Get Off My Lawn Podcast #59 | Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday
I start out getting mad at Tina Fey for pooping on America using the cute humor that came from having an awesome midwestern childhood with conservative parents. This leads to chastising all baby boomers for basically doing the same thing. Then, I take a 90 degree turn and devote the rest of the show to this weird mod kid I knew named Matt who kidnapped his girlfriend and went to prison for a long time. Back when we were roaming the streets of New York City, we broke into a Tofu factory and discovered dozens of illegal aliens being kept as slaves.
That is a little teaser for the new season of The Unbreakable, Kimmy Schmidt by Tina Fey.
That's not our new sponsor for the show.
I'm sure Tina Fey would be horrified that I even, that my name comes, that her name comes out of my mouth.
Although I did bump into her on Fire Island once.
That's a gay island here in New York.
that has a family section in it.
Fire Island is not all gay.
And comedians seem to like it.
Famous, rich comedians.
There was Tina Fey.
But I had an epiphany while looking at that trailer on my Instagram.
Tina Fey's humor comes from a solid family background from the Midwest.
Wholesome Republican parents with good values who gave her a beautiful life and she had a cute childhood.
Um, that was endearing.
So her jokes are Friday, Friday, gonna get down on Friday.
Hey, you're singing that wrong.
How?
I made it up.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Like, that's a joke that only someone who comes from a cute background could have.
She's in touch with her childhood.
And I think she's, and by the way, Tina Fey's one of the greatest writers in the history of comedy, no one can deny that.
As someone who's written a few pilots for TV and failed miserably, I watch that show with my daughter sometimes, and the way the A-plot and the B-plot combine at the end, she is, she's Amadeus Mozart.
She's remarkably gifted as a writer, and same with 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live.
And her movies are good, too.
Mean Girls, I mean, it was a masterpiece.
My wife still quotes it all the time.
But here's the thing I'm coming up with.
Where does she get all that greatness from?
That wholesome humor and her incredible understanding of high school and Mean Girls and all that stuff and being an outcast and the way that the in crowd isn't all they're cracked up to be.
She got that from having a conservative upbringing.
Her parents are right wing.
Her parents hated That she did the Sarah Palin imitation, and they told her as much.
And I kind of feel gypped.
You know what I mean?
Like, she becomes this anti-American, anti-Trump person, but she's using our background, our family values, and our stable environments, and our strong schools to crap on America.
It's like you train someone in the military and then they become a mass murderer and you go, no, no, that's not what I set you up for.
No, it's worse than that.
She's worse than a mass murderer.
Because she's saying America sucks and the whole reason she's good at her job is because of her great education and her wholesome upbringing.
It's sort of like baby boomers in general.
You know, they didn't go to PC school.
They went to good school.
Daniel Klaus talks about this with art school in the 50s and 60s.
You could go there, you would come out of art school, say you graduated from art school in 1962.
You could paint the cover of a Harlequin romance novel.
And you could do photorealism.
You don't have to do it, but at least you'd have that stable background.
Today, art school is you put a tampon in a teacup and you get an A+.
And so, they get all this awesome education, and this strong background, and then they use it to crap on us.
Like, you ever see Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces?
He's this reluctant boomer who hates his rich parents and stuff, and he's also a master pianist.
And you think, how'd you get so good at pianisting?
Well, you got that way with an uptight right-wing Republican dad who made you take piano lessons, gave you a good education, taught you mathematics in school.
Now we got new math.
Isn't that... what a bunch of ingrates, huh?
They get all the good stuff and then they use it to crap on us.
And we're just sitting here saying, uh, New York public schools have fistfights every day.
I don't think the bourgeoisie has any idea.
I don't want to make this podcast political.
I want to talk about this dude, Matt, but I just had to get that off my chest.
I don't think the bourgeoisie knows how insane East New York is, how bad the ghetto is, how bad the projects are, like you talk to a mailman who goes to deliver welfare checks at the PJs, the projects, you can't get into the lobby, you can't see it's so dense with pot smoke.
It's like there's a fire going on.
You have to crawl to get there, and then you can't drop off the welfare checks because everyone's ripped the doors off the mailboxes.
So you can't, and you're not allowed to leave, that's like leaving money somewhere, you're not allowed to leave it there.
So they can't drop off the checks.
That's just the mailman.
God knows what it's like for the cops to go there and try to administer a warrant.
Excuse me, do you know where Dan Nichols lives?
Oh, he's in 3B, officer.
Thank you!
Tuck, tuck, tuck.
Here's your warrant, buddy.
Bye!
I was talking to a prosecutor here in New York, and boy those guys are a wealth of juicy goss.
One guy showed me this legal document where these Hasidic Jews were making a motion to remove this case from the courts and settle it in whatever the Jewish version of Sharia is, like Haratz Court.
And it was being put through.
It was like, yeah, fine.
We'll take this away from the court.
The courts are crowded anyway.
You guys do it at your kangaroo court that you made up with your 10,000-year-old rules.
The Old Testament.
What should we do?
Cut our fingers off?
What's the punishment?
That's gotta be illegal.
You can't just remove a case from our judicial system and do it on your own.
That's Sharia law.
That's wrong.
That's not the deal.
And then another guy, different prosecutor, told me, he goes, every black girl's been raped.
Basically said, talk to any, because he deals with these cases all day, right?
And he said, any black girl who's 20 years old, she's been raped.
And it's so common in their community, he said, that it doesn't have the same stigma.
It's just like, oh, that sucks.
It's like you got beat up.
It's not like, oh my God, she was raped.
I mean, if some rich white girl gets raped, I mean, she takes a year off school and everyone freaks out.
Like Mattress Girl, she carries a mattress around and we all cry.
But not with black girls, not in East New York.
It's just, oh, you got raped?
That sucks.
Anyway, you wanna go get a cheeseburger?
Yeah, sure, I'm over it.
It only happened yesterday.
And then the schools, I talked about that on another episode, Hal.
It's just fist fights.
Like, first row's listening, second row's chatting, Third row and back, they're practicing fight moves.
So the teachers have no choice but to make upgrades.
