Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  Allie

  Yeah, sure.

  Marc

  No, there is no universal system. You’re just another person.

  Allie

  Yeah, just another person, so there’s nothing like, “Oh, well clearly you’ve had it pretty hard, so we’re going to go easy on you for a little while.” There’s none of that.

  Looking back, it’s like, “Wow! I’m pretty resilient.” If I can make it through all that and still—it makes me a little bit less anxious and scared about the future because I’ve seen like, “Okay, I can make it through this cluster-fuck of a year.”

  It was horrible, but I know that I can get through it. Now that I’m experiencing this reprieve of relative normalcy, it’s a good thing to have, because I can see that I’ve made it through that horrible stretch to this little island of safety where I am now.

  I go through this cycle roughly every two to four years where I look back at myself from two or four years ago, and it’s just, “Oh my God! What was I doing?” I’m so ashamed of that person from years ago. I live with this constant suspicion that I’m going to feel that way looking back at now, in two years, four years from now. Maybe that’s one reason why I don’t want to be wrong. I don’t want to be like, “Oh, I did a good job,” and then be wrong in four years. I want to be like, “Oh, I called it. I called it.” I’m not saying it’s logical. It’s not.

  Marc

  It’s anxiety. It’s dread.

  It’s fear of judgment.

  It’s fear of not being cool.

  It’s all that stuff that you grew up with.

  You don’t want to all of a sudden feel happy and then be told—by who, I don’t know—that you were wrong.

  Allie

  It’s like a preemptive defense mechanism.

  Marc

  But don’t you think—through your writing—that there is some self-acceptance now?

  Allie

  Yeah, oh there definitely is some degree of it. I feel more comfortable with myself. I feel like I have ironed out a little bit more of who I am. I’m definitely not there yet, but I know I feel more comfortable being in my head.

  TODD HANSON

  In January 2009, I had no intention of ever coming out of the hotel I checked into. It was what the doctors call an intent to die suicide attempt as opposed to a cry for help, cry for attention, whatever. You don’t want anyone to stop you from pulling it off.

  I didn’t want anyone to find me, I lived with my roommate at the time, one of my dearest friends. I didn’t want him to deal with it. I figured, in an anonymous hotel, a maid comes in, freaks out for two seconds, they call the paramedics or the cops, whoever deals with it, and that’s it. I left a note for the cops.

  It was a day that wasn’t so much a day as it was years and years and I’ve been sad my whole life and I’d had enough. I brought my pajamas and a robe for some reason, I don’t know why, and I brought a pad of paper and a pen and a canister of pills and a bottle of scotch whiskey. Because I had read that you need another central nervous system depressant like alcohol to ensure that the pills work. I took sixty pills. I read on the Internet that six combined with being drunk would be enough, so I took sixty. Maybe I’m the first person to point out that he discovered a factual error on the Internet, but apparently that information wasn’t correct or maybe nobody really knows. I talked to the doctors and they were like, “We don’t know why it didn’t work.”

  I’m not an alcoholic, I’m not even a big drinker. I’m not one of those people that responds much to alcohol. I drank the booze rather methodically out of a tall water glass. It took two and a half tall water glasses to finish the bottle and it was really weird; I was drinking it like water and it was just going down. It was weird my body did not reject the alcohol. Even though normally I can’t have more than three drinks without being sick. I drank half the bottle and then I took the entire mouthful of pills and then I drank the other half of the bottle and laid down and went to sleep.

  I left two notes. I left a note for my family and friends and loved ones. It was short. Then I left another informational note for the cops. The note to the cops was a red flag to them because it wasn’t a sentimental thing, like, I’m looking for help, it was, like, please call the following people. It was just numbers of people that they would need.

  The other note was very short and just said that I’ve been very lucky to have received so much love from so many people and I was really grateful and I didn’t mean to hurt anybody but I couldn’t deal with it anymore and I had this sickness for twenty years and I was sorry. But that it wasn’t anybody else’s fault because they’d all been way nicer to me than most people get and certainly more than anybody deserves or anyone has any right to expect. I felt very privileged and so I didn’t want to send that love into a bad place, but of course I did. What else could you do? I don’t know. It didn’t make sense is what I’m trying to say.

  I went to sleep and then I hear a maid banging on the door and I’m like, shit, I set this up on purpose. They said that the maid would not come at the normal time, but now they’re interrupting the thing. What if I get discovered? What I didn’t understand was that it was actually more than twenty-four hours later, the maid had not come by mistake, it was the next day, and nobody knows why I was alive at that time. I wasn’t supposed to be. I shouldn’t have been but I was.

  I didn’t know that it was the next day and I just felt like, fuck, this is going to interrupt it, and I tried to talk my way out of it so as not to be discovered. I tried to hide the notes, but I was on so many benzos that I was barely coherent. Anyway they eventually found me at my house, so I don’t know if the hotel threw me out and I was like, “Fuck, where do I go now?” I just wanted to lie down and let the pills finish.

