How to Piss in Public (30 page)

My eyes welled with tears and I looked up at the sky before quietly saying, “Thank you, God. Thank you for everything.” God didn’t reply. He was
pissed.
(So were the cofounders of Vice, incidentally. They refused to participate.)

The wedding the next day was beautiful and a sharp contrast to the mayhem that had come before. It was outdoors and my friend Jim Krewson’s band played beautiful bluegrass music. The speeches were great despite Pinky saying something about prostitutes and my dad doing his whole insult-me shtick.

My wife looked so beautiful I was in awe. After the ceremony, everyone went to the after-party, where Chromeo played, and Blobs and I drove off in a yellow Rolls complete with
just married
on the back and bouncing cans tied to the bumper.

After tying the knot, I drastically cut down the partying, especially after the kids were born, but I never forgot my vows to the brotherhood: Never stop believing—and by “believing,” we mean “being a retard.”

Hunting for Injuns (2005)

A
fter the marriage, my wife felt compelled to learn about my heritage. Though we did invent the modern world by creating the industrial revolution and separating church and state, all you need to know about modern Scottish culture is beer and yelling.

Learning about her people was a bit more complex. American Indians remain a mystery to most people, including me, and I was surprised to see how similar they are to my own peeps. For one, I never expected them to be so funny. Like with the Scots, riffing is an integral part of almost every tribe’s culture and even in the grimmest situation, someone in the room is going to bust out a gag.

What else? Their earwax is as powdery as that of the Taiwanese; they need all their body parts when they’re buried, so if they have a thumb amputated they have to keep it in a jar until they die; they say “aaayyy” after every joke; and they have bigger big toes than the rest of us. You should see the big toes on these people. Nike tried to make them a special shoe to fit it but it pissed them off because they hate stereotypes—even the true ones.

It kills the white man to learn that Indians aren’t looking for friends. The trusting Injuns are now extinct and the ones who have managed to
stick it out tend to be dubious grumps, at least when it comes to bro-ing down with Caucasians.

My father-in-law suggested I present Blobs’s tribe with a deer I killed myself. He said that the tribe would then accept our marriage as real. Thanks for telling me this
after
the marriage, Pops.

I hopped on a plane and headed to hunting hot spot Winnipeg, Manitoba, to give it a shot. I decided to go with a bow because I thought it would be more badass. After three hours at the practice range with no progress, my hosts rolled their eyes and said we had to get on with it. I was with an awesome hoser dad named Paul and a young Cree Indian named Reg.

My shirt says
COMMIES AREN’T COOL
with Che Guevara crossed out. That’s Hoser Paul giving the thumbs-up, and Reg is taking the picture. (2005)

We were all covered in camo gear from our feet to our heads. Even our faces had camo mesh on them. Smelling like anything in the bush will frighten away the deer, so food, beer, and pissing are banned. We wished each other luck, grabbed our bows, and went to different spots along a creek. I would kill a deer, present it to my mother-in-law’s
family, receive some amazing gifts I’d never heard of, and be accepted into the tribe. I had already decided on my Indian name—Whistling Cheeks.

I was told I had to stay perfectly still for the rest of the day and not even breathe heavy if I wanted to bag a deer. This sounds really fucking boring but I did it for several hours and it was awesome. Sitting perfectly still as you await your prey feels like you’re on opiates. It’s no different from meditating, and you get into this serene zone where you’re so at one with nature you feel like you could—FUCK! A deer!

The opium was gone and now I was on meth. My heart was pounding as loud as a boxing bell. I raised my bow as slowly as I could and the deer lifted his head for a moment with a “What the fuck was that?” expression. My eyeballs were protruding out of my face like a hot-rod cartoon. The whole thing lasted about three seconds. Before I knew it, my arrow had shot into the ground underneath the deer, and the animal was off like a springy rocket.

White man miss deer.

That night we went back to Paul’s and told stories. They made fun of me for getting “Moose Fright.”

