Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  We all have the right to cherry-pick the advice given us in order to do exactly what we wanted to do in the first place.

  As I said, courting is a little difficult when you’re married and when you’re newly sober and when the woman’s only twenty-three and you’re a dozen years older. I just know that in traditional courting this is not a conversation you should have after sex:

  Me [yelling]: So, are we doing this, or what? Because I’m going to fucking leave her. Are we doing this? Do you fucking love me? Do you fucking love me? Are you taking me? Are we doing this?

  Her [crying]: I don’t know!

  Me [still yelling]: What the fuck!? Yes or no? Are we doing this?

  Her: I guess so.

  Me: Good enough. I’m on it.

  If you don’t believe in magic, if you don’t believe that there are phrases, incantations, mantras, that can change the universe completely, literally change the entire course and trajectory of your life, even the objects in your periphery, you are wrong. There are. This is one of them: “Honey, I’m in love with someone else, and I’m having an affair with her.” Abracadabra! Locks are changed. Objects are moved and missing. You are dispatched into exile to a sublet on the Lower East Side, where you will remain alone, isolated, broken off from the world you knew. You deserve it. You have cut yourself off from a wife, a family, a future, your money. Everything.

  But I had that girl. Yes. I had that girl. And she was enough.

  We embark on this crazy thing, this girl and I. I’m getting sober. I’m going to meetings all the time. I’m writing a book. I’m doing a one-man show. Things are okay. I know some of you are thinking, “What about that other woman, you heartless fuck?” Yeah, what about her? She was a good person, I know. I felt like shit, but I had to do what I had to do. And some of you may think, “Well, you didn’t have to do that.” Well, yeah, I did. I did have to do that. It saved my life. I divorced that woman and married that girl and she eventually left me. Karma? Sure. She got me sober, though. I am still sober. I have her to thank for that.

  I actually use sobriety to try to frame the pain of my second divorce. I was at the Comedy Cellar one night, miserable and in the middle of it. I was talking to the late Greg Giraldo, who was always struggling with drugs and alcohol. A struggle he eventually lost. I asked him how much money he had spent over the years on rehabs. He said, “About two hundred and fifty grand.”

  My divorce cost me less than that. And I am still sober.

  In the middle of my second divorce, from this once-magical woman, I was a broken man. I was fucked-up on all levels. I was on my way to my mother’s in Florida, which means I was in real trouble because she is really the last person I ever want to lean on. Not that she’s a bad person; she’s just a bit boundaryless and draining. I’m at the airport in Los Angeles. I’m walking through the terminal to my gate, trying to catch a 6 A.M. flight. Shattered. My duffel bag was even sad as it bounced off my butt as I walked. I was about four months into my separation from Mishna. I looked up from my drudging and that’s when I saw her: Kim and her new husband, standing with their luggage at the gate I was passing.

  I think, “I can’t handle this. There’s no way.” So I do that thing where you put your hand up over your forehead, look the other way, and think, “There, I’m invisible.”

  I know she knows everything. Her best friend is my brother’s wife. She has to know all about the disaster that my life’s become. I get past the gate and I think I’m out of the woods but then I hear, “Marc!”

  I turn around and there’s nine years of history running toward me with a very familiar gait. She gets to me and asks, concern in her eyes, “How are you doing?”

  I explode in tears and uncontrollable blubbering. I cannot stop it. And without missing a beat, my first wife says, “Not so good, huh?”

  I was so happy she had that moment. I deserved it, she deserved it. And the sick thing about me is that right after we had that exchange there was a part of me that thought, “So, are we good? Can I go with you now?”

  4

  Two Prostitutes

  I don’t do prostitutes. I am not a hooker guy. I have had two experiences with prostitutes. Neither of them was fun or sexy or hot or anything but disturbing. They happened sometime in the late eighties when I was a struggling comic living in Boston.

  I was staying at my girlfriend’s apartment near Symphony Hall. The neighborhood was dicey late at night, in a crackhead-and-hooker kind of way. I remember on one occasion I got up to move my car from one side of the street to the other at six-thirty in the morning and this woman walked up to me looking very drug-frazzled and soul-hungry in a very skanked-out and evil way. She grabbed my crotch and said, “Do you want a date, baby?”

  It was that kind of neighborhood.

  One night I had been out doing a show. Afterward I got all hopped up on blow and booze and made my way home at about three-thirty in the morning. The woman I was living with was out of town. After I parked the car a sketchy-looking guy wearing a fedora walked up to me and said, “Coke?”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  There was a woman walking behind him, short, too much makeup, maybe Latino. She said, “You want a date?”

  At that moment, not a rare moment, I was consumed with self-hatred and really high. That is the magical combination that brought me to “yes.”

  “How much?” I asked. I had never paid for sex in my life.

  “Thirty,” she said.

  So this was not a high-end escort situation. This was a dirty street hooker situation.

  “Okay, what do we do?”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “I live right here,” I said.

  Bringing her into the house that I shared with my girlfriend was like polluting our home with the evil essence of street.

  We walked up four flights. She was wheezing after one. “How many more flights?”

