Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  ATTEMPTING NORMAL

  Attempting Normal is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2013 by Delusions, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maron, Marc.

  Attempting normal / Marc Maron.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9287-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-679-64413-2

  1. Maron, Marc. 2. Comedians—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.M515A3 2013

  792.702′8092—dc23

  [B] 2013000537

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker

  v3.1

  For everyone who is successfully defying their wiring

  “Once upon a time called now.”

  LOLLYPOP MAN,

  AKA THE LONG HAIRED SUCKER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: The Garage

  PART I: ATTEMPTING

  Chapter 1: The Situation in My Head

  Chapter 2: Twenty-Six

  Chapter 3: The First Marriage

  Chapter 4: Two Prostitutes

  Chapter 5: Mother’s Day Card from Dad

  Chapter 6: My Grandfather’s Mouth

  Chapter 7: Cats

  Chapter 8: Petty Lifting

  Chapter 9: Guitar

  Chapter 10: Lorne Michaels and Gorillas, 1994

  Chapter 11: The Clown and the Chair

  PART II: NORMAL

  Chapter 12: Babies

  Chapter 13: Viagra Diaries

  Chapter 14: I’m a Good Person

  Chapter 15: Hummingbirds and the Killer of Mice

  Chapter 16: Dunk the Clown

  Chapter 17: I Want to Understand Opera

  Chapter 18: I Almost Died #1: Cleveland

  Chapter 19: I Almost Died #2: “Mouth Cancer”

  Chapter 20: Whole Foods

  Chapter 21: I Almost Died #3: Prince’s Chicken

  Chapter 22: Xenophobia, Autoerotic Asphyxiation, and the History of Irish Poetry

  Chapter 23: Googleheimers

  Chapter 24: Cooking at Thanksgiving

  Chapter 25: The Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival Keynote Address

  Epilogue: Boomer Lives!

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  IFC Show Promo

  Introduction: The Garage

  The garage is a single-car garage that hangs precariously over the edge of a hill in my backyard. When I got the place it had a crumbling cement floor and an old, tool-scarred workbench built into the side. There were holes, cracks, random nails, hammered-in rubber pads, the ghosts of anvils and clamps. A hard man had sweated over engines and machines here, I thought. I put a floor in over the cement and kept the bench as an homage to real work. I put my printer on it.

  I always wanted it to be a work space. That was the plan when I bought the house. I think I was hoping it would turn into one of its own volition. But it took a couple of years, a divorce, and profound desperation before the garage became an office rather than just a place where I stored everything I have held on to all of my life.

  Before hoarding became a phenomenon, people just called it “collecting” or “being nostalgic.” I don’t hoard, exactly, but I get it. It’s a response to our need and desire for purpose, order, definition, and a fortress. It’s a calling that requires constant management, control, and obsessive attention. I am amassing artifacts from the history of me. My garage is the storeroom and temporary exhibition hall of the yet-to-be-built museum documenting the rise and fall of the Marc Age. I am the curator. I decide the meaning and worth of the collection based on my feelings in a moment. Where does this particular artifact take me now? How do I contextualize this laminated all-access talent pass from the 1995 Aspen comedy festival?

  There are hundreds of books here. I am surrounded by an empire of unread and partially read books. Titles like: The Denial of Death (read), A Thousand Plateaus (God, I tried), The Family (Manson phase), The Hero with a Thousand Faces (skimmed hard), Gravity’s Rainbow (nope), and The Illuminatus! Trilogy (of course). There are several bibles, The Aeneid, The Odyssey, The Anthology of American Poetry. I have Freud, Reich, Barthes, Fromm, Spinoza, Plato, Hunter S., DeLillo, Bangs, Benjamin, graphic novels, Hellblazer comics, beat poetry, cookbooks.

  I am not bragging. I am embarrassed. Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can’t read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don’t retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, “I get it.” Then I put them back on the shelf.

  There is a box full of hundreds of Polaroids. They were important in the eighties. They were art. Hockney and Warhol made them important. I was an important artist in my teens! I needed to take handheld Polaroids of myself at different phases of my life looking head-on into the camera. Different shirts, facial hair mistakes, hair ridiculousness, silly eyeglass frames, all changing over the years. Some surface manipulation. Smeared emulsion. Art. My head, documented and boxed.

  There are hundreds of audiocassettes and videocassettes. Me on An Evening at the Improv in 1989, Caroline’s Comedy Hour, static shots of club sets in different cities, cassettes of sets from more than twenty years from gigs all over the country. I intended to listen to them to learn, to craft, but I didn’t really. Documented. Boxed. I lived. I talked into microphones in front of people in a lot of places over a lot of years.

  There are two shelves of records. Some I have been holding on to since high school.

