by Marc Maron
What pissed me off about his timing, and I do believe it was deliberate, was that if there was any day that really could revolve around me it was this one. Instead, he disappeared that afternoon into the city. My mother and I wondered if we should call the police or check the bridges. While we paced around the street panicking, he wandered back, just in time to suck the energy out of the entire commencement ceremony. I believe everyone felt it. Boston University president John Silber, who gave the address, didn’t have half the impact he would have had my father not been sitting in the stadium. We’re probably better off. Silber and a stadium could have led to something collective and dubious. It’s possible my father’s involuntary needy Jewish dark magic saved lives that day.
He also hijacked my first wedding. By then my parents were divorced and my father, though he was there with his new wife, kept pestering my mother. He wandered around with a loose-leaf binder of poems he had written, asking people if they wanted to read them. The poems were horrible.
My father needs to have an effect on people. He needs to either drag them down to his level or blast through them with his anger. If he is in depressive mode, he is a gravitational force that pulls all attention downward, toward him and his suffering. In manic mode he needs other people to stop whatever they’re doing and regard him as a sage or wizard. I don’t think this is unusual with doctors, especially surgeons. When he is level he is just self-involved and detached. The bottom line with my old man is that he is an emotional terrorist. I love the guy, but it took a long time to seal up the damage from the paternal storm that I went through to get to my island. After a certain point I tried to focus on the positive elements of sharing genes with him. He’s in his seventies and still has a lot of energy. He’s very curious about things and speaks his mind. He doesn’t have anything like the wisdom of age or hindsight. He’s a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part.
What you don’t know about your parents is what becomes fascinating as you get older. They had a life before you were born and while you were growing up in the room down the hall and that was their business. My parents were very young when I came along, so the life before was limited to high school and college and whatever the hell went wrong in their childhoods. As to what happened to them after I was born, I’ve only gleaned bits and pieces, slipped moments.
I tend toward darkness in my amateur psychoanalytic practice. Since my parents are so crippled emotionally, I want there to be sordid sources for their behavior so I can respect them more and empathize instead of feeling mad and jilted. Obviously I will never know the most of it. I’m not sure they even do anymore. Things get lost as time dims the lights.
I’m curious and even inquisitive, but there’s some stuff I really don’t want to know about them. Parents seem to believe that there’s an emotional statute of limitations on their secrets, but I think that’s wrong: There’s some stuff they should never tell you. But after a divorce, or years of bad blood, or a supersaturation of shame, or just old age, parents think the statute is up and they will dump some toxic garbage on your psyche’s front lawn. For instance, I now know my father was a philandering madman. I’ve got details I can’t even disclose here that involve guns and pissed-off husbands.
Then there was this conversation on the phone with my mother.
Mom: I just wanted to tell you I am going into the hospital overnight. Everything is fine. I just wanted you to know.
Me: What do you mean? What’s wrong?
Mom: Nothing. Don’t worry.
Me: Just tell me what’s up. I can handle it.
Mom: I’m getting my boobs redone.
Me: Redone? What? When did you have them done originally?
Mom: Nineteen seventy-six. Right before your bar mitzvah.
Me: Really, you had like the original fake boobs.
Mom: Yes, the doctor said they needed to come out. They’re calcifying.
Me: Okay, that’s enough info. Well, let me know everything is okay.
I felt like my entire life was a lie. All those years I just thought my mom had great tits.
There are things I don’t want to know about my parents, but I like knowing things about myself. This sometimes means tracking my behavior back to root causes, to my emotional legacy, which runs through my parents. Because of my mother’s eating disorder I asked her if she had ever been sexually abused. She has become much more self-aware and quite pleasant and proactive about it. When I asked her, she said, “Ya know, Marc, I keep trying to remember something like that but I don’t think so.”
She blames her mean fat grandmother for it because she made my mother eat. I can handle that.
