Cool, Calm & Contentious

by Merrill Markoe

  I grant you that at first glance the very idea of a childhood so hammered by insensitive behavior that it creates people driven to seek love and attention from inebriated strangers may seem truly pathetic. But it’s also lovely that show business exists to provide this kind of arena, where the emotionally pummeled can offer their wounds for the inebriated to lick.

  Perhaps the most ironic part of the whole Crazy Mommy syndrome is that even after the comedian in training has grown up, moved away from home, and bothered to achieve enough status in show business to offer his or her discounting parent concrete evidence of his or her success in the outside world, it rarely changes the original parent-child dynamic. Our friend Bill Scheft discovered this when he took pains to alert his mother that he was going to be on the radio. After his appearance, he asked her if she had enjoyed the show. “I heard the beginning,” she said, “but then you started talking about people I didn’t know, so I turned it off.”

  Bill’s wife, the comedian Adrianne Tolsch, tells of the time when she found out that she was going to be in Newsweek magazine in a big article featuring her as one of the new “Queens of Comedy.” “I called Mom, dizzyingly excited and proud. ‘Mom, Newsweek magazine called me one of the new queens of comedy!’ I said. ‘A two-page spread, with a picture and everything!!’ … And Mom said, ‘You don’t say hello? You don’t say how are you? And we don’t get that magazine here.’ She lived in Los Angeles.”

  Then there’s the comedian friend (who asked to remain anonymous) who tells the story of coming home for the holidays right after she had broken up with her comedian boyfriend. “My father would not stop praising him. I finally said, ‘How can you be so enamored with a man who didn’t love your daughter?’ This made my father so angry, he stormed away from the dinner table. At that point, my mother stared daggers at me and said, ‘I can’t believe you. Your father has never known anyone who was on The Tonight Show before.’ ”

  It’s in our DNA to believe that our mothers have our best interests at heart. The idea is presented as truth in every corner of our culture. Clearly there’s a wide assortment of ways to define “best interests.” I even wrote this essay in order to try to recast otherwise disturbing anecdotes into something useful and uplifting. Because no matter how uncomfortable the circumstances were the first time through, it’s a really gratifying gift when an audience laughs at an awful narrative from a painful past. It’s almost like some kind of heavenly jury has redecided an unfair original verdict in favor of the poor weary kid with the saner perspective.

  Therefore, when people ask me, as they sometimes do, how to get into comedy, I have mainly one piece of advice. I tell them, try to be raised by a woman who has at least five or six of the following traits, which I culled from descriptive lists solicited from the people whose Crazy Mommy stories you just read: bright, clever, crafty, fearless, complex, artistic, resourceful, and inventive while at the same time oblivious, controlling, manipulative, neurotic, tasteless, intractable, solipsistic, thwarted, repressed, inconsistent, critical, self-destructive, depressed, angst-ridden, furious, suicidal, violent, narcissistic, fearful, self-loathing, selfish, and sadistic.

  If your mother has some qualities from each of the two areas, congratulations. Entertainment-starved drunks await you!

  Naturally, the legacy of a mother like this is not only upbeat. Side effects may also include the inability to ever trust anyone or feel at ease with yourself. You may also experience depression, hypersensitivity, obsessive compulsive disorder, masochism, backaches, migraines, rashes, eating disorders, and other rage-related symptoms. In my own case, my mother’s relentless micromanagement and harsh criticism instilled in me a sense of insecurity that, some twenty years after her death, can be managed but not eradicated entirely. And I got off easy. Dealing with my mother was not nearly as difficult as it must have been for my comedian friends who tell stories about alcoholic, drug-addicted, manic-depressive, narcissistic, sadistic, and Munchausen by proxy mommies.

  Fortunately, we live in an era where therapy and counseling lurk around every corner. Especially in Los Angeles and New York, where a lot of comedians wind up. Comedians are to the therapy economy what ten-year-old boys are to the videogame industry.

  Because I had been seeing a therapist for three or four years, when my mother insisted that I show her a television show that I had written and also appeared in, I decided to try out a new approach in my ongoing effort to make our interactions less painful. So after agreeing to let her watch a video of my work, I presented her with a condition. “It’s too late now to change anything,” I said to her. “I’d like to request a favor: No matter how you feel about what you see, just lie and say, ‘Hey! Nice job!’ and leave it at that!” I smiled and showed her how to give me a thumbs-up and a big delighted grin.

  In response, my mother stared at me, her features frozen in an unsmiling mask. “If I can’t criticize you, what are we supposed to talk about? The weather?” she finally said.

  * By “research,” I am referring to the ridiculously high percentage of yeses I got when I asked my friends who pursue comedy for a living, “Did you have a crazy mom?”

  † By “lion’s share,” I mean the African lion.

  ‡ For “crazy,” I’m using a very loose definition that encapsulates everything from clinical definitions of insanity to dinner-party anecdotes of unstable, inconsistent, or persistently exasperating motherly behavior.

