My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (63 page)

“I needed to shoot up to keep from getting sick,” he offered. “And plus, I’d spent forty bucks on it.”

Action was, again, necessary, so I moved Jason and Stephanie into the Oceanport house. The pair took a room at the back of the second floor, and both were put on heavy-duty monitoring, with Stephanie only allowed to leave daily for her job at a health food joint in Red Bank.

This time around, I was mandating a cold-turkey kick, so the methadone route was not an option. On the second day, Mewes was in such bad shape and pain, he took to crying and screaming at me. When I refused to give him dope money, he bashed his head against a wall, drawing blood. I sent him to his room.

Due to her pregnancy, Jen decided to give up the job she’d taken in New York at MTV. As a sort of going-away gesture, she held a Christmas party at our house, inviting the friends she’d made at her city gig. While we prepped for the shindig the morning of the affair, Mewes slipped out of the house, disappearing for hours. He returned while the party was in full swing, briefly muttering hello to the guests and heading upstairs. I excused myself and followed him.

He wasn’t in his room. Instead, he was in the upstairs hallway bathroom. Not hearing any noises emanating from the john, I silently stood outside, waiting for him to emerge. He knew I was there, and for an hour and change, we played a twisted game of chicken: him not coming out of the bathroom, and me waiting, stationed quietly outside, leaning against the wall. When he finally gave in and opened the door, he feigned surprise in seeing me.

“What’s up?”

“What were you doing in there?” I demanded.

“I was taking a shit and reading comics.”

“You weren’t taking a shit for over an hour.”

“I was reading comics too.”

I studied his face.

“What were you doing in there all that time?”

Dead silence.

“What were you doing in the bathroom all that time?”

“I swear, Moves. I was taking a shit and reading comics.”

I glared at him for long, silent minutes. He was clammy and making sporadic eye contact.

“What the fuck were you doing in the bathroom for an hour? Because you weren’t taking a shit or reading comics.”

“I was.”

“You weren’t. What the fuck were you doing in there?”

“I wasn’t doing dope, I swear to God.”

“I don’t believe you. What were you doing in there?”

“I swear to God, I wasn’t doing dope. I was taking a shit and reading comics.”

“You’re lying to me.”

He didn’t respond.

“I need you to tell me the truth.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“I’m gonna ask you one more time, and if you lie to me again, I’m throwing you out of this house. If you’re honest with me, you can stay. What the fuck were you doing in the bathroom for an hour.”

He stared at me. After a minute, he repeated “I was taking a shit and reading comics.”

“I want you out of here. Now. I don’t give a fuck where you go, but I want you out of here. Get out.”

Bitterly, he grabbed some stuff and took off. By the time I returned to the party, it was over.

I’d later learn that he wasn’t shooting up in the bathroom. Instead, he was smoking cocaine. The burned tin foil and straw were hidden under some towels in a drawer.

Stephanie came home an hour later, and when she asked where Jason was, I told her I’d kicked him out because he was doing drugs and lying about it to my face. The assumption was that he’d gone back to his mother’s apartment, but rather than have Stephanie join him there and have them both backslide, I told her she was welcome to stay in the house without him, so long as she stayed clean.

Mewes called multiple times every hour for the next week, but still, I was steadfast in his suspension. Stephanie pleaded Jason’s case and said he’d copped to smoking coke, but was remorseful about it and swore he wouldn’t do any more drugs ever again. He desperately wanted to come back. Ultimately, I relented, issuing even more stringent rules than he’d been living under before his ejection.

Stephanie, meanwhile, was looking deathly thin. Already slight in frame, the once-pretty girl Mewes had met in that comic book store in Pittsburgh was now a pale shadow of her former self. She weighed well under a hundred pounds.

Her parents, farm folk from the western Pennsylvania/Ohio area, had called our house one day looking for her. They told me they hadn’t spoken to her in months, and that any time they called Mewes’s mom’s apartment, nobody would answer. They’d somehow gotten my number and were puzzled as to why they couldn’t track down their only daughter. I saw my window.

“I don’t know how to break this to you, but Stephanie is a pretty bad drug addict,” I confessed. The stunned silence on the other end of the line spoke volumes. “She and Jason just moved in with us here at the new house, and they say they’re getting clean, but I don’t believe either of them. She’s sickly thin. I don’t want to sound dramatic or scare you guys even more, but your daughter’s gonna die if she doesn’t make some drastic changes.”

