Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (25 page)

I
n order for you to ascend, someone somewhere has todescend. In order for you to have so much, someone somewhere has to have far less. Someone has to sacrifice in order for you to succeed—even the audience, which gives up its money for your art.

The anonymity of the people making those sacrifices protects you from knowing where the money you make actually comes from, as well as keeps secret all the stories of what folks had to give up just so you can express yourself through art for a living. If I knew how much each dollar spent on crap I produced was actually worth—the effort that went into earning enough money to buy a ticket to a movie I made or purchase a book I wrote—the crushing guilt would likely send me off a cliff. Mercifully, I don’t have to see the sacrifices others make so that I can be me for a living.

But here’s the tough shit: Sometimes, you come to know the people who’ve lost something so that you could gain. Sometimes, you know them
intimately.
Sometimes, they tell you to put the toilet seat down when you’re finished taking a whiz, or maybe they give birth to your only child.

When I met Jen Schwalbach, I was in awe of her career. She was a twenty-six-year-old writing for
USA Today
, the most widely read newspaper in the known universe. You’d think it was her centerfold looks that captured my fancy, but fat dudes see
lots
of pretty women every day and we don’t go to pieces. This is because we’re trained by society and the media to believe thin, pretty women are meant for our physical betters: dudes with abs. Skinny, good-looking chicks rarely choose the corpulent fella unless you’re watching a sitcom. Jen was (and remains) beautiful and alluring, but that’s not what made her interesting to me; it was the fact that, at such a young age, she had what I considered a kick-ass job, where she was influencing millions of people a day.

The universe threw us together for the purposes of spin control: The legend of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon was in danger, and I was charged with setting the record straight. In the run-up to the announcement of the 1998 Academy Award nominations,
Good Will Hunting
was looking like a strong contender for a slew of nods. But the other studios running flicks that year didn’t like dem apples at all, so folks took a page out of the Miramax playbook and began pissing in the well, floating a rumor that the boys did
not
, in fact, write
Good Will Hunting
themselves. This was a ludicrous notion if you knew Ben and Matt—which nobody really did at that point. And while human beings can be petty and
jealous, human beings who work in the movie biz can be downright Tolkienesque in their quest to see others fail as they reach for
their
ring. The buzz around town was starting to turn from “Have you seen
Good Will Hunting
?!” to “I heard those boys had help with the script.”

Two names of secret
Good Will
collaborators were being floated to the press, and while one made sense, the second was ludicrous. William Goldman, the screenwriter of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and
The Princess Bride
, was the first and most believable Cyrano suggested by the competition. Oddly, I was the second name being whispered as a
Good Will
ghostwriter. In any other year, this would have been akin to suggesting I had something to do with
Star Wars
as well. But in April 1997, eight months prior to the
Good Will
opening, Miramax released my third flick:
Chasing Amy
. The more mature style of storytelling in
Amy
coupled with my name on
Good Will Hunting
as a co–executive producer and topped with the fact that both films shared a lead in Affleck spelled collusion to some. As God is my witness, the only hand I had in the script for
Good Will Hunting
was getting the script to Harvey Weinstein. Harvey, in turn, loved
Good Will
and bought the expensive turnaround script from Castle Rock. Ben, Matt, and Harvey asked me to direct it, which seemed equally ridiculous. I said I was flattered but understood they were all largely excited that the flick was finally happening at all, with nobody thinking clearly that a steady, experienced hand should be at the wheel of this potentially mighty ship. I was a dinghy skipper at best.

Goldman, conversely, was a legendary script doctor, and Castle Rock
had
asked the boys to take a meeting with
the grand pooh-bah of three-act structure. Castle Rock had bought the spec script for $800,000 and felt the quiet picture about a boy genius whose friends are his safe haven needed some intrigue. There was an NSA subplot the studio was hoping to shoehorn into
Good Will
, spun off the main character’s monologue about what might happen should he take the government job he was being offered. The studio was looking for
Hunting Will Hunting
—in which the insidious USA will stop at nothing to get its hands on the Southie savant. During their sit-down, according to Ben and Matt, Goldman told them their script was solid and needed no added bells and whistles. But the fact that the meeting occurred at all was enough to get tongues wagging.

