Comedy Sex God

by Pete Holmes

  Only I couldn’t stay.

  I wanted to live in that place of interconnectedness, with my heart open and my mind free, but eventually a few hours later the mushrooms left my system and I came back down and ate some french fries. I knew trying to talk about what had happened to me would ruin it—like finding a shiny stone in the ocean and realizing if you tried to bring it home it would dry out into an ordinary, boring rock. Words couldn’t come close to what I had experienced. I felt that homesickness of having just been under the blanket with God—with fundamental this-ness—only to be kicked out onto the cold morning floor. I was One With Everything and then back, stuck in Pete, my anxieties, neuroses, and desires waiting for me right where I left them.

  It’s a lousy feeling.

  I wondered if there was a prebirth place of Total Union where we all hang out before we’re born. Maybe this is why babies are always crying, I thought—wailing not because they just left the womb, but because they had just been yanked from something far better.

  But I had gotten a taste. I had finally experienced a response to my what-is-this? And the answer was far stranger, juicier, and lovelier than I could have ever imagined. God wasn’t done talking to us, as I had been told in church. The lines were still open. The Source, I could now see, is as close as the air on your skin.

  And the conversation was just getting started.

  los angeles

  I HAD HAD MY FIRST LITTLE BRUSH WITH TRUTH. I knew something was there—something real, something vital, impossible to hold in our minds or put into words—but I wasn’t yet ready to give everything up and pledge my life back to God. There was more I wanted to do here, on this plane, before I disappeared into enlightenment.

  A few months after my girlfriend and I broke up, I turned thirty-one and had the craziest birthday of my life.

  A few weeks earlier, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon—a new show at the time—had asked me to come and do my first-ever network stand-up set. The tape day fell exactly on my birthday, which was already too much to handle, and then I found out that Green Day, my favorite band, was the musical guest. Immediately, my mind jumped to visions of me killing, and then hanging out with the band backstage, sharing broccoli off the same fancy veggie plate, instantly becoming best friends as I banged out the chords to “Welcome to Paradise” on Billie Joe’s guitar (his idea).

  As the movie Comedian had taught me, I bought a new shirt—black, safe—and arrived at 30 Rock early, my head craning up to the high ceilings like a tourist, overwhelmed by the brass-and-marble cathedral of NBC. The only other time I had been there was years earlier, to nervously drop off an SNL audition tape that no one had asked for, giving it to a random security person who most likely threw it in a pile of unsolicited submissions they incinerated at the end of each workday. But this time was different; this time, I was invited. They had my name at security and everything. I smiled as they took my photo and gave me a little badge with my picture on it and walked me past the velvet ropes and toward the elevator.

  I was lucky and arrived early enough to watch Green Day do their sound check, which was incredible. The gloss on the floor was so shiny I could see another Green Day, inverted and reflected beneath the actual band. Double Green Day, I thought. Awesome. Just as I was feeling for the first time like show business was a party and I had finally been invited, my cell phone rang, and my agents told me I had been accepted to the writing staff of my first-ever TV writing job. I know people say in situations like this that they pinched themselves, but after I got off the phone I literally pinched myself, overwhelmed with my good fortune and only slightly nervous that this meant I would have to pack up and move to LA.

  My actual set of stand-up comedy that night was only just fine. I was nervous and played it safe, mostly doing one-liners, jokes that I thought were “bulletproof,” forgetting that the only thrill you get from stand-up is from taking risks and having them work. The thing I remember most was people on Twitter giving me shit for telling my “Do you think at the very first meeting of the KKK anyone pushed for the correct spelling of ‘clan’?” joke and then looking to my left, apparently checking with the Roots to see if the racial joke was over the line. I wasn’t—but yeah, it looked like I was.

  After my set, I passed Lorne Michaels in the hallway and stopped in my tracks. Not just because I was starstruck—I was—but because I thought maybe he would shake my hand vigorously and tell me that I was the future of comedy and the best thing he had seen since John Belushi in a kimono.

  Lorne Michaels walked right by.

  Still holding out for some premium, A-list compliments, I asked the producers if I could meet Green Day, and they took me to their dressing room. We exchanged a few pleasantries, but they didn’t say anything about my set. Maybe they didn’t see it, I thought, just as their drummer, Tré Cool, gave me a thumbs-up, smiled, and told me to “keep at it.” I would have preferred nothing. Keep at it? I thought. We just performed on the same TV show. You keep at it!

  But it didn’t matter; I had some momentum, and a new job, and for the first time, a reason to move to LA. Two weeks later I was living in Hollywood and dating someone new.

  LOS ANGELES WAS OVERT, FLASHY, AND LOUD, AND SO was my new girlfriend.

  She wasn’t like the other girls I had dated. She was a broad, and I mean that in the good way—she was unembarrassed, fun, and brassy. She smoked cigarettes and played cards with retired cops and would sometimes call in sick to work so we could make martinis and order groceries, making lunch drunk in our underwear. If I was going to shake the sex shame I had inherited from my church, this was the woman to do it with. She was sexy; she wore dresses and high heels every day and took me to strip clubs, the Hustler store, and one time to a pet shop to buy a leash even though neither of us owned a dog. She was as sex positive as my youth leaders had been sex negative, which is saying a lot. She took all my secret shame that I had been keeping in the shadows and shined a big red light on it.

