How to Piss in Public (7 page)

These skins were definitely not locals. They looked like orphans and had weird zits and jeans that didn’t fit right. One of them even wore running shoes, which is a choice so unfashionable for a skinhead, it’s
disturbing. A very tall skin in a tweed cap and cheap combat boots walked deep into my personal space and said, “Lemme try on your boots.” Once again my overworked adrenaline glands were forced into action. I knew I had to get the hell out of there but the skinheads knew that too, so the more I scoped out holes in their human fence, the stronger it became. “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I said, trying to sound like Charles Bronson but coming across like Weird Al. Then he put his foot next to mine and called out to his friends, laughing: “Hey, I think we’re the same size!”

A crowd of heartless spectators had assembled and this guy was now so close to me his head could have easily perched on my shoulder like a parakeet. “Take them off,” he said in a tone that was borderline seductive. I knew it was time to fight but I was scared shitless. I overheard a young girl in the crowd say, “Holy shit, is that guy ever scared shitless.” Out of nowhere, an even bigger skinhead marched up in a rage. “JOHN!” he yelled at my faltering assailant. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Then he mimed how to beat me up like I was a foam dummy at a women’s self-defense class. “You just go BANG,” he said while miming a kick to my stomach, “and then BAM,” miming a knee to my head.

“All right!” I yelled, breaking up the How to Kick My Ass seminar, “I’ll give you the boots.” Then I employed a dumb street-fighting trick my dad taught me that I never thought would work.

“At the count of three,” I said with authority, “I’ll take them off … One …” Then I swiveled around and shot out of there like a Jesus Lizard on Adderall. As my dad promised, the crowd stood there for exactly two seconds thinking, “Hey, wait a minute. He said he was going to give us the boots at the count of three. He only got to one. That ain’t right.” Two seconds is a lot of time.

“GET HIM!” John’s instructor yelled.

I was a good ten feet ahead of these guys and I tore through the shoppers like Jason Bourne. I looked back to see if they were gaining and was stunned to see the gap was closing fast. I don’t know if you’ve ever been chased by a gang of homeless Nazi skinheads before, but they look really awesome. Time goes very slowly when your brain is releasing
its own amphetamines and I could see them jumping over people in slow motion with their perfect cuffs and their straightlaced leather boots. The bomber jackets seemed to be made for running and the neat white shirts with suspenders and short-cropped hair looked so badass, I wanted an oil painting of my imminent demise.

After knocking over an old lady and sending her Christmas presents sprawling all over the street, I made a sharp left and sprinted across the road. In Pac-Man, you gain a lot of traction by making turns, but in real life the ghosts catch up, and I soon realized the chase was over. As I approached the other side of the street, I looked to my left and saw a young bald racist running through the air like a ghost-white LeBron James in springy shoes. His flying scissors kick smashed into my solar plexus and sent me crashing against the curb like a bag of potatoes. Before I could react to that, the others showed up and started kicking me with the kind of relentless hatred you only get from growing up in juvenile detention.

I covered my head and managed to keep most of the beating to my ribs, but after a good twenty seconds (that’s about a week in being-kicked time) I started to wonder if this was ever going to stop. It wasn’t, so I came up with an idea. I’d scare them into thinking they’d paralyzed me for life. “My back!” I yelled while letting my whole body go limp, “I can’t feel my legs!” These guys either didn’t know or didn’t care if I had a broken back and they kept whaling on my limp body like I was Rodney King. I gave up on playing dead and went back to protecting my head. When they finally decided to call it a day, I was a broken jar of jam dressed in punk clothes, and they dragged my bleeding body over to a park bench to exchange the boots.

As some chick untied my boots and handed them over to John, a huge Native guy walked up and said, “Is everything OK here?” I jumped up, yelled, “Hell no, kemosabe,” and we put our backs together while kicking the living shit out of each skinhead using multidimensional space-age karate moves. Oh, wait—that’s the fantasy I have every time I relive this story in my head. What really happened was I said, “Everything’s fine,” so the Indian shrugged and walked away.

