by Marc Maron
That night I get to the club, and the restaurant connected to the showroom is packed. I get excited. Then I notice there’s a guy in a gorilla suit dancing around presenting someone with some balloons and throwing candy around. It was a private party. I have a moment. I look at the guy in the gorilla suit and think, “That’s that guy’s job.” That moment is followed immediately by the thought, “My job is really not that far from that.” I’m just one or two evolutionary steps away from dancing around in a monkey suit with balloons. There is a fine line between telling jokes and smelling your own breath inside a plastic head. At least with stand-up comedy you have some choices. I can be on TV, I can write my own material, I can comment on the world, and I can express myself. Where’s the room for creative growth in a gorilla suit? When was the last time someone said, “The guy in the monkey suit is a genius.” Certainly not since Roddy McDowall.
I pictured the sad moment when the guy is at home after the gig. The head is on the coffee table and he thinks, “Hey, this is working out. This is the last time I rent. I’m going get my own suit.”
I made my way through the crowd. I passed the man in the gorilla suit and walked into the showroom. That night I did one of the best shows I’d ever done, for twenty-three people. It came from someplace real.
The other thing I learned about show business recently is the difference between art and entertainment. Sometimes they meet but not usually.
I had an experience that fully illustrates this dichotomy. I was in Montreal at the annual comedy festival, and they have a lot of street performers in Montreal, a lot of buskers I guess is the proper word, a romantic term for mimes and whatnot.
I was walking down the street and there was this huge crowd in the distance, gathered around something. I couldn’t really tell what it was, and as I got closer I saw that they were all looking up at something, but I still wasn’t clear what it was. And as I got closer I could hear them applauding and saw there, in the middle of the crowd, a guy in a clown suit on stilts, juggling. And people were just ecstatic. It was as if Jesus had come back. They were climbing over each other to put money in his hat. I looked at the spectacle of it and thought, “It’s a fuckin’ clown, you know, do we need another fuckin’ clown?” And then I kept walking down the street and about a block farther on another corner there was a guy playing saxophone. He was just standing there by himself and he was brilliant; he sounded like Coltrane, just blowing his guts out. Huge riffs. His neck looked like it was about to explode. No one was watching. There was like fifty cents in his sax case and a little stack of CDs. I looked up the street and saw a fresh crowd starting to gather around the juggling clown. Meanwhile, this guy’s still blowing his guts out. Then he stops. I look at him and say, “Jesus, man, that was beautiful. Was that Coltrane?” He says, “No, it’s an original, and if you like it so much, why don’t you buy my fuckin’ CD? It’s on there.”
“All right,” I said. I pick up the CD and I look at it.
He says, “It’s cut three.” I turned over the CD. You know what it was called? It was called “Killing the Clown on Stilts.”
At least that’s how I read it.
After the show in D.C. I went back down to the strip bar, but I felt good this time. I thought it would make a difference in my experience of the club, but it didn’t. There was a moment, though, that really moved me. It didn’t happen when a dancer was dancing for me. After each dancer finished on the stage it was her job to wipe down the mirror behind her and the pole before the next dancer came up. I was thinking about how temporary disappointment can be if you don’t linger on it too long and how there are beautiful things in the world if you look. It’s up to you to find them for yourself. I looked up at my missing Vermeer, Stripper Cleaning Mirror.
11
The Clown and the Chair
The night I broke the orange chair was the night I realized my marriage to Mishna was really on the ropes. My rage transformed a piece of furniture into garbage and my wife into a terrified hostage. The final blow was when I told the story onstage.
Mishna and I had bought the chair on the street when we were furnishing our new house. There was a little white-haired man who sporadically sold used furniture out of a storage locker on Hollywood Boulevard near Western Avenue. There’s a line of old garage doors that runs along the bottom of a building and sometimes he would be set up in front of an open one with his stuff out on the sidewalk. He was out there on Sundays, some Sundays.
We always rubbernecked his wares from the car. When we drove by he was always busy moving things around, rearranging. It seemed that there was an ever-evolving order to it all in his mind. He was a curator of the selected sellable detritus of other people’s lives.
One day we were driving by and saw a clown painting on the street. It looked like one of those classic old housewife hobby-painted clown heads in a cheesy wooden frame. We had to stop for the clown. We got out of the car and I walked quickly toward the painting, which was propped against the wall. I panic in yard sale and buffet situations. Even though there was no one else there looking at it I didn’t want it to be snatched up. I always think I am going to miss out on a deal or some kind of food.
The painting was top-notch kitschy crap.
“Hello, excuse me. How much is this clown?” I asked the little man, who seemed to be looking for something in the garage.
He stopped rummaging and turned around. He looked confused and wise simultaneously, like a sweet cranky wizard or a midlevel hobbit.
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s a nice piece,” he said, looking at it as if he had never really considered selling it. I wasn’t clear whether that was his technique or his actual sentiment.
“I guess I can do one twenty-five.”
“Seventy-five,” my wife said.
He wrestled with the number on his face and did some hand scratching.
“Okay, one hundred,” the wizard said.
“Sold!” I said preemptively, given my wife’s look.
