How to Piss in Public (5 page)

After stumbling across the highway overpass with my friend’s girlfriend Sarah, I told her to hang on a second then walked into a pile of bushes for a nap. She thought this was really romantic, so she pulled my flaccid schvanz out of my passed-out pants and started flopping it around. Wanking is a bit of an art form with us uncircumcised types. If you clutch the penis too low, the skin doesn’t move up and down enough to feel good, but if you hold it too high, you can tear the frenulum on the downstroke. What the fuck’s a frenulum? It’s the penile version of that thing under your tongue that stops you from swallowing it. Here, grab the neck of your T-shirt and hold a tiny piece of the front collar between your teeth. That’s how a foreskin is attached to a penis. It’s a very small tag of skin and when it tears, it feels like someone ripped your tongue out.

I was so drunk and numb I kept saying, “Harder,” as she beat me off and I remember something feeling really warm before falling asleep. I woke up alone at dawn in the bush and made my way over to Steve’s house, where I broke into his room, stripped down to my underwear, and slept for another three hours.

“Hey, man,” Steve said, waking me up at ten
a.m
., “what’s with your underwear?” I looked down and was shocked to see I was getting my period. My tighty-whiteys were now crimson, and when I pulled out the waistband to peer inside, it looked like an old bowl of raspberry cornflakes.

Steve and I barked, “HOLY SHIT!” so loud, his immigrant mom banged on the door and asked if we were OK in Italian. “Sì, Mamma. We’re fine,” Steve yelled back. I calmed down enough to get into a hot shower with my underwear on. Thirty minutes later, I was able to slowly remove my undies and gently soap off the dried blood. I didn’t have the courage to peel back my foreskin and check the damage, but I could tell it was severe.

I wanted whatever was in there to heal, so I didn’t even touch my dick for two weeks. This led to overwhelming horniness, so while Steve was over one sunny Saturday afternoon a fortnight after the incident, I suggested we go over to Jules’s house and fuck her brains out of her ears.

When we got to Jules’s place, she didn’t seem very into our plan. I went up to her room first and every time she protested, I’d put my hand on her crotch because she’d forget what she was saying and emit this ecstatic guttural moan. I’ve never seen another girl where you can shut her up just by touching her area. I call this rare phenomenon “Cunt Button.” Five minutes after her first “no,” I was fucking her from behind and enjoying the panoramic view of her breathtaking ass. She was wearing ankle socks with lace cuffs, and her big tits were swinging back and forth like bouncy balloons. I was the Chief Swine in Hog Heaven, but then I looked down and saw blood shooting out all over my pubes.

What?

I couldn’t stop pumping her, but every time I pushed in, a ringed jet of furiously dark blood sprayed back into my crotch with showerhead force. After trying to ignore it for a few seconds, I pulled my dick out and was horrified to see a bucket’s worth of blood on both of us and a puddle in the center of the mattress that was easily three liters. It was as if a shark had eaten her vagina while we were fucking.

I yelped, “WHAT THE SHIT!?” then pulled on my pants and ran the three blocks to my house, where I dashed straight to my room and hid under my bed. That’s right, I hid under my bed like a fucking tiny dog during a thunderstorm. As I lay there shaking with fear and confusion, Jules and Steve took her mattress into the basement of her house, where they scrubbed the blood off with a small hose in silence. He said it was one of the weirdest moments of his life. I was confused by menstruation and didn’t understand why her vagina did that to me. She was confused by my foreskin and didn’t understand why my penis would do that to her. Her confusion was warranted; mine was not, or not for the right reason at least. Sarah had torn a hole in my frenulum, and getting an erection was now like opening a Transylvanian fire hydrant.
I tried to look at it but every time I pulled back my foreskin, I felt an electric shock of pain resonate through my entire body.

A week later, I was sitting with a Muslim urologist who told me I had to be circumcised. “It’s like a hole in your jeans,” he admonished me. “You can sew it up but it will just rip again.” He made an appointment at the hospital for the next month, and I gulped.

