How to Piss in Public (9 page)

Nobody drinks at the camp because you have to be up so fucking early. We save that for the day off. Socializing during the work week
consists of the hour between finishing dinner at eight
p.m.
and going to bed at nine. Expert Night usually cuts that in half, so you’ve got thirty minutes to mingle, riff, and not flirt with any women because they were already snatched up instantly by guys seventy times better-looking than yourself.

After some hurried leisure, I passed John’s silly boots on the way to my tent again and heard his guitar quietly strumming. The nights were getting warmer now and I didn’t have to go to bed dressed like an arctic explorer, so I stripped down to my long johns and climbed into my sleeping bag. As I drifted off to sleep I heard, “YOU ARE A BEAR AND YOU EAT IN THE GARBAGE!” hollered at the top of John’s lungs.

I leapt up and unzipped my tent. “John?” I asked his tent, which had pulled its boots inside. “You OK?”

Then I heard, “Prepare to die!” Before I could worry about my safety I saw his silhouette, which proved he was definitely still in there. Then came, “No, no, please, I don’t want to die,” followed by thunderous guitar chords. He was acting out his opera. I might have been safe, but Snuggles was fucked. I went to sleep that night worried about John and even more worried for our safety.

The next day, I avoided checking on John until the very end of the day. I knew his land was pretty peanut-buttery so it would be difficult for him to fuck it up. But when I got there, the mercurial John was nowhere to be seen. He had flagged off surprisingly large portions to show they were finished, which wasn’t his style, so I walked in and began investigating. Something wasn’t right. I’d see a tree here and then nothing for twenty feet and then tree, tree, tree, tree, tree. They were tight in the soil and the lateral branch was exposed but there appeared to be no rhyme or reason to where he stuck them. We weren’t going to get paid unless the entire clear-cut was replaced with a grid of trees exactly six feet by six feet, and this wasn’t even close. I marched over a few hills and saw John planting with unprecedented determination. “JOHN!” I yelled as I approached in case he was a Martian again. He could tell I was shocked, so he balanced his water jug on his head to cut the tension.

“Hello,” he said, standing upright. His T-shirt was shredded and for some reason, he had covered himself in flagging tape (fluorescent ribbons we used to mark off segments of land). What really concerned me were his fucking eyes. They were swimming in pools of blood. The arms of his Coke-bottle glasses were long gone and had been replaced with strips of flagging tape. He had sort of mummified the top of his head by wrapping the colorful tape around his lenses and back around his head again and again until his glasses were pulled tightly against his eye sockets. He looked like an album cover. It gets worse. This bizarre design left small holes at the edge of each eye where blackflies could get in—and they did. Several dozen blackflies had snuck into the space between the glass and his eyes and they bit with impunity because they knew they could just come out the same way they came in. They bit the skin around his eyes so much, tiny pools of blood had formed at the bottom of the glasses where they were tightest against his skin. This collection of blood moved around when he talked the same way water does in your mask when you’ve been snorkeling for too long.

Dr. John the morning of the collapse. Note glasses made of flagging tape. (1991)

“Um, John,” I asked, “what’s going on with your trees?”

He didn’t know what I meant. “I’m not done yet,” he said, “and you had better let me finish or it’s all a waste.” I asked him if he was going to go back and fill in the spaces, and he snapped “NO!” at me, which was the first time I’d seen him act aggressive outside of the insufferable carnage Snuggles was forced to endure. “It’s a message to God,” he said angrily.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What’s a message to God?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Didn’t you see? It says ‘John.’” I still didn’t get it. “The trees!” he yelled with gnats swarming around his eyes and blood splashing onto his eyeballs like a monster in a Japanese cartoon. “They spell J-O-H-N! In twenty years I might be dead, but God will look down upon us and he’ll see my name. His name. It’s all his.” I was kind of starting to grasp what was happening and trying to decide between being angry and petrified. Then he got closer to me and said into my face, “Read John One. It says, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.’”

