Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

JON HAMM—ACTOR, DIRECTOR

  My dad had a lot of sadness in him. His first wife passed away suddenly. My mother, his second wife, passed away at a very young age. They were divorced at that point, but still, that’s a bummer.

  Marc

  You remember your mom passing away.

  Jon

  Yeah. Vividly. No fun. She had cancer and it was no good. She was single. I was living with her. She got custody and I’d go every other weekend to my dad’s. She had just massive, rapid abdominal cancer. This is 1980 in St. Louis. Obviously, it’s not like we were living in the Mayo Clinic or anything, or Manhattan where there’s up-to-date blah blah blah. There was just no treatment. It was kind of like, well, let’s cut it out. We’ll see what we can do.

  They took out a bunch of her colon and they didn’t get it all and it was in her liver, in her stomach, and that’s a wrap.

  It was not fun. It was not a good time. You’re ten, so you have no mechanism to deal with it either. There’s just nothing. You have family and you have friends, but your friends are ten. We’re not going to get a beer and commiserate. It’s going to be, “You want to play kickball?” All right. That’s all we got.

  It’s the lamest expression in the world, but it is what it is and you can’t do anything but get through it.

  LESLIE JONES—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  The conversation my dad and I had before he passed was, because, like, he used to always give my brother favor and I used to be like, “You never had to take care of me. My brother, you had to bail out of jail, you had to do all kinds of stuff. You never had to take care of me. I never came to you to borrow money. You never had to take care of me, ever. Even when I dropped out of school, I took care of myself, and I was just always wondering why you were always so fucking hard on me.”

  He said, “Because of just what you said, I never had to take care of you. Your brother, I’ve had to take care of him.” He was like, “You’re the one thing that I’m going to be proud that I had, and you’re so funny. It was all worth it because you are really funny.”

  It was good to get there before he passed.

  “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC—MUSICIAN, ACTOR, DIRECTOR

  It’s always hard for me to relive my parents’ deaths because it was the singular most traumatic thing that ever happened to me and I still feel the pain to this day. The shock has worn off, for the most part, but it’s a pain that I still carry with me.

  I was on the road and I got a phone call from my wife, in tears. I thought at the time that if she called up in tears, “Oh, her bird died. This is horrible.” It turned out, my parents both had passed away because of the flue being closed in their house and they had the fireplace going. They both died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

  It was, obviously, horrible. I could barely function, but I figured I had a responsibility. I had a show that night. I was in the middle of a tour. I had a small army of people depending on me, so I put my blinders on and I went into denial mode. I basically went onstage every single night, did the full show, acted like everything was just fine, but afterward—no meet and greets, no nothing. I just went and collapsed and just was a sobbing mess. In a way, it kind of got me through it because I needed denial at that point. It was just too much for me to accept. I was able to, for a couple hours every night, to have a break from the horror of my situation. Every now and then I’d have a lyric talking about my mother or whatever, and then I’d be like, “Ohhh.”

  I’ve heard from so many people over the years that my music has gotten them through a very hard, trying time of their life. I thought, “Well, maybe it’ll do the same for me.” In a way, it did. Here’s the thing, I always knew intellectually that someday my parents were going to pass away and I’d have to deal with it, but I never thought it would be out of the blue and at the same time.

  Also, I thought I’d be able to deal with my grief very privately, but instead, it became a worldwide news story. I didn’t want people walking on eggshells around me. I didn’t want people treating me differently. I was doing a comedy show every night. I didn’t want people going there and feeling sorry for me.

  I think the first night, I don’t even know if my crew knew. I think maybe the guys in my band knew. Then, it became a headline on CNN, so at that point everybody knew. We had a slide that we showed before the show started, saying: “Tonight’s performance is in honor of my parents.” It was sort of like dealing with the eight-hundred-pound gorilla and getting it out there. At that point, we did the show as normal. The outpouring of support from the fans was just unbelievable. I didn’t ever think I’d want to share my grief with people, but it really was cathartic and was nice to know that people had my back.

