Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (2 page)

And that’s what people congratulate you for: the fact that you—simple, normal you—cracked the code and got into the club. You get to see your name in lights and somehow
that’s
impressive. I remind these people that my most impressive accomplishment—like theirs (and yours, dear reader)—is that we beat out
billions
of tough competitors for the job of a lifetime. Motherfuck being the Sundance flavor of the month; being the sole product of that careless cumshot my old man somehow kept in my mom is akin to beating the Kurgan and becoming the Highlander. There can be only one (aside from twins, triplets, quadruplets, and quints—the monsters and freaks of the baby world). Whenever someone tells me I’m fat, I tell ’em I wasn’t always: Apparently, at one point in my life, I was fit enough to out-swim a legion of sperm. And now, like any past-their-prime athlete, I’m enjoying the good life: I hoisted my Cup already, so at this point, fuck off and lemme enjoy bacon and brownies (maybe even together).

You beat sock drawers full of dead cum that didn’t have
a chance coming out the gate. The odds that you wound up in an egg instead of a paper towel? Astronomically against you.

Some might have considered Don Smith’s balls mere mute witnesses in my father’s masturbatory war against his dick, but not Grace Schultz. My mom saw the potential in my dad’s balls. She didn’t see her unborn children in his eyes, she saw them outlined in the nooks and crannies of his testicles. And of all the wads my father busted during his too-short stay in this sector of the galaxy, I wound up in the moneyshot. And more than that, I didn’t get burned to virtual death like Anakin Skywalker on the lava shores of Mom’s nethers. I am, you am … we
all
am the best of billions.

Chuckle if you must, but all this jism talk is the important first step on the road to self-actualization. Fuck Tony Robbins; you wanna
really
inspire people? Remind them they’ve already beaten the odds, so the existence that follows is merely a victory lap to do with as they please. You’re a big, fat bucket of win when you begin this crapshoot life; no need to pressure yourself to do much more than use your time here as the wind-down to the only real contest that’ll ever matter: you vs. a billion other applicants.

Don Smith was a good guy and I owe him and my mom, Grace, everything I have. But I owe Dad maybe a little bit more. My whole life has been a reaction to his life, really—but mercifully not in any textbook manner that ever called for rebellion. For starters, I am literally a reaction (the nut) to his action (sexing Mom). Also: He worked at the U.S. Postal Service and hated it like a jihadist. Most people hate their jobs, true, but my old man despised his in an Ahab-and-Moby (or Eminem-and-Moby) kinda way. He never
said, “Go into the entertainment biz, son”—he was just a living example of why it was worth taking a shot going after the stuff of dreams rather than simply getting a job. I saw how much my dad hated working and realized he was right: Working blows. If you hate what you do, it’ll always be work.

But what if you inverted that equation? Dad didn’t have that luxury; he had mouths to feed and bills to pay. But after two decades of seeing how much he hated his job, I realized if you love what you do, it’ll never be work.

So I fell in love with movies.

It wasn’t hard. Dad would take me to see a new movie practically every Wednesday, with matinee prices around $1.75 to $3.50 by the time he stopped paying. We didn’t ever talk much on the way to the theater, and we’d already dispensed with our reviews by the time we got in the car after the flick was over, so there wasn’t a lot of chatter on the way home, either. But that was our thing: going to the movies. I never thought to ask him if it was more for him or more for me—his fat kid who wasn’t good at much of anything except playing with
Star Wars
figures and memorizing
Laverne and Shirley
episodes.

It wasn’t just movies with Dad, either. My father fed me comedy albums he’d bring home from a car-trunk record dealer at that job he hated so much: Redd Foxx, Bill Cosby, and most important, George Carlin—the master thinker/speaker/funny fuck. Carlin would not only help bridge the generational gap between me and my father, he’d become a television touchstone for us as well. One of my favorite childhood memories is watching
Carlin at Carnegie
with Dad the night it first aired on HBO, a thousand years ago.

Dad was always my TV buddy. When I was a youngster, he’d lie on the floor on his back, head turned over his left shoulder to watch this giant twenty-inch console that looked more like a credenza than a television. I’d lean on his belly, propped up on my elbows, wondering if there wasn’t an episode of
Batman
on instead of
Bowling for Dollars
. (If you wanna take a “Why didn’t you just suck your dad’s dick while you were at it, you loved him so much …” shot, feel free; I’ve heard how hard it can be for the limited to appreciate sentimentality.)

I was afforded one last opportunity to lay my head on Dad’s stomach the day he died. Seeing my father motionless on a Philadelphia hospital gurney had me bawling, but I remember feeling two other things in that moment besides grief: 1) a distinct lack of life in what’d once been a pip of a guy, and 2) regret, knowing Dad was gone for good, and here this was the first time since my childhood that I’d had my head on his stomach and the last time I’d be able to do it forever.

We never like to think about the last time of anything, let alone the Last Time last time. But since I continue to be a reaction to Don Smith’s life, I feel duty-bound to remember the specifics of Don Smith’s death. The facts are these:

May 31, 2003: The Smith nuclear family and their spouses went out to dinner, following my Q & A at the Wizard World comic book convention in Philadelphia. It was a glorious evening, everyone talking, laughing, eating heartily, and enjoying being together. My sister and her husband lived in Japan at the time, my brother and his husband lived in Florida, and Jen and I were out in California, so it was
rare that my mom could get all her kids together in one place. But man, could you tell they enjoyed reassembling the Justice League whenever they could. Parents
love
to view the fruits of their labor, and my old man was no exception. He polished off a filet mignon, three Manhattans, and a big slab of cheesecake while the rest of us jawed, and the more we talked, the more he laughed.

