Get Off My Lawn Podcast #16 | Did you ever see someone go crazy?
One of the great things about old as hell is you’ve seen a lot of people change over the years. A good 94% of them stay the same but 5% go on to be wildly successful and then 1% completely lose their minds. The takeaway here is not trying to change these stats but just give thanks that we didn’t get sucked into that tiny vortex of total insanity.
I don't mean go crazy like fucking party dude and do a backflip at a party and then do a line and then jump out the window.
I mean mentally deteriorate to nothing.
I've seen it a couple times.
Mostly in my younger days.
I guess that makes sense because you know you get older and you're not going to be around crazy people.
And people who are 32 don't really go nuts.
I remember there was a bald guy in a ska band who was around 30 and he went nuts.
Me, Mom and Morgenthaler, I think they were called.
I remember he was at the airport and he said, he holds up his passport to his friend and he goes, who's that?
And his friend goes, that's you, John.
And he goes, no, that's a picture of me.
Uh-oh.
I had a buddy named Ryan.
I moved out when I was 18 and back then you just crash on people's floors and stuff.
It's really great being a young person.
You don't need food.
You need beer.
I wish I could get in a time machine and just go and give myself a six-pack because beer was such a commodity back then.
It was like Bitcoin.
And you would just, you worked so hard for it.
I remember going to parties and you would grit your teeth And then chug the leftover beers.
And you grit your teeth because you didn't want to get cigarettes in your lungs, in your throat, in your esophagus.
So you're getting ash in there.
Luckily, this was Canada, so we didn't have to worry about tobacco chewers, but that must be a whole other ball of wax.
But, so when one of our friends went nuts, it was just like, that's okay.
It's like he got a new hairdo, or came out of the closet.
Maybe that is a form of going nuts, becoming gay.
That's an interesting dissertation research paper.
Of course, you'd never get the funding or the okay, but I think it's worth checking out.
Um, and he, he woke up once and he said, I smelt burning and he said, the color purple's trying to kill me.
Not the movie, not Oprah, but the actual color.
And he had a purple Lakers hat he would wear.
And he, he burnt holes in it with a lighter.
And the weirdest part about it was he, he held onto it.
He kept wearing it.
So you just hang out with Ryan and you could see his hair because there was gigantic like coffee mug sized burn holes in his purple hat.
If purple wants to kill me I'm throwing out the whole hat.
There's still the brim that could get you in the middle of the night, turn into a, I don't know how purple kills people, but I don't even want like a purple dot.
Couldn't that just go right through your head?
Like a little tiny grain of sand bullet?
That's gonna do some damage.
If you have a grain of sand go through your head, it's gonna give you a lobotomy.
Or maybe just take out some bad memories.
I also lived with this chick, Amy, for a while.
I saw her go nuts.
That was a very clinical example.
And in my book, Death of Cool, we talk about... I talk about this guy, Dr. John.
Now, that was a real serious case.
I won't repeat it too much here, because it's in the book, but he was amazing.
He had... There was Dr. John, and he was a doctor.
He taught at MIT.
If you ever got him talking about physics or astronomy, he'd blow your mind.
His real focus was an opera he was writing, and it contained all of his personalities, which included him, a little bit, but mostly Snuggles the dog and Superman.
Not Superman the superhero, but the Ubermensch.
The Nietzschean ubermensch, the perfect being.
And the perfect being was always tormenting Snuggles the dog.
And he would yell.
I'd hear him in his tent.
I'd hear the ubermensch screaming at Snuggles in John's tent, which was a child's tent, so his feet stuck out the bottom.
And he would say, You are a bear and you eat in the garbage!
That hurts, Snuggles.
Snuggles, by the way, had a doghouse that he lived in that had a picture of Moses in the doghouse.
And his arguments would happen face-to-face as he'd make sock puppets out of socks that were just socks on his hands.
And then he would crouch down low and put his hands over his head, and then these talking hand socks Would scream at each other on the bus as we went back and forth to our land.
So that was a loony.
But um, now Amy was a good case.
She worked at Degrassi Junior High.
Now there's been several iterations of Degrassi Junior High.
But this was uh, this was number one.
Drake in the wheelchair, that was like number five or something.
I don't know.
That was a reboot.
You know, one time I was talking to a guy and I said, dude, I went to junior high with you.
Diabri Moody in Nepean.
Did you go to Diabri Moody?
And he goes, oh, God.
I go, what's the matter?
You didn't like it there?
It was a good school.
Remember the creek going through the back?
Did you know David McIntosh?
And he goes, uh, no.
What teachers did you have there?
Because I think we hung out.
You know Darren Alberti?
Uh, and Kevin Jessup?
Any of these names ring a bell?
Christy Bradnax?
And he goes, uh, I was on a show called Degrassi Junior High.
I was in a band called Zit Remedy.
I thought someone from the TV was my friend and I hung out with him.
Homer Simpson did that.
He thought that the Fonz was his buddy and he would hang out at Al's Cafe with Patsy and Richard Cunningham.
I'm as stupid as Homer Simpson.
So Amy was in the first version and She took Herbal E, which I don't recommend.
And she started to lose it.
Now, I'm not a very caring person, so I never even noticed the first third of her decay.
But, uh... Plus, they're all lugs.
I lived with lesbians in Montreal.
And it was, uh... This is post Ryan and the Color Purple.
This is probably 1990.
I was 19.
And, um...
I call them lugs, lesbians until graduation.
It's these lesbians that are just doing it for fun.
And by the way, homo college students, it's pretty easy to be a lesbian, to be gay, when you're gorgeous and young.
Let's see you be a lesbian when you got a gunt.
Your tits are long enough to fit into your front pockets.
That's a little more challenging.
Any drunk college girl can make out with a chick.
Just to shock people.
You're not a minority.
I know you want to be special so bad, so you just eat out a 10, but I'm not impressed.
But they would have, um, they'd have all these different names.
Like I'd get a call, hi is Leroy there?
I don't know.
These girls change their names so much.
Do you mean the weird chick with the short hair who makes stupid, funky hats for a living that just look like something that that band Arrested Development would wear or De La Soul when they... This was the early 90s when rap was about dressing like a couch and having orange Chuck Taylors on.
Everyone was so cute and cuddly.
It was really irritating.
Yeah, that's who I mean.
Okay, yeah, she's here.
Leroy!
That's my dog's name.
It's confusing, because I'm doing this from my home office.
But he doesn't come when called anyway, so don't worry about it.
So she was losing her mind, and I didn't notice at the beginning, and I go, Amy, what's with your face?
She goes, what do you mean?
I go, you look, it was like that video, that black and white video.
I don't get madder if you're black or white.
And faces are changing like, I'm an old Chinese lady.
Oh, I'm a young white boy.
I'm a black guy.
And they use CGI to morph the faces.
That's what her face was like.
And I go, stop making like 37 faces.
Just settle on a face.
Lock into it.
It was like Martin Short in that movie Clifford, where he's a 12-year-old.
And what's his name?
Goes, just be a normal kid.
And he goes, OK.
And makes an awkward smile.
And he goes, no, that's a weird smile.
Just make a normal kid face.
And he makes another face.
Martin Short's a genius.
That movie's awesome.
Very underrated flick.
Martin Short plays a 12-year-old.
Please check it out.
Uh, so she's doing that and then I go, I just laugh it off.
I was dealing pot at the time and this was college and I go downstairs and leave and I heard later that she ran into the bathroom and stared at her face in the mirror and started screaming and punching the mirror and smashed the mirror.
I guess I found that out because I was trying to figure out what happened to the mirror.
So she was going insane.
She was wearing her favorite sweater from when she was In kindergarten, which was quite tight on her considering she was six feet tall.
I was crushing her ribcage.
I think my buddy Derek Beckles was dating her at the time and just totally abandoned her.