So Gina Gardini, a bionic ninja of a Miramax publicist, tasked me with a mission: give an interview to
USA Today
that would, among other things, allow me a big ol’ public forum to deny having anything to do with the writing of
Good Will Hunting
, as well as inform the world that the same script I read on the toilet over two hours, tears streaming down my face, was the same movie Gus Van Sant had made of the boys’ script. The ship was listing slightly; I was sent out to right it. Credibility clown pulled on his Miramaxkateer ears and went west.

I was heading to Los Angeles to rehearse
Dogma
with Chris Rock, who was trapped on the set of
Lethal Weapon 4
. Indie producer Scott Mosier had put in a friendly call to Hollywood producer Joel Silver to ask when
Lethal
was dropping Rock, since he was now a week beyond his contractual stop date. Silver screamed at Mos for thirty seconds about how Rock wasn’t going anywhere, then—presumably working from a dusty old set of movie-bully sides found in
the central casting office of
Lethal
studio Warner Bros.—demanded to know what Mos was gonna
do
about it.

What we did about it was send me to Los Angeles to rehearse
there
with Chris Rock. If Muhammad couldn’t get to the mountain, the mountain was gonna come to Muhammad. The timing was perfect because I was going to L.A., anyway, for my first comic book signing. Golden Apple on Melrose was hosting me and artist Jim Mahfood for a
Clerks: The Comic Book
signing, Saturday, January 24, 1998. So Gina Gardini asked if I’d sit down with a journalist from
USA Today
on Friday, January 23. Amid chatter of the upcoming comic book and taking a victory lap for the well-received
Chasing Amy
, I was to remind folks that Ben and Matt had no help in writing
Good Will Hunting
—certainly not from Bill Goldman, and least of all from the likes of me.

“Who am I talking to?” I remember asking Gina.

“Jennifer Schwalbach,” Gina said, sounding out the last name that would define the rest of my life.

I’d been in the movie business for four years at that point, so I’d met my share of
USA Today
writers. At that point, they all looked like my mom: older, matronly—even the dudes. So when I married that empirical knowledge to an old-lady-sounding name like Schwalbach, all I was seeing was this midlife giggling Gretel type, whom I’d likely be wrestling with over the last few Pringles in the can.

I was staying at the Bel Age Hotel off Sunset. My Friday was devoted to rehearsing with Rock, interviewing with
USA Today
, and maybe seeing my ex-girlfriend for dinner. Rock came over around noon, and we ran through the entire script together for two hours, stopping only to have getting-to-know-you chitchat about pussy and
Saturday
Night Live.
I said I was hoping to have dinner with my ex-girlfriend, which Rock insisted was a bad idea. She’d moved on, he guessed; better to instead just get laid in L.A. by anybody
but
my ex—that way, I’d get on with my life. We all know Chris Rock’s hysterical, but few realize he’s also pretty insightful when it comes to relationships.

After our rehearsal, Rock had to go back to the
Lethal Weapon
set for a night shoot. The interview with the reporter who I was sure was going to be older than I was, scheduled for two, so shortly after Rock left, there was a knock at the door. I don’t remember much about the walk from the couch to the door, and I wish I’d written it all down, because from the moment I opened that door, everything I thought I knew about life would be challenged and evolved, and everything I was sure I knew about love would suddenly seem childish.

The chick on the other side of the knock at the door didn’t look matronly in the least: She was gorgeous, tall, skinny, young—maybe even
my
age. I had spoken with cub reporters before; the Internet was
just
starting to move from the college campuses to homes all across America, and a new kind of journalism allowing for a younger generation of writers and reporters was forming. But print journalism was an old-timers’ club back then, so you’d rarely if ever be interviewed by kids your own age.

