Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  I decide that is the way to go: sleazy and self-punishing. I drive around the shitty part of L.A. where I live and I find this crappy hotel. It’s weird. It’s got bulletproof glass where you get your key and pay for the room in advance.

  There’s a couple of transvestite hookers there. I’m walking up to my room thinking, “Well, this is it. It’s the dark night of the soul.” One of the tranny hookers says, “Hey, you wanna date?”

  I find something compelling about them for reasons I don’t understand but my plate is a little full and I decide it isn’t the night to wade into these waters.

  “No, thanks,” I say, slightly frightened of myself.

  The room is just a shitty hotel room. Two shitty beds. Wood paneling. A TV with no cable. It’s hard to have a dark night of the soul when you don’t drink or do drugs or fuck trannies. The drama is limited. I just sit there rocking on the end of the bed talking to myself and crying.

  “Fuck her! Maybe not! I dunno! Maybe it’s me!”

  I’m just in there weeping on a shitty bed with two channels of TV thinking maybe I should get one of those trannies in here and talk to her. I don’t know what I would have said.

  “Well, you seem to have worked shit out. You’ve made some pretty dramatic decisions for your own wholeness. Can you help me?”

  I don’t. I just sit there. I don’t sleep. I cry. I watch the clock, wondering when it will officially be a whole night. When?

  When the sun comes up I decide it’s official, a night has passed. It’s 5:30 A.M. I’m going back. I drive back to my house in the cutting light of an up-all-night morning. I pull up my street to see she’s already put the chair out in front of the house. It sits there barely put together like a shame throne. An example to the rest of the neighborhood. I feel like Lance Kerwin in that movie The Loneliest Runner from when I was a kid. He was a bed wetter and he learned to run because his mom would put out his piss-stained sheets for all to see and he’d have to run home before his friends saw them and pull them down.

  I park the car and scurry over to the chair, pick it up, hold it together, and run it into the backyard. It isn’t garbage day. It is already bad enough that I am sure that the entire neighborhood has heard us fighting all the time. When I would run into my neighbors while putting out our garbage I would fight the urge to say, “Hey, I’m not hitting her.”

  I knock. I think it was my feeble attempt at showing respect and having boundaries. My wife opens the door. I walk in.

  “Hi. Sorry. Are we going to be okay?”

  I am weepy and contrite. It is predictable at this point. She is detached.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Damnit!”

  There is nothing worse than the feeling that you have lost your love and she is standing right in front of you.

  “Maybe we should go to couples counseling.”

  She had suggested this many times before and I just pushed it off into the future. Well, the future was here and it was too late. We went but at that point it was really an ambush that I paid for. I paid someone three hundred dollars to watch my wife call me an asshole for an hour. I sat there and said, “I know. I know! I acted like an asshole. Asshole. Wait, now. What about you?” I had no right to that question by the time we got there, according to her.

  Soon after this turning point I was invited to perform at the Aspen Comedy Festival to be part of an event featuring the Moth, a New York–based storytelling group. The theme was “On Thin Ice.” So I thought there was no better tale to tell than that of the breaking of the chair. I mean, I was on thin ice, no doubt. Our anniversary also fell on one of the dates we were there. I made dinner plans and my wife said I shouldn’t worry about it, that we didn’t have to go out and make a big deal about it. I’m pretty sure now that she was already emotionally involved with another man and she was just stringing me along getting her ducks in a row.

  I’m about to do the Moth show and I’m freaking out because I’m not sure what story to tell.

  “I don’t know what story to tell,” I said. My best thinking at the time led me to ask her this: “Hey, would you mind if I told the story about the chair? Breaking the chair? It’s a good story.”

  She said, “I don’t care, Marc.”

  “No, seriously. I’m asking your permission because it’s pretty hairy. I’ll make sure I look like the asshole because I was the asshole. I’ll make that clear. It’s funny, it’s deep, it’s real, it’s fucking awful.”

  “Do what you want.”

  “Okay. You sure? You cool? Because I can do a cat thing.”

  “No. Do the chair story. That will be good.”

  I think she was either unconsciously or maybe intentionally setting me up to do as much stupid shit as possible so she could make an undeniable case for herself to leave me. Despite how I make myself look, here I tried to give her whatever she wanted. I tried to love her properly but I was incapable and scared. I was obsessed with her leaving to such a degree that I made it happen. I didn’t take responsibility for my anger and it sank me. All I really wanted for her was to be successful and realize her dreams. Which she did, after she left me.

  It was an odd show. Billy Baldwin was also performing. The Aspen Comedy Festival was a prestigious event. Everyone from the comedy industry was there. It was sponsored by HBO. I get onstage in front of everybody in show business and I tell the story. I stand before almost every one of our peers, most of the comedy industry, and say, “I’m an emotionally abusive douche bag and she’s the one I fucking make cry all the time.” Billy Baldwin came up to me after the show and said, “You don’t deserve her.”

  If a Baldwin is giving me relationship advice I must be pretty far gone. I get offstage, I look at my wife, and she’s upset, she’s crying, she’s livid.

  “What do you think this makes me look like?” she sputtered out as soon as I reached her.