Eh, you're crazy.
Not interested, thanks.
So we're stuck with her.
And she was talking to her cat a lot.
And this was all herbal-y, by the way.
She's talking to her cat and she starts writing on these pieces of paper.
For four days.
I don't think she slept until the room was about two feet deep of just papers that had random thoughts on them.
Sometimes they'd have drawings and just piles and piles and piles of paper.
It was like the feds were going through a hospital's records and just emptying everything on the ground.
Just paper everywhere.
She must have bought, you know, boxes and boxes of it.
And, uh...
She says to me, in a moment of sanity, look, my parents are probably going to pick me up soon.
They're going to want to put me in a mental institution.
Don't let them do it.
It's my last wish.
And I go, got it, Amy.
And then her parents show up soon after, a couple days later.
And we're all sitting down.
And she's got these weird sort of swirling eyes that have a sort of catatonic stare with this distant smile.
Hello.
And I go, "This is Amy, yep, she's pretty damaged." And she looks at me and looks at her mother and her brother, and she goes, "Why are you all being weird?
You don't have to be weird." And I've got blue hair at the time.
I'm probably wearing-- like in Montreal, you don't wear blue jeans, you wear green or yellow jeans.
Everyone dresses like they're in a kid's show and they're the host.
So even a secretary going to work on Monday won't just wear a wool hat because it's cold.
She'll have a court jester's hat with little bells on it.
Everyone is in a kid's show there.
It's romper room.
And if you're slightly punk, well that's a whole other level.
So you just look completely ridiculous.
You look like a lazy clown.
And I'm there, a lazy, off-duty clown, collecting unemployment.
I wasn't literally collecting unemployment.
I mean, that's what I looked like.
And I said, the way 19-year-olds do, to her brother, Yeah, actually, um... Amy made it very clear to me that she doesn't want to be institutionalized, so I would be remiss if I didn't convey that to you.
It's something that means a lot to her, and it was... As her friend, I'm imparting that to you.
This guy's about 15 years older than me in a suit and his little sister lost her mind.
Just get the fuck out of my face.
And I don't know what happened to her after that.
I think she stayed in Toronto and got fixed.
I think she fixed, meaning her brain was repaired.
She's opened a cafe, I believe.
The way it worked with Degrassi Junior High is they didn't pay the kids the first round.
Typical Canadian socialist crap.
They would just pay them with lunch.
And then they became a massive success.
Biggest show in Australia.
Worldwide hit.
And they go, oh, we have some money.
We can't just give kids money.
Come up with a project and we'll pay for it.
So Amy's project was a cafe.
I think it worked, I'm not sure.
But Joey Jeremiah, remember him from Zit Remedy, the cool guy with the fedora?
He took his money and he made a documentary with it about gun violence in Canada.
That's like doing a documentary about the serious voodoo problem we have in Ontario.
That's like doing a documentary about the history of Canadian cricket.
It's dumb.
The only people who suffer gun violence in Canada, and this is back, I'm talking about the late 80s, early 90s, are deer.
And deer are dicks.
Deer are losers.
I've said this many times.
They are a biological abomination.
Basically, look, I'm a Western chauvinist.
I'm a human chauvinist, too.
And let's not kid ourselves when we see a hammerhead shark.
You are the initial formula, the microchip, gone awry.
You have gone astray.
The design after the Big Bang was, I'm gonna make these humans, and they're gonna get better and better, but it's kind of a crazy piece of toxic sludge I'm throwing into the mix here, so there's gonna be abominations.
And everything that's not human is an abomination.
A pygmy shrew is a cursed being.
It has to eat five times its weight every day.
It's always running around in a constant state of panic.
It's living in hell.
Humans literally rule.
So Joey, that's the only people who should be worried about gun violence and they're not people.
So that was a strange move.
A dumb cafe would have been better.
But it was a time when... You know what I just realized?
Sorry to interrupt myself.
When I said that to that guy about, yeah, she's not going to be going to a mental institution, just so you know, when I had that sort of patronizing tone to someone who has a lot more skin in the game, higher stakes, basically an authority figure, it reminds me of I went skiing recently.
And this is going to relate to insanity.
I went skiing recently, and I hadn't really been.
As Canadians, you grow up skiing all the time.
It's a blue-collar thing.
It's not a she-she sport.
The bourgeois people in the ski pants in Aspen, it's cheap in Canada.
And rednecks go because they live right there.
The farmer's kids are all skiing.
They wear jeans, no gloves, no hat, just a ski coat and jeans, and they whip down the hills.
We used to play this game, Chinese Downhill, where we would destroy each other.
Like, you'd see your buddy... The rule is to get to the bottom of the hill first, and that's it.
So you'd see your buddy about 20 feet away, and you'd just... Just swoop in on him like a seagull and just nail him!
Send him flying off the skis!
Or we'd go off the trail and just in through the woods.
That was fun, too.
And then, even waiting in line, we would smash each other's skis with our ski poles, leaving them looking like Swiss cheese in the back.
Everyone's skis were totally destroyed behind the ski boot.
So that's how I grew up with skiing and the idea of wearing a helmet was so unfathomable that if you saw someone with a helmet on, your heart would break in two.
And then I go back, revisited after a 20-year hiatus, and I get my son a snowboard, and I get my daughter and my youngest son skis.
I don't know why.
And I rent some skis.
You know, you don't really forget it.
It doesn't take long to bring it back.
I did snowboard for about 10 years.
Sorry, you can't snowboard as a 47-year-old man.
It's not a good look.
It's like being a 47-year-old skater and bending over at this age, fixing your bindings.
No.
But my son didn't want to do it.
He said, this is stupid.
I want to switch to skis.
You switch to skis.
They always do this thing, kids, where they go, you got to do that.
Yeah, I get to drink a bottle of bourbon and piss myself.
I get to drive cars.
I get to fly first class.
You're not me, dude.
It's not a democracy.
It's a benevolent dictatorship at best.
So I signed you up for lessons and he said, no, don't do that.
And then I went and I got the lessons and I said, OK, you got to go walk over to that guy with the red coat and he's going to take you down the hill with a different group.
And my nine-year-old son goes, why did you sign me up for lessons when I explicitly told you not to?
I explicitly?
You were explicit in your instructions were you little Lord Fauntleroy?
Holy crap did I laugh when he said that but it was exactly the way I talked about Amy.
And skiing is relevant to this conversation and so are helmets because people are going up and down that hill trillions of times all over the world right now.
Hordes and hordes of people whipping down the hills.
They're not dying.
Sonny Bono died.
Liam Neeson's wife died.
People are not bonk, ping, tonk, bonking their heads into those poles that run the chairlift.
Or they're not hitting their heads against trees.
How many deaths do we get a year from skiing?
Six.
Every single person on the hill is wearing a helmet.
That's just bad math.
The odds of an air conditioner landing on your head are higher.
The odds of dying from a spider bite are higher.
What are you doing?
It's like these women in New York with their giant water bottles.
Why are you doing that?
You're not going to die of dehydration.
That's absolutely insane.
I know, you know what it is, it's a hustle.
People, they just get, I don't like seeing people get hustled.
I don't know why I care.
But when I see you drinking water, I go, how many people in New York have suffered, have died from dehydration?
Oh, zero?
Okay.
What's the, where's the fire?
Why are you carrying a giant purse with three liters of water?
And these helmets everywhere.
You look like retards.
We used to build jumps for our bikes in the 70s.
The idea of wearing a helmet.
I was a bike messenger in Montreal through the winters for five years.
Never wore a helmet.
Yeah, I wiped out a bunch.
So what?
No one ever ran over my head.
That doesn't really happen.
And then I say that to people and they go, you shit the bed there, buddy.
Did you know that 98% of downhill skiing deaths are from someone not wearing a helmet?
I'm like, yeah.