You can't administer a test!
It would be like going to a punk show and going into the mosh pit and saying, guys, I need you to fill out this form.
It's not happening.
But speaking of people, so there's two Americas in many ways, but speaking of the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, taking advantage of a right-wing stable background, I was remembering this dude, Matt, I wanted to get more into stories on this podcast and less into politics, because you got the show, Get Off My Lawn, on CRTV.com, that you can sign up for to watch, and also my hit show, CRTV Tonight, which is every second Friday, and it's a lot of fun.
It's like red eye.
We sit around and talk with three guests.
And then I do a serious interview in the middle.
And then I talk to people on the street.
It's juxtaposed with man on the street stuff.
It's a lot of fun.
But this show should just be more stupid stories.
More like the get off my lawn on CRTV should be like Tucker Carlson.
And then this should be more Howard Stern.
I guess I should get some mentally retarded people to come in and say dumb things in a high-pitched voice.
But this dude Matt I was thinking about, now he comes from, just like Tina Fey, right?
He comes to New York City, he dresses like a mod.
This is years ago, right?
So we're talking early 2000s.
Dresses like a mod, cool guy, and I start noticing that he's weird.
Like, this was my first tip.
I was hanging out with David Cross a lot then, and he comes over to me and goes, Gavin, come here.
Come here, man.
What?
What's up?
And he goes, not near David.
No way.
No way.
Come here.
Come here.
So I go over to the corner.
I'm already annoyed, by the way.
It's like Jerry Seinfeld says.
He goes, I don't want to see anything on your phone.
Like, if you met an alien and you have a picture on your phone, just tell me about it.
I don't want to see anything on your phone.
I don't care if you were there when Ronald Reagan was shot and you have a picture of you in the background.
I don't care.
I don't want to see your phone.
Keep your phone in your pocket, especially at a bar, and I couldn't agree more.
But, uh, so he's dragging me over to an area.
What?
What are you going to show me?
A dead baby?
And he pulls out a handkerchief and it's got a pattern on it that is kind of a teeny bit swastika-y, but not really.
And that's why he didn't want to show it near David, because David's Jewish.
What?
And it didn't, maybe if it was like a giant swastika handkerchief, I'd go, oh, that's weird.
Where'd you get that?
But a pattern that sort of resembles that.
I'm getting annoyed now just telling you the story.
But anyway.
There's so many things about this dude, and that's kind of what I liked about New York back when I was in the scene was It was the island of misfit toys.
It was an amalgam of the biggest freaks and again This is why I always forget like when I go to my kids soccer game baseball games I forget who the parents are because they all look the same and they all dress the same no offense suburban parents, but in New York City Everyone is as different as the different members of the Sex Pistols.
So, it's very easy to tell people apart.
And Matt was one of those freakazoids, who seemed like a cool, kind of a mod dude.
I didn't know what he did for a living.
That was another thing about New York.
I had no idea where anyone made their money.
I obviously made my money with Vice, that was clear.
And I think a lot of Jewish girls had their dads pay their rent.
That was a pattern I noticed.
But besides that, I never really knew what anyone did.
Like Benjamin Cho, who's since died of a heroin overdose.
He was a designer, but I only ever saw him do one fashion season.
How did Benjamin Cho?
He DJ'd at Sway.
Or Brian DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance.
Gang Gang Dance couldn't have made any money.
Did he make his money as an artist?
I still don't know to this day.
And New York's expensive, like guys that I, Trevor Simser or Brian Duran of Leg Up Management, he's called, he calls his management company Leg Up Management because his nickname is Baby Leg because his dick is as big as a baby's leg.
What a weird nickname.
Those guys were like me, we worked 60 hour weeks.
You had to in New York.
That's just the deal.
You go to work around 11 a.m.
and you leave at 8 p.m.
That's what you do.
A short day's nine hours.
And you eat lunch at your desk.
But then these other people, they always just seem to have so much leisure time.
I guess they're trustyfians, and I think Matt was one of them.
Because he sat me down in a bar once.
This is like a handsome guy, young guy.
Imagine him in a suit, a mod kind of suit.
Maybe even a parka.
Side part, sort of sandy blonde hair.
Mile high cheekbones.
You ever see the way British people, because they're so ugly, because I guess the Vikings took all the hot chicks?
Yeah, that's why Scandinavians are so hot, right?
Because Vikings stole the hotties.
Especially Scotland.
That's why Glaswegians are so hideous.
My mom was the only hot one and she's gone.
I don't mean she's dead, I mean she left the country.
But I remember reading a review of Andrew W.K.
and it was, uh, his runway model looks, his mile-high cheekbones, and his piercing blue eyes, and you're like, what a thing to think of when you see Andrew W.K.
Mile-high cheekbones?
The guy, the party-hard guy?
That's your takeaway?
His bone structure?
Wow, you are from an ugly island.
Anyway, I'm trying to describe Matt so you can picture him better.
Cool, stylish dude.
Could be in a magazine, right?
And we're sitting talking once and he said, yeah, my dad died last year.
Maybe he's trying to justify that he doesn't have a job, so we just assume that it's inheritance, right?
And he goes, it's pretty intense to unplug your dad.
And I go, pardonne-moi?
He said, yeah.
I mean, the life support had been a year.
He was turning into a vegetable.
He had already told me before that if it gets to a certain point where he can't wipe his own ass, he wants me to unplug him.
And, you know, the nurses said, it's up to you.
We can put a do not resuscitate on the door.
And then eventually I just thought, I'm just going to do it.
And I unplugged him.
I should have- there's a lot of warning bells here, by the way.
You can't just unplug a machine.
That's from a TV show.
If it goes boop, they get a notice on their board, the nurse comes running in.
It's a big deal.
They can't afford to have people dropping dead because of an electrical connection.
But anyway, I believed him.
I was, what, 30?
And, uh, holy shit, this would have been 17 years ago.
And I believed him.
I'm like, holy fuck, Matt.
That's the most intense thing I've ever heard.
You committed patricide.
Like, what are we, in the Bible?
You murdered your father, Cain and Abel, murdering their brothers?
What is this, Moses now?
