My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (18 page)

When we get home, I head upstairs to grab a glass of iced tea for my sausages and sit down and finish reading
Variety
. Afterwards, Gail lets Scully and Mulder in and I feed the mutts before going back downstairs.

Jen’s generously offered to help me pack (once she’s done emailing Chay), so I pull all the clothes I wanna take with me out of my closet and dump them on the floor. I’ve opted against luggage, and instead, insist on using plastic storage tubs from Target. Since we’re driving up, I can fit a shit-load of these buckets into the back of the Expedition, as well as the luggage Jen’s bringing for her initial two-week stay.

I head to my office, plug in a 100-gig Firewire drive to back up my desk-top Mac. While it gobbles up all ninety gigs of my life’s work, I forge ahead on the dreaded
Rolling Stone
piece ‘til one-ish, at which point I give it a read and finally feel satisfied enough to turn it in. I email it to Jim, the
Rolling Stone
editor, and clean up some desk-top files before shutting down and emerging from the room, hands held triumphantly high to the couch-riding Jen, announcing the beast has been tamed. She’s already packed all my clothes into the containers, so now all that’s left for me to do is pack DVDs and sundry non-clothing items I’ll be needing for my nearly three-month stay up north.

I pack a massive container full of movies, packed to the top largely with a slew of flicks I haven’t even opened yet. I round up the comics I haven’t gotten around
to reading in the last few months as well, and put my office in order. With everything now sorted and packed, I head upstairs to sign the four hundred copies of
Silent Bob Speaks
that are waiting for me on the dining room table. Jen heads off to pick up Harley from school.

While signing the only amount of the second printing we could get from the book distrib (the second printing flew out of the warehouse, necessitating a third printing, which won’t be available ‘til mid-May), Gail comes upstairs to continue making family dinner: spaghetti and meatballs. I tell her to call Smalls so he can load up the truck with the luggage and then pack up the signed books for shipping to Don in Florida. Harley and Jen return, and Harley joins me, helping me stack the signed books. Since we had such a smearing problem with the last batch, I’m now signing inside the book — and as she stacks each copy, Harley takes a moment to open the book and inhale the Sharpie smell. We get through the stacks and it’s dinnertime. Byron appears for the first time, walking without wincing. Turns out the drugs the back doctor gave him are masking the pain enough for him to stand up and move around. He joins us for dinner.

It’s an early family dinner — ‘round 3:45 p.m. — because Harley has to go back to school for gymnastics. While the lucky sumbitches dig into pasta, I mix up some chicken salad and brew a glass of iced tea. We’re all chatting up Harley about her day, but she’s obsessed with this spider she spotted on the ceiling that seems to be making its way toward the stove.

I head downstairs closely followed by Jen and Harley. Jen’s connection to Harley is, naturally, stronger than mine, so whenever we have to leave the Quinnster behind, it emotionally cripples Jen. They’re going through their mother-daughter bond stuff, after which I hug and kiss the kid, tickle her and tell her I’ll see her in a week, and send her off to gymnastics.

I take a shower, wrap myself in a robe, then head to my office to see if I’ve gotten a response from the
Rolling Stone
guy. Finding nothing, I shut the computer down, get dressed, and head upstairs to sign the last batch of
Dogma
UK posters we’ll ever carry at the online Stash. When I’m done, I go back to our room, where Jen’s drawing ‘I Love You’ signs for Harley to find when she gets home. I clean up the TiVo storage and cancel some programs off the Season Pass menu. We give the room a once-over, say g’bye to Scully and Mulder, and I carry the last few tubs of gear to the elevator. We pop in to Byron and Gail’s room to say g’bye, then I head outside to spin the car around to the garage and load the last two containers from the elevator. Fully packed, we start our drive to Vancouver.

It’s a straight shot up on the 5, but since we’re leaving at about six, there’s a bunch of traffic. We clear the city and it’s smooth sailing. I call Don to tell him all the books are signed and we wind up talking for an hour. Turns out they’re moving the Online Stash fulfillment center to a warehouse space, as it’s gotten too big to keep in the offices they’d been in for the last year and a half. Don relates some amusingly horrifying tales of having to deal with the credit card companies until I lose connection to him in the mountains. Jen’s been buried in
Newsweek
the whole time, so she relishes the opportunity to fill me in on some of the stuff she’s read until we hit a gas and food stop. I call Don back and finish the convo while filling up the Expedition. Jen and I grab some McDonald’s (Diet Coke and fries) for her, and some Carl’s Jr. (bunless six dollar burger with cheese, chicken breast and iced tea) for me. We head back out to the road.