My father is a mystery to me, outside of knowing that he was the center of his family’s attention and that he had a depressed mother, and perhaps a biological propensity toward depression. I never really had a sense of what his relationship with his father was. By the time I met my grandfather, Ben, he was a very passive man. My grandmother and the woman he married after my grandmother died were both incredibly overbearing in one form or another, from what I could tell. As I got older my father told me that he lost his virginity when his father got him a prostitute. I also picked up here and there that my grandfather was a bit of a lady’s man and that caused some problems. That is really all I know. No real stories behind them, just information that I could enter into my emotional abacus. I’m always moving the beads around trying to figure out who I am.
With that said, I have never been able to explain to myself or anyone else what happened at my grandfather’s funeral. It is an event that has become the epitome of the dark poetry that defines my relationship with my dad and his with his father. He dismisses it. I can’t forget it. It defies meaning but craves it.
My grandpa Ben died from a stroke in 1992. I was on the east coast so I met my father at the funeral in New Jersey. I got to the funeral home to find that my father was manic, a normally strange disposition for a funeral, especially your own father’s, but par for the course for my dad. He was making the rounds, telling jokes, laughing, checking in with people’s lives. There was not a shred of grief in his behavior. To him it seemed like a fine time to be the center of attention. He was competing with the corpse and memory of his father. People act weird at funerals sometimes. Maybe he was consumed with sadness and this was a reaction to that. I don’t think so. After he had been strutting around spinning yarns for a while I saw my father approach the funeral director, who was a tall, young woman with glasses. I walked over to make sure everything was okay.
We were standing in front of the closed doors of the chapel where the service was going to take place. My father said, “Can I see the body? I’d like to check something.”
“Of course,” the woman said with the morbid politeness of a woman who chose a morbidly polite occupation.
Jews don’t do viewing. We do a plain pine box, closed. You remember your lost loved ones for who they were when they were alive. That’s my understanding of it. But it is obviously a family member’s choice to see a body.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. Not really to support my father but to buffer whatever might happen. He was very socially unpredictable in his manic states.
I had seen a body before. My high school buddy Dave died in the middle of the night of an asthma attack. I and a few other friends flew in from Los Angeles for the funeral. We got high before we went. It was an open-casket situation, although it didn’t start out that way. In the middle of the service some guy just walked up to the coffin and flipped the lid. I walked quickly up to the casket and looked at my dead friend. The Jewish policy made sense to me in that moment. Everything I knew of Dave was erased in a flash and would forevermore fight with the image of the propped-up, overly made-up head now seared into my memory. Yeah, I got closure, but I had never doubted he was dead in the first place.
My father, the funeral director, and I walked into the empty chapel. The plain pine coffin was at the end of the r
oom in front of the pews. We all stopped at the coffin. The woman stood to the side and lifted open the top half. My grandfather’s face and upper body were wrapped in his tallis. She pulled back the shawl from both sides of his head, revealing my grandpa Ben’s dead face. Eyes and mouth closed, lifeless. My father said, “It doesn’t look like him.”
I looked at my father and the funeral director, who said nothing. I let my father have his moment. My father then reached out his hand with a pointed finger and inserted his finger into his dead father’s mouth and pulled it open.
“Dad, what are you doing? Dad?”
“Is there a problem with the mouth, sir?” the woman asked.
“No, it doesn’t look like him.”
My father was a doctor, of course, and there was something clinical about his prodding but that didn’t explain anything. It was intrusive, disrespectful, and completely without boundary. I saw it as bizarre, a violation. Perhaps a small act of revenge for something I did not know or understand.
My father pushed the mouth shut. “It’s him.”
I was completely awed, stunned, and strangely energized by what Dad did.
“You can close it up,” he said.
I thanked the woman, and my father and I started to walk out of the chapel.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Yeah, I just wanted to see his teeth.”
We walked back into the main room, my father bounding ahead of me, ready to entertain the waiting crowd again.