What is this, 3,000 years ago?
What'd you hit him with, a giant rock?
He's like, I had no choice, man.
Holy shit.
I'm not saying that, you know, what you did is wrong, but, whew.
Like, Doug Stanhope has sucked ever since he killed his mom.
That's gotta have some really drastic effects.
Doug Stanhope, by the way, was shitting on Tommy Robinson, saying he hopes he rocks a deal.
Tommy's a good litmus test to see who's woke and who isn't.
Doug is clearly asleep.
And I think it's because he put his mom to sleep forever.
But, um, yeah, so I couldn't get over that.
And I think I even called him Patricide Matt after that.
And then, I think my girlfriend, yeah, she's my wife now, but my girlfriend was at his house once, and he had a bunch of roommates, and she saw a letter, and she's a snoopy little bitch, and she opened it and read it, and it said, Matthew, hello, oh, we understand that you want to go to New York to find yourself, you're in some sort of strange artistic phase,
And we don't mind the money and paying the rent and supporting you while you're there, but we do miss you and we do long for you to come back home and get serious about your life, Matthew.
There comes a time in a man's life when he has to buckle down and start to pursue a career.
Your father, my father, your grandfather, I expect more of you from a Montague.
Matthew, the nights are drawing in and winter approaches.
Is this reminiscent of your life?
Is the sun setting on your chance to further yourself and make a career as a great man?
Sincerely, your father, Arthur, M.D.
And it was on a doctor's letterhead.
Dad was alive!
The whole pull the plug thing was a fucking lie!
Isn't that weird?
I don't get liars.
It's so exhausting.
You got to remember things.
I don't even get guys who have affairs because you must have like seen in the movie Upgrade with your mistress and then you forget and you say to your wife, remember that scene in Upgrade when the guy fights the guy?
And she goes, I've never seen Upgrade.
Didn't I see it with you?
No.
Who'd you see it with?
I saw it on demand.
It's not on demand yet.
I saw the trailer.
You're talking to me about a scene in a trailer?
I... I... It was a really good trailer.
I mean, that must happen on a daily basis.
I can barely remember the truth, let alone a whole fucking life.
Anyway.
Yeah, he made himself into dead dad guy, and his doctor was paying the bills, but that's not even the crazy story about Matt.
We were, uh... I was shit-faced one night, uh, for a change, and it was that sort of weekend at Bernie's drunk where you... You're sort of, your brain is okay.
But the rest, none of the parts work.
It's sort of like that new movie, Pacific Rim, where you're in the robot and you can control it, but the robot's low on batteries.
So, like, you try to type and you go, Jesus, autocorrect is getting a hernia trying to keep up with me here.
And every time I open my mouth, I hear a person slurring.
Why is that guy slurring?
The words are fine up here.
Do you know where I could procure a sandwich?
Do you know where I could procure a fucking sandwich?
How did I forget English?
And then you're really tired, too.
It's also like you've been hit with a tranquilizer dart.
So anyway, I was that sort of swaying weekend at Bernie's guy, and Matt was fine.
And we were standing outside of Max Fish, and he goes, let's go on an adventure.
Okay.
So we jump in a taxi, and we just head south for some reason.
I think he already had cased this joint?
Because maybe he lived in Chinatown?
And he takes us to... Chinatown, by the way, in New York City, is China.
Kids go to Chinese schools, the signs are all in Chinese, and there's lots of places like this.
Flushing is like this, where you drive, like, take the...
The 7 train that you take to Citi Field to see the Mets, go one more stop to the very end of the 7 line, walk out, you're in China.
Like, the police speak Chinese, all the signs are Chinese, and people grow up there never speaking a word of English.
They don't listen to rock and roll, they listen to Chao-Ting-Chur.
In fact, I bet, I bet you Beijing is more Americanized than flushing New York.
And Chinatown in New York City is also like that.
Chinese are spreading.
You go to the Five Points now or Bill the Butcher's from, that's all Chinese.
Chinatown, like Little Italy is shrunk.
Little Italy is just a couple streets now in New York and no one can afford to live there except the guys who have been there for three generations and they pay 800 bucks a month.
But there, that's become like a Disneyland kind of Italian area.
They have the The San Gennaro feast and people come in from real Italian neighborhoods to sort of pretend that they're in a Scorsese film.
Anyway, so we're down in China.
We're ostensibly in China.
And he goes, check this out.
And we find some door and it's like a weird door.
Even the door is so Chinese.
It's like the doorknob is sideways.
It's like Asian girls' vaginas go horizontal and their doorknobs are the same way.
And he starts banging on the door, and someone opens the door, and he goes, Health Department!
And he has a fucking badge.
Now, the badge is a piece of shit plastic badge.
I guess he does this all the time?
But he had a fake badge on him that he flops down in his wallet, and then he goes, show me your ID.
So I just show them my- I pull down my wallet and do the same thing, and I have a driver's license, that's it.
And the guy goes, shit, he's freaking out.
And so, we start going down the stairs.
Now, I don't know if you watch a lot of Kung Fu, but there is a series that Jet Li did at the beginning of his career when he was still known as Li Lianjie.
And he plays a character named Wong Fei-Hung.
And Wong Fei-Hung is a true guy.
He's like a real person that existed, like Jesse James.
He was a doctor who learned martial arts to help protect from the government and tyranny.
And he ended up training all these people in Kung Fu and saving their lives.
Folk hero, the movies are awesome, but they're from a hundred years ago.
So, you know, when they have a restaurant scene, everything's made of bamboo and there's, you know, sort of cheap and beautiful and, and peasant-y rural architecture.
This is what was in this place.
There was nothing Western about any of the construction.
The, the, it was, it was like a Imagine a nightclub, right?
But a factory.
And it was a tofu factory.
They were making tofu down there.
And there was at least seven floors down.
And there was balconies made of bamboo.
Bamboo everywhere.
And wood.
And there was Chinese, like, little flags and stuff.
And writing in Chinese.
Like, paint.
Paintage.
It looked like an underground factory from a hundred years ago.
Deep in rural China.
In Fengyang province.
And so we keep going down.