I sat in the bath that night and thought very hard about what was going to be done. I was going to have a vastly different penis for the rest of my life, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Then I stomped my foot down like a Birkenstock-wearing feminist in a porn shop and said, “
No!
This is my body and I’ll handle who does what to it. My body, my foreskin, myself.” The next few weeks involved scalding-hot bath after scalding-hot bath and gently pulling back my submerged penis to allow soap to attend to the wound. Each bath was less painful than the previous one and soon I was ready to almost start masturbating again.

I let the operation date pass and, after a few very careful wanks, was ready to get back on the sex horse. Three months after Sarah’s clumsy hands shredded my precious foreskin, my dick was sliding into a fifteen-year-old soccer star named Jen. I made sure the hole was sopping wet first, and it worked. I fucked her for the usual teenage minute and pulled out a blood-free dink at the end.

I had ignored the doctor’s orders and successfully taken my foreskin back from the Man. Don’t ever let anyone chop the end of your dick off.

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

W
hen my dad was growing up, Britain didn’t really have a middle class. You were either a dockworker covered in shitty tattoos or an aristocrat who sipped tea and told someone to tell someone to tell someone what the dockworkers should be doing. My grandfather was a bookie who was determined to avoid this fate and changed our name from McGuinness to the much less Irish-sounding McInnes.

My father looks like a turtle with cancer. If he wore his hood up, he’d look like Darth Vader’s boss. He’s been in so many fights, his nose is flattened and his huge lips make him look like an albino KRS-One covered in gray stubble.

Though he seemed destined for blue-collar nothingness like his brothers, he got scholarships and a degree in physics and became a middle-class immigrant with middle-class kids. “The best thing about Glasgow,” he once told me in an affected accent that sounded more like Sean Connery than a kid who grew up with ill-fitting shoes, “is you never get homesick.” He has no intention of going back but it’s still in him. When some carefree vandals were giggling their way through our
backyard in Kanata one night, my dad leapt from his bed, jumped out the window, and kicked the living shit out of them—NUDE. My dad was charged with assault but the vision of his pendulous penis swinging back and forth while his bloody fists wrought endless carnage is an image those poor boys will likely never forget.

For the most part, however, his conversion to gentleman was complete and he projected his class ascendance onto my little brother, Kyle, and me. For one of us to do something trashy like get a tattoo would have erased his lifetime of hard work. To him tattoos were something you get in prison, and I’m pretty sure the only time he saw them was as a very young man when he briefly went to jail for trying to steal a car. (He’s so arrogant, he and his friends opened the hood and assumed they could figure out hot-wiring from scratch. After about an hour of scratching their chins and staring at the electrical system, a neighbor called the cops.)

I was eighteen at the time and had recently got my first tattoo, a skull, on my right shoulder. I knew the shit was going to hit the fan if my parents ever saw it. They are both very dramatic and it’s almost solely because they drink—a lot. I get why they drink. I have to be drunk to be around them sometimes, and they
are
them. Besides, my dad’s roots are Irish, and as Richard Nixon once said, “Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

Anyway, it was a brutally hot day in July and my parents were at the pub, so Kyle (who was five at the time) and I were playing soccer with no shirts on. I knew my brother was going to see my new tattoo, but I had a plan. I sat him down and very carefully explained what a secret was. “So, you can’t tell anyone that I have a drawing on me. It’s going to be there forever,” I said, holding his shoulders and staring into his little-kid eyes. “Got it? It’s very important that you understand this.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” he said, and we went back to kicking the ball around. When my parents got back, Kyle and I were in the kitchen making chocolate milk and I had my shirt back on. My dad had just procured a six-pack and was heading toward the fridge when my brother sang out, “I-I-I-I have a se-e-e-ecret!”

My ears got red-hot and I rushed over to grab his arm. “No you don’t,” I said through my teeth while squeezing a bit too hard.

“Ow!” he said, pulling away and holding his sore arm. “That really hurt!”

At this point I knew I was fucked, so I just sat back and prepared for Parental Armageddon. “What secret?” my dad yelled angrily. My brother looked at me. “
What
secret?” my dad said louder. After sticking to his guns for all of ten seconds, my brother obediently whispered the secret into our dad’s ear.

My dad then did one of the scariest and funniest things I’ve ever seen an adult do. He fell backward onto the floor flailing his arms like he was making a snow angel before bursting into fish-in-the-boat convulsions that looked like a robot dance mixed with a self-induced seizure.

