Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  This was what music was to me, magic. But it was a kind of magic I wanted to actually touch myself. It’s the irony or maybe the tragedy of being a fan that it’s not enough to let the music enter you like a drug or define and shape the world for you. You also want to somehow touch it and have it affirm you in more direct ways, whether you’re playing a riff like Chuck Berry or singing like Buddy Holly or buying Keith Richards’s guitar—or actually meeting your idols.

  In 1984 Lou Reed came to Boston to sign his album New Sensations at Strawberry Records in Kenmore Square, which at the time still had some grit to it. I had to go. I thought, “I’m going to go meet Lou Reed. What do I wear? How do I make an impression? How do I get Lou to validate me?” Some part of me believed it was just going to be him and me and we were going to have a conversation.

  I got to Kenmore Square and saw a line of people stretching out the door of Strawberry Records and winding down the street. I got on line behind a six-foot-five guy wearing a white jumpsuit. He had an amp strapped to his back and was playing Velvet Underground songs on his guitar. He was freakish looking. I should have spaced myself a few people behind him but I was excited. I didn’t know how I was going to follow that. I assumed that Lou would just move him along. A one-man tribute wearing a mock space suit is not necessarily the most flattering honor. I figured those kinds of people had to frighten Lou Reed because their weirdness wasn’t sexy, just weird.

  I wasn’t too worried. All I was thinking about was what I was going to say to Lou. How was I going to connect? I’d only have a moment to do it. My mind kept cycling through possibilities as I waited on line for about forty-five minutes, grasping my Transformer album in my sweaty fan hands. I finally got to the counter. I picked up New Sensations out of the bin on the way up. Some members of his new band grabbed both it and Transformer from me and signed both. Wait, what did they have to do with Transformer? It pissed me off.

  I finally got down the line to Lou. We were face-to-face. I hand him my records and I say, “How are you doing, Lou?”

  He says, “Good, man. What’s your name?”

  I say, “Marc.”

  He says, “Hey, Marc, how are you doing?” as he signs my records.

  I say, “Pretty good, Lou.” There’s a beat. I seize my moment.

  “Hey, Lou, what gauge pick do you use?”

  A little guitar talk. That was my big question. That was what was going to set me apart from the rest of the fans. And God bless Lou Reed, because he looked at me and said, “Medium, man, you’ve got to use a medium.”

  Contact. I’ve been using a medium pick ever since.

  10

  Lorne Michaels and Gorillas, 1994

  My mother always told me that I was a diaphragm baby. Which in my mind means I have an innate ability to overcome obstacles. In a race of 400 million, I was the winner. And then I had to bust through a diaphragm. God, I was ambitious when I had a tail. I had a biological imperative then, a goal. It was my job to propel bipolarity and a slight underbite into the next generation.

  As an adult I have been passionately banging and thrashing up against the ovum of show business for twenty-five years. I’ve been passionately banging and thrashing in general. It’s what I do. It is not unusual. I know you’ve probably heard that in show business it can take twenty years to create an overnight success but what you don’t hear is that that is the exact same amount of time it takes to create a bitter failure. You just don’t know what it’s going to be until the night before. It doesn’t have to be brought on by anything specific. Dreams don’t die with any sort of cacophony; there is no parade. The wind is just sucked out of you in a last sigh and you surrender.

  I’m beginning to realize that some things aren’t going to happen the way I had planned. That’s part of being an adult. All right, maybe I’m not going to be an astronaut. I’m going have to let that go. I’ll put it on the back burner. I’ll be mature about it, keep it as a hobby.

  Some people don’t even realize they’re bitter. If you don’t know whether you are or not, here’s a quick quiz you can give yourself. If you ever wake up in the morning and the first thing you say is “Oh, fuck, not again,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself in conversation with someone you know and that person brings up someone you both know and before he says another word you mutter, “That guy’s a fucking asshole,” you might be a little bitter. If you find yourself dismissing universally acclaimed landmark achievements, saying, for example, “The Godfather is an okay movie,” you might be bitter.

