white movie. We ran up and down hills and tossed flags like javelins. We threw garbage cans in the water and climbed trees as if they were made of stairs. We had the agility of Olympic monkeys and the whole thing was such a riot, we started laughing uncontrollably.

Then it happened.

Steve was bouncing along and saw a small circle of mud that was about two feet in diameter. Without a second thought he jumped on it,
expecting a small “splatch” and maybe a slightly muddy toe. Instead his entire body vanished into the atmosphere and the only thing left was his disembodied head sitting there on top of the puddle.

Do you get what I’m telling you?

His body was gone. Disappeared.

If you were a Nobel Prize–winning physicist you would have been confused. We were stupid kids on fucking acid. Ergo, we
completely
lost our shit. After screaming “What the fuck!?” about seven hundred times, I calmed down a bit and started to get mad at society for having such technology. “Why is it okay to annihilate people’s torsos and limbs using some kind of invisible death ray? I understand security can’t tolerate trespassers and I wouldn’t have complained if we were kicked out or arrested, but obliterated with a space gun? They shoot your body off if you walk on a golf course after hours? How long have they had this technology? Why isn’t there more blood? The military are the only ones who should be able to use such guns—
not
that fat rent-a-cop with the woman’s mustache! What if he gets drunk? He could end civilization! I’m going to fight for Body Gun–control legislation when I grow up.”

My mind was racing.

Marty was bewildered and laughing but in control. Dogboy and I were gone and had begun howling with confusion. Steve had been murdered. We were both sitting on our haunches with our arms outstretched screaming, “Whaaaat!?” over and over.

Steve knew how important it was to laugh at a time like this—especially if you’re not actually dead. He authoritatively said, “I’m all right. You can laugh,” and while still having no idea what happened to his body, Dogboy and I both fell back and laughed our heads off with no holds barred. I felt like my teeth were cumming. As we both pounded the grass and continued roaring, Steve commanded Marty to get him out. Being the legal giant that he is, Marty had no problem reaching into the muck, grabbing Steve by the armpits, and hoisting his mud-dripping body from what now appeared to be a perfectly cylindrical hole designed for people to fall into.

Then Steve said, “It’s shit,” and the laughter went to a whole ’nother level. But Steve wasn’t laughing. “I’m not high anymore,” he said like
a science teacher. The adrenaline had burned the lysergic acid diethylamide out of his system, and he was completely sober. As Steve washed all his clothes in a nearby creek, we calmed down enough to put the pieces together:

A golf course needs to have plenty of manure around to maintain perfect lawns, but you can’t have a huge mountain of manure sitting there while people play. So, they had these cylindrical containers drilled into the ground. The holes are less of an eyesore and can still hold enough fertilizer for the groundskeepers.

We all walked back to Steve’s house with him sopping wet but feces-free.

As Steve tried to explain to his mom what happened, we snuck downstairs to watch TV. He had a shower and came down later with new clothes on and a small joint we quietly and carefully smoked in the laundry room. As a particularly unfunny episode of
Who’s the Boss?
droned in the background, Steve’s buzz came back and I explained to him how I thought his entire body had gone flying off into the forest, leaving his head working but unattended.

As the laughter started up again, I considered drawing connections to cosmic exchanges and how Marty and I had the same hallucination earlier, but my mind snapped shut against it. Life’s too short to risk getting serious.

Popping the Cherry (1986)

A
fter a couple years of not knowing girls don’t not have vaginas, my friend Cheese called me up and said Big Julie, AKA Jules, was going to be at his house ready to roll. Cheese was kind of a mod but was real gross and orange about it. He never wore socks and his freckled feet were always smelly and wet. His brother, Skeeter, was a punk and they both lived in this crazy house in the woods with four other siblings. We didn’t really think Julie was Big. Girls taught us that name. It takes a fellow female’s cruel eye to teach a boy why someone five pounds overweight is a fatty. Boys don’t know who’s fat unless the girl is a massive cow. As far as I was concerned, Jules was a cute blonde with a baby face and the kind of ass you wanted to build a summer home on.

She was also one of the only girls at school who was a goer, and this was such a sure thing, Cheese assured me I’d be the Monks’ laughingstock if I didn’t corkscrew her like the pig the other girls said she was. It was one of my own rules biting me in the ass: “Never chicken out.”

It took forever to get to their house and when Cheese met me at the door, he gave me the lowdown. His house was a bizarre pile of extensions, as room after room had to be stuck on like Lego blocks every time his mother got pregnant. He led me up one staircase and
around the back to another. “You’re late so here’s the deal,” he said, leading me down a long hallway like I was about to go onstage. “She’s already agreed to it, so all you have to do is take her to my room and get started. I put a condom on my dresser and you better hurry, because my parents are going to be home soon.”

As the word “soon” came out of his mouth, we entered the living room. The whole entourage was there, and I realized we all still had our cherries intact except Jules. The boys were passing around a can of Pam cooking spray. In Canada, milk comes in thick white bags, and we would fill empty ones with what was mostly nitrous oxide from the Pam cans and then slowly inhale from the bag until nobody could talk. We called that state “the Stupids.” Which is apropos considering how many kids die from it.

I was nervous as hell but knew this was going to be awesome. Then something occurred to me while standing in the middle of the living room amid everyone’s juvenile glares and the smell of airborne canola oil. How the fuck was I going to initiate this? Jules was a slut, but we were all still middle-class suburban kids. “Slut” didn’t mean “biker bitch with crabs who will fuck your dog while tongue-kissing him and juggling his balls with her toes.” It meant, “Girl who doesn’t say
no
quite as often as all the others.” I couldn’t just walk up to her and say, “Hey, Jules. Wanna
do
it?” I also couldn’t grab her hand and walk to Cheese’s room like a cult leader choosing tonight’s child bride.

