And Then I Met Jim Carrey Again.
I was on all fours in the sand in front of his house.
“Can you put your top lower so your ass is in the air?” asked Molly, lightly tapping my back.
Halfway through her question I’d already complied. We both knew the mission.
“There we go!” she said. “Ok! Ready?” She turned towards my camera, Jim’s house looming behind it. “I’m gonna smack it!”
When she did, a poof of pure, powdered, copper mica exploded against my ass and then disseminated into the sea breeze with the sound of a light skin-on-skin clap. It shimmered much more delicately and graciously than the cheap plastic glitters most girls slop on their skin these days.
“Gah!” I exclaimed on impact. It was a little dramatized. That was a weak-ass spank.
“HA HA!” She squealed, scampering back to the camera.
“Wait! Let’s play it back! Let’s play it back!” I knew it’d come out well. It felt right.
“Oh. My. God.” She knew it did too.
On the next take, an old couple watched us while they walked behind me in the shot. The wife tried to block her husband’s view with her body and then pointed out into the ocean for something else for him to look at. He didn’t look, but he did look down, laughing. Jim’s neighbors had been tolerating over 2 hours of this show on their morning beach walk.
“That was a fail!” said Molly, after the smack. It hadn’t made a clap sound, but when we reviewed the footage, the poof looked cool. The lump of sand caught between my bikini bottoms and vagina, however, did not.
It was very Einhorn from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective though.
It had become common for scenes from Jim Carrey’s movies to show up in my reality. A few months ago I’d watched a guy at the gas pump overfill his car while staring at me in my panda helmet, just like Harry did in Dumb and Dumber while staring at the undercover cop.
Just this week I ran around at work trying to catch a rare bird who’d escaped, just like Ace Ventura, and I can’t tell you how many times a day I spot The Number 23.
It’d been a week and a half since I finally met Jim Carrey. After my initial sob-fest over how I perceived the interaction as a “fail” on my part, I’d been nothing but elated. I’d cleaned (almost) my entire apartment, started working on new music, stripped the plastic off my new canvas to start painting, and every couple hours I’d stopped what I was doing to shout, “OH MY GOD I FINALLY MET JIM CARREY!” I had one mission the last 3+ years and that one mission was to meet Jim Carrey, and
I.
Met.
Jim Carrey.
I DID IT!
I saw the mountain.
I climbed the mountain.
I made it to the top of the mountain.
DREAMS DO COME TRUE IF YOU MAKE THEM!
Then the clouds of emotion had cleared and I saw that I only made it to the base camp of the next peak of the same mountain.
Fine. I expected it. Accomplishment is pivotal, powerful, and yet, like the moment the sun sets, the colors are oh so quick to fade. It became obvious throughout my journey to get here that there would be more to this than just one meeting. Along the way, each rejection that I overcame to continue onward was evidence that I wasn’t just interested in meeting Jim Carrey, but in something far greater. Could Jim Carrey be my true love? My greatest enemy? My best fuck? My best friend? My soulmate? My reincarnated lover? My husband till death do us part? The other half to the prophecy I’m fulfilling? The answer to why anything matters at all?
All signs point to “MAYBE.” That’s good enough to keep going. Hope goes a long way if you spread it.
But now I needed help, and so did Molly.
The “glitter spank” was the climax of our video shoot for Molly’s new body oil product. She’s starting a skin care line using all natural, all edible (but don’t eat them) ingredients that make you smell good and sparkle. It’s called “I don’t know, baby,” so that when someone asks what you’re wearing, you reply, “I don’t know, baby.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“No, it’s I don’t know, baby.”
“How can you not know, baby, what you’re wearing?”
“No, the brand is ‘I don’t know, baby.’ That’s its name!”
It’s cute. It’s clever. It’s memorable.
Molly is memorable. She’s an entrepreneurial marine biologist fronting as a hippy Cover Girl model. She isn’t just hot and driven with a good attitude, but she’s got character.
When everyone meets her they think she has a sexy foreign accent, but it’s actually a speech impediment. She prides herself on it and that makes her attractive in a way that she couldn’t be without it. I’d never seen sexy dreads, but Molly has sexy dreads. She’s weaved them with (she says “unharmed”) baby alpaca fur so they’re uniformly soft and she cares for them so they’re not lumpy, wiry, and gross, like most dreads look. That’s gotta take time and talent.
