My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (61 page)

However, our eyes were opened at that July screening in San Diego when, upon their first appearance on screen, the packed-house erupted in excited recognition so enthusiastically you would’ve thought Yoda had, instead, been standing in front of the pet store in the flick, in CGI form, shredding motherfuckers with dual lightsabers.
Clerks
, by this point, had found its way to home video, and it was in video stores across America where the film had been finally discovered by its true audience: people not much different than the filmmakers themselves. And if this reaction was any indication, said audience LOVED Jay and Silent Bob.

The studio brass in attendance likened the flick’s reception in Diego to the
Animal House
test screening of lore. Dollar signs danced in their eyes, and Mewes was heralded as the Next Big Thing.

However, nobody took into consideration that the flick about a comic book geek playing to an audience full of comic book geeks at the world’s largest gathering of comic book geeks was perhaps a weighted exercise in self-selection, and hardly an indicator of how the movie would be embraced in the real world. When
Rats
was released a few months later, it opened to a paltry million and change on 800 screens. By the second weekend, it was out of theaters, damned to the video dustbin (where it, too, would find its eventual audience who’d, thankfully, turn it into a cult classic).

Mewes, meanwhile, had gone off to shoot a flick in Vancouver. Helmed by my friends Malcolm Ingram and Matt Gissing and entitled
Drawing Flies
the flick afforded Jason his first non-Jay role. It also afforded Jason his first taste of heroin courtesy of a girl whose name he doesn’t remember, on a jungle gym in a park lit by the Canadian moon.

By this point, Mewes had become something of a partier, keeping a ceiling on his activities that amounted to merely booze and weed. Had I been more educated on the subject of drug addiction and the genetically predisposed, I would’ve known that these were merely gateway drugs: brief stops on the road to something more harsh. Jason’s drug affinity wasn’t a worry in those days; hell, it was regarded as kinda cute. While in mid-
Rats
production, a bunch of us got together to record the commentary track for the
Clerks
laser disc (which would eventually become the original
Clerks
DVD), and on it, Mewes can be heard getting progressively more drunk over the ninety minute duration of the film. This wasn’t a big concern back then; he was just having a good time, I thought. Just because I’d never been a big fan of getting drunk or stoned didn’t mean I had to poo-poo everyone else’s parade. What, me worry?

Besides, the safeguard was in place already; the roadblock we all assumed would keep Jason from ever progressing to harder drugs. Mewes’s mother, released from jail around early ‘95, was diagnosed as HIV positive — a lifetime of shared needles the presumed culprit. Seeing his mom drop unhealthy amounts of weight and suffer AIDS-related ailments was, at one point, enough to make Mewes swear off ever even trying heroin.

But alas, there was that park in Canada. And nobody ever caught AIDS because they SNORTED heroin, Mewes rationalized. As long as he never shot-up, he’d be okay.

By the tail-end of the
Rats
post-production, I’d gotten involved with the actress Joey Adams, and soon, I was spending much more time in Los Angeles than New Jersey. This meant much more time away from Mewes, which in turn meant much more time for Mewes to experiment further with drugs. The high was the lure, and the between-films downtime didn’t help matters much either. Post-
Rats
and
Flies
, having squandered most of his movie money, Jason was forced to go back to work in non-performance roles. Some days, he was a roofer. Some nights, he delivered pizza. When, mid-delivery, someone would ask him “Weren’t you in a movie?” even the level-headed, non-egocentric Mewes would succumb to slight bouts of depression. Movie-making is a rush that’s sometimes followed by a hard come-down. On a set, an actor’s catered to: dressed, fed, and waited on. When all that goes away, and you suddenly find yourself waiting on others (or at least dropping off their pizza and hoping for a two buck tip), even the least big-headed of actors can succumb to a “Where have all the good times gone?” case of the blues.

So snorting heroin led to snorting coke. And snorting coke led to smoking coke and a one-time dalliance with a crack pipe as well. And I did nothing about it. It was Jason’s life, I figured. He was a big boy now, and he could handle himself.

“At least he’d never spike his veins,” I’d say. “Because of his mom. Of that much, I’m sure.”

