Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  Everyone always asked me, “What about being a doctor or a lawyer?” I’m like, “There’s none in my family.”

  JOE MANDE—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  Both of my parents were trial lawyers, so there were a few years where I just didn’t talk to my parents. Between my sister and I we would just get cross-examined on everything. We would be sitting at the dinner table, if they smelled anything fishy they were back on the clock and just grilling us until they figured out what the issue was or whatever.

  My sister and I both handled that in different ways. I think from seventh to tenth grade, I basically just pleaded the Fifth on everything. I mean, I just didn’t talk to them because I didn’t want to incriminate myself, so there were a few years where I hardly ever talked to my parents.

  My sister, on the other hand, she just plead insanity. My sister was just this wall of noise. Any time my parents tried to confront her on it, she’d just scream and slam her door. Actually, that’s a much better tactic. I just internalized everything.

  RON FUNCHES—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  I remember my first day of school. My mom was just being like, “Hey, some kids are going to like you, some kids are not going to like you for who you are. Don’t ever change who you are for them. If kids like you, cool. If they don’t, fuck them.”

  Marc

  Goddamn. I wish I had your mom.

  Ron

  She made her own mistakes too, but she’s pretty awesome.

  JOE MANDE

  In high school, they thought I had the most severe case of IBS they’d ever seen. They thought it was stomach cancer because I literally, for about four years, woke up every morning with just explosive diarrhea. Just every morning, that was just part of my routine.

  I was at this thing for my Jewish youth group when I was like fifteen. We were on a bus in Wisconsin and we had just gone to Taco Bell. I mean, already, red flags. It’s always, like, sort of Russian roulette with Mexican food. Mexican roulette. Immediately, I just knew I had to go and I was in a school bus, so there was no bathroom.

  I had to go up to my rabbi at the front of the bus and say, “You know, bad things are happening to me. We really need to pull over at the next rest stop.” He was like, “Yeah, I’ll make sure of it,” so I went to the back of the bus. The rest stop was five miles ahead and I’m just like pacing and then the bus driver just blew right past it. The next rest stop wasn’t for, like, forty-five miles and my body was going to explode.

  To this day, I can’t listen to Tom Petty without thinking of it. I put on the Wildflowers album and it was the only time I’ve ever successfully meditated. I meditated for those forty-five minutes until the next rest stop and then I ran. My friend came into the bathroom and he said he’s never heard a human body make those kinds of noises. Everyone on the bus was waiting for me, I mean, I was in there for like thirty-five minutes just evacuating. I probably hurt my body in the long run the way I was clenching every muscle. To this day I still don’t know how I did it, because it was bad.

  CONAN O’BRIEN

  This is not my nose. My nose was completely rebuilt. I was beaten up.

  I ran into a street gang. I was wearing a T-shirt that had the Irish flag on it. They were Italian. This was right near the aquarium in Boston. I was with my friend at the time. This is late high school. They beat the shit out of me, because I was a little bit of a wise guy. They said they wanted fifty cents, and I said, “No.”

  They said, “Why not?”

  I said, “I don’t feel like it.”

  Just as I finished that “it,” the tah sound, I got hit so hard in the face. I remember it was over pretty quickly. I went to the emergency room, and the doctor, I’ll never forget his name, Dr. Constable. He had a British accent. He looked kind of crazy. He had crazy hair, and he looked like the poet Ezra Pound.

  I said, “Is my nose broken?”

  He said, “Broken? Good God, man, it’s a bag of bones!” I’ll never forget that.

  JOE MANDE

  In ninth grade, I took Spanish. It was the only nonhonors class I ever took. I was very short and had braces and sweater vests. I don’t know why I wore sweater vests. I thought it was cool.

  I got into Spanish the first day of class and it was just me and the JV basketball team. That was the class, basically. I was like, “It’ll be fine. I listen to Outkast or whatever.” I sit down and they were just ruthless. They would make fun of me, they would call me names, they would choke me. I got choked a lot but it was never violent, they just would come up from behind when I wasn’t expecting it. Sometimes it was piano wire. They had piano wire. They would wrap wire around my neck and I would freak out, obviously, and then they would let go and just crack up. They’d be like, “Ahh, you stupid.”

  Marc

  “Look at him! He’s frightened for the right reason.”

  Joe

  Right, what an idiot. I was like, “How stupid of me to freak out.” They would throw empty cans of soda at my head and stuff. It sucked.

  That Spanish teacher was so broken, she was so done with life, so it was chaos. She looked like Newman from Seinfeld, so everyone called her Newman. They would call her Ms. Newman and she would respond to it. I mean, it was bad.

  Then that December our principal made this big announcement that no more gambling was allowed in the hallways. Because people played dice in the hallways and stuff. The Asian kids would have break-dance competitions in between classes. I actually started doing this thing where I got really good at making it look like I was about to start break dancing. Actually, I was just trying to get through the hallway, but I would get in the middle of this big circle and it would be my turn and I would start moving around to music and pumping my shirt and making it look like I was about to dance. I would just do it until they realized I was never going to start break dancing. I would go for like two minutes without actually doing any dancing before they pushed me out of the circle.

