How to Piss in Public (31 page)

I refused to learn anything during the classes. David was a little bit better, but we weren’t stunned when we failed the final exam. “I know you guys don’t work hard,” the teacher said, staring at our pathetic results, “but this is unbelievable. I’ve been doing this for twenty years and have not seen one single person fail, ever. I’ve even had
handicapped
people pass this test.”

We set up a rematch and I got on the computer to figure out a cheat. A week later David and I were high-fiving in front of the school after receiving a whopping fourteen out of twenty-seven correct (just over 51 percent). A week after that we were on our way to Cancún.

There were about a dozen people at the vacation house, including a skinny comedy writer named Mark Rivers and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. Mark, David, and I booked what’s called a drift dive, where you go down about a hundred feet and the current carries you along a coral reef.

A twenty-person boat took the group about three miles out into the ocean and everyone started to get their gear on. I met a Middle Eastern dude on the way who said you didn’t need a license to dive in Egypt and he saw guys spitting out blood after they came up because they didn’t know about the bends. I remember our teacher saying something about the bends. What were the bends again?

During the ride, Mark started testing his equipment by putting the regulator in his mouth, which made him gag. Every time he put it past his lips, he’d retch out a crippling dry heave. I usually feel like an alpha male around comedians, especially on vacation, because I inevitably have more tattoos than them. My sense of superiority was exacerbated by the fact that Mark dyes his gray hair a kind of orangey beige (an act I passionately disapprove of). I thought his gagging was the funniest thing I’d ever seen and couldn’t stop mocking him. As I snickered at Mark for continuing to gag, we all jumped into the ocean. Before I knew it, we were deep inside a crystal-clear ocean that went on forever.

This wasn’t a murky Canadian lake. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It wasn’t “cool,” like seeing a big painting of a dragon; it was stultifying, like seeing a herd of gigantic dragons in real life. Things were as frighteningly vivid as if I was floating in midair. I could see a football field of distance in front of me, above me, below me, and behind me. Oh, look! There’s a cluster of divers floating about a mile over there. It was like being in outer space but with professional lighting. I had no file for it in my brain.

The instructor noticed my face looked like
The Scream
and made the underwater motion for “Are you OK?” I made a hand gesture that
looked like I was gripping a dick, which is underwater sign language for “OK.” (You can’t do a thumbs-up because that means you want to go back up.) David and Mark were having a great time calmly exploring the scene about twenty feet below us.

Soon we were all a hundred feet under the surface. As my environment rapidly got weirder, I realized I should have paid attention in class. This was way freakier than looking down from the surface. The current took us deeper than a hundred feet by slowly dragging us to the right and over a mountainous coral cliff I hadn’t noticed before. Over the edge was beyond deep. It was an abyss. As my mind raced with fear, David and Mark cheerily drifted along the coral cliff’s edge, checking out the colorful fish hiding in the crevices. I tried to mellow out and pulled my underwater camera out of my vest to take pictures. As my jittery hands tried to work the controls, it felt like playing cribbage while falling from an airplane. At the height of my confusion, I looked up and saw a sea turtle staring at me like an angry penis in a Tupperware container. Then I looked higher and saw a huge fishing boat on the surface that was so far away, it was the size of a bedbug. My vision was starting to pinhole and I could feel my breathing get sporadic. I thought I was panicking but then I realized I’d gone way past that and was now experiencing a full-on panic attack. Then I realized this whole thing was happening underwater, where panicking can kill you. So my panic attack had a panic attack.

The most immediate problem with all this was the breathing. While using a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, you’re supposed to breathe slow and steady, like you’re asleep. Us panickers don’t like to be told how to breathe. We find it alarming.

I had a faint flash from the lessons back in New York. The instructor told us that if you blew up a balloon at the bottom of the ocean and then brought it to the surface, the air inside would keep expanding until the balloon popped before reaching the surface.

I was startled out of my flashback, which may have been actual death. “I’m going to pop like a balloon! I’m going to be like those bleeding Egyptians!” With bubbles exploding from my mouthpiece, I started waving my arms and signaling distress to the instructor, who
grabbed me and held me down. “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “these fuckers WANT me to die! It’s an insurance scam!”