  My neighbor April saw me on the street and apparently I had been trying to open the door but couldn’t work the key because I was so sedated that I could barely stand and I could barely talk normally. And she’s like, “You okay?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m fine.” So she said, “All right,” and she left. Then she thought about it and she came back and I was still fumbling with the key and then she said she noticed that my shoes were on the wrong feet and that I had a bloody nose. I don’t know if I fell, I must have tried to throw my clothes on real quick before I answered the door at the hotel, I don’t know. But I don’t remember having the wrong shoes on my feet or hurting my face. Maybe I fell down while I was staggering home.

  Eventually, my roommate figured it out because he.…

  He noticed that the cat food was on the floor open where the cats could get it and that’s what.…

  That’s what made him figure it out.

  That’s the other thing the note to the cops saidb. It said, “Please, my cat’s at home, but.…”

  You know despite this self-serving nature of the other note—“it’s not your fault, don’t be hurt by this, it’s really all for the best”—the fact is, I left the cat food on the floor for the cats to eat so that when nobody fed them they’d have some food before somebody discovered them or whatever. But I did abandon the cats. Writing on the note “find my cats at home,” I abandoned them and these little guys depended on me, and I abandoned everybody else. I said thank you for all the love they’ve shown me, but I didn’t show it back. I abandoned them, and that’s why now I know it was the wrong thing to do.

  But when I woke up I did not think that. I was very upset that I had been found and was not in the hotel.

  The way I look at it, I didn’t choose to come into the world the first time, I found myself in that circumstance because my parents had sex, and it was the same way this time at age forty. I think of it as a second birthday. That’s what I call it with my friends or whatever because I didn’t choose it any more than I chose the first one, it was not anything I would have opted to do, but I found myself in that situation and so many people showed a lot of love. And I thought, well, I can’t disrespect that, it’s too special of a thing and it�
��s too rare of a thing in the world to take what little of it there is and transmute it into pain by abandoning all those people trying to tell you they love you.

  I mean, when I finally checked out of the hospital, I had nothing. I had not really changed my mind about anything. I wasn’t really wrong about the circumstances that were going on at the time. Everything that was going wrong was in fact going wrong and continued to go wrong, but I had two things. The first thing was I had decided all these people’s love was worth preserving and therefore I had a will to live. But I didn’t have a desire to do anything. I had no idea what the future would hold. That whole first year all I did practically was sit on this couch every night and I had my cell phone and I would just call and if I didn’t get anyone on the line I’d leave a message and call the next number, and if I didn’t get anyone on the line I’d leave a whole bunch of messages and then somebody would call me back. I would lie here on this couch holding the phone like a teddy bear, waiting for it to ring, and if somebody called back, then I’d cry on the phone with them, and if nobody called back, then I’d cry alone, and it was like that for a long time.

  All those people coming to see me, they were all trying to cheer me up and I was just arguing with them. They were all like, it’s going to be okay and I’m like, you don’t understand, it’s actually not. But they were right and I was wrong. A component of mental health is a slight inability to see things accurately. You see people who are mentally healthy consistently have a slightly higher opinion of themselves than they’re actually worth or they think that their life is a little bit better, or they think some looming disaster isn’t as bad as it really is.

  I just wanted to say I’m sorry to all those people. It’s a selfish thing to do to take people’s love and not give it back, and if you abandon them, then all of the investment of love that they gave you, you’ve just transmuted into pain and it’s not fair to them. Not only do I thank all those people, but I also apologize to them. I have said this to all of them many times and they’re sick and tired of hearing it, to be honest, but I just thought it was important to say not only thank you but I’m sorry.

  And it will not happen again.

  FAILURE

  “An Uppercut Right to My Feelings”

  I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be a great, relevant comic. It was black or white, life or death, success or failure, mostly failure in my mind. I was only as good as my last set, and I never got the break I wanted. I just knew I didn’t have it and wasn’t getting it despite the fact that I worked obsessively hard. It was never enough compared to __________. I was desperate and angry all the time. I lived in a failure state of mind all the time. I was sinking.

  With a failure state of mind you are susceptible to massive resentment, jealousy, bitterness, self-hatred, creative paralysis, anxiety, and dread. Most of these are just fuel for the fire of failure. They were also the engine of my creativity. They were my themes. They drove me. I thought they were all the keys to my success. The bitterness started to erode my ability to create. Bitterness is just amplified self-pity, and self-pity in any form is not entertaining, but I insisted that all people must feel the same way I did.

  I used to think people who didn’t fail were somehow shallow sellouts who just knew how to sell themselves. I still think that is partially true, but what I have learned from talking to people is that those who work really hard and harness their talent, if they have it, can find a way. People I talked to, like Danny McBride, Terry Gross, and John Oliver, are all tremendously talented, all incredibly hard workers, and all well experienced in enduring soul-crushing failures. I also learned that acknowledging your victories, even minor instances, is important. Success or failure as a general description or overview of a creative life is ludicrous.

