How to Piss in Public (28 page)

This high continued for another five years. I started a TV division and sold a pilot to Showtime with David Cross. Suroosh used his golden-goose ear to run a record label, and Shane had us in seventeen countries with hundreds of employees and a film production company. Every year we were doubling in size and soon we were way bigger than we were during the dot-com days, and most important, it was ours again.

Things started changing around 2006 when Shane began discussing a merger with Viacom. The stakes got very high very fast and soon lawyers had to be consulted and releases had to be signed for every move we made. The show I had been pitching with Johnny Knoxville was morphing into a whole other MTV thing that I wasn’t in control of. For a travel DVD we did with Viacom, Cross and I set up an elaborate prank where we went to China and used the cheap labor there to outsource apple pies that came with an American flag in the center and played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This ended up on the DVD extras. I was flabbergasted. There are times when you do something that you think is funny but you understand if others disagree. Our China footage was not one of those things. As David put it, “I know for a fact that shit was great and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.” I did a web series with Eva Mendes that was canned. I shot bits with Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, and dozens more but nothing took. It became pretty clear this was no longer the old Vice, or what Shane called “The Gavin Show.” Pinky sees the world through TV metaphors and describes the Viacom merger as Les Nessman and Herb Tarlek taking over WKRP from Dr. Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap, but I see it as a band that woke up one day and realized they don’t like each other anymore or, more important, they don’t respect what the other members do. “It’s a different company,” the head of human resources told me, to which I replied, “We have a human resources?” I always hated the term “human resources.” It reminds me of
Soylent Green.
Fuck it.

Throughout 2007, we negotiated a split and by the beginning of 2008 I had sold my shares for an obscene amount of money. I never spoke to those guys again. As a
Vanity Fair
reporter put it, “It’s not like they had to get rid of Gavin, but they knew he would have to stop pissing on the furniture—and he just
would not
do it.”

With the money from the buyout, I bought a couple of apartments in Brooklyn and built my dream house upstate on a big piece of land I bought with Cross. I got my parents a Jaguar and myself a Range Rover, along with a bunch of other toys, and I stuck the rest into the stock market when it was at its lowest ebb since the Great Depression. I set up a standard estate credit shelter trust or whatever you call it and included a last will and testament that, for no reason, included the provision that my gravestone say I HEARD A RETARD SAY “CUNT” ONCE.

For the first time in thirteen years, I had the opportunity to do absolutely anything I wanted. I was a multimillionaire but to be totally honest, I never really cared about money and the vast dark infinity of it all scared the shit out of me. Leaving Viacom felt like leaving
Images Interculturelles
and leaving Szalwinski, but this time there was no magazine to rescue. I didn’t know what to do. I mentioned my plight to Will Ferrell while we were sitting with his manager, and my pal, Jimmy Miller at a Yankees game and he said, “You got out at the perfect time. I can’t even look at
Rolling Stone
anymore. It looks like a pamphlet.” I started bringing the family to Dial House every summer, where the founders of Crass lived, and they said the same thing, but they also told me to tell everyone to fuck off and drop out of society. I definitely didn’t deserve any sympathy but I was confused and lost.

I could have retired but I’d seen what happens to people who retire early—they die. After the Clash, Joe Strummer lived in a cave in Barcelona and quietly lost his mind. Looking back on it later he said, “Without people, you’re nothing.” I had a family now, but as far as creating things and making money went, I needed a new gang. Besides, I was almost positive my wife would stop fucking me if I didn’t have a job. Guys in sweatpants do not get blow jobs.

If you’re ever in a situation like this, I highly recommend getting in shape. My fitness regimen had been boxing for a while, but after signing
my good-bye papers, I really went apeshit on it. Boxing isn’t only good cardio. It’s a type of Irish therapy that’s crucial to your mental health. Got an important meeting or a pitch or you’re going to be on TV? Go boxing first and you will kill. It makes you feel invincible.

