Yearbook

by Seth Rogen

  Go to the park and have a picnic as the shrooms kick in.

  Hang out in the park and have a great time.

  Go back to the youth hostel and go to sleep.

  Things instantly went south. We got to the Smartshop, which is one of these little shops throughout Amsterdam that are filled with humid fish tanks where they cultivate hallucinogenic fungus. Normally, shrooms are all dried out and chewy, and we’d eat around three and a half grams each, which would usually amount to like three or four little dehydrated mushrooms, which is a solid amount.

  We ordered from the man behind the counter.

  Me: We’d like seven grams of your most hallucinogenic mushrooms, please.

  Shroom Salesman: Seven grams?

  Me: Yeah.

  Shroom Salesman: We don’t have seven grams.

  Ben: Huh? How much do you have?

  Shroom Salesman: They come in packs of thirty grams, approximately.

  Me: How many shrooms is that? Two hundred?

  Shroom Salesman: No, just one. Per pack.

  He motioned toward these little Rubik’s Cube–sized packages that each contained one fresh, wet mushroom.

  Curveball. Hmm…

  Ben: How many do most people eat?

  Shroom Salesman: It depends.

  Me and Ben huddled.

  Me: I mean, it’s probably mostly water weight, right?

  Ben: Yeah. A shroom is a shroom. The fact that it’s dehydrated shouldn’t make a difference. If anything, it’s probably more concentrated because it’s dehydrated.

  Me: Yeah. We should just gauge it by the amount of mushrooms we’d normally eat, not the weight.

  Ben: Yeah. Good call.

  Me: So, we’d normally have like three big mushrooms each.

  We turned back to the man behind the counter.

  Me: We’ll take ninety grams each please.

  The guy looked at us a bit strangely, but in retrospect not NEARLY as strangely as he should have. He gave us the shrooms and we went outside, where we shoveled them into our faces.

  Although inelegant, the first two steps were complete. Time for the next item on the agenda: Go to the grocery store and buy stuff for a picnic. Should be simple enough.

  Now again, for those of you who aren’t familiar with shrooms, they normally take between thirty and forty-five minutes to kick in, which should have been ample time to get what we needed and get to the park. But these were not normal mushrooms. And we had not taken a normal amount of them.

  We were barely three steps into the store when Ben looked at me. “Holy shit.”

  If he was referring to the fact that every aisle in sight was undulating rhythmically and had a shimmer as though the sunlight (which was not present in the store) was being diffused by a giant whirling fan, each blade made of a different-color piece of glass (which was also not present in the store), then I knew what he meant. “Yeah, man. Holy shit is right.”

  “This shit is kicking in HARD.”

  I waved my hand in front of my face. It left trails of a thousand streaking lines. “Yeah, dude. Super fucking hard.”

  Ben: Let’s just get some shit and get the fuck out of here. This place is freaking me out.

  I tried to calm Ben down. “Yeah, man, no worries. Let’s do this.”

  If you’ve ever been grocery shopping while an inhuman amount of hallucinogenic mushrooms are aggressively taking over your system, you know that shit ain’t easy. I get overwhelmed grocery shopping when I’m completely sober. This was like trying to solve an algebra problem while trying to find my way out of a maze, while dealing with the fact that someone had apparently taken my brain out of my skull, strapped it to a rocket ship, and blasted it out into the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Suffice to say, it was a challenge.

  Ben was getting…uncomfortable. “Let’s just get some shit and GO!”

  “Okay! Just chill!” I started putting stuff in the cart. It didn’t matter what. There was no way we’d be eating it. The cashier looked at me, eyes and mouth swirling around her face like a Picasso.

  “I’ll pay cash.”

  I gave her all the cash I had on me, which I really hoped was enough, and we hightailed it out of there. As we made our way toward the park, Ben had an intense, focused energy. “Let’s just get through this” was the overall vibe he was giving off. I was tripping hard but didn’t feel that bad—mentally. Physically, my stomach was turning on me. We hadn’t eaten anything before downing the shrooms, and they are, for all intents and purposes, poisonous, so I was getting a nasty case of rotgut.

  We made it to the park and dropped the shopping bag. Ben seemed relieved; I was dreading breaking the news.

  Me: Yo, man.

  Ben: Yeah?

  Me: Uh…I think I gotta go find a bathroom.

  Ben: NO!

  Me: I have to.

  Ben: I don’t care!

  Me: Why does it matter?

  Ben: Because I don’t want you to leave me alone here!

  Me: So, come with me!

  Ben: Fuck no! I can’t walk anymore! I’m not doing well, man!

  The sky was bright purple, so I knew where he was coming from.

  Me: Look, dude, just wait here, chill, and I’ll be back in, like, ten minutes. I’ll find a coffee shop or restaurant or something and then I’ll be right back.

  Ben looked like a child who was being abandoned. “Fuck. Fine. Just be fast.”

  I tried my best to be fast. I really did. I speed-walked over to the main road, which made me start to sweat and made my heart beat faster, which made the drugs pump through my system more intensely, which in turn made my heart beat faster and made me sweat more, creating a bit of a cycle. I was running out of time. I saw a quaint little tea shop and burst through the front door. I have a clear recollection of the horrified looks on the faces of the Dutch employees.