I shook him loose and managed to swim up much higher, but he caught me again. He held me there for what seemed like forever before I could shake him loose again. This happened about four times before I finally erupted out of the water, gasping like a fiend and possibly crying. I realize now he was saving my life because the only way to avoid the bends is to take breaks during the ascent.

When we got to the top, the instructor was livid—not at me but at David and Mark for not sticking close to my candy ass. He held on to my vest as I bobbed up and down in the waves like a blow-up beta male and the two of them showed up about a minute later.

“Are we done already?” David asked.

“How dare you!” the instructor yelled with a furious Mexican accent. “You were suppose to stay by your team! What da hell is da matter wit’ you?”

What a fool I had been. All that hubris and arrogance went crashing into the Caribbean and when it did, my heart sank like the
Titanic.

I didn’t talk much on the way back except to ask Mark and David not to say anything to the girls. As we opened the door to our vacation house the girls yelled, “How’d it go?” from the kitchen. Mark said, “Gavin got scared and had to wait in the boat,” before David added, “He had a pa-a-a-anic atta-a-a-a-ck,” and everyone laughed. It was humiliating. I had become an underwater pussy with a vagina as big and wet as the deep blue sea.

I Got Knocked the Fuck Out (2008)

F
reelance writing and making funny commercials is exactly what you’d expect it to be but working in TV is bizarre. Networks commission hundreds of pilots a year for big money, but for every eighty pilots they have written, only one will make it to air, and even then it will probably be canceled after a few episodes. It’s an entire industry where people are creating content for the garbage. I’m developing a show with FX right now called
Trim
about three straight guys who become hairdressers to get laid. The odds are about 100 percent it will never see the light of day but that’s just the nature of the beast. Some think it’s great. I know writers here in New York who don’t even want their shows to get picked up because they don’t want to move to L.A. I’m not like that. I’m too much of an attention whore to let things go unnoticed.

For example, I did a pilot for Al Gore’s network, Current TV, called
The Immersionist.
The pitch was, I wouldn’t just go and hang out with a group of people, I’d immerse myself in their lifestyle the way George Orwell did in
Down and Out in Paris and London
or Barbara Ehrenreich did in
Nickel and Dimed.
We picked a biker gang in Oakland
called the East Bay Rats as our first “tribe,” and I flew out there to go live with them.

They call themselves the Rats because they live in a crackhead slum and their motorbikes were dirty pieces of shit made from scrap metal. Against all odds, I managed to ingratiate myself with the group and almost convinced their president, Trevor, to make me a Rat. Pretending to be in a motorcycle gang is fun as shit. We destroyed a car with sledgehammers and then hitched it to a tow truck and rode it around the neighborhood. We crashed motorbikes and raced tricycles down a mountain at neck-breaking speeds. And we fought.

The East Bay Rats have a boxing ring in the backyard of their clubhouse and insist every member fight. When they asked me if I knew how to fight, I mentioned years of boxing experience, so they brought in a pro MMA fighter named Meathead Eric. He was a bald Asian kid with arms that looked like they were hiding bowling balls and shoulders as wide as an ox. He was nervous before he saw me but when I walked into the room with my shirt off, he smiled and started bobbing back and forth on the balls of his feet in anticipation. I wasn’t even remotely nervous because I had a plan. I was also a bit drunk.

One of the trainers at Church Street was the reigning IBF Continental Africa cruiserweight champion. He calls himself Jaffa “the African Assassin” Ballogou and yells shit like, “I AM A REAL MAN,” in the changing room as his penis swings around like a rubber snake in a Darth Vader helmet. We would spar occasionally and got to be such good pals, he let me in on a secret trick that wins any fight in the world.

The trick involves standing perfectly still and acting like you’re ready to receive a good right to the head. As the right comes at you, you immediately drop to your knees and nail the guy in the stomach. As he doubles over in pain, rise up off the mat like a phoenix and knock him out with a super uppercut to the chin. Bang. He’s out. Then the crowd cheers and girls start excreting juices. It never fails, but Ballogou told me I could use his black magic only as a last resort.

