by Marc Maron
Estee called Bonnie and Bonnie said, “Do not give him my fucking phone number.”
So I went down there another night. She was there. We went out for pizza. We had pizza. Cut to me going down on her in the car a little bit.
Marc
That was the first date? That’s unorthodox. That’s what you went with? I’m going to go down on her in the car.
Rich
I had to show that I’m a giver. I didn’t ask her to go down on me. A lot of comics would. Not me.
Marc
You’re a real prince.
Rich
Hey, it was a Mercedes. It wasn’t a crappy car. It was a nice car.
Then we just started dating a little. When I’d come to LA, we’d fool around. She was great. She was perfect. I was in LA taping something. I’m staying at a great hotel. She came over in the day, we went to the pool, and we ended up going to my room. We had sex and she got up and left. Are you crazy? She left!
Marc
You must have thought that was the best thing ever. You’re like, I’m in love.
Rich
I thought, “This is it. This is it.”
CAROL LEIFER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR
I like funny people. I don’t think people realize, when you’re coming up as a comic, and especially at that time, every night I went out to a comedy club. You’re at the clubs with other comics and you’re doing three sets a night.
Marc
I dated a couple. It makes sense, but the only difficult thing about it is that there is a point where someone’s going to overshadow the other one. To be supportive effectively becomes difficult when your egos are involved, or if opportunities are had by one or the other, it becomes a mess. Did you find that?
Carol
It’s complicated, it’s definitely a complicated situation, and I always look at something like the Academy Awards, when Julia Roberts won the Oscar and she was with Benjamin Bratt. I always watch them up onstage and it’s like, “Bye-bye relationship.”
It’s just too hard. In having a successful relationship now, having someone who’s not in the business really has worked better for me.
Marc
Am I going to get married again?
JANEANE GAROFALO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I would assume you would. You seem to be a romantic in that way. I don’t know why you’re not just content to live with people, but you seem to like to get married. There’s nothing wrong with getting married. It’s marrying the right person. I myself have never wanted to be married either. I have no problems living with people, I just don’t want to be married.
FRED ARMISEN—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, MUSICIAN
There’s always a way, if you really like someone, to keep them in your life. It doesn’t have to be dating.
Marc
So why would you get married again?
Fred
Because it’s so intoxicating. It’s so exciting. This is going to sound very shallow, but I get lost in fantasy a lot.
Marc
Really? The guy who does characters?
Fred
I would hope that I had a place where I didn’t get lost in it, but the fantasy of this person. This is something that’s happened to me a million times. I have a problem with intimacy where all of a sudden there’s a real person there.
I’m trying to fix this. I’m trying to get better at this, but something happens in me where it’s almost like an amnesia. It’s almost like waking up and going, Where am I? Who is this person? Why is this person looking me directly in the eye and having a conversation?
Marc
Who usually ends it, you or her?
Fred
It’s me becoming impossible. I shut it down. There’s infidelity, there’s cheating. It’s the most chaos I’ve had in my life.
I say these things because I’m not finished being a person. A person who I can be intimate with is a person who I don’t have sex with. Like Carrie Brownstein. I find true intimacy there. I know that I have it. I know that I’m not shut down.
CARRIE BROWNSTEIN—MUSICIAN, COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
Fred and I hit it off. We did not date. Which I’m certain is why we’re still really good friends. He would agree.
Marc
Was there a discussion?
Carrie
Yeah, there have been discussions.
Marc
Is it an ongoing discussion?
Carrie
We revisit that. But now for sure, we need to just be friends.
DAN HARMON—DIRECTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER
Whenever I’m going back to therapy I’m going because I’m in danger of fucking up with somebody who deserves better. I shut down. It’s all negative space. It’s all “what’s not there.” I don’t do anything bad. I never cheat, I don’t even flirt. I don’t compete. I also don’t make a lot of eye contact. I go into a domestic kind of cocoon. Stop having sex, I stop taking showers, I focus on my work.
CHELSEA PERETTI—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I max out in relationships it seems like at a year or two. I get cheated on, or … I don’t know. This is where I feel like I will be alone perhaps forever, but I do feel like things get uninteresting or something. I get that thing of like, “Oh, maybe there’s someone else who has something better.” And then you get to see that everyone has flaws eventually once you’re a year in or something. Also, I don’t feel like I’m always myself until a year in, and that’s also problematic. I’ve been cheated on actually many times, so.…
Marc
How do you handle that?
Chelsea
Depression. I shut down emotionally. Sometimes I’ll try to work it out, and then I break up with a person, and then I go through a period of total relief and feeling powerful. I feel freed of things.
