San Francisco Blog

Former Jackass member, editor for Big Brother, and writer for Vice and Bizarre – Chris Nieratko talks about his new book Skinema, Raymond Carver and Dave Eggers’ money back guarantee.

By David Downs, Web Music Editor, Village Voice Media

Fans of skateboarding, porn, drugs and-or riveting prose might want to catch author Chris Nieratko during his national summer book tour supporting Vice Books’ debut outing – Skinema. The book basically chronicles Nieratko’s life-long journey to brink of self-destruction and back through the format of a few hundred, 300-word long porn reviews.

“She Male Enslaved 2” ruminates on pre-Guliani Times Square. “Fuck the Teacher” explains how Chris’ first pre-nuptial fight got started over air-conditioning. It’s shit-your-pants-laughing funny, unpretentious and not a little touching.

In this extended interview, Nieratko talks about the dad that broke his nose, breaking his middle school teacher’s neck, fucking tattooed strippers in the ass, how Raymond Carver became his lodestar and how his now-wife Chrissie rescued him from himself. Interview Date: Monday,June 25, 2007

Doing press interviews, do you find that reporters have read the book?
Some have read the book, but actually for the most part um no. I get to lie about what’s in the book, which is great, because I love disinformation.

The guy on the Mancow show will only interview me if I talk exclusively aboutJackass. So my involvement was kind of fringe on that show, but I don’t mind making up facts. The one that I’m going to go with was actually that I was supposed to be Johnny Knoxville but a focus group found me too ugly. On a side note, I actually have a costume closet and one of my all-time favorites is a cow. It’s got these huge-ass utters. I have some photos of ‘bring a relative day’ for my six year old nephew where I wore the cow costume with a Superman S in the center of it.

What did you do at Bring a Relative to Class Day?
I read a book. I do remember they were very pinchy with the utters. They were going back to the nip. They were very excited about it, though. They really did hang on my every word. I talked about life on the farm. They asked what was up with the “S” and I explained how I was the supercow police over the other cows.

After that day, the teacher told my brother, ‘Yeah, your brother basically changed all these kids from wanting to grow up to be firemen and policemen to wanting to be cows.”

Now that you’re a published author and have seen the world, what would you tell kids about how to conduct themselves? Drop out of school? Do drugs? Fuck it?
It really depends on what age they are. For ages 5 to 11 I’d tell them, ‘Do all the drugs now, so you’ve already got it out your system so you can be productive. The teenage years are really wasted that way.'

How are you getting around? Do you have a tour van? Does Vice hook you up?
I’m flying thanks to my good friends at Red Bull. I’ve been doing a lot of consultation work for them – a bunch of skating events over the past four years – we’ve developed a little bit of a crush on each other. They are good enough friends to see that no one else is going to help me. They got behind me and really helped me out with travel.

So Hotels? No crashing at friends’ places?
A little bit of both. In fancy cities I'll be getting a hotel room, perhaps meeting up with some sexy ladies of the internet and MySpace, and making with the sexy photos in my room.

So people are actually emailing in naked photos to your web site like you asked?
They are just pouring in. This is the day and age when girls want to be rated more than ever. I’ve gotten more than half a dozen and that’s seven more than I expected. If I was a girl I would not be sending these photos.

When you interview people as reporter you often attack or insult them and subvert the traditional paradigm of the vanilla review. How do you intend to spice up the normally staid book tour appearance?
I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. I did something in Brooklyn. They had me on a 20 foot lift over 300 people . But I’m afraid of heights. I couldn’t get out of that fucking seat quick enough.
Philly I did a little thing -- speed befriending. I took each person by the hand and told them a story some of which was spawned off what they did, for each person on their own, person to person. Tomorrow at Quimby I got a slideshow. The set up depends.

You’ve said people aren’t responding to your autographs of penises.
Yeah,they say draw something in my book and when I do they say, 'Can you draw something different?'

How’s the turnout been?
The first one had like 300 people and it said ‘free beer’ in large font on the ad. The last one was a lot smaller, the words 'free beer' were maybe like 12 point type. Not as big a turnout but an equal of amount of sales.

Where you hitting up?
I’m doing some bookstores and skateshops -- the reason being you wouldn’t be even been talking to me right now if it wasn’t for my career in skateboard journalism. They helped me get to this point where I own two skate shops in Jersey.