The next time we worked together was on
Chasing Amy
. Mewes, at this point, was living with his mother in Keansburg. We’d still hang out when I was in town, and sometimes, he’d come out to LA. But for the two year period I was involved with Joey, our one-on-one time was pretty limited.
Amy
didn’t change that, as the Jay and Silent Bob scene in the flick was shot over the course of one night at the Marina Diner in Belford. Mewes was on his game that evening, having memorized all of his dialogue, pulling it off without a hitch. As the night wore on, I’d get sluggish, but Mewes would never tire. Coke’ll do that to you.

Amy
came out and put View Askew back on the map in a big way, with stellar reviews and awards to boot. The success of the film paved the way for
Dogma
, a flick I’d written prior to
Clerks
but stuck in a drawer for when I had enough cash to pull it off. Thanks to the $12 million theatrical gross of the $250,000
Amy
, we were given $10 million to make
Dogma
, a film in which Jay and Silent Bob figured more prominently than they ever had in any previous flick.

By this point, my relationship with Joey had ended, and I was back in Jersey full time, moving out of my post-
Clerks
condo and into a lush apartment on Broad Street in Red Bank. I started seeing Jason more and more, and together, we took a trip back out to LA to empty my stuff out of the apartment I shared with Joey, but primarily to convince
The X-Files
star Gillian Anderson to play the lead in
Dogma
. Harvey Weinstein, the chairman of Miramax, was co-sponsoring a charity fashion show to benefit AIDS, and he’d invited Scully to sit at his table. Our mission was to convince her that our angels-run-amuck picture was a worthy counterpart to the
Files
. So, in rented tuxes, Mewes and I spent the night wooing the little redhead, blissfully unaware that she’d later read the script and reportedly hate it.

Harvey gave us a lift back to the east coast on the Miramax jet. Over the course of the five hour and change flight, the three of us smoked (Harvey’s jet was dubbed “the flying ash tray”. and chit-chatted, with Harvey getting to know Jason better than he’d had time to in the past. When Jason uncharacteristically told Harvey he was really happy with his involvement in the AIDS benefit, due largely to the fact that his mother was HIV positive herself, the conversation got very serious, with Harvey insisting that he’d get Jason’s mom to the best doctors in New York City. A promise he’d later make good on multiple times over.

“We’re not gonna let your mother die,” the chairman of Miramax told Mewes.

It was around this time that I’d taken over a local comic book store on Monmouth Street that was going out of business and turned it into Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. Mewes, a longtime comics enthusiast (Deadshot and Vigilante being his favorite characters), asked if he could work at the store full time. Charmed by this notion, I gave him the run of the joint.

Months in, when the shop would sometimes open two hours late, or I’d walk in to find a customer hanging out in front of the register, telling me “Jason said he’d be right back. He went to meet someone for a few minutes,” it dawned on me that entrusting Mewes with this much responsibility maybe wasn’t such a hot idea. More than that, it was a massive red flag that something was truly amiss.

When we recorded the
Chasing Amy
commentary track for the Criterion laser disc (which, later, became the DVD commentary track as well), Mewes was looking pretty bad. He was nodding out during the record so often, I said to Affleck “I think Mewes might be narcoleptic.” Affleck, a bit more learned on the subject of drugs and addicts, offered “Bro, that ain’t narcolepsy.” The cut scene intros on the
Amy
DVD offer a portrait of Mewes that ain’t pretty: thin, dirty, and barely conscious.

At this point, I sat Jason down and said “You’re doing more than snorting heroin from time to time, aren’t you?” After an hour of denial, Mewes finally copped to crossing the boundary he’d so long ago set for himself upon seeing how HIV-ravaged his mother had become: he was shooting up.

Almost immediately, I moved him out of his mother’s house in Keansburg and into my Broad Street apartment, where I informed him he was gonna kick the brown, cold turkey. We looked into a methadone clinic in Asbury Park, but Mewes couldn’t start until the following Monday, two days away. After one day of withdrawls, Mewes became so violently ill, he begged for cash for a fix of heroin that would hold him over ‘til the next day, when he’d begin the meth program in earnest. He promised he’d get and stay clean, but he needed this last hit to keep him from succumbing to the DTs. Sweaty, convulsing, anxious and in tears, the boy pleading his case before me was a far cry from the offbeat soul I’d known for nearly a decade; he’d become a full-fledged junkie. Against all better judgment, I agreed to front him the money for the express purpose of scoring heroin, under the condition that he snort it, not shoot it.

