My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (60 page)

And the backseat was, indeed, where I’d wound up, as Bry trumped my refusal to let Mewes into my car by opting to drive his Firebird into the city instead, thus accommodating the minor a golden ticket into our clan. Worse still, Mewes had screamed “Shotgun!” thus usurping my hallowed front seat position. For the duration of the hour-long trek into mid-town Manhattan, I was forced to listen to my two friends cackling at Mewes’s braying, as he punctuated every outlandish comment with “NEH!” — a post-script that essentially meant “I’m kidding.” (Hence, the ass-kicking-inducing declaration “I fucked your mom last night!” was rendered benign, so long as it was quickly followed with the requisite “NEH!”. Beneath the guffaws of Bry and Walt, I could be heard muttering, arms crossed, “He ain’t so funny.”

Mewes became a constant fourth wheel in our triumvirate. If we went ice-skating, Mewes came along. If we went to the mall, Mewes was in tow. Late night trips to the Marina Diner? Mewes was not only there too, but always in need of a few bucks for fries. And through it all, I always regarded the kid as an interloper. My conversations were invariably directed at Bry and Walt, while Mewes listened in, ever sporting a puzzled look at the topic of conversation until he saw the opportunity to offer up some sort of outlandish what-if scenario that featured him fucking something or someone inappropriate nearby, topping it all off with a resounding “NEH!”

The truly noteworthy aspect of any of these hang sessions was the complete and total absence of booze or drugs. I’d fallen out with my former high school crew over the introduction of mandatory weekend keggers into our social agenda, distressed by the fact that hours of pre-star-69 crank calls had been replaced by obsessive quests to lay our hands on beers. Bry and Walt offered sober-living fun — not by virtue of any desire to lead clean, drug-free lives; simply because none of us were particularly fond of getting loaded. The addition of Mewes didn’t change that at all, as a young Jason declared himself “straight-edge”, which he defined as “no booze, no drugs, no chicks”. We’d tried to explain to him many times that a straight-edge life wasn’t defined by the absence of pussy, but a then-girl-shy Mewes opted to include it into his program anyway, to relieve himself of the pressure of trying to score. The vast amount of jerking off he’d engaged in on a daily basis, as related to me, Walt and Bry regularly and in vast detail, whether we wanted to hear about it or not, probably would’ve precluded any shot he might have had left over to offer potential girlfriends anyway.

But as Bry and Walt became less interested in Mewes and more interested in their respective chicks, the then-single me would often answer the doorbell at my house to find Mewes standing outside.

“What’s up?” I’d ask.

“What’re we doing today?” he’d anxiously inquire.

“Look, man — we’re not friends,” I’d tell him. “You’re friends with my friends. We don’t hang out together, you and I. We hang out as a group with Bry and Walt. Get it?”

“Right, right...” Mewes would respond, seeming to understand, then quickly add “So what’re we doing today?”

It was in this fashion that I sort of reluctantly inherited Mewes. And while I had volumes in common with Bry and Walt, on the surface, Mewes and I were about as different as could possibly be. Without Bry and Walt around, I bristled at his what-if scenarios. I’d spend double or triple time in a conversation with the kid, as I’d have to define over fifty percent of the words I used for him. And all the while, I remained resistant to his charms.

Until that day at the Rec Center.

Walt and I had just come back from our weekly new comics run, and were quietly sitting in the Rec library, bagging and boarding our books. The kids hadn’t gotten out of school yet, so it was deaf-child silent in the building, save the metal rantings of King Diamond emanating on low volume from a nearby boom-box. Then, suddenly, the stillness was shattered, as a sent-home-from-school-early Mewes kicked the Rec door open, marched into the building Groucho Marx style, and proceeded to fellate everything somewhat phallic in the room.

Walt and I watched with wonder as Mewes grabbed a pool cue and pretended to suck it off. Losing interest, he ran up to the phone on the front desk, grabbed the receiver from the cradle, and pretended to suck that off. He grabbed the flag pole and did the same. He grabbed a whiffle ball bat and did the same. This went on for twenty minutes, with seemingly no regard for our presence whatsoever. He never looked at us as if to say “Are you seeing this shit?” He never looked at us at all. He didn’t seem to care that we were even there. This wasn’t a show for our benefit. It was as if he’d been walking around Highlands moments earlier, took a gander at his watch, and was like “Wow — it’s two o’clock. I’d better get down to the Rec and suck everything off.” The kid had an agenda, and he was actively fulfilling it.

