Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  So now I was doing morning radio in New York while my wife was learning how to stop loving me in Los Angeles. The hours and distance were straining my marriage. The only time we could talk was right before I left the house. It would be 3 A.M. my time and midnight in L.A. and I would spend most of the conversation berating her for her imagined betrayals and unwillingness to do the only thing I wanted her to do: to care for me. It was deeply awful and I could feel the marriage disintegrating. I was a jealous, angry person. I knew that what was going on in my mind was not real but I could not stop it from coming out of my mouth. I kept finding myself at that horrible moment when you are about to say something hurtful to someone you love and you know you shouldn’t but can’t seem to stop it. You just watch it leave your mouth, hang in the air, and mold itself into a rock that plows into your lover’s face. The phone connection was like a transcontinental slingshot. That was my marriage.

  Then I would take a car into work, stopping on the way to pick up a large silo of liquid crack at Dunkin’ Donuts and two packages of M&Ms. I would then caff einate and sweeten myself into a mania amplified by exhaustion, by the angry fear that I was destroying my marriage, and by a deep hatred of all things Republican during the bleakest years of the Bush administration.

  A few months into the job I got a call at the office at 4 A.M. from Mishna. She told me Butch had died. I was furious. She had been telling me for days that Butch seemed sick. I guess her large heart got too heavy and Mishna never got around to taking her to the vet. In my mind she had killed my cat. It confirmed my worst suspicions about our marriage. She only cared about herself and wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a hurt animal. Me, or the cat. My cat was dead and my wife was a coldhearted child. She buried Butch with the help of Ernie the fix-it guy, in the same backyard that we’d gotten married in. I still regret missing the funeral of my cat. I think our marriage was buried that day, too. I hated Mishna.

  As the months went by, things just deteriorated. Mishna would come to New York for a few days or I would go home for a few days but the distance between us became hard to navigate. I was lost, angry, and tired. About this time I began noticing a pack of stray kittens in the back of my building. I would go out in the middle of the night to put my trash in the bins and these five kittens would be scrambling around eating the garbage in the dark. They were so clean, cute, and focused. Like most of life, the scene was simultaneously adorable and awful. I thought to myself, “Someone better deal with this or these cats are going to fuck each other and we’ll have an army of incested kitties out here.”

  This went on for a couple of weeks and I began to fall in love with these cats. There was this orange tabby with a tuft of hair on its nose that was a little asymmetrical and made him look like a monkey. There was a calico, a black-and-white longhair, a mean-looking, skittish striped cat, and this gray and white dwarfy fist of feline beauty that I would eventually name LaFonda. LaFonda is crazy, like Vietnam crazy. It’s my fault.

  Their mother was also around. The slut. I really didn’t know what to do with the cats. They wouldn’t let me get near them, but something had to be done about them. I just kept hanging on to the hope that someone else would deal with it. The truth is I was completely taken with two of these cats. I just thought they were too good to become alley cats. They were so perfect and clean and innocent that I didn’t want them to live that harsh alley-cat life. I think the impulse to save animals is, aside from being empathetic and humane, also symbolic of saving some part of ourselves. I wanted these cats to be okay. I wanted to be okay.

  The night before the 2004 Republican National Convention I was freaking out. We were going to cover the convention live at a booth in Madison Square Garden, behind enemy lines. I was nervous and couldn’t sleep. So, of course, I decided I was going to deal with the cat issue. That’s how I do. When life is scary and chaotic I like to make it more so.

  I took a large shoe box and cut a hole in it. I put a small can of food in the box and set it out by the garbage can while I stood behind the basement door and watched. I had recruited my neighbor Jodi to help me; her job was to make sure I didn’t completely freak out. I saw the first cat get in the box. I scrambled outside, quickly covered the hole in the box with a piece of cardboard, picked the box up, and ran it up two flights of stairs to my apartment. I released the animal into my place and it scurried scared and crazy behind the stove. “It’s freaked out,” I thought. It will grow to like me.

  Over the next few hours I performed this same procedure with four of the five kittens. Once I finally had them in the house it was like I’d released a pack of wild ferrets into my living room. They weren’t acting like house cats. I didn’t realize at the time that if a cat is eating on its own it’s not a cute housekitten: It’s feral. I had trapped and released four wild animals into my apartment.

  Two of them lodged themselves behind the stove. When I looked back there all I could see were two gaping, hissing mouths directed at me. The cat that I named Monkey went flying down the hallway and attempted to jump out a window. I was two stories up. He hit the screen, then climbed up the screen and wedged himself between the screen and the window. He stayed there for two days. LaFonda got herself stuck to a glue trap I had laid out for mice. She was flopping around on my kitchen floor, a mess of angry gray fur attached to a card. She didn’t know me, I didn’t know her, and I had to pull her off the trap. Her claws ripped through my hand but I managed to detach her from the goo plate. I believe the terror of that incident got locked deep in her wiring. She is still twitchy about it. That was her Nam.

