How to Piss in Public (16 page)

I was flown to Cleveland to interview the Strokes for an
NME
(British music magazine) cover story but they kept delaying it, so by the time we got started, I was blind drunk from sitting in a bar all day. Hearing the tape of this interview is like listening to a different person and the only thing I remember clearly is watching the show from the edge of the stage, then sitting on the stage next to the bassist, then sprawling out and falling asleep on the stage in front of four thousand people. They were not jazzed.

All in all I’d say, outside of the cash, being famous looks like a real pain in the ass. Famous people are not constantly getting accolades from well-informed peers who love their work. They’re getting harassed by twenty-one-year-olds who say stuff like, “Aren’t you the guy from that thing?” If you’re really famous, you make everyone so awkward when you walk in the room, you might as well be the Elephant Man. Bill Murray calls fame a “twenty-four-hour-a-day job” and tells people who want to be famous, “Try being rich first. See if that doesn’t cover most of it.”

Anyway, the best famous person I ever met was Clash front man Joe Strummer. His band was heavily influenced by glam legends Mott the Hoople, whose whole thing was being at one with the fans. They’d let anyone come backstage or into the recording studio. In a way, they invented the whole punk ethos of “kill rock stars.” The Clash continued this tradition and treated everyone like their best pal.

Shortly after moving to New York, I met Joe at a hotel in SoHo to discuss his 1999 album with the Mescaleros,
Rock Art and the X-Ray Style—
only, I hate talking to musicians about music. I want to hear about their process about as much as I want to watch a woman douching
before I go down on her. Just give me the good stuff and leave the rest behind the curtain.

I brought Joe a pile of DOs & DON’Ts and asked him to comment. He cared about fashion exactly the same way I did, with exaggerated passion.

“He looks like a bloody juggler,” Joe said, looking at a woman in orange overalls. I told him it was a girl and he looked up blinking. “Uh-oh,” he said, “looks like I’m going to have to spend my lunch break at LensCrafters!” The guy’s jokes reminded me of my gran’s in that they were awesome.

We got along smashingly and after the interview, we went out for lunch together. It took forever to get there because every time he saw a pile of garbage he had to root through it. “Why are you so fascinated by everything?” I asked him. “You act like you just got out of jail.” He said it was a genetic trait he couldn’t do anything about. “Ask Bo Diddley,” he hollered while pulling a broken lamp out of the garbage to see what was beneath. “He’s the same way. There’s something about guitarists where we can’t go by a skip without checking it out.”

I had the Clash’s first album in my bag because I wanted to ask him some questions about the early history of the band. “This is Mick Jones’s favorite album,” I told him.

“I know,” he said. Then he grabbed it out of my hand and said, “You see that picture? That’s in Camden Market in the alleyway outside our rehearsal space.” I was interested because I think I know exactly where it is. “See? You care. I was there with the missus and the kids recently and when I realized how close we were, I dragged them over. It was a bit farther than I thought and the kids were whining because they wanted Pokémon or something like that and I kept saying, ‘Trust me. It’s going to be worth it!’ So we make our way there and I tell everyone to close their eyes. I stood in the exact same spot I’m standing on the album and made the same expression and everything and I said, ‘All right, open your eyes!’ Guess what happened. Dead air. Nothing. The kids said, ‘All right, can we go now?’ and the missus says, ‘All right, Joe, that’s enough, let’s leave, please.’” I laughed and Joe signed the album with the words “Open your eyes! I said to the crowd but NO!”
at the top. I think autographs are queer but this is still one of my most prized possessions.

After lunch we went to drink pints at a bar on Seventh and A called Niagara where a mural of him now sits. About one minute after ordering our drinks, a geeky NYU student came up and said, “I’m really sorry, but are you Joe Strummer?” Joe said, “Yup!” and after agreeing to pose for a picture, he suggested they switch shirts and do it again. “I’ll be you and you be me.” Joe then put on the kid’s polo shirt while the kid put on Joe’s leather jacket and sunglasses. Their photo shoot went on for another twenty minutes and I told him I had to go. It was cool Joe was willing to indulge the kid but it also blew our hang. I told you fame was a pain in the ass. We agreed to meet for dinner later on that night.

