My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (59 page)

Naturally, I haven’t factored into the equation how the crazy dude is also a fucking geyser of petro-dollars. Maybe it’s a crazy dude on the subway that nobody wants to sit near who needs to be policed... who’s holding pockets full of winning rub-off tickets. And not just the free ticket rub-offs either; we’re talking $10,000-a-pop winning rub-off tickets. And his pockets are
bulging
with them, too. And the transit cop’s boss is like “Watch that nut-bar and make sure he doesn’t kill anyone on the train...” but his
real
agenda is to secure all those winning rub-off tickets for himself.

And meanwhile, in the midst of all this, said crazy dude on the subway who’s stuffed to the gills with winning rub-off lottery tickets is building a suitcase bomb that’ll take out a large section of the train, if not the
whole
fucking thing at once.

This is why I don’t teach civics or social studies.

I don’t know. It’s just wacky over there in the Middle East. And you don’t need Nostradamus to figure out the end of the world is gonna have something to do with that region. For years, this country was deeply afraid of the Russians. Now, the Middle East makes Khrushchev beating his shoe on a podium and telling the US “We will bury you!” seem as threatening as Elmer Fudd during wabbit season.

I mean, back during the Cold War, the two “Super Powers” held one another in check with the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction; neither side would rush into battle, because neither side saw the benefit in being dead. But with Middle Eastern extremists, you have an adversary who couldn’t give a fuck about M.A.D., so long as the decadence of the west is wiped out (not to mention all western inhabitants).

Even in their most cartoonish, Rambo-like villainy, the “Commies” still seemed human; and that, I believe, had a lot to do with their investment in this world. As a Godless bunch, they didn’t look to an afterlife for justice/reward; it was all about right here, right now. Now, the US is at odds with a bunch of religious zealots who couldn’t give a fuck about the present, beyond making sure we’re not in it for very long. They look to the next life, where shit’s gotta be better than it is for them in the here and now. And when you read about what life over there is like, who can blame them? I, too, would be looking to run to Jesus (or Allah) if my world was as full of unrest, poverty, hatred and fear as their world seems to be. Fuck life, at that point — “Let’s get busy dying; anything’s gotta be better than this horse-shit existence.”

I’ve got no answers, and I’m too terrified to even ask the questions. And even if I was equipped with all the facts, who am I to tell a motherfucker how to run their kitchen? Even if their kitchen threatens to blow up mine? All I know how to do is make movies (and some would say I can barely do that), so I should just shut my mouth and jot down some dopey shit for Jay and Silent Bob to do next.

Whoever said “May you live in interesting times” needs a smack in the mouth. I’d prefer shit to be PBS-boring over the current geo-political climate any day.

Me and my big mouth

Saturday 25 March 2006 @ 7:21 a.m.

At the UPenn gig the other night, I told a fifteen minute story that detailed Jason Mewes’s amazing journey from severe heroin abuse to sobriety, giving the man props for coming up on his third anniversary of being completely clean (April 6th) — a stellar accomplishment that should serve as inspiration for anyone looking to kick any monkey off their back. It’s an anecdote filled with tons of love and pride for my boy, which culminates with a conversation Mewes and I had two and a half years ago about what he noticed the big differences were between life on drugs and now off.

And in the age of internet gossip, that heroic tale of a guy who was able to beat his demons has been reduced to a brief snippet on
thesuperficial.com
about Mewes’s “romp” with a celebutante from a reality TV show whose name we can’t print here, lest we get sued (but dig deep enough online and you’ll figure out who I’m talking about).

It’s not like I haven’t told this story at other college gigs over the last few years, but for some reason, it’s now news. I got an email from someone at the
NY Daily News
regarding not just this bit, but another story that came from a question that night regarding my enmity for Reese Witherspoon (which is pretty well-covered in the book
Silent Bob Speaks
) that they want to run on Monday. This was my response...

“It’s one thing to tell that tale out of school at a college Q&A (in the context of a far larger, longer story about Mewes’s hard journey from heroin abuse to three years of total sobriety), and a completely different thing to just pull the stuff about bathroom sex and run it in a gossip column. So unless you’re gonna
run the whole, unedited transcript of me talking about how amazing it was for Mewes to get clean (a fifteen minute oral story), I’d rather you not include just that bathroom sex snippet, which makes it all seem like unsavory locker-room chit-chat.”

