Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (26 page)

I know I seem fixated on the fluids of it all, but don’t let society fool you: Spermy talk
isn’t
immature. Cum’s not only the foundation of life, it’s the foundation of any romantic relationship. People will tell you mutual respect is what builds bonds, but here’s the tough shit: It’s really
sex
. It’s not love, I know that. I’ve loved lots of women. And once ignited, love rarely ever dies, so I never
stopped
loving them. But I
did
stop
fucking
them (or being fucked
by
them, rather, as I’m a lazy bottom).

Monogamy—not just in marriage but in cohabitations of any length of time—is an unnatural state for human beings. We’re genetically programmed in the strands of our DNA to fuck as many different people as we can to produce as many offspring as we can so as to keep the species going. In this, we’re no different from the animals that terrify us or taste delicious: Remove the lofty ambitions, and we’re here to fuck and make more of us so that the human race never goes the way of the dinosaurs, which now exist solely at the summer box office.

That’s why it’s always impressive when people get married, or even just live monogamously with each other: It goes against biology. You’re conquering everything your monkey brain is telling you to do by bedding down with only one person; you’re telling nature to go fuck itself. Some folks can’t quit smoking, but with almost no effort, they’ll quit other cock or pussy for life and dedicate their naked time to solely one partner. And that mini miracle happens every day, but we never celebrate it because a church or a greeting card will have you believe it’s called love. It’s not; it’s cum. Don’t let anyone dress up cum and tell you it’s love. We love many, we cum with few.

And the first time I came with Jennifer Schwalbach was during unprotected sex while sporting an open wound on my dick.

Jennifer eventually tested me on the message board at
Viewaskew.com
, posting an entreaty to e-mail her. I wrote back instantly asking for her phone number. We’d just finished another round of
Dogma
rehearsals when I called Jennifer from my hotel room at the Westin William Penn in Pittsburgh.

“See?” I asked. “I told you I’d be watching. Mother Sister always watches.”

She didn’t catch the
Do the Right Thing
reference, but I didn’t care because this wasn’t Bryan Johnson or Scott Mosier, or someone with whom I’d share the language of pop culture; this was Jennifer Schwalbach—the young woman with that amazing job at
USA Today.
Her piece hadn’t run yet, but she said her bosses dug what she was writing so much, they were giving her more space for the
article. We talked for two hours, making a sorta date to talk again the next night.

All that morning, I was listening to famous movie stars read aloud words
I’d
written. Damon, Affleck, Rickman, Hayek, Rock, Lee, Fiorentino, Mewes—I barely heard any of them that day. All I could think about was Schwalbach and our phone date for that night. What would we talk about? How long would the conversation last
this
time? Was it at all possible that this chick might actually
like
me? I mean
like me
like me?

That night, we talked for four hours. I got maybe one hundred and twenty minutes of sleep before waking and directing stunt-Rock Derrick Simmons’s fall from the sky. The next night, we talked again. Always deep, always fun, always informative. The
Dogma
shoot is a blur to me, but those nightly getting-to-know-you marathons with Jen are crystal clear. It’s not hard to forget, as she’s still very much that same fascinating, pussy-carrying puzzle to me that she was over a Pittsburgh phone line, more than a decade ago.

Once again, like Zeus at his chessboard, Gina Gardini would change my fate by throwing me into another room with Jennifer Schwalbach. This time, however, it wouldn’t be a hotel room.

The Independent Spirit Awards were being held in a giant tent on the beach in Santa Monica, and
Chasing Amy
had gotten a fistful of nominations. But I was knee-deep in
Dogma
rehearsals and not interested in flying across the country to lose to Robert Duvall for
The Apostle
, so I’d passed. That’s when Gina called.

“The IFP is urging us to send a representative for
Amy
—which usually means the film’s going to win something. They strongly suggested sending you. And Harvey says you’ve gotta go.”

“When?”

“Saturday,” Gina told me. “You leave Pittsburgh early in the morning and you’re on a flight home from L.A. that night.”

“Less than twenty-four hours,” I confirmed, a genuine, giant non-L.A. fan. “Or I’m not going.”

I called Jen, who’d been covering the awards circuit for
USA Today
that year, hitting the Oscars, the Golden Globes, and even the Blockbuster Awards. Since she was all over the awards spectrum, I asked her if she was doing the Indie Spirit Awards as well.