We’d been wanting to do the video shoot for awhile as we’d already found we enjoy collaborating on social media photoshoots. It was my suggestion that we do it on Jim’s beach, but I suggested it in a sort of “this is probably a terrible idea but I can’t help but want to do it” kind of way. I was simultaneously enraptured to meet Jim again and utterly terrified after how the last encounter ended. In all the ways I thought I’d meet Jim Carrey, it had never occurred to me that I might have so little control over my own behavior. Maybe with Molly around I could avoid talking about the apocalypse or one of the many attempts I’d made to meet him. I could appear… “normal.”
Because of Jim’s rejection, I was also scared that maybe that was the first and last time I’d see him. What if he’d just happened to come out while I happened to be there? What if that entire meeting was just a rare, chance encounter? Would he even come out again if he knew I was there? Did he even find me sexy?
“When in doubt, test it out.” — Me
I couldn’t just be overtly sexy solo on his beach. I’d heard from many men that the ideal number to pickup women is 2. More than that, and you’re having to deal with too many. Less than that, and there’s got to be something wrong with her. Maybe that’s misogyny, but, hey, ladies, that’s our reality. We just gotta work with what we got.
Thus, it’s best to treat and understand men like animals, and I mean that in the best way possible, as I love animals. I’d picked a feral cat off the highway last year and the vet told me to talk on the phone with a friend around him to warm him up to me. Doing so would show him who I am and get him to trust me by not putting any pressure on him. It worked. My cat loves me now.
Why wouldn’t it work with Jim?
Molly is 11 years younger than me and has that inexhaustible, contagious young energy and naivety. She makes the perfect wingwoman for insecure Aisha: a state of being I hadn’t visited since middle school. When I’m with her I very much act like I’m back in middle school: I’m more daring and creative, but also more shy and insecure. I’d developed that prepubescent crush-based anxiety where I’d feel anxious if I didn’t go to his beach when I could, anxious if I did and see him, and anxious if I did and didn’t see him.
We also shot for a friend and ex-colleague of mine, Joelle Benvenuto, who I’d worked with at a VR company almost 10 years ago. It was called IMVU, which we’d been told was chosen because it stood for “Instant Message [with a] Vi-EW.” All the other possible URLs the team of engineers who started the company could come up with had already been bought. The focus of the product was to design avatars to socialize with in a virtual space.
It was a competitor with Second Life, so we shared some of their talent, who’d tell us that IMVU made more money but had less PR. Once you’re inside a new company no one really abides by the nondisclosure agreements from the old one, that’s why competing tech companies are always hiring from each other.
Our 10-year-old “mature startup” attracted and maintained a majority-female customer-base, so her and I bonded over our shared artistic visions for creating fashion show competitions for our users, but they were ultimately always ignored by our company’s all-male team of decision-makers. Years later, it was therapeutic watching her start her own business on Instagram where she got to call the shots end-to-end for her unique, modern, and intriguing jewelry line.
I was ecstatic when she chose me to help her out. In exchange for letting me choose and keep a couple necklaces she’d made, I’d shoot content with them for her social media accounts.
Her brand is called TheFuturisNow. (Etsy / Instagram)
I adore that our entire video session was ideated, run, and benefited from by an all-female group of entrepreneurs directly, tangibly helping one another. However, I wouldn’t use either of their products if they weren’t my friends. They’re just not my style. My life is active, so I can’t wear jewelry, and I have no need for glitter, because I already sparkle. Even my mom questioned why I’d bring Molly, another attractive woman, with me to meet Jim again on the beach. Does helping women as another woman mean to placate them based off your friendship instead of whether you gain value from their creations? This story wouldn’t have happened if my answer was no, and I really do enjoy this story. Besides, maybe the whole point of our existence isn’t really about the success of achieving our goals but enjoying the journey we share with each other to do so.
After over 2 hours of dribbling Molly’s glittery body oil formula for iDKB all over ourselves and shooting Joelle’s elegant necklace draped between our breasts, we concluded our session with dumping the remaining oil on our asses.
I’d told Molly our goal was to be so extremely, outrageously provocative that Jim Carrey would have no choice but be lured out by his penis, but I was still shocked when it actually worked.