Harley calls in to say g’night. When that convo’s done, the wife and I spend the next hour and a half chit-chatting. Aside from getting inside her body my favorite Jen/Kev pastime is getting inside her head. I find Jen insanely interesting, and I love hearing her talk and probing her verbally (orally and cock-ally, too). I tell her about my cheating dream, and we talk about my historical predilection for really pale girls, as well as which (if any) of her friends I’d fuck if we weren’t together (turns out none). After awhile, we opt for some iPod. We listen to a lot of Springsteen before clicking over to Spalding Gray’s ‘It’s a Slippery Slope’, which takes us into Sacramento.

We get a room at the Sheraton and load all her bags out of the car. I grab a change of clothes from my tubs and we head upstairs. We both take long leaks before climbing into bed and purchasing some
Frasier
episodes from the in-room movie menu to fall asleep to.

Friday 6 May 2005 @ 11:04 p.m.

I wake up around eight-ish, take a leak, then head out into the living room part of our hotel suite to update my diary, letting Jen sleep in.

Jen gets up around 10:30 a.m., immediately searching for coffee. The room service folks won’t do breakfast past ten, so we opt against eating here and decide to take showers and get a move on.

We drive about thirty miles down the road, then stop to gas up and grab some Quizno’s. I pull the box of Trivial Pursuit cards out of the back, just in case the wife feels like playing Alex Trebek, then we get back on the 5 North and drive.

And drive, and drive, and drive. We drive and listen to the iPod while Jen reads. We barely talk for a couple of hours, just occasionally exchanging warm glances or holding hands. For a while, I’m the deejay. Then, Jen takes over. I chew gum, she smokes. It takes us hours to get out of California. We only ever stop for gas, Diet Coke, and Iced Tea; then, it’s back on the road. We climb over the Shasta mountains and the hills of Oregon. We see America while listening to ‘America’. We chit-chat, then fall into long silences. When we get a signal, we talk to Harley and Gail. Later in the day, Jen digs into the Trivial Pursuit questions and quizzes me for hours ‘til it’s too dark to see the cards. We succumb to the desire for comfort food and snack out on fries and Chips Ahoy. And before we know it, twelve hours have gone by.

We pull into Seattle at one a.m. The whole last hour of the trip, I’ve been saying how the car feels like it’s out of alignment or something. As we pull into the garage of the hotel in the heart of the Emerald City, I discover why: we’ve got a pretty bad flat.

We get the bags into the lobby, check in, and head up to the room. I call AAA to see about getting the tire fixed in the a.m. It’s about a two-hour drive from where we are to Vancouver, so I should make it to my noon
Catch
rehearsal with plenty of time, if AAA shows up early enough. Before I fall asleep, I check email and update the diary.

Saturday 7 May 2005 @ 11:04 p.m.

I get up at seven and take a shower. As I dry off, I call AAA. Jen wakes up, and we head downstairs to meet the Triple A guy in the parking garage. The guy swaps out our tire, I tip him, and we go back to the room to shit and pack (though not together). We head out on the road by twenty after eight.

We stop at McDonald’s to fuel up, then race like hell to British Columbia. After clearing Customs, we cruise into Vancouver and check into the hotel. We’re in the residence side of the hotel. Neither of us are really into it, but it’s only until we secure an apartment.

Susanah’s assistant Rhonda comes by with Forest from the hair department, who measures my bald spot for a possible piece. Susanah joins us, and she, Sam Jaeger and I rehearse for a few hours. I don’t think I’m as strong as I was in the table read, but that might have something to do with the fact that I’ve only had four-and-a-half hours sleep. Sam’s great, and fun to bounce off, so the time flies.

Afterwards, I head to the room and find a note from Jen telling me to meet her in the downstairs bar. We chit-chat for a bit, and then head out into the city to grab some pizza, over which we decide to change our room for something less on the residence side and more on the hotel side. We head back to the hotel, make the change at the front desk, have our luggage moved to our new suite, then head out to London Drugs to grab an Airport Express (to replace the one I forgot at the hotel in Sacramento). We grab some other stuff (snacks and water), then shoot back to our room, where we hunker down in front of some season six
X-Files
with our wireless laptops and snacks, exhausted. We’re out cold by nine-thirty/ten.