98% of what number?
12?
Do you know how many times people go down a hill?
It's a miracle that they don't crash more.
It's a miracle that planes don't crash more.
It's a miracle.
I think we have something like 35,000 deaths in cars every year.
And, you know, you got Techsters now, I think that's 2,000, and drunk driving, and bad weather conditions.
But the fact that all these billions of opportunities are there for that car, just turn the steering wheel just a little bit to the left, and then you go onto the other road, that guy doesn't notice, wham, head-on collision.
How many head-on collisions do you avoid every time you drive?
I think it's a miracle that 320 million Americans don't have more deaths.
And it's like the human brain.
There we go.
Turned it all around.
One of the reasons I'm not an atheist anymore is just I'm so grateful to be alive and I'm just in such awe of not just my children and the fact that they're healthy and all their parts work, but that life exists.
That a giant explosion 3.5 billion years ago, with the plague, with two world wars, with all this conquest and destruction and famine and droughts, and I'm sitting here and all my shit works.
Thank you, God.
Thank you, first domino that was pushed.
And the brain is just like a ski hill or a highway.
There's all this opportunity for things to go wrong.
You can wear a helmet, but that's not going to change anything.
And all these synapses are firing.
And it's even a trip to think about your brain, because you're using your brain to think about your brain.
It's like Twitter, not shadow banning James O'Keefe's recent scandal where he caught them shadow banning.
They're hiding it.
He caught them censoring information and they're censoring it.
Last time I was in China, the police beat a journalist to death because he called them violent.
You know what?
I've been having some technical difficulties here today, and they've been very stressful.
I'm not going to bore you with them, but I need to go and check and make sure that this is being recorded.
The engineering room is about 15 feet away, so that means that there's going to be a A lull here as I run and get it.
Why don't I pull up a song that's relevant to this podcast so this time won't be wasted.
But I'm sorry, I have to go and check.
Be right back.
Okay.
Okay.
It's recording.
Everything seems to be working.
We'll see.
I might have just jinxed it.
So I'm just very thankful that I'm not insane.
And, um, that's the miracle.
That's already happened.
And it's a miracle that we can drive and not crash into each other.
It's a miracle we can ski and not die.
I know you're in awe of it, by the way.
That's why you wear that stupid helmet.
Because you're blown away.
So when I was around 19, there was no jobs.
I lived in Montreal, and the way it works in Quebec is it's apartheid.
Sorry.
It's legal to marry an English person, but hiring them, there's no jobs for anyone who's English.
And when I say English, I mean speaks French with the slightest accent.
You know, people say Vice was started with a welfare grant.
What?
Vice was started despite a welfare grant.
Think of it as communist Russia.
Where the only jobs you can get are through the government.
So you have to do some sort of government scam, get your foot in the door, and then take off.
And we paid them back, by the way, to the tune of $35,000.
But you can't just start a business there.
It's impossible.
You can't get a job there.
So I would bike message or I would go up To the North, where the deers are victims of gun violence, and plant trees up there where Dr. John went nuts and get some money.
And I was sick of it.
So I said, let's go on a trip to Europe.
Let's go gallivanting around Paris, darling.
But I only had about 800 bucks.
Ticket was 500.
So the reason that this was possible is punk rock.
Now, not exactly punk rock, but hardcore.
That's what we just played.
That was Minor Threat.
And I think it was a dude from Dag Nasty that was also in Minor Threat.
What's his name?
Guitarist guy?
He said, Hardcore is just American punk.
And what Americans do is they strip it down.
And they go, so what's this?
What is this thing?
Oh, it's punk.
You've got to have green hair, and you have to have bondage pants from Boy of London, and you have to have 14-hole Dr. Martin.
Nah, I'm not doing that.
I'm just going to wear jeans and a sweatshirt and shave my head.
Oh.
Well, you have to have these lyrics that are talking about society.
Nah, I'm not doing that.
I'm just going to scream, and I'm going to go super fast.
OK, bye.
It's like the word color.
They see British people spell it C-O-L-O-U-R, and they go, nah, we're not doing that.
It's color.
It's C-O-L-O-R.
Let's move it.
Come on, guys.
I'm not wasting time.
I have a giant six course meal here, and what we do is we spend, what, three hours eating it.
Maybe some Italians can do that.
I'm not doing that.
I'm just going to have a cheeseburger on the run.
Bye.
We're taking care of business every day!
Taking care of business, working overtime.
That's right.
Even the music.
My friend Marcus pointed this out to me.
He goes, British people are sedentary.
They're not adventurous.
All the adventurous people left, so they just get into fantasy.
That's why you have Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and all this imagining stuff.
And he goes, look at the music.
It's like, Satan laughing spreads his wings.
Oh Lord, yeah.
"Fairies wear boots and you gotta believe it." That's Black Sabbath.
And then you compare them to BTO, who are Canadian, but whatever, no big difference.
And they're like, "For the weekend, I just can't wait." So, one of the, there's a lot of great things about hardcore.
It took a lot of the great stuff about punk, stripped it down, but they maintain this DIY thing where we wanted to get this band, Oi Poloi, the skinhead band, not racist, to play this actual Rock Against Racism festival.
So we just started the festival in our town and flew them down.
You know, if you want to have a show, print out the posters yourself, make the show.
You want to have a magazine?
We would print fanzines and sell them for 50 cents with interviews with our favorite bands.
And here's the best part.
With punk, there was New York, London, a little bit of LA.
And that's it.
Everyone else could dare to dream of going to New York.
I mean, Chicago, I guess, had the Dead Boys, or where were they from?
Cincinnati or something?
But they would go to New York and play CBGBs.
That's all that mattered.
The big cities.
Hardcore was the opposite.
It said, screw those dinosaurs.
They're just repeating the same rock bullshit, rock star shit, that we're supposed to be rebelling against.
And you cared about your town.
So my town, Ottawa, had Honest Engine, and Grave Concern, and Dead Trout, and Neanderthal Sponge, and my band, Anal Chinook.
That's all we cared about.
We all hung out together, and we often lived in the same big house.
And that was our little scene.
Fighting Nazi skinheads, who, by the way, were Nazis.
They had swastika tattoos.
You hear about the Nazis today, and it's like the Tea Party are Nazis.
Anyone.
Trump's a Nazi.
No, we had guys with Klansmen tattoos who wanted to stab us.
And we were rich.
We were middle class kids from stable families who took the bus into the city.
Those skinheads, they grew up in foster homes.
There was always something wrong with them.
Like they'd have sneakers on.
You go like, you're a skinhead.
You're not supposed to wear sneakers.
And you realize they can't afford to be as perfect as, you know, as true to the brand as you can.
You buy all your stuff and get the right gear and you mock someone who doesn't have it.
They were starving.
That's why they beat us up for our boots.
Remember when I got the call that the skinheads were going to get me because I had Doc Martens on and you're not supposed to wear those?
Those are only for skinheads.
And I got the call from Krista Sandregret that Wolf was going to come to the show tonight and I better not wear my boots.
And I just remember sitting on the bowl and having explosive diarrhea that was like someone shot a Roto-Rooter septic emptier with a bazooka.
It was just... They got them eventually.
But, um...
So, there was a magazine called Maximum Rock and Roll, and that was sort of our internet, our Reddit.
It was run by a guy named Tim Yo, and he was pretty PC, so he filtered out a lot of stuff.
And he didn't get that, that sort of scene, that alternative rebellion back then.
Right now, it's so myopic, teenage rebellion.
I mean, there's the alt-light, and there's the new right, and these kids who like to meme and stuff.
They're cool.
But so much of being a young person now is just following the dotted line and that's Trump sucks, Trump sucks.
And this is so true of artists and musicians and even like thrash.
Like there's this band Power Trip that are threatening to kick my ass and I was looking at them on Twitter and they're talking about how we don't tolerate transphobic or homophobic speech or something.