After we’d put my cameras away, we returned to the ocean to rinse off, laughing about how difficult it was to remove all the excessive mica we’d smothered ourselves with. We couldn’t help but sparkle! We were excited about the footage we’d captured, and laughed about how ridiculous we’d been, smacking each others’ asses smack dab in front of Jim’s house like it were a public porn set. Not only had we begun the shoot by blasting music from my 360 degree bluetooth speaker at top volume, but we’d been shouting directions about the glory of each others’ body parts over the crash of the waves, screaming when they’d knocked us over.
“There’s no way he didn’t hear us,” I said.
“I swear I saw a shadow pass by his window when we first got here,” she said.
“I swear I felt him watching us when we were changing bikinis in the bushes.”
But we had no confidence that he saw anything, or if he was even home.
“I’m sure his neighbors will say something to him,” Molly said.
“He doesn’t have many neighbors. Most of the houses on his street are empty.” I knew this because I’ve helped trim coconut trees at most of them.
While telling Molly about my next plan to lure Jim Carrey out, Jim Carrey appeared.
It was like seeing Big Foot, but even better.
I stopped mid-sentence, mid-plan to exclaim, “OH MY GOD. THERE HE IS.”
He walked diagonally across the beach, behind Molly’s back, 25–50 yards or so away, towards the ocean. He even moved like Big Foot, the one captured in that famous video: a hurried gait, arms swinging, shoulders hunched, looking around without actually looking at anything.
I stared at him, waiting for him to look at us so I could wave. To me, it was pretty obvious Molly and I were putting out the vibe, amplified by our powers combined. To him… it appeared he wasn’t quite aware what we were doing or even what he was doing. He behaved like a man confused about his own behavior. It was like he didn’t think our obvious presence was an invitation for his or like he’d been reluctant to accept said invitation but even more reluctant to refuse it given what he’d think about himself if he did. Was he being driven by his body while his mind scrambled to backfill his actions with justifying stories to maintain a semblance of control and composure? Perhaps only the camera had prevented him from lunging sooner. I’m sure cameras give him PTSD.
I waved. He had his black hair over his eyes like an emo-kid. I waved again, bigger. This was the first scene we saw Clementine and Joel interact from Internal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. C’mon, Jim, the gig is up! He glanced at me and then looked away as if to avoid me seeing him seeing me, and then he raised his hand a bit, a slight wave, with a sheepish, maybe nervous, smile, before he changed course and headed towards us, into the water, fully clothed, in tan cargo shorts and a black graphic tee with the iconic, most famous photo of all time: Neil Armstrong’s “Man on the Moon” photo of Buzz Aldrin’s first steps on the Apollo 11 mission. The night before, I’d just finished watching his Man on the Moon, again.
“Aisha, right?” he said, as he came within earshot.
“Jim, right?” I replied, grinning.
He looked off and scoffed. He’d heard that one before.
Now, when I’ve told my friends and family this story, about meeting Jim Carrey again, the most significant moment to them is how he remembers my name. Yes, this is great, but Jim Carrey is a name guy. He remembers names up and down and left and right. In all his interviews (I’ve seen with the help of Youtube’s AI-powered algorithm) he drops like five full names in five minutes flat. It’s probably helped him a lot in the film industry, which has been primarily built on brown nosing. A person’s name is the key to their soul. I remember how he remembers everyone’s names because I’ve had to frantically google them all and then consequently remember none of them. I’ve only had one name stuck in my head for years, and that’s Jim Carrey’s.
“This is my friend Molly,” I said.
“Hi, Molly.”
“Hi!”
“I heard you playing ‘Tear You Apart’ by She Wants Revenge,” he said, floating out in front of us, all but his head submerged. Molly and I stood thigh deep in the water, past the shore break, the sun behind us. “Was that for inspiration?”
“Yeah! It was for our video shoot for my body oils skincare line that I’m launching. We were dripping it all over each other and rubbing it in. We even slapped each others’ asses with mica and it went POOF!”
I don’t think Molly connected at this point that Jim had seen it. He’d seen it all. He’d been there the whole time. That song was the first one we’d played over 2 hours ago.
“Uh huuuuuh,” Jim said, looking away, grinning, treading the water with his arms slowly. It was shallow enough that he crouched against the sand on the bottom.
He then looked at me and I just stood there, also grinning. There was a pause where he smiled back at me as if to tacitly say, “Well, I’m here. What do you want with me?” But I just stood there, grinning.