I walked home in John’s shitty boots and vowed to punch Pukey
in the face the next time I saw him (which I did). The next morning I couldn’t get out of bed and it was at least two months before I could laugh or cough without grabbing my aching ribs. Shortly after I was able to laugh without pain, Geoff returned from one of his southern sojourns and kicked the crap out of John. Apparently he had shamed the skinhead name by not fighting me one-on-one. A year after that, John threw himself in front of a train. Then Geoff blew his head off. After that, I was told Francois and Wolf went to prison, where they quickly became wiggers. The skinhead movement was dwindling when a punk gang from Toronto called Bunch of Fucking Goofs came through town and beat up every last one. That was the end of skinheads in our neck of the woods.

Everyone involved died or went to jail but that doesn’t make me feel better, because I will never forgive myself for not high-fiving that Indian and dying with my boots on. That’s the thing about being male: You quickly forget the times you were victorious. It’s the times you pussied out that stick in your craw forever.

Is Everybody on This Planet a Tree Planter? (1991)

I
started university in 1988 and worked as a janitor at the school to pay my rent. Canada’s system is British so tuition was only about $1,500 a year back then and part-time work was almost enough to live well without going into debt. Unfortunately, cleaning up the school before the students got there meant waking up when it was still dark out. That sucks. Before graduating several years later at a Montreal university where I transferred my credits, I worked on and off as a bike messenger, which made being a janitor feel like being a nude butler for sex-addicted supermodels. Not only did you have to get up at the butt-crack of dawn but you had to ride your bike through mountains of snow and piercing cold winds that made your dick vanish. Seriously. When I’d go pee, I’d look down and see nothing but foreskin and the meat part would slowly peek out as it was warmed by the traveling pee. It’s really important to be hungry from your late teens to your early twenties and coming from a middle-class background, I never asked my parents for a dime. This meant doing jobs that were so hard, they make me appreciate the living shit out of everything I have today.

I pumped gas, cleaned pools, washed dishes, painted houses, bar backed, moved furniture, all that stuff, but the hardest job I ever had by a long shot was planting trees in Northern Canada every spring from 1989 to 1994. Despite sounding fresh, sunny, and green, this brutal vocation actually involves driving about twenty hours north of Montreal—oh, sorry, I meant two hours. Wait, no I didn’t. I meant twen-ty hou-rs. How is there still land after twenty hours? If you were driving south, you’d be past Miami by then. When a logging company clear-cuts a huge piece of land, they have to pay the government a restocking fee. I’m not sure why the government has to get involved. It’s in the logging companies’ best interest to replant the trees. It’s called “farming.”

Anyway, we came in, replanted the whole place, and got the fee (after the government had taken out a healthy cut for themselves). Twenty years later, the whole thing would happen again. Logging sounds harsh, especially clear-cutting, but it’s actually the best thing for the forest because it provides an incentive for making sure it remains a healthy place to grow. As the founder of Earth First! says, “If you want to help the trees, buy more lumber.”

Northern Canada is a remarkably unforgiving place with a two-month spring that combines numbing cold with blistering heat and more bugs than a spider’s wet dreams. The summers last two more months and focus on the blistering-heat part. Then it’s back to snow.

To get there you drive and drive and drive until it looks exactly like the spot where the guy from
Into the Wild
died, then you set up a tent and wait for everyone else. Soon a camp forms with outhouses, a kitchen (made from a renovated school bus), and nothing to wash in. The focal point of the camp is the mess hall, a huge green army tent for eating and meeting that has about a dozen tables placed end-to-end in three long rows. The camaraderie is great and a bit of abuse does a body good, but spending May and June at the top of North America makes one thing very clear: Mother Nature does not like man.

