Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  The first time I went to Ireland was in 1999. I was recently divorced for the first time and newly sober. I don’t want to be hackneyed about it but people drink in Ireland. That is a reality. Sobriety is almost a mortal sin there, but that’s where I went to flaunt my recovery. I felt alienated and alone, rejected by the entire country. I remember going to AA meetings there, five of us huddled together in a church in a castle. That was nice. But there was a fortressed feeling about it. Like we were prisoners of rare blood and needed protection. Both are actually true.

  I spent two trying weeks in Kilkenny performing for a half-rural, half-suburban Irish crowd who were not necessarily comedy fans. They were there for the festival. I would assume many of them went to comedy shows once a year. It didn’t go very well. I just don’t think my introspection and personal struggle could compete with what I believed was a history of oppression. The Irish people had been through enough and whatever I was going on about seemed like indulgence. I even realized that.

  It was a projection on my part. My brain seeks to make me unique even if it’s in a bad light. I scared myself into thinking I was alone and being judged by Ireland as a weak, whiny, gutless Jew with problems.

  I still loved being in Ireland. I was shocked at how beautiful the place is. The intensity of the colors and the damp clarity of the landscapes are really stunning. I was moved in a deep way. And no matter what Roddy Doyle thought of my joke, I still respected the land and the people. Kilkenny was one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been but there was a heaviness beneath the beauty, the weight of history and the hardship that you can feel everywhere. But that potential darkness is countered by the lightness of the Irish approach to life—their cheerful embrace of the tragic and their slightly drunken acceptance of the way things are—that levels it out. My shows weren’t very good there and I was still slightly afraid of my audience and I left feeling defeated, but when I had the opportunity ten years later to go back, I jumped at it.

  When I got there for the second time I started every day with a run that took me right by Kilkenny Castle, which is big and old and glorious to look at. I knew nothing about it beyond that, but I took that beautiful run every morning past that castle and thought it was awe-inspiring; someone important must have lived there. Probably many important people lived there, important relative to the history of Ireland, or maybe not important at all, just kind of powerful. Either way it was pretty. It turns out that the castle was built in 1195. Eleven ninety-five! My house was built in 1924 and it’s about to slide down a fucking hill. It turns out that it’s possible to build a wall out of rock and basic mortar that will last a thousand years. As an American, that’s shocking.

  The run along the river was keeping me sane while I was there. The air is so clean, maybe because of all the green, all the trees and plants, the relentless lushness everywhere. But it’s so damn clean. I was running along a river next to the castle and listening to the Rolling Stones. I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with me?” Here I was running through the freshest air, the cleanest atmosphere I’ve been in all my life, and I’ve got the Rolling Stones blaring in my head. So I turned the music off and pulled the earphones out and just listened to the water and my breath and watched the Irish scenery.

  I was a better comic than I was on my first trip and I rose above my fear of Irish antipathy to eventually have some good sets there. I felt like I had finally put my Irish complex to rest, which freed me to enjoy my time there. Then I had a moment the last night I was there which I call “The History of Irish Poetry,” a better representation of the Irish character than the joke about the Indians.

  It was very late, around three-thirty in the morning. I was walking down the empty streets of Kilkenny with another comic. There was a full moon. We had just left a wrap party for the comedy festival. The streets were so quiet we could hear our feet hitting the uneven cobblestones beneath us. It was a perfect night. All the pubs had closed and you could feel history haunting the ominous darkened rock walls that lined the street.

  Out of nowhere a man appeared in the middle of the street like an apparition. He was a large man, fat with a white shirt. He was sweaty and his face was all red. He was holding a half-filled pint glass of beer. I had no idea where it came from. There were no open pubs around. When we saw him we stopped some distance away, warily, like we had come upon a wild animal. He stopped, too, looked right at us, raised the glass up, and exuberantly shouted, “It’s good to be happy!” Then, without missing a beat, he lowered the glass and lowered his head and said, almost under his breath, “There’s no hope.”

  The history of Irish poetry.

  23

  Googleheimers

  My mother lives in Florida so I visit there at least once a year. I used to hate Florida, until I realized it is a great American freak show. It is the most densely populated peculiar state I have been in. It is filled with people either at the end of their lives or the end of their ropes.

  The old people are interesting; they are finally free to do whatever they want but don’t quite have the energy to do it, yet they aren’t letting that stop them. Combine that with the odd mix of locals. I don’t want to call them rednecks or hill people, but you get it. There’s a little taste of the South in the worst way possible. There’s also a large Latino community.

  It’s a full-on, densely populated, always humid, senior salsa hillbilly hoedown all the time down here. The roads are very exciting because you just never know if someone is drunk or old or learned how to drive in another country.

  On my recent visits I’ve become a bit concerned with my empathy for the elderly. As I get older I’m losing the excitement about talking to them and engaging with them that I had when I was younger, when they seemed so wise and interesting. Maybe as I’m approaching old age myself—and I feel something happening to my brain—I am pulling away from the old people out of my own fear. In any case, I find myself wishing that somehow we could put all these old people down there to some productive use. The spirit of that thought illustrates a serious lack of empathy, but here we go.