I was dating an artist named Rose at the time. She was a tall Jew with jet-black hair who only did blow jobs. I told her about the dinner and she said she already knew Joe and had dated Pennie Smith, the guy who shot the
London Calling
album cover. Great. We all met at Three of Cups on First Avenue and when I walked into the room Joe yelled, “Here he is!” like we were old pals.

The table was a who’s-who of local musicians, including Chris Robinson, the singer of the Black Crowes, whom I sat across from. I was introduced to everyone at the table, including Pennie Smith, who was staring at Rose like she was his dead mother. “Hello, Pen,” she said victoriously.

Joe dominated the table with funny stories and effusive flattery directed at every guest, but Chris started feeling courageous as the night wore on and turned into a very loud Southern gentleman who was unlike the guy I sat down with. “I love me some bah-bee-kyew,” he yelled, unprovoked. “Pig foot, pig toe!” he added, like I was going to say, “Wait, ‘toe.’ Is you crazy? You eat a muthafuckin’ toe?” I didn’t say anything because I don’t give a shit if someone likes food. “Shit,” he said, cocking his head back, “I’ll eat a PIG’S ASS if they cook it right!” I thought this sounded a lot like the Chris Rock bit where he goes, “I’ll eat a PIG’S ASS if they cook it right!” and I said as much. Chris was oblivious but his girlfriend leaned over to me and said, “He
gets progressively more black and Southern the drunker he gets.” I was impressed she could be so blunt about her boyfriend while he was sitting right there (to really see Chris black it up, I highly recommend checking out his “Kinky Reggae” tribute to Bob Marley on YouTube). I looked over at Rose and she was chewing her food while staring at Pennie and not saying a word. “You all right?” I asked.

“Mmm hmm,” she responded without looking at me.

While Joe held court, I looked over at Pennie and couldn’t help but notice how cripplingly uncomfortable he was. He barely spoke all night and when he did talk it was quietly into the ear next to him. When Rose got up to go to the bathroom, Pennie waited until the door closed behind her. After it clicked shut he looked at me and said, “Mate, what are you doing? Do you know who that is?”

“Um, Rose?” I answered, confused. Then the woman sitting next to him came over and explained that Rose was a fucking lunatic who had been stalking Pennie for years and I really had to get her out of there. Apparently, she had been sending him endless letters and showing up at his studio unannounced. He hadn’t called the cops but he was thinking seriously about it now. Great. Thanks, Rose.

After our meal, we went upstairs and I dillydallied with Joe for a bit before telling him I had to leave. Joe demanded I stay, which is what he did to absolutely everyone who had to go, including strangers. The end result was this hulking pile of humans surrounding him like an army wherever he went. I shook his hand and took Rose home, where she sucked me off and went to sleep.

I had a
Fight Club
moment where I went back over our short relationship and realized, yes, she is completely out of her fucking mind. I quit answering her calls, and she eventually stopped leaving messages. When I saw her two years later, we gave each other awkward smiles that hurt my cheeks.

A year after that, Joe Strummer returned from walking his dog and collapsed dead on the living room floor. He didn’t know he had a congenital heart defect, nor did anyone else. He was fifty years old.

I Said, “Jesus Is Gay,” on National Television (2000)

A
lmost right after setting up our New York office, I was booked on Bill Maher’s show
Politically Incorrect.
The taping was in March, right in the middle of a bender I was on in Texas with Pinky. We were attending Austin’s South by Southwest music conference and had to leap on a plane at noon to make it to L.A. in time for the show. Guests on the show usually researched all the questions in advance and had all their answers prepared, but we just saw it as another page in the party book. I listened to the questions they gave me to research about as closely as you listened to economics lectures in high school.

When we got to L.A., our buddy David Choe met us at the airport. He’s a painter who started as a graffiti vandal and petty thief and he single-handedly made it cool to be Asian again. He’s handsome but he also looks like a racist cartoon of a Chinaman because he’s always smiling. Choe dresses like a cholo and was driving a beat-up Chevy Nova at the time. “We should go straight there from the airport,” he said after we threw our bags in his shitbox. “It could take forever to get there because of the traffic.”

“I fucking hate L.A.,” Pinky said as we pulled out of the parking lot. “It’s like
Waterworld
but with cars instead of Jet Skis. I mean, are there even any houses in this city, or do people just pull over and sleep in their cars when they get tired?” He was already dipping into the scotch I didn’t know we had and I asked for some of the same. The stewardesses were pretty stingy and the lack of service had delivered a crippling blow to our mutual buzzes. The beauty of benders, however, is it’s very easy to get them back on track.

