Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (27 page)

So in the midst of all this carnality, there finally came a moment of truth, when it was clear the pussy could be licked no more and the time for cock lodgin’ was at hand. I made one last-ditch effort to get out of fucking without hurting her feelings or further hurting my dick.

“I don’t have protection,” I said, not lying.

“You don’t need it,” was her response as she reached down to guide my cock into her body, her thumb resting on and
in
the dry-humping Potter-ish scar. When she slid that bolt home, I was in agony and ecstasy at the same time. It hurt so good, I thought Pinhead and the chattering-teeth Cenobite were gonna show up and tear my soul apart. After all, hell awaits the piece of shit who has unprotected sex while sporting an open wound! I knew the right thing to do was to fess up and tell her what all that dry-humping had done to my playmaker. I should’ve told her we needed to wait ’til I healed—because you’re never supposed to have condomless sex with a stranger while sporting an open wound. Instead, I kept schtum and rode to glory.

It was the most irresponsible and risky thing I ever did, sinking my cut-open cock into Schwalbach’s nethers—and I paid for it dearly. Being enveloped by those soaking lips should’ve felt like heaven on earth, but instead, it felt like I’d stuck my dick in battery acid. It burned with the heat of a thousand suns, and in my mind’s eye, I could see my dick melting like it was a Nazi opening the Lost Ark. But I never let on; instead, I simply had the best and most painful sex of my life that night.

Doesn’t that sound
horrible
? It’s everything they taught
us
not
to do in the age of AIDS awareness and
dangerously
irresponsible. And yet, I married the girl, we had a daughter, and thus far, we’ve lived happily ever after. There’s some more tough shit right there: Sometimes, you’ve gotta throw caution to the wind to find the treasure. Human beings do some stupid shit in an effort to cum with assistance: We
hate
to cum by ourselves. I speak for my gender when I say guys beat the truth out of their cocks regularly, often multiple times a day (sometimes more than once in a sitting), but like Heimdall at the gates of Asgard, it’s something we do more dutifully than happily. We’re lazy when it comes to ejaculating, so we’re always looking for a hand. Or a mouth. Or a vagina.

Or a
leg
.

Cut to nearly a decade later: Jen was getting ready to go out one night, and as she stood in the bathroom mirror in nothing but a towel, she suddenly became fascinating to me, the most interesting person not only in the world, but especially in the room at that moment. And to top it off, there was easy access to crown jewels usually encased in grope-proof pajamas or tight jeans that porky paws can never breach.

So I joined her at the bathroom mirror and started laying on hands like a tent-revival preacher, as if I could exorcise whatever demon she was housing … so
I
could move in instead. Now, the wife’s eight kinds of clever, so she can smell the hustle coming from miles away. Suddenly Mr. Twitter has shut his laptop and come a-courting. In response, still applying her war paint, Jen started closures of her own, locking those legs at the knees.

I started tugging at her towel in an effort to disappoint
this captivating creature one more time. All the blood that normally fuels common sense had now rushed to a cock so rigid and unbreakable, I could have cut diamonds with it. I looked down and saw the tip of the head poking out from under my belly—a rarity for this zaftig boy. And as I mounted up yet again for a ride inside my bride, Jennifer backed me off with the most powerful sentiment a wife can impart to her husband of ten years, the sharer of her dreams, adventures, and hopes, and father of her only begotten daughter …

“I don’t want you leaking out of me all night.”

This would be a major wrinkle in the campaign of most men, but as a married man, I knew this meant we were merely negotiating. I presented my counteroffer.

“Head?”

“It’s not your birthday …,” she muttered, applying her lipstick as if it were a Rubicon I dared not cross.

“Can you jerk me off?”

“Jerk
yourself
off.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I thought. And that’s when I heard these sad, desperate words leap from my lips …

“Well, can I at least look at your asshole while I jerk off?”

Most women would have been repulsed, but Schwalbach has had
years
to get used to the sad mess that is the man she married. Many a night, she’s had to pull open a pity cheek in the bed for the chatty fatty who wants to play looksies. She gently sighs each time I remind her that it was always my dream as a twelve-year-old tubster to look at a naked lady whenever I wanted. Had I known there’d be an Internet one day, perhaps I wouldn’t have romanticized marriage so. But
since I came (and came, and came …) of age in a more innocent time, I’m sentimental about marriage and a big believer in the institution, defined in the great Garden State of New Jersey as a legal union in which both partners are contractually forced to share nudity and orgasms with each other.