  Notebooks. There are dozens of notebooks. I always carry notebooks with me. I scribble in them in a barely readable scrawl. I do not write jokes. I write moments. Thoughts. Fragments that I have to sweat over as if they’re cryptic texts in a lost language when I try to interpret them. That shouldn’t be part of my process—decoding my own writing—but it has been for my entire life. What does that say about me? Why can’t I make it easy? I need to complicate everything to protect myself from success and to remain complicated and overwhelmed.

  I like to get things framed and to put things in small frames. On the wall: black-and-white photo of Muddy Waters, Apocalypse Now lobby card of Dennis Hopper, another of the cast of Freaks. A color photo of me and Sam Kinison; a caricature and clipping from the New Yorker review of my show The Jerusalem Syndrome; the cover of an antidrug pamphlet showing a skull wearing a crown holding a syringe with the words KING HEROIN over it; the poster for my HBO Half-hour from 1995, featuring all the comics in the series; my likeness from the Dr. Katz cartoon; three strips from a photo booth with my first real girlfriend; a picture of my ex-wife before she was my wife, before I ruined it; a photo of me and my brother on
the day of his wedding, him in a tux, me in a towel; me and my grandfather (I am wearing a Killing Joke shirt); Lenny Bruce dead and alive; the head of St. Catherine; a laminated copy of the New York Times article about my podcast; my father at age twenty-five; Frank Kozik’s poster for Gimme Shelter; Chuck Berry; a TV Guide crossword puzzle from 1992 with me as one of the clues: “Host of Short Attention Span Theater? MARON.”

  Why am I holding on to this stuff? Some of this junk is losing its punch. Pictures. Pieces of paper with writing on them—I can no longer connect with the thoughts or feelings that birthed them, that drove me in that panicky desperate moment to scribble in a barely legible scrawl as if on a cave wall. All say the same thing in some form or another: “I am here. This is me in this moment.” Do I have some fantasy that this stuff will be important after I die? Do I think that scholars will be thrilled that I left such a disorganized treasure trove of creative evidence of me? Will the archives be fought over by college libraries?

  What will probably happen is my brother will come out with my mother and look in the boxes. My mother will hold up a VHS or a cassette and say to my brother, “Do I have a machine that plays these?” My brother will shake his head no and they will throw it all away.

  Now the only items that have immediate meaning in my garage are a new table situated in the center of the room and the microphones that are attached to it. Me sitting at that table across from people talking to them on those microphones has changed the trajectory of my life completely.

  When I returned from New York City after my last stint at Air America Radio I had already done the first several podcasts. We called the show WTF because that was the angle, that seemed to be the most important question to me. I asked a fellow podcaster, Jesse Thorn, what mics I needed. He told me Shure SM7 mics are the mics he uses. I ordered a couple. He showed me how to use GarageBand on my Mac and that was that. A dude I knew who worked at a sound studio brought me some acoustic foam panels he had lying around. There were only a few and I put them up randomly around the garage. One on the ceiling. I have no idea if they even have an effect.

  I started asking people to come over and talk to me amid the clutter of my life. People came, hundreds now. The podcast evolved into a one-on-one interview show. I shared many powerful conversations revealing things about the people I was talking to and about myself that I would never have known. Things that will never be said the same way again. It happened organically. I needed to talk and people talked to me. All I am after in the garage is authentic conversation. I don’t prep much for interviews. I prepare to talk, to engage, to be emotionally available for an authentic exchange. If I got one of those per episode I’d be happy but I usually get many more than that. Hundreds of thousands of people have joined in on these conversations as listeners, which has affirmed one of the strange beliefs that has shaped my life: People want to share but they usually don’t.

  People don’t talk to each other about real things because they’re afraid of how they’ll be judged. Or they think other people don’t have the capacity to carry the burden of what they have to say. They see the compulsion to put that burden out in the world as a show of weakness. But all that stuff is what makes us human; more than that, it’s what makes being human interesting and funny. How we got away from that, I don’t know. But fuck that: We’re built to deal with shit. We’re built to deal with death, disease, failure, struggle, heartbreak, problems. It’s what separates us from the animals and why we envy and love animals so much. We’re aware of it all and have to process it. The way we each handle being human is where all the good stories, jokes, art, wisdom, revelations, and bullshit come from.

  I have met or come in contact with a lot of people over the almost thirty years I’ve been doing comedy. There are very few people I am not one degree of separation from. I also have a strange heart quirk: I develop oddly deep emotional connections to people in my life that are one-sided. I may be just a passing character to them. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know why that is. I can have one encounter with somebody and feel connected to them and read a lot into that. They become very important people to me, but to them I may just be like, “Oh yeah, we talked that one time, right?” To me it’s a life-changing moment that bonded us; to them, it was a five-minute polite chat in passing. I bring that bond to the talks I have with people. I think if there is any skill to what I do as interviewer it’s assuming an intimacy that is probably very one-sided.