  “Can I use please use your restroom?!” I blurted out.

  If those words were any indicator of my ability to control things coming out of me, I was in for a rough few minutes. They responded in Dutch in far too many words to mean “yes,” but I took it as an affirmation, because the alternative would have been worse for everyone.

  I barreled into a TINY little restroom and sat down as I proceeded to hallucinate intensely for an amount of time that, to this day, I couldn’t even begin to estimate. Somewhere between ten minutes and nineteen thousand years. I assume I did all the things a person does to consider the experience successful and then sped out of the restaurant as fast as I could, not wanting to see the melting faces of the horrified staff. I made it out to the street, which was rolling like a choppy river.

  Won’t be crossing that, I thought. I headed back toward the park on a road that was crammed with foot traffic. I was actually feeling quite good. I had done it. Mission accomplished. All good in the hoo—

  BLARGHHUUWWAAA!

  I projectile-vomited on the sidewalk with such velocity that it splattered on the legs of a lot of nearby pedestrians. They looked at me with disgust, as the purple sky turned lime green and began flashing like a strobe light.

  So close, I thought. I just gotta make it back to Ben and we can have our picnic and everything will be fine.

  As soon as I rounded the corner into the park, I knew everything was not going to be fine. There was Ben, right where I left him, except now he was lying motionless, facedown in the grass, his arms firmly pressed to his sides. I ran over to him.

  “Ben!”

  He turned and looked at me. “Holy fuck! We gotta go!”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know! I just gotta get out of here!”

  ”Okay, let’s go back to the hostel. We’ll pack up the food we bought and—”

/>   “No! Fuck it! Let’s bail!”

  Ben started quickly walking away from our nonsensical picnic. I followed, looking back, seeing our random ingredients shrink in the distance. A mess in an otherwise pristine park.

  Me: What were you doing facedown?

  Ben: I was hiding.

  Me: From who?

  Ben: Everyone was looking at me.

  Me: I didn’t see anyone looking at you.

  Ben: That’s because I was hiding.

  The logic added up.

  Ben: That was the worst moment of my life.

  Me: Whoa, really?

  Ben: Yeah. The worst moment.

  Me: So right now we’re like four minutes after the worst moment of your life?

  Ben: Yep.

  Me: That’s heavy shit.

  Ben: Sure is. Now I can’t talk anymore.

  And he didn’t. We made it back to the hostel, Ben in silence the whole time. We got to the room and he got in bed and hid under the blanket. I was still tripping VERY hard and didn’t just want to talk, I needed to. Then one of our roommates came into the room. He smiled.

  “What’s up, guys?”

  As soon as he spoke, I recognized the voice; it was the bed guy from the first night in the hostel! The Vincent Kartheiser guy! The whirling tornado of awkwardness who sucked up all in his path.

  “Not much,” I said. “We’re tripping pretty hard, and my buddy here is kinda out of commission for the time being.”

  “I hear that,” he said. “Wanna smoke a joint?”

  I wound up talking to annoying bed guy for a solid two hours, as Ben reassembled his consciousness to the point that he could communicate again. The guy turned out to be great. He was a skateboarder who was traveling around Europe alone. He’d been fucked with at a few hostels, so he was sensitive to the guy stealing his bed, and he seemed to feel bad about the whole incident. All in all, he was a fantastic dude.

  After he left, Ben rejoined reality and put his hand on my shoulder. “We should leave this place.”

  Me: The hostel?

  Ben: No. Amsterdam. Let’s get on a train and go to Paris.

  We weren’t supposed to go for a few days, and I wasn’t really sure where we would stay or how any of that would work, but nonetheless I nodded. “I’m fucking IN.”

  My agreeable nature likely had something to do with the fact that, at this point, I was still FULLY on mushrooms. It had maybe been three hours since we took them; every shadow danced, and mouths didn’t move according to the words coming out of them. We shoved our belongings in our giant backpacks and walked to the station, where we boarded our train to Paris.

  We continued to trip the whole way, arriving in Paris in the middle of the night, wandering the streets as the haze of the shrooms lifted. We turned to each other.

  Ben: Where are we gonna stay?

  Me: I have no idea.

  Ben: Where are we? What neighborhood is this?

  Me: I have no idea.

  Ben looked around.

  Ben: Why the fuck did we come to Paris?

  Me: Honestly…I have no idea.

  We spotted the Eiffel Tower in the distance and arrived as the sun rose, and that’s when it really hit us. We did so many shrooms we didn’t just freak out, or throw up on the street, or litter a whole picnic’s worth of food in one of the most beautiful parks in Holland. We did so many shrooms we wound up in a completely different country. So, if you’re ever in Amsterdam and you’re debating how many shrooms to buy from the Smartshop, err on the side of caution. And make sure your passport is securely hidden in your money belt, because you might need it.

  After being on two failed TV shows, in 2001 I found myself in the same boat as a million other motherfuckers in L.A.—an unemployed actor/writer with a real chip on his shoulder that other people’s shit was getting made and other people were getting parts he wasn’t, which is a great look.

