How to Piss in Public (4 page)

As his father was leaving the room, Cheese stood up and began fucking the air in huge comical pumps that made everyone else burst out laughing. Jules giggled and buried her face in the couch and I thought about how awesome it would be if I could stop time right then, put my dick in her mouth, and then stop time again forever. I had seen the light and things were different now.

Unfortunately, Jules got way dirtier. After getting married right out of high school she plopped out four younguns and abandoned them all to pursue a full-time position as a crack addict. I heard she was actually a sex addict who loved crack not because it was crack but because it made sex better. I recently found out she’s better now and is slowly putting her life back together. This ruined my ongoing fantasy of going undercover in the crack community to rescue her. That would have been intense.

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

I
n the mideighties, the moral panic du jour was drunk driving. Kids were shanghaied out of class and forced
Clockwork Orange–
style to watch gory videos of dismembered teenagers mangled by cars. Students’ moms would hold hands and sing songs about the dangers of being tipsy behind the wheel. They were mostly right, but our gang thought the whole thing was “gay” and decided to take a pro-drunk-driving stance. We started a group called SAS (Students Against Students Against Drunk Driving) and competed to see who could drive the drunkest. If you couldn’t find your parents’ car the next day, you won.

The police would regularly come to our school to discuss the problem, throwing themselves to the wolves in the process. We would heckle and snicker and make fart sounds throughout, and we proudly took the resulting detentions.

During one Q & A with an officer, we were given an opportunity to address the movie we had just seen about a supermodel who was paralyzed from the neck down after being T-boned by a drunk driver.
“Yeah, I have a question,” I said into the mic in front of the entire school. “Why do you consider being in a wheelchair so horrible? My mother is in a chair and has been her whole life and our family certainly doesn’t see her as some kind of
tragedy.
” My friends blew this lie by laughing, and the teachers at either end of the stage burned holes in me with their eyes. The cop sighed and explained that there will always be people who want to joke around and not take this seriously, but it is
deathly
serious. Officer McClaren, if you’re reading this right now, I apologize.

Two months earlier, I had turned sixteen and gotten my license. I was on a tear. On a cold Friday evening in December 1986, Dogboy called me to say his parents were finally leaving for the weekend. He lived in a huge, real house instead of the cookie-cutter McSuburbs the rest of us lived in. I immediately called our best partiers. Totti was an Italian punk with coarse broom hair and was so good at insults he was constantly making girls cry. His fat nerd friend Anthony always wore clothes that were too small for him so just looking at him was funny. I also made sure some farmers’ kids named Szabo and Dick drove Skeeter and Cheese in from the sticks. Shit was about to get crucial.

First, we went to the “Beer Store.” In Canada you can only buy beer from government-sanctioned sellers and that’s the brand name they chose for each one. We waited in the parking lot until some derelict agreed to buy us some in exchange for a few out of the box. An hour after opening that first Pandora’s beer, we were running up and down the stairs of Dogboy’s house shotgunning beers and shouting along with the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party).” First it was just the two of us, but people started streaming in around nine
p.m.
By ten, we had a real party worth fighting for.

The problem with parties in high school is that you have such intense blue balls after being denied for so long that when you finally get a chance, it comes rocketing out like explosive diarrhea. We were out of control. There were piggyback fights and wedgie rumbles. We were acting exactly like the jocks we hated, and the girls were huddled by the kitchen in fear. Occasionally one would emerge to say something
like, “Stop! He can’t breathe,” about the guy at the bottom of the dog pile, and we’d yell back, “Who cares?”

Just when we thought the party couldn’t get any more fun, a “Hello, boys!” rang from the top of the stairs. It was Anthony, prancing around in Dogboy’s mother’s bra and panties. Seeing his lily-white fat folds protrude out of her expensive lingerie made us laugh so hard, we all died and came back to life.

“That’s it!” I yelled after finally getting some air in my lungs. “We’re going for a drive!”

Riding the momentum of Anthony’s joke, everyone followed me outside into the freezing Canada cold. I had grabbed a set of keys that had a Chevrolet logo on them and jumped into a blue car that had the same logo on it. It was Dick’s car. I was one of the drunkest people in the world.

As I rolled out of the driveway in my stolen vehicle, seven people crammed inside. Skeeter and Totti then climbed onto the hood. The snow was piled ten feet high on either side of the road, but we were laughing like hyenas. Our frontal lobes weren’t developed enough to signal important emotions such as fear.

The car was old but in good condition and it puttered out onto the street with vigor. Skeeter and Totti were in clear and present danger as they held desperately on to the hood, and we had front-row seats to view the carnage. It was like we were watching an action movie on a huge flat-screen way before there were flat-screens. Skeeter looked like a rodeo clown in his skinny blond Mohawk and shredded jean jacket; Totti looked even funnier with giant black spikes coming out of his head and a long black trench coat.

When we started on our journey through the snowy ’burbs, the “boys on the hood” were laughing, but their smiles became inversely proportional to how hard I pushed on the gas. If I floored it, they’d look petrified. When I let off the gas, they cheered up again. I enjoyed playing with their facial expressions, but eventually I slammed down the pedal full throttle and gunned it.

“He’s not slowing down,” I heard Skeeter say to Totti through the windshield. Totti wasn’t prepared to give up quite yet and kept crying
at me to stop. I couldn’t stop laughing, let alone use a brake pedal. Totti finally gave up and turned to Skeeter to say, “We’re going to have to jump,” which made the entire car cheer. Skeeter and Totti looked into each other’s eyes with an expression that said, “We can do this.” Skeeter jumped first. As the car swerved violently off of Katimavik Road and onto McGibbon Drive, Skeeter leapt with all his might and instantly disappeared into a snowbank like a gopher into a hole.