It was clear that Jason and Stephanie were, by now, a lethal combination, supporting and fueling one another’s addiction, and the only way they’d ever get better would be to disappear from one another’s lives completely. They’d never make this choice on their own, so in that phone call, Stephanie’s parents, Jen and I made the decision for them.

An intervention of sorts was organized. Actually, it was more along the lines of a kidnapping. We gave her parents directions to our house, and arranged a time for them to show up, unannounced, on a day that Stephanie wasn’t working. I’d taken Mewes into Red Bank and left him at the Secret Stash with Walter for a few hours, insisting he had to help Walt with new comics to make up for his coke-smoking hijinx in the bathroom. He was elated by the prospect of getting out of the house for the first time in days, so he kissed Stephanie goodbye, telling her he’d see her later.

Stephanie’s parents arrived shortly after I got back to the house, and we quietly let them in and had them wait downstairs. I went to Jay and Stephanie’s room and told her she had visitors. Stephanie’s mom started crying at the sight of her, and Jen and I excused ourselves, heading outside to afford the family some alone time.

Stephanie packed and loaded her stuff into her parents’ car, passing us on the way out. We apologized for the deception, but she said she understood, and asked us to tell Jason she loved him. Her parents, who’d apparently had their daughter late in life, thanked us and asked that we not allow any contact between Jason and Stephanie, should she try to call. With that, the girl drove out of our lives, in tears.

I picked up Jason from the store a few hours later, and on the ride back to the house, I broke the news to him that Stephanie’s parents had come to get her and bring her home. Mewes assumed I was kidding, but when we got back to the house and he saw her stuff missing from the room, he realized it wasn’t a joke. We sat in the backyard, smoking, putting it all into perspective.

“I get it,” he said. “When I met her, she had her own apartment, her own car, a good job. And she left here with, what? One suitcase, maybe?”

“I think she had two suitcases.”

“I ruined her life, huh?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. She made her own choices. But you two WERE pretty toxic together,” I observed.

“Yeah.”

Mewes smoked quietly for a minute, and then chuckled.

“Remember that day back at the apartment, before you guys moved into this house? When you saw me laying on the floor outside of my bedroom, and you asked me what I was doing, and I was like ‘Shhhhh’?”

“I do,” I smiled. “That was weird.”

“I was pretty doped up, and I was sure Stephanie was cheating on me.”

“I don’t think she ever cheated on you, dude.”

“No, I thought she was cheating on me right THEN. I was watching her through the crack in the door because she was laying there with her eyes closed but her lips were moving.”

I was a bit lost. “And?”

“And I thought she had some guy under the bed. I thought some guy had climbed through our window when I was in the bathroom, and she heard me coming, and hid him under the bed, and she was whispering to him, and that’s why her mouth was moving. I thought she was pretending to be asleep. When you found me, I’d been watching her for two hours, waiting for a guy to come out from under the fucking bed.”

“You realize that’s insane, right?”

“It’s pretty nuts, right?”

“It’s beyond nuts. That fucking certifiable.”

“I’m an asshole,” Mewes laughed. Then, as a sober afterthought, he added “But I just loved her so much.”

It was at this point that he started crying. I hugged him.

“You think if we both got clean, me and Steph could be together again? Like normal people?”

“Sure,” I lied. Harsh truth wasn’t needed at that moment.

“I swear to God I’m gonna clean up.”

“You’ve gotta, man. It’s really time.”

Jason nodded. Then...

“But this is pretty hard to deal with right now, so I want to get some dope.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“I won’t do it here. I’ll do it at my mom’s. Stay there tonight, then come back here tomorrow, and go cold turkey.”

“I get how you’re feeling, but I can’t let you do that. If you leave now, I can’t let you back in. You understand, right?”

Mewes nodded, smoked, then shrugged, as if to say “It was worth a shot.” We went inside, ordered pizza, and watched a movie with my then-six months pregnant girlfriend. Even though Jen and I were sure we’d done the right thing, we still felt pretty guilty. Both of us were extra nice to Jason that night. The whole affair ranked as the most Mewes-induced heartbreaking day I’d ever known.

