Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (20 page)

That’s because, like your parents or your wife, a podcast doesn’t have to be looked at to be listened to. And like a Fleshlight, a podcast is there when
you
need it. Since it’s loads of chatter, it’s what they call white noise in the background of your day. It’s like listening to music but usually much funnier. Since it’s audio only, it doesn’t have to be stared at to be enjoyed, and it travels well on any MP3 player—which means podcasts can accompany you during your commute. Imagine getting all that mind-blowing free aural, those thick, hot loads of words splashed across your ears, chest, and neck … all while accomplishing something
else
. Something more
important
. You’re getting shit done when you can kill two birds with one stone, so listening to podcasts actually increases your productivity.

Ralph had never podcasted before, but he’d been in radio for over a dozen years, and radio and podcasting are kinda like Vulcans and Romulans: close enough. After SModcastle opened, Ralph e-mailed me asking, “Wanna do that movie biz show as a podcast instead? We can record it live at your SModcastle.” I suggested we call it
Hollywood Babble-On
, and suddenly Ralph and I were off and running.

Since Ralph is on the radio in Los Angeles every morning, he’s got his own audience—and
boy
, did that audience turn out for our
Babble
. From the show’s debut on, Ralph Garman’s fan base (the Garmy) would buy up every one of the forty-four available seats, selling out every
week—a feat matched only by Jason Mewes when we launched
Jay and Silent Bob Get Old
a few weeks later.

After months of
Babble-On
and
Get Old
easily selling out our tiny SModitorium, it was clear both shows would flourish in a bigger space. Scott and I had done
SModcast
at comedy clubs a few times, including twice at the world-renowned Improv on Melrose in Los Angeles. So even though SModcastle owner Kev Smith was over the moon about the consistently sold-out shows, costar Kev Smith knew we could easily fill
more
seats. I asked Ralph to sniff around town and see if another club wanted to host
Babble
, and on November 26, 2010, we hit the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club stage running, adding an element that’ll make any comedy funnier:
booze
! A few weeks later,
Get Old
moved up to the Lovitz as well—ironically setting an intervention podcast in a bar. Within a few months, SModCo bought the top floor of the Universal CityWalk hot spot, and Jon Lovitz changed the name of his club to the Jon Lovitz Podcast Theatre. SModcastle dropped her drawbridge and moved on up, to a deluxe apartment in the sky, where Ralph and I babble-the-fuck on every Saturday night.

Turns out truth and candor were the gateways to so-briety and success for Jason. Six months after the first episode, I was standing on a stage beside Mewes at the Hard Rock Live in Orlando, where fifteen hundred people had paid to see us talk to each other—partly because they wanted to help him stay clean by hearing him out, and mostly because he’s a funny fucker. In less than a year,
Jay and Silent Bob Get Old
begat sold-out live tours here
and
abroad, selling out shows in London, Sydney, Toronto. The guy who didn’t want to tell anyone he’d used needles now
tells the world funny-as-fuck cautionary tales of his wasted, wastoid youth on a weekly basis and always manages to do it with big laughs and bigger insight.

With all the talking we were doing, it was clear this was all becoming much SMore than just a hobby. So Mewes, Jen, and I tapped his wife, Jordan, to run SModCo, the umbrella company under which we’d podcast, broadcast, tour, shoot, publish, merchandise—a sort of View Askew Part 2. I had the find of the decade on
Cop Out
, when production manager Ray Quinlan told his daughter Meghan to drive me home from the office one night. Meghan quickly became my left hand (not my right, as that is my jerk-off hand, and I can still do that myself, thank you very much), so much so that she came back to California with us after the New York shoot wrapped. She’s now the producer of our
SModCo SMorning Show
, as well as the tour manager who put together the
Red State
USA Tour with Jeff Hyman, our show booker at Degy Entertainment. She brought in her fiancé, Alan, who now heads up our SMerchandise division. Together, we built a new clubhouse, where all we do is talk for a living. It’s pretty punk rock—dare I say, even a bit
indie
.