The referee snapped me out of my Ballogou flashback and reminded me I was in the ring with a monster. We were the first fight of the evening.
The referee introduced me as Sissy La La due to my less-than-fearsome presence, while Meathead Eric was allowed to stick to his real name. As the bell rang for the first round, the bikers chanted, “Sissy La La,” again and again.

We sized each other up for the first round. We each threw a few loose jabs to the head to see how fast the other guy was. It became clear very quickly that this guy was a fighter jet and I was a horse-drawn carriage. He was an energized cat playing with an alcoholic mouse. I hit him in the face a few times and he accepted each blow as if it was a breath mint. I’m surprised he didn’t say thanks.

When the uneventful first round ended, I went back to my corner and sat on a stool while nobody gave me a pep talk and told me what his weaknesses were. I looked around the backyard and it dawned on me that there were no paramedics. I thought, “What if things go bad?” I was starting to get nervous. “Shit, we’re in Oakland. We’d be lucky if 911 garnered
any
response from
anyone.
This could be my last night on earth. Fuck. What about my kids?”

Visions of my wife danced around in my head as the second-round bell rang. This was no longer a publicity stunt. I came at the fight with a whole new mentality: survival.

I laid into the buff Chink with everything I had and got in a good five punches in a row. The footage of this sequence shows that what I thought was a brief moment of victory looks more like a puppy who’s way too happy to see his owner. Eric stepped back and blocked most of my happy-dog advances until one of them managed to hit him square on the nose, which made him mad. He reached back with a wild right that dropped me to the ground like a bag of potatoes. Adrenaline and drugs propelled me instantly back up off the mat, lowering Eric’s confidence from 110 percent to 109 percent.

Being strategic about fighting is like trying to play pool while someone throws bowling balls at your head. I wanted a good fifteen minutes to recover from every hit but I had less than a second. As I tried desperately to regain my footing, Meathead hit me with a one-two combo that made my world go completely black for about two seconds. The referee stepped in and asked me if I wanted to go on.

The cameras were rolling. I couldn’t call off the fight after an extended blink. I told the referee I was ready to continue and decided it was time for an all-or-nothing grand finale.

Ballogou’s gigantic head appeared like an African moon above the crowd. “Go low,” he said in his weird Togolese accent, “then come up hard.” Eric’s right came at me like a meteor and I sank to my knees below it and nailed him in his twelve-pack as hard as I could. This caused Eric approximately zero discomfort so before I could deliver the deadly phoenix uppercut, I felt a left hook obliterate my head and send my whole body sprawling backward into the corner post. I was unconscious for about fifteen seconds.

“Stand back,” were the next words I heard as light flooded back into my black universe, “everyone stand back.” I understood English and knew that was a guy telling someone they had to get out of the way. Someone had been hurt, I guess. Then I saw a flashlight in my eyes. The referee asked me if I knew what my name was. He seemed relieved after hearing me say my name and told me to lay there for a while. Somehow it registered that I was in Oakland. I remember saying aloud, “Why the fuck am I in Oakland?” My new friend Trevor walked up to me and asked me if I knew who he was. He was a total stranger to me. “That’s not good,” he said.

Another strange side effect of being knocked out is you can feel your brain. You know how you can feel the shape of someone’s fist on your leg when they give you a charley horse? Same thing. I could feel the exact contours of my brain pressing against my skull, and every square inch of it ached. I knew I had kids but I couldn’t remember their names. I knew Blobs was an important word but I wasn’t sure why.

Within forty-five minutes I knew who I was again. I was a little frazzled but still able to laugh about the hilarious romp I just had with someone several light-years out of my class. I felt like Icarus. He gets a lot of shit for flying so close to the sun but at least he pushed it as far as it could go. I’d hate to go through life with wax all over my wings wondering if I could have gone a little bit higher.

When I got back to New York, I had a neurologist check me out
because my head still hurt, and he said my brain was swollen but medication would take care of it. A week after that I discovered something that hurt my brain even more—the show was canned. I almost died fighting a ninja superhero and the footage is going to sit in a dusty warehouse somewhere? How am I supposed to tell this story in a bar? It’s only a beginning and a middle. I can’t end a story like that. I needed an end. So, I made one.