Until a week later, when I learned how he’d burned a dealer at my house.

Me and My Shadow, Pt. 4

Monday 3 April 2006 @ 11:47 a.m.

Sometimes, it’s best to learn the details of a potentially dangerous situation only
when it’s well after the fact. If you’re hanging off a cliff, you don’t want the person pulling you up to say “Fuck, look at that drop below you! If you don’t make it, you’re gonna pancake against those rocks so hard, you might just atomize!” Only after you’ve gotten your two hands, feet and ass on terra firma do you ever really need to know how bad it was truly looking.

So naturally, when I learned the whole story of how Mewes had burned a dealer at my house months after it went down, I was filled with a mix of rage and relief.

It was a Tuesday, of that much I’m sure. Jen, still early on in her pregnancy, was out shopping, Stephanie had been at work in Red Bank, and Judy was cleaning the house. It was week two of the boy’s move back into the Oceanport joint, after he’d been caught smoking coke in the upstairs hallway bathroom. I was spending a lot more time babysitting Mewes, keeping him preoccupied in an effort to distract him from the desire to shoot dope.

We were sitting around watching TV when I got the call from Mosier, who was asking that I come to the office and sign off on our
Dogma
picture lock before it got sent to Skywalker Sound for the pre-mix. Without Jen around to take over Mewes duty, I was between a rock and a hard place: the boy was still feeling like shit from withdrawls and didn’t want to take the ten-minute ride to the office with me, knowing he’d then be stuck sitting around for two hours while I went through the flick.

“Besides,” he observed. “
Columbo
’s on.”

Uncharacteristically, Mewes was (and still remains) a massive
Columbo
and
Murder, She Wrote
fan. Had we been a Nielsen family, A&E and USA would’ve displaced ABC and NBC as the nation’s most watched networks, based solely on the amount of hours Mewes spent sacked out on the couch, engrossed in the crime dramas, desperate to solve the mysteries before the protagonists. Given his choice between porn and Cabot Cove, Mewes would forego double-penetrations for double indemnity plots.

With the boy enthralled by the cockeyed flatfoot in the trench coat, I came to the conclusion that it was okay to leave him by himself for a bit. He was flat broke, and I was secure in the knowledge that there was no other loot in the house with which he could make mischief in my absence. So I left him there to lay around and watch TV, pulling Judy aside on my way out to ask that she look in on Jay from time to time to make sure he was staying put. Without a car or cash, I figured there wasn’t much trouble he could actually get into.

I was wrong.

No sooner had I pulled out of the driveway before Mewes was on the horn with a dealer in Keansburg, giving him directions to my house along with instructions to bring a bag of dope. The boy then tried to bum forty bucks off Judy, who — as a former alcoholic herself — knew not to give the kid more than enough cash to buy a pack of cigarettes. Three dollars in hand, Mewes put his half-assed Mission: Impossible into action.

The backyard of our Oceanport house was situated at the end of a cul de sac, and it was there that Mewes met his dealer, unlocking the gates in the wooden fence that still afforded an easy view of the flat-roofed house. Maintaining a faux study of the windows, he told the dealer that they had to make the exchange quickly, as “Kevin’s watching me from the house.” The dealer didn’t know I wasn’t home, but since the customer was always right, he palmed the bag of dope and extended it out of the driver’s side window of the car toward Jason. Instead of doing the same with the money and shaking hands to make the dope swap, Mewes tossed the crumpled three dollar bills across the dealer into the passenger seat, snatching the dope from the man’s hand in the process. He then dashed into the backyard, quickly locked the gate, and ran into the house.

It didn’t take Columbo to deduce that three crumpled dollar bills was thirty seven crumpled dollar bills shy of the true purchase price, nor did it take a keen, Jessica Fletcher-like power of observation for the dealer to figure out which house Mewes had run inside. Pulling around to the front door, he rang the bell. Mewes told the oblivious Judy to inform whoever was there that he wasn’t home. Judy maintained the party line, even when the dealer said “But I saw him run into this house a minute ago. I KNOW he’s here.” Unwilling to cause a ruckus over thirty seven bucks, the dealer let his longtime customer off the hook with a warning of “Tell him he owes me double now.”