“We weren’t bothering you, were we?” I finally mustered.
“No,” He replied, lightly.
Molly carried the conversation. “What were you doing?”
“I was out for a bike ride,” he replied. Yeah, ok, if he was it was to think about what was happening on his beach and returning to find it still happening.
“You have a really nice beach,” Molly said.
“Yeah, it’s like a little piece of heaven,” he turned to look at the scenery behind him. You could see the end of Maui’s west coast, Lanai, and Kaho’olawe spread across the horizon.
“The sand is so soft,” I chimed in.
“Where do you two live?” Jim asked.
“HERE,” I spurted, thinking he was implying we might be tourists.
“Yeah, I know, but where?”
“Kihei!” Molly and I both said.
“Yeah, but where in Kihei?”
I almost started giving him my actual address, but caught myself, and said, “Over by Maui Sunset.” I’m not sure why I would’ve given him my full address but maybe it’s because that’s what he actually wanted to know. I knew his. It would only be fair, except I’d worked for it.
“Oh, ok,” Jim said. He didn’t keep pushing. I didn’t think of it at the time, but he may just have been wondering how far we’d come.
I suddenly felt awkward being so far out of the water while he was almost all the way in it, so I dropped down to my neck. Jim gave me a look. It was just a flicker before Molly asked, “What else do you do?”
“I just exist. I just be,” he said, starting to float on his back and look off into the sky.
“So you don’t do anything?” I asked. “You just sit there and breathe?” Uh oh. I’m cracking again. I’d listened to years of Jim Carrey spouting aloof guru-shit that other old white fake-ass gurus spout. It’s most often a guise to dissociate with being human.
He came back down and raised an eyebrow at me. “I read.”
“Oh yeah? What are you reading?” I was trying to be cool and friendly, but every question I asked reeked of frustration. Sexual frustration.
“I Am by Howard Falco,” he replied.
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about searching for one’s identity.”
“You’re not painting?”
“No, I’m not painting. I don’t have any inspiration to paint.” He paused. “Are you painting?”
“I just started a piece,” I said, suddenly excited, drooling a little. I’d just started a piece with his face on it: the face that now floated before me.
“She’s a really good artist!” Molly chimed in. Way to go, wingwoman.
“Did you look up that artist I told you about? Jean-Michel Basquiat?”
“Uhhhhh, who?” Shit. I’d remembered the name wrong that he told me last time, but, Jiiiiim, I’m struggling to remember anyone’s but yours! It’s biological.
“Jean-Michel Basquiat. He’s like the father of modern art. I told you to look him up.” Now Jim sounded frustrated. “He’s also done collaborations with Andy Warhol.”
Great. Another name I knew but didn’t know well enough to respond to.
“I like painting on uneven surfaces… like that boat.” The boat he hadn’t seen, not even when it was half complete.
“That’s why I told you about him.” The way he said it was biting: like I’d disrespected him.
Now Molly carried on a conversation with him about the two artists while I drifted away, shameful. I don’t have a lot of respect for many artists but maybe I should so I don’t feel alienated from what Jim wants to talk about. I felt a twang of jealousy as the two of them spoke. She was only a couple feet away from him, closer than I’d ever gotten, and as she moved closer, he did too. Why was I repelling him? How could they be so comfortable together? I felt invisible. If he only knew who I really am…
“You are just radiating sunshine!” Jim Carrey said of Molly, making my jealousy worse. It wasn’t a feeling I was used to. All the men I’d dated I’d never become jealous with, much to their dismay. I thought it a source of my power, but I really just wasn’t that into them. They weren’t Jim Carrey.
I wasn’t just jealous, but perturbed. She was “radiating sunshine” because I’d made her. She’d been down dealing with a medical trauma that I had experience with, so I’d overcome my insecurities with her as another attractive, threatening female to suggest the shoot and drive its production to cheer her up, refocus her attention on her ambition, and make her feel good about her body again. No one had done that for me, so it was important to me to do that for my friend. Even how I edited our music video, I’d put her first and edited the heck out of the subpar footage she shot of me and put it last. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so excessive with raising her up, but I did enjoy it, she is a beautiful woman who’s fun to shoot and edit, and I am an artist, after all… but maybe I did get a little carried away, especially because she later used the footage I shot of her and didn’t give me any credit. Whatever. All I want is Jim Carrey anyway.