We're inspecting all the tofu.
Clearly this entire place was illegal, because these guys were shitting bricks.
And he grabs some of the tofu off like a giant square that was as big as a dining room table, this piece of tofu.
And he grabs it and he stuffs it in my face.
He goes, how does that taste?
And I'm just like, I'm drunk.
And I bet the Chinese guys were like, these fucking health inspectors, they come to our place drunk.
And I'm afraid one of them is going to shoot us.
These guys are so hammered.
That's actually, that's pretty normal because I remember having a restaurant and the health inspectors would come and they were totally corrupt.
They were all from Guyana, by the way.
Did I tell you about that?
I had a restaurant, a southern fried restaurant with a black guy named Curtis Brown and uh...
We kept getting dinged with these stupid fucking health inspectors, me, and they were all from Guyana, and we would, I admittedly, get kind of abusive with them because they would, you know, you get a few fines and you lose your A, it becomes a B, that's tens of thousands of dollars down the drain.
You need to maintain that A. And we'd get fined for dinged cans, like a can of beans has a dent in it, Tins are aluminum, fuckhead from Guyana, and they also are plastic lined.
So, there's no problem with dents.
The original dent law goes from the 20s when tins were made of tin, and you could get, uh, what's it called?
Tinnitus?
Is that- that's not from loud music?
That- that disease you get from tin.
The- the guy who built the Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling, he got that on his foot.
I always confuse it with tinnitus, but it's- it's a name like that, and it comes from fragments of tin.
Uh, that's impossible now!
So it's just a racket, New York's corrupt, and obviously these guys, who were totally illegal, were dealing with corrupt health officials, who coincidentally were not.
They were two drunk guys pretending to be health officials.
Anyway, it gets weirder!
So we test out the tofu, we tell them it's fine, but we want to examine the living quarters.
Now they're really shitting their pants.
And we push back a big black curtain that was just a big piece of black cloth, right?
There's another room here with nothing but bamboo motherfucking bunk beds.
And they're stacked like four people high.
They had a video out today of the places that Trump is putting these kids, and it's not in cages, that was Obama.
And it looks pretty nice, and they go, look at this, there's ten beds to a room!
And you go, those look like really nice beds.
And look, the kid put up some pictures on his wall.
This is not a prison.
Um, this place looked like a prison.
I mean, these people were being packed in like sardines in these horrible bunks in pitch blackness.
It's hot down there.
This is in the summer, by the way.
It's humid.
There's no AC, obviously.
And these guys are just sitting there in bunks, all illegal aliens, I 100% guarantee that, and just working in the tofu factory and then sleeping.
Working, probably eating tofu as they work.
I worked with a guy at a bagel shop in Montreal once when I was, like, 18.
And, uh, guess how many hours this Chinaman worked?
Now, he was there legally, so... No, I. Legally.
So, this is a different scenario, but it also just shows you that Chinese people can really work their asses off.
Guess how many hours he worked?
I'll give you some time.
I'll go get a coffee.
I'll be right back.
Alright, I'm back.
24 hours a day.
He would save up his...
Breaks, his 15-minute breaks, until he could accrue six hours, and then he would sleep upstairs on a foldable chair.
And he would work there for, like, two years.
So he ended up making about a quarter million dollars a year.
Like they talk about the immigrants stealing our jobs, he was basically stealing our jobs.
I mean, he was doing three people's worth of work.
So he had three, oh wait a minute, 250 grand.
He was doing like five people's work.
Working 24 hours a day at this place and just eating bagels as he worked.
And this was of course so he could pay, it's 50 grand to leave China.
50 grand cash.
So I guess he was accruing the 50, 50, 50, 50 he needed for his family.
But these guys, and by the way, even in China they do this because they have a totally different culture than us.
People are different.
And in China, the attitude is, let's work ourselves nearly to death, and then take two months off for Chinese New Year.
And we'll go, we'll live like dogs, packed like sardines, and make suits.
Like, I went to a tailor's, David Cross and I actually went in Shanghai, And there was tailors, like, stacked on top of each other.
It was only an eight-foot ceiling, but they had built a sort of shelf for another tailor to go up there, and they were just... sewing suits all day.
And those people were not slaves, and they're obviously not in China illegally, but they would just... I think it's just their culture.
You work your ass off, and then you don't work, and you go up to the country, and you have a big house there, and all your family's there, and you get to relax.
I'm not a fan.
I don't... I don't want to do that.
I want to work...
A normal amount in the day, and then have dinner with my family and relax and read the paper.
Anyway!
So it's possible that these guys culturally are predisposed to this kind of abuse.
Oh my god, that's a horrible thing to say, but you know, I don't see Scotsman being crammed into bunks like that and making tofu in a humid dungeon for several years at a time, just for the honor of maybe having your friend or your relative come over later on.
Nah, no.
But I was just amazed that there was this, and I think Matt and I, we were bluffing pretty well up to the point of the body count, but when we saw these bunks, and there was probably like 50 people crammed into this tiny room that's the size of my studio I'm in right now, 50 people in this little studio, just ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, just stacked.
On top of each other.
And there was plenty of people there, like, just awake.
And they're sort of sitting up in their bamboo bunks, staring at us like, oh shit, are we gonna be, are you ice?
Are we gonna be detained now?
And we're like, alright.
Checked, looked under some of the beds for weapons.
I don't know what the fuck we were doing.
We had switched roles now from health inspector to corrections officer.
And we just kept exploring.
And it seemed to go on and on and on, the catacombs.
I told you about that other time, right?
We went to a school.
Yeah, I think I did.
It's a school next to Mars Bar, which is gone now.
This is on 2nd and 2nd in the city, 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street.
And there was an underground school.
Yeah, it's in the Trevor Simser episode, I remember now, where we went down.
And there was just this endless catacomb of homeless people.
There is a whole other underground New York.
In fact, there's a great documentary about this.
I think it's called Dark Days.
DJ Shadow did the music for it.
And it's about the people who live In the abandoned subway tunnels of New York City, where there's entire villages.
Entire fucking villages of cardboard homes underground, under New York, where it doesn't get too hot.
