Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  “Whoa, this is amazing, this guy can walk the walk.” Just anyone who could talk to a woman is my hero, and this guy’s walking in, stealing a celebrity’s girlfriend. I’m like, that was it, I was done. Cocaine did nothing for me, but watching Mystery do this thing was my coke. My reality was blown.

  Then I just tried to start to hang around him as much as I could. Eventually he’s like, “I need a wingman for my workshop.” I’m like, “I want to do that, just to learn what you’re doing.”

  Marc

  Is he an attractive guy, this guy?

  Neil

  It depends on how you see him. He’s tall, he’s like six feet tall, but it’s funny that we go to looks. I don’t think it has anything to do with looks.

  Marc

  Would you classify him as a guy who was once like you?

  Neil

  He’s super nerdy, if he’s not going out and putting on a whole show, it’s like long, greasy hair in a ponytail, computer nerd guy. But then he’d go out, and really dress up, and act tall and confident, and become that other guy. That was an illusion.

  It’s embarrassing. My biggest opportunity in life was not when The New York Times called me and said, “Will you write for us?” It was when Mystery asked me to be his wingman. Obviously it spoke to some deep need inside me to finally really get acceptance.

  Marc

  There’s nothing like getting sex. It’s exciting, and it means a lot.

  Neil

  Yes, thank you for validating that. Then we started traveling around the world doing workshops, and eventually I started to get good at it. I found all the other guys who I read about in that community, and befriended them all, and learned their different tips and tricks.

  The surreal thing that happened was about maybe two years into it, they did a survey in this weird world of pickup artists, of the top pickup artist. I was number one, and Mystery was number two. The student had surpassed the master.

  I would decide each night, “Am I going to call someone over, or go out with someone I’ve met, or am I going to go out and meet new people?”

  It was weird, it was like a skill set you would work on. It wasn’t enough to have sex, it was like, “How can I turn getting a threesome into a science?” We’d work through all this stuff, and at this point, we’re all living together in a house too. I had done an article for Rolling Stone about Courtney Love, and she moved into the house. We had a house with maybe six pickup artists and Courtney Love.

  These guys would be in the living room, doing the pickup workshop, and Courtney Love would come careening through, topless. For some guys, that was their first sight of a female breast.

  Some were guys who were really good-looking, cool guys, but they didn’t know it inside, they didn’t have that esteem. Other guys were over as exchange students from somewhere else, and just felt out of place in the culture. A lot of guys like that.

  In retrospect, I realize what the Game was. The Game was having an overbearing, dominant, neurotic mom, having a total fear of women, and feeling like you need to have some power, or control, over the situation. It had nothing even to do with sex, it was just about self-esteem and fear.

  If you’re just having sex, it’s pleasurable, and it’s nice, and it feels good, and you enjoy people, that’s great. If you’re doing it to fill some hole, that’s the addiction.

  I was really cynical about the whole rehab, sex addiction thing. When I checked in, they said, “Anyone who masturbates is a sex addict, anyone who watches porn is a sex addict.” There are some groups, not this one, that say anyone who has premarital sex is a sex addict. Basically everyone listening would be a sex addict by someone’s definition.

  If you already have that compulsion, it’s really easy to dive into it.

  Marc

  Yeah, I track my entire perception of sex to seeing porn too young. It fucking hobbled me, man.

  Neil

  What did you see that did that?

  Marc

  When I was fourteen, we found a Betamax of Deep Throat and The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Then when I was fifteen, we actually had fake IDs and went to porn theaters, but the assumption at that age, especially for a socially awkward, sexually awkward kid was that’s the way it’s done. Anything below that, or that doesn’t happen that way, is not good sex. I was fucked from the get-go.

  Neil

  Yeah, that’s called your attraction template. It sets a template in your mind for what sex is supposed to be. Your first experience molds you, it creates those neuro-connections that don’t exist.

