Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  M: Yeah, yeah.

  L: And you had an apron on and you were miserable. You were really working hard, and it was a very humbling moment in your life. And you were like, “Oh, you guys, I’ve got a break in a few minutes, so, you wanna hang out?” And I immediately liked you. Because, that humbling moment made me like you a lot. And it was interesting to then watch you go from being the kinda L.A., long hair, Kinison-pack, coked-up kinda guy. I watched you break that down. And I watched you start talking about who you were, instead of doing your bits as that guy.

  M: Yeah, yeah.

  L: I started watching you humiliate yourself more on stage, which is a good thing. I mean that in a good way.

  M: Yeah.

  L: You had a huge humility wave that started coming. I’ve always [thought] that your progress [came from] taking away more and more layers. Taking more of your defenses away from yourself.

  M: Not without a fight.

  L: No! But the fight is fun to watch.

  1

  The Situation in My Head

  I had a bad run-in with myself on a plane recently. I had just flown from Dublin to Chicago and hadn’t slept much. I was strung out. Tired. Tweaky. I changed planes in Chicago to fly to Los Angeles. Things were vibrating and I was edgy. I was in the exhaustion zone, feeling the kind of tired you can’t sleep off because you can’t sleep, because your blood is pumping caff einated dread and loathing.

  I was seated at the front of coach in an aisle seat, directly behind the first-class dividing wall and the flight attendant service area. It’s my favorite seat on a plane. I like watching people get on the plane so I can judge them. I like judging. I didn’t see any real problems among the passengers who awkwardly clumped onto the plane, but I definitely felt like I was in a better place than some of them, which helped take the edge off my mood. Judging works.

  We took off. The flight attendants were strapped in almost directly in front of me, facing me. I always scan their faces for fear. I rarely see it. When I do see something dark flicker across their faces, it usually seems like it has nothing to do with the job. More likely something personal that followed them onto the plane. But then again, what do I know. I project. Then I judge.

  The crew seemed pleasant. One woman in particular seemed genuinely nice: blond hair, about fifty, pretty in the classic California way. I always wonder when I see older flight attendants if they’ve been at it since the seventies, when things were crazy. Did she ever have sex in a cockpit? Did she survive a crash? Get tied up in a hijacking? Did she ever have sex in a bathroom with a passenger? With the pilot? I like to give my flight attendants a bit of backstory. I decided she was an out-of-control instigator of major in-flight mayhem back in the day. She got through it disease-free and didn’t end up in rehab. She started a family, her husband had a drug problem he couldn’t kick and left her, but she did all right. The husband had a lot of money, so she’s good. Humble and wise. She lives in Topanga with a few big dogs. Her kids are in college. Only a few people know her from her old life and one of them is the pilot on the flight I am on. That’s who I made the flight attendant up to be.

  Once we were up in the air I was crawling out of my skin. I couldn’t sleep and had definitely had enough of flying. I needed to walk around and judge. I walked down the aisle toward the back of the plane in hopes of going to the bathroom. I didn’t really have to go but sometimes it’s just nice to lock yourself in the bathroom of a plane and take a few minutes to look in the mirror. I reached the door of the bathroom and the little lock indicator said Vacant, but there was a man standing in front of the door. Hanging out, I guess. He was a Middle Eastern–looking man, olive-skinned with Semitic features—a dubious shade of brown. I looked at him and gave him a raised-eyebrow grunt, asking if he was waiting. He looked me right in the eye but didn’t speak for a moment. Then he shook his head no. It was a simple gesture, but seemed ominous and cryptic. I couldn’t understand why he was standing there. In retrospect he was probably just doing what I was doing. Stretching, moving around. But in that moment, when I looked into his eyes, fear shot through me. I was sure that this guy was up to something. He had that look in his eye. Scheming, driven, full of will and sacrifice. He was clearly Palestinian or Saudi and we were all in trouble. The worst of it was that I was sure I was the only one on the plane who knew that something truly awful was about to happen. I knew and he knew I knew. I could see it in that quick glance he shot me letting me know that he wasn’t going into the bathroom. No, he was going into the cockpit. It was that kind of look.

