My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (62 page)

This caught my attention. “What? You wanna ask that girl to come back to Jersey with us? Us two total strangers? Dude, she’ll never say yes.”

“She already did.”

“You already ASKED her?! You said you were THINKING about asking her!”

“I WAS thinking about asking her. So I ASKED her. She invited me to her place, but I told her I can’t stay here because I’m on a program. So she said she’d come home with us. So can she come home with us?”

He had me. He knew I wouldn’t leave him alone in Pittsburgh, and he knew I needed a break from spending every waking hour with him as well. Stephanie, he and I both knew, would afford me that break.

So Stephanie punched out of work and took the six-hour trek back to Red Bank with us, staying at the apartment for a little over a week. During that time, I was able to go to the office, get some
Dogma
pre-pro and script revisions done,
and concentrate on things that didn’t have to do with keeping Mewes clean, all for the low, low price of letting a total stranger sleep in my apartment.

When, a month or so later, we settled on Pittsburgh as the location of the
Dogma
shoot, Mewes was ebullient. He’d taken a shine to Stephanie, so he suddenly couldn’t wait to get started making the flick, mostly so he could hang out with the girl in her home town.

But the work had to come first. For months, I’d impressed upon him the importance of learning all of his lines in advance, as this time around, we were gonna have real actors in the flick.

“What, like Ben?” Mewes asked.

“I said REAL actors,” I corrected. “Like Alan Rickman.”

“Who’s that?”

“The guy from
Die Hard
.”

“Bruce Willis?”

“No man, the other guy.”

“The ‘Yippie-kay-ay motherfucker’ guy?”

“That’s Alan Rickman.”

“What’s so special about him??”

“He’s British. And Brits invented acting. So he won’t put up with any of your ‘Snootchie bootchies’ bullshit. He’ll tear you up if you’re not excellent, because he’s Alan fucking Rickman. So you’ve gotta know all your lines. We can’t be asking people to leave the set because you’re nervous, like we did on
Clerks
. This shit’s serious — because Rickman will go ballistic if he smells blood in the water

You’ve gotta come correct.”

So naturally, I was pretty nervous when Jason and I sat down for our first, Pittsburgh-based, one-on-one
Dogma
rehearsal, and the boy was scriptless.

“Where’s your fucking script, asshole?” I sighed.

“I don’t need it.”

“You don’t need your script for rehearsals. Right. Take mine and let’s get going.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t need it. Go ahead. Try me.”

So I turned to the first Jay and Silent Bob scene and fed him Bethany’s lines, and without looking at my script, Mewes delivered Jay’s lines in a letter-perfect fashion.

“Alright, so you’ve got the first scene down,” I allowed. “Let’s mix it up and try a scene from later in the flick.”

So I fed him his lead-in lines from the church exterior scene, and Mewes spits out the Jay responses without hesitation.

“You memorized all your lines already?!” I demanded, shocked.

“Uh-huh.”

“All of ’em?!”

“Yeah. Everyone else’s, too.”

“Yeah, right”

“Try me.”

I read him Loki’s lines from a Jayless scene, and amazingly, he responded with Bartleby’s lines. I was dumbfounded, to say the least.

“You memorized ALL the lines in the script?!?!”

“Even the girl parts.”

“What’re you, fucking Rain Man?! Why’d you memorize the whole goddamn script?!”

“I don’t wanna piss off that Rickman dude.”

When Mewes wasn’t rehearsing, he was spending every waking moment with Stephanie, either at her apartment or in our shared hotel suite: two rooms adjoining a common living room, so I could keep my eye on the recovering boy. Uber-producer Scott Mosier and I told Jason early on that, for insurance purposes, he’d be subject to random piss tests to scan his urine for traces of dope, as a way to keep him on his toes. Mewes obliged, so we felt we had the situation under control, but we wanted a little extra insurance.

“We’ve got money in the budget to give you an assistant,” Scott informed me, three weeks before principal photography commenced.

“I don’t need an assistant.”

“That’s what I figured. So I was thinking maybe we can hire Stephanie to be Mewes’s assistant.”

“What is she gonna assist him in, getting his cock in her mouth? That guy REALLY doesn’t need an assistant.”

“I know, but she might be useful in keeping an eye on him, y’know? Like, she could let us know if he’s sniffing around for heroin or anything. Kinda like our spy on the payroll.”

