How to Piss in Public Read online

  Though technically a memoir, this is more a compendium of hair-whitening bar stories that punch you in the throat until your eyes explode. Many people have watched their friends die and some have been to jail. There are those who have stepped in the ring with professional fighters and been beaten within an inch of their lives. Others have created media empires. Very few have done all this and embarrassed dozens of celebrities; enjoyed more than a couple of threesomes; brought the world “Warhol’s Children”; consistently attracted a million views with viral comedy videos; said, “Jesus is gay,” on national television; and made two American Indians from scratch.

  There certainly isn’t anyone with this kind of life experience who can convey each tale in such a hilarious and endearing way. Whether he’s watching his friend get decapitated on acid or snorting cocaine off women’s breasts, McInnes only ever has one priority: maximum laughs. He’s not here to tell you how wise his father is or how hard it was to achieve his success. He’s here to make you laugh so hard, you puke. That’s it.

  “You will not find a memoir like this anywhere. Usually when people are this insane, they can’t form coherent sentences, but Gavin brilliantly weaves his bizarre outlook on life in a way that makes it somehow feel relatable. I love this book.”

  —JUSTIN HALPERN, author of Sh*t My Dad Says

  “I laughed so hard I got a headache.”

  —JUSTIN THEROUX, author of Tropic Thunder and Iron Man 2

  “I loved this book, though it may have given my eyeballs gonorrhea.”

  —SAMANTHA BEE, author of I Know I Am, but What Are You?

  “Wonderfully powerful, funny, and full of life, this book is amazing and a pleasure to explore. I cried while reading the 9/11 chapter.”

  —ANDREW W.K., author of “Party Hard”

  “An interesting, infuriating read. You will never love this book harder than it already loves you.”

  —PATTON OSWALT, author of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

  “My idea of heaven is standing at a bar (made of clouds) and telling the most hilarious story of all time as all my dead friends burst into paroxysms of laughter. This is no small beans. There’s nothing more human than storytelling. What do you think separates us from all those other, loser species? Genes? Wrong. It’s memes. While monkeys hysterically yell ‘oooh ooh ahh ah’ in vain and dolphins squeak out those irrelevant little eeks, we walk over to our fellow caveman and say, ‘Stay the hell away from saber-toothed tigers. I just saw them eat a guy.’ And then we tell him a story about it that makes him shit his fur shorts. Storytelling has kept us way ahead of the pack for at least the past forty thousand years, and in a world where there’s probably been more published in the past few months than in all previous months combined, we’ve only just begun.”

  —GAVIN McINNES, author of this

  “This book sucks.”

  —TUCKER MAX, author of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

  Described as “the godfather of hipsterdom” and “one of hipsterdom’s primary architects,” GAVIN MCINNES is more than just a rude lunatic who keeps getting beat up. He is an icon who personifies irreverence for an entire generation. He’s played in punk bands, done stand-up, and acted in movies and television, but he’s a writer by trade and cofounded Vice magazine in 1994 before growing it into a multimedia empire that still dominates youth culture today.

  McInnes is the author of The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll; DOs & DON’Ts; DOs & DON’Ts 2; and Street Boners, which is based on his website StreetCarnage.com. He writes for television, creates funny commercials with his production company Rooster New York, and is a regular “wild card” on Fox News’s late-night show Red Eye. He lives in New York with his wife and two kids.

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  SimonandSchuster.com

  • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNABEL MEHRAN

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Also by Gavin McInnes

  Street Boners: 1,764 Hipster Fashion Jokes

  Dos and Don’ts: 10 Years of “Vice” Magazine’s Street Fashion Critiques

  The “Vice” Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll

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  Copyright © 2012 by Gavin McInnes

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  First Scribner hardcover edition March 2012

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011034596

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1417-6

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  Contents

  Where No Man Has Gone Before (1984)

  Zapped by Space Guns into a Shit Hole on Acid (1985)

  Popping the Cherry (1986)

  The Stupidest Plan in the History of Police Chases (1986)

  Desperately Saving Foreskin (1987)

  “He’s Gone and Got a Bloody Tattoo!” (1988)

  Anal Chinook: Revenge of the Punk Nerds (1988)

  Stomped by Very Stylish Nazis (1988)

  Is Everybody on This Planet a Tree Planter? (1991)

  Hey, Dude, Where’s My Nose? (1992)

  Unlaid in Taiwan (1992)

  The Time I Gave Myself an STD (1993)

  Shitstorm (1994)

  The Story of Vice: Part One (1994–1999)

  The Cuban Penis Crisis (2000)

  The Story of Vice: Part Two (1999–2001)

  Dinner with the Clash (1999)

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

  Lying to the Press (1999–)

  New Wave Hookers (2000)

  Asian Cocaine Orgy (2000)

  Circles or Strokes? (2001)

  September 11 (2001)

  A Faggot Kicked My Ass (2002)