  I didn’t go into the bathroom. I lingered around in the rear flight attendant station thinking, watching, figuring out what had to be done. The suspicious-looking, dubious-shade-of-brown man started making his way down the aisle. I decided to follow him. I found out very quickly that it’s hard to discreetly follow someone on an aircraft. I gave him about ten steps, then I started pacing behind him down the aisle toward the front of the plane. He walked right through the division between the classes, from coach into business. I stopped in the service area, afraid to cross the class line, and watched him disappear behind the curtain. I was completely panicked. I knew he was heading for the cockpit. I hadn’t figured out what his plan was but I knew we were all in trouble and no else knew. I had to save us. I pulled the curtain back and focused intently on the man moving toward the front of the plane. I can only imagine what my face looked like or what kind of panic vibrations were peeling off me as I stood there trying to figure out a plan, my brain working the angles.

  “Is everything okay, sir?”

  It was the flight attendant, the one who’d been through some shit and come out on the other side. I turned. She looked concerned. Some part of me knew I couldn’t spill everything, that she wouldn’t understand if I just babbled out everything I knew. So this came out of my mouth:

  “Uh, well, there’s … a situation. In my head.”

  “Maybe you should sit down, sir,” she said, concerned, like I was the one with a problem.

  “Um. I think we … okay. Yeah, okay,” I said, letting go of my horrible knowledge and the impending crisis for a moment. “I’ll sit down. But … okay.”

  I sat down in my seat, my brain still feverishly running scenarios. I knew what was happening. I saw it in my mind. The dubious-shaded-brown man was already in the cockpit. He had on a pair of rubber gloves that had been soaked in an ancient toxin that he had achieved immunity to by exposing himself to it in small doses over the last year. He had already touched the neck of the pilot and copilot, who were in full cardiac arrest with a pinkish white foam coming out of their mouths as they gasped and writhed in their final throes. The man was moments away from taking control of the plane, plummeting us to a lower altitude, and putting us on a flight path into the target of his choice.

  I don’t make pretty pictures. Sometimes I wish my imagination were fueled by something other than panic and dread. But I don’t have control over my gift. It has control over me and I am dragged by it more often than not, away from the idyllic land of normal and onto the jagged shores of self-destruction. Imagining the worst has always been a great comfort to me. If there is turbulence there is an imminent crash. If she doesn’t pick up the phone, she is fucking someone. If there is a lump it is a tumor. By thinking like this I protect myself from disappointment. And if anything other than the worst-case scenario unfolds, what a pleasant surprise! The problem is that I am always walking around preparing for and reacting to the horrors of what my brain is making up, living as if every potential terror and every defeat were already happening—because in my mind, it always is. I think if I could just create a series of characters to enact all the heinous possibilities my brain manufactures to insulate me from joy, then I would be using my creativity in a safer way. I see maybe an animated series or perhaps several epic paintings, large canvases. I’m talking the whole wall of the gallery big.

  I don’t like animation and I’m not a painter. All I can do is imagine these hor
rors and share them with you.

  I sat in my seat powerless, waiting for the plunge. I was squinting hard and clutching the armrests when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see the entire flight crew standing over me. The one who seemed to be the leader, a hard-looking woman, asked, “Are you all right, sir? Do you need medical attention?” The kind flight attendant had betrayed me and now stood behind the monster in an apron who was interrogating me. I wondered how I became the problem. If they only knew what was about to happen they would be thanking me for being the one person perceptive enough to see it. I was actually hoping that we’d lurch into a sudden descent at that moment. I was hoping that they would all go flying toward the back of the plane, screaming and thumping along the ceiling. Then they’d know I was right.

  I noticed the other passengers were also looking at the problem, which was apparently me. I looked up at the huddled flight attendants, all feigning concern, and I said, “No, I’m good. Thanks.”

  As this ambush was unfolding I noticed the dubious-shaded-brown man making his way back down the aisle toward an empty seat. His seat. He shot a look at me with those same eyes in which I’d seen a deadly agenda minutes ago. Now they seemed to be smiling and nodding. Racist.