Live podcasts are the spine of everything I do now. Live podcasts begat the
Red State
USA Tour and birthed a streaming online radio station dubbed S.I.R.—SModcast Internet Radio—where every morning I host a show with my real wife, Jen, or my man-wife, Jay. And live podcasts led to a TV show: AMC recently announced they’d debut the
Tell ’Em, Steve-Dave
–inspired
Comic Book Men
on February 12, 2012, with
The Walking Dead
as its lead-in—a veritable geek orgy. I’m going to be able to watch Bry and Walt on television once a week, on the best network in the business.

I never would’ve done any of that shit if it weren’t for my friends. Not only did they give me someone to talk to, they gave me interesting things to talk
about
. They even gave me a way to make a living, simply by unwittingly training me with hours of what many deemed useless conversation about nothing very important. Turns out that stuff was the fundamental building blocks of what ultimately became
Clerks
and
SModcast.

But your friends won’t always be there for you: They’ve got lives of their own. Sometimes, no one will be there for you—because some shit in life you’ve gotta go through all by yourself. And if you can make it through the tough shit by yourself, you will soar with the eagles …

Depending on whether you’re too fat to fly …

W
hen I stepped in the worst, toughest shit of my life, it was because I’d spent the day trying to orally please a bunch of heavy-duty cock-suckers in San Francisco.

Let me back up a second.

My friend Malcolm Ingram is a bear. Not the kind whose porridge you scarf before you take over his comfy bed. No, Malcolm is a proud, albeit large, member of the gay community. Within the gay community, there are many distinctions and subgroups: gay men, lesbian women, transgender people, bisexuals, muscle queens, twinks, and so forth. Malcolm is classified as a bear—that is to say, he’s a gay man who’s fat and hairy like me, yet has sex with thinner, generally better-looking men. In much the same way my wife is a chubby-chaser—thus explaining how a hideous fucking CHUD such as myself can get some pussy as fine as
Jen Schwalbach’s—Malcolm found for himself a community of chubby-chasing
dudes.

And if these dudes were chicks, they’d be
way
the fuck out of what would be considered Malcolm’s league. Hell, even as
dudes
, they’re out of his league. Malcolm’s fucking
up
—and not in the usual bad way: No matter where he goes in the world, he’s always got a good-looking, thin dude hovering around him. I remember the day Malcolm introduced me to one of his first steady boyfriends and the guy was so hot, even
I’d
have thought about temporarily relocating his wiener to my mouth if he said the right thing. He would’ve looked at home on the cover of
Men’s Health
, but here he was, on the arm (and behind closed doors, on the knob) of my best friend from the True North. I was proud of Malcolm: Not only was he boldly punching above his weight class, he was winning title bouts! My bear friend was surrounded by happy, hefty-hungry
cubs
—the nickname given to the guys who’re into bears. Isn’t that
adorable
?

Back in February 2010, I was scheduled to be in the Bay Area for the Macworld conference. Malcolm revealed he was also in San Francisco that week, but not for Macworld. Malcolm was flying in for the International Bear Rendezvous just across town—a sort of Macworld for big, gay dudes and the shapely men who love (or at least lust for) them.

Malcolm began his pitch. “You’re an icon in the bear world, dude. You’re like the Angelina Jolie of the bear community. So you should come to IBR with me and do a live podcast while you’re already in town for Macworld.”

I agreed and started promoting the IBR live podcast on Twitter … until Malcolm pulled a Malcolm and started
bickering with me about details of the event. Turned off by the unwieldy chip on his shoulder, I bowed out a week before the show. My new plan, instead, was to fly up to the Bay Area with Jen from the Burbank airport, land in Oakland, do the Macworld Q & A, spend the night at the W Hotel trying to have sex with my wife, eat some room service, and come home the next morning.

But after all the drama between me and Malcolm, Jen bailed on the trip altogether. “Just go do Macworld and come home,” she said insistently.