Congrats on opening your second one, how are they doing?
I’ve seen shops come and go, but they’re doing fantastic. We just opened the second one right in New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University – of nappy headed hos and Don Imus fame.

How much are your blanks [slang for a cheap, graphic-free skateboard deck]?
We don’t sell blanks. I’ve always thought blanks were gay, not even the good gay. I just always was attracted to skateboard graphics for the skulls and the blood or whatever the picture was. To walk into a store and not to see a kid’s face light up from a picture because, well, it’s cheaper for blanks doesn’t make sense. The air conditioning gets put on on high thanks to the Nike skateboarding program. They made it so we can open two stores. It’s been four years. We sell anything that’s true to skating. We're very competitive pricewise. We just want kids to be stoked on it. We just do a lot of stuff like demos all the time. We remember the memories that people created for us by having them for younger kids. We’re in the middle of Sayreville, New Jersey, home of Bon Jovi, yet it’s definitely a destination location. People are driving an hour north or south bypassing numerous malls to come see us. That’s why we’re stopping by Deluxe stores in SF, top brands Crooked, Real and Antihero are all SF. They do amazing for us and we're going be there for them.

Who’s going to show up, the skinny Chris or the fat Chris?
The thinner, balding Chris. I’m stressed out. I’ve been trying to knock my wife up, that’s really half of it. She’s meeting me in Hawaii and there's a chance she might be pregnant right now. I’m considering asking her to have an abortion, because I really don’t want to go to Hawaii with a pregnant chick. Who am I going to drink with?

How old are you?
I’d say between 25-35 is my ballpark. It’s a pro skateboarder lie like a baseballer’s lie. In skateboarding or major league baseball you have to kind of ballpark your age to always be young enough to be considered competitive.

If you look at the arc of the book, it seems like you have this really crazy younger period and them you sort of mellow. What caused that change? Did you hit rock bottom?
It was meeting the woman who became my wife. As many people said before, ‘it takes a strong woman to save a stupid man.’ It was her. I had no interest in getting past age of 30. I was making a bee-line to the grave -- ingesting anything, like, ‘Here, Miracle Grow.’ ‘Allright.’
She came along and suddenly there was thoughts of picket fences and children and marriage and the things that had never been felt in my head. One day I was probably doing a minimum of 30 to 50 pills a day, then cold turkey, nothing, all thanks to her – the book's a really really crazy drug self help romance novel.

How’d you meet her?
Actually in my backyard. I like telling people that she was going through my trash and boy does she love that. No, I was visiting New Jersey and one friend let me house sit at his house so I got a credit card and got a bunch of kegs to throw a party and friends of mine brought her along to party. I walked out of my house with some beers and a pitcher of sangria and saw her in the back yard. I think I dropped the glass of sangria. I just walked over to her and we were inseparable for an entire week. We never had sex. I was completely nervous. We kissed on the lips without tongue. That’s it. When I went back to California we talked on a regular basis. We had this mad cross country relationship and every month we’d meet up. But it was that first week when I said, ‘I’m going to marry you.’

Did she know about your reputation for drugs and porn and Jackass?
She didn’t know anything. One day all these people are asking me Jackass questions and she had never seen it. On a date, five girls came up to me to take pictures. I made really sad clown face then they walked away, and she was like, ‘what the fuck was that about?’

Where’d you learn how to write. Did you read a lot of Bukowski? Celine?
I grew up with no books. I was a comic book nerd. I used to love guys like Chris Claremont, Frank Miller. I didn’t get into anything in terms of any author until college. This very neurotic amazing Jesuit priest turned me onto Raymond Carver. I went bananas for him. This priest knew the etymology for every word in English. He got me into Raymond Carver and it was over, later on Bukowski, but for the majority of my life I didn’t have a reference point. I just wrote in same voice in my head and the words being put on paper aren’t much different. No fancy writing style, no spelling, no big words. If you were to check any of my college transcripts you’d see I failed writing. I fucking failed the fucking pretest for the writing classes.

So I got stuck in a writing class with the fucking football team. Here I was. I had skipped my senior year of high school. I was 17 years old with these big strapping fellas that were just doing all they could, and to hear them talk and try to express themselves … Father McCarty, saw that I was bored out of my mind, but he also saw something else there and gave me Raymond Carver.