  “I’m really okay. Just tired. Sorry,” I said to the crowd looking down at me. They dispersed, warily. I was embarrassed.

  I sat there ashamed. I had profiled. I was delusional. I felt like everyone on the plane was looking at me, the weirdo who freaked out. I sat with my head down the rest of the flight. When I heard the landing gear engage I looked up and saw the flight attendants once again strapping themselves into their little seats. I was a little mad at the ex–wild woman. I thought she’d be cool but she ratted me out. I couldn’t hold anyone’s eye contact. Just before we touched down she leaned in and asked, “What happened up there?” I looked up at her. She looked caring and sympathetic at that moment. Reluctantly, in a quiet, shaky voice, I said, “I had a situation in my head.”

  She looked at me nodding and said, “It happens to all of us.”

  The wheels hit the tarmac.

  2

  Twenty-Six

  Years ago I did a particularly angry set onstage. I talked about AIDS, the end of the world, and how silly and hopeless life was. A guy came up to me after the show and asked, “Why comedy?”

  That was all he said. I was dumbfounded.

  I started doing comedy in the late eighties. I was raised in Albuquerque, but I went to school in Boston, and that’s where my career started, after I placed second in a regional competition sponsored by radio station WBCN. The competition was called the Comedy Riot. There were several rounds; we started out with a five-minute round, then a ten and after that a fifteen. That was probably about all the material I had when I started working, which was immediately after the contest.

  Back then there was an unspoken system in comedy. You started at open mics, then you opened or hosted, then you middled or featured, and then you graduated to headlining. Those were the hoops. The time it took to jump through them varied depending on opportunity and talent.

  So I started with the open mics. Boston had a few clubs but once I’d run through every one of them, I entered the world of one-nighters, road gigs usually contracted out by bookers to pubs, bars, bowling alleys, hotel conference rooms, dance clubs, VFW halls, college cafeterias, patios, parks, boats, or people’s homes—in other words, any type of venue other than one that was conducive to performing comedy. A place called the Boston Comedy Company would book you on a show and you’d go by their headquarters in a basement in Allston and pick up your directions. As an opener I would get anywhere from $50 to $125 to drive anywhere from ten to five hundred miles to open for another act. Most of the gigs were two-man shows. The opener did a half hour and the headliner did forty-five minutes and then you got the fuck out of there unless it was a two-nighter or on an island with no way off, like Nantucket and its Muse, a club that put you up in the “band house,” a cinder-block shack out back with bunk beds. There was no choice. There was no boat until the morning. Horrendous.

  I drove everywhere to do gigs anywhere: Pancho Villa’s in Leominster, Frank’s in Franklin, Cranston Bowl in Cranston, Rhode Island, Captain Nick’s in Ogunquit, Maine, Jimmy’s in Dedham, Nick’s at the Kowloon in Saugus, the University of Maine at Machias, the Taunton Regency, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Martha’s Vineyard, Margaritaville in Worcester. Low ceilings and stale beer and graffiti on the bathroom walls and crowds of angry New Englanders. Among these crowds I felt like a puzzling freak or a crazy but harmless visitor who for some reason demanded everyone’s attention all the time. Most of the time I drove home for hours half drunk, chain-smoking in my car and reliving my set. I always felt like I had survived something, that the simple fact that I made it through the show meant I was victorious. But the war wasn’t over yet: The next battle was in the car, the war I waged on myself. I’m not funny enough, that joke didn’t work, why can’t I stop sweating, fuck those people, I need more jokes, where the fuck am I, shit I don’t have a map. I’ll never forget the electricity of postperformance elation and self-flagellation, flying through the New England countryside at night in a VW Golf. Not romantic. But those gigs were my training. I learned to do comedy anywhere for anyone in almost any situation.

  One-nighters were contracted out for a certain amount of time and no headliner wanted to do a single minute of material more than necessary, so the opener had to do a full half hour or else get shit from the headliner, who’d be forced to stretch his material to make up the time. If you were opening you were also probably driving the headliner to the gig—so if you didn’t do your time, it could be a long ride home.