I'm thinking, you're a metal band?
Like, you're supposed to be a scary metal band and you're worried about offending trannies?
That's not Eddie from Iron Maiden.
That's not... Can you imagine Lemmy from Motorhead saying, Lemmy would collect Nazi memorabilia.
His whole house looked like Adolf Hitler's compound.
He wasn't a Nazi, but he just thought those Kaiser helmets looked cool and stuff.
But back with punk in the 80s, there was, and hardcore, you had Johnny Ramone who was an anti-communist, and you had this New York scene that the San Franciscoites in Maximum Rock and Roll thought was racist, because they'd sing with American flags and stuff and make fun of people on welfare.
But inevitably, when you look this up, you go, oh, it's Cubans.
Cuban exiles who know socialism firsthand and are very happy to be in America.
And they don't like commies.
You know, crass!
The anarchists don't like commies.
You're not supposed to like commies if you're an anarchist.
But today, we talk to anarchists who are carrying hammer and sickle flags.
They hate the government, but they want more regulation.
They hate the government, but they want it to take rich people's money and redistribute it.
Okay?
I trust the government to do a great job of that.
I'm sure they'll be very fair.
And I remember Tim Yo, the guy who ran Maximum Rock and Roll, would, you know, criticize and censor Agnostic Front and the Cro-Mags.
These were Manhattan hardcore bands.
And those guys, I think they were Cubans or the singer was or something, but those guys lived in Manhattan.
You can't be a homophobe or an anti-Semiter racist in Manhattan.
People who don't live in the city don't get that.
It's a gay bar.
Hell's Kitchen is not scary anymore.
It's men in white leather pants and literal feather boas.
It looks like a bad Hollywood representation of a gay village.
It doesn't look real.
And it's obviously very black.
It's obviously incredibly Hispanic.
I mean, Washington Heights is just a huge big Dominican party with people listening to music on the streets of the hijacked to their ghetto blaster from the streetlight.
I mean, it's it's you're in the Dominican Republic in Washington Heights.
You're in you're in Puerto Rico and in Williamsburg.
You're with the Hasidim in this on the same street next to the Puerto Ricans.
If you had any kind of prejudice, you'd be exhausted.
But when other people from the West Coast hear us talk, they don't know that we know these people and we hang out with them, and we're ball-busting.
We're not criticizing.
So, that's a tangent that's not relevant to anything.
But Tim Yeo, Maxim Rock'n'Roll, great magazine, pushed the DIY thing and pushed the Your Scene Matters.
In fact, most of the magazine was scene reports.
And it was a thrill to be in them.
I was in the Ottawa one and I was honored.
And it would just be about like, here's the Portland scene, here's the Boise, Idaho scene.
And you got to know these bands and you'd start trading tapes.
Like, oh, I want to hear this Boise, Idaho band that screams about how horrible drunk driving is and stuff.
You know, weird little fetishes.
And then there was like Adrenaline OD and Rhythm Pigs and these weird sort of Jimi Hendrix sounding hardcore bands.
And you wanted to hear about them or they'd include Japan and they'd include Australia with the hard-ons and the celibate rifles.
And they'd have their addresses in the magazine.
So you'd write them.
And then you'd talk to them.
You'd trade tapes.
I'd trade tapes with this guy in Britain who was sending me bands like Death by Milk Float that I'd never heard of.
And I would send him all my local bands.
So we had circumvented the music business and we were sending, actually there's a punk band called Bow Wow Wow that has a song about it called C30, C60, C90 about cassette tapes and how we would just record our own music.
Some as it would be a live show and send it to each other and we had this whole world where we didn't care what bands were popular and We were really into our own stuff.
And that we had built ourselves.
Very healthy shit for a young man.
And moshing too was a very healthy thing.
And we would even argue about that!
I remember Fugazi, remember the band I just played you?
So they evolved into Fugazi.
And they had a big thing, they would stop the show if women weren't moshing.
And I remember writing in to Max from Rock and Roll going, this is ridiculous.
I was having the same fights I have today.
Moshing is dangerous, it's violent, there's arms flailing, plus skinheads will show up and start punching us from the perimeter of the mosh pit.
Women don't have to be there.
We don't need some fat chick getting her head stood on.
Uh...
Remember Aidan Gert, the drummer of Godspeed, You Black Emperor, and I?
There's this thing they do in the pit where when you fall, it's about unity!
So you reach down, you scoop up the guy and help him, but we were jerks and clowns.
So we would fall on purpose and then be really hard to pick up.
Like, it's supposed to just be a nice hook.
You reach down like a big arm hook, like Popeye, and then the other guy has his arm and you whip him up!
Mac, you're up!
But we would sort of be slippery and sloppy.
Funny stuff.
See?
Isn't that a healthy life for a young man?
Being a doofus?
He once got beat up by the top skinhead in the town, Joff.
For three hours straight.
Three hours.
I wasn't there.
Three hours he got beat up by Joff.
And all he would say is, what can I say, man?
I'm Aiden Girt and you're Joff.
And then just pound, pound.
Joff ended up blowing his head off with a machine gun, by the way.
Because his baby mama wouldn't let him see his daughter.
Juicy stuff.
So, I've got all these addresses.
There's no work in Montreal.
I think, let's just go.
Let's go there.
And I can get some guys to come, but they'll go, I'll come for a month or something.
I go, I might go forever.
It's that age.
I think I went to a doctor that age and said, I want my tubes tied.
The world's overpopulated.
And luckily he said no.
Now I've got three kids.
It's my little boy's, my five-year-old's birthday today.
Um, so I said, I'm just gonna be punk forever and I'm gonna go to this thing and there's a real movement going on there.
The scene's dying here.
Everyone was really serious.
But it was a scene.
It was like Hasidic Jews.
It was like the Amish where you stand on a street corner and someone else sees you and like the Hasids in Williamsburg, they'll stand on a street corner and they'll just, uh, Some other guy would say, what are you going?
Oh, we're going to the Hushnow.
I have to get some shtukas.
And they'll get in the minivan and just get a drive.
Because they're such a homogeneous culture.
I assume it's the same with Amish.
Although, getting a drive from an Amish is no big favor, right?
You just hop on his little buggy.
You'll be there in two hours.
I'll walk, thanks.
But the punks had that scene too.
So I hop on a plane and I didn't really spend much money after that.
I went to Darby, stayed with this band Concrete Socks.
They were named after their drummer Socks because he wouldn't change his socks ever.
And they would be so stiff they could stand up on their own.
And then you'd hear about a band that was going to another town, so you'd just hop in the back of the van and go there, to some other squad.
There was this one in Sweden, and then I met my buddy Steve there.
And, uh...
We're set up.
Women are beautiful.
We do a few jobs, odd jobs around there to earn your keep.
You dumpster dive, get food from the garbage.
The beer was cheap.
It was super fun.
And we hear about another group that's going to Berlin.
And I go, let's hop on that ride.
And he goes, weirdest thing, I'll never forget this.
He says, wouldn't it be so awesome just to fast forward to the end of this trip, the four months, and just walk into the Biftec and be the Europe guys?
Biftec was our local bar at the time.
Uh, what?
That's like a virgin looking at a naked lady and going, God, I wish I could just fast forward past this lay and be the laid guy.
Everyone would look at me, hey, did you get laid?
And I'd go, yeah, I sure probably did.
Uh, no thanks.
I don't care about being known as the laid guy.
I want the laid part.
I want to finally have boobies in my face.
I've been waiting for this for 17 years.
And I thought that was sort of what punk taught us, you know?
It taught us to not be worried about what other people think.
Not be worried about fame or your reputation.
Are you a celebrity?
Ooh, you wanna be on Big Brother?
Like, these reality shows, all these women get divorced.