  Parts of it were fun, sure, but mostly I felt like a tourist, trying out what it might feel like to be a Sex Guy. Smoking, buttoning one less button on my shirts, trying not to blush at midday naked selfie texts—our relationship really made sense to me only when I was drunk, so instead of telling her it wasn’t feeling right and that maybe we should just be friends, I got and stayed drunk for pretty much an entire year. I gained forty pounds in vodka and Grubhub and started wearing giant, loose dress shirts that looked like smocks. I would routinely stop at the liquor store on my way home from work and buy us booze and cigarettes, blaring AC/DC in the car, trying desperately to convince myself that I was this guy, but I had no idea what I was doing. One time my girlfriend asked me to pick up cigarettes for us, so I ducked into a CVS in the valley and asked for a pack of Marlboro Lights, still feeling like they might see through me and say “No, you’re a Baby Boy, get out of here,” and the clerk told me, “We only have the soft pack. Is that okay?” I panicked, not expecting any follow-up questions, and said, “Forget it.” I had no idea what a soft pack was and pictured a pouch of loose tobacco that I didn’t want. I’m not a cowboy.

  Part of me knew I was a tourist, that I couldn’t keep up with a woman this big, but we had had sex, and back then that was enough for me to fall deeply in love. So we dated for thirteen months.

  After we broke up—it took ten tries because she scared the shit out of me—I decided I had had enough of serial monogamy and would try to break my record and go longer than four weeks being single. I was emboldened by my “wild relationship” and figured if I could ride that motorcycle of a woman, maybe I could survive on my own. I vowed to be alone for at least a year. I felt like I had been swinging from relationship to relationship like Tarzan on the vines, and it was time to lower myself and just walk on the jungle floor.

  making it weird

  AS I LAUNCHED INTO ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING periods of my life—single for the first time, still unproven as a comedian but still very, very hungry for success—I decided s
omewhat reluctantly to do what every other person in the exact same situation in LA would do: I started a podcast. I briefly considered calling it Keeping It Crispy with Pete Holmes—only because it made me laugh every time I said it—but ultimately decided on the more understandable title You Made It Weird. (“Keep it crispy” would live on as the show’s sign-off.)

  Before I started a podcast, I was actually kind of shy, at least about things I considered to be failures, faults, or shortcomings. I wasn’t transparent on the air right away—in fact, I started out very slowly. I’d reveal something personal, then I’d check the comments and my Twitter feed. If no one seemed to hate me or think I was a monster, the next week I would try a little bit more. To my surprise, the more I overshared, the more people enjoyed it and related. I seemed to have discovered a whole sea of people just like me: people who married their first sexual partners, or got married because they were religious, or got left by their spouse when they were still in their twenties. And as I slowly started to talk about God more, I found listeners who had the same problems with the church they had been raised in but who still ached with that basic wonder and what-is-this?-ness.

  It was nice, like one big support group. I thought sharing my story would drive people away, but it had the opposite effect: listeners started emailing and tweeting from all over the world. People started sharing things that they thought—well, probably knew—I needed to hear. They sent me books on codependence, aptly noticing a pattern in my dating life; they shared music and fiction that had changed their lives. One listener named Abby heard me complaining week after week about how nothing would cure the brain fog I had been experiencing after a mild concussion and recommended I get my eyes checked for something called “convergence insufficiency.” Sure enough, that’s what I had, and soon I felt much better. I had thought a podcast would help me find fans or sell tickets on the road. I had no idea it would actually make my life better, but it did. I was getting feedback.

  ONE DAY I GOT AN EMAIL FROM A COMEDIAN NAMED Matt Ruby whom I had known briefly in New York. The subject was “Keeping it crispy.”

  “Hey man, loving the podcast,” Matt wrote. “I highly recommend you check out Joseph Campbell if you don’t know him already.” The link he sent looked like an old episode of 60 Minutes or a video my social studies teacher would play for us, but I fought through the cheesy graphics and ’80s synth music, and to this day I’m so glad I did. I had no idea a six-part PBS documentary from 1988 was going to give language to something I had been feeling and unable to express my entire life, pre- and post-mushrooms.

  I had found Joseph Campbell.

  joey cambs

  JOSEPH CAMPBELL, OR JOEY CAMBS AS I LIKE TO CALL him, was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 to 1972, specializing in teaching mythology. His most famous work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, outlines what he called “the hero’s journey,” the archetypal steps taken by the heroes found in myths from all over the world, from Odysseus to Jesus to Frodo.

  Joey was one of the first Western thinkers to put the emphasis not on which religion was right or true, but rather on what all religions had in common, the ideas and themes found in every tradition that could perhaps point us toward universal truth.

  It’s embarrassing to admit, but before I watched Joseph Campbell’s PBS special, The Power of Myth, I didn’t know exactly what a myth was. I knew what “power” was. And I was very familiar with “of.” But the rest of that title was a mystery. Watching it, I discovered that a myth is a story told with metaphors, which was nice to learn—the only problem being, I also had no idea what a metaphor was.