I loved making Dad laugh. He’d get really quiet, his whole body would shake, his face would light up as his eyes glassed over, but he didn’t make a sound. Essentially, Dad laughed the way I cum—which may be weird for Jen or my mom to read, but it’s true. When dinner was over, I packed Mom and Dad into a cab and kissed them both g’night, planting one right on the old man’s forehead, telling him I’d see him in the morning.

That night, my father died screaming.

M
y brother and my parents were sharing a suite at a Philadelphia hotel when it happened. According to Brother Don, Dad woke my mother tearing off the sheets, screaming he was on fire. It was massive heart failure, and within minutes he was gone.

“What do you mean
screaming
?” I asked Don after he related the details of Dad’s final minutes.

“He didn’t go quietly,” my brother observed.

And I hated that. Don Smith deserved a quiet, pain-free demise, because my old man did
not
have an easy life. He was born with a harelip and a cleft palate in an age when there wasn’t much they could do for you. He’d undergone experimental cosmetic surgeries as a child to give him a
more normal appearance, with his case even appearing in a medical textbook my mother once showed me. In his tweens, he lost a summer to further corrective surgeries. A childhood spent in bandages made him a painfully shy grown-up, though not too shy; he did pack enough charm to land my mother (who was by no means easy prey or a shrinking violet). He raised three kids on a meager post office salary doing a job he abjectly detested. He took shit from his parents right up ’til
their
ends. The least the universe could’ve done for this guy was put him to bed quietly.

But instead, my father died screaming. Tough shit.

That’s when I started waking up. The beginning of a better Kevin Smith came with the painful death of his quiet hero—because that’s when I realized that this life is a rigged game that you cannot win. Even good men die screaming.

N
ow, here’s the important part of all this talk about cum and my dad, and here’s what you need to remember in order to achieve and accomplish your dreams in this life. Please pay attention very carefully, because this is the truest thing a stranger will ever say to you:

In the face of such hopelessness as our eventual, unavoidable death, there is little sense in not at least
trying
to accomplish all of your wildest dreams in life.

Lemme include a strong exception: If your wildest dreams are to hunt humans or kill children, I’m not talking to you. Please draw no hidden, sociopathic meaning from my words. Life is fragile and painful enough, so don’t hurt people, asshole.

Life is also, as George Carlin taught us, a zero-sum
game. We all lose in the end. We all die screaming. If that’s the case, we might as well make for ourselves a paradise in this world. Make yourself happy and comfortable as often as you can, because sooner or later, the infinite hands you a bill for all these goods and services.

What follows is some tough shit. Tough shit to read, tough shit to accept. Granted, I didn’t live through a mass genocide, nor am I a survivor of childhood abuse, so the title of this book may feel like an overstatement. If you want to read about real heroes and true survivors of horrible abuse, pick up
Shit Only Really Strong People Can Survive.
I assure you, I won’t be the author of that tome. I’m the
other
guy, the guy who talks about cum a lot.

And the cum’s gonna fly up in here. I talk about real life in these pages, and real life comes from cum. It’s the only natural resource we don’t fight wars over, as well as the one we’re always the most generous in sharing.

It’s advice; don’t fight it. Either make something of the advice or simply discard it, but don’t try to fight it. It’s coming from the laziest fat fuck I’ve ever met, who came from a government-cheese-eating, lower-lower-
lower
-middle-class home and still somehow bent the universe to complement
his
will.

So this is the level of discourse you’re committing to, gentle reader. If you have little stomach for this kind of cum-versation, you may not be able to swallow what I’m about to shoot at you. If you’re a spitter, close this book, because from here on in we talk about some tough shit.

I
t’s very easy to find movie nerds on the Internet now—folks you can banter back and forth with about our nation’s real national pastime. But back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, before the dawn of dial-up, if you weren’t attending a comic convention in a big city, you had to stumble across fellow geeks in real life. And back then, geekdom of any kind, even for movies, was not as commonplace as it is now. Contrary to what Huey Lewis and the News told us, it was most certainly not hip to be square. When you wanted to find like-minded cineasts in the suburbs, it was more akin to cruising public restrooms: lots of sidelong glances at the urinals and foot-tapping under the stalls, hoping someone would get what you were after.

The first true film geek I ever met was Vincent Pereira, and ironically, we’d meet on what would eventually become a movie set: the same Quick Stop convenience store in
Leonardo, New Jersey, where we’d one day shoot
Clerks
. Vinny was a local high school kid the Quick Stop owners paid to stock the milk and mop the floors at night, but he was also
waaaaay
into film—so much so that he planned on
being
a filmmaker one day.

But I wouldn’t know any of this for the first few months we’d work together because the guy rarely spoke. That changed the night he came in to stock the milk and found me watching an episode of
Twin Peaks
I’d taped from ABC the night before.

Normally, when Vincent came in at nine, he’d head right to the cooler, saying very little. That night, he paused briefly near the counter, recognizing the show and smiling slightly. He disappeared into the cooler as usual, but then reemerged and joined me at the register.

“You like David Lynch?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “
Blue Velvet
is one of my favorite films.”

In those days, you couldn’t reference
Blue Velvet
without launching into a bad impression of Dennis Hopper uttering his immortal line “
I’ll fuck anything that mooooves!
” (indeed, I had the Jay character bellow it in
Clerks
). Vincent was polite about how terrible the impression was and immediately launched into a discussion of
Ronnie Rocket
and
One Saliva Bubble
—two unproduced Lynch flicks he’d read about in a laser disc zine (if you’re too young to remember either of those media-conveyance devices, laser discs were precursors of DVDs, Blu-rays, and digital, and zines were homemade publications and the precursors to blogs).