  “Well, I asked you!”

  “Goddamnit, Marc!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m embarrassed. You made a fool of me in front of all these people.”

  I didn’t see it that way. I thought if I could frame it as a story, as a piece of comedy with me as the butt of the joke, I would be absolved in her eyes. I thought that publicly showing my faults and my desire to change would work. I also thought if I could make this horror story funny it would be a profound example of what I could do as a comic. This is the risk of living your art. If your life is disintegrating, saying so publicly doesn’t necessarily reverse the rot. Usually the opposite is true, especially if the bit works.

  When we get back to the hotel room she’s completely detached. I can’t sleep. I feel bad and I have to do a political panel show in the morning. I fall asleep for a second and I have this horrible dream. It isn’t a narrative dream, more of a feeling. There is a setting but it is uneventful: I’m outside, the sky is gray. There are no mandalas unless they are hiding in a vague cloud of terror. All I know is that I am alone. That is all the dream was. The realization that I am alone. I wake up and say, “I can’t … I can’t sleep. I’m freakin’ out, baby. Baby, baby …”

  Waking up she says, “What? What do you want? I have a ski race tomorrow.”

  “Well, I’m fucking losin’ it.”

  “Yeah, so what’s new?”

  “Well, can we just talk? Help me out!”

  “You want me to blow you?”

  “Okay.”

  I knew that would take my mind off the end of my marriage and the stress of the show. She was angry and I think in her mind blowing me would be easier than talking to me. Have you ever had a spiteful, detached blowjob? Have you ever had one that had the subtext of this is it. Not a happy ending. She avoided me the entire next day.

  We get back from Aspen. Obviously it’s strained and stressed. I didn’t know she was moving toward somebody else. I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that there’s not a lot of fucking going on. There are other forms of sex, but not fucking. Hand job
s were never my bag. To me they’re a struggle. I can do that myself. But all of a sudden she’s decided, “I just want to do that now.”

  “Really?”

  She was presenting it like it was a great option, her new thing. In retrospect what she was telling me was, “That thing you’ve got there is not going anywhere near my vagina ever again. This arm’s length is the distance that will always exist, between that thing and me. This is as far as it goes.”

  It was completely naïve and insensitive of me not to realize how far away my behavior had forced her. It really wasn’t until I came back from a week’s work in New York and she left me that I really got it. It was about a month after the Aspen festival. I had been out doing shows with Henry Rollins and Janeane Garofalo. My wife picked me up at LAX, gave me a bottle of water, and drove me home. During the ride I was telling her about the show. She seemed detached but that wasn’t unusual by that point. In the middle of that ride from the airport, out of nowhere, my wife said, “Marc, you really are a genius.” Her tone was odd and the sentiment seemed to come out of nowhere. Unsolicited. Usually a statement like that is preceded by me pacing around beating the shit out of myself, yelling, “I’m a fraud! I am a fucking loser!” But this came out of nowhere in a dead voice and for no reason.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Why did you say that?”

  “Because you are.”

  We got to the house and walked in. I put my bags down and she went into the kitchen, sat at the table, and started crying. I walked into the kitchen and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “I want a trial separation,” she said.

  “Why?” I said.

  I knew why. I didn’t know what else to say. It was just an impulse to dialogue. When I heard her speak and I looked at her face it was clear that she was done and was now pleading for some kind of permission from herself. Not me. I watched her walk out with no luggage and I said, “What am I supposed to do?” She said, “I don’t know. Call someone.”

  That was it.

  Months later, after it became apparent that she wasn’t coming back, I entered some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Everything was emotionally heightened and dead simultaneously. It was confusing and exhausting. I was a functioning catatonic on fire on the inside. I was surrounded by a haze of pain.

  I was driving home one afternoon during this period when I rolled past a woman putting household objects and furniture out in her front yard. I figured it was a garage sale or she was termite bombing. As I moved past her house an object I saw stopped me. Dragged me into the present. A chair. The chair? The orange Danish modern chair that I broke and that subsequently broke up my marriage appeared to be sitting on her front lawn. “Impossible,” I thought. That was destroyed, thrown out, gone. I stopped my car abruptly in the street, opened my car door, and ran up into her yard. She was pulling more stuff out of her house. I said, “Hi. Hey, are you selling this stuff?”

  “Just take whatever you want. I’m leaving,” she said, going angrily about her business.

  “Where did you get this chair? I used to have one exactly like it. I’ve never seen another one.”

  “I found it,” she said. “Take it.”

  I inspected the chair. It had been carefully rebuilt, put back together. It was the chair.

  “Did you find this on the street up on the hill around the corner?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Why?”

  “This chair destroyed my marriage.”

  She looked at me with a dark, stressed gaze for a second like she was looking through me at something burning in the distance and said, “Mine, too.”

  I didn’t ask any questions. Synchronicity was upon us. The causality was there, it was explainable, but the meaning of the object before us was at once unique and shared. It was some kind of black magic that sent my thoughts back to the garage wizard who kept Jung’s curtains locked up. What had he unleashed on this world, my world, her world, with this chair?

  “We have to take it out of circulation.”