I think I’m evolving, but it’s very hard for me to just say, “This doesn’t really feel like it’s working. Let’s not go further.” Instead I’ll say, “This doesn’t feel like it’s working, but we have so much fun eating dinner,” and just, “Let’s give it two more years. I like cuddling.” You know?
Marc
Yeah, I don’t know how the hell to get out of things. I usually wait until it explodes into some dramatic mess.
Chelsea
Yeah, me too, but my goal as a human being is to be able to be more honest about “This doesn’t really feel like it’s working.”
AMY SCHUMER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I feel, with men, like if you and I were together, say we’re married, and you have sex with someone else, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything about your feelings for me. I believe that’s true for men.
Marc
But if you were in that relationship, would you be able to make that distinction?
Amy
Two, three years ago, no fucking way. Like, run for your life, but now, I don’t know. I don’t want to ever find out about it, especially if it didn’t mean something to you. Because I believe that something’s going on with you. People go through phases. It would be very hurtful, but I don’t believe that having sex with someone else necessarily affects your feelings for the person that you’re with.
Marc
Have you ever dated an enraged dick Jew?
LENA DUNHAM—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
Like fifteen of them. It was my specialty before my current relationship.
I was raised by a decidedly nonabusive man and by an intensely self-actualized feminist, and then when I found my way into the world as an adult woman embarking on my sexual life, and saw that I had this incredible drive to find myself in dark situations where I wasn’t being treated with the respect that I thought I or even any human deserves.
I would have walked right out if somebody screamed in my face or was abusive to me in any physical way. It was much more just like people who have a dark relationship with themselves, an uncomfortable relationship with their sexuality and expressed that through hate
and disdain for the women that they’re with, disguised as humor and a need to be obliterated half of the time.
I got all the dark stuff of dating a comic minus the pleasure of dating somebody funny. They’re needy people who want to pretend that they don’t need you. Needy people who want to pretend you’re not an important role in their life. People who aren’t happy for you when you’re successful. People who don’t believe in you. People who act like they’re doing you a favor by being attracted to you, all of those things factor into my early dating life.
I’m not describing one boyfriend or one incident. I’m describing a chain of people and situations that I put myself through. They were painful and they took a good four years off of the evolution and health of my self-esteem, and they seemed like these cool explorations of a life that I had never known, and in reality, they were super damaging.
I do definitely have something like “look at me now” energy directed at ex-boyfriends and I don’t really want to own that. But how can you help it? You must have some of that toward people who you feel didn’t understand?
Marc
My second wife said, “You’re not going to be famous until you’re dead.”
Lena
Really? You’re alive.
Marc
I’m alive.
Lena
And a lot of people really like you.
Marc
Yeah, yeah. Trying to accept that now.
Lena
I feel really safe with a lot of the men in my life. I feel safe with my dad and I feel safe with my boyfriend Jack and I feel safe with Judd Apatow and I feel safe in my cast, but sometimes I feel like I go into a situation with a guy I don’t know ready to feel mistreated or manhandled and I’m pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t happen.
Marc
The way I’ve explored that lately is that I was in a relationship for three and a half years. I don’t even think she really liked me. There was an age difference and we both had other problems, but it became clear that I was interchangeable and that she didn’t really like me necessarily. The way I framed it in my head is that everything was going pretty well for me at that point, but I didn’t hate myself. So I needed to outsource that job.
NICK GRIFFIN—COMEDIAN, WRITER
Somebody was talking to me the other day about going to marriage counseling, and they said marriage counseling generally doesn’t help the marriage but it does point out what’s wrong with it by a third party. I remember we went to counseling and she said, “He doesn’t do this,” and I thought to myself, “I don’t do that. And I’m not going to.” I knew she was absolutely right and she hit it right on the head and I thought we’re not moving forward. There’s nowhere to go because I’m not going to do that.
It was my fault for the most part, I think, pretty much.
Once you walk out of marriage counseling, there’s no resolution and you don’t feel better, so even if you’re still married there’s just waiting until next week. There’s no having sex in between the sessions.
NATASHA LEGGERO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR
I met this guy who was Australian, and he was like forty-two and I was twenty-two. I gave up my New York apartment, my rent-controlled apartment. I moved to Australia to be with him. I thought he was so sophisticated. I got there and he was a con artist.
I was like, “God, these guys are so lame in New York! I want someone who knows what a wine list looks like and how to read a wine list.” I just wanted someone sophisticated.
So I meet this guy, and he kind of looked like Mick Jagger, he had this cool striped blazer and he was really soft-spoken. He was like, “I just came back from this new festival called Burning Man.” It was the first year of Burning Man. He was like, “I’m making a documentary on the information super highway,” which was the Internet, obviously. He was like, “I do book reviews for the Australian Financial.” He did book reviews, he was an intellectual property lawyer. He was just fascinating to me! I was like, “Oh my God! I can’t believe that I met this person.”