  MOLLY SHANNON—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  My dad raised two kids by himself. My mom died when I was four and a half, so it was hard on him. He was a single dad left with a four-year-old and a six-year-old. My little sister Katy was also killed in that car accident, and he was driving.

  It was a station wagon, and it was late at night, and he was going to drop my cousin off, and my aunt let our cousin’s friend go with us too. My dad and I talked about it later. I think he would have liked my mom to drive, but she was like, “No, you can drive.”

  I don’t know if he nodded off. I don’t know what happened, but at that time, they didn’t have breakaway lampposts, so he just smashed into it. Nowadays they’ll bend, or they’ll break away. My mom was in the front and he was in the front. My sister and I were in the very back of the station wagon, so we were bruised up, but my baby sister, Katy, and my cousin Fran were in the middle, so they were killed. It was very sad.

  We went to the hospital, and I remember having a fantasy that they were still alive. My sister and I were in beds next to one another in the hospital, and developmentally there’s such a big difference between a six-year-old understanding what’s going on, and a four-year-old. I was really out of it, in fantasy, like, “They must be somewhere else up there, on a different floor.” My sister kind of knew what had happened, and kind of had to answer questions and talk to people. She was the one that was the most with it. Basically, I remember thinking, “I want to go see Katy.” I really wanted to see my baby sister, because I thought she must be with the other babies.

  There were a lot of kids on our floor and I was helping them. They didn’t have parents coming to visit them, so I helped those kids. I remember playing with them, and helping them, and I think that’s instantly where I went to. Then there were all these people bringing us toys and all that stuff. I was like, “Why are all these people bringing us toys?” Relatives bringing us toys, and then I said, “I really want to go see my mom and my sister now.” I assumed they were alive. I finally put on my robe and wanted to go see them.

  They were like, “I’m so sorry.…” I think an aunt told me or something. “We’re so sorry, but they’ve gone to heaven.” I was like, “What? Can we get there? Could we fly there, or take a hot air balloon, or could we take an airplane?” I just couldn’t accept the fact that we couldn’t get there. I kind of kept on that for a long time. It’s very complicated, but I think there’s no way that you can take that in. It would just annihilate you when you’re that little, so you just kind of go into some fantasy of waiting and waiting.

  Then in the night, I remember screaming, “I want my mommy!” I just remember feeling so deflated.

  Marc

  Did you envy people who had moms? Did you have anger?

  Molly

  I was so close to my dad that I didn’t really feel that way, but I remember if a teacher put her arm on me, I was like, “That feels so good.” It made me feel really shy. I think for teachers like in third grade, I didn’t want to get too close, so I would act really bad, just so I could be in control. I was like, “I could act bad so that way I’m in charge.” Does that make sense?

  I think when you’re that little, you feel like you must have done something wrong to make them leave. You’re too self-centered, so you think you
must have done something wrong.

  I have a different take on everything now. I feel so lucky. I feel like I don’t take things for granted at all, because I feel like, “Oh my God, I pulled myself up out of the wreckage, and I created a life for myself, and now I’m a mom, and I have children, and I got help for myself so that I can start my own family.” It’s a miracle. My sister and I talk about it. We feel really lucky. It might not have gone that way, you know?

  ARTIE LANGE—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, RADIO HOST

  My father was a very blue-collar guy. He climbed roofs for a living. He got to about ninth grade, my father. He grew up on the street in Newark. The toughest, most street-smart guy I ever knew in my life. I looked up to him. He was like my best friend but too much of a best friend. You find that out later in life.

  He fell off a roof a week after my eighteenth birthday and became a quadriplegic.

  I worked with him. My job was to hold the ladder and that day … I sound like I grew up in the 1940s sometimes, but I used to hustle pool. My buddies and I used to play nine ball and we used to go to the local county college and go into the game room. It was free fucking money. We would pretend we didn’t know each other and we’d get into a nine ball game. If you hit the five in, it was twenty bucks. The nine was thirty. My buddy would set me up to shoot them in and the third guy would pay me. Then I’d split the money with my friends, until a guy found out and we almost got our ass kicked.

