Jim Carrey - Memoirs and Misinformation

They knew him as Jim Carrey.

And by the middle of that December his lawn had burned to a dull, amber brittle. And at night, after the sprinklers ten minutes of city-rationed watering, the grass blades floated in pooled waterlimp and wasted like his mothers hair in the final morphine sweats.

The city of Los Angeles had been moving hellward since April, with bone-dry reservoirs and strings of scorching days, the forecasts reading like a sadists charm bracelet, 97-98-105-103. Last week an F- had flashed like a switchblade through the ash-filled sky just as one of the gardeners on the Hummingbird Road estate collapsed of sunstroke and fell into seizures. The man fought as they carried him to the house, saying the Virgin Mary had promised him a slow dance for three dollars in the cool shade of the ravine. At night came the Santa Anas, those devil winds that sapped the soul, that set police sirens wailing as the sunsets burned through napalm oranges into sooty mauves. Then each morning a smoggy breath would draw across the canyons and into the great house, passing through air filters recently equipped with sensors to detect assassination by nerve gas.

He was bearded and bleary eyed after months of breakdown and catastrophe. He lay naked in his bed, so far from peak form that if you watched through a hacked security camera at this moment you might barely recognize him, might at first confuse him with a Lebanese hostage. Then, in a swell of facial recognition, youd realize: This is no ordinary shut-in watching television alone on a gigantic bed, and as the bloodred Netflix logo glared from an unseen TV youd say, I know this man, Ive seen him on everything from billboards to breakfast cereals. Hes the movie star: Jim Carrey.

Just weeks ago, thirty seconds of home security footage was leaked to The Hollywood Reporter by some traitor in his extended personal-protection apparatus. In it Carrey bobbed facedown and fetal in his pool, wailing underwater like a captive orca. His publicist, Sissy Bosch, told Variety that he was preparing to play John the Baptist for Terrence Malick, who conveniently declined comment. The video sold for fifty thousand dollars, a sum just large enough to inspire that most sacred of animal behaviorsa spontaneous market response. After the fifth paparazzo scaled his backyard fence, his security team had it raised to fifteen feet, electrified, and fringed with razor wire, an eighty-five-thousand-dollar job including the city council bribe. Jim had since begun to hear the sizzles and squeaks of electrocuted wildlife as a sorrowful necessity, animal sacrifice to his godhead. And while some believed Sissy Boschs John the Baptist story, most noted that it didnt explain Carreys weight gain, or why some heard a distinctly Chinese accent in his moanings.

It was now 2:58 in the morning.

Hed been watching television for seven hours.

The binge had started with an episode of Ancient Predators featuring Megalodon, the super-shark terror of the ancient seas. Then came Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthal, the story of how these early humans parted as cousins on the African plains, then re-met as strangers in Europe, only to begin a contest of genocide. Cro-Magnon had slaughtered without mercy, leaving famished Neanderthal orphans staring out from French caves into a blizzard, whose screaming whiteness, Jim knew, was that of total erasure. He was half French Canadian and learned from the narrator that he carried Neanderthal DNA within him; he was descended from these orphans. Feeling their doom as his own, hed begun crying tears of desolation and then, unable to bear these, hed hit pause with his grease-slicked thumb, freezing the screen on the tiny Neanderthal faces. For ten minutes he lay trembling, muttering Oh God over and over until Netflix, greedy for its own bandwidth, reset to the main menu, casting its red glow over him and his guard dogsidentical twin, steel-toothed Rottweilers who both answered to Jophiel. Their name was shared for the sake of efficiency in emergency, so that if one of Jim Carreys many enemies broke into the house and he had only seconds to act, he could summon both with a breath.

Fearing this was the moment when he would discover his own long-standing nonexistence, questioning even the value of an existence as part of a species forever looping between horror and heartache, he wondered if the latest viral news story vexing his publicists was right. Had he actually died while snowboarding in Zermatt? Hed seen a YouTube video about how time behaves strangely in death, your final seconds distending, yielding rich washes of experience. What if he had died in recent days, arriving not in a hell or a heaven but rather a bedbound purgatory?

Hed heard stories about the Los Angeles morgue. Bored attendants taking gross pictures of the famous fallen, selling them to TMZ for down payments on houses in the Valley. He flipped to YouTube, whose algorithms, like reading his mind, offered a montage of celebrity death photos. A shot of John Lennon. Face puddled on a gurney. Splayed out for the crowd. If they could do this to John Lennon

His mind now conjured an image of his own lifeless form, swollen and foul, the morgue goons standing above him, cameras blazing.

Fuck, he breathed, unsure if hed breathed it or not.

Hed gone to the bathroom, trying to reclaim existential certainty with a warm rush of urine through his middle-aged urethra. His heart was racing. What if it failed in his sleep and they found him in the morning, caked in his own excrement? What if the entire flight of paranoia that had brought him to this moment of feared death was a premonition of a future death, the Zermatt snowboarding disaster just fates deft misdirection? No, if death should come, hed look his bestcrevice as clean as a whistle.

Thus resolved, hed sat on his Japanese toilet and evacuated his bowels, wiped himself, and hopped in the shower, thoroughly sponging the orifice, then drying and powdering himself. He moved to the vanity mirror and kept going, trimming his wiry eyebrows, plucking the wolf hairs from his ears, rubbing bronzer across his forehead, his neck, around his clavicles in a broad swoop, so he looked like a Grecian bust.

Now he was ready for the boys at the morgue.

Here was a great star, theyd say. A box-office god of the kind they dont make anymore.

Now he was marginally less afraid.

He settled back into bed and began watching the first thing Netflix offered: Pompeii Reconstructed: Countdown to Disaster.

This was the Hamptons or Riviera of the ancient world, said the host, Ted Berman, an off-brand Indiana Jones in a thrift-store fedora. Once again, Jim felt reality blurring into fiction as a digitally animated cloud of burning ash billowed up from Mount Vesuvius, the computerized notion of a cameras POV rose with it, high above the city, then stopped and panned into the volcanic crater, which suddenly seemed so very endless and all-devouring that Carrey cried out, Security inventory!