"I didn’t know he had the eight-ball of cocaine strapped to his leg! That was news to me! And if I had known that, I never would have grabbed the intercom and told everybody I was the captain and that I was losing control of the aircraft because I wasn’t feeling well… ”
At 53, Nicolas Cage’s voice still takes on a mischievous cadence when he talks about his youthful follies. This particular yarn concerns the time he and Charlie Sheen pulled off a stunt that today would see them quickly swapping their civvies for orange jumpsuits. “It was just kids goofing off — I was in my early twenties and so was Charlie,” Cage says. “But yeah, I did that, and the plane was not losing control — it was perfectly steady — and understandably the captain was very angry with me. And when we landed there were airport police there to greet us at the door, and I talked us out of it and they finally let us go. But when I got into the car with Charlie in San Francisco, and he showed me what was wrapped around his ankle with a rubber band… ”
Another of Cage’s memorable anecdotes today begins, ominously enough, with Tom Waits, for reasons Cage has never quite ascertained, giving him a bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms. “Tom was one of my best friends for many years — we had one of those relationships that was full of mischief — and for some reason he gave me a bag of mushrooms and I didn’t even know what to do with these things. So they were in my refrigerator and they were dried out, but my cat, Lewis, whenever I opened the refrigerator, would jump in and try to grab them. I don’t know why he was so attracted to them — it was like catnip! He really wanted those mushrooms. One time he got some and got into them, and I chased him, but he grabbed some with his mouth and started eating them. So I thought, ‘Well, I’d better do them with him, I guess’. So we did that and it was kind of an amazing experience. I remember I was in bed and he was on the nightstand staring at me, and I was staring back at him, and we could not stop looking at each other. We had this, like, deep connection like we were brothers or something. I haven’t done it again since — it was a one-off.”