  That day I was supposed to hold the ladder and I didn’t go to work with him. I told him I was going to look for a job and I went to shoot pool. I shot pool all day. I got home and my mom said, “He fell off a roof.” He put the ladder on top of a picnic table to get to the top of the roof and he went to swing a hammer and it fell. He fell thirty feet on his head and became a quadriplegic. Had no insurance. Nothing. We went broke. He lasted four and a half years before he died. I think he offed himself through the help of crazy friends that he had. There was no autopsy.

  Marc

  You felt guilty?

  Artie

  God yeah, that I wasn’t there to hold the ladder. For a long time.

  He would ask me to kill him every week. He’s like, “Just fucking shoot me.” He couldn’t move from the neck down. We had to feed him. It’s a living hell. He always said God was punishing him. He was an atheist, my father. My mother, big Catholic. My father would always say to me, “Don’t tell your mother I told you, but there’s nothing fucking up there.” He’d always say to me, “Do all the shit, get the confirmation, but there’s nothing up there.” Then when you’re a quadriplegic for four years, he started to think maybe there is.

  If there is a heaven or hell, I hope God gave him his hell here.

  JACK ANTONOFF—MUSICIAN, PRODUCER

  I had two siblings, now one is dead. My youngest sister, about eleven years ago, died of brain cancer. It’s terrible. It’s just the worst thing ever.

  We have this argument a lot in my family. When you get that question—How many siblings do you have?—what do you say? So I usually say, “I have a sister.”

  She was thirteen, I was eighteen. My entire life is based off that moment. Music, everything. It was the single most important thing that ever happened to me and probably will happen to me. Something froze there, and I think I’m constantly looking back on it. I’m thirty and I’m dealing with that at thirty. At forty, I’ll be dealing with that at forty. I don’t think that goes away. I wouldn’t want it to go away.

  MIKE DESTEFANO—COMEDIAN, DRUG COUNSELOR (1966–2011)

  When I was twenty-one, I found out I’m HIV positive. I was diagnosed with HIV. This is twenty-three years ago, and that’s what changed my fucking life. That’s what just changed every priority. When you know that you’ve got four or five years to live, for real, you change shit.

  I met my wife at the support group, the AIDS support group that we went to. I used to walk around and look at women that were in this particular building, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and I’d go, “Oh, I hope she has AIDS!” That’s the way it was back then, it was like, “Please, I hope she has AIDS.”

  I met this beautiful girl, Fran, and she had been a recovering addict as well, and she was also positive. One thing that the HIV thing gave me was, it gave me that sense of “I don’t give a fuck, I’m not afraid of anything,” and that’s what I was always looking for as a kid. I wanted to be a gangster so I could be unafraid. I was on the fence. I lived on the fence most of my life. I was a kid riding my bicycle and I saw these two guys giving a cabdriver a beating, and when I say a beating, they were slamming his fucking head in the door of the car, they were fucking pulverizing this guy, and I remember looking at them, going, “I want to be like them,” and then I looked down at the guy that was being hit, and I felt bad for him. I was like, “This poor guy.” Then I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out, “Which one am I going to be? Those are the only two fucking paths.” That was like, “This is what I have to choose from.”

  We move to Florida because of the health. We were dying. We came down here, I was twenty-two, she was a little older than me, she was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and we literally came to Florida like two old people would do. That’s what my life was at that time. I didn’t know how long I would live. Back then, people got the virus, they died in four to five years. I expected that to happen.

  I noticed her getting sick during playing tennis, which is weird. We’re playing tennis back and forth, and she wasn’t moving as quick as she was. I said, “What’s the matter?” She says, “My legs hurt, I have pains in my legs.” We went to the doctor, and it was a thing called neuropathy, which meant that her immune system was really low and fucked-up. It was causing nerve damage in her body. That was the beginning of it. It was the beginning of such a long and fucking painful deterioration. It was a slow, fucked-up time for me back then.