  It was nice to find out I wasn’t the only one. One of the first stories Cambs tells in the series is about being interviewed by a radio host who was particularly miffed that Joey had been calling God a metaphor, which, like me, he took to mean that God was a lie.

  “So, you’re saying God isn’t real,” the DJ poked.

  “No,” Joey replied. “I’m saying God is a metaphor.”

  “Which means God isn’t real,” the DJ persisted.

  “No,” Joey replied again. “It means God is a metaphor.” It went on like this for a while until finally, backed into a corner, Joseph Campbell turned it around on the DJ.

  “Let me ask you,” Joey said. “Can you give me an example of a metaphor?” The DJ took a moment and came back with the answer I would’ve given: “The man ran like a deer.” “No,” Campbell replied. “That’s an analogy. A metaphor is, ‘The man was a deer.’”

  Safe at home, far from the real tension of this real situation, I had the luxury of pretending I knew that, but it was news to me. I’m sure countless English teachers had tried to drill this idea into my head, but I had never heard it put with the stakes so high. I thought it was interesting but had no idea what an impact this distinction was going to have on the rest of my life. It was just a vocabulary lesson, but it was the first step toward being able to put language to my experience on psychedelics, as well as begin to reclaim some of the traditions and stories of my youth.

  GROWING UP, MY GOD WAS THE BURGER KING KING. I mean, of course it was the God of the Bible, but whenever I pictured him, I would imagine the Burger King king, sitting up on a cloud, listening to me and nodding his crowned head, a Whopper Jr. within easy reach, his face frozen in that creepy, unmoving, permanent smile, Jesus rollerblading in the background.

  When I stopped believing in God, the Burger King king was the God I stopped believing in. He was pretty easy to let go of—too many of my friends could dismantle my faith by simply asking, “You believe there’s an old man in the sky watching you masturbate?” For much of my life, I had to reply, “Yes. God’s . . . kinky like that?”

  And then came Joseph Campbell, who introduced me to the idea that the image I had for God and the God itself were not the same thing.

  I was newly atheist, and like a lot of people who lose their faith, I had immediately begun judging others who still believed what I only recently stopped believing. I became another one of them, a member of the horde of people casually dismembering the faith of others with a simple, condescending, “You really believe in an old man in the sky?”

  And then everything shifted with a simple English lesson. Metaphors, Campbell taught me, are used to tell stories about things that are hard to touch with our intellect—experiences like God. The man didn’t run like a deer, the man was a deer.

  Of course. The Burger King king wasn’t real—he was my first metaphor. The fast food icon wasn’t really up there, on a cloud, looking down. People were right—that is a very simple thing to believe in literally. But I was learning that it was a different kind of true than literally true. It had been my way of explaining something I could intuit—a Unifying Consciousness behind reality—but struggled to put into words.

  The analogy would be: “God is like an old man in the sky on a throne.”

  That’s a pretty clear way to communicate the very far-out idea that there’s a Something that’s been around since the beginning (old) that has a higher perspective (sky) and is kind of a big deal (throne).

  This becomes the metaphor: “God is an old man in the sky on a throne.”

  My Burger King king was both right and wrong. Joseph Campbell was the first person I had found who explained to me that the image I chose wasn’t supposed to be taken literally. That wasn’t the point. It was an idea that was pointing to a truth that was hard—maybe impossible—to put into words.

  But it’s better than that. Campbell wasn’t just saying we use metaphors to talk about God, Campbell was saying that God itself is a metaphor. My whole life, I had thought of God as the answer, the thing you point to, not another thing pointing to another thing. God had always been the last Russian doll in the chain of progressively smaller Russian dolls. (He was the tiny little cute one at the end that you kind of want to bite.) But Cambs didn’t agree—his definition of God wasn’t about knowing, his definition of God was about coming to terms w
ith our perpetual unknowing.

  Joey put it like this: “God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought, including being and nonbeing.” When I heard him say that—watching him on my TV, reclined, covered in potato chip crumbs, wearing an adult onesie I spent most of my weekends in, complete with hood, footies, and a butt flap for easy pooping—he 100 percent blew my mind. Just like that, I had heard a definition of God I could wholeheartedly get behind that also lined up perfectly with my own recent mystical experience.

  Instead of something you know, and something you know you know, and something you know you know correctly so you are “in” and others are “out,” Campbell was saying that there is one more doll inside the God doll: a mystery. You can’t even picture it. No image would suffice. Some things are just too immense to trap with language. There was no way to explain what I’d felt on mushrooms, for example—I was steeping in mystery—so what chance do we have to put the boundless consciousness behind, within, and throughout infinity into a neat little package that we only have to talk about for thirty minutes every Sunday?

  Zero? Is it zero?

  I started wishing people would use Joey’s definition in everyday situations, instead of speaking about God the way we do with such casual certainty. I really wanted to watch an actress win an Emmy and instead of hearing her thank God, hear her thank “a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought including being and nonbeing.” Or instead of “in God we trust,” reading “in a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought including being and nonbeing we trust” on the back of an enormous quarter.