“Chad Retires – Departing, Delays, & the Damn Ice House”

3:01 PM – BOB:

Here we go again.  I spent the last three and a half months booking another tour.  This time we’re headed through the South and up the East Coast.  Tour producer Mia Cevallos and her right-hand woman Jamie Flaxmann have been busting every hump they have to help find locations and get us some press.  We post all the good stuff we come across on the two Facebook pages:

http://www.facebook.com/TotalBadassTheMoviep
http://www.facebook.com/HellOnWheelsTheMovie

Getting Started  (late)

Picking up, Chad…and a lucky charm

Check list…where’s, Billy Bishop?

Departure Pause (again)…and OBSOLETE© Billy Bishop?

3:33 PM – CHAD:

As you may recall from our West Coast tour journal, the last time I left town with the movie, I put my lone surviving guinea pig, Suckerfish, in charge of selling weed for me while I was gone. That is not the case this time around, because I have officially retired and I’m not even fucking kidding. I’d love to sit here and tell you it was due to strong ethics on my part or some sort of divine rehabilitation, but that is simply not the case. I mean, I’ve wanted to quit selling weed for about seventeen years now but could never bring myself to do so. I can look back on my life since I moved  to Austin in 1991 and it’s basically one landmark after another of times I promised myself I was going to quit selling weed, but never did: Every birthday and New Years for the better part of two decades, when I got kicked out of college, when I went back to college, when my son was born, when I left the family, when the kids moved back in with me, when I got a felony for making the fake SXSW wristbands, when I got off probation for it five years later…. Every time I swore once the date or event passed, I was done selling weed for good. Never has this been more the case than when the movie about me selling weed came out.

Once Total Badass was actually out and we showed it in town four or five times then toured the country with it, I was pretty sure it was about time to go ahead and quit. You have no idea how nerve wracking it is to sell weed when there’s a movie out about you selling weed, trust me. When I got back in town from that first tour, I even told my son, Shay, that I was going to be making some big changes in the way we do things that were long overdue and our lives were going to be much better because of it. I now refer to that as my “Pay No Attention to the Three to Five Pounds of Weed in the Closet Speech”.  I put it right up there with The Gettysburg Address and George Bush’s Mission Accomplished lecture as far as eloquent, yet misguided monologues go.

In the interest of making excuses and condoning crime in general, let me say  it’s always been financial reality that sidetracks me from walking the straight and narrow. I’ve explained before how selling drugs is like magic…. You’re just able to look back at the last year and somehow you’ve been able to pay for shit like rent and beer and sporting events when, in real life, the math never would have added up. So, even when I got back in from our tour over the summer, the realities of the bills and the car and all this shit just came right in and took over any plans I might have had about quitting. All along, I’ve also suffered from the common delusion about how if I could just get a little bit of money… just enough to pay my debts and get a little ahead on my bills… then I would walk away and never look back. Since selling pot is no different than any other shitty little job as far as getting ahead and upwards mobility are concerned, that day never comes. Except this time, it did.

Back right before the summer of 2008, on the first day that Bob and I ever worked on a scene for the movie, my grandma died. I actually had tentative plans to go by and interview her on our way back from the guinea pig show we went to, but it was too late at night by the time we were finished. The next morning, my Aunt called me and when I saw her name on my cell phone, I knew Meema had died. Well, fast forward two years later, and I’m back in town from the West Coast, spinning my fucking wheels for the thousandth time and, if I may get a bit personal, at an all time low as far as hopelessness and reality creeping into my head are concerned when my Aunt calls me again. Meema had left me some money. Not much, by any stretch of the imagination, but enough to equal about a year’s worth of weed selling salary. I’m not saying that I squandered any of it, but I did spend enough to pay off my debts and get a little ahead on my bills… and stop selling weed for the rest of my fucking life.

Now, I love Meema very much and her and Pop’s deaths are certainly right up there on the list of shittiest things that happen in life, but for the sake of humor and being honest, I have to tell you that the psychological relief that came along with that little financial windfall was so overwhelming that I couldn’t get the song, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” out of my head for like two weeks. Seriously, I’d just be driving down the road with this huge smile on my face and the words to the song on a permanent loop in my brain. Here, sing them with me: “Grandma got run over by a reindeer, walking home from our house Christmas Eve. You may say there’s no such thing as Santa, but as for me and grandpa we believe.” So, when I get back in town this time, don’t ask me to sell you any weed, because I quit. Take this job and fucking shove it. I feel like the biggest burden of my life has been lifted, because I’m never going to sell another scrap of weed ever again for as long as I fucking live… except for the three quarter pounds I have stashed away at my house because obviously, I can’t just let that sit there and go to waste.

4:17 PM – BOB:

Fucking Billy Bishop.  I love the bastard, but he’s late as usual.  Billy is a badass artist and poster printer, but odds are you won’t get your posters until the event they are promoting is half over.  And so here we go again…

MEET Billy Bishop?

Guinea Pig Tee…no Billy

Got Shirts

So yeah, fresh out of the gate and we’re already running late.

On the drive to Houston, Chad and I decided to write a few scripts on this tour.  We figured to do that last tour, but blew it off and partied non-stop instead. Our re-commitment to writing scripts on tour was, shortly after, followed by a silent re-commitment to blowing it off again.

Arriving in Houston

7:16 PM – CHAD:

Our first official stop on the tour was at The Dam Ice House which is right by the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks where the movie played. The Dam Ice House is… well, I’ll let our friend, Dave, tell you:

The DAMN ICE HOUSE – Thanks, Dave!

Headed to and at the ALAMO Theater

A Fist full…

In review…BURP.

11:11 PM – BOB:

Houston screening was rowdy fun.  LOTS of laughs.  The ‘toons got the mood set right and the flick killed.

11:34 PM – CHAD:

We had established The Dam Ice House as the staging ground for an eventual assault on the theatre, but when we got there, only Bonnie Bilski, Holly Anders, and Chris Cortez were to be found. Luckily, after the movie, a lot more Brazoswood High School Alumni showed up, as evidenced in the following video: (Before showing the video, I would also like to add that Thao Ho, Kathy Krampota, Eileen Asswood, and countless other B’wood women were there looking better than ever as was my “cousin” Abbey, who is still not literally related to me and thus it would be perfectly fine if we made out, sweetheart.)

Roll Call

The Houston screening was fucking great, to put it lightly. We had unbelievable support from the guys at 1560 The Game, a shitload of high school friends showed up, and someone gave me so many fucking pills, you might as well quit reading this shit now because I don’t care about it anymore. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Bob and I fail to post a goddamn thing on this journal for over a week.  The Q and A after the screening was easily the best one we’ve had on the east coast trip so far, especially towards the end where Holly Anders asks the question that exposes Jesse, Charles Jesse Miller Jr, as the farce that his life has become:

(Coming Sooon): VIDEO D01-c-qanda