  NICK GRIFFIN

  I feel the same way about sex as I do about stand-up at this point. I only feel like in the last five years that I’ve really gotten the hang. I had sex and I did it right and it was all fine and sex with my wife was good, but I think I just started to relax in the last five years.

  AMY POEHLER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR

  It’s very interesting when you’re no longer being sexualized what happens. When you’re pregnant, men act really weird. Some of them act really into you and interested in you. A lot of guys, really they don’t even want to make eye contact with you. It’s very strange.

  JONATHAN AMES

  I feel sexuality for me has been, as an easy phrase, acting out. But acting out pain and trying to re-create psychodynamics usually of humiliation to get to a place of profound self-loathing. But sometimes, though, there is a great comfort in the humiliation because now I’m at the place that I want to be.

  I was reading some book on people with sexual problems and I only read the introduction. I tend to only enjoy genre fiction, so once I pick up nonfiction, I peter out after the intros.

  Anyway, this doctor wrote about people seeking an obliteration of self. He was into the idea of people with fetishes because he thought that they might be able to achieve ecstasy through the obliteration of self, like a man who’s so into shoes that he will completely lose himself. I think in normal heterosexual coupling, you can have perhaps obliteration of self. Let’s say you’re going down on a woman and you completely lose yourself in it and just the carnality and just how beautiful she is and how sexy, you’re down there. I don’t know, you lose yourself. You’re, like, on another planet. I think fetishes or perversions sometimes, maybe you get there faster or maybe just going down on women is the same thing as licking a shoe. I don’t know.

  I think that’s what I’ve sought out, the obliteration of self. I had to get away from myself. These things are like Alice in Wonderland things. The things that might be outside the norm of human sexuality.

  JIM NORTON—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, RADIO HOST

  I’ve never had a problem with talking about myself and my own sexual shortcomings, or my own addictive behavior sexually, because anybody truly questioning it is going to be fraudulent. Even if a man doesn’t cheat or get hookers, any man that acts like he doesn’t comprehend how another man could pay for a blow job is a liar. I know he’s a liar, and he knows he’s a liar.

  Any type of criticism like that, you have to meet, I think, with complete belligerence. When people are apologetic about themselves, that’s when they run into trouble. People smell blood and they pounce. I’ve never been apologetic about the things I talk about. I’m not ashamed of it, or if I’m ashamed of it, I say, “I’m ashamed of it.”

  MARGARET CHO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I was seeing this guy who was really, really wild and crazy. He was turned on by me going and fucking people and telling him about it. He was the most emotionally unavailable person. He only wanted to have a relationship with me so that I could be sort of like his avatar and go and do these crazy things that he was not physically capable of doing. He would jerk off and listen. I never touched him or anything.

  JIM NORTON

  For me, sex and sexual behavior are isolating. It’s very, very dark and alone. I don’t want to cruise prostitutes with friends. It’s me alone being ritualistic. I would only let a hooker in the car if she ap
proached from the right and leaned in the right side of my window. It was this weird seduction game I would play with myself.

  Marc

  They had to honor a fantasy before you even exchanged money.

  Jim

  Yeah. To me, it’s too easy. They just get in and suck my dick with money and there’s no seduction. Again, there’s no push and pull. There’s no tension. I like to have a little bit of tension, a little buildup to it. The more little pieces of the ritual you put in, the longer the ritual can go on. Once you cum, it’s over.

  If a girl tells me she loves me while I’m fucking her, my dick, it wilts like somebody threw fucking hot water on it. I can’t keep a hard-on through that. It does nothing for me unless she’s a prostitute. If a prostitute says “I love you,” I’ll cum immediately.

  It’s embarrassing to be so trapped in the Madonna-whore thing, but it’s very hard for me to love the same person who I want to smell their armpits.