  “A few more,” I said in the middle of my own steep shame ascension.

  We got into the apartment. She was catching her breath.

  “What do we do?” I asked like a moron.

  “You have the money?”

  I handed her thirty dollars. She put it in her purse and started to breathe normally.

  “Is this your first time?”

  “Paying for it? Yes.”

  “Well, don’t worry, baby. Lie down and take your pants off.”

  I lay down on the bed. She kneeled between my legs and hunched over me and started giving me head. It was just ugly. It wasn’t working for me. There was too much shame, weirdness, and coke so I asked, “Can you take your shirt off or something?”

  “It’s ten more bucks.”

  I pulled a ten-spot out of my wallet and handed it her.

  “Okay, here’s ten dollars.”

  She took her shirt off and put my hand on her breast and said, “Do you feel a lump in there?”

  “Really?”

  She continues to go down on me and I’m feeling her breast for lumps. I guess you get what you pay for because it was definitely not sexy and I did feel a lump. It was horrifying. I had a moment where I thought maybe she should be paying me for the examination.

  “Uh, yeah, there’s something there.”

  “I know, right? I have to get that checked out.”

  “Yeah, you should definitely get a second opinion.”

  She’s sucking my cock on and off throughout this exchange. Then the phone rings and it’s my girlfriend leaving a message. We hear it in the room. I’m lying there with my cock in the mouth of a woman whose possibly cancerous breast is in my hand, a woman I’m paying to have sex with on our bed, and I hear, “Hi, honey! I guess you’re sleeping. Just calling to say I love you and I miss you.”

  “Is that your girlfriend?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “That’s nice.”

  I couldn’t have imagined that such a perfect storm of shame and self-hate was possible in one scenario. Somehow I was able to finish
because once I set my mind to something I can usually follow through. It was a very sad orgasm. My dick was crying.

  When I’m done she of course tells me she doesn’t usually do this, that she works with computers. Then she asks if she can take my cigarettes and condoms from my dresser and all the loose change. I say sure. I thank her, let her out, and I immediately go into the bathroom and I scrub myself like I am dirty under my skin.

  I really tried to believe that she worked with computers.

  My second hooker story was a similar situation. This one is a little more poetic. I had moved to Somerville, which was, at the time, a malignant suburb next to Cambridge, but once again found myself in downtown Boston. I had just finished a set at Nick’s Comedy Stop. It was two-thirty or three in the morning, the magic hour, apparently. I was partying with some comics at a bar that let us stay after closing, just a block from the infamous Combat Zone in Boston, a nasty few blocks of depravity and dirty fun. I’m in my car, in the Zone, driving home, festering, high, and hating being me. I see this hooker walking that walk down the street and I think, “Ugh. All right, I’m going to try again.”

  I pull up and she gets in the car. I’m coked out of my mind. I ask her how much and she says thirty dollars. So, again, I’m dealing with a very high level of escort here.

  “Thirty bucks for a blowjob?”

  “Yeah.” She has a bit of grit and gravel in her voice. It is the far end of the night. Who knows what she has been through already. How many cars? Cocks? I give her the money.

  “Okay, where do we go?” I say nervously, coked.

  “Just pull around the corner up ahead.” Layered beneath the rasp in her throat is that undeniable and annoying New England accent.

  So I pull around the corner, park, and ask, “What now?” I am still not experienced with street hooker etiquette or process.

  “Pull down your pants.”

  I do. She places a condom over my coked, frightened cock, which, at that moment, is frantically trying to retreat into my body. Rightly so.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Then she looks at me and says through her phlegm, “I don’t usually do this. I’m just in town for my father’s funeral.”

  I think, “Huh?” That is just too deep to take in. Maybe this is her way of grieving. It ripples my mind with sadness.

  Just as she is about to start working on me, two squad cars come out of nowhere and surround my car. Their headlights blind me. I panic and say, “What do I do?”

  “Well, I think you should pull up your pants. I’ll deal with this.”

  I do what I can in the moment.

  She gets out of the car and goes into some shtick with the cops. Talking about how I saved her from her boyfriend who was beating her up. I can’t immediately tell if they are buying it.

  A cop comes around to my window. I open the window. He shines a light in my face. This is a time in Boston when they list busted johns in the paper. It is not the kind of press I am looking for.

  “Where do you live?” the cop asks.

  “Somerville.”

  “Why don’t you go there.”

  “I will. Thanks, officer.”

  My heart was pounding with cocaine and fear as I drove down the expressway. I was relieved. I couldn’t believe he let me off. There was enough coke and alcohol in my system to bust me for DWI, never mind the two lines of blow I usually saved for breakfast in a bindle in my pocket. Once I got out of the Zone and down the road a bit I looked down and saw that I had not really pulled my pants up properly. They were halfway up and my underwear was still down. The head of my dick was sticking out of the top of my pants, with a half-unrolled condom hanging off it. It was mocking me, reprimanding me. It was angry and disappointed with what I almost put it through, not to mention ashamed.

