Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  After a late show on Friday night in Nashville, I and a couple of other comics headed out to Prince’s. We drove into the parking lot of a small strip mall. Prince’s was the only storefront open. There was a three-hundred-pound man standing in front of the place wearing a tank top, smoking a cigar, and packing a sidearm. There were a few black people hanging out in front of the place. It felt like a wall of you don’t belong here. Maybe I was projecting that. Maybe that was a wall I was creating. I just felt like an intruder, a tourist, an outsider that they put up with because the place is famous. I was nervous.

  When I walked in, it was clearly a pretty beat-up joint. There were about five booths and a monitor hanging from the ceiling that looked new. On the screen there was an advertisement for advertising on that same screen. There was a pickup window in the back with handwritten menus pinned up around it. There were people just sitting around, not eating, and not looking like they were going to eat. They weren’t menacing, just hanging out. There was a guy on a pay phone. You hardly ever see that anymore. It was like a community clubhouse.

  I felt like I was walking into another world, chaotic and dirty but clearly an institution. There were three ways to order the chicken: medium hot, hot, and extra hot. My friend Chad told me that they would not let white people order the extra hot, which of course made me want to order it more. I was told that there was no way I could handle it. I thought to myself, “What does that even mean? Do black people have special mouths and assholes?” It seemed exclusionary. Not that we didn’t deserve a little exclusion, but I was insulted. Still, I honored the myth and ordered the “hot.”

  There were other white people there. There were some drunk college kids and one guy who looked like a regular and going there was the high point of his life. We waited twenty minutes before they called out my number. Chad picked up the two brown paper bags of chicken. Chad’s a good guy. He’s been through a rough divorce and his heart is heavy; he’s got a burden. That burden makes him funny. He was ecstatic to eat the chicken and to focus on the pain outside himself.

  He set the bags down on the table. I pulled the wax-paper-wrapped breast out of the bag and could feel the heat on my hands. Not temperature heat but pepper heat. I was anxious about eating it. I was a little scared but I was sure I could handle it.

  I took one bite of the chicken and my face started burning under my skin. My mouth was on fire. I felt like my tongue was swelling. I was sitting with five dudes who were having a conversation but the heat in my head was blurring their words. I couldn’t talk or listen. I had tunnel vision. All I was thinking was “I have to get through this.” Is that a way to approach food? I’ve got to get through this.

  Chad was sitting next to me. He took a bite and his face turned red and he started hiccupping. He jumped up to go get water. He said he eats this all the time but he couldn’t believe how hot it was. There was no relief from it. It was so hot it was beyond unnatural. It was unnecessary.

  The guys started talking about someone getting arrested outside. I looked out the side of my eye. There was a black man being cuffed on the hood of a police car. There were guns drawn. I couldn’t look; I was just trying to get through this thing that was happening, this holocaust in my face. I could get no relief. I was completely consumed and present in this fire in my being. It was horrible but I could not stop eating it. My eyes were watering, my body was trying to reject what I was putting into it. I was in a different dimension. It was like an amazing drug. Everything in my body was elevated, numb, and burning. All of my other senses were shutting down. I couldn’t think about anything else and my whole world narrowed to the next painful bite of chicken that I seemed to have no choice but to put in my mouth. I was a gladiator of the palate. I was going to win.

  When I got back to my hotel my mouth was starting to settle down. I should’ve found some ice cream but it was late and I just wanted to crash. I got into bed and made the mistake of touching my balls. This was the next level of the journey. A burning commenced that could not be washed off. I tried to frame it as a pleasurable sensation, a new thing that I needed to experience, but it didn’t work. It just gave me a flashback to a fairly traumatic event at summer camp involving cinnamon toothpicks, crying, and an embarrassing trip to the nurse.