  Anyway, back to the story. Our principal, she instituted this no gambling policy. I saw an opportunity and I went up to these kids in the back of my class and I was like, “I can teach you a gambling game that you’ll never get in trouble for playing if you just stop choking me.” It was a clear negotiation. They thought about it, and the next day I taught them how to play dreidel for money.

  For a good month, outside my Spanish class, you would walk by and see these black kids in Avirex jackets, huddled over a top. Just like, “Yo, that’s a ‘W’ motherfucker, pay up.”

  ALLIE BROSH—WRITER, ILLUSTRATOR

  I was never a cool kid. They made an attempt to, like, maybe I could be in that group, but I was too scared.

  Marc

  They reached out? They sent a representative?

  Allie

  They reached out and I was too scared. I was always an awkward kid. I was always behind, never knew what to do with myself, or how to be. My best friend, this kid named Joey. He was a cool kid and I never was. I always felt very intimidated by him. Much of my early life was defined by trying to get him to think that I was cool. He would give me advice on how to dress. I spent my early preteen years wearing jeans and baggy shirts—totally rocking the skater-guy look.

  I didn’t fit in to anybody but him. He didn’t know what he was doing either. To me, he looked like he knew what he was doing.

  I was like the tumor on his life. He found this group of cool friends, and I wasn’t meshing with the cool friends. They could just tell. Cool kids have this sense where they just know that you aren’t one of them, right? It also didn’t help that about three months earlier, my friend Joey had dared me to shave my head.

  I did that because he dared me to and I didn’t want to look like I was chicken.

  Marc

  Oh, no! People who don’t know who they are can’t shave their heads!

  Allie

  Yeah, exactly! I didn’t know who I was.

  Marc

  I did that.

  Allie

  It was re
ally bad timing. It was about two weeks before I discovered that I’m interested in boys. I had no view of self before this—no self-consciousness, nothing. Then, I shaved my head and I discovered, “Wow! I am not pretty!” I had giant braces. When you do something like that—when you do something that’s so obviously—it just shows that you don’t know how to do the things that show people you can be one of them. They see you and they’re like, “There’s something wrong here.”

  MARIA BAMFORD

  My dad sent me to a Dale Carnegie training course on How to Win Friends & Influence People. For eighteen weeks I went with some businessmen and women, and it saved me. I was super depressed. I was sleeping all day through school. I took the course and suddenly I was able to have friendships.

  I just had a format of how to talk to people. Because I had so much anxiety. So after taking the course, I would say, “Hi, Marc. Marc, it’s really great to see you. You know, Marc, your set was so great last night, Marc. I really mean that.”

  Then you listen to people and then you tell the person back what they just said, but with a positive spin on it. It was fantastic, I tell you. Like, immediate results.

  Then it all crashed down when I went to college, and people on the East Coast were like, “Why are you talking like that to me? Just calm down.” I think there was an air of hysteria with my Dale Carnegie techniques in college because I was very afraid, so I’m sure they were telling me to calm down for a good reason.

  GILLIAN JACOBS—ACTOR

  My interests were always very different from what other kids my age were into, so I think that we didn’t really have a lot to talk about, and the more they didn’t understand me, the louder I talked about what I was into, so they just didn’t know what to make of me.

  My mom would only let me buy clothes that she approved of, so I wore a lot of sweater sets in high school because she liked sweater sets. I remember going to an outlet store and wanting to buy a skirt. It was not a revealing skirt, it was a floor-length skirt, but my mom was like, “I don’t like it. The material looks cheap.” She wouldn’t let me buy it. I was dressed like a middle-aged woman.

  AMAZING JOHNATHAN—COMEDIAN, MAGICIAN

  I used to be able to bend spoons. I figured out how to bend a spoon using my mind. It was just misdirection. I would make them look away for a second and I would bend it.

  I did it really well, and I did it for my physics teacher, who I really admired. He said to me, “Is that real? Are you really doing this or is it a trick?” I was really unpopular in school. I was not standing out at all. I lied and I said, “Yeah, I can really do it,” thinking that would be the end of it.

  Nah.

  The next hour, I’m sitting in class, and I hear on the speaker, “John Szeles, please come to the principal.” Shit, this has something to do with the spoon bending, I know it does.

  I walk in there, there’s my mom and my dad. They were called out of work. A bunch of spoons on the desk and a local reporter. I’m like, “Fuck. This is not good.”

  They wanted me to demonstrate my powers. My mom took me aside and said, “Can you really do this, or are you just lying?” I looked her straight in the eye, and I said, “I can really do this.” It’s like a snowball going downhill. I said, “I can really do it.” I proceeded to bend all the spoons and they freaked out. I bent everything.

  The reporter, he’s chomping at the bit to do this great story with the psychic kid. I had to figure a way out of it because I figured the local magicians would bust me on it and make me a fraud. Like magicians do. Magicians, they busted Uri Geller for doing it. They’ll bust me too. If it’s in the paper, you can bet someone’s going to come forward and go, “That’s bullshit.”