Their lives turn to shit.
And what do they make?
Fifteen grand?
I don't think they make any kind of money.
So it's just fame.
Fame sucks!
It's just getting hassled in the street by strangers who want a selfie and can't work their phone properly.
So we went to Berlin, and that was heavy duty.
I mean, Britain has punk and stuff.
There was a squat there in London we went to where Steve got body lice, or the guy I was with got body lice.
But the beauty of this whole maximum rock and roll thing was I had a cigarette tin.
It was like Four inches by four inches and it was just replete with addresses of all the people I've been corresponding with and trading tapes with from the scene.
And it was a tight-knit scene.
I remember we were in Stuttgart and we'd just seen this band Toten Hosen.
I think they're called Dirty Pants.
I'm talking to some guy, I'm going through his records, and it's big black songs about fucking, and you know, crass, and Poison Idea, and all these bands, and I'm going, wait a minute, this is my record collection!
You just have my record collection, the Dead Milkman, all these bands, MDC, and he goes, in a typical German fashion, they really know how to ruin everything, he goes, yes, well don't you understand that's what you're on right now?
This is what everyone calls it, they call it the same record tour.
That's a lame name, by the way, dude.
Oh, I can almost remember his name.
Werner.
I believe his name was Werner, yes.
You're on the same record tour.
Everywhere you go, you'll have these same records.
Thanks, dude.
By the way, the proper response Germany is, I know, cool, eh?
So, in Berlin, there's this squat, I think it's called the Meinza squat, and it's been there so long that they basically fought the law and won.
In fact, there was a giant siege.
This is M-E-I-N-Z-A.
A giant siege with the police where they dug, the punks dug a trough in the road so the police couldn't get their SWAT team giant tanks, basically.
You know, those things that have the battering rams?
They couldn't get them to the SWAT because these giant holes in the road had been dug.
I mean, six foot trenches!
Amazing!
And we go there.
My girlfriend had shown up at this point.
That annoyed Steve.
We ended up having a falling out over it, really.
Didn't speak for a while.
My girlfriend showed up and we went to this anti-Nazi rally.
It was a Nazi rally that was a real-life Nazi rally.
I wish these whiners, these snowflakes, could see real Nazis.
And I'm not talking about World War II.
Obviously, the Greatest Generation has done a lot of serious Nazi fighting.
But we did, I'm going to say, a thousandth of that.
The Nazi bashing going on today is like a millionth.
But at least our guys had swastikas and were scary and a direct threat to us.
So these guys are marching, and by the way, I totally condone that.
They should have the right to march.
Pedophiles should have the right to march.
And they're marching on, they're escorted by the police.
God bless their cotton socks.
And all the punks have bottle rockets.
I guess bottle rockets are legal in Germany?
So, pshew, pshew, pshew, pshew!
They're shooting these things off.
I have a camera, and because I have a camera, it's a force field.
They're very good with the press over there.
And so, I'm going up to fights, and wrestles, and bottle smashing, and I'm a foot away, and the cops don't touch me.
Nor do the skinheads and the punks, by the way.
I'm just I'm a camera makes you magic there the other guys had like signs that said press on them, but I got under their moniker and It eventually became a standoff And the punks and the skins were staring at each other.
The police were with the skinheads because they were fighting for the right to march because it was the law.
And the police start pushing forward.
The punks start pushing back.
Eventually, the punks overpower them.
Again, what is this?
Taiwan?
Why?
Japan?
Why are the cops such wimps in Germany?
And so they put all the skinheads in a paddy wagon and sent them away.
So this trip is life-changing, obviously.
It's totally thrilling.
Perfect thing for a 20-year-old to be doing.
Exploring the world, meeting all these different people, and there's nothing like traveling when you stay with people who live there.
You know, you're sleeping on the floor, you're drinking schlop from a giant thing, you don't even know what it is, some sort of miso soup.
You're eating a pile of chickpeas that have just been mashed into a huge barrel that's feeding 15 people.
You're getting body lice, but you don't care about any of that.
I didn't really get any pussy.
Oh yeah, I brought my girlfriend.
And you don't care about any of the inconveniences.
You're just really getting to know the place.
You're getting to know the town with really interesting people too.
Anarchists.
Bonafide anarchists who are in bands and making things.
We went to this one squat called Forte Prenestino near Rome.
And it was an abandoned officer's barracks.
And they were powered by bicycles.
So what you do as a new person is you got your backpack with your sleeping bag and you go, Hi, I'm here.
I want to stay for a few days.
All right, to go downstairs in the workout, maybe you do an hour, okay?
Okay.
You go down there, you pedal these bikes, the bikes generate electricity for the fort.
And so you go down there, it's like a punk rock soul cycle with all these punks just peddling their asses off generating electricity.
Then you go upstairs and there's some food and there's artists on stilts and they've got a band going.
You know who was big on that?
You know Manu Negra?
You know that Manu Chow?
He's got a solo career.
He just had a big hit.
God, what's his name?
Mano Negra was his band, and then he went solo and had a huge hit recently, and he was part of that scene.
Or Chumbawamba!
They were, they, that, I get knocked down, but I get up again!
They were part of the Krusty Punk, uh, Anarcho Squatter scene with Krass and all that.
It's funny seeing these people occasionally get hits, but that's kind of what I'm getting to with Hugo.
And, obviously, the G-Dog, me.
So, uh...
We do that.
We travel, we go down to Sicily.
My girlfriend there is wearing pants, which is unheard of in Palermo.
That's for whores.
So, uh, I just got a bad feeling that this system crashed again.
I'm going to go run and check it.
Give me 30 seconds.
Okay.
Just pretend you're going to have to deal with this soon with ads.
Cause I'm going to start taking ads.
CRTV wants me to go up to two podcasts a week, cut down to 45 minutes, which I'm having trouble doing.
I'm obviously way past that now.
But they want to read a couple ads and do Tuesdays and Fridays.
So I'll be doing that.
And again, it's not on the CRTV.com site.
It's on Google Play, iTunes, normal podcast places.
Okay, I'm going to press play and go run and check and make sure this system hasn't crashed.
I'm not talking to a steel dildo.
Go recording. - Bye.
I'm out.
That's good news.
I'm tempted to stop it and then press record again.
Whatever.
How am I going to get these things down to 45 minutes?
I haven't even started the story yet.
This is all building up to Yugo de Luchi.
We're in Palermo.
My girlfriend's wearing pants.
Everyone's staring at her because a woman wears a dress.
But there's such Catholic hypocrisy down there.
These religious Puritans shocked at pants.
Meanwhile, everywhere I walk, I'm walking in syringes.
So heroin seems to be okay, but not pants.
I think heroin's killed a lot more people than pants.
And is to this day.
So, I'm drinking Bud Light, by the way, which is... How are you supposed to... My dad drinks this because he's such a drunk.
He needs an anchor, so he'll have like 37 Bud Lights and get a tiny buzz.
I just, I could drink 1,000 of these.
It just makes you bloated and you fart.
Do people get a buzz off of this?
Even Budweiser.
I was on Keith the Cop's boat on the 4th of July.
I must have drank 20 beers.
I got off there and I just, you know, peed 20 beers.
That was it.
Zero buzz.
And then of course there's Maker's Mark, which is just, you have three and then you start slurring, so it's gotta be a happy medium.
But anyway.
So we go on our way out of Italy.
We stop in Genova.
Now Genova is, if Italy is a boot, Genova is, if a knee-high boot, it's where your knee is, the front of your knee is.
It's just when you're running out of Italy.
You're almost done.
Beautiful little city.
It's not, I like sort of the city next to the city, like Utrecht.
Is a city next to Amsterdam.
It's got all the greatness of Amsterdam, but without the drunk jocks.
And the junkies that want to murder you.
The weird Somali immigrants that say, psst, come here!