It is perhaps for this reason, then, that for the first six seconds of the rest of our lives together, I assumed Jennifer Schwalbach was a hooker Chris Rock had sent to my room.

This would explain the pure carnality of our relationship, actually: Since my first impression of my wife-to-be was “sex worker,” it would stand to reason that I’m so very
physically obsessed with her. Even if we’re not in the same room or state, I’m
thinking
about having sex with Jennifer Schwalbach. Put one mile between me and Jen Schwalbach, and there will be phone or iChat sex. This is because the only sexually level playing field for a fat man is in print and on the phone. That’s the only way I
ever
got laid in this life: selling my shit with words. In the realm of thoughts and letters, I can be as sexy and seductive as Eric, the vampire Viking in
True Blood.
It’s only when I’ve gotta compete in the visible spectrum that I’m revealed as Jabba the Hutt or Quasimodo.

But there are two ways into any person, body or soul: through the heart and through the head. The eye is less reliable, because it only
sees
—and what we see changes every day. But shit that’s lodged in your head or heart? That never goes
anywhere
. It’s not visible, so it’s an image that’s only corrupted by our own folly. The flesh decays, but memories of a feeling, an insight, an intellectual or spiritual impact? They only burn
brighter
with time. We race toward the future while we lionize the past. We look ahead for half our lives, then spend the other half looking back. Written or spoken, words are the foundation of reality, so thankfully, within six seconds of that hotel door swinging wide, the heartbreaker announced her true intentions. “Hi, I’m Jennifer Schwalbach with
USA Today.
”

Those were the first words my wife would ever say to me, thus giving the hook to my Chris Rock hooker theory. I invited her in, repeating over and over how I’d never met anybody from
USA Today
who was younger than Methuselah. She sat on the couch; I sat on the floor opposite her, separated by a coffee table. We covered the
Clerks
comic
book, the difference
Amy
made to my career, the burgeoning all-star cast of
Dogma
, and, finally, whether I had anything to do with
Good Will Hunting.
While her mini tape recorder captured my words, it never picked up my
inner
monologue—the bulk of which concerned having such a beautiful, smart, accomplished, interesting, and frighteningly sexy girl in my hotel room, knowing it was going no further than career chitchat. She seemed comfortable in my hotel room, but then chicks usually were around me: Unlike the thin boys who assume every girl wants to fuck them, I’m the nonthreatening chubsy-ubsy—the guy every girl is friends with yet few ever really wanna see naked.

We talked on the record for an hour, and after the interview ended, we talked for two more hours
off
the record. The opening conversation was about the relationships we’d both had a hard time ending, which revealed far more about who we were to each other than a peek inside a diary might’ve provided. After that, we talked about Los Angeles and how much she loved it, and I talked about Jersey and how I’d never leave it. But mostly, we talked about
her
job. I was blown away that someone so young was writing for the galaxy’s most available newspaper. And while we were both in high-profile communications media, the reach she had with her work, I argued, went far further than the reach of my dopey flicks. Her job was ultimately more impressive than mine, so I figured I’d interview
her
for a while. As it turned out, ’til I drop dead.

As she was packing up to head out, Jennifer expressed serious doubt that I spent as much time online answering questions at the
Viewaskew.com
message board as I said I did. I told her to post a question herself one day and watch
how quickly I responded. We shook hands good-bye—technically, our first physical intimacy since I can still remember how soft and slender her fingers felt—but I released quicker than I normally would, so as not to creep her out. Then, three hours and change after her arrival at my hotel room door, cub reporter Jen Schwalbach was gone … leaving me six shades of smitten.

All of a sudden, I had this dream of having a girlfriend as cool and accomplished as Jennifer Schwalbach. The last time I had a big dream, it was about becoming a filmmaker. This time, it was about becoming
hers
. And boy, did I
really
wanna cum with her.