His breath stank and his face was so filthy there was no real demarcation between his curly hair and his beard. He was a hairy caveman with a plastic rainbow headband and blood goggles. He also had a shovel in his hand. Tree-planting equipment is tough. The shovels weigh about twenty pounds with a steel handle, blade, shoulder, and cutting edge. To be brained with one of these would take a tenth of a second and even if you weren’t knocked unconscious, you would definitely bleed to death on the way to the hospital, which was at least seven hours away. As I stared at his death blade in my peripheral vision, I realized this motherfucker had lost it a long time ago and what I was seeing was some mentally ill zombie shit. He was in a blackout of madness.

I have spoken to some guys who have been to prison and they tell me the best way to deal with a psycho is to shrug him off. If you’re playing cards with the other inmates and someone comes up to you with a broken pen while shouting, “You want me to stab this in your fucking face!?” you have three choices: You can get tough and threaten him (stabbed); you can whimper and beg for mercy (stabbed); or you can
shrug your shoulders like he’s asking you if you want another Jujube and casually say, “Nah” (not stabbed).

I looked John right in his unbelievably gory face, shrugged my shoulders, and said, “You’re not getting new land until you go back and fill in those spots.” Then I turned around and walked away thinking, “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.” I had no idea if my fake coolness had calmed him down or if I sealed my fate as a blasphemer who must be executed in the name of the Lord. As I pondered this ultimatum, I heard the
fwum, fwum
of the Reaper’s scythe hurtling through the air. I whipped around to see the last
fwum
miss me by two inches and the shovel smash against a tree stump, taking off a fist-sized chunk of wood that was meant to be my cerebellum. I had escaped death by a mere two inches. I knew I had to stand my ground, but fear poured over me like that bucket of pig’s blood in
Carrie.
“You just fucked up big-time,” I said like he was about to get three weeks of detention. “BIG-time!” I stormed off but it wasn’t easy to walk because adrenaline had my knees jiggling like a pair of tits.

I avoided the school bus and went back to camp in Markus’s truck. I explained exactly what had happened and he told me he’d handle it, like I was complaining that the Porta-Potty was full. His apathy infuriated me. “Dude,” I yelled, “
handle
it? Who do you think you are, Harry Houdini? You can’t ‘handle’ this. He doesn’t need a talking-to. He doesn’t even need to be fired. He needs his family to come here with the men in the white coats and have him taken away. He’s GONE.” Markus agreed. We stopped at the refers (large eighteen-wheelers full of baby trees) to check when they’d be ready to unload and spent a few hours refueling the ATVs. When we finally got back to camp, we agreed we were going to take John into town and see about medical help. We made our way over to his tent only to see a small rectangle on the ground where it used to be. “He went into town with an assessor,” Bumbum said in his weird Nigerian accent. “John said he had to get his medications and was leaving on the five o’clock bus. He’ll be back tomorrow.” We gave chase but stopped at the nearest phone realizing that’s what we’d do when we got to town anyway. After about twenty quarters and several dozen wrong numbers, we reached John’s brother, who was surprisingly unimpressed.

“This is how it always goes,” his brother told us. “John forgets his pills once and then starts thinking he’s better than a pill-needer. Soon enough he’s off the deep end again and can’t be convinced he needs help.” We learned his family had tried to get John into a home many times, and it had only occasionally worked. He told us John would be long gone by now and it would be impossible to find him.

We drove back to camp stupefied and helpless. When something like this happens, you wonder if your input made things worse. I was sad I hadn’t handled it better, but I was also kind of relieved I no longer had to work with the shovel-swinging alien astrophysicist who spoke to God and made atheist classical guitar operas about a German nihilist who kills a puppy that has a poster of Moses in his doghouse.

Hey, Dude, Where’s My Nose? (1992)

I
was twenty-two in 1992 and my look was mostly composed of dirt. I was living in Montreal but went back to Kanata regularly to visit my family. I had also started a new band called Leatherassbuttfuk with a fat guy called Bullshitter Shane.

