Jolt Country

On a mid-December early morn, circa 2003, on the balcony of my house in the Hollywood Hills, Jason Mewes, my friend of seventeen years and co-star in five films at that point, dropped a bomb that shoud’ve repulsed the shit out of me, or at the very least, made me vomit a little in my mouth.

“Last night, at the Spider Club, Nicole Richie dragged me into the bathroom and fucked me.”

And yet, instead of retching, I found myself battling another type of growing lump in my throat – the kind induced by watching your child enter the world, or the last ten minutes of “Field of Dreams”. I was suppressing tearful joy, momentarily setting aside the compulsion to smack Jason upside the head, hollering “Don’t fuck the vapid, dammit!” due to the fact that I was so insanely proud of how far the boy had come and relieved that we were having this conversation at all.

See, for years, Jason had had what seemed like an unbeatable, untreatable addiction to, alternately, heroin and oxycontin. It was a heartbreaking, trying and puzzling five-year stretch for me, so I can’t imagine how bad it was for him (well, that’s not entirely true. Mewes would periodically flash self-awareness with statements like “If I’m still like this when I turn thirty, I should probably kill myself.”).