  Around the time I was starting out, a comic named Frankie Bastille had just moved to Boston from Cleveland. He has since passed and I’m not sure that many mourned him. He was a comic gypsy, a road warrior, a drug fiend, and a borderline criminal. I liked him but I was in the minority. One of the first one-nighters I did was with Frankie. We would go on to do several more but the routine was always the same as that first time. I’d go to his apartment building to pick him up. As I was walking down the hall I’d hear a voice screaming down the hallway from behind a closed door somewhere, “Where’s my tooth? Where’s my fucking tooth?”

  That first time I knocked on his door, Frankie opened it and smiled big, revealing a missing front tooth.

  “Hey, man. You the opener?”

  “Yeah. I’m Marc.”

  “Frankie. I can’t find my tooth.”

  Frankie had a false front tooth on a mouthpiece that he would always seem to misplace. The ritual of finding the missing tooth repeated itself every time I had to pick Frankie up. More often than not the tooth was very close by, sometimes in his pocket.

  He looked ragged in a rock-and-roll kind of way, a bit like Keith Richards, which he was aware and proud of. He had a Tibetan chant tattooed around one of his arms and he was charming like a con man. You wanted to be around him but you didn’t want to get too close, leave him alone with your stuff, or owe him anything.

  That first gig I worked with Frankie we had to drive a couple of hours into Connecticut to do a show at a bar and dance club. The entire way down Frankie laid down the law. He kept saying, “The most important thing is doing your time.” He also recited to me a poem called “The Road,” about being a road comic. I can’t recall what it was but it was earnest and celebratory, like a pirate shanty.

  I was nervous about doing my time. I had not done many gigs and was just getting up to around a half hour. The club was packed. There was a disco ball hanging over the crowd and lots of mirrors around. I took the stage and did all the jokes I had.

  When I’d finished my act, I said, “Thank you very much. You’re a great crowd. Now, let’s welcome your headliner to the stage. He does clubs and colleges all over … Frankie Bastille.” The crowd cheered but Frankie did not take the stage. The clapping tapered off and I was still standing at the mic.
No Frankie in sight. I tried again: “Please welcome, Frankie Bastille …” Nothing. The room is starting to get that awkward tension. I am not sure what to do. Then a voice comes out of the darkness, from the back of the room.

  “Twenty-six.”

  It was Frankie.

  “What?” I said, panicked, squinting into the darkness.

  “You did twenty-six minutes. You have four minutes left.”

  “Uh …”

  I scrambled and did a street joke and then brought Frankie up. He did his forty-five and we got in the car to drive home. I started to apologize but he cut me off.

  “You gotta do your time, man,” he said, and that was it.

  I did not aspire to be Frankie. He was infamous in certain comedy circles but not really respected or liked. No one really knew him and he liked it like that. In the eighties there were a lot of people doing comedy who just seemed to be keeping a few steps ahead of the IRS, ex-wives, and parole officers. Frankie was one of them. There was a story that he was arrested walking off stage for a parole violation and the cops found out because they had heard him on the radio plugging his weekend show. He learned his lesson. From that point on he didn’t give out head shots. He didn’t want to be on the marquee or in the paper. He didn’t stay in any one town very long. He always had people after him for one reason or another.

  I figured Frankie liked drugs but I had no idea what he was really up to until we took a trip down to Cape Cod. The gig down there was at a massive Chinese restaurant called Johnny Yee’s. The comedy show followed a Polynesian dance show. The restaurant had a huge stage that they pulled out for the dancers and then rolled back in when they were done. The stage that was left for us was six feet high and you had to walk up some stairs to get on it. There was a moat of a dance floor between you and the first row of tables.

  It was in Yarmouth, so it was about an hour-and-a-half drive. I picked up Frankie, we looked for his tooth, and hit the road. Once we got onto the Cape Frankie asked me for a dollar bill. I gave him one. He rolled it up. He pulled a small packet out of his pocket. It was a bundle of what looked to be ten smaller packets. I know now these were dime bags. He ripped one open, stuck one end of the bill in the bag and one in his nose, and snorted the contents. He sniffed a bit, looked at me, smiled, and said, “You ever try heroin?”