  I was also pretty lonely and found it really hard to meet women that I got along with. I was the age of a college student, but I was in the adult work world, and I was gross. Not sexually gross, just young-dude gross. My apartment was disgusting. I think I didn’t change my sheets for maybe six months? It literally didn’t occur to me. It seemed like changing your rug, as in something you just don’t do. There was no differentiation for me between the sheets and the mattress, and you don’t change your mattress, right? At one point I just bought new sheets and put them over my old dirty ones.

  Once, my apartment had a terrible fly infestation. My kitchen was SWARMED by hundreds and hundreds of flies, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out the cause. Someone told me that it might be a gas leak, as that can attract flies, which scared the shit out of me because I smoked all day every day, and the thought of poisoning myself or exploding myself wasn’t awesome. I called the gas company to come check out the apartment.

  The guy came with a little gas-detecting device, but no alerts sounded. “It’s so weird. I just can’t figure out what it is.”

  Then he walked over and opened a drawer under the sink. “Maybe it’s this…?”

  There was an eggplant with a thick cloud of flies around it that must have been placed there about three months earlier and had melted into goop. So if you’ve ever wondered what happens to an eggplant that you leave in a drawer for three months, it melts and attracts flies and makes you realize you should probably make some better life choices. What the fuck was I doing buying an eggplant in the first place? I wasn’t gonna cook that shit. Anyway…

  I used to meet people when I went out and did stand-up comedy, but I had recently quit, because I wasn’t that good at it. It was actually quite a bummer, but I’m glad I quit. I’d go out to clubs and see Sarah Silverman, David Cross, Zach Galifianakis, Bob Odenkirk, Paul F. Tompkins, just DESTROYING, and then I’d get up and not destroy. I was the worst thing you could be, which was just fine—good enough to keep going, but not great enough to really make an impression. I bailed, and over the years I watched a lot of them become super-famous, which made me feel even better about the choice. Sometimes quitting is great, I guess, which is not something they teach you as a kid. “Never quit, but sometimes do quit, ’cause you simply might not be that good at some shit.”

  It was around this time that L.A.’s nightlife was having a resurgence in the form of a few nightclubs that had I guess what you’d call “hot” nights. My friend Dave was friends with another guy who was a promoter for all these clubs, so we’d go out and basically try to meet women. It was a crazy scene. People dressed wild.

  I remember being in a VIP room, drinking and hanging out with Rick James for an evening. He wore a sequined blazer and platform shoes, towering over everyone else in the club.

  I remember being at a house party at Simon Cowell’s, and there was a woman wearing what can only be described as a series of handkerchiefs sewn together into a dress.

  Me: Who is that?

  Dave: I actually went to high school with her. Her dad owns the Hilton hotels! Her name is Paris.

  I swear once I saw Owen Wilson at a club in a mink coat, so if that doesn’t encapsulate the time, I don’t know what does.

  I think I went on a date with only one woman I met at a club, and it ended bizarrely. Alex was a friend of a friend. I called her a few days after we met, which seems barbaric today, and asked her out to dinner. We went and seemed to really hit it off. At the end of the night, we made out by her car and talked about seeing each other soon. I was totally smitten.

  I called her the next day, because I have no game, and she didn’t call me back. A few days went by, so I called again and left a message. A few days after that, she called and explained that she had gotten an audition for Lois Lane in the new Superman reboot starring Brandon Routh, directed by now-disgraced creepo Bryan Singer. S
he was learning her lines all week, which I totally understood. She said she’d call me after the audition, which she never did. I probably acted like an idiot in some way, so who can blame her. It just made me mad at myself for fucking things up.

  But a couple weeks after our first date, I got some great news: I had an audition for a movie, which was always nerve-racking but the sign of a real opportunity. And it wasn’t just any movie; it was the movie that was being made for the second season of Project Greenlight, a show I was fucking obsessed with.

  In general, I love reality television, and Project Greenlight was one of the shows that made me a convert. If you don’t know, Project Greenlight was a show created by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, which posed the questions: “Does the Hollywood system work? Does it actually award the best filmmakers the opportunity to make films, or are there those out there who are just as talented but don’t have the connections or opportunities?”

  If you watched the show, the answer would seem to be “Yep! The Hollywood system works like a motherfucker,” because all the movies to come out of Project Greenlight fucking suck butt. They also literally only picked white dudes to direct the movies in every single season of the show, so they weren’t really granting opportunities to people who wouldn’t have probably gotten them anyway.

  But at the time, none of this was clear to me. It was just an exciting opportunity that was taking my mind off what an unlovable loser I was in my personal life.

  The movie was called The Battle of Shaker Heights, and I was auditioning for the funny friend of the main guy, which was standard for me. I pulled up outside the office building where the auditions were being held, walked into the waiting room, and saw two very shocking things:

  The first was a giant camera in my face, filming me the second I opened the door. I hadn’t thought of it, but I realized in that moment that by auditioning to be in the Project Greenlight movie, I was, by default, going to be on Project Greenlight, because the process itself is the actual product.