How to Piss in Public

by McInnes, Gavin

  After a bit of small talk and a lot of green scenery, I gently guided the conversation back to his socks. “So what was going on with the puppets?” I asked.

  “It’s for a thing I’m working on,” he replied stoically, “a classical guitar opera.” I asked who it was about, and he said Snuggles the Dog and the Super Man. Everyone knew he had other guests living in his mind, but I was now getting to meet them personally. Apparently, Snuggles is an adorable little guy with a heart of gold who looks like Rowlf the dog from The Muppet Show. “He’d never hurt a flea,” John told me. He also told me Snuggles has a large poster of Moses in his doghouse.

  I asked John why he called Superman “the” Superman, and he corrected me: “Oh, no, no, not the superhero—the Nietzschean ‘Übermensch.’ The über male. The Super Man wants Snuggles to die but Snuggles doesn’t want to die … It sounds weird out of context.” For the rest of the drive, I tried to conceive of a context wherein that wouldn’t be weird. I thought about German fascism and Hebrew Bible scholars, but settled on “possibly a cartoon used to educate psychiatrists about mental disorders.”

  The first day went surprisingly smoothly. Tree planting is about working as a private contractor for the government, and like all things government, the people you answer to are not honest. For example, your first assessment is always two out of ten no matter what. “You had a lateral branch under the dirt,” they’ll comment, like trees were made of moth wings and couldn’t survive in the wild. I didn’t pay attention to most of what they said. All I knew is if we did our best and were nice, they’d give us enough perfects at the end to counteract all these early twos and we’d have a passing quality grade that allowed everyone to get paid.

  My day consisted of walking and ATVing over several miles of scarified land and making sure everyone was alive and working. I’d also riff a little bit and occasionally scare the bejesus out of someone by jumping out from behind a bush. They were all an amicable, hardworking bunch. The Africans were always friendly and planted like cyborgs created to plant perfect trees. Jocks were similar. You had to watch the Indians and the hosers because they tended to stash trees and claim them as planted. And I’m sorry, but the girls were hopeless. It’s man’s—or maybe bulldyke’s—work. Sometimes I thought the only reason women were there was to take advantage of the incredibly tilted female-to-male ratio. It wasn’t unusual to see a girl with the head of a crow and the body of a tuna-filled garbage bag being followed around by a guy who was so handsome, I’d fuck him.

  That night, we had spaghetti for dinner and the chef even put bread sticks on the table. Fancy. We consumed the meal like death-row inmates inhaling their last wish and I sauntered happily over to John, who was sitting by himself. “Hey, John, lemme ask you something,” I said. “How would you feel about playing some music to the other inmates?” He told me he couldn’t because the opera wasn’t even close to done. “Fuck the opera,” I said before adding, “No offense.” I meant to say, “We’d like to hear whatever you got.”

  Without saying a word, John got up and left the tent. Soon after, his crazy face popped back into the tent holding a beautiful guitar in mint condition. Everyone clapped and slid down the bench to see the show.

  After some brief tuning, John gently broke into Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” His fingers were filthy and covered with stray pieces of duct tape, but he played the song like it was his debut at Carnegie Hall. It was the most heart-wrenchingly sincere and perfectly in-key folk guitar I’d ever heard. He was a tramp who sounded like an angel and when we heard him say, “I’ve been in my mind / It’s such a fine line … And I’m getting old,” there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. One of the girls, Jill McAlpine, was full-on bawling her eyes out. The song ends with the chorus, but instead of giving us that final strum, John kept the tempo and pulled us into some of the most evocative Spanish guitar this side of the Atlantic. His fingers were wandering all over the frets and it sounded like someone who had been playing guitar for so long, it was a part of his body.

  I started to think about other mad genii: The guy who developed Morse code thought immigrants were out to kill him. Nikola Tesla, the true inventor of electricity, only stayed in a hotel room if its number was divisible by three. Einstein believed in Martians, Pythagoras had a cult, and Andrew Jackson regularly beat the shit out of people with his walking stick. “Wow,” I thought, “Dr. John is so good at playing guitar he’s making me philosophical about the entire world’s sanity. Now, that’s some sweet licks.”

  When he was finally done, he looked up and said, “That’s it,” with the most sane smile I’d ever seen him give. Everyone stood up, overalls at their sides, rubber boots covered in mud, and clapped their chafed hands like Oprah’s studio audience.

  John went to bed early that night. Maybe he tasted what it was like to be sane and it made him homesick for his old life. I left the mess hall soon after him and saw his boots sticking out the bottom of his tent. He’d bought a kid’s tent to save money, so his enormous frame couldn’t hope to fit in it and his two feet stuck out a good foot from the bottom like he was in a Peanuts cartoon. “Good night, John,” I whispered as I walked by. He said nothing. He was already out.

