Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  20

  Whole Foods

  I never liked Whole Foods. I never wanted to shop there. I think it is an elitist, overpriced sham. I found Whole Foods reprehensible even before their CEO John Mackey wrote his horrible oped in The Wall Street Journal.

  I hate Whole Foods because everything is overpriced. Most people want to be healthy and everybody should have access to healthy things but what Whole Foods is trying to establish and represent is the idea that you can’t be healthy unless you can afford it. Notwithstanding there’s no indication that organic vegetables are any better for you than non-organic vegetables. Are you worried about pesticides? You’ll adapt to pesticides. What are we, a bunch of pussies all of a sudden? We’ve adapted to worse. The air in my house is 65 percent feline shit particulate. I can handle some non-organic fruit. In terms of nutrients they’re no different. For years I shopped at a vegetable stand in Astoria from a guy with a Greek accent a block from an elevated subway that rained filth from the sky every seven minutes. I was fine.

  John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, wrote an editorial in The Wall Street Journal against health care reform. There was a lot of libertarian wrong-mindedness in his piece—some crazy ideas about tort reform, some misguided nonsense about allowing insurance companies to go across state lines, which I think will only lead to bigger monopolizations, not more competitive markets.

  There’s a lot of bullshit in his editorial. But the thing that interests me the most is these couple of paragraphs:

  Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

  What I extrapolate from that paragraph is that he is willing to just let poor people die. It’s not his fault or even his concern. It’s part of the malignant evolutionary theory of free market capitalism. If you can’t afford the good food or if you can’t afford health care or if you don’t have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can’t get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game—bzzzzz—thanks for playing extreme capitalism.

  Here’s the next paragraph:

  Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.

  Okay, well how about we make it a new right? What’s wrong with that? Later in his editorial Mackey says:

  Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

  So listen, all of you sick people, despite however you may have gotten ill, whether it was genetic, or who knows why you got cancer. If you just eat better, and perhaps shop at Whole Foods, you have a better shot at survival. As long as you don’t get caught or killed stealing or robbing someone just to afford a head of lettuce or a slice of meat at that place, that is.

  I decided to boycott Whole Foods, like lots of other people. I’d been doing it even before the editorial because it made my soul feel less dirty. But after the editorial I took it further. My subsequent action was impulsive and mysterious to me. I don’t know why I did it. I will try to figure it out here.

  I wanted to buy some stevia, which is a very sweet sweetener derived from a root. It has no fat in it, no chemicals. It’s spectacular stuff. I usually get the stevia at Trader Joe’s, a nice store that doesn’t present any political or ethical dilemmas. I find TJ’s irritating because everyone is so friendly and I start to question that, but that’s my problem. Also, the way they package things is a little too cute for me but there are a couple of things I get there. Stevia is one of those things.

  But on this day, they didn’t have the stuff I wanted. The good stuff. The 100 percent pure stuff. They had the one that was cut with filler to bulk it up, like shitty cocaine.

  I knew I could go to Whole Foods and get pure stevia. I’ll admit I have lapses in personal integrity. I thought to myself: “You have your principles. But these are extenuating circumstances. Go get the stevia. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  I went into the Whole Foods in Union Square in New York, which is a block away from the Trader Joe’s. I’m a sellout, a scab, but I go in. I’m just going to grab the high-grade stevia. I walk into the Whole Foods and it’s a cluster-fuck of food elitism, quirky handwritten signs, overpriced food, and lines and lines of people. They run people through a literal maze to pay for food. They treat you like a rodent. You have to respond to a color and a number signaling you forward like an aspirational healthy robot.

  But I press on. I go downstairs, I pick up the stevia, the good shit, 100 percent. I’m holding it in my hand and looking out at the Whole Foods all around me. I’m feeling absolute disgust. I hate everything it represents. I hate John Mackey. I hate the idea that people have to pay through-the-ass exorbitant amounts of money just to have healthy food. It’s not right, and I blame John Mackey, but my hatred for this kind of grotesque third-world unfairness existed before him and runs deeper than one rich asshole. I look over at the long line, the customers with their carts and baskets, penned in like cattle. I’m holding my little container of stevia. It’s $7.99. I’m looking at it and realize, “Dude there is no way you are waiting on that line. And you know what? There’s no way you’re paying for this stevia. You cannot pay for it. What you are going to do, Marc, is you’re going to hold it in your hand in front of you as if you’re looking at it and walk right out of the store.”

