How to Piss in Public (18 page)

Then we moved to America, where journalists are even less interested in truth.

Where French v. English was the big deal in Montreal, America was all about race. So when the
New York Press
came to interview us, I dressed up as a Nazi skinhead and had Shane dress as a British soccer
hooligan. Suroosh wore a suit and we put a bandage on his head covered in fake blood. He was our hate-crime victim. We played our roles to a T, and when the reporter asked us if we get annoyed by all the hipsters in Brooklyn I said, “Well, at least they’re not fucking niggers or Puerto Ricans.” This caused a minor earthquake in the local media because you’re not supposed to use that horrible, horrible word but I’m sorry. Whenever people say “African-American,” all I hear is “Black people freak me out.” Eventually all this niggermarole brought
The New York Times
to our door. When they prodded me for a similar quote, my self-destructive instincts kicked in and I told them, “I love being white and I think it’s something to be very proud of. I don’t want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.” In a culture where “racist” includes anything but white self-flagellation, this quote ballooned into a gigantic Super Ghost that has haunted me ever since—and maybe it should. It definitely wasn’t complete bullshit like the other pranks. I don’t think being white is anything to be ashamed of. Hell, we didn’t start slavery, we ended it. I was well aware the poo-bahs at the
Times
would turn my Western chauvinism into “Nazi hipster wants to kill Mexicans,” and I threw gas on the fire anyway. I’ll always be one Google search away from being fired from a normal job but I’d rather it be like that than have to search for the proper words every time I open my big mouth.

My most involved prank was prompted in late 2009 after I had left Vice, and the media website Gawker encouraged readers to send in votes to decide who was the Hipster of the Decade. The finalists were myself, a woman who went to jail for fraud and was known as the Hipster Grifter, a group of promoters called Misshapes, American Apparel founder Dov Charney, and the anonymous creator of the website and radio show Hipster Runoff. I had some footage lying around of myself eating cornflakes soaked in piss to see if the expression “Who pissed in your cornflakes?” has any basis in fact. It was for a sketch comedy DVD I did called
Gavin McInnes Is a Fucking Asshole
but we couldn’t use it because it was so fucking gross, it dominated the whole movie and ruined all the jokes that followed it (kind of like when Sinéad
O’Connor ripped up that picture of the pope on
SNL
). I decided to pretend it hadn’t been shot yet and used it as evidence of a prank where I had been tricked into eating it after losing a bet.

While posing as my buddy Arvind Dilawar, I invented this whole complicated challenge to the Gawker readers that said I’d convinced Gavin to eat a bowl of piss-soaked cornflakes if he won the competition. This brought in a ton of extra votes but not enough to win. When “Gavin” didn’t win, “Arvind” tricked “Gavin” into thinking he DID win by Photoshopping the results. As far as the public was concerned, Gavin foolishly believed the lie and thought he was the Hipster of the Decade. Meanwhile, I was both guys and knew full well I hadn’t won. Posing as Arvind, I posted the footage of Gavin eating the bowl of cornflakes. Are you with “me”? I know. It’s involved. Basically I duped Gawker into thinking someone had duped me into eating a bowl of piss. They ate it up like untainted breakfast cereal and reveled in my humiliation.

The headline read
hipster of the decade loser gavin mcinnes accepts “award” by eating bowl of pissed-in cereal
and the article went on to say, “Dying. No, seriously. Okay: Street Carnage impresario Gavin McInnes told his blogger he’d piss in Corn Flakes and eat them if he won our Hipster of the Decade contest. He lost. So … why’s he pissing in Corn Flakes and eating them? Well, the answer: he was
pranked.
”

There’s something really satisfying about reading someone who is pranked say, “he was pranked.” It felt great but nothing will ever top the one I played on our hometown’s leading paper, the
Ottawa Citizen,
ten years earlier in 1999. Besides being useless at their jobs, journalists are also sycophants looking to mingle with the “tastemakers.” After talking to the kid who was flying down from Ottawa to interview us, it seemed abundantly clear he was just looking to have fun in New York. I explained I was trying to get a show on TV with the help of Tom Green’s old producer and the reporter suggested he come to the pitch. “Fuck no,” I thought to myself. “Of course,” I said aloud.