So who do you read now?
The one rule that I live and die by, ‘If I didn’t write it, I don’t read it.’ I have got this thing about me where it's weird. Absorption. If I were to read something and then I went to write about anything, a little bit of that person I read comes through. My voice is what I live with, it's who I surround myself with. Most of my friends aren’t college grads, they are union workers, electricians, carpenters, people I grew up with. People I’ve known for 25 more years. We can all laugh at the same jokes. God bless ‘em. I try to just write to the people I know and luckily the majority of America is still salt of the earth.

Did your dad read? Where is he now?
He's dead to me. I haven't had contact with him in 20 years. I like to tell people that he died in Pearl Harbor. It’s sort of a history test. One time when I was out with a skateboard team, we were driving on Pearl Harbor Memorial Highway in Texas so I say, ‘Pull over!’ and people like are like ‘Why?’ ‘Pull over! Have some respect! Pull over!’ They’re like, ‘What’s the deal?’ I get them to pull over and I just point to the road sign and they’re like, 'What?’ ‘Fucking Pearl Harbor, man! My dad died in Pearl Harbor.’ And you want to know the raddest thing? Skateboard kids don’t go to school, and they don’t know shit about history. So they were all consoling me and I had one dude taking photos of rocks and saying, 'This is amazing. I never thought I’d go to Pearl Harbor.’ He thought Pearl Harbor was in Texas.

What does your traditional, Catholic mom think of your book and life?
The other night at a carnival at my church and former grade school, my mom was talking to a lady neighbor I hadn’t seen in 20 years and she’s like, ‘Here’s my son Chris. He writes for Red Bull.’ ... She just doesn’t know. I had interviewed the Wu-Tang clan and I got printed in Thrasher -- its big, like, so huge for me – and I’m like, ‘Hey mom check it out.’ She says, ‘Are there curse words in it? Then I don’t want to read it.’

So she would not approve?
I’m Portugese Catholic. No way. I spent K-8th grade in catholic school, then got throw out of public middle school for breaking a teacher’s neck.

That transition’s brutal.
Yeah, I was way behind with the teaching, then I was just bouncing off the fucking walls. It’s public school. People are listening to rap in the hallway.

It's like going from no leash to too long a leash.
Yeah.

What do your older brother and younger sister do?
My brother owns the Sayreville Bar and Restaurant in my hometown. My sister works for a pharmaceutical company. We’re all within few miles of each other. My nephews are amazing.

What will your next book be?
A parenting guide for drug addict parents or formerly drug addicted parents -- a sort of Parenting For Retards with nothing but bad advice. It started with my friend’s web site -- true mom confessions. People just go on the site and say, ‘I hate my fucking husband when he won’t get off the fucking couch.’ They asked me to come on and talk about trying to get my wife pregnant. There’s one story on there about a woman who took her daughter to get her hearing checked. The doctor said her hearing is fine, and the mom said, ‘then how come she doesn’t listen to me?’ Cute joke. So I went on and said ‘I’ve found that my nephew doesn’t listen but I figured out way a fool proof way for your child to always listen to you. At a very young age, when they wake up in morning or when they ask for help, backhand them. Continue to do this every day. Every time you address them, you backhand them. And by the time you enter a room at age 15, they will pay attention.’ Here were these ladies with kids and it’s just total crickets.

Did your mom use the belt?
Oh, you bet. She would spank us, but my father beat the hell out of all of us brutally. He broke my nose like four times.

Christ, I’m sorry to hear that. There’s a fair amount of urges to fight in the book. Maybe you took away some your Dad’s habits?

Yeah, well. [Silence.]

So how’s work these days, what’s keeping you busy?
Writing little bit for Vice, doing Bizarre in London, the majority of stuff in the book is from there. I'm working on genre of film -- the AIDS comedy. You can’t give me enough work. I’m up at six and don’t go to sleep until past midnight.

You talk a lot about getting anal in the book. What are the top three indicators of that proclivity?
Tattoos is clear indicator that a girl is dirty. With tattoos, generally 99 percent of them are interested in anal sex, no problem. My research has definitely shown tattoo equals anal. If they’re homeless on street, chances are they’re game, and if they’re superwasted. Alcohol, again, is the social duct tape.