  That’s what I did. I held the stevia in front of me. Not because I didn’t want it to look like I was stealing. I wanted to hold it right out in front of me as if to say I’m leaving with this because I deserve it, because this store sucks, because I don’t want to wait on line, because the person who runs this operation is a wrong-minded, right-wing libertarian whack-job who just wants poor people to die, that’s why. I was holding it as if I were the Statue of Liberty, my container of stevia my torch. I walked out through the in door, past the security guard, holding that stevia in front of me, looking at it as I walked out onto the street. When I was back out on the street, I stood in front of the store holding the plastic jar aloft. I wanted to see if anyone was going to stop me, to say, “Do you want to pay for that, buddy? Did you forget something, buddy? You’re under arrest.” Any of that. Nothing happened. I waited a few minutes. I probably looked ridiculous standing there on a crowded New York City street with my stevia in the air, but I waited a few minutes more and no one came. I put the stevia in my bag. I felt good.

  Not only did I not feel guilty, but I felt like I wanted to go back and steal more stuff from Whole Foods. It’s easy if you live in a big city. They can’t manage that place. They can barely manage the lines.

  Join me. Go in. Get yourself some healthy greens, some organic produce, and some vitamins if you have no money. Just bring your Whole Foods organic hemp bag, load it up, and just walk out. Walk out through the in-door. And if they ask if you paid for it just say, “Yeah, I did.” Or if you pussy out, just say, “I forgot because I have a vitamin deficiency because I’ve been eating and shopping at affordable supermarkets lately. I should always shop here, because do you see what happens when I don’t? I’m sorry,” and go back in and pay for it.

  Don’t boycott Whole Foods—steal from them.

  21

  I Almost Died #3: Prince’s Chicken

  I am in a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, and things ar
e not good inside of me. That is not an emotional observation. I don’t think I’m going to die. But last night I came close. I might be being a bit dramatic. I’ll let you be the judge. I put a lot of things into my body, for better or for worse. Something went in last night, and I don’t know how else to say it: That thing fucked my shit up. I mean literally.

  I read a short story in high school once about a hot-pepper-eating contest. I remember liking it. I don’t remember much of what I was assigned to read in high school. I did a lot of sleeping in English class and my teacher was a mean old drunk woman who looked like she was balancing a pile of hair on her shaking head.

  It was the descriptions of the peppers and the experience of eating them that sticks in my mind all these years later. I couldn’t remember the name of the story so I googled it. It was actually hard to find. I found someone had scanned the story and put it on their personal Flickr page. Obviously, someone else at some point thought, “What was that pepper story I read in high school?”

  So I reread “The Grains of Paradise,” by James Street. The story turns out to be about an American man on an agricultural research mission in Mexico to learn about corn. The story culminates in a pepper-eating challenge with a local landowner and grower of peppers. The story is really about class, caste, honor, country, competition, business, and politics. I assume that’s why they put the story in the book: so we could learn the power of literature to elevate and integrate layered themes into a narrative. I got none of that and I’m sure the shaking wig at the front of the class didn’t illuminate any of that, but to be fair I don’t remember either way. The point is: I thought it was a story about eating really hot peppers. As you get older and wiser everything becomes a bit more loaded with meaning and/or completely drained of it. It sort of happens simultaneously.

  I think I was intrigued by a story about eating really hot peppers because I like things spicy. I like hot sauce. I’m not a fanatic about it but when I do find a good hot sauce I get excited. I don’t search for them, which I guess is the dividing line between just liking something and being obsessed. I have stockpiled hot sauce in my life. Sometimes the smaller distributors go out of business and you’re left hanging with the taste still in your mouth, so you had better hoard a bit if you want to get your fix. There was an amazing hot sauce called Inner Beauty with mangos and habañeros that was the shit. Gone. I held on to a bottle of that stuff for three years, doling it out sparingly. I wanted it to last forever.

  I am willing to risk some discomfort for spicy food. Jalapeños destroy my stomach for a bit and cause mild to extraordinary pain when exiting my body, but I still eat them. Not as much as I used to but some part of me thinks it’s still worth it. The rest of me thinks it’s a problem. Anal pain and chaos does not equal feeling alive. I should learn and remember that, in all areas of my life.

  When I travel, which is often, I try to find regional foods that I can’t get in Los Angeles. That is really just a rationalization for me to eat barbecue, biscuits, mac and cheese, and various members of the pie family whenever I find myself anywhere that could be called southern, which means, in this country, pretty much anywhere. I always ask locals where I should eat. Then I look at the review sites to see if they check out. In Nashville almost everyone told me to go to Prince’s Hot Chicken. Not necessarily because it was good but because there was nothing else like it. I was warned that it would be the hottest thing I ever put in my face.

  I’m not a big fried chicken guy but I felt like everything everyone was telling me was a challenge, like they were defying me to go to Prince’s. Some fans brought a cold batch of it to the show on my first night in town. I took a couple of bites. It was so hot that after two bites I started hiccupping and I thought, “I’ve got to get this at the source, fresh out of the fryer.” But those two bites alone gave me GI tract problems the next day.