Yeah, Dark Days is the name of the film.
Doesn't get too hot.
I would never go down there.
It's funny, too, because you kind of see the white guys doing better than other people, like getting organized, and they have pit bulls that they raise there, and they guard their garbage in their cardboard mansion.
There's the white part of town, there's the black part of town.
But it's an incredible film, and New York is an incredible city, because there's just, like, people say, oh, it's a melting pot, and there's that stupid Beastie Boys song where they're like, Black Puerto Rican, we all get together on the subway.
Rich guys, white guys, yeah, we're all chillin' on the subway, yeah.
We're on the 9 and the B and the J and the Z and we're all buddies and we're all friends and I have a Puerto Rican friend.
No you don't.
There's Puerto Rican New York.
That's one New York.
There's black New York.
Actually, there's two blacks New Yorks.
There's Brooklyn blacks.
Who are totally different than Harlem Blacks.
Brooklyn Blacks wear different pants.
Like the skinny jeans thing was big in Harlem way before it was in New York.
In Brooklyn, I mean.
Brooklyn Blacks were still wearing the baggy pants right up until like seven years ago.
Brooklyn Blacks is more crime.
There's more welfare.
There's more laziness.
Harlem Blacks are always moving and shaking.
There's always a hustle.
Sometimes it's illegal.
Often it's not.
Maybe it's like, I'm making jeans.
I make pants.
We're having a party.
There's always like a party they're promoting and they got the little flyers.
They're always on the move.
And Harlem Blacks don't like Brooklyn Blacks.
I think they're lazy.
And then, there's several underground New Yorks, and I'm not speaking figuratively.
There is a literal underground Chinese New York, where there's tofu factories and illegal aliens stacked up in bamboo bunk beds like it's a Wong Fei Hung movie.
And there's underground villages of homeless people, several different types, including the ones who live in the subways.
I kind of like that about New York, is that it's so unbelievably weird, and every time you peel a layer of the onion back, you go, what the fuck?
And it is so corrupt, it's still build-a-butcher Tammany Hall.
You wouldn't believe the kind of laziness and bullshit.
Even like that thing I told you about the Chinese guy who worked 24 hours a day, union electricians do that too.
They'll work 48 hours in a weekend, because it goes time, then time and a half, then double time and a half.
And they save up their breaks, and they sleep on lawn chairs on Friday night and Saturday night, and just go.
And they're working the whole time.
It's not really like they're sitting on their ass, but they get double time and a half.
They end up making, I calculated, 12 grand in a weekend.
So, you know, you're slow on some car payments or you want to buy a new Range Rover, just do four of those weekends.
Boom.
Ready to rock.
Tricked out Range Rover.
You did it, buddies.
And I noticed, I know some union dudes and some cops and, you know, once you get into the established, not in crowd, but like traditional crowd, You know, cops will give you a mini badge, you get a concealed carry permit easier.
Not in Manhattan, those days are gone.
That whole thing, that was all pay to play and that got blown up.
That was a guy named John Campbell.
He was my guy too.
And he was just, you'd give him seven grand and he'd pay people to get a permit.
Fuck the forms, don't worry about that, it's just money.
A la Tammany Hall, Bill the Butcher.
And he got caught, and he's in prison now.
And he was my guy.
And guess what else about John Campbell?
Please look him up if you don't believe me.
He has a vagina.
Yep.
Short, fat guy who started taking testosterone probably like 20 years ago.
Married to a woman who I guess fingers him?
I don't know what they do.
They use a double dong?
I don't know.
Maybe he uses a strap on?
I'm not sure how that works.
Just a short, fat, bald guy with a beard.
He looks like the short, fat guy from American Pickers.
Exactly like that guy like there's nothing you know how with a lot of trans you can sort of tell when you've been taking those pills for 30 years Like I got a buddy Todd Seavey.
I think is his name, and he he's he's been taking pills He's bald and he has a vagina and his boyfriend.
Just fucks him in his vagina and Eats him out, and he looks like the guy who repairs your transmission.
He's a hoser like in a lumberjack jacket and bald With like a little goatee.
He doesn't look remotely feminine.
I said to him, dude, if your boyfriend ever dumps you, you're screwed because who is into this?
It's a redneck mechanic who looks like he tells dirty jokes at the bar and day drinks, who happens to have no penis.
So you have to go down on this mechanic with a hairy chest.
Me, basically me, but a little uglier.
No offense, dude.
And then just a vagina.
That's a very, very rare taste.
That would be like being attracted to someone who has three eyes.
You're not going to find a lot of takers on eHarmony.
But yeah, that was John Campbell.
Of course it's the elephant in the room.
Every time you talk to him, you're like, you have a fucking vagina.
He, by the way, he was in the closet and then when he started to get arrested, he said, no, no, I wasn't bribing anyone.
I had to buy gifts because I'm trans and there's transphobia in the police community.
So I needed to, uh, give gifts to sort of become equal.
And the judge goes, yeah, no, I'm not buying it.
10 years in prison.
I actually don't know how much, how many years in prison you got, but... You got in big trouble, and that was the end of the Manhattan Gravy Chain, but there's still the burbs!
There's still Long Island, there's still Westchester, there's still plenty of places to have a gun.
Any hizzle, um...
Yeah, the corruption with some of these guys.
Like, you know when you take the train, the Long Island Railroad, or Metro North, and you go into the city?
Those guys who stamp your ticket?
By the way, I know some of these guys.
God bless your cotton socks, but your job is insane.
Totally meaningless.
I don't mean you as a person have a shitty life.
I mean, it would be so easy to replace you with a machine.
We do it in the subway in New York.
In New York City, you just swipe.
Don't have a card to swipe?
Can't get on the train.
We're still punching tickets?
I mean, I have my tickets on my phone, and I show them that.
But people still buy a ticket, and he has a fucking hole punch and goes, ka-clunk.
What is this?
That Tom Hanks CGI movie?
Polar Bear Express?
How have we not moved on from the 20s?
I'll tell you why.
Corruption.
There's tons of money in New York and, you know, fifth generation hand-me-downs, fire department.