7
Cats
I have become known for my cats because I have made my cats known. I talked about them constantly on my radio show and now on my podcast. I want it to be known now that I am not a “Cat Guy.” I am a “My Cat Guy.” I don’t care about your cats. I will pretend to if I come over. I will say things like, “Awww, lookitthatguylookitthatnicecat.” Secretly I will be thinking, “What a sad, fat, ugly dumb cat you have. Look at that thing. It’s a feline train wreck. It looks like it’s days away from hanging itself from its scratching post. It can’t even muster up the gumption to play with what’s left of that fake mouse you gave it. It doesn’t go outside? It’s just a hostage to your pain and neediness. Wow, you should probably put that cat down before it dies of ennui.”
I don’t say all that. I say, “Aw, lookitthatlittleguysocute.”
I grew up with dogs, lots of dogs. Over the course of my childhood we had four Old English sheepdogs. A good part of my young life was spent covered in dog hair, cleaning up shit and pulling different-sized dogs off my leg. My father wanted to show dogs professionally. He was obsessed with it. As with all his obsessions—skiing, stereo equipment, cars, guns, vitamins—the family was just expected to fall in line behind his dog-show dreams.
I don’t know why he chose Old English sheepdogs but he did. Our first was Mac Duff. Mac is the dog that set my father off on the addictive cycle of amassing dogs. It wasn’t Mac’s fault; Mac was a fun dog but he got cancer and my mother had him put down. He wouldn’t be the last. Over time my mother became the Dr. Kevorkian of animals.
Mac Duff wasn’t Mac’s whole name. Breeders have this thing where a dog’s entire genetic chain has to be represented in the name, for instance, our eventual champion Cheerio Lord Raglan. A royal name for a dog that was too genetically thoroughbred to be a good pet. Cheerio Lord Raglan was inbred and nervous, crazy even, but really beautiful. He didn’t know his own strength and would snap at you for no reason. A bite from a stunning dog doesn’t hurt any less. It’s actually worse because you have to defer your pain to the privilege of owning a champion. You just have to suck it up. This dynamic also applies to living with beautiful women.
Our family vacations were centered around dog shows. It was all about the dog. There were travel cages, grooming tables, special leashes and food, and walks. There was a lot of brushing going on. My father would sit and brush a dog for what seemed like hours on the floor next to a pile of gray dog hair. It seemed like one of us should have been spinning it into yarn. All these vacations culminated with my father trotting around a ring like an idiot with a leashed and terrified mass of bouncing fur.
Then there was Samantha, whom my dad got suckered into buying from some cons who convinced him she was a show dog. We thought Sam was a clean genetic machine. Turns out, not so much—her snout was too long, or maybe it was her brow. The point was, she had a flaw and that made her a pet disappointment. She seemed to know it, too, moping around in a lifelong apology for something that was out of her control, as so many of us do. Great dog, though.
Then we bred the Lord with some other guy’s dog, which the owner claimed was of noble lineage, and got Disco, again not quite on the genetic money. Disco was nuts like her father but unshowable. By the time my father lost interest in showing and breeding dogs we had three: a retired champion, his townie wife, and a fucked-up kid from another marriage.
So I was never going to be a dog person; even my masochism and desire to revisit childhood trauma has its limits. But there were cats around in my childhood, too. My mother liked to talk to them. When asked why, she used to say, “They don’t talk back.” It usually took her three names to get to mine when she was calling out to me in the house, and two of them were animals. Still, I always liked the cats. There was Garfield, the large, lean field cat, and Gimper, the long-haired black princess with a limp. They weren’t show animals; they were hunters and gatherers. We lived on three and a half acres so you never knew what they would bring home: lizards, snakes, birds, large bugs. It was always a treat to be presented with any of this vast array of dying gifts.