What went into the book? What got left out?
There was a lot left out of the book. I’ve been writing these things for ten years inVice once a month and in London there five times a month -- for ten years. We compiled them and I took them on our honeymoon and if didn’t make me laugh the second time around I cut it. The thing is -- this was the first time around I’ve read some of them, ‘cus I write it and chuck it and I utterly did not remember many of the things that happened to me, or even writing them. I used to sleep at my office in the Larry Flynt building, come back wasted, turn on the computer and just file.

Going through and looking at photos of me arm in arm with all the guys in Metallica or me trying to kiss Darryl Hannah, I’m like, ‘When the fuck did I meet these people?’ I truly was blacked out for a good spell in my life. I was at this party a while back when I met this girl and she looks at me, she makes eye contact, then she just fully turns her body away toward her husband and just blanks me. I realize I haven’t seen her since I was 13 or 14, so I start drinking more and more and then I go, ‘Oh, wait a second, I bumped in to her in L.A. back ‘99, and next thing you know we were in Vegas with a friend getting more wasted and the entire ride there we were joking about getting married and we went so far as to nearly get married. I barely got out of it, got cold feet at the chapel, sort of sobered up and said ‘what am I doing? Marrying somebody who is so eager to get married she would do this’ and she felt totally jilted. She wanted it be married so bad.

So how did the book come to fruition?
I knew that they needed a book and they were obligated to a certain number of books each year. Before, Bizarre was going to put it out in London and DJ Fanatic did the photo shoot with a larger girl, all you see is my legs in front.

So Bizarre wanted to put it out and they had myself and wife over there and we talked and contracts came and went. They wanted to produce it, to be this, eh, like a fluff piece and do a thousand of them. I love those guys, but I said, ‘Small beans. Listen, I need to pave my driveway. I’m trying to knock my wife up.' Basically I had already begun collecting all the reviews myself because no matter how fucked up I got I always let them know in an email that whatever I write is mine. I own it. Wu-Tang taught me that.

So two years later Gavin McInnes told me, ‘We just signed this book deal with MTV for the second Dos and Don’t book.’ I said, ‘Do you need more books?’ He said, ‘We’re obligated.’ ‘Well, here’s one I’ve done.' It wasn’t done, but I sent them a good hundred pages of it and now they pretend like all the reviews were on Vice. On the web site it says ‘even reviews we rejected.’ They refuse to acknowledge that most of them were fromBizarre.

How important is a trademark look? And do you have one? That Hitler mustache?
That’s funny. I used to wear aviator sunglass, mirrored aviators and I wore them from 95 until maybe about 6 months ago, nonstop morning, day, night, in bed I always had the things on. It wasn’t even the cool factor, it was kind of like my little mask that I could hide behind. But as a child I had a lazy eye and since I started wearing sunglasses all the time, I stopped wearing reading glasses or wearing contacts because doing all these drugs and wearing contacts was hurting my eyes and making it difficult for me to see.

Six months ago I went to an eye doctor who said, ‘You’re going blind in your lazy left eye. You have to stop wearing sunglasses or you’ll go blind.'

Got any final thoughts for your San Francisco readers where you appear this week?
Isn’t this where Dave Eggers is from?

Yeah. He wrote a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius about founding Might Magazine in Berkeley.
Can you get a message to him?

Sure.
I wanted to tell you that if you know him -- he owes me two weeks of European vacation. I took his book with me and read it back when I was in Denmark. He owes me those weeks back.

Not a fan, huh?
I’m kind of the polar opposite of what he does. That why I feel like he owes me a vacation. I think it started out well, I could really relate to him taking care of his mother – just like the small town suburbs guy, and I was really into that, and then he became privileged. I have no pity for the rich, like, ‘Wah, my little brother. ...’ Just, like, fuck off.

He might be the nicest dude but I can’t relate to that. I come from a totally different place. My mom’s working in the same factory warehouse she’s worked at for the last 30 years. I don’t give a shit for people who don’t know who to spend their money. I’m trying to put food in my wive's mouth.

Funny you mention that because, I was talking to another writer about the difference between theBelieverHipster and theVice Hipster. I was saying it’s drugs, but maybe it’s class.
I don’t know what the Vice audience is. I don’t relate. I read something in Vice, then I go to their events and it’s all top hats and rubber galoshes and very ironic. Just, like, grow up. Get a fucking job.

Like it’s just a bunch of middle and upper class fucks slumming it.
Yeah. I’m going to sell so many books to them.

Link to Chris’s How To Find a Girl into Anal Guide

Link to Amazon.com Skinema page