Then we had a few dates. He would take me to the Algonquin Hotel. We would meet at the Algonquin and eat at the Ivy!
He went back to Australia. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to be with this man!” My older friends were like, “Natasha, I’ve known people like this. I don’t think you should go.” I am like, “No, No. I am going to go.” Then finally, I gave up all of my stuff and I went there. I was, like, twenty-two. I got there and in my mind I was like, “We are going to literary parties!” Because he does book reviews, he’s a lawyer, and he must be rich.
I get there. First, he picks me up from the airport and he looks worried. I think he couldn’t believe that I came. It looked like he hadn’t slept.
I am like, “Oh, when are we going to start eating caviar?” And we go to his little shack. It’s a fine, little studio apartment. He draped purple felt all over the walls to try to make it fancy. There was IKEA furniture. I was kind of disoriented because of the flight to Australia. I was like, “I am just going to lie down.” I lay down, and I woke up to the Seinfeld theme song. He was like, “Seinfeld’s starting!” He watched television all day. I was in Australia with this guy who I thought was my dream man, and he would just want to watch television and John Candy movies.
Then it started. I couldn’t answer the phone. He was getting money from other women. He was just a crazy person. The signs were every day. We would get into three fights every day. He would be like, “Don’t use that! That is not the knife you use to butter the bread!” He would get really mad at me for stuff like that. I would bring him his coffee in the morning. He would be like, “How could you expect me to look at that much liquid this early in the morning! It’s too full!” I think I had Stockholm syndrome or something.
We didn’t have any money. I was like, “I thought you were a book reviewer?” Then I would see him reading the want ads. He was like, “Well, we need some money, Wiener.” He would call me Wiener. He was like, “We need some money! You need to go out and get a job.” I got this waitressing job and he would sit there and stare at me while I would wait tables! Then they fired me. Then I got a job at a brothel answering phones for, like, a day because he got really mad.
He would take the money. It would be, like, thirty or sixty dollars, and spend it all on champagne and picnic food. He was like, “We have to walk this way because the roses will be blowing. The eastern winds are right now. If we walk up this street, even though it’s longer, we will get the smell of the roses.”
I would be in his house, so I started digging through his shit. I was like, “What is happening here? I know something is wrong.” I remember getting on my hands and knees. I was like, “God, please give me a sign.” Then the phone rang. He was like, “Wiener, I need you to take your university money and put it in the mailbox.” I’m like, “Why? That’s my money! That’s $1,200!” He was like, “Just do as I say!”
I get down there, and there is this girl bawling. She’s like, “Give me that money!” I was like, “What? I thought it was for Alex?” She is like, “No! He needs to pay for my abortion!”
I asked him, “Did you have sex with her?” He would just say, “I was with no one.” I would be like, “No, but did you do it?” He would just keep repeating, “I was with no one.” I think that is a tactic that con artists use. I forget. It’s called something. You just keep repeating something until the person believes it.
Marc
It’s called lying.
Natasha
I believe he had some kind of antisocial personality disorder, maybe.
This is how people like that lie: I remember we were on a date at someone’s house back in New York, and they were playing Neil Young. I was like, “Oh, I love Neil Young. My favorite Neil Young album is Hawks and Doves.”
He was like, “You know Hawks and Doves?”
I was like, “Yes!”
In my head, in New York, I was like, “I have to move there! This
man knows my favorite album!”
I remember once when I was in Australia, I was looking through his music. I was like, “Don’t you have Hawks and Doves? I feel like listening to that.” He was like, “What’s that?”
He was such a unique person and very funny. We would be on the bus and he would be like, “Excuse me! Driver!” He would act like we were in a limo, on the bus. Everyone hated him in Australia. People were like, “Who is this guy?” People were worried about me. Strangers were like, “Are you okay?” He would be like, “Excuse me! Is this bus going to blah-blah, driver?” The bus driver was like, “Read the sign.” Alex would flip his scarf and be like, “Are you assuming, sir, that I can read?” He would say these crazy things to people.
One time we were at the store and I saw him stealing potatoes. He would steal things. I would be like, “Alex, you can’t steal!” I was raised really well. I would be like, “We have to pay for this!” He would try to dine and dash.
He always told me his dad was a doctor and his mother was from French royalty. “My mother would have loved you, your ankles are so small. That’s a sign of good breeding.” He was always telling me all of these things. Then when I went through all of his stuff one day, I found his birth certificate. It said his dad was an electroplater, which is a very low factory job.
I told my mom I needed $2,000 for a plane ticket back. It was only $800 and I paid for him to go back with me. Then we moved back to New York.
He was like, “I am not traveling all the way back to America without going to the Lake District in England!” We went to Thailand with my mom’s money. I ended up paying her back.