I decided we were going to create an entire universe for this reporter à la
The Truman Show
. I wasn’t only pitching shows to MTV—we were
merging
with them (a concoction that ironically ended up becoming somewhat true a decade later). I enlisted my friend Matt Sweeney to be the network exec and he brought in his cousin Spencer as their Next Big Thing. Matt suggested we all meet at an incredibly expensive restaurant in SoHo called Canteen.

When we got there, the reporter nervously pulled out his tape recorder and repeatedly thanked everyone for the privilege of being there. Matt is a tall, skinny musician with a funny mustache and his cousin Spencer is a stoned-looking young artist who was squatting in Tompkins Square Park at the time. They were both acting very serious and self-important, the way their characters should be. As my bill mounted, I realized Matt had stuffed a scam within a scam and was actually hustling a pricey lunch out of me in the process. After a bit of small talk, Matt got down to brass tacks. “Spencer is my eyes and ears,” he told the table before looking at Shane, Suroosh, and me and adding, “He says you guys are
it.
” Before we could interject he added, “I think it’s time to merge.” Someone at the table suggested we change the name from MTV to ViceTV, but Matt was good at his job and called the guy a cretin.

The reporter was blown away. This was a real-deal New York meeting with the city’s biggest players and he was in the thick of it. By the end of the meeting, we were all millionaires and I was stuck with the biggest lunch bill I’d ever had, $350.

Over the next few days, we stuffed that reporter so full of horseshit he smelled like an ass. We were buying a building in midtown for ViceCo. We set up franchises across Europe, China, and the Middle East. I collected antique cars. The list was endless. When the feature finally came out, it took up three entire newspaper pages carrying the headline
tom green wannabes want their mtv.
(My father still keeps this article in his office and regularly brings it out to show guests. “They usually cringe when I read it,” he once told me proudly, “until they find out the whole thing’s fake. Then they love it.”)

I showed the piece to the Tom Green producer and was surprised to see her go beet-red with rage. “You can’t do this!” she screeched, apparently having never heard of hijinks before. “It’s unethical.” Then
she called the
Ottawa Citizen
and ratted us out. Thanks, lady. When he realized what happened, the reporter completely lost his shit and spent the next few days calling everyone in the feature and babbling about ethics and honesty and yadda yadda yadda. I think he was drinking. He was especially mad at Matt Sweeney, a person he hadn’t noticed was phenomenally easy to look up.

In response to the first few calls, Matt told him to calm down, but Matt eventually became annoyed and gave a line that I have used maybe ten thousand times since. “Relax, guy,” he said flatly. “It’s New York City. You got hustled.”

New Wave Hookers (2000)

P
asserby was an art gallery in the West Village with a fun bar and a dance floor that lit up like
Saturday Night Fever.
A hilariously eccentric group of designers called As Four would often be there dressed in mummy rags and stilettos with their circular purses and pointy beards and tits hanging out, but it was also kind of scuzzy. You’d see junkies among the artists and it wasn’t unusual to see a drag queen beating the shit out of someone who was trying to steal his handbag.

Pinky had come to visit New York from Montreal and he was dressed like a grunge B-boy in basketball shoes and dirty jeans. Vice was still in the throes of the dot-com boom at this point and I was not spending my money wisely. I was rocking a Eurotrash velour tracksuit with no pockets and spotless $200 kicks. I was also buying way too much gold and had a huge ring on every finger. One said “Love,” another said, “Hate,” and there was also “Brooklyn Lager,” “NYPD,” and, of course, “Vice.” I had gold teeth and had blown almost $1,000 on a huge gold rope chain around my neck.

Pinky was smoking a cigarette outside Passerby and I was with him. Then a cab pulled up and three of the hottest women I’d ever seen climbed out. I also remember a dry-ice haze all around, but that’s probably
just in my head. They were all dressed like those girls in the ZZ Top videos they call “the Eliminator Girls.” They had fingerless gloves on and huge hair with tutus and weird plastic jewelry. They looked like slutty versions of early Madonna but the last one to get out made my whole body ache with lust. Her name was Blobs and she stepped out of the cab with skintight yellow jeans and white ankle socks with kiss marks all over them stuffed into stilettos. When she stood outside the cab she was tall with Chinky raccoon eyes and lips bigger than an inner tube (turns out she wasn’t a Chink—they were American Indian eyes). Pinky and I turned into Lenny and Squiggy and bit our fists. They looked back at us like the snobby cunts they were and marched into the club with their noses in the air.