  I was lying there in bed with the burning in my groin slowly starting to fade when I was attacked from the inside by the most profound and painful stomach cramps I had ever had. I had to curl up my body to try to ease the ache. I knew that the peppers were eating away at my stomach lining and that I would probably die of internal bleeding. I started gulping water, which worked for a minute or two. I didn’t know what to do. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be ironic, after all I have been through in my life, some of it in hotel rooms, to die from an overdose of hot chicken? Marc Maron found dead in hotel room. Autopsy reveals fried chicken is the culprit.”

  I thought about calling a cab to take me to the emergency room. Then I thought it through. I imagined the scene: me, a white guy, shows up at an emergency room in the middle of the night clutching his stomach. The admission nurse looks up at me dismissively, a judgmental arch in her eyebrow, and says, “Prince’s?”

  I didn’t want that.

  As I fell asleep I couldn’t help but think I was being taught a lesson. I felt like I deserved it, like I was paying some reparation for being nervous at Prince’s, for succumbing to racial mythology and not ordering the extra hot, for not getting Slim his fucking amp back from that racist restaurant owner who treated him like the help.

  I rode it out. I didn’t die.

  22

  Xenophobia, Autoerotic Asphyxiation, and the History of Irish Poetry

  Running away works. Sometimes you have to change it up: new people, new restaurants, new Laundromat, new barista, new life. Yeah, the adage is true—that wherever you go, there you are—but you in an entirely new setting is a new you, or at least the old you in a new context, and that’s not nothing.

  That is why I’ve grown to like the road. There is a freedom that comes through the loneliness of being stranded by work in another town or country. My freedom initially takes the form of self-abuse of some kind: food, sex, masturbation, drugs, making a mess, or oversleeping. My impulse: “I can make this mess here. It doesn’t count. This is planet road.”

  I am a homeowner, which means that a good part of my brain is always consumed with all the little anxieties and tasks that go along with owning a home, a list too long to make here without afflicting myself with paralyzing stress. The minute I walk into a clean hotel room and realize that I am not responsible for anything other than not destroying it, all my other worries melt away. I hook up my computer, see what the room has to offer (a special shower fixture, a view), and sit down in my temporary furnished box and relax on a strange, expertly made bed. I then lie down on that bed and masturbate.

  As real-life anxieties melt away, my suddenly free mind starts to piece together everything that led up to me being in that hotel room. Within a few hours I land on the question, “Who am I, really? No one knows me. Do I know myself?” That’s when I go outside, untethered from my life, and start shopping around—for love or at least a functional identity.

  That can be hard depending on where the hotel is located. Downtown areas usually suck because after five they are ghost towns and you just become a lone stranger wandering around wondering if you are going to be murdered in the street or if anyone else is alive in this city and if so where are they. University towns are okay, for a few hours, before you realize that you are old and silly. I try to seek out places that make me feel connected: coffee shops, record stores, hipster blocks, malls (ironically), indigenous food. Anything that will connect me to other people, a culture, life. I want to do what locals do. I am living there for a few days. I can also justify just about anything as professional research. I have to try new things so I can make them funny.

  Running away works, but it doesn’t work as well for me abroad. I am a little xenophobic. It
’s not limited to other countries or people from other cultures. I can feel out of place standing in my driveway. I feel that way with my neighbors. I feel that way at the Mexican supermarket down the street. The feeling is just compounded when I am in another country.

  On a recent trip to Glasgow, Scotland, I was determined not to freak out about being in another country. As an American I am always threatened by smaller, culturally well-defined countries. The Scottish have a cultural identity that has lasted centuries. They have different cereals, cakes, and brands. Everything is really old. I convinced myself that it would be fine, that they’d get me. They speak English, after all. That turned out to be arguable.