It was when he finally reached the Rec’s only video game — a standard Asteroids kiosk that time had forgotten — that he finally paused. Studying it momentarily and finding nothing dick-like to pretend to suck off, he seemed stymied. There was no joystick to give him purchase; just a roller ball and a fire button. Walt and I watched with great curiosity, waiting to see how he’d overcome this unforeseen obstacle.

After what felt like five minutes, Mewes shrugged, bent down to the game controls, and started working the roller ball like it was a clit — his tongue darting in and out of his mouth, lapping at the orb as he spun it with his finger.

That’s when I finally caved and fell completely in love with Jason Mewes. I thought “This kid’s a comic genius. And if nothing else, he knows how to suck a dick. So if I ever get really bored hanging out with him, at least there’s always that to fall back on.”

From then on, Mewes and I became inseparable. We were a very unlikely pair, but we somehow found common ground. He became my adopted son of sorts, and I wound up being his biggest advocate in our little group, bringing him into our weekend street hockey games (for which I had to buy him roller blades) or taking him with us to the movies (for which I’d have to buy his tickets).

Bry, Walt and I made it our mission in life to get him laid, as Mewes — the most uninhibited, say-anything pottiest of potty mouths — would clam up around girls. At one party, we hooked him up with a chick who dragged him into the bathroom to make out, while we waited outside the door for news that he’d finally busted his cherry. Through the door, we heard stuff like “That’s not it” and “Eww, gimme some toilet paper.” Later, we’d learn he didn’t make it into paradise before going off like a broken hydrant against her hip.

For years, Jason would crack me up with his weird observations and impromptu comedic sketches. Even though the dude never did the high school plays or showed any interest in theater or acting, I’d constantly commend him with “Someone should put you in a movie, man.”

One day, I decided that I’d be that someone, when I finally left Highlands for a brief stint at the Vancouver Film School. I was gone for only six months before dropping out and heading back home, where I discovered the once-straight-edge Mewes, in my absence, had become a weekend warrior: booze, weed, and chicks were the order of the day for him, as he racked up bed-post notches that left my own in the dust. He’d changed somewhat, with the addition of blueberry schnapps and dime-bags, but was still very much the same loveable nut-bar regardless: the kind of guy who, after knowing you for five minutes, would say things like “It’s warm in here, isn’t it?” and then pull his cock out.

It was that Jason Mewes who I’d co-opted for the Jay character in
Clerks
, the script I’d written shortly after dropping out of film school. The role was written to Mewes’s strengths, so much so that his complete inexperience in acting wouldn’t be a hindrance. The part was peppered with his colloquialisms and catchphrases, written to Jason’s intonations and verbal patois. And yet, after reading the script, Mewes first words were “I don’t know if I can do this, man.”

“Why not? It’s just you on a page.”

“Yeah, but why would I say something like ‘Neh’?”

“I don’t know. Why DO you say something like ‘Neh’?”

“I do?”

I spent a month teaching Jay how to be Jay, during which time I accepted the fact that I’d never be able to pull off the role of Randal — the part I’d written for myself — and concentrated on finding something else for me to do in the flick, on camera. Since the part didn’t require the memorization of any lines, I opted to slip into the role of Jay’s quiet muscle, figuring Mewes and I would at least look visually interesting standing beside one another (him wiry and full of energy, me not). And together, dressed in costumes not at all unlike what we normally wore at the time, we became Jay and Silent Bob, the neighborhood drug dealers.

The great irony, of course, is that it’d be drugs that would one day not only threaten the continuation of Jay and Silent Bob, but also Jason’s life.

Me and My Shadow, Pt. 2

Wednesday 29 March 2006 @ 3:54 p.m.

The great irony of the
Clerks
theatrical release is that very little attention was given to Jay and Silent Bob in the profile pieces or reviews. Aside from identifying me as the director who also played a small role in the film, the arrival of the two characters — characters I’d not only forever be most closely identified by, but who’d go on to feature prominently in all my subsequent flicks, right up to the who’d’ve-thunk-it lengths of the pair actually headlining their own movie seven years later — went largely unheralded. To wit, the only notice Jason Mewes received for his performance in
Clerks
while the flick was still in theaters came from a small review in
People
magazine, in which the author wrote “You want to find the rock he crawled out from under and make sure there’s no more like him under it.”