“It must be my body oils. They have mica in them so they make me sparkle,” Molly said. Clever girl: still selling her product, but also revealing her priority. Clever Jim must see that, especially coming from Hollywood.
“No no,” Jim insisted. He was delighted. Maybe he didn’t see that. “You are just all smiles.”
I fumed. She was making me look like a grouchy troll in comparison. I shouldn’t be mad at her because she was oblivious in her inexperience to the delicate art of picking up men, so I was mad at myself. I was lock-jawed, silent, and stupid, my heart pounding in my ears.
Molly looked over at me with wide eyes, giving me that “what are you doing, you weirdo” look. She mouthed, “C’mere!” and motioned with her hand. Jim looked over at me too, perplexed.
I’d drifted a good 15–20 feet away from them.
I dug my feet into the bottom to fight the current to get closer to them again, but still further than they were from each other.
“Where are you from?” Jim asked me.
“Colorado,” I replied. “But I just came from California.”
He nodded, but I wonder if he asked because I look like a local girl. That’s usually why men ask.
“I’m from Santa Cruz,” Molly said. “How often do you live here?”
“I spend about half my time here and the other half in LA,” he replied.
“How about Canada?” I asked.
“Uhhh, yeaah…” he backed away from me a bit. How come my questions seemed to do that to him? Maybe I come off creepy, like I know too much.
“Have you been to the drum circle?” Molly asked. Oh no.
“The drum circle?”
“Yeah! It’s on Sundays. Everyone gets together on the beach to spin fire and play drums. It’s really fun! We should go together some time.”
“I’m not really a partier. I don’t smoke, drink, or do any drugs.” I knew that, and that’s the main reason why I’d mostly quit, but now he probably thought I hadn’t. Thanks, Molly.
“The drum circle is full of predators. When I’ve gone with Molly I have to constantly protect her while she just basks in the moonlight.” Oh no, now I was painting a mental picture of Molly basking in the moonlight for him! I know how much he loves the moon. I’d meant for him to see I was the mature, responsible one between us, but now I sounded like a hag even the predators don’t want.
“Yeah, but that’s the whole universe,” he replied.
“Well, maybe we could still get together,” said Molly. She’s going for it. She didn’t know what had happened to him in court. “We could exchange personal contact information…”
“I’m kind of shy about that kind of thing.” Good answer. I’ve since used it when men have asked for my phone number. It works well. “We’ll see each other around.”
He then turned and dove into the ocean, like a humpback whale breaching, but feet flat and flying up in the air at different angles. Molly immediately turned and splashed towards me, eyes wide.
“LET’S GO BEFORE IT GETS AWKWARD,” she almost shouted. “I’M HUNGRY!” We’d been shooting since 6am and it was now close to 9. Molly hadn’t eaten anything.
Jim rose to the surface again, a few feet further than from where he was, face and chest to the sky, floating, his ears still submerged.
“Ok, yeah, let’s go eat.” If she weren’t here I’d have decided to push past “awkward” to enter into the territory of “terrifying.” “Let’s say bye to him first.”
We trudged through the water over to him.
“Hey, Jim! We’re gonna go eat breakfast. We’ll see you later!”
He popped his head up.
“Oh, ok. See ya.”
We made our way back to our stuff on the beach. I put my faux fur coat and 3D printed horns on, picked up my bag, and turned to wave to Jim as we left. He watched us from the water, only his head floating above the surface once again. He waved back this time.
Afterwards, over breakfast, Molly and I dissected the encounter.
“All I could think was, ‘I’M TALKING TO THE GRINCH!’” She said.
While she was beyond excited to meet her first celebrity, I was awash with anguish over everything that went wrong. Again.
“He made this face — I couldn’t read his expression…”
“What was the expression?” Molly asked.
“Uh… I don’t know… confusion, maybe?” I couldn’t believe that I’d studied his face in so many movies, interviews, and shows for so long and I still couldn’t read him. “It was when I dropped my body into the water. I felt awkward just standing there in front of him.”
“Oh…” Molly said.
“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?”
“Did you know your nipple was out?”
“WHAT?!” I spurted my cold-pressed grapefruit juice.
“Your nipple was kind of, like, peaking out.”
“B-but — how do you know he saw it?”
“Oh, he saw it. I saw him see it. Don’t worry. I think he liked it.”
We laughed. I’d forgotten that was the main point.