Sunday 8 May 2005 @ 11:04 p.m.

Get up around seven-thirty, which bugs me because there are no dogs, and yet still I’m rising early. Jen’s not in bed, so I sleepily call out her name and get a response from the bathroom. She emerges, and I wish her a Happy Mother’s Day. I take a dumpski, do some Listerine, and we call home to talk to Harley. Jen gets blue because there’s a full-blown Mother’s Day celebration going on back at the house, with Chay, Gail, Byron and Harley, and she misses her daughter. As a distraction, we throw on some clothes and head downstairs to look for food.

We don’t wander far. There’s a Mother’s Day brunch going on in the hotel restaurant. And since Mother’s Day is the (allegedly) busiest day in the food service industry’s calendar, the hotel’s opened their upstairs ballroom and turned it into a makeshift dining room as well — where folks without reservations (like us) are shuffled. We chow down, trying to figure out why the Mother’s Day motif (as represented on both floors, near the buffet table) is a little patch of faux garden with some flowers sprouting up and a small shovel and pitchfork nearby. Wouldn’t a stroller have been more appropriate, as you can be a mother who’s never been into gardening, but you can’t be a mother without a kid being in the mix somewhere? “It’s Canada-town, Jake.”

When we’re done eating, we saunter back to London Drugs to pick up an oscillating fan so Jen can smoke in the room without smoking me out. We grab some water and other stuff too, then stop by Starbucks to latte Jen up before lugging our booty back to the hotel.

Once in the room and in our woobs, Jen lays down and I call my Mom to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day and fill her in on my life since my last call. I was having a Mother’s Day gift made for her, but it’s not done yet, so it may be either a Dad’s Two-Year Anniversary gift or morph into an Anniversary gift.

When I get off the phone, I curl up in bed beside Jen, and we watch a bunch of season six
X-Files
while posting and checking email. Jen sends me a great
piece she wrote about our drive that I urge her to post on the board, but she’s feeling a little shy about it, so opts against. It’s the second thing she’s written in the last two weeks (other than all the email she writes to Chay), so I’m thrilled to read it and savor every word.

Hours slip by, during which time we snack out and eat lunch, all while watching Scully and Mulder run around the very town we’re now in.

I use the one-line schedule provided by production to fill in my iCal with all the dates I’m shooting, so as to come up with some idea of when I can and can’t fly home for long weekends and stuff. Jen and I go over it to map out how many times she’ll be coming back to Vancouver before the big move, after Harley’s done with school, when the entire family will come to town. Before we realize it, we’ve pissed away most of the day on
X-Files
and laying around — which was just what the doctor ordered, really. Jen wants a backrub, so she suggests we head downstairs, or take a walk to the water. I counter with suggesting a drive, instead, to take in our surroundings and get our bearings. We argue about this for a few minutes before switching positions on the subject (in arguments, we tend to try to out-think what one another is gonna say next or eventually), then settling on the drive. Harley calls as we’re waiting for the elevator, so I talk to her a bit then pass the phone over to the parent she really wants to talk to. Jen opts against getting into the elevator, so as not to lose cell signal, and I tell her I’m gonna head downstairs and give the valet guy our ticket.

While waiting for the car downstairs, I run into Olyphant and we chit-chat about the next week’s schedule. Jen joins us, says hi, and then Schwalbach and I are off, into the Vancouver non-night (it’s past eight, yet still very light out).

I do the Kev/Van ‘92 Reality Tour with Jen, first showing her the old location of the Vancouver Film School (on Hamilton), then swinging over the Cambie Bridge to the other side of town, detailing the looooong walk to school I used to take, while searching for the house I lived in during my six-month stay (we look for a half hour, but I can’t find it). All the while, I’m having flashbacks to the only time in my life when I was truly lonely. Aside from Mosier (who lived way out in Port Moody), I had no friends in this burg — nobody to hang with. Nobody from back home ever came out to visit me either, and since this was pre-internet, I had very little contact with Jersey. Of all people, Walter was my life-line to Highlands then — writing me handwritten letters detailing the misadventures of Mewes or chatting comics. He always included artwork in his packages, too; indeed, that’s when he’d sent me the drawing of the clown in fishnets that would become our company logo for a decade. For the friend who probably understood what I was doing the least back then (nobody we knew had ever been to film school or thought about making a movie), Walt was my sounding board: I remember writing to him asking if he thought the name View Askew would be good for a production company. I still have all of his letters.