This was deemed a good idea, and we brought Stephanie into the office to explain the situation to her: Mewes was a recovering heroin addict, only seven months clean at this point, and we wanted to make sure he stayed clean. So we were opting to pay her three hundred bucks a week to be Jason’s assistant as far as he was concerned, but really, she’d be reporting back to production, alerting us to any suspicious activity, letting us know if he was backsliding into the brown.

Stephanie agreed, partly because it meant she could quit her job at Eide’s and be with Jason all the time, and partly, she said, because she cared about the boy and could see we cared about him too. The deal was struck, and Mosier and I felt like baby geniuses.

Little did I know that’d be the second time I’d shake hands with the devil, as Stephanie became Jay’s Pittsburgh connection for heroin.

Me and My Shadow, Pt. 3

Thursday 30 March 2006 @ 5:57 p.m.

About three weeks into the
Dogma
shoot, we spent a day outside a shuttered Burger King that Ratface, our production designer, had outfitted to pass as Mooby’s, a fictional fast food franchise with the unlikely corporate icon of a cow as its pitchman (the faux burger joint would pop up again in
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
and ultimately feature prominently in
Clerks II
). The scene saw Linda Fiorentino’s Bethany, Jason Mewes’s Jay and my Silent Bob quizzing Chris Rock’s Rufus, the 13th Apostle who’d fallen from the sky moments before. The day will always be noteworthy to me for two reasons: 1) due to a gripe with production, Linda wasn’t speaking to me that morning, making it an interesting challenge to my directorial responsibilities, and 2) because Mewes disrupted shooting in a most unique fashion.

We were shooting Rock’s coverage, and since Silent Bob had no lines in the scene, it allowed me to ride the monitor instead of sit in for off-camera. In the midst of a take, Rock was detailing Rufus’s outrage in being left out of the
Bible
, when all of a sudden, he started laughing, completely breaking character. I called cut and made my way to the table.

“What’s up?”

“Check out Mewes,” he chuckled.

I looked over at Jason to see him fast asleep, sitting up, in an almost bovine manner. One nudge or two later, and Mewes startled awake.

“Are we going again?” he asked.

“What’re you doing?”

“What?”

“You feel asleep in the middle of the take, dude.”

“Yeah, but not for the whole take.”

“Dude — you FELL ASLEEP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TAKE.”

“But we ain’t shooting me, we’re shooting Rock.”

“You still have to stay awake, man! Just ‘cause the camera’s not on you doesn’t mean you can take a fucking nap!”

“Alright.”

“What the fuck?!”

“What’s the big deal?”

“You’re supposed to be present in the scene for the other actors! Rock needs to act off of you! AND you’ve got dialogue to deliver, too! How the fuck can you just fall asleep in the middle of a take?!”

“It’s the fourth fucking take, though.”

“SO?!?”

“I can’t help it. They just keep saying the same shit, over and over.”

That sentiment became so instantly revered by the cast and crew that it wound up on the back of the production’s wrap-gift t-shirt. With that simple and honest observation, the boy was able to succinctly express the unspoken overview of movie-makers the world over: filming any scene can get a bit repetitive. Whether you’re making
Schindler’s List
or
Weekend at Bernie’s
, “they keep saying the same shit, over and over” is the thought that inevitably and eventually floats through the minds of casts and crews everywhere. The tedium of life on a movie set was completely nailed by Jason Mewes.

Years later, I’d learn that Mewes wasn’t really bored; he was simply “catching a nod” — his preferred terminology for the heroin-induced state of euphoria afforded shortly after shooting up.

Had I been educated on the subject of heroin abuse, I’d have realized that Mewes had, indeed, started using again on the set of
Dogma
. After seven months of closely-watched sobriety, my responsibilities in governing the film’s day-to-day production and my naïve belief that Mewes had, indeed, cleaned up forever, afforded Jason the ability to quietly shoot-up while keeping it on the down-low. Even though the boy was turning in a performance on that flick that was so beyond-belief great it once prompted Matty Damon to observe “Who’d have thought Jay would steal the entire fucking show out from under us?” he was doing so with the dirty brown coursing through his veins on a daily basis, and passing for sober.

His then-largest salary, combined with the additional influx of the three hundred bucks weekly we were paying Stephanie to keep an eye on him and report any suspicious activity back to us, kept the pair flush with “diesel”. The with-drawls that would’ve alerted me weren’t a factor, because the loot he was making and immediately spending kept him doped up and free from the DTs.