  In the days that followed I tried to shoo them back out the door but they didn’t even know where they were so they wouldn’t leave the apartment. I had no idea how to handle the situation. I tried to pull the “I’m your parent now” thing, but these cats were already about three months old; they weren’t trying to hear that mess. I was surrounded by vicious little things and all I’d wanted was friends.

  Night was the worst. The black-and-white cat whom I called Hissy would sit in the window of the kitchen, which faced out the back of the building. She would wail and her mother would answer in the alley. It was heartbreaking. I was living in a cat opera and I was the bad guy. The other one, whom I called Meanie, had a very frightening stink eye that he would shoot at me. He was horribly menacing for something that size. Monkey dislodged himself from the window, and LaFonda, after the mouse-trap incident, spent most of her time under the couch. When I shut the door to my bedroom to go to sleep, they’d all emerge. From under my covers, it sounded like my house was being ransacked and robbed. I would let it go on because I wanted them to have fun. When I woke up and walked into the living room there were no cats but half the couch was ripped open and the stuffing was all over the floor, books were destroyed, the rug was partially unwoven, and the TV was on.

  I started talking about the cat crisis on my radio show. I was reaching out to cat ladies. Most big cities have a small army of middle-aged, usually single, misanthropic women who live for cats. I needed help. Emails started coming in. Someone donated two cages for my apartment to separate the cats and try to socialize them a bit. A woman came over with syringes and we put gloves on and inoculated the four kittens and took them to the vet to have them fixed. Another woman brought over traps and I trapped the mother and the other kitten and fixed them. I was doing good.

  It was all I could talk about to anyone: on the radio, to my wife, to anyone who would listen. Cat tales. I think it actually may have bought more time in my marriage. I didn’t have the mental space for jealousy. I was running a small veterinary hospital out of my apartment.

  Needless to say, none of these cats was becoming any less wild and they all hated me. I was scarred and torn and discouraged. When I left Air America, I was confronted with the problem of what to do with the cats. I had done my best over the course of a few months, but now I was leaving New York and wasn’t so sure that I wanted to bring a pack of wild animals with me. I loved
a couple of them, though, and became intent on getting LaFonda and Monkey to Los Angeles. I found a woman who liked feral cats to take Hissy. Meanie was a disgruntled loner. There was no one who could tame that cat. So I tricked him into a box and took him to the Yemeni bodega across the street. They said they needed a mouser. I brought Meanie down into the basement of the store. The owner, Tony, put out a can of food and I said goodbye. I thought I would see him again. I went into that store all the time.

  A few days later I went in to get some ice cream. I asked Tony how Meanie was doing. He said, “That cat is crazy. He’s gone.” I asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “He’s in Brooklyn with my cousin.”

  I took that to mean the same thing as “he swims with the fishes.” I don’t think Tony killed the cat but I’m sure he sent it back out into the streets. It made me sad but I knew the cat was fixed and probably happier.

  There was no way I was leaving Monkey and LaFonda behind. I loved just about everything about them and I needed them in my life despite the fact that they clearly had little to no interest in me. Much like the women I tend to fall in love with.

  Raising feral cats was something I was getting used to, but transporting them was a whole other box of horror. Mishna flew out and picked up Monkey. She said it wasn’t that big of a deal. But it was my job to carry the mighty LaFonda across country.

  I was terrified of LaFonda. I still am. She is nothing but a ball of muscle and claws. The only time she had ever been in a cage was to go to the vet to get fixed, and it took two of us even to get her to do that and one of us was a registered Cat Lady. Now I was alone and completely panicked and tweaked. I put on leather gloves, got my mind into a “by any means necessary” state, and approached the cat. I wrestled her to the ground and picked her up with both hands. She bit through the gloves and lunged at my face, drawing blood on my arms with her claws and biting through thick leather into my hand. When I finally got her into the cage, she shit all over it. All my cats do that. As soon as I get them in the cage they evacuate their tiny cat bowels as if to say, “Fuck you! Who wins now?” Once I got her secured I bandaged my face, arms, and finger. There were scratches up and down both of my arms. But I’d completed my mission: I had courageously wrestled the wild into submission like some primitive. I felt connected to a tradition of men who hunted and led tribes. I had my bags packed and my cat boxed and I headed to JFK Airport for my flight.

  Things were going pretty smoothly. I was waiting on the security line and was about to put the cat box on the belt to go through the machine when a Transportation Security Administration guy said, “You’re going to have to take the cat out of the box and walk it through.”

  I said, “What? There’s no way that is going to happen.”

  “Well, then you can’t go through,” he said.

  “Do you know what I’ve been through? Look at my hands, look at my arms, look at my face! There’s no way I’m taking that cat out of that box!”

  I was yelling, waving my arms at the TSA dude.

  People were looking at me, some shocked, others just perturbed. I was that guy. I was a crazy cat lady guy.

  My biggest fear was that I would get her out of the case and she would jump out of my arms and my life would become a Disney comedy. I pictured a montage of me running after a cat on jet-ways, down the aisles of planes, in the middle of a runway, on aircraft wings, behind ticket counters, on a baggage claim.

