How Far Would (Or Should) You Go For Your Art?
I read this quote recently:
Do what you can
with what you have.
Nothing more is needed.
I like it.
It’s nice.
I also struggle with it.
Not it’s meaning, obviously. I get the intention. But if I’m being honest, I have a hard time trusting it.
Do you?
I mean, we live in a world where A.I. assists with everything, anyone can be de-aged on screen and handsome Colin Farrell is cornering the market on all the overweight, club-footed Penguin roles!
Clearly something more is needed, right?
I have worked in my profession for over thirty years, and yet, when I look back at my career, I sometimes can’t stop thinking, the universe clearly had other plans for me, but I resisted. And I bent this career to my will with the effort that it takes to reroute a river up a mountain. I forced my way in!!!
And that’s not exactly doing what you can with what you have. Is it? Maybe it is.
My problem now is that I’ve done it one way for so long that I never trust myself to just relax and be me. I think, I WILL BECOME WHAT THEY NEED! Then I start the ol’ song and dance. I rev those engines and bang those drums all while thinking, is this all really necessary?
Then this happened:
When I was being interviewed for a writing position on the show Disjointed (about a woman who runs a pot dispensary) it was the only time I ever had to lie about my drug usage.
(It was in the opposite direction, mind you, but so be it. I was going to BECOME the writer they needed!)
To be honest, I don’t do drugs. In fact, I know so little about drugs that for years I thought my dorm was situated next to skunks and not potheads.
But I knew that for Disjointed, a show about a woman (Kathy Bates, in fact) running a pot dispensary, they’d be looking for someone who knew more than just how to spell Ganja.
(I looked up how to spell that, by the way.)
So during the interview for the job, when the showrunner said, “How often do you smoke?” My voice lifted about eight octaves.
“Weeeeell,” I squeaked, hoping to stall until I could figure out a suitable answer without outright lying.
I found myself saying things like, “I’ve got a kid now, so not as much as I used to.”
(Phew. So far not lying.) But the showrunner kept staring at me waiting for more of a concrete answer. So I continued.
“Let’s just stay I don’t buy it for myself. I rely on the kindness of others.”
(Also true. Sort of. I had heard someone say that once, so I figured I was good.)
And guess what?
It worked!
Not long after that, I got a call from my agent saying I got the job!
I fooled them!
But the moment of joy was cut short when he added, “They’d like all the writers to meet up at the Cannabis Expo the weekend before to get to know one another.”
Dear Lord, I thought! There’s no way I’m going to pull off a lie like this surrounded by peers at an overnight pot party. What am I going to do?!
A brief side note: I have a number of friends who are what you call “celebrities” and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble even though marijuana is legal. That being said, I have this one particular friend who had been dying to get me high since the moment I met him. He would go so far as to blow smoke directly at me in the hopes that I would at least get a contact high. Let’s call him Vern.
So imagine Vern’s delight when I rang him up and said, “Vern! I’ve got to get high by August!”
Soon after, a date was set and I was getting ready to head over to Vern’s house for our completely planned, overly controlled, supervised evening of drug use.
Did I mention I brought a journal?
As I got ready to go, my wife said, “You should Uber.”
I shot her a look. “Duh,” I responded childishly. “I know that!”
(I did not know that, by the way, but I wanted to seem like a pro.)
Within seconds of that exchange, I got a text from Vern” “You should Uber,” he wrote. “Duh!” I texted back. (With a lot more attitude since now I legitimately did know, having just been advised not four seconds earlier.)
When I arrived at Vern’s house the first thing I did was say to his wife, Kitty (also a made-up name) “I don’t want to get F$%ked up. I just want to get high.”
Kitty said, “You can’t get F$%ked up doing pot.”
“Uhhh,” I stammered. “I disagree. I’ve seen people lose their sh*t taking edibles.”
“Edibles, yes!” she relented. “But not smoking.”
I wrote that down in my journal:
“Can’t get F’d up from just smoking.”
Vern took me out to the patio and pulled out what I thought was a Kazoo. He said, “The first time I smoked with Snoop Dogg it was with a solid gold blunt like this, and since this is your first time I wanted it to be just as special.”
I was touched. Maybe pot heads were getting a bad rap. Maybe this drug actually made them sweeter. I jotted down the words, “Blunt,” “Snoop Dogg” and “Kazoo” just because I like the way it looks.
Now before you jump to conclusions, let me just say that whenever I tell this story, afterwards, people always say to me,
“WHO ARE YOU, 50 CENT?! Why the f&%k did you do so much?!”
And I always say the same thing: “I. DON’T. KNOW!”
I didn’t know it was so much! This was my first time. I thought I was in good hands. But instead of thinking, Oh how sweet these people are, I should have been thinking, these are the LAST people I should have trusted because they’re HIGH ALL THE TIME!!!
But back to the story.
