How to Piss in Public (6 page)

First time onstage, ever. (1988)

On the night of our first show, the other bands we played with were nervous and stared at their frets, petrified of fucking up. The scene was really judgmental and violent back then and I was nervous too but as soon as I got on that stage, all my fear turned into adrenaline. I felt like a pit bull going into a dogfight. Our opening song was about acid rain so I grabbed the mic off its stand, stood on the monitor, and chanted, “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is … DYING!” The song started
with a bang and all one hundred punks in the audience exploded into a swirling circle of sweaty moshers. We sustained this level of energy throughout the show as kids jumped off the speakers into the pit and leapt around the stage like Super Mario. The show ended with me covered in my own blood and leaping into the crowd as Blake and the lead guitarist, Orca, played classic rock solos. From that night on, we vowed to make each show crazier than the last. Music historians call this evolution of the genre “Punk Pathetique.” Seriously, they do.

We started gigging a lot downtown and were soon able to open up for every big punk band that came to town. We dressed in drag while opening for Millions of Dead Cops and fought the skinheads who tried to wreck the show. We dressed as Kiss and ate cow brains while opening for Dayglo Abortions and they loved it so much, they named a song after us. As far as Kanata punk was concerned, we were bigger than Jesus!

After we graduated high school, Steve and I left the rural suburbs behind and moved into a “punk house” downtown. He was now playing guitar for a Clash soundalike band called the Trapt. The tradition for houses back then was for one guy to dress real neat, get a two-bedroom, and then let another five punks move in when the landlord wasn’t looking. We’d usually get evicted within the year and the punk house would just move to the next spot. The third time this happened we got an actual home on Percy Street and called it “Percy Street.” It had several floors and a big living room that became party central for every teenage misfit within a hundred miles.

I was finally in the in crowd. Those punks I saw from the bus who were walking in slow motion? They were in my living room now. The guy carrying the beer was James Deziel, the drummer for the Trapt. The chick with the leopard print was a one-eyed beauty we all called Bumba Clut. The drummer for Honest Injun was drinking beer in the kitchen and Aidan Girt, a six-foot-tall, skinny, bald guy with huge glasses who had been in almost every punk band in the city, was living next to Steve’s room. He was Anal Chinook’s drummer now. I slept on a cot in the boiler room downstairs, which felt like the punkest place on earth. We drank together, stole groceries together, ran from skinheads
together, and played music together. I was no longer a suburban kid reading about punk and hardcore in fanzines. I was living it. It was everything I had ever hoped for and it was kind of whatever.

You heard me. Being cool sucks. As Cormac McCarthy said, “There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.” I missed the road. Back in high school, my friendships were based on who was funny or who was just plain fun. At Percy Street, they were based on hair. You could be the biggest idiot in the world but if your jacket had the same bands painted on it that mine did, well then, I guess we’re pals. I appreciated the camaraderie but let’s be honest. It’s not exactly a formula for a genuine existence.

The skinheads thing also got to be pretty tedious after a while. Everyone talked about them so much, I had to put up a sign that said
no more talking about skinheads.
We all pretended it was about fighting fascism but at the end of the day it was middle-class white kids (us) fighting working-class white kids (them) and they were way better fighters. The visible minorities and Jews we were supposedly defending didn’t give a shit about our war, nor should they have. It wasn’t about them. It was a bunch of class. It was just another version of political correctness and all that bullshit we were copying from our parents is about is the upper classes telling the lower classes how to think. “Hey, uneducated plebes,” we were saying with our noses in the air, “it’s not ‘black’ anymore. It’s ‘African-American.’ Didn’t you get the dictum? Let’s fight.” Somewhere along the road to the tavern, the hijinks had become pedantic. Besides, fighting hurts.

Aidan the drummer and I usually took the bus back to the suburbs to practice because the rest of the band was still there, but once in a blue moon they’d come visit us at Percy Street. When I’d open the door and see their uncool, suburban faces I’d almost smother them with kisses. Orca, our guitarist, dressed like a gym teacher, and Paul, the bassist, looked like a male feminist in his flowery vest and baggy cords. On this particular night, Blake was wearing a tea cozy on his head and bell-bottoms that said “Blake” on them in Magic Marker.

They had borrowed a car and made it down for a big summer party we were having because a bunch of punks were visiting from Montreal.
After greeting Orca and Blake at the door, I dragged these hometown heroes past the cool kids into the kitchen, where we all started shotgunning beers. Within a mere four shotguns, Orca said, “I think I’m going to puke,” and ran to the front of the house, where projectile vomit shot out of his face like a psychedelic dragon. Blake yelled, “Nice word balloon. What’s it say?” at Orca’s barfing, and that hilarious concept prompted me to stand on a chair and declare a Punk-Off. Without any notice, I ran up the wall and backflipped into the center of the living room, which shattered my kneecap with a large
snap.
Blake, Orca, and Aidan went outside to go streaking but my knee was filling up with blood and was beginning to look like a colossal bruised tumor. I spent the rest of the party incapacitated and slept in a chair that night.

The next day I tried to stand and felt a firecracker of pain shoot up my leg. This is the part of an injury where you start to panic and think about permanent damage. “Did I give myself knee AIDS?” I thought. I made a girl named Elise pick me up and drive me to the hospital, where an X-ray revealed I had shattered my kneecap. This was terrible news as we were booked to open for the Dead Milkmen in a couple of weeks. The doctor fixed me up with a removable cast made of Velcro straps and steel rods encased in canvas and told me there was no way it would be healed in two weeks. I hobbled back home determined to prove her wrong (yes “her,” you sexist asshole).