I flew to the Oakland airport from Burbank, checked in at the San Francisco W Hotel, walked a block and change to the Moscone Center, and did a Q & A at Macworld. Afterward, a very contrite Malcolm appeared backstage. I had a few hours ’til my flight home, so we hung out, smoked some weed, and buried the hatchet—which sounds erotically charged but merely means we squashed the petty shit from days before. Once we were cool again, naturally Malcolm asked, “So … you wanna do the live podcast at IBR still?”

“Sir …” I sighed, about to remind him how he’d made his bed and now had to lie in it.

“You wanna do this,” Malcolm said seriously. “This may be the only room in the world where you will be sexualized by the entire crowd. You’re gonna be talking, and they’re all gonna be thinking, ‘I’d fuck him.’ How can you pass that up—knowing what it feels like to have a whole room full of people lusting after you?”

I corrected him. “
Dudes
, Malcolm … a whole room full of
dudes
will be lusting after me.”

“What happened to the adventurous Kevin Smith?” he
needled. “Where’s the Kevin Smith who made
Clerks
? The ballsy Kevin Smith who took chances? Do it for the experience!”

Jedi mind-tricked by the Carl Lazlo, Esquire of bears, I agreed to rejoin Malcolm for the podcast the next day. Regardless, I still had to fly home that night, as Jen and Harley were expecting me for dinner. I’d fly
back
to the Bay Area the day after and do the live podcast with Malcolm at the International Bear Rendezvous.

When I got home and told my wife I was heading back to San Francisco for Malcolm’s event, Jen—perhaps feeling I’d surrender to wild, gay abandon in a room full of chubby brothers—said she was going to come with me. So I bought three tickets to Oakland on Southwest Airlines: one for me, one for Jen, one empty seat so we didn’t have to sit with any strangers. Simple.

Simple started shitting itself pretty quickly. That morning, Jen opted to not make the trip to San Francisco, insisting I simply turn around and fly home after the IBR. So I dragged my ass to the Burbank airport and stuck my ID in the machine to retrieve my ticket to Oakland. That’s when the machine spit out
two
tickets: one for me, and one for an extra seat—the seat that would’ve been between me and Jen had she traveled with me as intended, keeping our row somewhat private. Traveling alone, however, I had no need for this extra ticket. But as I was running late for the flight, rather than turn in the second ticket for a refund, I opted to eat the cost and head to the plane.

The flight was pretty empty, so not only did I not need my second seat, many passengers had whole
rows
to themselves. We landed in Oakland without incident and I cabbed
it over to the hotel that was ground zero for the International Bear Rendezvous, where Malcolm and I did a gay bear/straight bear podcast for a ballroom full of heavy dudes like us (as well as some of the twinks who eat them).

So it was a fat, fat day. I was among my people: jolly dudes—except these dudes were particularly jolly because they like sucking cock a whole bunch. And while we weren’t championing morbid obesity, shouting from stage, “Let’s celebrate our unhealth! It’s cool to be fat!” we also weren’t mourning being out of shape, as if being portly is a debilitating handicap. Some of us would rather concentrate on the engine that drags the rest of that cellulite-packed train. For me, the year leading up to this day was more about taking care of the upstairs than the downstairs, so to speak: recharging the batteries, rebooting the software, chasing whimsies. I wasn’t thinking about getting out and exercising every (or any) day; I was figuring out what to do with myself in a world where I knew I didn’t want to direct many more films. Trimmer thighs don’t seem that important when there are bigger issues and concerns on your mind.

But IBR was refreshing—it was the one place where being fat was celebrated. I live my life fat and I have to navigate through a thin person’s world at all times, and if you want to do that without vocal ridicule from the normies, you’ve always gotta offer them empty reassurance that you’re trying to do something about your weight problem. If they feel like you’re at least sorry for your grievous offense of not looking like everybody else, they’ll leave you alone. At least until they need to make sport of you to raise themselves up a bit at a social gathering, where folks can watch you react to the last acceptable prejudice in this
country: fat bias. It’s a world full of size queens, and folks who look like me tend to get the hairy eyeball for not being able to maintain a shape or form that’s easy on the eyes for the fit ’n’ trim to have to look at.