“I’m not,” she replied.

“Damn …” I sighed.

“Why?”

“Well, I’m flying out for the Spirits, but I don’t know anybody in Los Angeles anymore,” I lied. “And since you were doing all the award shows for the paper, I thought maybe you’d be at this one, too, so at least there was someone in the tent I might kinda know.”

“Do you want me to go with you to the Spirit Awards?” She made the heavy lifting easier. I quickly followed up with the fat-guy assurance.

“It wouldn’t be a date-date,” I said, even though it
would
be a date-date. “It’s just being there together—but only because I thought you were already going.”

“I’ll go,” she declared, sounding like Diane Court. And I, her very plump Lloyd Dobler, hung up the phone, called Salma Hayek, and let her know I wouldn’t be her chaste-date
for the Indie Spirit Awards as previously arranged. I told Salma Hayek that I had a serious shot at pussy far above my pay grade. I’m sure she was just glad I wasn’t talking about
her
pussy, so she told me to chase it.

I left on the earliest flight out of Pittsburgh on a Saturday morning, which got me into LAX an hour before the show. I grabbed my bag and cabbed it to the Santa Monica beach, just as the red carpet was emptying and folks were getting seated for the show inside. I looked for Jen for a few seconds before she emerged from the tent, dressed to thrill. She was quite simply
stunning
and very out of my league. Thankfully, I was at the thinnest I’d ever been in my adult life: 230 pounds. I’d borrowed a Versace jacket from wardrobe that I was wearing atop a Graphitti Designs Superman logo T-shirt and jeans (full pants, not shorts), so I actually looked presentable as well. Jen took my arm and led me to the Miramax table, where Harvey leaned over and asked me, “Who’s this?”

“A journalist,” I whispered back. Harvey shot me a very disapproving look and clammed up for the remainder of the evening—most of which I wasn’t around for anyway.

When the Best Screenplay winner was announced, as if God was trying to help me win this fine woman’s heart, my dick lily was gilded with a golden statue. I got up and gave a funny acceptance speech, playing to the whole room but putting on my absolute best performance for an audience of
one.
After the thank-you speech, I was whisked backstage to do press, returning to the podium to give away an award and also joining Jason Lee to hug him onstage while he received
his
award as Best Supporting Actor for
Chasing Amy.
But from the moment I got up from the Miramax table, I
never sat back down that entire day. In fact, by the time I’d emerged from backstage after doing all the press requests Miramax lined up, Jennifer was one of the only people left in the tent. I apologized for abandoning her, but she said she’d forgive me so long as we fucking
left
already. We climbed into her fire-engine-red Jeep, the Cherry Bomb, and hit the 10 East.

“Where do you wanna go?” she asked, all long hair and sunglasses in the blinding California sun. I wanted to say, “Anywhere you’re going …,” but instead managed to spit out, “Your place.”

“Oh, no,” she said, slowing the car, offering me wide eyes. “My place is a pigsty.”

“I don’t care. I just wanna change out of these nice clothes and put on a hoodie.”

She looked at my clothes, which really weren’t all that nice, and asked, “You can’t just do that in the car?”

“We’re in and out,” I promised.

Soon, we were at Jen’s single-girl apartment on Poinsettia. She warned me again about the mess I was about to see before letting me into the least messy apartment I’d ever laid eyes on. I got changed and left my luggage and laptop locked in her bedroom as we took off to grab some eats. And for the next two glorious hours at Jerry’s Famous Deli, I sat across from Jennifer Schwalbach and gazed into her eyes, watching her lips move as she spoke. Mind you, this was only the second time we’d ever even been in each other’s company, with most of our courting having been done via e-mail and on the phone. So as pretty as I thought she was
before
I knew much about her, the details made her truly
dazzling
. March 23, 1998, is not only the date of my favorite
meal at Jerry’s Famous Deli, it’s also the date of my favorite meal I’ve ever eaten. And while the food tasted better because I was falling in love, it was Jen Schwalbach’s company that made that dinner what it was for me: the first in what I hoped would be a long line of shared suppers with the most interesting person I’d ever met.

