Matthew McConaughey famously got arrested back in 1999, during a night with marijuana, and the actor is opening up more about his addiction to the famous green herb. The 55-year-old Academy Award winner turned author has a new book out, “Poems & Prayers,” where he details a night when he got so stoned he missed his own birthday. where he details the night that made him put down marijuana after he missed his own birthday.
McConaughey used to smoke a lot of “Mexican dirt weed.” "The kind where you passed the joint around, laughed, got the munchies, and hopefully snuck off for some good sex,” he wrote in the book, per US Weekly.
It would put him in “a paralysis puff of f***ing analysis,” and he would find himself "stuck for hours staring at that one grain in that one piece of wood in my ceiling rafters, thinking it was trying to tell me something important. It wasn’t."
One night, ahead of his birthday, that loop mixed with the magic sounds of Janet Jackson, and it was a life-changing combination. He said he listened to her track “That’s the Way Love Goes” 32 times in a row, and couldn't quit listening to it. “I was sitting there crying over that song. I thought it was more important than celebrating my birth," he told USA Today.
Once he had listened to it enough times, he went in only to find everybody had left the party they had thrown for him. "It was over. I missed it!" The Failure to Launch star continued.
“If every dance step matters too much, we never find our rhythm. If we give every note too much credit, we’ll never hear the song. That’s why I quit smoking,” he explains in the book.
The book is a follow-up to his memoir Greenlights. He told USA Today, looking back at his journals, the first 14 days were embarrassing and "full of shame and remorse. “I started noticing like, ‘Well, dude, you put yourself in a position to get humiliated the next month and learn your lesson.’ Instead of feeling the shame and the guilt, I started to chuckle and go, 'That's kind of how life goes, isn't it?' he explained.
The bongo incident
Missing his own birthday is a good story, but not as good as his famous bongo incident. The Sing star was famously arrested on Oct. 25, 1999, following a noise complaint. Officers entered his home and found him dancing naked with bongo drums, marijuana, and a bong on the coffee table. He declared his innocence, resisted arrest, was taken to jail, and ultimately fined for a noise complaint.
He talked about the arrest in Greenlights, where he explained that he had just watched his alma mater football team, the Texas Longhorns, win on Saturday and partied “through the night into Sunday and through Sunday night without sleeping a wink.”
He started to unwind around 2:30 am by getting undressed, smoking, and opening the window, to listen to Henri Dikongué. “What I didn’t know was that while I was banging away in my bliss, two Austin policemen also thought it was time to barge into my house unannounced, wrestle me to the ground with nightsticks, handcuff me, and pin me to the floor,” the future Academy-Award winner wrote.
He refused to put on pants because he thought it was a sign that he was minding his business. The cops led him, still naked, through the street, and he had a game plan. “My thinking was that in mid-flight, while upside down in the air, I would assume a pike position and then slide my cuffed wrists under my butt and up and over my legs, and then stick the landing,” he wrote.
The future father believed “pulling off such an extraordinary Houdini-like stunt, the officers would be so impressed they would abrogate the arrest and set me free.” He tried and ended up slamming to the ground in front of 40 neighbors.
When he arrived at the Austin Police Station, he finally accepted pants from a working inmate. “Trust me, you do wanna put these on,” he urged the actor.
McConaughey faced the judge a few hours later, who was confused by how a noise complaint had gotten that far, why officers forcibly entered his home, and ultimately dismissed the disturbing the peace and possession misdemeanors.
His lawyer got the resisting arrest charge dismissed in place of a violation of a $50 sound ordinance citation. It was later expunged from his record.