  Bigger Than Texas (2003)

  Don’t Let Your Mom Get Stoned (2003)

  That’s What I Get for Teasing Junkies (2003)

  Yet Another Asian Threesome (2003)

  Funnest Blackout Ever, You Guys! (2003)

  Lord of the Botflies (2003)

  Partying with Mötley Crüe (2004)

  The Story of Vice: Part Three (2001–2008)

  Will You Marry Me, Blobs? (2004)

  A Dog Named Pancake Saved Our Lives (2005)

  The KKK Stag (2005)

  Hunting for Injuns (2005)

  Underwater Pussy (2006)

  I Got Knocked the Fuck Out (2008)

  The Death of Cool: Dash Snow (2009)

&n
bsp; The Excess of Success (2010)

  Turning Forty (2010)

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Photos

  HOW TO PISS

  IN PUBLIC

  Where No Man Has Gone Before (1984)

  “My girlfriend has no vagina,” said the voice behind me. I was fixing my shitty Mohawk in the reflective windows by the principal’s office and turned around. It was my friend Lawrence McCallister, a big-nosed geek covered in zits who always had some kind of catastrophe on his hands.

  “How can she have no vagina?” I asked, continuing to preen.

  “I know, I know,” he responded, “but trust me. I’m positive.”

  I consoled him with a pat on his shoulder and said, “That sucks, man,” but I was secretly thrilled. I thought I was the only one in school who had felt around down there and got nothing. I was worried it was some kind of Sword in the Stone thing where if you don’t feel an opening, it means you’re gay.

  I went to the Earl of March High School in a rural Canadian suburb called Kanata. In 1984, I was a punk fourteen-year-old and knew as much about sex as you know about the early eighties Kanata punk scene. This was before the Internet but after Playboy, so everything we understood about naked ladies came from Hustler, an almost medical porn mag that always featured women with their slutty high heels up by their slutty ears and their pink pussies splayed wide open. They held their legs up so high and so spread, a generation of young men grew up assuming the vagina was a bazooka-sized hole located right below the belly button.

  To make matters worse, girls in the eighties wore jeans so tight, they had to use a bent coat hanger to pull up the zipper. Heavy petting back then involved cramming your hand into a vacuum-sealed denim space and desperately writhing around in search of an opening. You’d force your fingers across some sparse pubes, go right, then left, go farther down than humanly possible, and if you didn’t feel an opening, you’d assume it wasn’t there. It didn’t help that teenage boys are too horny to do anything properly.

  Girls didn’t share this libidinous curse but really enjoyed kissing, so we made an unspoken truce that involved lying around in a negligent parent’s basement listening to Led Zeppelin. The boys would oblige the girls with hours and hours of Frenching and the girls would oblige the boys with maybe a third of the underside of one tit.

  A few months after hearing of Lawrence’s lost hole and resigning myself to the fact that I might never find one, I found one. I was kissing a half-black girl named Megan Franklyn in Mark Donnelly’s basement listening to “Stairway to Heaven” and I’d been rooting around in her skintight drawers for so long, my wrist felt broken. Out of nowhere, I had a huge surge of frustrated confidence and thought, “Let’s just fucking give ’er and go where no man has gone before.” (The phrase “give ’er” is a Canadian’s way of saying “Git-R-Done.”) I plunged my aching hand so deep into the abyss I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had popped out in China. Then I went even farther. Finally, about half a foot lower than I could have ever imagined, my virgin fingers finally touched beef curtains. “What the what?” I thought. “It’s basically in the asshole.”

  After discovering pussy, I dropped acid, started a band, got beat up, ripped my foreskin, went to jail, planted trees, dealt drugs, got tattoos, squatted Europe, got hustled, had some threesomes, farted, watched my friends die, lived in China, played some pranks, started a multimedia global empire, got on TV, gave myself gonorrhea, got beat up again, invented hipsters, went broke, got rich, got married, got knocked out, and had some kids. If I could go back in time and tell Young Me one thing, it would be the same thing I’d tell all young men.

  Dear fourteen-year-old boys,

  First, stop reading this. This book is for older people. Second, if you are fourteen, here’s a tip from someone with so much experience, gynecologists call me Mister: Her hole is way farther down than you think. You know when you hear directions and they say, “Keep driving, and when you think you’ve gone too far, keep going”? That’s where it is. And once you find it, your life will never be the same.

  Sincerely,

  Your Pal,

  Me

  Zapped by Space Guns into a Shit Hole on Acid (1985)

  I would never do acid in New York City—it’s too dirty and claustrophobic—but when you’re stuck way out in Buttfuck, Ontario, it’s your only escape.

  First, let me tell you how Buttfuck this place was. Canadian developers back then were busy creating cookie-cutter housing communities in the middle of nowhere. They had slogans such as “Tomorrow’s city … today” and names such as New Granada and Bridlewood. They were far from the city and had no drugs, bars, gangs, sluts, or crime—just trees, houses, and the local school.