None of those are in Utrecht.
Although, I haven't been since 91, so maybe they're terrible now.
I heard it's been islamicized.
That bad dream machine were just there and they said it's over.
But anyway.
We're down there and Of course I have in my cigarette tin, Hugo DeLucci.
Every city I went in, I got my cigarette tin.
It was awesome.
And that's, you know what that is?
That's from caring.
Like I cared about the music and the culture and I was really into it.
People recognize that.
I think that's why Vice was so good when it started out.
It was done by people who made mixtapes for girls, and knew about bands, and were really into it.
You know, when you're not into it, you can't, especially young people, they can smell when you're full of shit.
So, I've got my Hugo, and I give him a call.
Hey, yes, yes, I remember you.
Yeah, come upstairs.
You wanted this address.
I go up there, and it's not a squat at all.
First time, really, at someone's house.
Actually no, about 20% of them were someone's house, but it was getting rare in Europe.
So we go in, and he's got a rap band going.
Now, rap today, you wouldn't ever think of it as anything close to punk, they couldn't be farther apart.
But back then, 1990, 1991.
Punk was dying.
It had sort of split.
And it was this crusty core, which was these homeless Antifa kids who, you know, smelled like crap and had dreads just by accident.
And they would listen to grindcore, this earache record stuff, like Napalm Death and all these bands that were just a cacophony.
Chaos UK.
You couldn't, I mean, it hurt your ears.
No hooks at ever.
Just go listen to Napalm Death and get back to me.
And then the other side was this SoCal big short wearing, like, they all looked like they worked at these customs.
You know these reality TV shows where they customize your car and add flames on it?
Pimp My Ride type of stuff?
They all look like that.
Like Fat Mike at Fat Records and singing these really earnest songs that are trying to sing well.
And it just wasn't, uh, and this ironic white trash thing where they have bowling clubs and I'm totally white trash.
I don't know.
It's not my cup of tea.
It didn't seem punk to me.
It seemed like pop.
So it was either pop or death metal, basically.
So then NWA were coming out and swearing and stuff and saying, kill cops, which sounded cool to me as a 20-year-old.
So I'm at work!
So, uh... See, now he threw me off my train of thought.
Stupid.
He's lucky it's his birthday, man, or he would be getting 20 lashes.
So, rap was kind of interesting, and Hugo Delucci lived with these two hot chicks.
He was, like, three's company.
He had a terrible hairdo.
He had, like, a little mushroom cut, but because he was the cool guy, it seemed neat.
You know, when you can be... When you're so cool that ugly makes you even cooler?
Kind of like Harmony Corrine.
And they did a rap band, and it was like anarchist, activist, creative artist dudes who would go to these rallies and they'd do rap songs and they would beatbox and stuff.
And I know it sounds queer right now in the context of 2017, but it seemed really interesting back then.
Like they were, you know, bringing a new type of music into the movement.
And he says, you could sleep up on the roof, which I did with my girlfriend.
Steve was with us then, and he slept with one of the girls, I think, which was rare.
There wasn't a lot of poontang going on in the punk scene, probably because everyone's genitalia stink.
And we were just so transient that no one had a chance to meet us.
It wasn't like a Motley Crue tour, that's for sure.
But anyway, we get up there and I remember the first night, they just start beatboxing.
Beatboxing so gay!
And they're doing it, and they're passing around.
So they're sort of going, you, you, you.
And they're like, oh, ciao, tesoro.
Now I'm sounding Japanese.
And then they point to me, right?
It's kind of like our initiation into the group.
So I did this trick, which I highly recommend.
I took a song from my own band.
And pretended I was thinking of the lyrics as I said them.
So I'm like, there's thinking going down, not happening together, while there's people going around, thinking about the weather, yeah.
Don't forget your mind with your money and your dark.
You can booze it if you lose it, don't forget to make your mark.
Once is once, but it's not the only time.
If you blow it on a nickel, you can spend it on a dime, yeah.
Just pausing a song I'd sung a hundred times.
Yeah, that's great, Gavin.
Good rap.
You make good rapping.
Steve came up to me later, by the way, after that.
Second worst thing he ever said was he goes, uh... Can I ask you something?
Is it hard to rap?
I don't know.
I would imagine it's quite tricky.
I didn't do that.
I cheated.
So Hugo and I got along great because I was a cartoonist at the time.
And cartoonist, by the way, in Montreal and Europe, it's not superhero.
Superheroes are the antithesis of what we liked.
I guess you would call it graphic novels today.
But it was like cool drawings, autobiographical stuff, you know, Chester Brown type stuff, Peter Bagg, Dan Klaus type of guys.
And he worked with Libertoire.
Who was one of the greatest cartoonists of all time.
Libertoire worked for Heavy Metal, which was called Metal Hurlant over there.
It was a French thing.
And he was just such an incredible artist and his drawings were so intense.
Look up Ran Xerox.
R-A-N-X-E-R-O-X.
And I go, holy shit, you knew Libertoire?
He's a Yoda of heroine.
And, uh, he succumbed to the crunchy heroin streets.
Um, but he said, oh yes, I know Libertoire.
He come in, he have nothing.
He have maybe a piece of liquid paper.
He have a crayon.
He have a charcoal.
You know, maybe three things.
And then he use that and he make a masterpiece.
I go, yeah, I know.
God damn it.
You did cartooning with him?
Oh yeah, I show you some.
He showed me some cartoons.
They were great.
Not obviously in Libertoire's range, but really cool little simple things.
Then he said, I work at a TV station.
You know what I do?
I come up with the idea we have a little logo in the bottom right.
And I'm sounding like Mario.
He used to jump on these turtles.
He was trying to save this princess woman.
She lived over a bunch of smokestacks.
And I think, and I don't want to look this up because I don't want to know if it's not true.
I think he invented the whole idea of having a logo of your station ID in the bottom right.
I had never seen it before then.
He told me he did it for his Italian station and now it's everywhere.
Give me that, please.
And I just, like, with these hot chicks that he lived with, and he was so happy all the time, he was like Roberto Benigni, you know, in that movie where he's dying in the Holocaust.
So I'm hanging out with Hugo, and he's talking about his, you know, his chibi job, which is just some dumb job, and the guy's just so effusive, you know?
And sometimes, I'm into egalitarianism, and I was talking about how hardcore says, no, no, you're special.
But, by the same token, sometimes you just meet some people and they're extraordinary.
Like Sean Lennon.
He's a fucking genius.
And sometimes I can't... I've hung out with him a few times and I can't help but think, are you just better than other people?
I mean, I believe Yoko Ono comes from a long line of samurais.
Maybe you just have better samurai skills.
He once said that he got in a fight and he was blown away by how good he was.
He was like, I didn't know I could fight.
It was like Jason Bourne.
All of a sudden he's just going...
And so I'm hanging out with Hugo, and look, most of us can be great.
But there are certain people that are just gifted.
Like Andrew Breitbart.
When you hung out with him, you felt just sort of like this glow.
And these guys are always really benevolent and interested in you.
And, you know, they don't brag.
They just like want to, let's go do stuff.
You know what I mean?
It's like they're, they're, they almost died.
And then God said, all right, you can go back to earth, but don't be a bitch.
Okay.
Thank you, God.
I'm going to be awesome.
Like Scrooge after the three ghosts, you know, those kinds of people.
So he was that kind of guy.
And I knew he was destined for greatness.
Um, And he took us to his mother's house.
Pesto.
Christopher Columbus comes from Geneva, but also pesto.
And his mother makes the pesto, you know, the nonna.
And it's delicious and he's laughing with her.
He's got a great relationship with his family.
Just an amazing guy.
I got along with him great.
One of the highlights of the trip.
And so we keep traveling.
We go to some squats, more squats, and you know, eventually the money runs out and people have to go home and it was time to return to reality.
