Will I Ever Get My Money From Vice?
Eddie Huang's recent doc, Vice Is Broke, got me to thinking...about filthy lucre, those that steal said lucre, and whether it's legal to use rusty butter knives to redress your financial grievances.
“Well, you can take your clothes off now.”
The art director shifted uncomfortably and we huddled inside a smallish hotel room in Brussels, post an OXBOW show. Unlike every single doctor’s visit wherein I am asked to do the same thing, now I’m game. She’s interesting looking in a kind of mid-century modern Amy Winehouse way. The publications director and the photographer round out the crew.
The premise is simple: Vice magazine, the journal of note for the international urban hipster, has been full of photos of nude women so if turnaround is fair play, they intended to turn it around. So this issue of a spin off imprint would feature men in rock in the nude. Having been on stage nude several times it was both a no-brainer to ask and a no-brainer that I would consent to doing so for their publication. Besides which I’d written for Vice for years.
But swanning around the room nude, very much in my element I had had a thought. Since nothing is quite as disappointing as the nude male, excepting the erection, had any one else been photographed with an erection? Given that no one had this was then to be my mission. But first a word of warning to the publications director: if any of these make their way to the internet? I’d kill him. After all, I had kids.
“No worry,” he said. “But I’ll be leaving now.”
“What? Why?” I asked. “You’ll be missing the best part!”
“OK,” I laughed. “Now on to the erection.” I turn to the art director. “Could you please turnaround?”
“No.”
“That’s what worries me.” And he was gone, leaving me with the photographer and the art director.
“OK,” I laughed. “Now on to the erection.” I turn to the art director. “Could you please turnaround?”
“No.” She neither smiled nor laughed. Was I asking her to turn around in an excess of shyness? Or was it because I wanted a back shot? It mattered to her not at all either way so I grimly tugged my penis into a state of erection while the room waited for me to do so. Photos were taken, the magazine was published, and I never heard from any of them again.
This was the last coherent thing I ever remember doing for the empire, long arms and deep pockets of the Vice Media empire. And in some ways it was the most satisfying in that it promised the least and at the very least delivered the least.
You see, I’d seen Vice mostly next to the toilets of people of my tribe. Skateboarding cats in their late 20s who had grown out of hardcore but were still semi-interested in FTW, fucking the world. Electro-clash was its soundtrack and the founder I would come to be best acquainted with, Gavin McInnes, had a wicked wit. Best exemplified in the “Fashion Dos and Don’ts” that were a staple of every issue.
The circumstances under which he first wrote me are lost in the mists of memory and time but it came on the cusp of my first major success: a feature in the Sean Penn issue of GQ Magazine. The piece, as far as I know, was the first national piece on what then had been called NHB, or No Holds Barred, fighting. Soon to generally be called Mixed Martial Arts.
McInnes had wanted me to write something for Vice. A piece on performance enhancing drugs. I crafted a delicate treatise, and emailed it off. Versus my very last communique with McInnes from 2019, where he, through the safe distance of the Internet, called me an “unbelievable retard” for writing in another piece that he had been fired from Vice, these were love bombs.
But when I volunteered to fight the Proud Boy founder his response was swift: “yeah. Not you.”
While he appreciated my appreciation for word craft he tipped me to the Vice editorial aesthetic. Shorn of writerly touches he wanted it to read like an email to a friend. Do that, he said and by way of a threat. “Or I can do it for you.”
To paraphrase Guru from Gangstarr, wherever my Beemer goes you know that I’m driving, so yeah: if my name is on it, I gotta write it. He agreed. I toned it down but when the printed version was sent to me he had Vice-ized it. My complaints were calmed because, well, a check showed up soon thereafter and his version was not bad and totally doable going forward.
I mean Vice pieces took exactly as long as it took to write an email to a friend, so perfect.
Over the years McInnes had never failed to amuse. Me, at least. He had introduced me to Jim Goad. It was clear that he expected fireworks for what he believed would be our widely divergent world views but Goad and I maintain a friendship to this day. And in a move that in literary terms might be called foreshadowing, he challenged all of his readers to a fight.
I wrote right way. I had already had to threaten to beat my now good friend, Vice exec Andy Capper if he didn’t bring money for my most recent piece for the London Vice, and put it into my hand. Which he did, during an OXBOW show at the Underworld in Camden. So violence and Vice to me seemed always to go hand in hand. I later would also write for Vice’s UFC vertical Fightland. So…yeah.
But when I volunteered to fight the Proud Boy founder his response was swift: “yeah. Not you.” Which, given that I had literally written a book on fighting, Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking was probably a smart move. And largely why I thought the whole Proud Boy thing was a put-on, where the son of wealthy parents and he, himself, wealthy via Vice, could play act at bad ass.
This is not about that though. This is about my motherfucking money and on the occasion of Eddie Huang’s new Vice doc, Vice Is Broke, I was triggered by Vice’s corporate response to Huang’s contention, fundamentally, that they robbed him.
Now total disclosure. When I was part of the ship of fools that was OZY, as part of their annual festival, I had interviewed Huang. I found him to be affable, smart as a whip, funny and a fine gentlemen.
I also had the mixed pleasure of doing a chapter in the Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll. Their janky Punks and Skins book, Capper had told me, cost them nothing to make but he had sold so many of them, he had claimed to feel embarrassed. At the embarrassment of riches.
So the one with my chapter in it? Well, given how many bookshelves I saw sporting the Vice Guide, it seemed the world had bought the book and while my contribution was only a chapter, surely I’d get paid for it.
But in light of their bankruptcy filing last year, Vice’s response to Huang seemed…churlish at best. Criminally inept at worst.
“Eddie Huang was never an employee of Vice and has no current knowledge of the company. Like many others, he produced a television show in 2017, but it was not renewed. Any of his reporting on Vice is old news and no longer relevant news. Vice is now well into its next chapter, and the company has strategically reconfigured to meet the challenges and culture of a new media landscape.”
Shane Smith, from his mansion, I’m sure read that, smiled and maybe had an errant thought: we still got it. The Vice World News in Latin America, a desk that had unceremoniously been done dirty by Vice management, I’m sure cries very tiny tears for my financial plight after having their entire professional lives upended. As did all of the people who held years of stock options that are worthless now, or near.
But fuck that.
Every time Smith made some sort of public pronouncement for years I dogged him, like Donald Drake, with requests for my funds. I secretly wished they would never pay me so that I could continue this I enjoyed it so much. But he was eventually shunted out, unsurprisingly, for Nancy Dubuc, who was not nearly as fun to bug for cash. Vice, though, whose valuation had reached almost $6 bil at one point, had made all of its founders wealthy beyond all measure. So holding on to my scant pennies just seemed…mean spirited.
Which was, I guess the thrust of Huang’s piece. And herein lies the template and the genius of Huang’s angle of attack: we getting paid one way OR another. While I’m sure he’s banking on the bank he’ll make from his doc, my needs are much more modest: I’d be satisfied with an in-person meeting, and would forgo the actual cash owed, for…well, a happy ending?
It’s really the least they can do. And while I have no idea if a $20k handjob would be worth it, I’m more than willing to have them try. Until then…I’ll be forwarding this to Vice Media in the hopes that their bankruptcy restructuring makes me whole and restores my faith in corporate decency. And handjobs.
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