Fire department's another fucking joke.
There's no more fires in New York.
You don't build... Studs in homes are now made of aluminum.
They don't use wood studs anymore.
So, everything is fireproof.
I've lived here for 20 years.
I've seen two fucking fires.
Two.
But I hear a fire engine every goddamn day, because they go and they do ER and stuff.
I don't know.
I've fought with a lot of firemen.
Argued.
I don't mean fist fight.
I don't think I'd last very long fighting a fireman.
Although, they're getting fatter and they're letting women in, so maybe I will beat up a firewoman at some point.
But, uh, yeah.
Crazy pensions for what?
For some first aid?
Because someone choked on a chicken bone?
You're not running into burning buildings anymore, dude.
And, by the way, I know what you did in 9-11.
You did lose a lot of men.
Yes, you also stole a lot of Rolexes, if I recall.
Yeah, the FDNY broke into a Rolex store in the World Trade Center and stole a bunch of fucking watches.
Can you believe that?
I wouldn't want that Rolex on my wrist.
This is the death watch.
This watch I got from a pile of dead bodies.
Anyway, um, No, but these ticket guys, this is what they do, okay?
They go in... They go from their home to Grand Central.
That's a shift now.
Now they have a break.
And then they take the train back home.
That's considered the end of that shift.
There's a break in the middle of these two trips, which is just to Grand Central and back.
You know how long that break is?
Oh, five hours.
I don't know how much these guys make.
I think they make about 80 grand a year once they're settled in.
So they go in, and by the way, God bless your cotton hustle.
I wanted my son to be a cop.
He's not interested, but the money's just sitting there.
I actually almost got beat up by a fireman because he was with me.
And then I go, look, the money's just sitting there.
I want someone, if everyone's picking up, I want my son to have some.
And he goes, hold on a second.
You fucking, you're against the pensions that firemen and cops get, yet you want your own son to be part of that?
And they go, yeah.
And he goes, fuck you!
We're done!
We're fucking done!
That really pissed him off.
These blue collar people, they're very big on honor and character and they can get quite grumpy.
Actually, I have noticed that about blue collars.
They're different than me.
I'm middle class.
Like I had this guy, we, our families hung out sometimes and he was a union dude and my wife just stopped following his wife on Instagram.
So?
I don't want to look at your kids all the time.
You're filling up my feed.
And he goes, yo, what the fuck?
I saw your wife stopped following my wife on Instagram.
And I go, yeah, who cares, dude?
And he goes, well, we stopped following you.
That's the way it goes in Brooklyn.
I still like you.
I just don't want to look at your kids.
We're not friends anymore.
Another thing he did to me, and I love this guy by the way.
Love him to death.
He did me a bunch of favors because he's a plumber and he fixed a bunch of things in my house.
Running tap and all that.
Now you gotta do something for me.
And I'm a shitty carpenter.
I love doing carpentry, but I'm terrible.
And I built some frames for some pictures.
Like big, huge wood frames that look all, you know, beat up.
He was like, I want you to make me one of those frames for something for my kid.
He grabbed some random painting his daughter did.
So I made him one of my shitty frames.
And you know, you can see like where I put in the nails and stuff.
It's not good.
It looks like a child made it.
But- and I didn't- he didn't really want a frame, but that was just the Brooklyn thing.
Oh, I did something for you.
You do something for me now.
Now we're together.
Don't unfollow me, motherfucker.
They get real mad if you, like, don't call them back and stuff.
Meanwhile, middle-class people, you cannot speak for two years.
And then it's, hi, how's it going?
No, not- not the blue collars in New York.
And!
That pays back tenfold.
Like, I know a guy, I can pay him 1,500 bucks, he'll change the odometer on my car.
He'll hack my Land Rover and reduce the mileage.
Now, I'm not sure how that works with blue books and stuff, but... And maybe you can't do that anymore, but that's a cool thing to know.
Or, when there was the Katrina and no one had gas, I can get you gas.
Go to, uh, corner of Bowery and 3rd.
Say, uh, Dino sent you.
I got a big tank of gas.
Where'd you get the gas from?
Don't worry about it.
That's fucking awesome.
Anyway, so these guys at Metro North, you know, your brother will set you up, your dad sets you up, it's a thing.
Or another way you can get one of these jobs is just to clean shit.
If you go there and you work on the trains for minimum wage and clean up all the barf and the shit for, say, three years, It's like being a prospect in a biker gang.
And it is a criminal enterprise, basically.
So, they go in, in the morning, and I'm telling you this as an anecdotal example of how corrupt New York City is.
They go in and then they have these secret rooms in Grand Central.
There's a whole secret world in that building and you can see them when you're at the station.
Look up next time you're at Grand Central and you'll see these strange glass floors that you'll see blue-collar dudes walking along like it's something out of Hunger Games.
And they're going to their secret room.
So I've never been there.
No civilians are allowed.
You need to be a ticket guy.
So you go up to these things and they have... The guy who told me all this might even get in trouble for this.
But anyway.
They go in.
There's a giant lobby.
where you sit on these 1950s couches because they haven't updated anything and it's all like Art Deco kind of, no Art Deco's 20th, what do you call it, mid-century modern uh... you know Frank Lloyd Wright couches and an old TV and you watch movies, they got a bunch of DVDs, a bunch of VHS tapes, you can go watch Home Alone you sit there with your buddies, shoot the shit uh... make a sandwich, got a little, just like the fire department and They got little rooms.
You want to take a nap?
Here, go into 13B.
And in these little tiny rooms, it's not like the Chinese were stacked up, you got a little cot and, um, you got a little cot, a little side table, sit there, set your alarm for when you have to finish.
So you're getting paid as you sleep.
And when I was finding this out, I just said, dude, I would become the most savage alcoholic If I had five hours to kill in New York City every single day?
Oh yeah, I then went through a phase like that.
Sometimes you just go to see a movie.
Just go see a movie by yourself as you're making $45 an hour to go and see a goddamn movie.
So there's a lot, you know, the older I get the more I realize that Everything is so vastly different.
There's so many different Americas.
I actually kind of like discovering them all.