  Everyone is a little bitter. We’re born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, “No, you can’t.” That’s the big challenge of life—to chisel disappointment into wisdom so people respect you and you don’t annoy your friends with your whining. You don’t want to be the bitter guy in the group. It’s the difference between “I’ve been through that and this is what I’ve learned” and “I’m fucked. Everything sucks.” That said, be careful not to medicate bitterness because you’ve mistaken it for depression, because the truth is, you’re right: Everything does suck most of the time and there’s a fine line between bitterness and astute cultural observation.

  I had many dreams as a teenager. One was to be an artist—any kind of artist, preferably a comic. And if I was a comic, I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live. I loved John Belushi and Chevy Chase. Nowadays, that dream doesn’t even make sense to me: I never really did characters other than the one I am becoming and I certainly haven’t watched the show in years. But back in 1994 it almost happened. I had a meeting with Lorne Michaels.

  Lorne had seen me a couple of times and was considering me for the cast of Saturday Night Live. Along with SNL, Michaels produced Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I had appeared on the O’Brien show the night before the meeting. I was feeling like a player. I had smoked a little weed that morning so I was a little buzzed. I was also reading Bruce Wagner’s Force Majeure and there were times when I wasn’t real clear whether I was a character in the book or what was happening was really happening. I was on the precipice of realizing a dream I had since I was a teenager. I had been waiting in the SNL lobby for about an hour and a half when the head writer of the show came out. He seemed more nervous than I was and stammered out, “Okay, he’s ready to see you.”

  It was a private meeting in Lorne’s office. I walked in with the writer and Lorne was putting something on a bookshelf. Lorne Michaels is a big presence. He’s not really fat or tall, but in showbiz he is a god, possibly self-appointed. The head writer and I are standing there and he doesn’t acknowledge us. He just continues to work at the bookshelf. He has heard us walk in. It is already awkward.

  The head writer is seeming increasingly nervous and eventually says, “Lorne, Marc Maron is here.”

  Lorne turns around and says, “How was Conan last night?”

  “Fine, it was good. It was.”

  “Did they laugh at you? Were they laughing?”

  I looked at the head writer like what the fuck?

  “Yeah, I did pretty well.”

  “It’s better when they laugh, isn’t it?” he says.

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  Then Lorne turns around and says, “I don’t know what you think you are doing down there below Fourteenth Street, but it doesn’t matter.”

  A few days before the meeting I had been featured with some other comics in a New York Times piece about the burgeoning alternative comedy scene on the Lower East Side. In retrospect, telling me this might have been the only reason Lorne had me into his office. He wanted to school me.

  The meeting was off to an awkward start.

  That was the beginning, weird. Then we all sit down. I’m there in front of his desk. In front of me, right behind a picture that’s facing him, there’s a little bowl of candy. I was tweaking about the whole situation. So everything suddenly felt very loaded and I was thinking, I’m not going to take any
fucking candy. It’s a test of some kind. He’s testing my self-control. But how could that be the case given this show’s history? Maybe I should take the entire bowl and put it in my mouth and dance around the room like a clown. Then I’ll definitely get the show. I can’t talk with candy in my mouth.

  I became very self-conscious.

  I leave my head and check back into the situation at hand and Lorne is philosophizing. He speaks like everything he says is to be taken in on a very deep level. He is a man who clearly has the last word. He was in the middle of a long discourse that I had missed because I was thinking about the candy. He is saying, “You know, comedians are like monkeys.”

  I laugh uncomfortably.

  “People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it’s scary. And the bear because it’s intense. But the monkey makes people laugh.”

  I just couldn’t stop myself and I said, “Yeah, I guess if they’re not throwing their shit at you.”