Naturally, I’m not expecting they’ll keep the context. Sadly, it’s not news that Jay — with nearly both feet in the grave at the lowest point in his life — was able to single-handedly pull himself out of the self-made hell of drug addiction and work his way back to the land of the living, clean and sober; what’s news is that he had sex in a bathroom stall with a dork from a reality show.

*sigh*

Slow News Day

Monday 27 March 2006 @ 3:31 p.m.

Much ado about nothing, over some shit I said in the UPenn Q&A...

All stemming from the same poorly-worded story. All insisting I’m still harping on Reese when it was in response to a question. All treating it like it’s new info, when the Reese story alone’s been around for five years, online, and in print...

Lots of folks in talk-backs teeing off on me as being irrelevant or unfunny, which other cats in the real world, not cyber-snipers, apparently disagree with. The great irony is, the talk-back people on the blog/gossip sites are taking me to task for being a gossip. Kettle, I call thee black.

Also, I’m being called “egocentric”. Anyone who’s ever seen the
Evening With Kevin Smith
DVD knows how very little ego I have, as I spend far more time blasting myself than other people.

Lots of sound and fury signifying nothing. The sun still rises and sets, I’ve still got a job,
Clerks II
is still coming out on August 18th, at which point some folks will go see it, some folks won’t, some will dig it, and some will hate on it.

Same as it ever was.

Me and My Shadow, Pt. 1

Tuesday 28 March 2006 @ 4:00 p.m.

Since the gossip sites have seen fit to print only the portion of the Jason Mewes story I told at UPenn (that portion being what said sites seem to feel is the only interesting aspect of Mewes’s life), I figured why not put the whole tale of Jason’s battle with drug addiction into print here, where folks can get a better idea of who Jason truly is and maybe why he fell victim to heroin abuse in the first place. I’m thinking it’s gonna be at least a four-parter, and I’m hoping to wrap it up by April 6th, the day Mewes celebrates his “sober birthday”, when Jay will mark his third straight year of living completely drug and alcohol free.

At the least, it’s a more comprehensive profile of a guy who’s accomplished a lot more than celebrity bathroom sex; at the most, it’s an ode to a very unlikely hero of mine and a man I love (in a decidedly hetero way).

Enjoy.

On a mid-December early morn, circa 2003, on the balcony of my house in the Hollywood Hills, Jason Mewes, my friend of seventeen years and co-star in five films at that point, dropped a bomb that should’ve repulsed the shit out of me, or at the very least, made me vomit a little in my mouth.

“Last night, at the Spider Club, ****** ****** dragged me into the bathroom and fucked me.”

And yet, instead of retching, I found myself battling another type of growing lump in my throat — the kind induced by watching your child enter the world, or the last ten minutes of
Field of Dreams
. I was suppressing tearful joy, momentarily setting aside the compulsion to smack Jason upside the head, hollering “Don’t fuck the vapid, dammit!” due to the fact that I was so insanely proud of how far the boy had come and relieved that we were having this conversation at all.

See, for years, Jason had had what seemed like an unbeatable, untreatable addiction to, alternately, heroin and oxycontin. It was a heartbreaking, trying and puzzling five-year stretch for me, so I can’t imagine how bad it was for him (well, that’s not entirely true. Mewes would periodically flash self-awareness with statements like “If I’m still like this when I turn thirty, I should probably kill myself.”..

Those who’ve never struggled with drug dependency themselves, or loved anybody who has, will often dismiss the props more empathetic folks extend to the ex-junkie with caustic bon mots along the lines of “So he/she quit drugs? Big deal. Why celebrate someone for finally exhibiting common sense? They didn’t have to get hooked in the first place. It’s not like someone held a gun to their head and told them to try drugs.” Oftentimes, these are the same people who think being gay is a choice, too.

But in the case of drug abusers, not every addict has the luxury of choosing a glamorous existence of despair, lies, theft and self-loathing. Some people are born genetically predisposed to chasing the dragon.

Like Mewes.