  I had a fairly revolutionary idea. I don’t know if it’s doable. I want to call it Googleheimers. Maybe it’s wrong-minded but let me explain. Florida is riddled with huge condo complexes with literally thousands of senior citizens in them. We need to create an interface that allows people to get on their computers and access all the wisdom and stories of the old people in the condo developments through a search engine. I’m not a technological guy so I don’t know how you would go about doing this. I’m trying with my limited knowledge to figure out how to make this work without the need to implant some sort of chip in their heads. That seems a bit totalitarian and wrong but it might be necessary. Maybe it could be pitched as some form of medical alert device. At their next doctor’s appointments doctors could talk to them about implanting a chip in their brains that would hook them up to a new service. If anything goes wrong with their health the chip will automatically dispatch an ambulance or generate a phone call with lifesaving information. The chip should actually do this. We have the technology, right?

  When confronted with this new lifesaving technology they might respond with some version of “What? I don’t understand. A machine?”

  “It’s not going to hurt,” the doctor will say. “And you’ll never need to call the ambulance. It will just come.”

  There should be a representative from Googleheimers present to tell the prospective source brain, “Also, people will be able to see into your brain when they search for information, like events in history and whatnot. You’d be helping.”

  “I don’t think I want to.”

  “We’ll give you a break on your medicine if you let us put it in.”

  “All right. I’m not going to feel anything, right?”

  “Nope, painless.”

  “Okay, go ahead and put the gizmo in. I’m on a lot of medicine.”

  There should also be a video element. Maybe in every apartment the
re’s a camera. When somebody Googleheimers something that the particular person in this apartment knows, maybe a little swing music or doo-wop plays and a light comes on to signal to the resident that they need to go to their computer.

  Let’s say you Googleheimer the JFK assassination. All of a sudden a little light goes off in Murray Jacobs’s condo and the music comes on. He sits up at his little portable TV dinner table and says, “Oh no, here we go.” He goes and sits down at his computer and the camera comes on. He sees “JFK assassination” on his screen and starts reflecting about it to you. So you’re looking for information and boom, there’s Murray saying, “Oh sure, I remember. That was a sad day. We’d eaten lunch at the place on Seventh Avenue, me and Doris. We heard the thing about the guy—Kennedy. We liked him even though he was Catholic. He was a nice-looking guy. He seemed like he liked the right things. He liked the black people. We were very, I don’t know what you call it today; we didn’t call it liberal back then, we just called it being a good person. Then we heard the news and it was awful. Doris cried a little bit and we took home half of the cheesecake and I think I had diarrhea because of it. That’s what I remember.”

  That would be the type of information you get when you search Googleheimers. You can use it in a term paper or perhaps for a speaking engagement. You could quote Murray, for example, if you were writing a paper for school: “This was an awful day in November 1963, according to Murray Jacobs. It was sad and they didn’t finish their cheesecake and he got diarrhea.”

  I think that would be entertaining information, sourced to someone who lived through it. It would run the range of people who were at the retirement community. However, I’m thinking I should change the name because Googleheimers might be considered a little derogatory, with its Semitic overtones. The name SeniorMatrix might be more fitting.

  24

  Cooking at Thanksgiving

  I prepare a yearly Thanksgiving dinner for twenty-four people at my mother’s house in Florida. It is a healing and horrifying event for me, full of joy and spite. My mother taught me to be afraid of food. Not all food, but certainly all foods with sugar and fat in them, so almost all food. I think the first word I was taught by my mother was mommy and the second word was skinny. Counting calories was how I learned to do math. My mother has been 116 pounds for as long as I can remember. Needless to say, she is an awful cook because she doesn’t eat anything that normal people would want to eat.

  I like to cook. I didn’t learn much in college but I did learn to appreciate cooking. I had a philosophy professor who threw awesome parties at his house. He was one of those borderline inappropriate teachers full of menace, intelligence, and sexuality and he was a gourmet cook. At one of his soirées I asked how he learned to cook and he said by reading cookbooks. Then he hit on me. That’s it! I was inspired—not to be gay but to learn how to cook. The idea that I could do something giving and seemingly selfless for a group of people and still be the center of attention seemed like a magical talent. I wanted to cook for people—or “at” people, as a recent girlfriend accused me of doing. It all made sense. I wanted to cook at my mother for making me crazy.

  Of course I cook with spite. That is part of my creativity as a comic and an amateur chef. Armed with a knack for recipes and a vengeance against my mother, I started the tradition of traveling from wherever I lived—New York, Los Angeles—to Hollywood, Florida, to cook at my mother and for my extended family.

  Every year I get to her house a few days before Thanksgiving and start stocking up. Fresh-killed turkey, turkey parts, potatoes (sweet and regular), cream, sour cream, whipping cream, butter, sugar, flour. I fill my mother’s fridge with some of her mortal enemies. She deals with it. She likes having me there once a year. She even has her one knife sharpened and borrows a carving set.

  I refuse her help and I mock her questions.

  “Can’t we use low-fat sour cream?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you use half the butter?”