  “Yes,” she said, catatonically, like how I felt.

  Then this stranger and I proceeded to destroy the chair with our hands and our feet until it was unfixable. We took a breath and looked down at the scattered chair shards.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  A horn honked. I turned to see my car, door open, sitting in the middle of the street, running. Someone needed to get by.

  “Good luck with everything,” I said, then walked back to my car and drove away, strangely relieved. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw her making a pile of culprit pieces.

  WTF #269

  April 9, 2012

  Marc: Do you find it weird that as we get older, there’s this whole element of, like, Wait, what happened to that guy? You know what I mean?

  David Cross: Yeah, of course.

  M: And it’s very hard for me to frame it because I see points in my life where I’m like, I could be that guy. And I have a tremendous heavy heart about it. You know, when you run into people and you’re like, Hey, what have you been doing? and they are like, Well … uh … I don’t know. Isn’t there something heartbreaking about the whole thing?

  D: Yeah … depending on the person, depending on the path they took and what they did along that path. I mean, I think you’re as good an example as anybody because you were clearly gifted and talented, and you also had a lot of demons, and you exacerbated the situation irresponsibly [laughing] and then you got to a point … and you were still able to kind of power through, but you had also sort of plateaued at that point.

  M: Yeah.

  D: And I don’t know what it was that motivated you, um, nor do I care to know.

  M: Yeah. [Laughing]

  D: But you eventually cleaned up. And you’re a better person for it; you’re a better comedian; you’re a better writer. There are people who didn’t do that.

  12

  Babies

  I’ve had two wives but no children. When my first wife started reading baby books, that was a red flag to me and I freaked out. I knew I had to get out. I wasn’t ready. I felt like if I had kids I would have no life. That everything I wanted to accomplish would have to go on hold or get ditched to service the kid. That my ridiculous show business dream would have to be reined in and I would just have to do whatever was necessary to support a family. That I would be resigned to a life of bitter surrender, trying not to infect the kid with my sadness and disappointment, hoping that the kid didn’t notice my deep resentment of his or her part in my failure.

  So, clearly, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.

  When I was with the second wife I thought maybe we could do it. Maybe we should do it. In my mind, I was ready. She wasn’t. She put it very succinctly: “You think I’m going to bring children into this?” My response was something along the lines of, “What does that even fucking mean? You don’t think I’d be a good father? Fuck you. Fuck this.” The fact is, she was right. I was an abusive, selfish, needy, angry asshole.

  Now I’m just kind of selfish, a little less angry, occasionally needy, with flights of asshole. I’ve grown.

  After the second divorce I accepted that I wouldn’t have kids. I didn’t have a woman in my life. I was getting old. I would probably be happier without them. I could put an end to the genetic bundle of selfishness, depression, and anger that has tumbled down through time along my father’s line of descent. I would be doing the world a favor.

  I’m not sure my parents even wanted to have kids. I think they did it because that was what they were supposed to do; it was what their generation did. The truth is, they were kids themselves when they had me. My mother was twenty-two and my father was twenty-six. I don’t really think of them as parents. They’re just these people I grew up with who were a little older than me. My parents were always too worried and panicky, too consumed with themselves to ever make me feel like things would be okay. So now I’m a panicky, worried, self-consumed adult who is fundamentally unable to feel like thin
gs will be okay. There is some part of me that will always be looking, futilely, for a parent to just make things okay.

  My mother has stepped up her parenting game over the last few years, and she applies these new skills to my brother Craig’s three kids. Grandkids have given her a second shot at being a parent, but in a more hands-off situation. She seems to be excelling.

  But when I watch my father around Craig’s kids, it makes me sad to think of little me being raised by this man. He engages with them for a few minutes, until he realizes they aren’t really all that interested in him. Then he detaches. I was in Phoenix for the bat mitzvah of one of Craig’s kids and I had to go pick my father up at his hotel and bring him over to the house. I got to the hotel and I said to my father, “You ready to go?”

  “Where we going?” he asked. He was getting dressed.

  “We’re going over to Craig’s so you can hang out with the grandkids, right?”

  Without irony or a second thought my father said, “Yeah, you know, some people get something out of that. I don’t get anything out of that.” Completely deadpan.

  So I said, “Well, what do want to do?”

  “You remember those mustard slacks I had? You can’t find those anymore. I’ve looked all over.”

  “Okay,” I said, a little afraid of the non sequitur.

  “Let’s go across the street to the mall and see if they’ve got them.”

  My father and I then went to the mall across the street, where he walked into the most expensive store he could find and dropped three hundred dollars on a pair of almost-mustard slacks. Then we went to my niece’s bat mitzvah brunch so my father could show off his pants.

  I am at a crossroads. I am in a relationship with a women who is twenty years younger than I am. I’m not bragging. The age difference presents its own set of problems but I love her. When we met we had no idea that we would end up together. We thought we were just going to hang out, have fun, and move on. Now, after three years of very intense trials and tribulations, fits and starts, we are living together and she wants a baby. I know this because she says things like, “When are you going to put a baby in me?” I’m thinking, “I don’t know. When you frame it differently?”