  When I started the podcast I had failed. I was in my mid-forties. My comedy career hadn’t panned out. I had no real prospects in my mind. I was broke and coming out of a second childless marriage. I thought I was the victim for a while, but then started to see my part in my position in life. I had to accept it and try to move on. I had to really let it all go in my heart and just start the podcast with no expectations and no income and keep working. I believed I wasn’t ever going to be a relevant comic and that all my opportunities were behind me. I was old and had missed my window. It wasn’t until I let go of expectations and let the humility settle in as opposed to anger, self-pity, and the idea of failure that I became grounded in my body and a fucking grown-up.

  Oddly I still talk about all the themes that once hobbled me but know that I can walk and have some hindsight. They are a cautionary tale or a struggle that can be won. Without failure, I would not have any success.

  JASON SEGEL—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, WRITER

  If the criteria of success is that if you don’t make it, you’re a failure, then a lot of people are walking around feeling shitty.

  AMAZING JOHNATHAN—COMEDIAN, MAGICIAN

  The school talent show stopped me from being a real magician. The talent show at my high school went so horribly wrong that the next day in school, the kids didn’t tease me. Kids are cruel about that stuff, but it was so bad they didn’t say a word. They avoided me.

  I did six tricks, and all six tricks went wrong. I mean, the girl in the sword box had a leg cramp, and she said, “I have to get out! I have to get out of this.” She got out of the sword box halfway through the trick and knocked all the sides off. Two mirrors smashed.

  I killed my dove. I produced a dove and it ran. It got out of my hand and was running and I chased it and it stopped real fast. I couldn’t stop that fast. I ran right over it, squashed it with my foot.

  Then, oh, I exposed the levitation. You could see the steel bar holding the girl up in the air the whole entire time. It was supposed to be hidden until I got right in front of it.

  This was going to be my big thing. This was going to get me chicks in high school. This was going to be what made me from an idiot to a champ.

  Then the final thing was the guillotine. I said, “That can’t go wrong,” because the blade falls. It penetrates the neck and doesn’t cut the head off. That’s the trick. Then they shut the lights off. Well, they shut the lights off just as the blade started to drop, so you never saw it penetrate the guy’s neck. It just blacked out. That was it. That was all done to Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend.” I’m dressed like a dick from Godspell with those rainbow suspenders and the heart on my forehead. I thought that was so cool. I had my hair permed like Doug Henning. I just tanked, man. I went to Toronto and got so shitfaced after that night. I said, “I’ll never do magic again.” I never did. Never did a serious magic show after that.

  JON BENJAMIN—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, ACTOR

  I’ve done phone pranks that have gone awry. One involved the FBI.

  My friend Charlie, he lived in Boston, in the South End, and I would occasionally stay at his apartment when I didn’t have other places to live. The gist of it was, we were watching TV, we were getting high. My mom is a ballet teacher, and me and Charlie grew up in the same town where his sister lived. He was telling me that his sister’s kids are going to go to this other ballet school that was in Worcester. It was kind of a rival to my mom’s.

  So I jokingly said, “Let’s call her. Give me Didi’s number, I’m going to call your sister and tell her not to do that.” So I called their phone. It was a machine, and the message came on, and I left this message in an old lady voice or something, like, “This is Diane, from the Charlotte Klein Dance School. After reviewing your daughter’s application, we don’t feel she’s ready for the Charlotte Klein program. Perhaps you should try Performing Arts School in Worcester.” My mother’s school.

  Whatever. It was dumb. That was it. Hung up. I don’t even think Charlie laughed. He was just watching porn or something.

  Three weeks later, I got a call from Charlie saying, “This is all fucked! I went to Worcester, and we are fucked! You’re fucked!”

  “What are you talking
about?”

  “Your message!”

  “What do you mean?”

  His sister was a lawyer who worked for his father, who was also a lawyer. He was a big divorce attorney in Worcester. The sister was working on a really ugly divorce case, where the mother of the woman was harassing Charlie’s sister. The mom was a mean angry person. So they took the joke message that I left to be the mother of the woman involved in the case, and they took that as a threat on Didi’s daughter’s life because, according to the message, she knows where the kid goes to ballet school.

  Apparently, in the three weeks before Charlie’s call, they had called the FBI, they pay like eight grand to do voice match from the machine, the tape of me, going “This is Diane, from the Charlotte Klein.…” I don’t know how they jumped to that conclusion. I must have sounded just like that woman, and that woman was making this veiled threat about “I know where your daughter goes to ballet school.”

  Marc

  How did it get resolved?

  Jon

  Oh, never.

  Charlie’s father called me up and he was like, “You psycho fucking idiot! You will never make a cent! I’m going to sue you! You’ll never make a cent for the rest of your fucking life, you psycho! How could you do that?” I was like, “I … I didn’t even … How was I…”

  Charlie, apparently, completely sold me down the river. When he got home, it was like that scene from The Godfather. The father is pacing.

  Charlie is like, “What’s going on?”

  They’re like, “This is bad.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “This woman is trying to kill Didi’s daughter.”

  They told him about the tape, and the message, and Charlie’s like, “That was Jon Benjamin.”

  Immediately. “That was my friend Jon Benjamin.”