  That said, it was not like that with Conan O’Brien. I was 165 episodes into my show when he finally said he would do it. I know he is busy. He does a daily show and that is insane, but I really wanted him on. I am very aware of the differences in our lives and work. I have been appearing on his show since 1994, when he was in his first year at Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I did standup twice and then wanted to move to panel—the guest on the couch—because I used to love the dynamic between Letterman and his panel guests like Richard Lewis and Jay Leno. I wanted to have that with Conan. He let me, and I have appeared as that guy three or four times a year ever since—except when he hosted The Tonight Show that one year, but we are now back at it. I’ve been on with him upward of forty-five times. What I am trying to say is that Conan and I have a relationship and have since 1994—on camera. We’d never hung out. We never really talked much except a hello in the dressing room and during commercials. Our rapport evolved, but it was always professional. He’s been good to me over the years and I always appreciated and was grateful for the times he had me on.

  When Conan agreed to come to my garage, it was huge to me. I was nervous. I live in a small house. I was anxious about him judging my life. I felt like I should clean, or move, or build an addition before he got there. I’ve known him for almost twenty years and he doesn’t know my life other than what I tell him on his show. I wanted to make a good impression.

  When he came over it was dark out. I opened the door and realized I had never seen him out of makeup or out of the studio. It was bizarre for me. It was a little stilted. He’s an awkward guy anyway and he’s also very tall. I wasn’t sure he would even fit in my house once he walked in. I wanted to get out to the garage as quickly as possible, because I knew in that moment that I had an uncomfortable reverence for Conan. Some part of me felt like I was imposing on this important man who was doing me a favor and we needed to get on with it.

  Once we got behind the mics it all flowed very easily. It wasn’t about what was said, it was the fact that this was the first time I had really talked to him. He told me stuff that wasn’t part of his public narrative and I got to know him a bit. It was emotional for me, because I had always wanted to be his pal in some way, and even more so because he was doing the podcast and that meant I was doing something relevant. I felt proud. I wanted to do a good job because I respected him and in some way it was a turning of the tables.

  When we finished we went back into the house and Conan was just sort of lingering. He was looking at stuff on my table, on my walls, and it was awkward again. Not in a bad way, but we were both back to our roles. I was a guy whom he let appear on his show and had a good television rapport with, and he was a star who, in my mind, had better things to do. That might not have been the case. We have a history and we had just had this great talk and now I knew I couldn’t say, “Okay, we’ll talk tomorrow.” Or “Let me know when you want me to come by the house for dinner.” Or anything real friends say to each other. It literally got to the point where I was wondering how to get him out of my house because I didn’t know what do say or do. It was time for him to go back to his life and me to get on with mine.

  But what was important about that situation was that I felt like Conan and I met as equals. I didn’t feel small. And it’s because I was doing the thing I needed to do. In our interview, Conan said something about the secret of his success: “Get yourself in a situation where you have no choice.” And that’s what I’m doing, because I had no choice. I was broke and broken and lost when I started WTF.
I didn’t plan it this way. I would’ve done it the other way if it had happened or I had been allowed to, but it didn’t and I haven’t. In retrospect I’m not even sure I could have. So I’m stuck with me and that’s okay, most of time. That struggle is what I put out into the world.

  This is who I am: I overthink and I ruminate. I’m obsessive. But what I really want is relief. Most people are the same. We’re all carrying around some shit. When you hear the things that people have gone through and realize you’ve gone through the same, it provides an amazing amount of relief. It gives us hope. And I think that’s what we’re supposed to get from each other. The hope that, maybe, just maybe, we’re going to be okay. Maybe.

  WTF #111

  October 4, 2010

  Louis C.K.: The first time I saw you was at Catch, and, um …

  Marc: In Boston.

  L: In Boston, yeah.

  M: But, like, you didn’t know me, I didn’t know you then. But I remember …

  L: I didn’t know you, and I didn’t like you on stage the first time I saw you. You were very aggressive.

  M: Yeah.

  L: And you were also very … You were in a lot of turmoil. I think you were just coming out of all this sort of Sam Kinison coke business.

  M: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

  L: So you were very … You exuded a huge amount of insecurity and craziness.

  M: [Laughing] Undisciplined, though. Like, I didn’t think I was.

  L: Yeah, like, you made me uncomfortable. And then I met you … And then David Cross, I think, said, “Um, I’m going to hang out with this guy. You wanna come with me?” And he told me it was you, and I was like, “Oh, that guy.” So then we went to the Coffee Connection.

  M: Where I worked.

  L: Where you were working, which is now, like, Starbucks. And you were washing dishes. It was like a movie, like a bad movie. It was like a pile of cups and saucers and you were washing them with, like, a big hang-over-the-sink spigot.