  It was an awkward moment, more awkward than the rest of the moments leading up to that one. Lorne seemed taken aback for about a second and then commenced to stare directly into my eyes for a long time. So long that the head writer fidgeted in his chair and laughed uncomfortably and said, “Lorne?”

  Lorne said, “You can tell a lot from someone’s eyes.”

  I was in a staring contest with one of the most powerful men in show business. I tried to exude some starness from my face.

  Uncomfortable, I blinked and I took a candy.

  As soon as I took the candy I swear to God Lorne shot a look at the head writer that clearly meant that I had failed the test. I walked out of there thinking I had ruined my career because of a Jolly Rancher. I don’t even like Jolly Ranchers. I festered about it for days.

  The day after I had the meeting with Lorne Michaels, the day after I felt myself on the precipice of something great, I had to go to Washington, D.C., to perform. I was the big headliner at the Comedy Cafe. What I didn’t know until I got there was that it was the last weekend the club would be open and they didn’t want to blow any money on publicity.

  The first night, Friday night, first show, nine people. Not the worst thing in the world but as a comic, rarely do you walk offstage after performing for nine people saying, “Fuck yeah! God, I made the right career choice! Man, I feel good about myself.”

  Second show, three people; three. One of them was the opener and he heckled. So needless to say, after meeting with Lorne and having this experience at the club I wasn’t feeling great about myself.

  After the shows I was feeling low so I went down to the strip bar next door, which was owned by the guy who owned the comedy club. It was one of these really sad, old strip bars where they have one stage and three girls. Men had to stand in line like some sort of religious procession to tip the woman, to honor the goddess of the pole.

  So it’s bad enough that we were sitting in the dark corners of the strip bar, but then we all had to get in line in the light and meekly make an offering. I didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t working. I was looking for some warmth, some affection, some love. If part of the stripper’s job was to come up and say, “You’re really funny,” I would have been fine with that. That would have helped. But strippers don’t say that unless you date them and that comes with a whole other bag of problems.

  I was sitting in the back of the strip club looking vulnerable with the book I was reading at the time, The Poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, when one of the girls asked me if I wanted a table dance.

  I agreed. She started dancing for me. I tried to focus. I made small talk. I said, “What do you do during the day?”

  She put her tits in my face and said, “I’m a student.”

  “What do you study?” I said, face full of boobs.

  “English literature,” she said as she stood up, turned around, and bent over and shook her ass at me and spanked it. She looked back over her shoulder and said, “I’m minoring in political science.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  She turned back around and stood in front of me. She cupped one of her breasts with her hand, pushed it up, bent her head down toward the breast, and said, “On weekends I work with autistic children.”

  Then she licked her nipple.

  I gave her twenty bucks, for the kids.

  I left the strip bar feeling worse than before, because I wanted to fuck. I went to a convenience store and I loaded up on the low budget antidepressants: cigarettes, chocolate doughnuts, dirty magazines, soda. I just got this bag of junk and went to my hotel room and started in.

  I was reading a magazine, I was listening to a CD on my Discman, I was smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, having a doughnut, and watching television all at the same time. I was like some sort of many-armed Indian god, the Vishnu of self-avoidance. If Sinbad’s ship were sailing past my cave and his crew looked in, one of them would say, “It is the beast with many arms. We should kill it.”

  Sinbad would reply, “No need. He is dangerous only to himself.”

  It wasn’t enough. I didn’t have any drugs or alcohol, or else it would have been a very different party. It was my first attempt at sobriety. It didn’t stick that time but I eventually got it.

  It was just a sad, desperate situation.

  Then something amazing happens. This show comes on television and it’s about gorillas. It’s about people helping gorillas in the jungle. Helping gorillas find better living environments. Helping the gorillas to have better lives in their gorilla worlds. As I watched I felt moved. It was one of those moments that seemed beyond coincidence, like my purpose was unfolding before my eyes. Those moments usually happen when I am annihilated with enough despair to think, “Oh, my God! That’s what I should be doing. I should be out in the jungle with a shirt with a lot of pockets and a pith helmet helping monkeys.”