I am puffing away on this little yellow submarine and feeling absolutely nothing when all of a sudden, I notice the ends of my mouth begin turning upright. Vern is expounding on the different types of Sativas and Indigas (More notes for my journal) when I realized I couldn’t stop smiling at him.
“And how long will it take to get high,” I ask?
He stares back and, noticing my bad impersonation of the Joker, expertly points out, “You’re high now.”
“Ah!” was my retort as I made another entry in my journal. (High. Now.)
But then it turns.
I get paranoid.
I can’t put sentences together. Dear God! I’m a writer! Have I just destroyed the one part of my brain that I rely on the most? I have zero memory retention! This was definitely worth writing about in my journal, so I wrote:
“I have zero…”
A pause the size of that Kazoo ran through my brain.
“Zero WHAT?! What was I saying?!?! What did I have zero of?
Oh! Right! Retention.”
But it was too late. By now I had become completely panicked. Vern and Kitty are doing all of the talking and all I can think of is, “They know I’m not talking. They can tell I’ve forgotten how to talk. They’re about to find me out.”
Again, in hindsight, people say to me, “Wait! So you just got high? You didn’t watch a movie or listen to music or stare at album covers?” To which I say,
“I THOUGHT I WAS WITH PROFESSIONALS!” I could barely remember my own name let alone become the activities director! But yes. We just sat there staring at each other until I asked if we could put the TV on.
Now at this point I’ve had enough. So I turn to Kitty and say, “I think I’m done now. I think I’d like this to be over. How long does this usually last?” She says, “About three to four hours.”
THREE TO FOUR HOURS?!?!?! I’ll be dead by then. My brain will have melted into… Into WHAT?!?! I CAN’T EVEN THINK OF WHAT TO CALL MUSH!!!
Wait, MUSH!!! That was the word I was looking for!
I ask Kitty if there’s anything that can make it go faster. She says, “Food.”
“Can I have some?” I ask.
“Sure.” She says. “We have tons of candy.”
Candy? I was hoping for a meatball sub! So I decide to raid their kitchen and wind up making about forty-seven English muffin peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
At which point, a mutual friend of ours walks in. Let’s call him, Bruce. Bruce is already laughing, but also slightly miffed that he wasn’t alerted to the fact that this circus act was going on. He asks me a question but in the two and a half seconds between the time he finished asking and the time I began responding, I forgot the question.
“What did you ask me?”
Bruce laughs harder and repeats the question.
I also laugh.
But that causes me to forget the question again. “One more time.”
Bruce laughs even harder and asks again. Finally, I compose myself and…
Nope! Still can’t remember the question. Now even Bruce is a little concerned. Luckily, however, as predicted, I finally come down about three and a half hours later.
I Uber home (Duh!) and crawl into bed a little after midnight. The next morning, I get a call from Kitty.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yes, I’m fine, thanks.”
“Okay, good,” she says. “Because after you left, I did some of the weed you smoked… and it F&%KED ME UP!!!!”
I have to say, that gave me a little sense of pride.
I went to add it to my journal when I realized the book was filled with gibberish, except for the word kazoo. Which, really, looks odd even when you’re sober.
But my time on Disjointed wound up being one of the most fun experiences I’ve had working on a show and, despite my efforts, I don’t think I was fooling anyone. In fact, I came to that conclusion when one of the other writers said to me, “You’re not fooling anyone.”
But it didn’t matter. I contributed to the room. I just did it in my own way.
Because who did they hire?
Me!
Nothing more was needed.
POSTSCRIPT
A few years ago, I went to a nutritionist because I wanted to change my eating habits and lose some weight. Nutritionist is an odd title because it doesn’t mean they’re a doctor, per say. They just have knowledge of… I guess nutrients. This one also had an endorsement by Janet Jackson on his website so what more could I need?
After doing numerous blood tests, the nutritionist calls me to say that everything looks good and losing the weight shouldn’t be a problem.
“Great,” I say.
Then, with what could only be practiced comic timing, he adds… “However…”
I wait for the canned studio audience laughter which I assume is coming when he says, “Your adrenaline is off the charts. I mean, it’s like you’re a crack addict!”
“Ok,” I say. Trying to decide if I should be alarmed or offended.
“And,” he continues. “Your testosterone is super low. But we can fix that.”
So he puts me on this medication that’s supposed to help me, but guess what it does instead?
It makes me depressed.
I have never been depressed in my life, and yet now I’m finding it hard to be enthused about anything. I quickly got off the meds and returned to normal, but in doing so three things became clear.
1) I had even more empathy for people who suffer from depression.
2) It re-affirmed the lesson that despite what out-of-whack things might be happening in my body, it’s still my body and whatever is happening in there is working, so don’t mess with it. Again, nothing more was needed.
3) Janet Jackson doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
HOSTSCRIPT
The site Bleeding Cool was Bloody Crafty in helping us spread the word about HOST MORTEM! Check out the article HERE!
