DUE DATE

My new friend Stephen’s got style—he stays at the bar while I go to the movie. And when I come out he’s still there, and I rejoin him as if I’d just stepped out for a quick smoke. But then, I’ve had quick smokes that changed my life. And Due Date changed my life. It’s like the Grand Canyon it celebrates—it was just another groove until someone named it, and now, wherever we are, we always feel we are on the side of it from which we desperately need to cross to the other. Addictions are, by definition, out of control.

I love trivia and quirk. But I don’t much care for Zach Galifiniakis’s web-based talk show, Between Two Ferns, in which he and his celebrity buddies wink and smirk at one another, as if it’s all a game. Fooling no one. Because how can Robert Downey Jr. not live for art, since he so clearly does? The absolutely gorgeous way he handles a Blackberry. Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. The celebrities are gods, and when we see them—I saw Jake Gyllenhaal canoodling with Taylor Swift by the Key Food near Gorilla the day before it was even in Us—it’s like the old myth-time again, when they’d swing down to mingle, and under their darkling eyelids one stole glimpses of sparrow and sickle both.

Galifiniakis heads for “Hollywood” to become a star—the birth the title promises is his, from besotted liar to karma-king. Waking up in roadside America, that washed-out light, feet cold, jeans still unzipped. Seeking sleep, he braces footsoles on the windshield and rubs one out. Driving, exhausted, he gives in to sweet sleep and crashes big. Sipping the coffee brewed, by mistake, from his father’s ashes, and discovering the truth, he sips again. What a response, what pure courage. To be father to yourself!