And I think I was there for about five months.
And I'd been all over Spain, Germany, France was fun, back then in Paris.
The cops hated punks for some reason.
And they would just, if a cop saw a punk rocker, like someone with a mohawk or blue hair, he would just beat the living shit out of you for no reason.
It was like what, what, you know, we hear about being black in America in the 50s.
I mean, you were just reviled.
And I just remembered that punks were banned from pubs in England around that time.
Peter and the Test Tube Babies have a song about it called Banned from the Pubs.
Ban, ban, ban, they don't like punks, ban from the pubs.
Ban, ban, ban, they think we're drunk, ban from the pubs.
Meanwhile, Proud Boys are always banned from pubs every time we get out.
But we probably deserve it.
Anyway, so the trip peters down, and, uh, peters out.
And then, sort of like herpes, uh, I would call Hugo when I was drunk and stuff, maybe like once a month after I got back, then once every two months, and then the outbreaks would get less and less, and I'd call him once a year.
But I thought, I'm going to hear about this guy in the future.
He's going to start a movement.
He's going to be a mogul.
He's going to create something big.
He had that vibe about him.
So fast forward 15 years, and I'm married, and it's time for the honeymoon.
We got $3,000 in gifts at the marriage.
I thought, let's go party.
And so my wife wants to go from London to the bottom of Italy, back up.
She wants to do south of France.
No, not the bottom of Italy.
Just dip into Italy, sorry.
But all over the south of France.
You know, Toulouse, Paris, Barcelona.
Okay, whatever you want, babe.
What are you going to do after a marriage?
Say no?
No, I want to go hunting.
I want to go investigate gun violence in Sudbury, Ontario.
So, uh, we agreed to do that.
I agreed to do that.
Rented a car.
Go down there.
Great time.
This is no cigarette tin trip either.
We just sort of, we stay at various hotels.
Sometimes we keep it cheap.
We go to Beaujolais.
One time, I saw this, uh, this, they had this big tap with this big drum that was like five feet by five feet of just red wine.
And I see the red wine in it.
And I go, holy shit, I'm just going to steal this.
We're at the vineyard where they make this Beaujolais.
I'm just going to fucking chug it.
So she keeps a lookout and I put my mouth under it and just start letting it pour in.
It's the diesel dispenser, Gavin.
That's where the trucks get their diesel from.
I remember from tree planting, because we used to siphon gas, getting gas in your face is one of the worst experiences.
It's like pouring bleach into your body.
I mean, it is.
It is.
It gets in your sinuses.
Fuck, it sucks.
One of the worst- I wouldn't- I wouldn't get gas in my sinuses right now for... $79,000.
You'd need $80,000 for me to do it, and I'd be in a bad mood for two days.
Anyway.
So we're traveling and traveling, and we're having a nice time.
I would have- I could have afforded to have a little more sex on that honeymoon, actually.
If we'd just gone to, like, some Some Hawaiian place where we're just in a shack?
I feel like it would have just been like three times a day.
But when you're traveling and stuff, you really... I don't know.
But anyway, you do what your wife says with marriage and honeymoons.
It's not a... It's not a place you want to start arguing, especially when you've been married for a day.
And... I go, wait a minute, we're near Genova.
I wonder if Hugo de Lucia is around.
This is now 15 years after when we had hung out.
So I was 35.
I met him when I was 20.
And it's a tiny little town.
So I assume he's still alternative in a little way, right?
I mean, most people that are weird at 20, they stay kind of weird forever.
I don't think punk chose them.
I think they chose punk.
You know, a goth is still gonna be a little unusual when she's 40.
Gays sure are.
So...
I go into this, there's a second-hand clothing shop, and I confess to my wife that I really want to find Hugo, and she's not excited about it.
It's not romantic.
It's like Dog the Bounty Hunter all of a sudden.
And her tits are not big enough for that role.
So we go into this second-hand clothing store, and I say, hi, I'm looking for a guy named... It's good to have the accent of the locals.
It helps them understand the English better.
I'm looking for a guy named Hugo Delucci.
And she looks at me weird, she goes, Hugo?
And I go, yeah, Hugo.
Hugo Delucci.
Yeah, do you know him?
Si, si, everyone knows Hugo.
And then she's looking at me weird and I realize, he's Tony Soprano now.
He's Tony Sopranionio.
And now he doesn't have two women, he has a harem.
And he's the Donald Trump of Genova.
He probably owns hotels, businesses.
And we're going to have some weird Scarface party with him with like a big pile of coke on a thing and naked ladies everywhere and I'm not going to cheat on my wife.
But, you know, maybe she'll want to like horse around.
Who knows where this night's going to go, but it's going to be decadent.
And so she's looking at me weird.
She probably thinks I'm like a hitman for him or some, you know, high powered pitbull attorney that's here to sue gold for not being expensive enough.
And so she goes, uh, hold on a second.
And she goes, okay, here is an address.
This is his ex wife, uh, from many, many years ago.
And she goes, Okay, here is an address.
This is his ex-wife from many, many years ago.
She knows him, and she maybe tells you.
So she goes, Fine, we go to this other restaurant.
And I'm condensing a lot of dead ends here to expedite the story.
But it was about a five, six hour quest to get him and a lot of waiting.
But so we go to the ex-wife's restaurant.
She's not there.
But the manager calls her.
at her country house or whatever.
You see, Europeans are always on fucking vacation.
I have no idea how Italy, Spain and France have any GDP.
I think France has nuclear power, maybe that's why they do, but every time you call a European, they go, yes, well, we just finished the Christmas vacation, but in January's we go to the Black Forest with my family.
We stay at our cabin for six weeks.
Six weeks?
That's called retiring, dude.
Grab a cheeseburger, get to work.
For the weekend!
Aren't you taking care of business?
Working overtime, that's right!
No, I'm going to the Black Forest with my father.
We're going to make gnomes out of one piece of wood.
You know, a lot of people will do a head, and then a body, and then little shoes.
But my father is a carver.
He uses mahogany and old oak, and we make these gnomes.
I've been working on mine for five years now.
Five years now!
I am from China and Europe!
Cheer up!
Cheer up, dude!
I'm from cheer up!
So we go, she calls, Hi, I'm at my, we are here on the Italian fucking version of Black Forest.
And, uh, but Hugo would love to see you.
He would love it so much.
Oh my God.
I go, you guys aren't together.
Oh no, no, no.
We, we divorced me 10 years ago.
It's actually, uh, 12 years ago.
Yes.
But here's his address.
Tells me the address.
So I go to the building where he's supposed to be and I'm kind of jealous.
Like, I love the cheeseburger thing, but I'm also kind of jealous of the just whole family sitting down at a huge table.
There's your cousins, your mother, you know, your uncles and your seven siblings.
You know, that must be great.
It must be great for your mental health, which we'll get to.
So I don't know what apartment he's in.
She didn't tell me.
So I go up to the top and there's about three apartments per floor and they're all beautiful old stone architecture, you know, like the walls.
If you punch them, you'd break your knuckles.
And they have these steel gates on them because it's Italy and it's junkie town.
So it's weird seeing, it's kind of incongruous, right?
Seeing this beautiful old wood door and all this wonderful floral architecture and these little details, these ornate details with just a cage on front of the door.
The cage looked like those old-timey elevators, you know, that sort of open up.
And I would be like, Hugo!
Hugo!
Hugo!
Up and down, you know, the three, the four floors.
At one point, some woman came out and said, hello.
No, she said, what are you doing, honey?
Honey is pretty much the only word I know, so that's why I'm repeating it.
I said, Hugo.
No, no, maybe Hugo.
No, I don't think he'd live here.
No, no.
So I go back, and I have two other leads, and eventually I get a hold of someone who knows him, and she says, He's going to, I'm going to call him, he's going to call me back, and then you call me back.