Reminiscing about the hunt is almost as fun as the hunt itself. We were in Paul’s backyard smoking pot and drinking beer when the whole—I’m talking the
entire
—sky lit up and turned into an infinitely large, undulating blanket of changing colors. I’d seen the Northern Lights, AKA Aurora Borealis, before, but not this intense. It went from slow, glowing lights to a flashing storm of lights, to huge blasts of color zipping through the cosmos like they were being controlled by a galaxy-sized kid with a flashlight. Then it went back to the undulating color blanket. Even the locals were going nuts.

“Dese are your wife’s fuckin’ ancestors sayin’ it’s OK,” Paul told me, channeling the Native American spirit world through a hoser’s slang. “It’s like de’re sayin’ ‘give ’er.’”

But after returning from Winnipeg with no deer carcass in tow, I knew I had to do something big to curry the Indian side of my family’s favor (and these kinds of Indians don’t even like curry). So when
my wife invited me to her aunt’s house for a sweat-lodge ceremony in January, I leapt at the chance.

The house was just outside Madison, Wisconsin, in a rural area, but it wasn’t on a reservation. I was with my wife and her brother and the aunts happily introduced us to everyone in the room, which was mostly huge Indian men. The walls were filled with framed pictures of the men in the family wearing their military uniforms. Indians get a lot of flak for distancing themselves from America but they sure take the army seriously. I don’t think I met a guy there who wasn’t enlisted.

They asked me if I was truly prepared for the sweat lodge and I asked them why they were getting so heavy all of a sudden. “Oh, he’ll be fine,” the aunt said, interrupting our discussion. “We had kids in there the other day who were four years old. They loved it.”

The sweat lodge was a dome made of bent branches about ten feet in diameter. The center had a small pit filled with large hot rocks that glowed red. The heat was kept in by a series of wet blankets surrounding the outside.

Blobs, her brother, me, and three Indian men crawled inside and sat cross-legged around the fire. Within seconds, I knew I was in trouble. Scottish is about as white as white gets. We invented redheads. To us, people from Wales are Southerners. I’m designed to be standing on a craggy mountain in the highlands wearing nothing but a tartan cloth as freezing rain blows sideways through my hairy beard. I’m not designed for heat. It makes me claustrophobic.

The door was a flap made by folding a blanket up, and when our host closed it he closed the door on hope. Goddamnit, it’s hot in there. It’s not hot like a sauna where you go, “Jeesh! Hot enough for ya?” It’s hot like a live lobster being dropped into boiling water and realizing he is being prepared as food. “Has anyone died from this?” I asked nervously after introductions were made (the answer is “yes” followed by “plenty”). The Indian man leading the ceremony told me about a chief from another tribe who was in a one-person sweat lodge for so long, he cooked himself. “When they went to pull him out,” our host said, “the meat came off the bone like a Christmas turkey.” He was probably fucking with me, but the fact that I was putting my life into
a stranger’s hands made me very uncomfortable. Being burned alive wasn’t helping.

White man scared.

I looked over at Blobs and she was completely drenched in sweat. Everyone was. I decided I was going to say, “Fuck this,” and march out of the tent. As this tempting thought raced through my head they opened the flap and cold air rushed in. O Great Spirit, it felt like every pore in my body was chugging a glass of ice-cold water. But they quickly shut the flap again.

We were told to pray for family members who were fellow war vets suffering from various postwar maladies. One of them had some kind of lung infection and we all had to concentrate to get the poison out. This is an easy concept to grasp when you’re saying grace, but I was having a bad acid trip. “We can control toxins in other people’s bodies,” I rambled silently, “so is it possible there are waves of energy going through the cosmos we can then manipulate and coerce into making real changes in the real world? No, it isn’t! It can’t be!” I was losing it. As they began their traditional songs, I started bobbing back and forth like an autistic orphan.