By the time we wrapped the flick, I’d fallen in love with the woman I’d eventually marry, Jennifer Schwalbach. Having met her shortly before production began while she was interviewing me for
USA Today
, our relationship was on such a fast track that, when I went back to Jersey, she moved out from LA and in with me. Mewes, too, moved Stephanie to Red Bank, post-wrap, so the four of us lived in that apartment on Broad Street, until a few months later, when Jen’s pregnancy prompted the purchase of a house. Jen found a home for us in nearby Oceanport, the most prominent features of which were the indoor pool (rare in the Jersey burbs) and the flat roofs (which we’d later discover were designed by the house’s builder, a later-jailed pedophile who had window-peeping on his daughters in mind when he was constructing the dwelling).

Mewes and Stephanie were spending so much time at Mewes’s mom’s apartment in Keansburg that he didn’t ask to move into the Oceanport house. Instead, Bryan Johnson and his then-girlfriend took up residence in one of the five bedrooms.

It was at this point that Mewes asked me to co-sign on a red Ford Explorer for him. Feeling guilty for the lack of time I was spending with the boy (due to my new relationship and the vast amount of hours I spent in the editing room, cutting the flick), I obliged. The deal was that I’d take care of lease payments on the vehicle and he was responsible for the insurance. Beyond that, I’d only see Jay when he needed money — which was so frequent that it warranted me adding him to the View Askew payroll.

A glamorous side-effect of heroin abuse is a weakening of the teeth, apparently. Oblivious to this fact, as Mewes’s teeth began falling out at an alarming rate, I assumed he was eating far too much sugar. His diet consisted of Hostess cupcakes and the artificially sweetened red drink sold in gallon form at most grocery stores that we referred to as “bug juice”, topped off with a steady mouthful of Lemonheads. The most hardcore smoker I’ve ever known, Mewes could easily go through four packs a day — half of which wound up burning holes in his clothes when he’d nod out, mid-cigarette, and drop the burning cancer sticks on himself. Many times, he’d later report, he’d be woken up by the scent of burnt cotton, if he wasn’t startled awake by a Marlboro burning down to the filter, singeing his fingers.

By Jen’s second month of pregnancy, Mewes admitted he was in serious arrears on his truck insurance payments. This happened at the worse time imaginable: when Mewes nodded out at a traffic light and rolled into the car of an off-duty Middletown cop. The guy, who was very cool about the incident, asked only that Mewes pay for the damages to his car: some nine hundred bucks worth. Furious at his negligence (as a co-signer on the lease, I would’ve been liable had the officer wanted to sue), I told Mewes that I’d take care of the bill, but was confiscating the car for a month as punishment. When he surrendered the keys, I took a look at the odometer to mark the mileage, in case Mewes was hiding a second set and had thoughts of spiriting the car away while I spent my days editing
Dogma
. My eyes bugged when I saw Jason had somehow managed to put 20,000 miles on the car in less than three months.

“How the fuck did you manage that? I’ve had my Jeep for almost two years and I STILL haven’t put that much mileage on it!” I barked. “And I’ve taken the fucking thing cross-country!”

After hours of interrogation, Mewes copped to slipping back into heroin usage. The many miles he put on the car were from constant trips up to Newark to score — five, sometimes six back-and-forth trips of over a hundred miles a day. He pulled up his sleeves to reveal a connect-the-dots worthy series of track marks, accompanied by bruises and burns. Immediately, we took the Explorer back to the leasing lot and abandoned it for the dealers to find, a note on the windshield that read “Can’t pay anymore.”

Since Stephanie had brought her car with her from Pittsburgh, the pair still had wheels to get around. But the word was out on Jason and his drug activities in Keansburg, and anytime he’d motor down the main drag in town, the fuzz would inevitably pull him over and search the vehicle. One such pullover came about as a result of the police spotting Mewes, his sister, and Stephanie driving around with a deployed airbag, following a minor traffic accident the week before. The subsequent search resulted in an arrest, when a needle kit was found in the car and a bag of dope was discovered in Jason’s boot, under his foot. Frustrated and disgusted, I refused to bail him out of his first overnight stint in county. After Scott Mosier sprung the boy, I asked him how he could be so stupid as to not at least attempt to toss the junk once he saw a cop in his rearview.