  I had made such a scene that when I went to take LaFonda out of the box the TSA guy said, “Okay, everyone stand back.” Like I was defusing a bomb. I lifted little LaFonda out of the crate and she was more frightened than I was, but not much. I walked her quickly through the metal detector and then started screaming, “Where’s the box!”

  I didn’t know at the time that all she would want to do was get back in the box. The airport was just a big blur of sights and sounds that were alien to her. The box, she understood.

  I got her back in, sheepishly apologized to the agent and gawking passengers, and skulked away toward my gate.

  We made it home and now my cats are free.

  I lost a job, a marriage, and several pints of blood in the process, but they’ve won. They started in the garbage in Astoria, Queens, and now live in the hills of Highland Park, California. This is a cat success story.

  8

  Petty Lifting

  I was back living in New York when I heard that Mishna, my second ex-wife, was living there with her new man. The divorce was still fresh and I had not been able to pull myself together for months. I knew that I would eventually run into her. I just didn’t know when. How would it unfold? Would I be on the train? At a show? Carrying a cat in a cage? Holding a yoga mat? Would I yell, cry, avoid her? All of those? Would she be with her man? Would I hit him, yell at him, or cry at him? Maybe I would just yell at both of them. No. All the scenarios that I played out in my mind amplified the shame and sadness of my position. There was no winning because I had already lost, and at the center of any of the situations I imagined would be me, holding my own ass, which she had handed me.

  I dreaded and hoped that I would run into my ex. Every day was an involuntary search to connect with her. It was the hidden agenda of my heart. I couldn’t really focus on much else. I felt like I needed closure. I needed to be punched in the heart with the reality of the situation. That is what emotional connection is to me sometimes. Pain makes me know I am alive. Joy and comfort are awkward and make me want to die. I needed to see in her eyes that she didn’t care about me and I had no power over her. Of course, I was hedging my bets. Some part of me hoped we would once again lock into that shared emotional frequency that undeniably connected us. I thought that connection was indelible, no matter what happened between us, even if it was like a tattoo that seemed like the right thing to do at the time but is now just a fading green mistake.

  Worse than the feeling of loss that comes with a breakup is the feeling of losing. Loss is a state of emotional injury that you can get past; losing is a feeling of humiliation and defeat that stays fresh. The latter causes most of the problems in the world. If there is another man involved, it is almost impossible not to judge yourself as a failure and see him as an enemy.

  Technology doesn’t help. After my marriage ended, I set aside some time to work on a self-funded research project called “Who Is My Ex Fucking.” It took about twenty minutes. I googled her name and searched images. I found a picture of her and a guy at an event. Their names were listed beneath the picture. I searched his name and within a few minutes I found out he was a Harvard graduate, a screenwriter, rich, and that his mother is a famous artist. The only consolation I had in that moment is that his credits were eh and he wasn’t that attractive. It was a small consolation. Doing a Google search to find out things about your ex is similar to googling cancer when you think you have it. Depending on what you find, it can confirm in a moment that you are dying inside and there is nothing you can do about it.

  I had flown my cat Monkey from California out to New York to stay with me. It is a sad situation when you are leaning on a cat for emotional support, but he showed up for me. Me and Monkey in Astoria, Queens, holding down the fort. It was a return to Monkey’s roots. Out in back was the garbage can he had been eating out of when I found him. We were both at the source of a lot of past trauma and chaos. I don’t think he hung on to his past as much I did. He had been eating out of the garbage. I was thrown away.

  I had made a habit of compulsively checking the email that comes through my website. Trolling for validation, contempt, hate: the speedball of social networking in the age of accessibility.

  A cryptic email showed up in the inbox. It was from a woman who said she would be in New York for a couple of days and wanted to have coffee with me. She was familiar with my radio work. She said she made a living off her image but she was getting a little “long in the tooth” for it. I had not heard that expression up until that point so I had to learn what that was. Initially I thought it
was something frightening. The whole thing was a little mysterious: “images,” long teeth, aging.

  I googled her name and found a link to a modeling site. There was a portfolio of a model with her name and from the pictures, it appeared that she was a fairly successful one. I immediately thought that someone was pranking me, that it was a setup of some kind, but I was so sad and desperate for excitement and connection that the potential danger of the situation—both emotionally and physically—didn’t stop me from setting up a meeting with this person.

  I showed up at the coffee shop we had agreed to meet at in Soho. I looked around and saw a blond woman wearing old-lady glasses and sitting by herself. It was her. The woman from the modeling spread. It’s always a little silly to see pretty women trying to unpretty themselves with glasses. Maybe that is just the way I see it. Maybe she was just wearing glasses because she has bad eyesight, and I was objectifying her. Of course that was it. But then objectification is a model’s racket.

  We talked for a few minutes. She said she was a fan of my radio work and used to come see me with her boyfriend when we did live shows and they lived in Brooklyn. I kind of remembered her. She had that strange mutant beauty that models have. It’s the kind of beauty that no matter what they are wearing or how they try to hide themselves, a sharply defined, electric appeal comes through and zaps your desire.