  I don’t talk about this to be shocking. I’m annoyed when people are shocked by it. I want them to enjoy the honesty of it and laugh at it. I never want them to be shocked because, to me, it’s stuff that a lot of them do anyway. Come on. We’re not really breaking ground here. I’m not a kid fucker.

  ALI WONG—COMEDIAN, WRITER

  I’m, obviously, like a perverted, gross, freaky person. Sticking my fingers up a man’s butt hole, a straight man’s ass, is so exciting to me. I went to Disneyland recently and I got this special hookup where I got to skip all the lines, got to go on these awesome roller coasters. None of that was more exciting to me than sticking my fingers up a straight man’s butt hole.

  When you’re the first to do it, it’s so exciting because at my age and at this point in my life, sex is 99 percent mental shit anyways. For me to get aroused, doggy-style or spanking don’t cut it no more. I have to wage psychological warfare on a man in order for me to cum.

  MARGARET CHO

  I’ve always been pretty bisexual. Sometimes it depends on the girl. I usually like really butch women and also women who are very dominant, and also women who are transitioning to male bodies.

  When I go through kind of a gay phase, when I’m really into women or there’s this one girl that I’m just crazy about, but she doesn’t live here. When we’re together, I feel so powerful, like I don’t need men. We don’t need men at all. It feels really good. When you can go into a universe where you just need women, that’s just unbelievable. That sort of proves that I’m not gay, because I have so much invested in patriarchy. Being with a woman is a beautiful vacation from patriarchy.

  Then this one girl that I really like, it just gets really complicated because she has a lot of male energy even though she looks very female. It’s like she’s a man in a woman’s body in a female. It’s hard to explain. She’s super mean. I like that.

  DAN SAVAGE—JOURNALIST, WRITER, ACTIVIST

  Bisexuality definitely exists. I think people are a little flexible around the edges. Every once in a while, I see a woman that I am like, “Yeah, zing. I kind of feel something.” It is almost invariably a lesbian firefighter. A lesbian who looks like a guy: muscles, and looks like Rolfe from The Sound of Music, but is a woman.

  Every once in a while, I see a lesbian who blings onto my sex-dar. When that happens, I do not think, “Oh my God, I must really be straight.” I do not have this panic attack. Straight guys, when they see the one dude who pings onto their sex-dar, suddenly have this panic attack about what it must mean. “Maybe I am not really straight; it does not matter how much pussy I have eaten, it does not matter how much pussy I have pounded.” Those guys write me every day, having just flat-out panic attacks that they must be gay.

  I feel sorry for you straight guys, I really do. You are less free sexually than everybody else. I am a gay dude. I could leave here and go have sex with a woman, and nobody is going to think I am straight now. Everyone will think, “Oh, that must have been crazy. That fag Savage fucked a woman. I wonder what that was about.” No one is going to say, “Damn, Savage is not a fag! He fucked a woman!”

  Women can do whatever they want—they eat pussy in college, and then they can be straight-identified, and nobody says, “Not straight.”

  Straight guys, you are trapped. It’s not a prison of your own construction solely, because straight women, when they find out that their husbands or boyfriends had one same-sex encounter, write me, panicked that it must mean he is gay. Gay guys, if we found out that some hot movie star had had one same-sex relationship or encounter, we would all insist that he had to be gay. He could not do that if he were not gay.

  It’s sad for straight guys. I did not like straight guys when I started writing a sex advice column. I started feeling so sorry for straight guys after about two years of reading their letters. If there is anything girlie or gay that intrigues you or interests you, it can undermine your heterosexual bona fides with other straight people, other straight guys. It induces a kind of paranoia in straight guys, that they are not sort of comfortably straight. Not all of them—individual results may vary—but they are sort of paranoid.

  I used to pretend to be straight when I was fifteen years old, and really try to perform straight. I see so many straight guys who are adults who are still doing that: still trying to convince the world that they are straight. Nobody walks around once they are out of the closet and gay going, “I have got to convince everybody. I have to walk this very careful line with my playing gay, so that nobody thinks I am not gay.” Straight guys have to walk this line all their lives.