So with all the patience of a Canadian saint, Jen stepped her legs apart slightly as the towel dropped. And while she continued to put on her face in the bathroom mirror, my wife-for-life announced, “You’ve got five minutes.”

Gentle reader, I needed merely one minute before I cannoned millions of potential Harley siblings into the back of my wife’s knee. That’s the beauty of marriage: You bind yourself to someone who understands that every once in a while, you’ve gotta chimp out and answer to that primal teenager still buried in your brain who wants to explore and do all the weird shit you’d fantasized about while pounding pudd back home at Mom and Dad’s. Sometimes, in order for a marriage to work, you’ve gotta let your spouse stare at your asshole and jerk off while you’re busy doing something else. No Catholic priest is ever gonna tell you that in a Pre-Cana Conference; that comes from a soldier who’s spent the past dozen years in the trenches … or rather,
Jen’s
trench—which I’m using metaphorically, of course, and not as descriptive of the length, depth, or width of her hoo-ha.

Faced with the dismal prospect of cumming alone, even the mighty fall to their knees—in this case, literally. Picture, if you will, a beautiful, tall, dignified, naked woman primping in the bathroom mirror as Jabba the Hutt kneels at her backside like she’s a rack of candles in church, tugging one out while he spectates before her anus.

And that, my friends, is the very definition of
marriage.
In marriage, we walk through life with a partner—someone you never have to be afraid of saying dopey, depraved shit in front of. Rather than run screaming, Schwalbach weighed a certainty against a doubt, dropped her towel, and let me perv out, literally behind her back. Jen Schwalbach was and continues to be my favorite person in the world because I’ve never had more fun with any other living creature than I have with her. That’s not just a wife, that’s a
dream girl
.

Achieving your dreams isn’t hard. Like anything in life, there’s an equation to follow: You’ve gotta learn how to dream practically wild while conducting yourself as wildly practical. I didn’t dream of curing cancer or traveling to another galaxy for a career; I chose something that seemed achievable: film. Other cats who didn’t seem any more special than I was had made movies; why not
me
?

But while dreaming is free and fun, you’ve gotta make sure you manage your expectations. Accept that nothing will ever go for you exactly as it went for someone else, but more important, know that you never get
exactly
what you want; it’s usually a modified or over-the-top version of what you sought in the first place. In my case, I wanted a career in the arts, so I could remain an adolescent my entire adult life.

But art is not math: The numbers don’t always add up or make sense—which is part of art’s magic. However, magic isn’t a predictable construct; it’s an alchemy you pray will work each time, not a de facto recipe for success. If you wanna be in film, creative writing, music, painting, or performance, know that there are very few concretes—because, chiefly, your job is to make believe. That’s all “talented”
adults really are: overgrown children, unwilling to accept standard-issue adulthood. If you feel the circus calling, answer her, but know that you may be in for a life of sacrifice to attain your goals. There is no financial security in any creative pursuit. If you want certainty, get out of art.

Just learn to manage your expectations. Be malleable—so that if all that’s open to your square peg is a round hole, you can still make it work. Sometimes, you’re so wrapped up in the details, you forget there is lots more to the picture. The canvas of art is vast; be happy you get to add any color to it, not bitchy about which crayons are taken. Shine with what you got.

I learned this by observing my wife for the last decade-plus. Jennifer managed
her
expectations when she hooked up with me. My wife’s a good-looking woman and I’m a fat schlub. She could have done a lot better than me and landed one of those thin boys with roving eyes. But she knew that while she’d have to look past my perceived deficit of a spare-tire belly, I was above par in most other areas that counted: I was loyal, interesting, funny, a great provider, and I ate pussy like it contained the cure for fat, or more likely, sugar—the
source
of fat. Thin boys may not have the gut, but that means they also have more options, because
everybody
wants thin and in shape. But if you fuck a dude nobody wants to fuck—a fat dude—you can be relatively sure he’ll never cheat on you. And even
better
? He’ll show you insane appreciation for making the alternative choice—even over the course of a lifetime.