  But I decided to enter Glasgow without fear, and within hours I was feeling very comfortable. The Scots I came in contact with were nothing but pleasant. The audiences were great. I felt like I was turning a corner on my feelings of awkwardness and loneliness abroad. I did Scorching the Earth, the big divorce show I put together after I went through that horrible time in my life. I was nervous about it because Scorching is devoted to a single story; one that runs through a lot of painful stuff. I had a hard enough time doing it in the States. But the Glaswegians were a great audience. I realized that there’s a different tradition to comedy here. There is a storytelling tradition in the United Kingdom. They can listen to jokes and they like jokes, but they can also be completely compelled by a longer story, even without the constant payoff in punch lines you get with a series of loosely connected jokes. It was so refreshing and encouraging. It was the best performance of that show I had ever done.

  My first morning there I got up and went to the complimentary breakfast buffet off the lobby. They had sausages and things I had never seen before. Blood pudding, black pudding, haggis patties, sausage links, thick-cut English bacon, Lorne sausage, which is a square patty of what seemed to be deep-fried particle meat. I wanted to eat them all. I couldn’t have been more excited to cram what they call the square sausage right into my face. I ate a little bit of all this stuff. I had heard about haggis but I had never eaten it before. I was still frightened of that. I only took a little taste of it but I couldn’t intellectually overcome what it is—lamb’s heart, liver, lungs, and suet. For some reason I could eat the black pudding with no problem and loved it. I guess coagulated blood was simpler to wrap my head around. The point was, I wanted to eat like a local. I wanted to be accepted there, even on the inside. I shoved it all into my face hole.

  I then went walking around Glasgow smelling the air around me and thinking, “Are they frying food everywhere here?” And then I realized the smell was coming off me. I was sweating broken-down animal fat for two days. That night I woke up thinking there was somebody else in my bed, perhaps an animal trainer or farmer, then I realized it was me. It smelled weird. I thought this must be what it is like to be Scottish on the inside.

  I talked to a Glaswegian and asked, “Do you eat this way every day, because if this is the way you do it, I’m going to try. I’m going to run with you.”

  “Of course we don’t eat that every day. What do you think, we’re fucking stupid?” he said.

  “Well, how do you it?” I asked, slightly desperate.

  He told me that the Lorne sausage is a quick-breakfast type of food that is usually ordered as a sausage sandwich served on a roll, along with a potato scone, which is like a pancake or a piece of chapati bread.

  I looked up Lorne sausage on Wikipedia to find out what part of Scottish history I was digesting. I learned that it’s a brick of ground-up pig cut with a little bit of Rusk filler. After I ate it, later in the day, I talked to another guy about it and he said you put it on a roll and top it with ketchup or tomato chutney. I asked about mustard and he said you would never put mustard on that, so I felt like an idiot. I had to fight the urge to do it all again with ketchup. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. The next day I ate some muesli and fruit instead. I’d had enough.

  That didn’t stop me that night from wandering alone into a curry shop looking to reward myself for a good show. This is another lesson that I learned about the United Kingdom. I’m used to eating Middle Eastern or Indian food in America. You order a kebab, you get one kebab. So I went in and ordered two shish kebabs and some pakoras and they gave me three mountains of food in Styrofoam cases—tandoori chicken, kebabs smothered in onions and a syrupy, sugary sauce, and a whole box of pakoras. I shoveled it all into my hole.

  I think it should be known that I have an eating disorder that involves intense shame over eating almost anything. The muesli wasn’t enough to erase that deep guilt. Alone again in my room I felt stranded, fat, and wrong. Because I was thinking about fat, I started thinking about how I hadn’t gone to the gym in months, and even though I had my running shoes with me, I hadn’t actually worn them yet. My New Balances have been around the world, but they don’t get out much. I looked at my running shoes on the floor. I looked at my computer on the desk. I knew porn was just two clicks away. And I thought: Am I going to be that guy? Am I going to sit in my room in shame masturbating and napping?