So when I opted to include the stoner duo in
Mallrats
a year later, it wasn’t to capitalize on their insane popularity. For all we knew, there was none. Popping Jay and Silent Bob into
Rats
was simply a matter of sating my desire to put Jason on film again, and solely because he always made me laugh.

As far as the studio was concerned, however, I stood alone. The execs at Universal were dead set against giving Jason the part of Jay, so much so that they insisted we bring alternate Jay choices to the final round of casting sessions. When both Seth Green and Breckin Myer asked me why they were being considered for the part at all when Jason Mewes was so, as they put it, “genius” in
Clerks
, I told them I was as puzzled as they were. Here was a role that wouldn’t have ever existed without Jason Mewes, and yet Jason Mewes was far from the frontrunner, inasmuch as the studio folks were concerned.

Still, Mewes worked his ass off throughout the auditioning process, and when I made the final, big push for him, Universal relented and said I could cast him with the following conditions:

1) Unlike the other cast members, he wouldn’t be flown out to Minnesota on
the studio’s dime.

2) Unlike the other cast members, he wouldn’t be put up in his own hotel room during rehearsals. As a result, he would live in my room during his trial period.

3) Unlike the other cast members, he wouldn’t be paid for the month-long rehearsal run in Minnesota.

4) If after his first day of shooting dailies were reviewed by the studio and deemed unworthy of the film (a film, mind you, called fucking
Mallrats
), Jason was to be shit-canned and immediately replaced with Seth Green.

Never having made a studio feature before, I assumed this was somewhat normal. Mercifully, so did Mewes.

In one of the few turn-of-events that I can ever truly define as poetic justice, the same suits who were so down on Jason’s casting as Jay wound up being so over-the-top up with him after his first full week of dailies, that not only were they sending kudos back from LA, they also began building the marketing plan around his character and the catch-phrase “snootchie bootchies”.

How Mewes arrived at “snootchie bootchies”, a nonsensical utterance of which he is the sole author, is a fascinating study in linguistics. Whenever Mewes used to say something borderline insulting that might warrant an ass-kicking from the short-fused or the ill-tempered, he would immediately follow it with the exclamation “NEH!” as if to quickly editorialize the objectionable declaration in question and render it null and void. For example “I felched your mom’s ass last night after I cocked her in the doody-hole” when punctuated with “NEH!” became less inflammatory to the recipient, because the “NEH!” communicated the caveat “I’m kidding. Don’t hit me.” But as with all living things, only evolution would insure its survival over time, and “Neh” soon gave way to “Nootch” as in “I felched your Mom’s ass last night after I cocked her in the doody-hole. NOOTCH!” “Nootch” hung on as long as it could, until it gave way to “Snootch!” “Snootch” later birthed “Snootch to the nootch” which then begat “Snootchie nootchies”, which in turn led to the now-legendary-in-some-circles
Mallrats
exclamatory “SNOOTCHIE BOOTCHIES!” There’s nothing quite like watching language grow before your very eyes. An etymologist could have a field day with Mewesian slang.

And Mewes had a field day on
Mallrats
. He very quickly became the most beloved (and most frequently fucked) person on set. About four weeks in on the shoot,
Rolling Stone
magazine finally gave Jason long-overdue
Clerks
props in an article entitled ‘Five Minute Oscars’, in which the author listed the best performances in movies that year by people with the least amount of screen time. Mewes’s Jay was among the honorees, and in an expression of cast and crew pride, the piece was hung on the back of the office door for all to see.

It was only at the single best theatrical screening
Mallrats
would ever boast — the 1995 San Diego Comic-Con screening — that we learned how deep an impression Jay and Silent Bob had actually made in
Clerks
. A true art-house release, during the film’s theatrical life it never played on much more than fifty screens at once, which meant reviews in high-brow, big city papers and some national magazines only. And since, with the exception of the aforementioned
People
blurb, none of those reviews ever singled out Jay and Silent Bob, not to mention the fact that the internet hadn’t taken off as it would two years later, we all assumed that nobody gave two tin shits about the stoner duo.