  JUDY GOLD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  People ask, “When did you know?” I knew when I was three that there was something different about me. That I wasn’t like everyone else. Three.

  I was cutting my hair. I wanted to look like a boy. I made everyone call me Ringo. My grandmother’s like, “Judith, why are you cutting your hair off?” I just wanted to do boy things. I had no desire to play with dolls. I knew that there was something different about me, and I had different feelings about the girls. You don’t know until you’re an adolescent, and you become a sexual person, “That’s what it is.” And in the 1970s, you do not tell anyone.

  My first big crush was Barbara Eden. I just loved her, I thought she was the most beautiful thing. Then, of course, teachers, and then of course Barbra Streisand, and I loved Joan Rivers too. I loved outspoken females. Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields, I loved those women.

  KEVIN ALLISON—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, PODCAST HOST

  I’m about three and a half years old, when I’m looking at this statue, this Hummel statue of a boy with his pajama bottoms falling off. You can see his butt. I’m thinking, “Oh my God.” I grabbed that statue and started running around the house, saying, “Look at this! You can see his heinie!”

  And my brothers and sisters laughed, and then I thought, “Well, the neighbors, they ought to know about this too,” so I start running out of the house to be like, “Look! Look! You can see his heinie!” All of the sudden, I feel my mom grab my collar from behind and bring me back into the house.

  She said, “I’m just going to take this and put it where it will be safe,” and it was gone. It was never to be seen again.

  I could see a look in her eyes that was like, fearful. Put the kibosh on this.

  JIM NORTON

  My first turn-on was pee. I can remember being a kid and there was a brother and sister. I was either first or second grade. I lived in Edison, New Jersey. He was my age. She was a year older. I would get them both at different times. I would lay behind the shrubs and convince them to sit on my face because they both had pissed their pants a lot. I would just breathe in the urine smell through their pants. That was one of my first turn-ons as a kid, the smell of piss.

  It’s animal on some level. We’re probably supposed to be turned on by it. When you look at it, animals mark territory. It’s used for something. It would turn me on. One girl I dated used to piss her panties for me. I was like in my midtwenti
es. I would tell her, “I want to smell it,” and just fucking lick her pussy after she had pissed her panties. I’m not into cross-dressing, but one time she pissed her panties for me, then she asked me to put them on, and I did. It was the dirtiest thing I had done until that point. She kind of blew me through her own piss panties. I know that probably has really ruined her since then, but to me it was just the start of really enjoying piss.

  KEVIN ALLISON

  When I was five, I convinced the boy next door, who was also five, to take our clothes off. I said, “Wouldn’t this be funny if we took off all our clothes”—I had this all planned out—“and ran around your basement listening to Walt Disney’s Cinderella soundtrack?”

  “Cinderelly! Cinderelly!” And then at one point, I said, wouldn’t it be funny if you bent over and spread your butt so I can see what’s inside there, and that moment was like a holy grail moment for me.

  He turned around and I had an erection. I was not familiar with that. He was pointing at it, laughing, and I was like, “Oh my God! what the hell is this?” And soon after, his mom came down and discovered us. And I was not allowed to hang out with the kid next door anymore.

  Marc

  So, no Hummel figures, no neighbor kid.

  Kevin

  Yeah.

  JIM NORTON

  I can count ten sexual partners before fourth grade. I’d say almost all of them boys, a couple girls. Oral sex. I vaguely remember someone trying to fuck me in the ass. I think they were my age. I don’t count it as abuse because it was consensual between kids.

  I didn’t get an erection at that age. I didn’t know what they were. My friend Shawn got hard-ons. He would blow me and I wouldn’t get an erection. I would do him and he would get an erection. I had no idea why his penis did that. It felt good and it was secretive. We love the secretive nature of it. Girls scared me because they had something different than me.