jackassworld

No, he’s not the 28th member of the extended Wu-Tang Clan, but rather the more respectable* elder of the Aghoris we met first on Wildboyz in 2004 and then again for the DVD extra features of jackass number two in 2006. What exactly is an Aghori, you ask? Well, we originally learned about this extremely radical Hindu sect while researching India on Wildboyz. It was Knate, I think, who saw them in a segment on the National Geographic Taboo series that portrayed them as these creepy cannibal outcasts that lived on the outskirts of cremation grounds. Apparently, the fundamental basis of their spiritual belief is that the worse off their existence is here on Earth then the closer they will be to the gods—Shiva, in particular—so they do all sorts of unholy crap like eating and wallowing in the ashes and/or bodies of the dead, drinking pee-pee from their penis or their friend’s penis (the more conservative prefer whiskey from de-capped skulls), living as exiles from society, and just getting all wasted and shit in the name of religion. So I guess you could say they’re like the Church of Darfology. And where one Darf is bad enough, just imagine what it’s like when you get three or four of these fuckers all congregated together…it gets a bit unwieldy, to say the least. Especially when you’re trying to make them the focus of a big-time Hollywood production.

Of course it didn’t help matters much when half of our own cast got so freaked out** by the Aghoris that they were ordered off the set by the Director and sent to their hotel rooms. Dave England stuck around solely, I think, to deliver the one line he’d been working on all day about his having “Aghoriphobia,” which he did indeed get a chance to frantically throw out after one of the Aghoris started carving up his thigh and tried to put a blood Bindi on him***. Seconds later, the same dude was peeing in a cup and shambling toward the film crew, at which point Trip Taylor called the shoot and Johnny Knoxville sauntered past the camera saying, “Welcome to the DVD extra features of jackass number two.”

* I use this term loosely, of course, because Baba did give Chris Pontius a “credit card” no more than few minutes after meeting him. No, not the kind you charge with, but rather a sly slip of the hand up an exposed butt crack.

** To be fair, this is partly our fault and the head honcho of the Indian production company we were working with. In addition to all our tales of the Aghori craze that went down on Wildboyz, Tabrez would give us a daily “Aghori” update, like how his “handlers” had to restrain a few of these “holy men” by chaining them to their beds on the train during transport. So by the time it came to actually film with the Aghoris at the end of the trip, Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy, and Wee Man wanted nothing to do with these fucktards whatsoever and responded in kind with civil disobedience. Unfortunately, this primarily left Chris and Steve-O to reprise their Wildboyz chores with a “tourist” in tow.

*** Some in the crew still dispute the validity of this act, claiming it to be a parlor trick and not the real cutting deal.

(photos by Sean Cliver; Choki Dhani, India; 2006)