One phone call and twenty minutes later, and I laid eyes, for the first time, on what would become the bane of my existence: heroin. As Mewes readied it for snorting on my living room table, he chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just weird. I mean, I know this ain’t right, and I’m glad you did this for me this one time, but.”

“But what?”

“But it’s like you just shook hands with the devil. For me. I think that’s kinda cool. Not cool-cool, ‘cause I know it ain’t right. But, y’know: nice.”

It was the only time I’d ever knowingly give Mewes money to buy any kind of drug. Even nine years later, he still refers to it as “That day you shook hands with the devil, Moves.”

For the next five months, Jason and I became inseparable again, but this time around, I wasn’t as much his friend as his babysitter. Granted, we’d have good times and enjoy one another’s company; but not letting Mewes out of my sight became an every-waking-moment priority. The hours were organized around keeping Jay preoccupied and busy. Idle hands being the devil’s workshop, constant activity was the order of the day and our days went something like this:

1) Get woken up by Mewes around 6 a.m., as he was fiending for his methadone fix.

2) Drive over to Asbury Park to hit the meth clinic, where Mewes would throw back a shot of methadone that, over the following months, would shrink in dosage, until he was off it completely.

3) Hit Dunkin Donuts for Mewes’s favorite sugar fix, the “manager’s special” (a glazed donut covered in icing and sprinkles).

4) Head to Toys ‘R’ Us and wait for the store to open, at which point we’d rush the
Star Wars
section to see if any 12 inch Greedo dolls were on the shelf (they were all the rage at that point; packed one-per-case, they were easy to re-sell at the Stash for a premium).

5) Head back to the apartment and shower.

6) Play video games.

7) Watch laser discs.

8) Head back out into the world to other toy stores to look for more 12 inch Greedo dolls.

9) Head to dinner, hit home and watch movies ‘til it was time to go to sleep. And so it went, for nearly half a year. Sometimes, we’d read the
Dogma
script, readying Mewes for his biggest role yet. Sometimes, we’d hang with Bry, Walt or Ed. When the local Toys ‘R’ Us started drying up for not just 12 inch Greedo dolls, but also 12 inch Hoth Luke on Tauntaun sets, Mewes, who’d replaced the addiction to heroin with the addiction to finding 12 inch
Star Wars
dolls for the Stash to re-sell, would suggest alternatives.

“Moves, we can try Toys ‘R’ Us’s outside of Monmouth County.”

“Like where?” I’d ask.

“I dunno. Ohio?”

We’d take long day trips, scouring the land for 12 inch Greedo dolls, bullshitting, laughing, talking about his attitude toward drugs that day. And slowly, as his meth dose lessened, the heroin-induced haze lifted, and the real Mewes began to emerge again.

The methadone clinic trips revealed quite a growing heroin problem in Monmouth County, as there was always a long line in front of the place when we pulled up every morning. Mewes would jump in line, and I’d sit in the car listening to Howard Stern. Invariably, someone in the line would look at Mewes, then look at me, then look back at Mewes wide-eyed, apparently thinking “Jesus, Jay and Silent Bob have a real problem, man.” Stoners are cute; junkies are sad.

And I knew a thing or two about excess myself. By late ‘97, my weight had ballooned to 270 pounds. During this time, I too took to self-improvement, jumping onto an all-liquid diet program called Optifast, run out of the local hospital. Inspired by Mewes’s commitment to wrestling the monkey off his back, I battle my demons as well, dropping down to 230 pounds. We were healthier, happier and one of us was hungrier for pussy.

Mewes accompanied me to a Duquesne college gig in Pittsburgh, where, post-Q&A, we hit a comic book store called Eide’s. While I was looking for rarities and toys to bring back to the Stash, Mewes was chatting up a girl behind the counter named Stephanie. We were in the store a total of thirty minutes before Mewes pulled me aside.

“I like this girl, Moves.”

“Uh-huh,” I half-listened, as I flipped through a long-box full of comics.

“She wants to hang out with me. But I know I can’t stay here by myself because of the drugs and shit. So I was thinking about asking her to come home with us.”