A typical workday starts about three hours before you go to bed, as Monty Python would say. You get dropped off on your land when the sun comes up and it’s so cold you have to dress like the Michelin Man to stay alive. The trees are frozen and you need to make gloves out of
duct tape to be able to retain dexterity without getting frostbite. You’re given a few trays of trees that look like tampons with a sprout of evergreen on top. You load these seedlings into three huge bags attached to a belt harness around your waist, and the bags push so hard against your ass cheeks, you can’t not get hemorrhoids. By the end of a season you have an asshole that never really recovers. In fact, right this very second I have a wad of toilet paper on my anal lips to prevent leaking. I call it a manpon.

After loading up as fast as you can, you head out onto your land thrusting your heavy shovel into the dirt every six feet, sticking a tree in at the right height, and stamping it down, all in a five-second fluid motion. The mornings are so cold, you can’t feel your fingers, but by noon it’s so hot, a bolo tie seems like a wool coat. The bugs are so thick, it looks like the air is made of fishnet stockings. If you take a shit they cover your bag and eat it alive. Every time you bite a sandwich, it’s 20 percent bugs. They get so intense that many planters forgo bug dope and just cover their bodies in Mazola oil so the bugs drown before they can bite you. I couldn’t handle that level of sunburn so I just duct-taped long johns to my body until I was used to the bites.

Being left alone for ten hours a day is a mental enema. You start remembering scenes from grade school and getting songs you forgot you knew stuck in your head. You also talk to yourself quite a bit and anthropomorphize everything around you. If a branch whipped me, I would snap it to shreds in front of the other branches to put the fear of God in them. I’d also leave mosquito corpses all over my face to do the same.

Unlike hell, you eventually become numb to the pain and your body adapts. By the end of the season, you are so immune to the bugs some people even forget to put on bug dope. Your blood becomes so thin, you can actually watch a bite go from an itchy red dot to nothing at all within seconds.

The problem with having super-thin blood is that getting wasted becomes almost impossible. We’d front-load a six-pack and a flask of whiskey on the way into town during our days off, but it provided as much buzz as two shots would give a mortal.

Second-year tree planting, complete with beard, dreadlocks, and blue balls. (1990)

In a strange way, I enjoyed all this shittiness and would even up the ante by quitting everything cold turkey the day I got there. No drugs, no booze, no coffee, and no masturbating. This last one was really hard to pull off and dwarfed the other challenges tenfold. One sunny day after three weeks of not beating my meat, I was tanned enough to use the Mazola trick without getting sunburned. I broke out the oil and put some on my hand. Now, I’m no fag but I hadn’t been with a woman in a long time and I kind of have pretty beautiful legs. They look like Beyoncé’s if she forgot to shave for a couple of weeks. As I smoothed the warm oil on my more-muscular-than-usual frame, I realized I was accidentally seducing myself. I filled the crevices under my taut breasts and spread oil down my sinewy bronze arms. It was working. I had a boner. “No,” I said to myself with flushed cheeks, then, against my will, I reached into my underwear (all I was wearing at the time) and began
to rape myself. I was no match for me and within thirty seconds, I was inseminating the cutover, a brief moment of pleasure in a world of hurt.

For all this suffering, most companies offer a whopping fifteen cents a tree. Somehow we were able to turn a two-month season of this into a good ten grand, but when I do the math, I get scared. There’s something satanic about a gulag where it’s only worth it if you do the same thing 66,666 times.

Though you hear a lot about tree hugging in college, the collegians who actually pull up their bootstraps and get up there are few and far between. The forty or so people who made up your average tree-planting camp were only about 5 percent hippies, and those were usually the four or five females who managed to defy their gender and live like homeless lumberjacks for two months. The rest of the crew were jocks, blue-collar students, French Canadians, Natives, hosers, and weird African exchange students, including one guy named Bumbum Boobah who was very lucky he didn’t attend third grade in America. They were a motley crew whom you had trouble picturing in the real world, but none of them was more interplanetary than a professor from one of America’s top universities who we called Dr. John.