I'm Not High (29 page)

One night later on, after we were done shooting for the day, Dave was reflecting on life, the movie, and Monk. Dave was so psyched that his career was taking off.

“I want to do this like Mel Brooks,” he said. “Keep writing my own stuff. Keep casting my own friends.” Dave was thinking that doing movies would allow him to spend time with his dad, who was now getting older, and he was happy that Monk had been trained so well. He laughed a little bit thinking about how the dog almost got him kicked out of the hotel.

As we were talking, I looked past Dave to see Monk taking a nice big juicy logger on his pillow. Seeing Dave’s face was priceless. It was like his own child had betrayed him. Monk jumped off the bed and scooted underneath it. Dave followed him. He stuck his head under the comforter and then slowly pulled back and looked up at me. Whenever I see Dave disappointed, it is the funniest thing. I don’t know why.

“Man,” he said disgustedly, shaking his head. “There’s like forty piles of shit under this bed. On my socks. In my shoes.”

All Monk was doing was going under the bed to do what he had been doing out in the open. The thing that made Dave the maddest was all the time and money down the drain.

“I just spent two thousand dollars to train this dog to be sneaky,” he complained. “That’s all. I paid all this money not for obedience, but just for him to be sneaky.” And with that he pulled his shirt over his nose and began picking up the poop.

So sometimes you think you’ve solved a problem, but all you’ve really done is move the shit somewhere else.

I needed to figure out how I was going to play my character Brian. My niece was really into the Grateful Dead and at the time, she was living with my wife and me in New York City. I’m a metalhead, so the Grateful Dead weren’t for me. I didn’t know much about them at all. One day, my niece showed me a VHS box set of some Grateful Dead concerts and suggested that I might “find” Brian in there somewhere.

I sat down and watched, and on my second or third tape, I saw people going into a stadium before the show, getting frisked and patted down. There was this guy, and he’s in line dancing, and he has a flower in his hand, and as he gets to the security guy and they’re frisking him, he just keeps dancing. And he is still smiling. Nobody is bringing this guy down. I grabbed my wife and said, “This is Brian.” No matter where this guy is in life, he’s happy. He’s in his own world. If he’s in prison, he’s happy. If he’s being tortured, he’s happy. No matter what, he’s still got a smile on his face.

And I also took acting lessons from this teacher in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. During the shoot, I would fly down periodically, and he’d help me build tremendously on my biggest
Half Baked
scenes by really becoming Brian.

And whenever I would get back on set, having just seen my teacher, people would ask me if I was high. And I’d say no, I was just content to be alone, focusing, and staying in the Brian mind-set.

I loved everything about the whole experience of making
Half Baked
. I was excited about my trailer. It had a bedroom, a couch, a TV, a stereo, etc. To me that was the greatest thing. Craft services was unreal, too. I showed up weighing 175 pounds and when I left I weighed 195. I had no idea how it all worked.

“You want breakfast?” A guy in an apron asked on my first day on set.

“What do you have?”

“Whatever you want.”

Even smoothies. One guy’s job was just to make smoothies. Sometimes when I was done shooting, I wouldn’t even go back to the hotel. I’d stick around the set. I loved watching scenes get made, even if I wasn’t in them. Or just hanging in my trailer, rocking out to metal. I tried to get Dave to understand Metallica, but he couldn’t do it. It was too crazy for him. But he got me into Biggie Smalls and Tupac.

The funniest thing is that I truly never got stoned while filming the movie. Well, almost.

Right after I finished shooting one day, a PA came up to me and handed me a little package and said, “Go enjoy yourself.” On any movie you do, there’s always someone on the set who eventually comes up to you and says, “I’m the whatever-you-need guy.” And this was different from the craft services make-you-an-omelet guy. If you need a hooker? This guy will get you a hooker. You need a freak? He’ll get you a freak. You need drugs? He’ll get you drugs. He’s the jack-of-all-trades; whatever you need, he can get, no questions asked. On every movie set. Sure, they’re on the payroll supposedly to grip or lay down a wire, but they’re really there for an entirely different purpose.