I stepped up my regimen from three times a week to every single day. I even built an outside gym at my place upstate. Then one day, two blocks away from Ground Zero at Church Street Boxing Gym, it hit me. It was after a bout with a cantankerous sparring partner ten years my senior who’d kicked my ass so hard it made me mad. “I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,” I realized while taking off my headgear. “The same shit I’ve always done. And I’m gonna give ’er.” The motto at Church Street is “Fighting Solves Everything” and they’re right. As prominent NPR nerd Ira Glass says, “You’ve just gotta fight your way through. It is only by going through a volume of work that … your work will be as good as your ambitions.” I’m out to make the funniest shit possible. I’m not out to make people laugh. It’s not up to me if they laugh or not. As weird 1920s dancer Martha Graham put it, “It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

Pinky, me, and a bunch of ex-Vice people started a company with the totally unremarkable name Street Boners and TV Carnage. Then I dove headfirst into a sea of failures and took my punches like the first half of a
Rocky
fight. I wrote two screenplays that didn’t go anywhere. I started a hardcore punk cover band that broke up quickly. I convinced Comedy Central and Adult Swim to commission pilots they later canned. I got a gig writing for a show Justin Theroux was doing for HBO that never got off the ground. The Travel Channel bought eight episodes of a show I created called
America on Zero Dollars a Day
and then killed it after the first episode. I did a documentary about a movie-watching competition for Netflix called
A Million in the Morning,
which they later passed on, and I made that sketch comedy movie called
Gavin McInnes Is a Fucking Asshole,
which few people saw outside of the cornflakes scene. I also wrote a book of DOs & DON’Ts called
Street Boners
that crawled off the shelves (thanks in part to that totally unmarketable name).
On the bright side, I broke even on my investment in a taco truck.

It was a humbling slog but sometimes the shit I threw at the wall actually stuck. I started doing stand-up and only bombed half the time. A short film I did called
Asshole
got into Sundance. I realized I’d need a new guy to handle the business and marketing side of things so I offered my friend Sebastian a commission on everything he brought in. Soon we had sponsors to pay for my viral comedy videos and after convincing Vans to let us urinate on their shoes for a comedy sketch called “How to Piss in Public” we got over a million hits on YouTube and a cover story in
Adweek
magazine. Sebastian quickly went from being my manager to my business partner. We called our new company Rooster NYC and focused on funny commercials and TV production. We did a comedy sketch with Kevin Hart and T-Pain that garnered 12 million views. This led to a series of commercials for the porn domain .XXX, where they were spending $25 million dollars to compete with .COM. Within a year, investors were offering deals reminiscent of the Viacom days.

No matter how big Rooster became I was still determined to write my incendiary political rants and was lucky enough to get a cushy job as a columnist for the eccentric Greek tycoon Taki Theodoracopulos doing exactly that. Then I got Jim Goad hired as editor, something I had been planning for a long time at
Vice
. The column later led to a regular spot on the Fox News show
Red Eye,
an uppity talk show that destroys CNN and MSNBC in the ratings despite being on at three
A.M.

New York is a lot like the Lord in that it helps those who help themselves. A couple of years after ending a career where I ran a company, wrote articles, made funny videos, and pitched TV, I was running two companies where I wrote articles, made funny videos, and pitched TV. And, just like in the early days, there’s no boss. At Rooster NYC, when clients give too many notes and start to wreck the joke, we fire them. At Street Carnage, when advertisers get mad at articles like “Fuck the Muslims” and the time we filmed a guy shooting heroin for our “Wasted Pushups” show, we tell them to fuck off too. As the article in
Adweek
said, “Gavin McInnes doesn’t care about your product.” All I care about is all I’ve ever cared about: being able to do fun shit with my friends without anyone telling us what to do.

Will You Marry Me, Blobs? (2004)

U
pdating the Vice story takes us so far ahead I forgot to tell you about getting married. Smack-dab in the middle of the last story, I proposed.

My friends often ask me how you know when it’s time to pop the question but for me there was no question. When it was time I could just tell it was time and I set up the greatest proposal of all time to make sure she said yes.

I was partying so hard back then, life was still check-to-check, so I set up an interest-free payment plan at Zales where I had a year to pay it off. Then I booked two tickets to Paris and contacted some friends there about getting a French child actor to surprise Blobs.