I once had an unforgettable, primal bonding moment with Garfield, a bizarre episode shared by two males of different species. I was visiting home one day after I’d already moved away and started doing stand-up. I was in my mid-twenties and had gone to do a set at a club in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I hooked up with one of the waitresses there and had no choice but to take her home to my childhood room for the sex. We had to be quiet because what was left of my parents’ marriage was sleeping upstairs. In the middle of the hungry, grasping intimacy of two strangers having a go at it I heard Garfield come into the room. I lifted my face up and saw that he was carrying the corpse of the biggest field mouse I had ever seen. The thing was almost as big as the cat. He took it under my desk. The woman did not notice any of this.
I was stifling my sex noises, she was stifling hers, and Garfield was savaging a rat-sized mouse a few feet away. I could hear his snorting and tearing. I came like a teenager in his bedroom, a compressed and quiet climax so as not to wake up my parents. The woman and I got dressed and I walked her out. As I was walking down the hallway back to my room I saw Garfield walking out. I went in and looked under the desk and there on the floor, neatly arranged, was the tail, the head, and what looked to be a fetus of a field mouse. I wasn’t disgusted. I was impressed. I felt that we had connected on the great timeless arc of animal drives. I didn’t read too much into it other than the hope that it was a good omen. I hadn’t used protection.
I went years without any pets, but in the middle of my divorce from my first wife, Kim, my then-girlfriend Mishna brought me a tiny black-and-white female cat I named Butch. I called her Butch because she had swagger. I was seeing Mishna while my divorce was being processed but she wasn’t living with me. It was just Butch and me. She was a very small kitten and I wanted her to have everything. I went to holistic pet food stores and got her raw food so she would have the right bugs in her guts to survive outside if necessary. I even made her fresh cat food for a while but that proved to be ridiculous and she really didn’t like it much. I think I wanted to treat Butch the way I wish I could’ve treated myself. I wanted life to be perfect for her since mine seemed to have crumbled. I invested a lot of love and caring into that cat.
When my divorce was complete Mishna and I moved to Los Angeles from New York City. She left her Forty-sixth Street walk-up and I sublet my apartment in Astoria. It was a big ordeal. We rented a U-Haul,
put all of our stuff in it, and set out. I had to get there in three days to make a meeting for a show I was trying to sell. In light of all the chaos, including the truck breaking down, our primary concern was Butch. I drove the truck and Mishna drove my old Honda Accord with the cat. Butch rode in the back of the Accord with a plant she had taken a liking to. She always slept in the pot of this plant, which was adorable. Of course in the car she had no use for it but I still have that plant.
After we made it out to L.A. we adopted a shelter cat called Boomer to keep Butch company. The cats at the shelter were mostly older cats. They looked as though someone had forgotten them or had had enough of them. There was one cat that seemed to be out of his mind. Completely nervous and unfriendly but young. I wanted that cat. That was Boomer. Having dealt with other cats since then, I know now that Boomer was feral. I liked his energy. I like anything I have to fight to get to like me. During this time we also found out that Butch had a genetic heart defect. Her heart was too big. The vet told us that she wouldn’t live long.
Mishna and I got married in our backyard in L.A. and tried to build a life there. The problem was I wasn’t working very much, so I decided to take a gig as the morning host on Air America, a new liberal-oriented radio network. I took the job hoping to take down the Bush administration but definitely to make money. The show was based in New York, but Mishna didn’t want to join me—she was an actress, comedian, and screenwriter. An aspiring actress, comedian, and screenwriter. She wanted to be in L.A.
I still had the lease on the old beat-up apartment in Astoria so I moved back in, furnished it with IKEA garbage, and started the hardest job of my life. I would go to sleep at 8:30 P.M. and wake up at 2:30 A.M. to get it together to get to the studio by 4:00 A.M. Then I would start crunching the news with my staff and partner to get on the air with something to say by 6:00 A.M. After a few weeks of that schedule I became completely detached from regular life or my version of the same. There was no going out, there was no staying up, there was no real socializing except on the air and with my staff. I did stand-up on weekends. I never really felt rested. I was walking around like I’d just been in a long pillow fight, dazed but not hurt. All my energy went into keeping alert enough to function.