I had the next few days off from shooting, so I went into my trailer, smoked, and delivered an impromptu Metallica air jam concert to myself. I was terrifically sweaty. A PA girl came and knocked on the door. In my haze, it sounded like pretend knocking. “Just a minor hallucination,” I thought. I kind of laughed, because it would be really funny if someone was really at my door. I kept the Metallica pumping, but that knock was growing louder. My heart rate quickened. I came back to earth as best I could and got a little nervous and paranoid. In a panic, I opened the windows, started fanning my hands near them, hid the weed, and sprayed some Glade air freshener. I thought this might make the knocking go away. It didn’t. In my mind, chaos was unfolding. I found a couple of mints, popped them in my mouth, and opened the door.

“Hey, Jim,” the PA girl said. “This sucks, but the producers are asking if you can go and film one more scene tonight.”

“Uh. Um. Scene?”

“I know you’re done,” she said. “They want to call and ask you personally and apologize.”

The PA girl left, and sure enough, my phone rang. Producer Bob Simonds was on the line explaining that Clarence Williams, the guy who played Sampson, was leaving the set. He was fed up. He wanted out and he wanted to be done tonight. Could I please do my last scene with him, so he could be on his way?

So I went to go do the scene, and this is why I freaked out: There was this makeup lady, Inga. She was in her fifties and sort of a motherly type to me. She had those instincts, you know? I made my way nervously over to the set, still high as a kite, as there was no time to sit in a chair in the makeup room; we were going to shoot this thing, send Clarence on his way, and wrap it up for the night. And Inga was just going to do my makeup really fast as I stood there, two feet away from the whole production.

She started staring at me. I was still sweating from the Metallica jam session. Then she looked right into my face and said, “Are you all right?” And that sent me
beyond
paranoia.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just thinking about my lines.”

“Well, you don’t look all right.”

That was all I needed to hear. Clarence was having a temper tantrum. They were all going to find out that I was high. I was not going to be able to do my lines. And I was going to get fired. I truly thought I was going to get fired from doing a weed movie just for smoking weed. And meanwhile, everyone on the set was probably blasted out of their minds. I was having a major internal meltdown. I started sweating more. Inga couldn’t get the makeup right because of it, and I had to keep assuring her I was fine. Finally she threw her hands up, and I went to the set.

Before they started shooting the scene, Tamra Davis, the director, explained to me that Clarence was supposed to fall down on this X, and I was supposed to step over him and say, “Sucks to be you, man.” So simple even a guy who is baked could do it, right?

The first time Clarence fell down he didn’t land on the X. Or maybe it was my own perception playing tricks on me. So I did what they told me to do, the best that I could. As high as I was, I stepped over where Clarence landed and tried to make it look seamless. I was moving in slow motion. It felt like it took about forty-five minutes. My own voice in my ears sounded like I was some underwater creature. “Suuuuckkkkksssss toooooo bbbeeeeeee youuuuuuuu, mmmmaaaaaan!” The world stopped spinning. I started hyperventilating. I convinced myself that I forgot how to breathe properly. The director, Tamra Davis, in a please-tell-me-we-got-this voice, asked, “Did we get this?”

The camera guy leaned over to her and said, “Nope.”

Then Clarence stood up and yelled, “Well, I landed on
my
mark.” That jarred about half of the high right out of me. And, you know, everyone was scared of him, so we had to do it all over again. And again. And again.

Clarence missed his mark three or four more times. Eventually, people were so bummed with Clarence that my fears of being found out dissipated.

In case you were wondering, I last saw Dave a couple years back at the Aspen Comedy Festival. It was long after his whole trip to Africa and all that jazz. I really felt for him at that time, and I called him and left a message saying I was willing to help him out if I could in any way. He called back and let me know that he appreciated it. In Aspen, he was a little weary of all that surrounded him. My only advice to him was that he should spend time with his kids and enjoy his family. He’s one of the few guys who are such big talents that they can disappear from the public for years and then come back and pick right back up. And maybe that’s what he’s doing now.