You know, there's a Cops America.
There's blue-collar New York America.
There's probably a whole other southern blue-collar thing that I don't know anything about.
Like Alabama.
The fuck?
Moonshine guys.
That's a whole other thing going on.
And Matt, the weirdo, Was this guy, who uh, sorry I'm spacing because I'm remembering I gotta do my uh, my uh, sponsor read soon.
I won't read, I'll keep it funny.
Um, that's We The People.
What's the website again?
We The People Holsters, right?
Yeah.
I'll just print this out, shall we?
Yeah, so Matt was, he was kind of like me in the sense that he was traveling from one dimension to the other.
He was a rich kid from the Midwest.
I was middle class, grew up middle class.
And I was sort of slumming it in New York City.
And actually, I was slumming it from when I was 18 till I guess I sold my shares of Weiss.
So a quarter of a century I was slumming it.
And by the way, while I was doing all that, staying in squats in Europe and stuff, I was seeing trans people.
And queers, and polyamorous, and feminist separatists who don't want to be with men.
So, all these new phases with these social justice warriors, I remember them from the 80s.
Jesus Christ, that thing is loud.
It's 2018.
Can we not get some better machines?
I don't think those should make any noise anymore.
It's like these fucking dishwashers.
Hey, a machine can wash my dishes.
Cool.
Yeah, it only takes two hours.
Of technology, and shooting jets, and soap, and... Two hours?
I could do all the dishes on my block in two hours.
Isn't it?
And a washing machine, too.
60 minutes, God knows how much electricity.
Then you gotta put them in the dryer.
We haven't- I'm not that impressed.
Even fucking trains!
I'm not that impressed, guys.
You go, what, 65 miles an hour?
So, like, a slow car?
Oh, okay.
How long have you had these things for?
Oh, since, basically, uh...
The beginning of man.
We've had trains for, what, 300 years?
I mean, when were we... The Industrial Revolution, we used trains for coal mining and everything.
We've had trains forever, and they go sort of fast.
They should be bullets now.
I should get... I should faint.
I should pass out from the... What's it called?
The centrifugal force?
When you go... You know, they do that with astronauts.
I should be fainting on a train, and then wake up going...
I could probably write it out with a silent pen in less time.
Can you get me that, Dave?
Can you get me that?
Um, so I'm not even done with Matt.
Uh, and his weirdness.
Maybe, I think a lot of these guys get into drugs, or maybe he was already crazy.
I don't know, maybe that's what the letter was to his dad.
Maybe his dad has a bunch of normal doctor-lawyer kids, and then Matt was the one that wasn't quite right in the head.
Uh, because I hadn't talked to him for a while.
He went to Florida, and he was in this relationship with this girl, who I believe dumped him, and he went bananas after that.
So you know what he did?
He does what all reasonable guys do when they get dumped.
He kidnapped her, brought her to a hotel, kept her locked up in a hotel for two days.
He stole her.
Get dumped by your girlfriend?
Kidnapped her, brought her to a hotel, kept her locked up in a hotel for two days.
He stole her.
Get dumped by your girlfriend, steal her back.
Now, I'm not sure you're familiar with the law, but that's a big fucking deal.
That's like kidnapping.
A friend of mine is going through it right now actually.
It's a pretty horrific story and I'll just take a tangent with it.
His wife is a fucking mental patient and she threatens to kill herself.
Um, so he won't let her leave, because as much as he hates her guts, it's his ex-wife, it's the mother of his children, and he wants them to have a mom.
A crazy mom is better than a dead mom.
So he won't let her leave, because she's harmed herself.
Now, meanwhile, he's calling 911, and almost crying on the phone, saying, my wife is suicidal, I don't know what to do, and she's here in the house, I don't want her to leave, I'm not gonna let her leave.
He gets arrested for abduction.
And I forget the exact legal verbiage, but it's like, well, preventing departure or something, like confining a person against their will.
It's not quite kidnapping, but it's like that.
There's so many fucking stupid rules, like when Ryan McGinley stole a painting with Sam Segelnick and Sperm... What's his name?
S-S-Semen?
The graffiti guy?
The woman whose painting or picture they stole jumped on the car, then they drove.
So part of their charge, two of them did a year in prison for this, part of the charge was kidnapping.
Because when she was on the car and they moved forward like 10 feet, that was them transporting someone.
What is she, are they child trafficking?
Two of them human trafficking?
You don't want to get caught up in the law, boys.
Anyway, the judge, he has a coke charge, this guy who didn't want his ex-wife to commit suicide.
So he has a criminal record.
So they also count it as a violation of his parole.
Hey, you're on parole for your cocaine.
He had like a bag of coke.
You know, like everyone in the world, I believe 7 million Americans are using cocaine right now.
I don't mean have you tried it once.
I mean our frequent users, 7 million.
Everyone's fucking done coke.
Jesus Christ.
I don't do coke.
I'm 47.
But if someone walks up to you and goes and you're drunk and they go, you want to do a little toots my goots?
Who says no?
I swear to God I could go up to to the Queen of England.
Hello.
Hi.
Oh, it's an honor to meet your majesty.
Um, I heard that you're a little hungover and you have to do a talk later on.
Would you want a little hee-haw?
A little Do you want a little?
I'm just, I'm tapping my nose by the way.
I know you can't see me.
She'd be like, um, well, I'm quite old.
Yeah, just a little.
Here, I got it on a key.
You want to just do a little bumper magoo?
Um, maybe just the one nostril.
Oh, that's a little jolt to the senses.
Might as well even it out.
I mean, why have one?
I need, I should do both sides.
Oh, there we are.
All right, let's put that away.
I'm the queen!
So this guy is facing 10 years.
Now we have a lawyer for him.
We're fighting it.
God, it's funny how on Twitter everyone's talking smack.
Proud Boys, you guys are thugs.
You guys are pussies with your tickle parties.
I wish.
I wish I wasn't having to bail Trigger Tommy out of jail after a knife fight where three people almost died.
I'm dealing with several knife fights right now.
Knives are hot in the scene at these rallies now.
Fucking knives.
What are we rumbling?