As he jerked around on the floor, his beers left their plastic holder and shot around the kitchen in different directions like tear gas canisters. My mother then began jogging on the spot and pleading, “What is it? What is it? What is it?” Eventually my dad was able to control his spasms enough to eke out the words, “HE’S GONE AND GOT A BLOODY TATTOO!” He kept flapping around on the floor after he said it. He couldn’t stop.

When my mom got the news she immediately started bawling and taking off her clothes. Apparently panic induces hot flashes. As I stood there in awe of their reactions, my mother plunged to her knees and stood at my feet like I was the messiah. “Please, son,” she said, holding her hands in Scottish prayer and looking up at me, “tell me you regret it, son. Tell me you regret it.” She was now wearing nothing but sweatpants and a bra. Women shouldn’t pray in sweatpants and a bra.

After a good two minutes of doing the Alligator Death Dance, my father stood up and stared at me red-faced with his veins bulging and his eyes about to pop. I should have been scared, but I had been dealing with their insanity my whole life. “Go ahead,” I said, putting up my dukes for the first time in my life, “
hit
me.”

My dad would never hit his kids because that’s what his dad did, so instead he screamed, “Aaaaaah!” at the top of his lungs and started
running around the house. It was one long continuous scream as he ran out of the kitchen, through the living room, into his room, around his bed, back through the living room, back into the kitchen, then out again, step and repeat. He ran this hollering obstacle course at least three times. As this went on, my mother continued to sit at my feet in the prayer position, crying and repeating, “Tell me you regret it, son, TELL ME YOU REGRET IT.” I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. This was outrageous.

My dad’s “Aaaah!” ended with his running back into the kitchen and strangling me—only he’d never do that, so he strangled the air around my neck like I had on an invisible neck brace. He was air-strangling me.

“What are you doing?” I asked as his hands floated around my throat.

“Get out,” he hissed like a Scottish snake, “before I do something I regret.”

I walked out the back door and the screen door slammed shut on my brother, who was trying to follow me. I turned back and he was standing behind the screen looking very sad and confused. “What did I do?” he asked.

I wanted to say, “Well, I hope you just learned what a secret is, dipshit,” but I said, “Don’t worry about it, buddy. They’re just being crazy.”

Since then the only tattoos I got were “What?” on the inside of my lip, “Approach with caution” logos on my legs, a Scottish battle anthem on my left arm with “Ain’t No Nice Guy” and “Arm Your Desires” above that, and a sun with a dancing tree frog inside it above that. And on the other arm all I got was a poem about vices, “Aren’t Thou Bored,” and a gun, and an anarchy sign with the Crass logo, and then just “Destruction Creates” across the top of my back with a skull-head jellyfish eating Chiang Kai-shek and Fidel Castro that goes from my neck to my ass and around the sides of my ribs. I also have the word “Blobs” over my right tit. And my kids’ names on my wrists. My brother doesn’t have any tattoos.

Anal Chinook: Revenge of the Punk Nerds (1988)

B
y the time I was eighteen, punk had gone from a silly uniform for our gang to a religion I was ready to die for. On the weekends we’d take the bus into the city and I’d see the downtown punks walking with their friends and carrying beer to some awesome party I wasn’t invited to. They had fluorescent-cone spiked hair, knee-high army boots, and studded leather jackets with leopard-print lapels. When I saw them walking in a pack like that, I was so awestruck, they appeared to be walking in slow motion. Fuck being chased around by security guards. I wanted to be chased by cops in riot gear. There were punk riots in Britain and entire squatted neighborhoods in Europe. My favorite band, Crass, was causing international incidents with their political pranks and even our own downtown scene was putting on Rock Against Racism gigs that British bands like Oi Polloi were flying down to play.

I started singing for a band called Anal Chinook (the latter word meaning “warm wind” in Inuit) run by a charming little hippie named Blake who still collected WWF toys and dressed like a roadie from
Fraggle Rock.
His parents were very laid-back and they let us play in
the basement so loud, it once gave his dog a heart attack. We had to change the chorus of “Fuck You” to “God Bless You” but they gave us the freedom to practice whenever we wanted to so when we finally got a show in the city, we were more than ready.