  This is how I got out of it. I told my mom that I wanted to be a normal kid. I didn’t want to be a freak at school. I just wanted to be a normal kid. I didn’t want everyone looking at me like I was weird. She bought it. They all bought it. Nobody did the story, but it leaked. This is the good part. It leaked out and I didn’t get that press, which I didn’t want, but everyone thought I was mysterious. I got mad pussy my senior year. I was the Man Who Fell to Earth. If a chick thinks that you can read her mind or anything like that, you’re in.

  If I was with a girl, when they’d leave the room, I’d go through their purse, take their license out, get their birth date, know their zodiac sign, I have all the details. Would put it back fast in their purse. They come back and we’d be doing lines and all that. Let me touch your forehead for a minute. Boom! You’re a Virgo.

  JON GLAZER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I was probably eight when my parents got divorced. I have vague memories of it, but I remember just crying and sitting on the steps and just being really upset and yelling, but I don’t remember the moment. It’s just all vague, but I do remember it being upsetting.

  My stepdad told me about when he and my mom announced they were getting married. I was in high school. He said he was actually very impressed about how I handled it. They just told me they were getting married. I remember those first moments. I was probably fourteen and he said I just sat there quietly, just took it in. Got up from the table, went upstairs. Put on shorts and a T-shirt and my running shoes and just went jogging, but it wasn’t like I could go running somewhere and then come back. We lived in this apartment complex that had a loop. They told me they were getting married and then I just left and they watched me run laps. He said he was very impressed about how I was handling this and how I was dealing with it.

  I remember when my dad told me he was getting remarried the first time, I was in the sixth grade and I was taking violin lessons and he picked me up. My mom always picked me up, so right away I’m like, “All right, okay. Something’s not right.” And then, “Hey, I thought we’d go get a bite to eat. Anywhere you want to go.” I was like, “All right, what the fuck is going on?” There was a sub shop that I liked right across the street. It was more about let’s just go there. It wasn’t like I was going to say, “Oh great, let’s go to this great place.” I just knew something was up.

  We went there, but it wasn’t a sit-down place. We get these sandwiches and just go sit in his car in the parking lot. It’s facing the school across the street and I’m just sitting there very tight, eating my sub, and it’s right next to me, tight to my chest, and I felt like I knew what was coming. I’m trying to think about what is going on. I’m like, “Oh, I think I know what’s about to happen.” We’re sitting there and quietly eating. He’s like, “Hey, so I’ve got some news for you. Just wanted to let you know that Shelly and I decided to get married.” I can just feel my body just crunching, super tense and just not sure. Didn’t know how to handle it, but it was upsetting and it shouldn’t have been. It should have been like, “Oh, great. Great, good for you.” Shelly was awesome. She was so cool, but I just didn’t know how to handle it.

  I did not say a word. I just sat there, just eating my sandwich. Probably not even eating it, but just holding it. We just sat there in silence and then eventually he started the car and drove me back to my mom’s. It was really fucking weird and I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it, not because we’re avoiding it, I always just forget. I feel like I have to know what he was thinking at the moment, how he felt. So weird.

  AMY SCHUMER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  My mom leaves my dad. Has an affair with my best friend’s dad. Breaks up their family. I’m in school. We’re trying to still be best friends. Like, we were best friends. It was crazy.

  Marc

  People forget that when you stick your dick into something that’s nearby, the ripple effect is going to be fairly profound.

  Amy

  That vagina’s going to be at a PTA meeting with your wife next week. It sucked.

  Marc

  So the whole town was affected by it.

  Amy

  Yeah. She was Hester Prynne. I was like, “I love my mom. She’s my family, so fuck you guys.” Then years later, I was like, “Mom, how
could you do that?”

  When I was sixteen, I got angry. I played volleyball pretty seriously. I was on this club team, and it was preliminaries for the Junior Olympics. My mom was a chaperone. We had to go to San Jose, from New York to San Jose. I got caught shoplifting while at this tournament, so I was benched the whole tournament. I’m standing there with my knee pads around my ankles, and my mom’s just standing there for the whole weekend having to stare at me with hatred, but I could always stare right back at her and be like, “Yeah, but you ruined my life.”

  RON FUNCHES

  My dad had a drug problem for a while. I’m assuming a few, but mostly cocaine.

  Marc

  That’s why your parents split up, because of the drugs? Your mom was like, “Fuck this. I’m going to Chicago with the kids. When you get your shit together, give me a call”?

  Ron

  Yeah. He didn’t call for several years. He started to get in touch a little bit later, and he was going to Portland to work in construction, and Chicago wasn’t working out too well for me. My dad was never a positive influence for me. He wasn’t there to parent me, but he still wants to then offer advice. He wants me to be a super Christian.

  Marc

  When did that come around? After the drugs left?

  Ron

  Yeah, of course. You’ve got to always replace one thing with another. I was just getting through high school, and then out of the high school just hanging out and working at canneries, or Chuck E. Cheese.