  That was the last time I ever paid for a prostitute. It only cost me seventy bucks to discover that I am not a prostitute guy. And my consolation is that I helped two women: one to confirm her fears and hopefully get to a doctor; the other, apparently, to process the death of her father.

  We do what we can.

  5

  Mother’s Day Card from Dad

  My dad sent out this Mother’s Day card to my brother’s wife. My brother forwarded it to me because we tend to forward each other our dad’s brainskids of weirdness in the rare moments when they are documented.

  Let me set the scene: It’s one of those formatted “fun” emails. It’s laid out like a greeting card. It has an owl in the upper left-hand side, sitting on a branch, against a wood-grain backdrop, and it says:

  HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY AND GRANDMOTHER’S DAY CHECKED OUT A FEW QUOTATIONS.

  “I used to think it a pity that her mother, rather than she, had not thought of birth control.” Muriel Spark

  A daily life treating iatrogenic and street-trading drug dependent hard heroin addicts and lackluster un-enthusiastic sad specimens of society bring validity to that quote. Human pollution is the drug world legal and illegal. Couple that with the industrial pollutants destroying our food chain, the GEO (genetically engineered crops) and creatures improving our capitalism profit margin add the threat of Muslim domination in Europe and bawalah(sp) modern society takes on a beauty all of its own.

  My dad is a doctor. I don’t even know what bawalah means. If you have forgotten, this is a Mother’s Day card.

  “The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human body, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.” Thomas Alva Edison reassures me that my “hobby practice” of Wellness and Ideal Immunity passed through at least one genuine genius mind. Have a good and growing following in that area alone. The stumbling block is poverty of the masses making CHO (carbs) the staple of all diets, severely low vitamin D, inadequate other vitamins, few omega 3s especially during pregnancy-lower IQ of baby 8–10 points due to impecunious existence and severe family ignorance. Coupled with wrong social choices and denial that a radio TV news and newspaper exist, even worldwideweb-only news would be welcome.

  Again, this is a Mother’s Day card.

  “Thinking out of the box is a learned process that should be next to godliness in the priorities in what to teach your children. The trick is to recognize when the box, itself, is faulty and deserving change.” Barry Maron while watching and hearing a jury of 12 peers in Oklahoma make a decision in a medical malpractice case against a loser doctor. Shades of the OJ jury nullification.

  In case you aren’t reading carefully, he just quoted himself in this card. For Mother’s Day, of course.

  Enjoy the late great United States of America as it morphs into the Socialist USA. Words cannot help if all reasonable actions have failed. The Uzi and Magnum are the must have entities. Own one, learn to use it and carry it. You and your children will with reasonable probability need them sooner than later. Barry

  Happy Mother’s Day!

  6

  My Grandfather’s Mouth

  The most peculiar, sad, and entertaining part of living with a manic-depressive is the timing of erratic emotional behavior, whether it is up or down. My father has had some really impressively timed mood events.

  The day I graduated from college my parents came to Boston for the commencement. It was a kind of miracle that I finished. I had the potential to be a perpetual student, the kind that would eventually have an office of some sort at the school. I did five years undergrad and there was really no way I could have strung it out any longer. I cobbled a major and minor together from the classes I took impulsively: English literature with a concentration on the Romantics, with a minor in film criticism. I don’t even remember going to the yearlong Romantic poetry class because it was at 9 A.M. I have a vague recollection of cramming “Ode on a Grecian Urn” into my head and trying to read The Cenci in a night. I related to the poets, not necessarily their work, and that’s what I wrote about in that class. I thought that was valid and I sold it. I
graduated with honors, which was ridiculous. Charm goes a long way in the liberal arts.

  My father was the valedictorian of his high school class. He came from a lower-middle-class upbringing and received a scholarship to college, then went on to medical school. His father was an odd-job bookkeeper and his mother was an elementary school teacher. I knew my grandparents a bit when I was younger. My grandmother seemed to be consumed with dread and worry and always in a panic about something. My grandfather didn’t talk much and most of my memories of him involve him sitting quietly on the couch in his boxers with a bowl of summer fruit, eating nectarines with his large distended testicles hanging out of his shorts. My brother and I thought this was hilarious.

  My father was the center of his family’s attention, the wunderkind. His sister sort of faded behind his glory and became a teacher like her mother. He was mythic in the family. The doctor, the genius, the golden one.

  I had lived with my father’s erratic, selfish, sometimes abusive behavior all my life. It was always about him. A midlife diagnosis of bipolarity seemed to be his way of taking an easy out, at least in my mind. Initially I didn’t buy the diagnosis. Even now, sometimes I don’t know. It’s very hard to determine the validity of a mood disorder when someone is as plain old narcissistic as my dad. I thought he was just a man-child who refused self-awareness and defied wisdom even as his life fell apart around him. When necessary he would blame the “illness.”

  When my folks showed up in Boston for my graduation, my father was close to despondent. It was supposed to be my day, but when we had a moment alone in the car, me sitting there in my graduation robe, my father looked at me and said, “I don’t want to live anymore.” Being used to this line of conversation, I said, “You think you can make it one more day? I’m about to graduate.” I could usually make him laugh even at his lowest. That was sort of my job.