  It was about a five-year period of slow deterioration, and then these rapid, fucked-up things, where she had pneumonia like fifteen times, she was in the hospital, and she was given her last rites a few times and survived it and came back. It was just a brutal, brutal time.

  I was her caregiver. I never thought of leaving her. I never even considered it. Today, it’s the greatest decision I’ve made. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done, was care for my wife. I’ll never do anything that great again. Fucking HBO specials, whatever you want to give me. Nothing will be better than that, because it was such a deep reckoning within myself that I am not a piece of shit. That I don’t deserve to stick needles in my arm. I am a good person. Look what I’m capable of. I’m capable of deep love and commitment. That was my whole life, was taking care of her.

  I was not in the room when she died. I had been by her side every night. Her mother had been in town the night she died, and her mother wanted to stay with her alone, and I left her there, and I went home, and that’s the night that she passed away. It’s not a very big deal to me. I know what I did for her.

  During her last days, she was in the hospice. I had just gotten a Harley, my first Harley. I rode up on one today. I love motorcycles. She came out and saw it, and she got upset. She was angry at me and she went back inside all pissed off. This gay dude that worked there— That’s a group of people that, without them I wouldn’t be alive. Gay men fucking saved my ass. The AIDS organizations, they’re all run by gays. The hospices, the nurses were all gay guys. They’ve got some deep well of love within them that’s just incredible.

  So she goes inside, and she was pissed off that I had the motorcycle. This gay guy, let’s call him “Bill.” I say, “Why is she so mad at me?” Bill says, “Well, she just feels like you’re moving on with your life and you don’t love her anymore, you have this motorcycle. You don’t need her anymore.” That was a strange thing, and I realized how much I did need her. I loved her, she was my best friend. What I did was, I went home and I brought some of my work shirts back to the hospice, and I brought them into her room and said, “Franny, my shir
ts are a fucking mess, I need you to iron them for me.” She got all, “Fuck you, I’m in hospice,” you know. I left, I come back twenty minutes later, all the shirts are ironed, she got up, and then she’s like, “Where’s the motorcycle?” Now she’s excited about it. I guess that guy was right. She just wanted to know that I still needed her, like I loved her, you know what I mean? People don’t know they’re dying. They feel like, “I’m alive right now.” Dying is an event, they pass away at one moment. Up until that moment, they are alive, and they want to be loved, and they want to give and share in that case.

  Now she wants to see the motorcycle. I take her out. She wants to sit on it. I put her on it. She wants to start it up. She’s wearing a paper dress, essentially, she’s got her morphine pole next to her and she’s sitting on this Harley; I’m worried about her burning her frigging leg off. She says, “Can you just take me for a little ride around the parking lot?” I’m like, “No, I can’t.” Then it just hits me, I’m like, “No, you have to. You’re in this moment, you have to do this motorcycle ride.” Fuck, of course I will, yeah. I’m riding around the hospice parking lot, and then my friend comes barreling in in this van who’s a cripple in a wheelchair, laughing, saying, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m riding Franny around.” Franny’s like, “Can we just go out on the street a little bit?” She’s holding the pole! It was a pole with four wheels on the bottom, and we’re riding around this hospice! You can hear the goddamn wheels clanging and banging. It was insane.

  I pass the front door and all these nurses are standing out front and they’re all crying. They’re watching us and they’re fucking crying. I didn’t know why they were crying. I was like, “Why are they crying?” I didn’t get what they were seeing. I didn’t know, because I was just in it. I was living it. I knew my wife, who had suffered, the suffering that she had been through in her life. She was a prostitute, she was a fucking heroin addict, she was beaten by fucking pimps, and this is her past, you know? Then she ends up with AIDS, and she’s dying. All she wants is a fucking ride on my motorcycle. What a gift, you know?