I was always impressed with her gumption but in that moment I fought it. I am not a good haggler. I don’t like the game of it. I usually just pay what they ask for. I don’t want to engage with the charade unless I don’t care if I own what I am haggling for. There is a weird truth to the idea that if you really don’t care, things will generally go your way. If you’re really invested and emotionally attached, things will get away from you or at least get chaotic and scary. That’s been my experience with relationships.
“You need anything else?” he asked, like we were putting him out. I began to wonder if he actually sold stuff or he just took the stuff out of the garage every so often to assess what he had.
“Yeah, we need a chair,” I said.
He led us over to a beautiful modern Danish chair. It was curvy, with wooden sides and an orange leather seat and backrest. My wife loved it. It was going to be hers for her office in the house. It was probably from the forties, maybe the fifties; old but not fragile.
It shouldn’t have broken as easily as it did.
“I love it,” she said. “How much?”
“Uh, I don’t know. It’s the only one I have.”
He seemed to want to hold on to everything we asked him about.
I said, “I’ll give you one-fifty.”
I shouldn’t have started the negotiating. My wife gave me the “you should’ve let me handle this” look again.
“I don’t know. That’s a one of a kind. You know, I don’t think I want to part with it.”
I was pissed but I didn’t care. I said, “Two hundred.”
He said, “Yeah, okay, but take care of it. I’ve never seen one like that. It’s a special chair.”
“No problem,” I snapped.
It seemed he really wanted his artifacts to be with the right people. I might have underestimated him at the time. He might have had a deeper understanding of the relationship between people and objects than the rest of us do. An odd pairing between a chair and a couple might d
isrupt the trajectory of the lives of the people and the chair. Of course, anything can be backloaded with meaning. That’s how we explain things away when we don’t want to take full responsibility for actions that are frightening and disastrous. It’s the core of mysticism.
My wife was happy. She loved it. I was happy and felt like I had manned up to the moment. I had done it wrong but it still only cost me two hundred dollars.
“Anything else you’re looking for? Or can I get on with my day?”
“We need curtains but I guess you don’t really have that kind of stuff.”
“I’ve got a lot more stuff that I haven’t gone through. I do have some curtains but I don’t know if they’re for sale. Let’s have a look.”
The little man had kind of a hobble to his walk. We followed him to the garage locker door one down from the open one. He labored with a ring of keys and unlocked the white wooden doors and pulled them both open to reveal a massive mound of tables, chairs, lamps, paintings, and fabrics. Everything was piled on top of everything else. There was no way to walk around or check stuff out. It was a chaos mound of groovy treasure. My wife and I looked at each other like we had just been led into the cavern of cool truth.
We were excited, a secret stash. This all could have been part of his method. He lured curious people into his web of antique trash and made them feel like they were the first to lay eyes on the mid-century booty. As it turns out, the whole encounter became very mind-altering. I had no idea what was about to happen.
“I have some curtains up there. Can you see them?”
There was a huge unruly bundle of what looked to be the ugliest curtains in the world. My wife and I looked at each other.
“I don’t know if those will work. Thanks for showing us,” she said.
“Yeah, I don’t think I can sell them.”
Of course you don’t, I thought.
“They were in Carl Jung’s office,” he said, flatly.
He must have seen me coming. He was an empath. He understood my uncapped personality, my propensity toward improvising the mystical, and hanging hope and power on inanimate objects.
“Carl Jung was in Los Angeles. How did I not know that?”
It seemed way too random to be bullshit. Suddenly, in my mind those curtains were an aperture for a room where a master sat doing the big work. The very mind that helped establish the fact that we are innately propelled toward something bigger than ourselves, and that spirituality is a primal deep craving based on universal archetypes that lay within the historical soul of the human experience. He invented the idea of the collective unconscious, for fuck’s sake. He realized that synchronicity was real, in an almost magical way, relative to our perception, connections, and the power of meaning. I pictured him opening those curtains to let the day in, mandalas of pipe smoke surrounding him, as the great genius gazed out into the light.
“We have to have those curtains!” I blurted.
“They don’t really fit the house,” my wife said.
“Yeah, I’m not sure if I want to sell them.”
The wizard decided I wasn’t ready for the Jungian curtains. He was reluctant about the chair, too. Why was he judging me? What did he see within me? I was reading too much into it.
I paid the man. We loaded the chair and clown into the car and headed home.
I thought about those curtains for weeks. I thought about how they would change my life because they were saturated with unused Jung thoughts. I just needed to wring them out. Perhaps I could make a robe out of them, several robes. I could’ve created an entire line of Jungwear.
Then I did some research on Jung in L.A. Turns out it was highly unlikely that those curtains ever came in contact with the man. They were probably just in an office at the Jung Institute. I was disappointed and something died, maybe the dream of achieving a Jungian breakthrough via curtains.
I don’t think those curtains could have stopped the emotional momentum of unmanaged cycles of primal rage in my marriage. I’m not sure anything could. Patterns had been set. My anger was unaddressed despite the damage it was causing. I just never thought it was a real problem, because when I was finished being angry I was done, every time. If you are a rager, when you are done raging you feel relief. It is out of you. It’s like masturbating, only it’s toxic to others and much harder to clean up. But even if the rager feels done, the rage will have generated in the other person a contempt that festers and swells, even if unspoken. Because the other person is afraid to speak.