  My parents were educated but working-class Scots who wanted to get as far away from their shitty past as possible. Like all ex–poor people they wanted a better life for their kids and this seemed like a great opportunity. They tried England but it wasn’t working. Canada was brand-new back then. It had just settled on a flag in 1965 and was yet to choose a national anthem (they chose “O Canada” in 1980). In the 1970s, they were building their lower middle class from scratch and pouring British immigrants into the mold like pancake mix.

  In 1975, five years after a breathtakingly gorgeous baby Me was born, the Glaswegians who created me gave up on their new home in England and stuck the whole family in a mass-produced Canadian suburb surrounded by farmers’ fields. Kanata is a half hour from Canada’s tiny capital, Ottawa, and had houses that were so prefab and generic, I would often get lost trying to figure out which one was mine.

  On my first day of school, I was asked to say a few words and after using my posh English accent to say, “Well, hellowe, I simply cannot tell you how chuffed I am to be here in Canad-er and have brought along my park-er for the occasion,” I got the shit pounded out of me so badly, I was saying, “Maggie Longclaws is pregnant, eh?” like Bob and Doug McKenzie within the week. This began my life role as a misfit always adapting to uncomfortable situations. Whether it’s an Englishman in Ontario, an English speaker in French Canada, a Canadian in New York, or the only dad at the family resort covered in tattoos, I’ve always been most comfortable when I’m out of place.

  Can you blame them for kicking my ass? (1975)

  It was fun, though. Rural seclusion is great when you’re a little kid. We shot at each other with BB guns, chased cows, and would make jumps for our bikes that were so intense, anyone who landed wrong was guaranteed a broken wrist. This was in the pre-safety days when not only did we not wear helmets, we didn’t even wear shoes, and if your bike didn’t have brakes, you’d have to stop the front tire with your bare foot. We swung off tire ropes into swimming holes in the summer and had snowball fights in the winter, but when the testosterone kicks in, so does the need for more. The seclusion goes from “groovy times” to a pressure cooker that makes you want to start a nuclear war. So, the day our teenage years began, we took our cold, bleak, lame environment and magically converted it into Funtown by using drugs. We also started a club that we pretended was a gang.

  Steve (hat), Dogboy (curly hair), and me in a photo booth where we’d try to not laugh for as long as possible. (1986)

  Half the students at my high school were the children of British expats, and the other half were Canadian farmers’ kids. Our crew consisted of about a dozen ornery misfits from both sides. We called ourselves the Monks because we were loosely divided into mods (a now-esoteric subculture that was like punk but based more on neatly dressed, working-class 1960s British soul fans) and punks, though there were quite a few hosers (Canadian rednecks). Our crew ran the gamut. There was a huge basketball player with a harelip named Marty, a male-model-looking kid we thought was ugly so we called him Dogboy, and the Fonzarelli of the group, Steve Durand. Lawrence McCallister was a mod and so was his buddy John. We called John Pukey Stallion because he always threw up at parties and never got laid. We weren’t part of the school’s
social hierarchy and had carved our own niche as the weird kids.

  Being fucking idiots was very important to us. If anyone farted or burped without saying “safety” before someone else called “slut,” everyone in the gang got to beat the poo-stuffings out of him until he could name five breakfast cereals. Unfortunately, guys started memorizing cereal lists, so we were forced to switch it to chocolate bars to keep things interesting. This was the early stages of a career devoted to troublemaking. Our motto was, “It ain’t shit ’til it hits the fan” but the bully from The Simpsons later said it much better when he asked Bart, “If no one gets mad, are you really being bad?”

  Drugs enhanced this lifestyle, especially acid. We’d drop a tab around eight o’clock at night and go walk around a boring landscape that had blissfully transformed into a place worth visiting. I acquired X-ray vision to see through houses and observe how people lived when they didn’t know they were being watched. We stole hovercrafts and walked through trees. One time, Pukey’s head was a chicken.

  My favorite LSD trip happened when I was fifteen. It was me, Steve, Dogboy, and Marty. We met after dinner behind our high school, and Steve pulled a sheet of about ten tabs from his wallet. As we each put one of the tiny square papers on our tongues, Dogboy said to Steve, “Let me see your driver’s license.” Steve pulled it out and Dogboy fell to the ground laughing. Steve always went cross-eyed in his ID pictures and eventually we made it a tradition—even for the yearbook. Soon we were all sharing our driver’s licenses and laughing at them, but I noticed something strange about Marty when he saw his. He looked disturbed. Marty’s harelip was obvious, but we’d known him for so long we couldn’t see it. Now I was seeing it. It was more than a single harelip; it was a full, lustrous, head-of-harelip. “That’s kind of a bad trip,” Marty said after quietly looking at the picture on his license. Then he put it back in his wallet and decided to move on.