After an evening of visiting our respective folks, we went for a beer in downtown Ottawa. I had on rubber boots, a few homeless-man dreads that were just clumps of tangled hair, and a jacket with a hole in the back that was bigger than the jacket. Shane wore a soiled baseball hat, an old leather jacket he stole from a dead skinhead (yes, Geoff), and boots with holes in the toes. People called him Bullshitter Shane because he could talk his way into any job or woman’s pants, or in this case, band. He was playing “not guitar,” which meant he’d furiously shake the strings back and forth to play or just drag the guitar along the stage. Whenever Shane needed money he’d shave his beard and lie his way into a waiter job that paid hundreds of dollars a night. Then he’d spend it all on his friends, get laid, and go back to a life of poverty.

On this particular evening we were with a preppy contrarian named
Jeff who rebelled against our rebellion by shunning our filthy ways just to spite us. While we were in rags, he wore suits and ties and even occasionally tried to pull off an ascot, which isn’t really possible. It’s like wearing a monocle. He’d recently had his entire mouth wired shut after playing devil’s advocate to the wrong guy in the wrong bar and receiving a series of skull-shattering knuckle sandwiches that left him speechless.

Ottawa is on Quebec’s border, which is like Salt Lake City playing footsie with Las Vegas. Where our town shut down around midnight, the French province over the bridge had bars that never shut and girls’ legs that did the same. You didn’t go out drinking in Ottawa without ending the night in the town of Hull half a mile away. I had borrowed my parents’ car and on our way into a parking lot to make the trip over the bridge, a stocky jock wearing his school’s sweater yelled, “Ottawa trash!” He was standing next to a customized pickup truck filled with other sports enthusiasts in finely marbled shape like a bunch of testosterone-fueled dunce statues. I laughed it off. I don’t think Shane even heard it. But Jeff decided it would be prudent to respond. “Ooooh, I’m s-o-o-o scared,” Jeff said through his wired jaw, so it sounded more like, “Vvvvh, I’m sch-o-o-o schared.” Back at the bar, Jeff had used that same strange accent to tell us how lucky he was to have a jaw at all. He said it took the surgeons thirteen hours to rebuild, and if it suffered any kind of trauma again he would basically have no face. Then again, if he had had no face, he wouldn’t have had a mouth, and we wouldn’t have been in this situation.

As his blockheaded football friends climbed out of the truck, the buffed-out heckler stormed us. Shane and I put Jeff behind us and prepared for what was sure to be a pretty serious beating. It was.

“YOU CHALLENGING ME!?” the jock yelled up into Shane’s face before adding, “YOU CHALLENGING ME!?” Shane exhaled a tired sigh, turned his hat backward, and began to roll up his sleeves. Apparently beating up jocks is tedious work. Before I could blink, the jock extinguished Shane with a cobra-fast punch that sent him crumpling to the ground like a deflated balloon. All the other frat boys were starting to surround us, and I started farting uncontrollably. Shane
regained consciousness fairly quickly but was only able to make it up to doggy-style position before his assailant yanked Shane’s head back by the hair and started pounding him in the face so fucking hard and fast, it was like watching a pile driver crush a soda can. The punches were unyielding and each one shot blood out of Shane’s face and sprayed it across the parking lot. I hurled myself at the guy. It was meant to be a tackle, but the effect was more like a lemur throwing itself on a station wagon. Without even slowing down, the angry pugilist yelled, “Get this fucking guy offa me!” and kept pounding.

Then everything went completely black.

When I woke up I was about six feet away lying on the pavement. Bart Simpson was there, running around me in circles (seriously). I was also literally seeing stars. Blood was everywhere and when I put my hand on my face to touch my nose, it was gone. I was only partly conscious but it was very clear I had been hit with a two-by-four that had lopped off my nose. I remembered reading about farmers who brought their dismembered arms to the hospital and realized I had better find my nose if I didn’t want to look like Michael Jackson for the rest of my life. As I slowly drifted back into consciousness, I realized it wasn’t a big piece of wood but a big piece of fist that had accomplished this feat. Then I saw two very athletic college students staring at me in horror. One of them yelled, “Holy shit!” and the other yelled, “Let’s go!” and they scurried back to the truck. This is how E.T. must have felt. When the guy assigned to disfiguring Shane looked up and saw my face, he dropped what he was doing and they all jumped into their vehicle before peeling out like murderers.