They could tell I was not coping so the host assured me we would open the flap after one more song. This didn’t help because it wasn’t a specific time. White people can take almost endless amounts of suffering; they just need to know exactly when it’s going to end. Indian songs go on forever. It’s not like “Louie Louie” where you get three choruses, then a guitar solo, then one more chorus and you’re done. The chanting they were doing in the tent, though beautiful and haunting, kept going and going and going. Every time I thought we were done and things were coming to a close, someone else would come in with a “
Hay
-ay-aya-hey I hey-a-a” and we were off on a whole other part.

They opened the flap for what felt like a fraction of a second and then put on three more red-hot rocks for what they called the Final Round. Now I was mad. “Are they fucking with me?” I thought. “Is this some kind of joke?” The host noticed he was murdering me and he said I could put my hands behind my back and reach for some cold air outside the bottom of the tent. I did so and it was heavenly. I haven’t
been that jealous of my fingers since they touched Megan’s beef curtains back in 1984.

As a kid, I hated roller coasters until someone explained you’re supposed to yell your head off instead of sitting there holding your stomach on every turn. I tried that and realized what everyone was screaming about. Roller coasters rule. It’s holding everything inside that makes you sick. I extrapolated this lesson and applied it to everything: If I wasn’t a dick to people, I’d get sick. If someone’s boring, I have to put my arms in the air and scream it to the world or I’ll puke.

I resigned myself to surviving this steaming-hot roller-coaster ride at all costs. This was no longer a taste test of another culture’s delicacies—it was war and I didn’t care if they hung me by my nipples. I wasn’t going to give in.

So, for the Final Round’s entirety, I shamelessly increased the bobbing to head-banging proportions and said, “Uuuh! Uuuh! Uuuh!” so loud, it almost drowned out their singing. My brother-in-law was embarrassed and my wife was getting riled, but I’m sorry. You can’t expect a lobster to act like Dirty Harry when you’re boiling him alive. I had to shake the fear out.

After at least three hundred million hours of this, I made it to the end and when we finally walked out into the cold night air, I started to chuckle. We all had steam floating off of us like we were made of dry ice and every step I took melted everything around it. The intense suffering inside the lodge makes you appreciate how great you have it outside. A lot of Indian ceremonies seem to be about giving thanks and not taking things for granted. I was more than just happy to be out of there. Endorphins were pouring out of my brain and I felt spiritually obese. It was a rush of euphoric appreciation I’ve never gotten from any drug. It was almost better than sex.

We had dinner after and hung out a bit and I got the feeling I was accepted as a mate but definitely not as one of the gang. I don’t think the Indian side of the family will ever accept me as one of them and I don’t blame them. That’s how they roll. We spent four hundred years trying to get along and it simply did not work out. I don’t buy the myth that they were a serene, peaceful people who were introduced to
warfare by us savages. They had war when we got here and we fought like hell for centuries. We fought with them, against them; some joined us in our battles and we joined them in others. We obliterated them and they destroyed us. Eventually, we got the land and the ones who remain have agreed to disagree.

In my children’s tribal papers everyone gets a full name but I’m simply listed as “Caucasian.” Oh well, at least they’re politically correct.

Underwater Pussy (2006)

T
he great thing about rich guys who grew up poor is they don’t give a shit about money. David Cross is one of those guys and would regularly book these massive vacation homes in the Caribbean or Mexico and tell us everything was on him if we paid for our flights.

He suggested we get our scuba licenses to go deep-sea diving in Cancún, and within a week we were enrolled in a course at a tiny shop in New York called Village Divers. We took it about as seriously as Mr. Kotter’s class. “Today we’re going to talk about valves,” the hirsute Palestinian teacher would tell us. “A bad seal can cost you your life.” I held up my beer and blurted out, “I guess Heidi Klum got one of the good ones.” I hadn’t been in school since school and had forgotten how fun it was to be the class clown. That was my gig back in the day—so much so, I was put in a special eighth-grade class for “emotionally disturbed” kids.