Jen managed her expectations, yes—but she also sacrificed. Film had taken over my life years before I met Jen. Since 1991, making movies was the prime directive: It was
my passion, my art, all I wanted to do in life, and yet it never seemed impossible to accomplish. Richard Linklater had done it with
Slacker.
Hal Hartley had done it with
The Unbelievable Truth
and
Trust.
Spike Lee had broken through with
She’s Gotta Have It.
P. J. Castellaneta shot the gay film
Together Alone
for less than ten grand, while Robert Rodriguez made an entire action movie allegedly for seven thousand dollars. None of these guys seemed anointed by God, unless you consider Harvey Weinstein the Almighty; why, then, couldn’t
I
do it as well?

By the time I’d met Jen Schwalbach, I’d committed my life to film, much in the same way the clergy commit their lives to Christ. But Jesus requires a leap of faith in
Him
; film would require a leap of faith in
me.
Making movies was all I wanted to do, so I organized my life around cinema. If folks wanted to share time with me or be in my world, they had to understand that film would always be my first love.

When I met Jen, I was in pre-production on
Dogma
and well established in the indie film pantheon as the guy who shot onto the scene with
Clerks
, stumbled at the box office with
Mallrats
, and took a huge jump with the truly indie
Chasing Amy
—a film about male sexual insecurity and the nature of love. I’d soared and sunk and come back from the brink of irrelevancy, going from overnight sensation to indie whipping boy to drunken master—a cycle that would repeat every few years for the rest of my life in film. I was
entrenched
in movies and
nothing
was gonna get me out of them.

Jennifer Schwalbach was a journalist at the biggest newspaper in the world. She’d just gotten her own byline when we were thrown together for the
Good Will Hunting
spinterview. She was going places … until we fell in love. And in order to give us half a shot at making it as a couple, Jennifer made the most noble and unthinkable sacrifice for the greater good. She quit her job.

In fact, Jen quit
two
jobs for me and my world. First, she left
USA Today
, moving east to be closer to me. She’d landed a gig at MTV in New York City and was making excellent progress when the Kevin Smith Effect would knock her even further off her own path: Jen got pregnant with Harley. Soon, the MTV gig would be sacrificed at the altar of our relationship—the altar she built and maintained because I was too busy making dopey movies back in Jersey. Just like me, Jennifer Schwalbach had ambitions and dreams of accomplishments that would make her parents proud. Unlike me, Jennifer Schwalbach was willing to chuck it all for something profoundly more rewarding.

That’s
some tough shit right there: knowing you destroyed the life of the only person you’d take a bullet for. Jenny Schwalbach’s potential was hampered and hindered because she fell in love with the wrong guy—one of those fucking filmmakers who thinks solely about himself and his work, who plays for a living and makes pretend for money. The portrait of the artist as a young man slowly devolves into the depiction of a self-involved paid liar with a half-lived life—more make-believe than reality. I would have been alone in that life—perhaps lost in my art eventually—because film is a siren that calls you to her jagged rocks to pick your bones clean, then lies in wait for another hapless dreamer to sail by. You give yourself to something old and massive that promises immortality but instead uses you up and moves on. But we don’t ever bitch: The life of an artist
is vibrant, electric, and fulfilling … until it’s not anymore. And after decades spent pursuing something with all the passion and purpose of Odysseus, to paraphrase
Conan the Barbarian
’s King Osric, “There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a guy’s love for the chick he initially believed was a hooker paid for by Chris Rock.”

For years, I thought I was doing the important work, but movies are just smoke and mirrors and shadows and fog. Telling the lie that tells the truth doesn’t take courage so much as it takes a willingness to lay down your life in service of making shit up. In that, it’s no different from child’s play: Filmmakers fill their time with empty celluloid distractions, maintaining each is an important pursuit with all the passion and vehemence kids display when
they
frolic in lands of make-believe on a playground, in a schoolyard, or in their bedrooms. It’s the epic diversion from the all-encompassing truth that one day very soon, we will cease to be.