After Choe pulled into HBO Studios, I stuffed the scotch bottle down the front of my pants and double-checked our cocaine supply. We weren’t about to risk a no-booze policy at this thing. The staff at the entrance were unable to detect any of our contraband so Choe, Pinky, and I stumbled down the hall and into the greenroom with ease. There are two ways to approach a situation like this: You can be nervous and hope everyone likes you or you can just throw up your hands and treat everyone around you like puppets someone hired to amuse you.

We exploded into the greenroom like a triumvirate of bullies looking for a nerd to wedgie. It was a pretty big room with two long couches and a small kitchen partially separated by a frosted glass partition. It looked like a teachers’ lounge for the most expensive private school in the world. We had cut it a little close timewise, so all the guests were already present and accounted for. None of them seemed to care that the Three Musketeers had arrived. Quietly sitting on the couch was Bishop John Shelby Spong, an incredibly smart but dull religious man who looked like a very tall Montgomery Burns. I’ve never really understood the whole Christian scholar thing. Congratulations, you read one book. Next to him was Robert Conrad, a sexy tough-guy actor from the sixties best known to later generations for his “I dare you to knock this Duracell battery off my shoulder” ads. He looked like Ned Flanders–meets–Steve McQueen and was there with a new bride who looked like a child. Over by the window, where cell phone reception was apparently better, we had Lisa Ann Walter, a pretty redhead with perfect tits who looked like a young Joy Behar dipped in babe sauce. She was discussing some deal with her agent, which is always weird to
see because you’re watching someone discuss a company they work at and the company is themselves.

A nebbishy homosexual with a headset and a clipboard immediately swooped in and introduced me to the other guests. Pinky and David hung back on a couch closer to the door as Pinky plotted how to drink scotch and do coke without getting caught. David’s race lacks the enzymes to do the same, so he just looked at magazines. Everyone gave me a friendly but brief wave and I made a mental note to do everything in my power to get into Lisa Ann’s pants—which I never did.

We still had an hour to kill and everyone seemed preoccupied with the spouse or manager they’d brought along for the ride, so Pinky and I oozed toward the kitchen part of the waiting area, where the partition provided a semblance of privacy. HBO was being broadcast on a giant screen in the middle of the room, which was a great distraction for everyone else’s eyes and ears. I moved over to the fridge, which was completely out of view, and pretended to care about it. “Fancy a swig?” I whispered to Pinky, and he said, “Yes, but I wish we had ice. Warm scotch tastes like gasoline.” Nobody was looking so I took the small coke bag out of my pocket, dipped my key in, and snorted a bump the size of a mouse’s eyeball. It burned like a motherfucker and made the back of my throat taste like nail polish remover. Pinky took my keys and did twice as much as me and then bent over in pain like someone had just stabbed him in the nose. How glamorous. We did this a few times and it was less pleasant each time. Sometimes I think the only thing coke does is make you want more coke. I turned to Pinky and said, “I’m not sure I should be doing this. Cocaine often brings out the worst in me.”

“Me too,” he added, and presented a coke booger so huge and disgusting, it made me dry-heave.

The buzz from Austin was back with a vengeance and we were ready to rock. I zinged Pinky with, “I don’t know what all these Muslim women are complaining about. I love getting stoned,” and he zinged me back with, “Give a man a bump, you have a friend for the night. Teach a man to shoot up, you have a friend for life.” We were
on.

Just as we were indulging in our unprecedented wit, the Neb arrived with his clipboard and asked us if we were all right. “Shit!” I thought. “How are we going to explain standing here by a (probably) empty fridge?” Neb smiled and asked us if we wanted a beer. Then he opened the fridge we had been ignoring and made the four shelves of beer evident to our bloodshot eyes. “There’s Beck’s and Budweiser,” he said cheerily with his clipboard to one side. “There’s some weird pumpkin beer in there too if you’re into that. What else? There’s Heineken … drink up!” Each word felt better than when you take off a wet bathing suit and replace it with underwear from the dryer. I almost Frenched him for telling us what lay right beneath our powdered noses.