I spent the next fourteen days limping around like a teenage war vet. I was trying not to lose my busboy job and practice for the biggest gig of our lives but I was walking like a hundred-year-old. Our stage shows had gone from wearing funny hats to epic sagas with gigantic props that belonged on Broadway. We did a song about my foreskin tragedy, for example, that included a huge foam penis Blake circumcised with his teeth while chanting, “He sold his cock to punk rock!” The Dead Milkmen show was going to incorporate my broken knee in a groundbreakingly brilliant way and the music had to be tight. The whole city was going to be there. Even my mom.

Two weeks later, I was on a dark stage in a wheelchair and dressed all in black like a death metal paraplegic. Behind me was a gigantic projection of a government movie about child safety we rented from the
library for fifteen bucks. After a very quiet and eerie intro song, Blake stepped out of the darkness and summoned Ozzy Osbourne. Ominous guitar music filled the room as white fog did the same. Then a black kid from Blake’s basketball team appeared through the smoke and said, “You summoned me?” in a normal voice. He blessed us all with magic devil powers and even healed my leg by removing the cast and commanding me to walk (which fucking killed). As we praised black Ozzy’s satanic powers, Dead Milkmen vocalist Rodney Anonymous Mellencamp magically appeared with a pitchfork and killed him. We gasped in horror and were inconsolable until Blake pointed out that the show must go on.

Right before being “healed” by Ozzy. Note leg brace. (1990)

The rest of the set was all about bringing Ozzy back from the grave. We had written a song for the event with a chorus that went, “Oh-double-Zed-Y,
” again and again and we forced the audience to sing along in an attempt to revive the Sabbath singer. We encouraged people to stop slam-dancing and take a moment of silence to pray for our leader. I even climbed up to the rafters using a rope that took all the skin off my hands and hollered spooky-sounding pleas for him to return. Nothing worked until we all got together to shit in a bucket, which was then thrown into the crowd. That worked.

The shit wasn’t shit. It was unwrapped chocolate bars but they were very convincing and got such good air, one of them flew by my mom, who was standing at the back with a girlfriend of mine. I was told later that my mom said, “Charming,” after it flew past her head.

Ozzy was back and we reprised the Ozzy song with black Ozzy himself singing the chorus. We dragged this part out so long, Rodney showed up with his pitchfork again and chased us all off the stage. Then the Dead Milkmen went on. What an intro. As Crass did in 1984 after their Miner’s Benefit, we packed it in after that show because it was obvious we had achieved perfection and there was no sense commencing our inevitable decline.

After the show, I caught up with my mom and asked her what she thought. She was angry about the poo but I managed to calm her down and explained it was four Oh Henry! bars and a Mars bar. “Oh,” she said, finally convinced. “Well, good then, because throwing feces at people is illegal. You know that, right? It’s assault.” I was going to say, “Well, then monkeys in the zoo should be in jail,” but I didn’t because I realized monkeys in the zoo are in jail.

Stomped by Very Stylish Nazis (1988)

T
he Nazi skinheads in our quaint little government town were like exaggerations of Hollywood bad guys. Their leader, Geoff, regularly made trips down south to meet with militia groups and would come back with a trunk full of guns. He was a Coke-machine-shaped ogre who eventually blew his giant head off with an M16 while on the phone with his baby’s mama. Just below him on the bully scale was Wolf, a stocky psychopath who carried a cane with a removable handle that doubled as a rapier, like he was some kind of British assassin from the 1800s. At the bottom of the top brass was the foppishly named Francois, a French-Canadian nationalist whose entire back was tattooed with three gigantic Klansmen riding their horses into battle—a battle that must have been happening somewhere down his ass crack.

We tried to fight these guys, but it was like fairies trying to wrestle Skeletor. Not only were we outmatched, we were outviolenced. It wasn’t unusual to be sitting at a house party drinking beer and have a dozen of them swarm through the front door smashing everyone (women included) with baseball bats, only to disappear out the back as
quickly as they came. Aidan was particularly damaged by one of these attacks and seemed weird afterward. They would come to our shows and beat us up in the pit, then they’d get onstage and attack the band. We occasionally won, but you sound like an asshole describing a fight you won so I’ll leave those out. For the most part the “Boneheads” met little resistance stealing our beer, our girlfriends, and even our boots.

Back in the eighties, Dr. Martens were a coveted combat boot mostly used by British mailmen. They were orthopedic and very cool looking, so whenever skinheads saw a punk wearing them, the punk got “rolled for his Docs.” Regular trips to Scotland to visit relatives meant I had special access to this Holy Grail of shoes, but I had to be careful about wearing them in downtown Ottawa.

In December of 1986, I got a call from my ex-girlfriend Christa. Despite being half-squaw, she was one of the girls the skinheads stole. “Wolf knows you have Docs,” she whispered over the phone. “Don’t wear them to the SNFU show.” Then she hung up. I fart when I’m scared, and this warning turned my ass into a shit-powered leaf blower.

I didn’t wear my boots to that particular show, but the word was out and it was only a matter of time before the Gestapo confiscated them. About a week later, I was walking downtown with Pukey Stallion, who was dressed head to toe in perfect mod clothing. I had all my best punk gear on, including my coveted ten-hole black Doc Martens. As we joked with each other across Rideau Street and through a beautiful shopping plaza where civil servants spent hundreds of dollars treating themselves, we came to a clearing and found ourselves smack-dab in the middle of about ten skinheads. They saw us before we saw them and had already spread out into a wide circle that blocked the most obvious escape routes. Pukey and I had been close friends since the first day of high school and I knew he would have my back because—Pukey? Pukey?
Hello?
Fucking cocksucker. He didn’t go to get cops or friends or anyone. He went home. I now had to take on all these skinheads by myself.