  A local told me that you have to go to Prince’s late at night because it’s in “the hood” and it gets crazy at night. The place is open until 3 A.M. When people talk about black neighborhoods like that it implies something benignly racist. When you hear “the hood” it means someplace you wouldn’t go, where you aren’t wanted, but you might be tolerated and it’s cool, there might be trouble, but it’s cool. Oh, and black people are crazy and wild and don’t live like us. Some of this is true. Some blacks don’t live like me, but then some white people don’t live like me, either. It’s called poverty. Many poor people live in broken-down communities, and in most states, certainly in the South, some black people are kept there by layers of historic segregation, racial and economic. I am not racist but I’m a nervous person. It is not ethnicity or race specific. It is a case-by-case feeling. If I am confronted by something that I don’t understand, it frightens me or makes me uncomfortable. Whether it be a person, a place, or a thing, I get nervous. I don’t think that’s an inappropriate human reaction. Nervousness doesn’t become racism until you hear yourself saying things like “Oh, shit, there’s a lot of them.” Then you might need to check yourself and follow where that thought goes. You might be on a slippery slope.

  I did find myself a little fascinated with black people in Tennessee. First I thought they have really great black people in Nashville. I saw them as closer to the source of what brought them here and the horror that defined them in this country in the beginning and now to varying degrees. Because of that in my mind they had more integrity. Then I was at a drugstore and I saw a black guy with a natural ’fro and in my recollection he had one of those fist picks in his back pocket. I thought, “That’s a classic black guy. These are classic black people here in Nashville.”

  Then I thought, “Is that so different than ‘Oh, shit, there’s a lot of them’?”

  I don’t spend much time in black neighborhoods.

  Not unlike a lot of creative middle-class Jewish kids, many of my heroes were black. Richard Pryor changed my life. Before I saw the first Live in Concert film when I was in high school, at a midnight showing with my buddy Dave, I didn’t know it was possible to laugh that much. As I said before, when I first started playing guitar I became completely obsessed with learning Chuck Berry’s signature opening. It changed my life. I listen to Muddy Waters frequently and have a different experience every year or so with his music. It grows deeper for me.

  I was a lost kid most of my childhood and adolescence, personality-wise. I envied black identity. I envied the honesty of black expression and community. I was always alone in my mind and I certainly grew disenchanted with the Jewish thing. Black people struck me as cool and real. I thought that black people and white people were different, but the difference filled me with awe and envy.

  When I graduated from college I took a train across the country. I had decided in my head that I had to ride the rails and see America drunk from a series of sleeper cars on Amtrak. My first stop was Chicago. I didn’t really get out into the city but I did get my boots shined by a black guy in Union Station. He gave me a vague history of the station and I thought it was an amazing conversation. My next stop was Memphis. I spent two days there. I went to the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. I went to Graceland. I went to Beale Street, where I saw a real bluesman. Some guy called Slim sat on an old amp with a beat-up old guitar playing sloppy slide and singing incoherently. I thought it was genius. He said he knew from the way I was watching him that I was a guitar player and asked if I wanted to play while he went to the bathroom. I said hell yeah. There was a crowd gathered there. I sat down and tried to play but his guitar was tuned to some weird open tuning and I sounded awful. I sat there retuning his guitar so I could play it. He came back just as I’d finished playing half a song and he took the guitar back. He was pissed for a minute that I had screwed with his tuning but he retuned and kept playing. I stood there for more than an hour watching.

  There was a small crowd gathered around. People were dancing a bit. Then this panicky-looking white man in a tie came barging through the crowd and walked up to
Slim and said, “Slim, I need your amp.”

  Slim looked confused as he stood up and the man unplugged his guitar and started to walk away with his amp. The racially mixed crowd looked confused and started to break up. I was concerned and asked Slim what was going on. He shrugged and indicated he didn’t know. So I said we should find out. So Slim and I followed the trotting man with the amp to the gate. We watched him walk into a back patio of a restaurant where there was some sort of conference going on. From outside the patio we watched the man plug a mic into Slim’s amp and hand it to a guy standing at a podium. The man at the podium started talking and the guy who took the amp noticed me and Slim standing there. I was furious and demanded an explanation. The guy said, “You from around here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why don’t you just mind your own business.” He looked at Slim. “I’ll take care of you.”

  In retrospect I guess the guy owned the restaurant, booked it out for an event, and didn’t set up a PA. He freaked out and just took Slim’s amp because he knew Slim and he knew he could. Slim probably played around there every day and was a local fixture. The guy probably threw Slim a few bucks after I wandered away defeated. It was the attitude of the whole event that angered me. I wasn’t one of the Jews at the front of a civil rights march or trying to register black voters but, man, I wanted justice for Slim in the amp situation. The South might be desegregated but it may never be integrated. And by “the South” I mean America.