Birth of Gabrielle

Tracy Morgan used to tell me, “You know, you should have children, Jim. God wants you to have children, and he’s gonna show up in all kinds of mysterious shapes and forms, and you may never know when he’s here, but I can tell you now, one of those shapes is a baby.” Tracy Morgan is crazy but he’s also usually right.

In 1998, Dee and I decided to start a family. We didn’t know and didn’t want to know the baby’s gender, but I’d been having visions of a girl who looked like a little version of my wife since forever, even before we were married. A cute, smiley-eyed girl with pigtails. Once Dee was pregnant we just prayed for a healthy baby, and if it wasn’t a healthy baby we prayed for the strength to raise a child with whatever complications it might have.

If we were having a boy, he’d be named Bill, after Dee’s grandfather. But we had zero names chosen for girls. I thought a little girl would be an “angel” so we hunted around for some variation on that. Just not Angela or Angelica, though. Too Italian.

When Dee was seven months along she suggested “Gabrielle.”

“I’ve heard of Gabriella, but not Gabrielle,” I said. “That sounds kinda Irish to me.”

“Nope,” Dee said. “Like the Archangel Gabriel, the messenger of good news.”

“You know,” I said, “I’m not even sure I know what an archangel is. I’m not so into that name.”

The clock kept ticking and with about two weeks before Dee was due to go into labor, we’d settled on Jaquelin. It was a pretty name to us, but it had no real meaning. We were living in Manhattan at the time, and our routine was that we’d walk into Central Park on nice days, lay down a blanket, and just talk and snuggle. Our lives were going to drastically change forever, so this was a nice chance to chill and bond.

One day in the park, Dee said, “Have you ever given any more thought to
Gabrielle
?”

“No,” I said.

Dee took a nap, and as I watched some kids playing in the distance, I started testing it out. “Gabrielle, come here.” “Ladies and gentlemen, Gabrielle Breuer.” “Don’t touch that, Gabrielle.” “I love you, Gabrielle.” I still wasn’t convinced. A while later, Dee woke up, and we folded the blanket and began walking home.

As we exited the park on the West Side, near the Sheep Meadow, a goofy-looking guy approached us. He didn’t feel threatening, but I didn’t know what to make of him. Dee’s belly was protruding, obviously, and he came right up to it and said, “You’re holding a little angel in there!”

“Thanks,” we both said, smiling and walking carefully away from the man. He followed us, all smiles, and said, “It’s a girl, isn’t it?” Before we could answer, he said, “It’s a girl and she is a little angel.”

I began to get angry. I wanted to get home, not tell a stranger about our unborn child’s gender.

“It is a little girl, right?” he asked us again.

“We don’t know what it is,” I said. “But thank you.”

“I’m telling you,” he said. “It is a girl, and she’s an angel. Do you have a name picked out?”

“We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” I said again. “We have names picked out for both.”

Out of the blue, this nutty man said, “How about Gabrielle? That’s a beautiful name for your little angel girl. There you go.”

The hairs on my ass stood straight on end, and time froze. Dee squeezed my hand. We stood there, numb.

Call it whatever you want, joke about a homeless guy naming our kid, but I still get goose bumps.

If only Gabrielle’s birth had had a little of that magic. For one thing, Gabrielle was stuck. When Dee began to go into labor in our apartment, she really was in pain. She screamed that the baby was coming out of her ass. I’d never seen her in so much pain, so I brought her to the hospital. They stuck her in a room, and she sent me immediately to the nurse’s desk and told me to ask for her doctor ASAP.

“My wife’s in a lot of pain,” I told this ginormous West Indian nurse.

“Of course she’s in a lot of pain,” the woman said dismissively. “She’s pregnant. I called the doctor and when she come, she come.”

I walked back to Dee’s room. Another nurse examined Dee and said we should go home for the time being because Dee was only dilated two centimeters. They gave her some painkillers, which Dee took. Soon thereafter she was tripping and falling all over our apartment. I freaked out and brought her back to the hospital at three thirty A.M. In the end my wife was in labor for nineteen hours, and she was cursing so much that truck drivers were stopping by to take notes.

Her doctor finally came in.

“This woman needs an epidural!” the ob-gyn said.

“No sh—,” Dee started to say through gritted teeth.