My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (37 page)

I get home and nurse Jenny a bit ‘til we crash, watching TiVo’ed
Simpsons
.

Saturday 16 July 2005 @ 2:23 a.m.

I wake up around 5 a.m., and for the first time in months, I let the dogs out. That’s followed by the morning dumpski, after which I head into my office and check email for a while before getting in the shower. As I’m drying off, I call Bryan to tell him I’m on my way. I write the increasingly more flu-ridden Jen a love note and stick it on the bathroom door with a Band-Aid before grabbing my gear quietly, so as not to wake up Princess Sicky-Poo, and heading out.

I pick up Bry and shoot down the 101 to grab Malcolm in Silverlake. Our trio locked and loaded, we start the trek down to Diego.

What should only take me two hours winds up being a nearly four-hour trip, thanks to a few accidents on the freeway, as well as horrendous traffic. But I don’t care, as I’m hanging with Big Bry — something I haven’t gotten to do in awhile.

Bry is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and probably the funniest person I know. Even if I haven’t seen him for months, ten seconds in, and we’re back in the groove, bullshitting about movies, aging, relationships, Walt, our parents, Malcolm, Mewes, and especially life back in Highlands. Bry and I never take walks down Memory Lane; we patrol it, Neighborhood Watch style. We obsess over shit that happened fifteen years ago, dissect conversations we had with people in High School, reminisce about all the trouble we almost got into, and still wonder why the fuck three sober dudes (me, Bry, and Ed) got thrown out of four parties, back in the summer of ‘89. Jen hates being around us when we go on the Highlands rants; most other people except Mewes or Walt do too; I guess they always feel like “I don’t know who Shubee, Neeny Balls, Johnny Ram, Stinkweed, or Big Lady are, so this crap doesn’t interest me.” But Bry and I can do hours on former classmates and people we haven’t seen in nearly two decades — so much so that it’d probably scare some of those cats to know how often we talk about them, when they probably haven’t given us a thought in years.

And it’s not a Glory Days kinda misty look-back, where we pine for the girls we never got or something like that; it’s far less sexy than that, really. It’s conversation after conversation about Soukel’s microscope (a yearbook photo of a girl we never really spoke to that captured our imaginations); about the way Ed would construct hockey nets for the Rec tennis court games every weekend, then destroy them in frustration over a missed shot; about that time we spied on Walt and Debbie when they were still just dating, and how we caught our friend in an uncharacteristic tender moment when he took his girlfriend in his arms and slow danced; about Tara and Jamie, the insanely young girls who Ed and Bry dated on the down-low for years; about Clearwater, the beach club landlocked on Memorial Parkway, a mile from the nearest beach, and its owner, Luke Penta, whose mantra was “Have fun, don’t run...”. about eighties metal bands, and how white kids from the suburbs (like me) traded it in for another kind of bad-boy music called hip-hop, while Bry still rocks out to twenty year-old King Diamond jams.

Perfect example of what losers we are: last year, while Bry was living in Vegas for a few months, I was staying at the Hard Rock for a week, writing
Clerks 2
during the day and playing blackjack with Bry at night. One evening, we pushed away from the tables early and went back to the room, where we went online and looked up a slew of people we went to High School with, laughing our asses off about how there we were, in the middle of Sin City, where we could indulge ourselves in any form of debauchery known to man, and we were happiest Google-ing motherfuckers who probably hadn’t uttered our names since we graduated. Bullshitting about the old days with Bry is one of my top five favorite pastimes, because we’ve never let them become the old days; with us, the past is the present.

Four hours whip by, and we’re in San Diego, at the Marriott. The Con has gotten me a room cross town at the W Hotel, but even though we left LA at eight in the morning, we’re arriving with about forty-five minutes to spare before my one o’clock panel, so I blow off the W and valet Jen’s Range Rover at the Marriott. Bry, Mitch and I take leaks, then grab some quick lunch before calling Chappy to meet us at the back of the Convention Center with our badges.

Chappy walks us in, and I head straight to Hall H, where I’ll be doing my panel. They’re bringing people in, so the Con folks bring us up to the green room. I’m sweating my ass off after the trek around the Convention Center, so I’m grabbing napkins and scrubbing the copious amounts of perspiration off my brow. Then, they bring us down the elevator to the back of the stage, and I meet up with Richard Kelly, who’ll be doing a brief
Southland Tales
thing at the end of my Q&A, when we announce the
Southland Tales
prequel graphic novels Richard’s writing and Chappy and I are publishing through a joint View Askew/Graphitti Designs venture. Also backstage is Diane from Funimation, who’s set me up with some
Degrassi
clips to show the crowd, from the Jay and Silent Bob episodes. I go over the clips with her, making sure they’re whole scenes, and not just outtakes, and she assures me they are. With that, I head out.