The truth is that if you are ever yelling at a woman it doesn’t matter what it is about because 95 percent of the time you should just be screaming, “Why can’t you be my mommy? Why?” Or, “Why can’t you be a better mommy than my mommy?” The other 5 percent is probably justified but there are other ways to communicate than yelling, I am told.
By the time the fight took place the orange chair was well established in my wife’s office room. It had been over a year since we bought it. The clown had found its place on the wall in the bathroom. To this day when I look at myself in the mirror the sad clown is there looking down at me. That’s as good a metaphor for my relationship with a god as I can come up with.
The reason for the fight was not specific. Once a fight starts it really doesn’t matter what it is about, anyway. I know we were lying in bed. I was festering about something she hadn’t done, or that she’d done, or that in my opinion she should have done, or that she might do if I didn’t say something. I also knew we had made it through a day and I probably didn’t need to say anything to fuck that up. Let me put it this way: There was absolutely no reason for me to say anything other than to start a fight. I was just one of those sick people who doesn’t know if someone loves them unless the other person is crying. The fight began in my head.
Inner Good Marc: Hey, buddy, just let it go. It isn’t worth it. So what? She did the thing that upsets you. It’s really not that big a deal.
Inner Bad Marc: Shut up. I can’t sleep. I thought I killed you in high school. I’m tired of being taken advantage of.
Inner Good Marc: You aren’t. This is just one of those little things that really don’t matter. She has to be able to do things. You can’t control everything.
Inner Bad Marc: You’re a pussy. This is important. She disrespects me all the time and it keeps happening.
Inner Good Marc: Disrespect is a bit much. Maybe she just doesn’t know how to communicate with you because you are so pissed-off all the time and she does covert things to get back at you for stifling her.
Inner Bad Marc: Exactly. That’s why I’m going to bring it up!
(Marc exits his head and enters the bed. His wife is falling asleep.)
Marc: Hey, baby. Why did you do that thing today?
Marc’s Wife: What thing?
Marc: You know, that thing that pisses me off because it’s rude.
Marc’s Wife: I don’t want to do this right now.
Marc: Do what? We’re having a conversation.
Marc’s Wife: No, we’re not. You are starting a fight and I don’t want to cry tonight. I want to go to sleep.
Marc: I just don’t understand why you did that thing. You keep doing it.
Marc’s Wife: (getting out of bed) I don’t want to do this again. (She goes into her office room, slams the door, and starts dressing.) I’m leaving.
Marc: (following her, aggressively pushing door open) Wait. I just wanted to talk about it.
Marc’s Wife: No, you didn’t. I just want to leave. Please let me leave. I don’t want to do this anymore.
Marc: Wait, don’t leave.
Marc’s Wife: Please let me leave. (She starts crying.)
Marc: No, don’t leave. What do you mean leave? For how long? Why?
Marc’s Wife: (Hysterical) Just let me leave.
(Marc picks up the orange chair like he is going to move it. Lifts it a foot off the ground and slams it on the floor for effect. The chair, in an almost cartoonlike way, falls apart in
three pieces. First one side, then the other, then the center falls out. Marc’s wife is crying hysterically.)
Marc’s Wife: You’re breaking things. It’s not safe. I’m leaving. I’m leaving.
Marc: What are you talking about? It broke itself. What a piece of shit. You could’ve hurt yourself on this thing.
(She makes a run for the front door. Marc stops her. Grabs her arms. Looks at her.)
Marc: Please don’t leave.
(He sees for the first time she is terrified and doesn’t like him at all. His heart drops. He has gone too far.)
Marc: I’ll leave. I should leave.
(Marc prepares to leave.)
My wife sat down on the couch. Crying. I floundered around. Trying to worm out of leaving. I knew that I should be the one to leave. I am the man. I fucked up. I didn’t want to run her out of the house but I also didn’t want her to leave because I didn’t know if or when she would come back and I couldn’t live with that. I thought I had control over that. That is the core of emotional abuse.
“You want me to leave?”
She looked exhausted and destroyed.
“Can’t we just get past this?”
She wasn’t talking. Despondent.
“Okay, I guess I’m leaving. It’s one in the morning. Are you sure you want me to go?”
I started to collect my things. Keys, I put my jacket on, I opened the door.
“Shit, toothbrush.” I turned around to go back in the house. She stood up from the couch and with an intensity and focus of anger I had never seen from her before said, “Just get the fuck out.”
I did. She slammed the door behind me.
I get in my car. It’s one-thirty in the morning, I’m in Los Angeles, and I don’t know where I’m going to go. I’m scared and crazy. My first thought is, “I don’t know any hotels. Maybe I’ll just go downtown and go to the Standard. That’s nice. Maybe they put a little mint on the pillow. Take a swim tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get a good breakfast.” Then there is that part of me that thinks, “Marc, this is a dark night of the soul. You have to go to a dark night of the soul hotel.”