  The next day I got to John’s land at around noon. We were spread out over a small city’s worth of terrain, so even with an ATV to get me through the easy parts, I’d be lucky to check on a planter more than once a day. When I got to John, he smiled and said, “Hello,” like he had never seen me before. He had on a wool hat and a sweater despite the fact that the temperature had risen to molten-lava levels. That’s not good. I remembered that one of schizophrenia’s primary characteristics is an inability to gauge temperature. “Who are you?” he asked like Data from Star Trek.

  “I’m Gavin, remember?” I said like a cop trying to talk someone down off the edge. “I work here.”

  John found all this very intriguing and tilted his head to the side like a curious bird. “Oh, that’s great,” he said with a huge, dirty smile. “I had been hoping to meet someone soon and try to figure out what’s going on here. What do you do?” he asked, now sounding more like C-3PO. I told him I manage tree planters and he asked one of the most disturbing questions I’ve ever heard: “Is everybody on this planet a tree planter?”

  Holy shit. John was so far gone he had rebooted his hard drive and not only did he have no idea who he was, he had no idea what fucking planet he was on. Is there a farther gone than that?

  I explained to John that an infinitesimally small percentage of the six billion people on our planet were tree planters and left him to his work. His trees were not looking great. Very few of them were the requisite six feet apart and about half the ones I tugged on came out of the ground like they had simply fallen out of his bag. This could be bad for all of us because it would hurt the average. I called the boss on the walkie-talkie and arranged to meet him nearby.

  His red GMC truck pulled up a few minutes later and I got in. He was eating insects. The strange thing about blackflies (not really flies but small “buffalo gnats”) is they bite the shit out of you in the field, but they won’t bite you if they’re somewhere they can’t get out, like a truck. Though mosquitoes will devour a full-grown man in his tent, blackflies will spend the whole evening bouncing against the ceiling trying to figure out an escape route. This first led to our killing them in droves on tent ceilings for revenge, but then one guy ate one. Delicious. For some reason unbeknownst to science, one out of three blackflies tastes like raspberry bubble gum. The other two taste like potato. (Mosquitoes don’t taste like anything.) As I stepped into the truck I began snacking too. The boss’s name was Markus Saunders and he was of Nordic descent with a huge blond beard and long blond hair. He was tall with gorilla hands but he also had high cheekbones and that Northern European nose that looks like a chickadee.

  “Something’s up with John. I think he has to go,” I said as I dabbed my forefinger on the windshield and procured two gnats to eat. “He’s acting we
ird.”

  Markus stopped eating. “I’ve had too many of those,” he said, undoing his top button. “I know John is incredibly weird, but firing people out here is all but impossible,” he explained. “I need to make a long list of all their offenses or they drag my ass through worker’s comp bullshit and all kinds of other bureaucratic nightmares. But I will have a talk with him and kind of feel him out.” I was happy with that and walked off feeling satisfied. I had only eaten a few bugs, but I wasn’t that hungry to begin with.

  Markus spoke to John and said he seemed perfectly fine. A few days went by and John kept sailing along, so Markus asked him if he’d host that evening’s Expert Night. “No problem,” John said. After dinner, I went up to John and asked him if he was ready to start because, well, it’s after dinner now. He had no idea what I was talking about. I explained. He looked puzzled but stood up.

  “Hey, guys,” he said.

  “Hello, John,” everyone said like we were in AA.

  John looked around the tent and I could tell he was not prepared and had put zero thought into what his subject was going to be. Then he looked at the table below him and noticed some tiny white dots that were the result of the sun shining through minuscule holes in the top of the tent. “You see that?” he said, pointing to one of the bright dots. “That’s the sun.” He then looked up and calmly described the fundamentals of what we were seeing. “The holes act as lenses and actually project a full image of the entire flaming star—it’s not a planet—onto the table,” he said. “What a gift.” Then he got closer to the one in front of him and started to describe the sun to us. “Look at it. That’s a perfectly complete representation of a ball of fire a hundred times the size of our planet.” We were spellbound. “Oh!” he added enthusiastically. “You see those dark dots just off the center? Those are sunspots. They’re sort of cold patches caused by really strong magnetic activity. I mean, they’re still hot enough to evaporate metal, but because they’re so much cooler than the rest of the planet, they appear as dull, dark holes.” Then he stood back up and addressed the crowd. “You know, studies have shown people are much happier when they surround themselves with people who are less successful. Those poor sunspots are in hell.” Everyone laughed. The reclusive Dr. John had killed again.

  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.