I’ve never spoken in Hall H before, oddly enough. Not sure how new it is, but the biggest room I’ve ever done at Comic-Con has always been the biggest room I was under the impression they offered: the 3,000 seater. Hall H is more than double that; at 6,500, it’s the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to before. And the house is packed.

Now I’m not stupid: I know all those people aren’t there just for me. Some folks camp out in these lecture halls, watching a full day’s worth of programming, waiting through shit they’re not wild about to get to stuff they love. Even as I hit the stage, I know there are a bunch of folks in attendance holding seats for the
King Kong
panel later in the day. But I always dig having non-VA enthusiasts in the room, because if I do my job correctly, I can convert them by panel’s end. I’ve read online many times the same sentiment, post-Q&A or panel: “I never liked his flicks, but he’s pretty fucking funny.” I’ll take that. Not to say I want an audience of heathens, but mixing a few in with the hardcore keeps a brother honest, sometimes; makes him work harder to win the room.

I’m getting the big laughs, until I make the mistake of running the
Degrassi
clips, which isn’t the whole Jay and Bob ninja fight scene I was assured it was, but is instead two whole takes of me talking to the Caitlin character, completely dry of sound mixing and score. Worse, those two takes aren’t much different from one another, and they’re played back-to-back; so the already tepid reaction the first take got seemed like a standing ovation compared to the relative silence watching it run again accompanied. I was so pissed; I mean, had I known what the clips were — and that they were identical, no less — I’d have kept answering queries instead. Indeed, I believe we probably put a few fence-sitters off from buying the
Jay and Silent Bob Do Degrassi
DVD, so boring were the clips.

The lights come back up and I recover pretty quickly, getting the Ha-Has back ASAP. When the Con folks tell me I’ve got to wrap it up (and I’m not used to an hour-only Q&A; the shortest I’ve done in recent memory has been four hours), I bring out Richard Kelly, who looks a little shell-shocked by the Sermon on the Mount atmosphere of Hall H. He drops a little science (and a clip) about
Southland Tales
, and then we’re off.

I grab a smoke with the boys, then head to the booth to do some signing of the San Diego exclusive Kevin Smith InAction Figure. Five hundred people have just suddenly gathered at the Graphitti/Secret Stash West booth, and the Fire Marshal’s threatening to shut the Con down, unless we can disburse the crowd and get the aisles clear. I agree to sign for the first seventy-five people at the booth, and then promise to tag for the remaining four hundred and change upstairs, in the autograph area.

All the signing takes me to about 5:45/6:00-ish, after which I wash the fuck out of my hands (shaking hands with that many people will make a brother germ-y, to say the least), then head back to the green room to chill and wait for the Big Show.

While I was signing, Malcolm and Bryan were badgering me about staying to watch the Tenacious D performance following the
King Kong
panel. But I was telling them “I’ve gotta get home to Jen. We’ve got a drive ahead of us.” But Malcolm pleaded until I relented and offered, “If I can intro the D, I’ll stick around.” Malcolm’s nothing if not a closer, so he went to work on securing me the Tenacious D intro honors. He came back in five minutes, offering, “It’s done. They’re psyched you wanna do it.”

Smoking on the green room porch, I’m thrown by how star-studded the San Diego Comic-Con has become. Back in ‘95, the first time I ever attended, the biggest non-comics name in attendance was maybe Bruce Campbell. Now, it’s like ShoWest Junior there. No less than three of the most recent Academy Award winners for Best Actor and Actress (Adrien Brody, Charlize Theron, and Jamie Foxx) were whoring their latest projects (
Kong
,
Aeon Flux
, and
Stealth
) to the Con crowds. It’s nuts how much power the geek audience now wields, whereas we could never even so much as get a handjob back in the day.

I chat it up with Mark Steven Johnson, who’s there with Eva Mendes, the female lead of Mark’s
Ghost Rider
; I talk to Rob Cohen about
Stealth
; I talk to my man Jack Black (the guy I met with over a year ago to talk into playing
Ranger Danger
) about the flick he’s gonna do with the
Napoleon Dynamite
director. And then, it’s time to do the D.