  I had to stop myself before I started making the phone calls because I didn’t want to scare my friends. “Guess what? I’m quitting comedy. No, gorillas. I’m helping the gorillas now. No, I’m fine.”

  I’ve had moments like that before.

  Then the screen fades to black and the title IVAN’S STORY comes up in white letters. It was about this sad gorilla in this concrete environment. He had no toys and he’d been there for twenty years. Just an old, neglected gorilla at a roadside attraction zoo, not even a real zoo. One of those places you see billboards for along the highway in the middle of nowhere: GAS, FOOD, SEE A LIVE GORILLA. And he was just sitting there in what appeared to be a cell, tapping on the wall. I thought maybe at a different time it was a much more passionate display of anger but years and repetition had rendered it an empty existential hobby.

  I realized why this suddenly seemed so important. I was Ivan. I was disappointed, despairing, and tired of fighting. I was in a cage of my own making, unable to get out. People would pay to see me and leave sad and disappointed. Then I realized Ivan didn’t have porn.

  I switched the channel to the filthy menu. Now everything was going. It was just awful. Hotel room porn is the worst. I’m not delusional. I know I’m not watching healthy people. But porn is comforting. Yet another empty victory in the war against self. When it’s over, the instigators of the battle are still fucking on the TV, mocking me.

  Then I stopped and considered myself sitting there on my bed, surrounded by my elaborate array of empty existential hobbies. And I thought again about that abandoned monkey, and actually had a bonding moment with him. We’re really not that different from monkeys. What’s the difference? Pants? What’s the difference between grunting and “Oh, email.” If Ivan had a monitor in his little cell he’d see me just sitting there flaunting the full range of distractions that pants-wearing civilization offers us. A Discman, a laptop, a remote. My cell.

  It was awful. I turned it off and I went to sleep. The next morning I had to get up and do morning radio at six o’clock. I get there and I’m all covered with a fine film of sugar, cum, hotel room air; it’s just disgusting. My hair is fucked-up and it�
��s all just hammering into me the truth: that I once thought I was going to do something great in this life and it isn’t working out.

  Chuckling Dumbfucks in the morning on Hot one hundred point who gives a shit. With morning radio there’s always a guy with a regular name and then the Something Man. So I’m sitting there with Bob and the GasMan thinking, If Rimbaud were alive he wouldn’t have had to do this …

  “So Artie, you’re in town doing some poetry, huh?”

  An array of sound effects ranging from farts to yawns steps on Rimbaud’s poem about farts and yawns.

  After the radio show I walked around the capital, cold and dirty, picturing monkeys on the National Mall. The Founding Fathers.

  I went into the National Gallery to see the Vermeer exhibition. His paintings elevate the mundane into timeless visual poetry. Art like this is the real separation between monkeys and man. The paintings seemed to be mocking me with their beauty and depth. I walked by the canvases looking at title cards. They blurred when I tried to read them: What Did You Do Today? Look at You, Sad Man. Did You Masturbate in a Hotel Room Last Night? I rubbed my eyes and then they came clear. Girl Asleep at Table, Woman Pouring Milk, Woman Combing Her Hair, Woman Holding Balance, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, Head of a Young Girl. Simple moments stolen, rendered, eternalized.

  I walked into the rotunda of the National Gallery and there was a girls’ choir singing Christmas carols. What seemed like a hundred teenage girls stood in tiers belting out the festive songs. I stood there like some exhausted, debauched troll trying to fight the fantasy of them all standing there naked. I knew people could see in my face the unbridled frustration of the sad, tired, compulsive man in his overcoat.

  I distracted myself with the sculptures. One was clearly a young girl barely clothed. It was beautiful and there was no shame in looking at that. I wondered if that was what was driving the artist. Was he just chipping away angrily with pent-up desire on his face thinking, “God, I want to fuck her”? That is where most creativity comes from.