So, my dick took over and came up with this idea: There was a thin cane in a bucket by the fireplace. I took it out and tossed it about nonchalantly as I spoke. It was just a secondary prop to a bigger story. “You guys hear Jen has no vagina?” I asked the crowd with testosterone coursing through my veins like a pack of mad greyhounds. “Lawrence, why don’t you tell everyone about your mutant girlfriend?” Lawrence got out from beneath the bus I had just thrown him under and tried to punch me, but I blocked it with a swat of the cane. He yelled,
“Hey!”
and fell back on the couch in a Pam stupor holding the red line I’d just planted on his arm. Jules laughed. I cocked an eyebrow up in a “What do we have here?” face. I was going for an Errol Flynn vibe, but my heart was almost pounding its way out of my rib cage. As Lawrence
fended off candid questions from the others about his vaginaless girlfriend, I jokingly gave Jules some taunting spanks with the cane. She shrieked and ran off down the hallway toward Cheese’s room. Thanks, penis. I’ll take it from here.

After we were out of living room range, I abandoned the cane and gave chase. When we got to Cheese’s room, everything became Vaseline-lens fuzzy and I was no longer at a buddy’s house horsing around. I was on Unicorn Island with the mermaid fairy goddess responsible for rainbows. The best word to describe it would be “phantasmagoric.”

It wasn’t Jules’s first time, but she knew it was mine and she wanted it to be perfect. She had on a white sundress and looked like Doris Day or some kind of perfect fifties housewife. She pulled her dress over her head and revealed … OH MY FUCKING LORD JESUS IN HEAVEN ABOVE
.
She was wearing a corset and lingerie. That’s right: a white silk corset laced up the front with white lace panties and white stockings held up with white garters. She was a Howard Johnson’s vanilla milkshake layered in marshmallow and topped with whipped cream. I’ll never forget the face she made. Kind of a sad smile, like a dog that peed on the carpet but was still happy you’re home. “Is it all right?” she asked sheepishly. It was so all right I couldn’t reply and made a spluttering choking sound that was meant to come out as, “You look so fucking beautiful, baby, wow.” Jules pulled the bow at the top of her corset and her enormous breasts bobbled out to see what all the fuss was about. They stood there like the Grand Tetons, two majestic, magical mounds made of awesomeness that said, “Let’s
do
this.” Jules pushed me on the bed as I frantically grabbed for my dancing boner.

Before I could continue to be unable to say anything, she began one of these “blow job” things everybody had been talking about. Only it didn’t feel like my dick was being sucked. It felt like it had been removed and replaced with the cosmos. I couldn’t make out any particular gestures, just extreme joy. It was like I was floating in space and every molecule of the universe was madly in love with bliss. If I’d seen a multicolored dolphin floating by me, I would have high-fived it.

With all due respect to everyone else who’s blown me since, it never
felt anything like this. My hands had pins and needles all over them, and the area on my face where a beard would be was tingling as if a billion ants in silk slippers were practicing ballet on it. When I touched this vibrating invisible beard with my pins-and-needles hands, it felt like I was pulling long cobwebs off and stretching them out across the room. I started wondering if she’d spit magic mushrooms into my urethra.

One of the few rational thoughts that entered my head during all this was the terrible realization that I was about to blow my load. This had been an amazing thirteen seconds, but I couldn’t lose my virginity to a mouth. I sat up with a jolt and as Jules kept asking, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I furiously tried to get a rolled-up rubber sheath around something that wasn’t prepared to have anything on it but a cunt. Jules got on all fours and I got behind her in a red-cheeked panic like my hair was on fire. For a tenth of a second I paused and thought …

“Hey, there it is. The vagina! Live. Man, it really is basically in the asshole.”

When I pushed it in, I was surprised at how much doggie style bends your dick down. It doesn’t go in and out; it goes up and down. “Hmmm. That’s interesting. I wonder if—” SPLOOJ! “Really, me? Three seconds?” Jules wasn’t even sure if we had started yet. I took off the condom and held it by the window to make sure something had actually happened. Then, as several million abortions looked back at their deadbeat dad, headlights blinded my eyes. “Cheese’s parents are home!” I yelled before taking a third of a second to get dressed. It wasn’t a lie. They really were home. Jules tossed her panties and corset under the bed and threw her dress on at the speed of light.

Adults will read this and assume I felt bad about my split-second sexual endurance or that Jules was disappointed in how unsatisfying it was. But that isn’t how kids fuck. The first few times the guy is happy if blood doesn’t shoot everywhere, and the girl is happy if nothing weird happens, like an ear-splitting queef. Having a condom that actually did its job? Well, now that’s basically a perfect lay.

By the time Cheese’s parents made it through their labyrinth of a
home into the living room, Jules and I were just two other teenagers sitting on the couch.

“Everything all right?” Cheese’s father asked suspiciously in his strange Liverpudlian accent. Cheese said yes and I smiled at Jules. “If I find any of you have been into my liquor there will be hell to pay, understand?” We all nodded and kept flipping through magazines in an attempt to convince him teenagers are really geriatrics who enjoy staying in and reading on a Saturday night. Cheese’s dad paused and stared a bit before walking out of the room. If he was worried about our ripping him off, he should have checked the cooking spray supply.