I told her we had to go meet my parents and discuss a tax clause regarding their will. Visiting bombastic drunk Scots in the Canadian winter to discuss a death tax is the worst life has to offer so I was setting the bar low. The first time she met them, I showed her my old teddy bear and she sat in the living room staring at its mangled face as they stared at her the same way. “You like that?” my dad asked her loudly only moments after being introduced. Before she could respond he yelled, “I FUCKED Teddy!” You never know what’s going to happen in their presence but it’s never relaxing.

At the airport, we got in the Europe line instead of the Canada line. Blobs was used to my scams and cheats and figured this was just another shortcut so she went along with it. She didn’t even check the sign on the gate to see if it said Ottawa.

At the bar, I presented her the tickets. “Thanks,” she said apathetically. Then I went, “This looks weird. They spelled Ottawa wrong.” Blobs hugged me as hard as she could and we began a weekend of nothing but ear-to-ear smiles.

Montmartre is our spot when we go to Paris. It’s got the quaint hills you saw in the movie
Amélie
with the huge Sacré-Coeur church at the top, and just when everything is getting too nice, the disgusting sex shops and seedy bars of Pigalle lure you to the bottom. At the border of the two worlds is an incredibly corny bar called Aux Noctambules where an old man in a pompadour and a red suit named Pierre Carré sings songs about all the places he’s been, like “
dans
MEXIC-O-O-O-O!” Only, he couldn’t have been to any of those places because he’s played at this bar every night of his life since he was a kid. He sings 365 nights a year there and every time we go to Paris we bask in his crazy anthems like the Catholics in Sacré-Coeur several hundred feet above us.

On our last Paris trip, we went to the Eiffel Tower at five in the morning to do cartwheels. I convinced her I could do one over a park bench and ended up unconscious on the brick with a broken collarbone. The rest of the night was spent going to various hospitals and eventually faking a seizure in order to be seen. Talk about romantic.

I had the whole proposal scheduled for the day after we got there and it was going to happen not far from the site of the collarbone incident the year before. After a pleasant brunch, it was time to take a taxi to the tower. I had scheduled a light-skinned black child (half–American Indian would have been ideal because she was supposed to represent our future kids, but this was the closest I could get) to run up to Blobs under the Eiffel Tower and hand her my ring at three
p.m.
We had exactly fifteen minutes and I couldn’t find a taxi for miles. I was starting to panic. About ten minutes after I needed one, we crawled into a cab and I realized we were still going to make it. My adrenaline
was flowing and I started playing air drums against my will. Blobs looked confused. “You like that?” I asked like a Scottish dad thinking of something controversial to say. “You like when I play the drums? You wanna hear me play the drums for the rest of your life?” This strange bit of dialogue is the only part I regret about the whole thing. I wasn’t in control at that moment.

We got to the Eiffel Tower only a tiny bit late. I tried to act casual but knew we had to get underneath the tower where avenue Gustave Eiffel meets Parc du Champ de Mars. I held her hand and the mulatto girl started running across the grass toward us. She handed a crumpled-up paper bag to Blobs and said, “
Bonjour, madame, j’ai un petit cadeau pour vous,
” then she ran away. Blobs asked me what she said and I told her she said, “Hello, madam, I have a small present for you,” and added, “Open it up.” When she saw the ring, she started to cry and I managed not to cry while asking her if she’d marry me. I didn’t get on one knee because I think that sends the wrong message. She said yes and we held each other and then we made out and walked around holding hands. It was fucking heavenly.

That night we sang karaoke in Pigalle and saw Pierre Carré perform his cheesy songs and a year later, we were married. Then two small people came out of her and we gave them American Indian names.

A Dog Named Pancake Saved Our Lives (2005)

F
our Brothers
is a movie about some badass orphans who were all adopted by a nice old lady who got her fucking head blown off. The brothers come back to their hometown to get revenge and—holy shit—do they ever. I went to see it with my soon-to-be wife and she came up with the brilliant idea of bringing a flask of whiskey. Until then we had been following the New York tradition of sneaking beer cans into the theater, which makes for a loud
pksh!
every time you open one and a dozen “excuse me’s” each time you have to go pee. A flask solves both problems, though it’s not good for the Irish.