  In that moment I really understood how David Carradine hung himself while he was masturbating in a hotel room on the road. Because is that something you can do at home? I don’t think so. That’s a hotel room thing, hanging yourself with a belt off a closet door while you jerk off. Why would anyone do that at home? Many times sitting in a hotel room somewhere I’ve thought, “I want to kill myself.” Then, within a few minutes I think, “Fuck it, I’ll jerk off.” I suppose combining the two, cheating one to amplify the other, would make perfect sense eventually. I’m not saying I’d do it. I don’t want to risk my life masturbating. I am saying it crossed my mind sitting there in Scotland sweating slightly curried lard on a strange bed. I’m glad I didn’t know the procedure and I had forgotten my belt. I settled for masturbating and napping. Then I put on my running shoes and walked around Glasgow. I didn’t run but I wanted them to get out.

  Ireland was another challenge for me. I’ve got to be honest with you. I used to have an aversion to Irish people. This was back when I was in college. I lived in Boston, so I guess my problem was specifically with American Irish people. I felt that they were all out to get me. It all revolved around a traffic incident.

  I remember the day; it was the day John Belushi died. I was devastated. I was driving around in my car, in grief. One of my favorite comedians was dead. I got pulled over. The officer’s name was O’Brien. I don’t remember why he pulled me over, but I didn’t have a current insurance card so they towed my car and sent me home.

  I remember O’Brien looking at my license and expired insurance card and saying, “You can’t drive this vehicle.”

  “Okay, I’ll drive it home and I won’t drive until I get my new insurance card. I promise.”

  “No, you can’t drive it at all. Get out now. I am having it towed.”

  “John Belushi is dead,” I said.

  “Get out of the vehicle.”

  I stood at the side of the road, sad, with the name O’Brien ringing in my ears. O’Brien, O’Brien, O’Brien. With every angry repetition, the voice in my head spoke with a thicker brogue until it sounded like the evil leprechaun in those horror movies. O’Brien. All it took was one O’Brien to make me feel like the Irish were against me and had been for centuries. Officer O’Brien sparked a several- year- long paranoia.

  I had to go to some sort of arraignment to get the ticket dismissed and O’Brien was there. I was before a magistrate of some kind; let’s say his name was Malloy. I told them I got my insurance back. They looked at me and Malloy said he’d let me off because this coming Sunday was Easter Sunday. Then O’Brien looked at me and said, “Yeah, it’s Passover, too.”

  From that point I got a little uncomfortable around the Irish. I’d go to bars and have too much to drink and think there was an Irish conspiracy to take me down. I was a pretty sensitive guy and I was a Jew. There was a type of Irish townie in New England that scared the shit out of me. T
hey just liked to fight for fighting’s sake and they were menacing. I found them threatening but I also envied them in a slightly condescending way because they seemed to know exactly who they were. They were angry, usually wasted, and clearly not without issues, but they were consistent in their disposition and seemed to have full, active social lives, mostly revolving around terrorizing college students and being thrown in jail for being drunk and disorderly. I respected their spirit. In my mind they were a rugged, tough bunch that got shit done and weren’t afraid. My opposites.

  I made a tremendous faux pas years later while interviewing the author Roddy Doyle on a radio show. It revealed a racism that I had not really thought through. Someone had told me an Irish joke that I thought was a perfect representation of what I respected about the Irish in a general way, that rugged spirit and determinism. I told the joke to him to his face, excited:

  During the westward expansion two Irish immigrants landed in New York City. They went to a bar and asked the bartender if there was any work available. The bartender told them to head west because they were offering a dollar for every Indian scalp brought in. The two Irish guys headed west and went looking for Indians. They found themselves riding through a ravine and all of a sudden hundreds of Indians started lining up along the top of the ravine on both sides preparing to descend on the two Irishmen. They stopped their horses and looked around at all of the Indians. One said to the other, “Look at all those Indians. We’re going to be rich.”

  Roddy Doyle indulged me in the telling and, when I was through, quietly stared at me. I laughed alone and then we both entered an awkward silence once it occurred to me that he hated the joke, and probably me. I thought the joke was a great characterization of the Irish spirit. I never even entertained the idea that the two men in the joke were morons. I just thought they were ambitious and fearless and part of me thought they might pull it off.