“I have to have her,” I said to Pinky.

“Who?” he asked.

“The last one.”

Inside, the girls danced and made fun of people, and I chugged beer trying to summon the courage to talk to the last one but it took way too long. About three hours later, when my buzz was sufficiently strong, I headed toward her but just before I got there, she started screaming like snakes were shooting out of the floor. She was holding her hand in the air like it had been badly burned and her friend Annabel was screaming, too. Both ran to the bathroom and Blobs left her purse on the floor as everyone stared at it. I assumed she pricked her finger with a syringe but it was much worse. It was poo. Someone had taken a shit in her purse.

“Are you serious?” I said to a guy who called himself A-Ron the Downtown Don.

“Yes!” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “Old New York is back.” I was told later that some junkie fashion designer from As Four was having his monthly shit and the bathrooms were full of people doing blow so he squatted on a handbag and pushed out the constipated loaf into the only place he could hide. That was the end of Blobs going to Passerby and I didn’t see her again until months later.

I didn’t want to stay there after Blobs left so Pinky and I wandered out onto the street. Pinky said, “Let’s go get veggie burgers,” because
we were vegetarians. Pinky’s pockets were bulging with all our shit because I had nowhere to put it and together we looked like a British coke dealer and his grunge enforcer. It was a warm spring night and as we walked from the relatively empty Twenty-sixth Street and onto a busy Eighth Avenue, I felt mad at the world. I had just lost the One.

I had my best buddy in town, however, and that meant the riffs were a limitless barrage of lightning bolts destroying everything in their wake and I very quickly cheered up. People hated when we got together because they couldn’t handle how fantastic we were. No matter how hard you tried to step to us we would Celebrity Roast you to a crisp before you could finish your last sentence. Back in Montreal, a big-titted slut named Sarah and her snarky friend Rebecca said, “You know, you guys are great alone but when you’re together, you’re total assholes and it bums people out.” Pinky put his finger on his mouth in a pensive way and then said, “Um, yeah, but didn’t we fuck you?” Snap! Because we had. The first time we met them.

Tonight felt like every conversation would be exactly like that. Women would try to tell us to fuck off, but we wouldn’t be able to hear them because they’d have our dicks in their mouths. We were strutting like teenage roosters and if there was a soundtrack playing it would have included songs like “I Get Money” and “I Run New York.” At the crest of this ego tsunami, a car full of incredibly hot black chicks pulled up next to us and crawled along at a walking pace. The car was a beat-up Honda Civic but the girls were pimped out. The women we saw at Passerby were fashionable and well aware of the cultural references we were referencing. This was on some other shit. These girls were so intense it wasn’t so much sexy as it was scary. They were dressed in thigh-high leather boots and had the kind of colored contacts you didn’t see until ten years later on Halloween. They had long, crazy nails with diamonds in them and fluorescent pink miniskirts. They were what I now know to be “freaks” but all my naïve Canadian eyes saw were three New Wave hookers looking for a friend.

“Where you goin’, baby?” the dark-skinned driver said to me out her window with Farrah Fawcett blond hair blowing in the wind.

“We’re goin’ to get veggie burgers,” I said in a Canadian accent that sounded like a prepubescent farmer.

She said, “What?” and I said, “Vegetarian burgers.” I could tell she had no fucking clue what I was talking about but was so eager to hook up, she was willing to pretend she did. “You want a lift?” she asked, smiling and revealing even more gold teeth than I had.

“Fuck yeah,” I said.

I pushed Pinky to the other side of the car and we both got in either back door. Now I could really see what we were in for. The driver was still the freakiest, but the girl in the passenger seat and the one squeezed between Pinky and me were definitely top-flight fly booty bitches. They looked like black ghetto versions of Lady Gaga. They all shared the driver’s
Charlie’s Angels
hair in various colors but the one in the passenger seat had on a fucking catsuit with a leather string lacing up the area below her love melons so tightly, it made her cleavage heave up to her throat. The one between us was wearing white hot pants, a shredded neon yellow tank top, and my Achilles’ heel: heels with ankle socks. Seeing her short pink socks peek out of five-inch patent-leather white pumps made my heart flutter and I shot a thankful glance up to God that said, “Mah nigga.”