I can't, his number is a payphone or something?
I'm like, oh, I get it, because he's a dealer, and he doesn't want to give out his number.
So I say, okay.
So I wait by the payphone for a call, and he tells me to meet him at this outdoor men's, like, cafe.
Which, by the way, I've never really understood these people who drink coffee at 10 p.m.
What's going on there?
Aren't you going to be up all night now?
And so it's all these men drinking coffee.
At a, it looks like a bar, but there's no roof or walls.
It's just like, imagine that you take a cool little cafe and remove the roof and the walls and it's just a bar with tables.
And I don't know, it never rains in Geneva?
I don't understand how that works.
And so he says, I'll meet you there in an hour.
And an hour later, we're sitting there and I managed to have a beer, um, at the cafe place, the Wallace Cafe.
And I see, I see a figure coming towards us.
There's tons of alleyways down there.
Great place for an action movie.
There, Jason Statham.
If you want to chase some dudes, that's a good place to be chasing people.
Liam Neeson.
If you want to get your daughter kidnapped, I would suggest Genova.
It's a good place to find the guys.
And I see the silhouette of the man with his silly little mushroom hairdo.
He's still got his look.
And he's walking towards us.
And I'm thinking, is he going to, like, pull out two big bags of Coke or something?
Or a joint?
And say, let's party!
I'm confused where his entourage is.
But as he slowly comes out of the darkness, the streetlights hit him.
And he's no longer a silhouette, he's a person.
And Tony Soprano meets Donald Trump, meets Andrew Breitbart, meets Libertoire, meets every cool and interesting person I've ever met.
The most interesting man looks like shit.
He has sores on his face.
And I don't know if he's a junkie, but, you know, they look like they've been picked at.
So he's got some weeping sores on his face.
He's wearing similar clothes to what he was wearing when I met him 15 years ago.
He doesn't smell fantastic.
He kind of has that homeless smell that's like part dick cheese and part B.O., but also has a sweet, tangy smell to it.
It's like, you know how bums smell like rotten cotton candy sometimes?
And his jeans are so old they're leathery.
You know crusty punks, you look at their black jeans and they have a sheen to them?
I think that's leather in a sense.
They've been wearing their pants for so long that their dead skin cells, you know, have had nowhere to go and they get embedded in the cotton twill.
And the next thing you know, you have human leather pants.
That are, you know, 90% denim, 10% you.
That's your dandruff is embedded in the fibers.
And like spilled ketchup and stuff.
I mean, they talk about the Nazis with the Jewish skin lampshades.
You're wearing human pants.
Those pants should be illegal.
That's like cannibalism.
You shouldn't be able to wear human leather.
Even if it's your own dandruff, leg dandruff.
So he's got that look and his eyes are broken.
And I realize, and this has been my very long way of saying this, I realize that Hugo DeLucci has lost his mind.
And the reason that woman was staring at me is because I am someone from his past when he was the king.
And like all nice people, she probably hoped that me, you know, someone from his past might snap him back.
Or maybe he's a junkie and she's hoping that, you know, I might help him get clean.
He's probably ripped off everyone he knows as junkies do.
It was fucking pathetic.
Uh, he pulled out a joint.
I said he'd have two big bags of Coke or whatever.
He pulled out a joint.
And I didn't want to smoke a joint.
I'm not a big pot guy, unless I'm... Even back then, if I was safe, inside, watching a movie that was funny, maybe.
Or gonna horse around with my lady?
Sure.
But, like, walking around a new city?
I don't want to be baked.
I want to be ready to fight a mugger.
So, he pulls out his joint, and we smoke it, sort of, as a friend.
And that was a very nice gesture.
I'm sorry to shit on the guy, I mean...
Calling him a pathetic lunatic, but it's sad.
And, you know, we did the courteous thing, hugged him.
Hey, hey.
And he smokes a joint.
He goes, I have something I want to show you.
I think he, one of the reasons he took so long, I think he went to go get this.
Or maybe he carries it with him everywhere.
He pulls out a magazine.
And I recognized the magazine because he showed it to me in 1990.
It was an interview with him.
And he said exactly what he said in 1990.
He said, this is a magazine.
It's like the Time Magazine of Italy.
It's a big magazine.
It's kind of a big deal.
You know, the date was still 1989.
It was the same magazine when he was showing me all this shit and all his drawings and all this stuff.
One of the many awesome things he showed me was an interview in a popular Italian magazine.
I went, oh, that's cool.
Yeah, right on.
Great.
This was now his teddy bear.
This was now his security blanket.
And I just feel like this crazy person was looking at the old Hugo and thinking, could I make this a portal?
Could I somehow go through this magazine back to when I had a brain that worked and I was sane?
And the pages looked like the Constitution.
They were yellowed and it looked like I could snap them.
And the pages were brown and, you know, brittle.
And big sort of cracks in them and stuff and very few right angles.
There was few straight lines.
It really did look like, you know, an old pirate map.
And he shows me the same things he showed me before and says the same things about them.
It was like, are you a coffee or a tea man?
I'll take a beer anytime, blah, blah, blah.
Silly little interview jokes like that.
And he goes, you see?
And that's me.
That's me, Hugo.
And I didn't have the heart to say, yeah, dude, I remember you showing me this when it wasn't a tattered keepsake that was clearly kept under the mattress at the homeless shelter.
This is heartbreaking.
And then, you know, I'm about to get dumped by my wife.
This is a honeymoon and I'm watching a man who lost his mind.
So he disappears down a different alleyway and slowly, you know, resumes his silhouette.
We both know we're never going to speak again.
You know, it's the elephant in the room with the mentally ill.
It's like people with Down syndrome.
They must know that abortion is trying to eradicate them from the planet.
They're currently undergoing Ethnic cleansing.
Or not ethnic cleansing, genetic cleansing.
They're undergoing a form of genocide.
And that's gotta get in there at some point, you know?
And I think Hugo recognized that I'm not blind.
I see your human pants.
I see your Constitution security blanket.
I see your fucking zit face.
I see your silly bowl cut.
And it's funny how the bowl cut seemed so cool in 1991 when he was a god, and now it just looked ridiculous.
He looked like an eraser.
And he walks off into the darkness.
And, uh, not a lot of sex going on that night.
My wife and I, we're not that horny.
Believe it or not.
And I just thought, the takeaway here isn't that you could lose your mind at any time.
It isn't that we need to pay more attention to the mentally ill, that we need to invest in lunacy, and we have to go get vans and pick these people up and get them in rehab if they're junkies.
I'm not saying that.
I don't think that's true.
I think it's an inevitability.
There's going to be a percent, a tiny percent, one percent.
Sure, one percent of us are going to go nuts.
And usually it's, you know, in your early 20s, late teens to early 20s when the schizophrenia kicks in.
And it is as rare as a skier hitting his head on a tree.
It is as rare as a woman drinking, dying of dehydration in New York City.
That's a miracle.
We should thank God, or if you're an atheist, thank nature, or just thank your lucky stars, or whoever you people thank, that this incredibly complex organism in between your ears is firing correctly.
Sure, you get depressed sometimes, you might have your own demons, I don't know, if you smoke, you're a drunk, whatever, you can't hold down a relationship, that's irrelevant, okay?
Hugo DiLucci's carrying around the same magazine he had 15 years ago.
That's a breakdown.
People cry when you mention his name.
That's a breakdown.
But we are all saying, you downloaded a podcast, you're curious, you just listened for over an hour.
You're a curious person who wants to learn about stuff.
What a blessing that is!
And, you know, this is what I love about church, but I know you hate church, so let's just say the Native American church.
Does that make it sound cooler now that there's Indians involved?
The Native American church, a big part of it is just thanks, gratitude.
Thank you for this.
Thank the North, thank the East, thank the West, thank the South.