  “What’s the point? This is once a year.”

  “Will you make a few brussels sprouts without butter?”

  “Fine. I can do that. Now leave me alone. I am cooking.”

  The stuffing is the key to my Thanksgiving dinner. It is a recipe passed down to me from my college professor. It is rich and mind-blowing. It is memorable. It makes an impact. It is talked about. I cook the stuffing outside the bird.

  Last Thanksgiving, in the crucial moments before serving the meal, I put the stuffing in the oven in the condo next door to brown the top. Mom’s neighbors are snowbirds and we use their condo for a second oven. She has the keys. I ran back to my mom’s to strain the brussels sprouts. I went back next door to a smoke-filled kitchen. I pulled the stuffing out. It was black and smoldering. I stormed back to my mother’s and said, “We’re screwed. Everything is ruined. Send everyone home.” She came back with me to the other condo. I paced around screaming, “What’s the point, let’s throw it away, the whole dinner is destroyed!” My mother said, “Scrape the burnt stuff off the top. Stop making a production.”

  I wanted to make a production, The “Marc’s Thanksgiving Dinner Is Perfect” production. I do every year and now my lead actor was a mess and might not be able to perform.

  “What do you know about food? Who is going to eat this? Look at it!”

  “So what?” she said. “You’re being a baby.”

  I was. I pulled all the charred stuffing off and I put out the food. No one seemed to notice. The dinner was a hit.

  My mother sat there with her plate of plain brussels sprouts and some of the black stuffing top.

  “You know what, Marc? The burnt top is the best part.”

  I guess my mother loves me.

  25

  The Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival Keynote Address

  I was asked to give the keynote speech at the 2011 Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. I was nervous and horrified as I approached the podium at 1 P.M. on July 28, 2011, in front of about four hundred peers and showbiz types. These were people who I felt judged me my entire career. People who I thought had kept me down and made my life difficult. But once I stopped at the podium a peace came over me. I knew that what I was about to say was from my heart. I knew there were some laughs and some pain. I knew that I had arrived … in my body. I fought back some tears a few minutes in but I got through it. It was one of the most intense and elating experiences of my life. I showed up for myself and my craft.

  Welcome to the Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and fuck you, some of you; you know who you are. Wait. Sorry. That was the old me. I would like to apologize for being a dick just then. Goddamnit. See, that’s progress. The amount of time between action and apology was seconds.

  I am excited to be here. So I will now proceed to make this speech all about me and see where that takes us.

  Things are going pretty well for me right now and that is a problem. I don’t know what kind of person you are but I am the kind of person who when things are going well there is a voice in my head saying, “You’re going to fuck it up. You’re going to fuck it up, Marc.” Over and over and over again. I just wish that voice were louder than the voice screaming, “Let’s fuck it up! Come on, pussy! What happened to you? Fuck it up. Burn some bridges, fuck up your career, fuck up this speech, break up with your girlfriend, start drinking again, pussy! You used to have balls and edge! Have you forgotten what it’s like being alone on a couch drunk and crying with no future and nothing left to lose? Have you forgotten what freedom feels like, pussy? Fuck it up!”

  So, that is going on right now.

  When they asked me to give this speech months ago the first thing I said to my manager was “What? They can’t get anyone else? With this much time? Really?” Then my manager said, “They want you.” So I asked, “Why me?”

  Why ask why me? is the better question. This was obviously a good thing—I got the gig—but I’m the kind of person that needs to deconstru
ct even a good thing so I can understand what is expected of me and who is expecting it. You would think, “Well, Marc, they want you to be funny.” Not good enough. In my mind I needed to know what the angle was. Did no one else want to do this? Did someone drop out? Be honest, who said no already? Chelsea Handler? Did Chelsea Handler say no already? I don’t want Chelsea Handler’s sloppy seconds. Am I cheap? I mean, shit, I’ve been doing comedy for twenty-five years and I’ve been invited to this festival maybe twice before this. Which is ridiculous considering how many “new faces” I’ve tried out along the way. To their credit the festival did have me on the “remember these old faces” show a few years ago, but I get it. Let’s be honest. I haven’t made anyone in this room any real money. I’m currently working out of my garage. I am in a constant battle with resentment against many people in this room. So, again, why me?

  You see what happened there? Within minutes the opportunity to give this speech became “This is a setup. They’re fucking me. What kind of bullshit is this?”

  That is the kind of thinking that has kept me out of the big time for my entire career.

  Okay, I’m going to try to address both sides here—the industry and the comics. It’s not really an us against them situation but sometimes it feels like it is.

  As I said, I have been doing stand-up for twenty-five years. I’ve put more than half my life into building my clown. That’s how I see it. Comics keep getting up onstage and in time the part of them that lives and thrives up there is their clown. My clown was fueled by jealousy and spite for most of my career. I’m the clown who recently read The War for Late Night and thought it was basically about me not being in show business. I’m the clown who thought most of Jon Stewart’s success was based on his commitment to a haircut. I’m the clown that thought Louis C.K.’s show Louie should be called Fuck You, Marc Maron.