Born the son of a heroin abuser, Mewes spent most of his childhood raised by an aunt while his mother fed her jones or spent years in jail. She wasn’t above stealing credit cards from neighborhood mailboxes, which resulted in the only Christmas gift of his childhood Jason recalls receiving from his mother: a new bike. The bike came in handy when, during a brief period of her smack-addled fifty years, his mom operated as a drug dealer, using an oblivious nine year old Jason as a bag-man who delivered drugs to locals his mother didn’t trust enough to deal with herself.

With no father on the scene (to this day, Jason still doesn’t know who his dad is), the story of young Mewes plays out in an almost depraved Dickensian fashion. The nights when his mom wanted to party, she’d drop him and his sister off at the houses of total strangers. The origins of Jay’s fear of confined spaces can be traced back to said drop-offs when, shortly after his mother lit off for brown-stone pastures, he and his sister would be locked in a closet for safekeeping.

And yet, given the astounding level of parental neglect, Mewes somehow managed to grow up to be a good, if somewhat offbeat, kid — the guy with the million-dollar heart (and, sometimes, a nickel fucking head). It was that combo that made me fall in hetero love with him seventeen years ago, though it was far from love at first sight.

Highlands, the town we’re both from, isn’t a sprawling metropolis by any stretch of the imagination. Classified as a borough, Highlands is primarily a sea-farming town, with clamming as its largest industry. Roughly one square mile in length, it was rumored that the town had once made the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most bars in the shortest distance. However, the decade-old addition of a ferry into the financial district of across-the-river Manhattan has since sent real estate in Highlands sky-rocketing to dizzying heights: my childhood home — a small, three bedroom ranch-style house in the once inexpensive downtown area, purchased in the late sixties for $14,000 and sold by my parents in 1998 for $90,000 — is again up for sale, this time with an asking price north of $300,000. The waterfront condos that’ve sprung up around town like coffee bars in the last ten years, start at easily over half a mil.

But back in the day, all men (and women) were not as equal, as the pre-ferry Highlands was distinctly separated into two classes: the more affluent uptown and the lower income downtown. The latter was the home to a young Smith and Mewes, separated by about two blocks. While I hadn’t really known Mewes growing up, I’d known of him: locals referred to the boy as “That Mewes kid”.
You’d hear stuff like “There’s that Mewes kid. He broke the window at Beedles’ Pharmacy.” Or “There’s that Mewes kid. I heard he fucked a dog once.” Neither, of course, were true, but that was Mewes in the eighties: a sonic boom with dirt on it, often at the epicenter of any number of suburban legends.

I was formally introduced to Jason by my friends Walter Flanagan and Bryan Johnson, shortly after completing a year-long stint as a latch-key kid after school activity director (ie I oversaw many games of kickball, foosball and billiards from 3 p.m. to 6) at the Bob Wilson Memorial Recreation Center — a building named in memory of the town’s greatest celebrity, the former mayor who moonlighted as a prop man in the movie biz while managing to pick up a few bit parts along the way (the cameraman on the soap opera in
Tootsie
who passes out when Dustin Hoffman finally reveals himself, live and on-air, to be a man? That was Bob Wilson). After I’d moved on from the Rec Center, Bry and Walt began regaling me with tales of Jason Mewes, who they’d started hanging out with, after weeks of digging on his Rec-related monkeyshines. On our way to Devils’ games or mall trips, Bry and Walt would lavish the highest of praise on the absent Mewes with “Isn’t he fucked up?”

It was only a matter of time, I knew, before he’d be incorporated into our group — a group that I’d only recently joined myself. On a Saturday trip to a NY comic book show, Bry and Walt sprung the young Mewes on me, insisting we bring the fellow comics enthusiast (who owned no comics) with us to the city.

“You’re serious?” I asked, giving Mewes the once-over. “He’s a kid. You want me to transport a minor over state lines in my car? No way.”

Mewes, my junior by four years and Walt and Bry’s junior by six, was still a high school student at this point — something my compatriots and I hadn’t been in years. But that wasn’t nearly as threatening to me as the addition of a fourth party into our merry band. I’d been hanging with Walt and Bry for roughly a year, so I was the new funny guy. I knew that bringing on a newer, funnier guy meant relegating my cachet to the backseat.