After dinner, we walked around her neighborhood talking, killing time before I had to head back to LAX for a flight back to Pittsburgh. Eventually, we went back to her apartment, where she wouldn’t show me her driver’s license and I wouldn’t show her my Mad Hatter tattoo. She suggested a swap, but I drove a harder bargain: I’d show her the tat if I could touch her ears.

It sounds creepy now, but in the moment, it was chaste and sweet. Jen’s got these big-ass, Dumbo-looking ears that will allure the
fuck
out of an ear man like myself when they poke out from the midst of long, girly hair. This was my big move: I wanted to touch her ears before I flew back to Pittsburgh. Luckily, Schwalbach’s a modern woman: Suddenly, she had her head in my lap, face up, saying, “Okay: touch my ears.”

Meanwhile, even at my adult thinnest, I was still sucking in the gut. A fat man
always
has his gut sucked in—even when a gorgeous woman has her head in his lap.
Especially
when a gorgeous woman has her head in his lap. So here was this girl I was nuts about, head facing up in my lap, and I was unable to breathe, not because I was in love … but because if I exhaled, I ran the risk of releasing a flab-alanche that would certainly suffocate the poor girl, if not knock her head off my lap entirely.

And the whole time we were talking, I was trying to
discern whether she was into me or was just being polite since I was a guest in her home. The head in the lap wasn’t clue enough for me because I’m a retarded jackass with zero self-confidence. I wanted to kiss her, but what if she did the duck? What if she got weirded out and it registered on her face? What if I went to kiss her and she vomited upward, at my face?

There was this old Graphitti Designs Flaming Carrot T-shirt Walt Flanagan always used to wear whenever we’d go comics hunting or play street hockey on the tennis courts. Worn to perfection, it featured Bob Burden’s indie comic sensation swinging from a rope with a girl in his arms, emblazoned with the logo
Fortune Favors the Bold!
I decided to test the wisdom of that T-shirt. Tossing caution and fear to the wind, I leaned down and gently mashed my lips against Jennifer Schwalbach’s. Much to my delight, she didn’t retreat in the least; she kissed
back.

That kiss led to an hour-long make-out session on her couch, which included some rigorous, desperate jeans-on-jeans dry-humping. An hour in, she asked me about the flight I was supposed to be on that night. I told her I’d rather stay in L.A. and talk to her all night, insisting I’d sleep on the couch. In the most seductive and promising whisper, Jennifer said I didn’t have to sleep on the couch, then hopped up playfully and excused herself, shutting her bedroom door.

Alone finally after nearly thirty minutes of grueling groin pain, I unzipped my jeans to discover all the dry-humping Jen and I were doing had left a mark: a Potter-ish jagged scar that was, unfortunately, on the wrong head. The grinding we’d been doing on the couch was so intense that
Jen had ground the zipper of my jeans right through my underwear, into my very tender dickhead. There was a cut, some blood, and the looming prospect of an abrupt ending to what was easily the best night of my life. I zipped up just as Jennifer emerged from her bedroom, dressed in a nightie that didn’t scream sex but also didn’t communicate hand job either. The room behind her was full of lit candles. The message was clear. The dick pain, however, was excruciating.

We hit the bed and went back to making out. She got my pants off, but I was hoping I could spend so much time eating her pussy, she wouldn’t go for my cock. I hoped maybe she’d be so tuckered and sated after I’d eaten at the Y for an hour that she’d just roll over and go to sleep, leaving my injured little soldier for the MASH helicopter to take away. From what I’d seen, the fucker’d been damn near decapitated; the last thing it needed was sexual attention, or any other attention for that matter.

But Schwalbach was going for the gusto. If this was to be a one-night stand, she was gonna get what she wanted, and that was a good fuckin’. Even
without
the wiener slitzel, however, she was never gonna be getting that from the likes of
me
. Had she known she was in hot pursuit of a bloody, battered dick, she might’ve changed her mind. Hell, had she realized all a fat man’s gonna offer in bed is the Snoopy’s Doghouse (he lies down, someone climbs on top of him, and he
gets
fucked), she likely would’ve run screaming from her own apartment. That position over and over can get boring, as my wife will tell you, but it’s chiefly a precautionary measure: You do
not
want someone of my girth and width losing balance due to poor upper-body strength and collapsing on you. Even with all the cushiony blubber, an
impact like that can take out a rib or flatten a boob worse than a mammogram.