I’m a huge Tenacious D fan. I remember the first time I saw the HBO shorts, back while we were shooting
Dogma
in Pittsburgh. Mos had gotten a bunch of tapes of the shows from Raskind I believe, and they were the buzz-watch of the show, passed from cast and crew member to cast and crew member. I’d seen them play in New York one night, years back with Jen, Malcolm and Alanis, of all people. We’d hit a PJ Harvey show at the Knitting Factory, and then shot over to what I’m thinking was the Hammerstein Ballroom to watch JB and KG own bitches. My fandom forced me to uncharacteristically ask if I could do something
I wasn’t being asked to do in the first place — which has happened on only two other occasions I can think of: when I wanted to guest on
Law & Order
and
Degrassi
. But I didn’t care. I am humbled by the D, and wanted to bring them out that night. Mercifully, the guys said yes, and suddenly, there I was: having another one of those “after this, I can die a happy man” moments.

So we’re backstage, the house is packed, and the New Line trailer show is coming to an end, signaling the start of the Tenacious D set. I’m given the hand mic and told to go. I ascend the stairs, the happiest boy in the world.

And then trip on the top step and fall flat on my face in front of 6,500 people.

Yes, it was embarrassing as fuck — ‘cause when a fat man goes down, he goes down hard. But I immediately leapt to my feet, dusted off, and got a thunderous greeting. I joke around for a bit, and then tell the crowd “There are only nine cocks in the world I would suck. There were ten, but I topped Affleck off and crossed his name off the list. These guys I’m gonna bring out are numbers six and five. Give it up for the men of Inspirado... TENACIOUS D.”

As I leave the stage, I hug Jack and get stopped by Kyle, who turns his back to the crowd, drops his shorts, and thrusts his dick at me. I mime making the drop, and then rush off stage, through the backstage, and over to the small private seating area on stage right, where I watch the killer performance of two chubby guys who’re flat-out geniuses drop on the crowd. Once the show’s over, I collect Bry and Malcolm, and Margot and George, our escorts/security, bring us through the loading docks and back to the hotel, where we grab the car and hit the road.

Two hours and change and a McDonald’s stop later, I drop Malcolm and Bry off, and head home to Jen, who’s now so feverish, she’s sweated through three pairs of pajamas — which is saying a lot because Schwalbach NEVER sweats. I lay down beside Jen, recounting the events of the day for her. Then, I load up her water pitcher with ice and fresh aqua and pop in a DVD of the eighties
Twilight Zone
from the new box set that just came out last week, to which we fall asleep.

Sunday 17 July 2005 @ 2:24 a.m.

I wake up around five, take a dump, let the dogs out, and check the boards and email. I bring my laptop upstairs and make some oatmeal, throwing it back while checking the weekend grosses. I’m feeling a little gross, so I jump in the pool for a while and play ball with Mulder.

Post-pool, I dry off and head downstairs, where I crawl back into bed and go
back to sleep ‘til noon.

I get up and putter with Jen before she sends me to Bristol for more soup and ice cream, to soothe her swollen glands and sore throat. On the way back, I hit 7-11 for some smokes and Emergen-C for Jen.

When I get back to the house, I indulge in some ice cream beside the wife, watching
Twilight Zone
eps. Later, I do laundry and make Italian Sausages on the grill, most of which I burn and give to the dogs. I convince Jen to come upstairs and relax in the sun for a while, then head downstairs to shit and shower. While drying off, I check the laundry again and bring up some new water for the office cooler.

We talk to Harley on the phone, who’s still up in Big Bear with Nan, Pop and Jimmy, and opt not to bring her home, in case Jen’s contagious. Gail jumps on and reminds me to get going, as I’ve got a 7:50 p.m. flight back to Vancouver to catch. Jen’s saying she’s gonna go, but I read her the riot act, as she’s in no shape to travel upstairs, let alone to the Van.

I grab my laundry, fold and pack it, then get dressed and head upstairs to sign a bunch of
Jersey Girl
and
Dogma
grid posters for the online Stash. Mewes joins me, and we chit-chat a bit while I’m signing, then head downstairs, where he collects my bag to load into the car, and I say g’bye to my poor, sick One True, who’s heartbroken she can’t come with me in her condition, but will join me in a few days, when her fever breaks.