Totti was next. As he crouched on the hood and surveyed the safest place to jump, I sped up and everyone in the car yelled things like, “You can do it, Totti!” He’s a much bigger guy than Skeeter, so when he finally summoned the courage to jump, he went smashing into the snowbank like a meteor and made a huge explosion of snow shoot up around him. Instead of stopping to make sure our friends were all right, we cheered louder and headed to the Kanata Town Center to do some donuts as our hapless friends disappeared into the background.

The grocery store at the back of this minimall was where many of us worked pushing shopping carts and stacking shelves. It was abandoned at this late hour, which made it the perfect place to crank the wheel to one side and force the car to spin in endless circles that jeopardized everyone’s safety. The enormous parking lot’s black ice had reduced the friction to about nothing. “Watch this,” I yelled as I opened the driver’s door, held on to the steering wheel, and leaned my entire body toward the pavement so my head was facing the tire. To this day, I can still clearly see the snowy front left tire spinning at twenty miles an hour mere inches from my face.

Donuts are a great way to make driving a car scary because you’re not in control of where the car goes. The wheels are spinning in a direction you’re not steering toward, and a huge lamppost is right around the corner. This circular dance with the devil went on for so long I was about to throw up. We had performed a half-dozen 360-degree turns by now, so I pulled myself up, straightened out the car, and went screeching out of the parking lot to rejoin Dogboy’s house party.

BWUP! BWUP!

“What the fuck was that?” I yelled, praying to God I didn’t just hear a police siren.

“COPS!” yelled everyone in the car. Of course it was the cops. What else were they going to be doing, arresting cows? I was shitting my pants but kept driving anyway.

“Quick, is anyone in the car not wasted?” I squawked like a crazy woman. Everyone looked at each other shaking their heads no. “Alan!” I yelled to a guy in the passenger’s seat I barely knew. “Get in the driver’s seat right now.”

“Fuck you!” he replied. I needed another plan.

I clearly was in big trouble and I didn’t want to make it worse by speeding or breaking any other laws so I came up with this unbelievably stupid idea: a perfectly legal police chase. I was going to drive at the speed limit, stop at stop signs, and even indicate before I turned, BUT I was going to do my turns at the very last second. That way they wouldn’t be able to add any charges, but I’d still get away. This plan would have worked perfectly if the two police officers had been drinking all day and could barely drive. As luck would have it, they were both sober as the judge I was soon to be in front of.

After about one minute of this strange charade, they quietly pulled in front of me and forced me to park. We were now pretty close to the party and as I got out, farmer’s-son Dick walked up and yelled, “That guy stole my fucking car!” to the cops. Thanks, Dick. As the cop pulled out the Breathalyzer, I came up with an even stupider plan than the “creeping escape” that had just failed. “I know,” I thought while trying to not see two of everything, “I’ll act like I’m inhaling while I exhale, and then I’ll act like I’m exhaling when I inhale.” The officer told me to take a deep breath and blow into the machine. As I surreptitiously blew air out of my nose, I puffed up my chest and pointed at it as if to say, “This guy is getting as much air in those lungs as he possibly can,” even though I was doing the opposite. Then I put my lips on the machine and gestured with my arms like I was exhaling while I secretly inhaled. My reading was pretty good—negative 10, which means I was driving at two hundred times less than the legal limit. The cop told me to do it again and after two more pathetic attempts, he shouted, “Don’t suck! Blow!”

I blew, and it sucked. I was twice the legal limit and on my way to jail.

The fifteenth stupid idea I had that night was to smile for the mug shot. I spent the rest of the night in jail, and my dad picked me up early the next morning, at which point he was treated to the said photograph. Seeing the black-and-white photo of his son in a studded leather jacket with a flippant smirk made him so fucking mad he didn’t say one word to me for an entire year (seriously) and referred to me only in the third person as “that asshole.”

During this time, I was expected to go to court and plead guilty to driving under the influence, so I did. What an eye-opener. Criminals are fucking losers. I wore a suit to the proceedings as any sane person would, but I turned out to be the only sane person in the courtroom. Ahead of me was a kid, charged with criminal negligence, who had no problem standing in front of the judge with his headphones on. When he was told this is unacceptable, he pulled them out of his ears and said to the judge, “OK, OK—
fu-u-u-uck.
”

Just when I thought that couldn’t be topped, a bum giggled his way up to the stand while looking back at his buddy and giving the thumbs-up. He had on a baseball hat with two foam tits on it that said
i love tits
in felt.

Both these guys got charged, but when I showed up looking like a model citizen, justice proved it was indeed blind and charged me, too. My license was revoked and I had a criminal record.

The good news is that I was made president of SAS. The better news is that I dismantled the organization immediately. Canadian law is pretty easy on minors, so the day I turned eighteen, the whole thing was flushed down the toilet and erased from the history books—which sort of sucked, because I really wanted that mug shot.

I’d like to say I never drove drunk again, but c’mon. The legal limit in New York is two beers, and if you can’t command your vehicle after two beers you shouldn’t be commanding a vehicle in the first place.

I can tell you that I never drove THAT drunk again.

Desperately Saving Foreskin (1987)

My high school ID from this year is the only ID I own where I don’t have crossed eyes. (1987)

P
rohibition taught society that banning alcohol makes drinkers tenacious. My crew, the Monks, fought the ageist laws of the 1980s by pouring a teeny bit from every bottle in our parents’ liquor cabinets into a communal jar and calling the concoction “Jungle Juice.”

This gasoline-flavored poison would get you so plastered so fast, the night quickly devolved into fistfights, puking, and tears. House parties were rare in Kanata, so we held “Bush Bashes” deep in the forest where cops and parents couldn’t find us. The way home was very confusing and many of us got lost for hours. (A few years ago, some kid died making his way home, so Bush Bashes are now forbidden.)