Is this the Greasers versus the Socs?
Anyway, yeah.
Ten fucking years.
Despite the 9-11 call.
9-11 call.
Despite the 9-1-1 call where he's pleading with police saying, kidnappers don't do that.
And Ryan McGinley and Sam Sagalik, those guys didn't deserve a kidnapping charge.
Matt, on the other hand, yeah, that's pretty much right out of, you know, a movie.
What's his name?
The guy who did Kill Bill?
It's right out of one of those movies.
True Lies kind of a thing.
Kidnapping a girl and taking her to a motel room is basically what we wrote in the law books.
Don't ever do that.
Here's the ideal situation of bad when we write laws.
Don't take a girl to a motel and keep her there as a hostage.
Signed, Society.
So he went to jail!
He went to jail for that.
He's out now.
I think he emailed me once or twice, but... Fuck, what a fucking weirdo, man.
The second he showed me that fake swastika handkerchief, I should have known this guy is a fucking freak, but... I did have some good times.
I got to see an underground Chinese slave tofu factory.
Listeners of this podcast, get off my lawn, can use the code GAVIN and get $10 off their first holder.
That's $24.
Those holsters start at $34.
They've got an adjustable cant, adjustable ride.
You are hearing a person discuss something that he can't have.
So this is painful for me.
This is like a fat, ugly burn victim telling you about a supermodel's body.
She is to look at.
She's a nine.
She's a brunette.
She has sort of cat eyes, big lashes like a young Sophia Loren.
Her tits are perfect and have an amazing amount of droop that you could fit maybe three pencils underneath.
Her vagina is abnormally small.
She's remarkably libidinous.
She cries when you have sex with her.
Her ass looks like two bowling balls that are best friends hanging out with each other at a party.
Everything else about her is perfect.
Her skin feels like touching porcelain.
She is absolutely flawless and a hilarious MIT grad who can juggle.
That's how I feel telling you how you can hold your awesome handgun.
I don't even know what kind of handguns there are.
There's the skinny flat one.
I think that's called a revolver.
There's the thing that you play Russian Roulette with that you spin.
What's that?
Like a 38?
Is that the kind with the barrel?
Are there double-barreled ones that you can get?
Well, whatever they are, these guys will customize them because they got this fancy plastic that can mold perfectly.
And apparently, Fatty McGee's have a little bit more trouble carrying their concealed carry because they don't have that nice little surfer thing that you have in your pelvis.
You know, sexy guys like to wear their surf shorts low and they have those little dips that make the ladies moist.
Us fatties don't have that.
And this adjustable cant and adjustable ride Allows for that.
So, God, I'm getting my concealed carry, at least for the burbs.
And then... I'm never going to give up trying to get a concealed carry.
Never.
It must feel so... I mean, it feels great walking down the... the street.
Not street, but walking through the woods with a gun.
But my gun weighs a hundred pounds.
I'm exaggerating.
But just, like, sitting in a bar...
With, like, Anthony does, where he's got his gun on his ribcage, just sitting there underneath a Hawaiian shirt, and just knowing that if any shit goes down, I can shoot the bad guy in the head.
And I've noticed, by the way, liberals often criticize conservatives and gun lovers for that.
They go, these guys have fantasies about a home invasion, or shooting someone in the face, shooting some criminal.
I was thinking the other day, yeah?
What's the matter with that?
That's a cool fantasy.
I want to shoot a bad guy.
How is that sick and depraved?
I don't want to murder some guy walking down the street with his dog, just pop him in the head, but I want to save lives.
If someone was going to shoot up a Taco Bell and I shot him before he shot everyone, that would feel really cool, would it not?
No, but you killed a man.
Sort of.
I mean, I killed an animal.
I killed a murderer.
I don't agree with these people who say the death penalty isn't Christian.
He's murdering people.
We're killing a murderer.
We're saving lives.
That's good.
Guns save millions of lives.
Millions of crimes are prevented by people thinking you have a gun.
Anyway, there I go, making it fucking political again.
That's the way it always goes.
The point of this show was to just choose a random weirdo I knew 17 years ago and talk about how going out and meeting people and seeing all the weird shit in New York makes me so happy I'm alive.
I'm so lucky.
And speaking of pulling the plug on someone, if I can't wipe my own ass, do not pull the plug.
I don't care if I'm a fucking brain in a jar with one eye.
If I can communicate and do Morse code through winking my one eye, my one-eyed trouser snake, I want to stay alive, because it seems like every year I realize there's a whole other America I didn't know existed.
Oh, by the way, a great book on that is called Almost Heaven, I believe.
Actually, let's look it up.
Almost Heaven.
I'm going to end the show with this.
I'm sorry to not be organized, but there's an amazing book And it's all about all the weird Americas you don't know about.
There it is!
I got it.
Almost Heaven by Martin Fletcher.
Worst named book ever.
Should be called Weird Places in America.
But what this guy did was, and it's sort of the theme of this...
This podcast, you really gotta get this book.
He's a good writer, Martin Fletcher, and he really, he does what I call immersionism, like when Barbara Ehrenreich became poor for that book Nickel and Dimed.
He just travels around America and finds these weird little scenes, like a town where they speak German all the time, or a town that's just basically Brazilian.
They play lacrosse, they speak Brazilian, all the signs are in Brazilian.
He finds some little island in the Northeast that's booze-free.
All the fishermen, they go there and they drink Coca-Cola in these bars, and they all have a weird fucking English accent, because it's so sort of frozen in time.
He goes all across America finding these weird scenes that you can't believe are in America.
It's a really fun read.
Great for the toilet.
And speaking of which, I have to go pee.
So please check out wethepeopleholsters.com forward slash Gavin.
Please go to CRTV.com and check out my shows, Get Off My Lawn and CRTV Tonight with Gavin McInnes.
We've got one airing this Friday.
Oh shoot!
I started this show with a Friday song thinking it's Friday.
My brain is a piece of shit these days.
Last Friday, I went into the studio in New York, showed up in a suit, and I'm like, where the fuck are you, Dave?
And he goes, we don't do a show on Fridays, dumbass.
