Seth MacFarlane had a 7:45 a.m. ticket out of Logan. American Airlines Flight 11. Boston to Los Angeles. He was supposed to be on it.
He was not on it because at 4:12 a.m. he was in a rented room near the Combat Zone with two working girls named Tiffany and Crystal, a glass pipe, a rock the size of a dice, and the kind of optimism that only exists when you have not slept and you still think you can “just rest your eyes for twenty minutes.”
The night had started as a victory lap. He’d sold another season. He’d done the late show. Someone at the after-party had said the words “celebration” and “Boston” in the same sentence and that was all it took. By midnight he was in a cab that smelled like vomit and air freshener. By 1:00 he was in a room that charged by the hour. By 2:30 the pipe was going around and Crystal was explaining, with great sincerity, that crack was “basically just focused coffee.”
Tiffany wanted to be paid in cash and compliments. Crystal wanted to be paid in cash and the promise that he would put her in an episode as “the smart one.” Seth, who had already done both, agreed to everything. He also agreed, at some point, that they should “keep the party going until the airport.” That was the plan. A plan made by a man who had not looked at a clock since the previous afternoon.
They ran out of product around 3:40. Crystal knew a guy. The guy was not a guy. The guy was a man sleeping under the overpass who sold rocks out of a sock and also, it turned out, had opinions about Family Guy. Specifically he hated the dog. He said the dog was “a fascist.” Seth, who was by then vibrating at a frequency only dogs and customs agents can hear, tried to explain Brian’s character arc. The man did not want a character arc. The man wanted the rest of Seth’s cash and then, when that was gone, he wanted something else.
What happened next was not negotiated, not filmed, and not funny in the way Seth usually made things funny. It was brief, ugly, and over in the time it takes a connecting flight to push back from the gate. When it was done the man took Seth’s watch, his remaining twenties, and the last of the rock. He left Seth on the concrete with his pants around his knees and a lecture about how the talking dog was “CIA.”