  Never Again

  SOMETIMES I LIKE TO IMAGINE MYSELF FLYING OVER A MAP OF my life on Google Earth. I know just what it would look like, too. There, rising out of the ocean, beyond those burned-out campfire pits along the rocky coast of Northern California, are the precipitous cliffs of my teenage years. I zoom past those quickly, scrolling, scrolling, making sure I don’t get trapped on some craggy ledge where I’ll be stuck staring down at my tenth-grade yearbook photo. God, I hate my hair like that.

  Instead, I head farther north, riding over the forests and parklands of the Sierras until, on the horizon, I spot the volcano that was my twenties. Once a sputtering, lava-erupting embodiment of a million noisy unsolvable problems, now it looks placid and quaint, no hint of the bedlam it intended to spew onto the nearby townspeople.

  From there I glide south toward the desert, soaring and circling like a hawk on a thermal, enjoying the vast expanses of barren terrain full of rocks and boulders. I float out over some eerie sandstone spires at the edge of a dilapidated ghost town until I spot the boarded-up entrance to an abandoned mine. That was my thirties, now covered with cobwebs and crawling with scorpions. No good reason to spend much time here, either.

  So I head east, then continue in a northerly direction, enjoying the tidy geometry of nicely tended farmland until a burned-out, pockmarked area is looming before me. The contrast in topography is so stark that for a second it makes me gasp. I’m looking down on a massive, rutted field full of rusted barbed wire, shallow graves, and muddy zigzagging dugouts that resemble the trenches of the Battle of Verdun. Too high up to see the gory details, I keep clicking on the map to enlarge it until scavenging rats and feral cats come into focus. Now I can also make out all kinds of familiar-looking things mixed up in this wet toxic sludge: ticket stubs from sports events I pretended to be watching, half-full bottles of men’s toiletries that were left behind after the first grenade was launched. The closer I get, the more I can spot other familiar fragments: grimy disintegrated letters containing adorable nicknames too humiliating to acknowledge; torn pieces of playfully staged photos from assorted decades. Those clowning, grinning, muggy faces and poses certainly looked a lot more winsome at the time. Where am I? What is this icky place?

  Surprise: I am hovering over the grizzled terrain of my love life, starting at age eighteen.

  Ah, love. What a pain in the ass it has been since I met it.

  That feeling of obsession and elation resulting from an intense moment of chemistry with a member of the opposite sex I barely knew but felt close to because we�
�d gone out for coffee … followed by the anxiety, the turmoil, the misunderstandings and inappropriate expectations that come from being thrust into a state of intimacy with a complete stranger.

  In my checkered past, I have had four long-term (as in more than three years) “love” relationships, all vying for the title of goofiest or most delusional. So glaring were their shortcomings that at no point did I seriously consider marriage, for fear of turning the sacred vow of “forever” into a sarcastic remark. But having a clear picture of the limitations of these liaisons did not keep me from moving in with these men and sticking around for a long time. That’s because in my youth, living with a nutty, unreliable guy made the same good common sense as having sex on the first date. As far as I was concerned, it was unreasonable to think of forgoing fun solely on the grounds that it might be counterproductive. After all, incomprehensible, spontaneous chaos was the first real step on the path to having the deeper, richer “life experiences” required for making good art.

  By the time the last of these relationships ended I was such a quaking mass of colliding, exploding neurotransmitter malfunctions that the only coherent sentence I could form in my native tongue went: “Never again.”

  So there I was, trapped in that damp, mildew-covered portal between the eighties and the nineties, obsessively analyzing memories of ancient conversations with old boyfriends in search of some hidden second layer of meaning that wouldn’t become visible for many years.

  Ah, the eighties.

  Who didn’t love those happy-go-lucky days when single women could luxuriate in a delightful study that claimed that the chances of a woman in her forties being killed by a terrorist were greater than her chances of getting married? In retrospect, the only remotely beneficial by-product of 9/11 was the instant and radical change in the terrorist murder/marriage odds in favor of older single women.

  Then again, what were we expecting? If someone had told Mother Nature at the dawn of creation that there would come a day when her sons and daughters would be doing Jell-O shots and going to Ozzfest in their forties, fifties, and sixties, sometimes still in hopes of hooking up with their ultimate soul mates … she would have laughed derisively. Then, if she was feeling irritable, she would have made the whole species extinct.

  Unless I’m misunderstanding something, Mother Nature’s Original Plan for the Dating and Mating of All Creatures was basically this: when said creatures were in their teens, they were supposed to attract the healthiest, most genetically desirable members of their own species and procreate. They were meant to do it pretty quickly, too, judging by the time span between meeting and mating allowed for in nearly every other life-form, which can usually be measured in hours, if not minutes or seconds.

  And once the act of giving birth was over, all bets were off. There’s very little evidence that Mother Nature saw happiness as the next logical step for the new family. In fact, she seems to be fine with cannibalism (sharks, hamsters, and chimps all eat their young), fratricide (when black eagles have two chicks, the stronger one kills the weaker one), infanticide (monkeys, ducks, and pigs keep the size of their broods down by killing the extras), and child abandonment (pandas let all but one cub die; black bears walk away from their babies unless there are at least three).

  But that’s for those guys. We humans like to rewrite and improve Mother Nature’s rules wherever possible. Thus we have reinterpreted a successful postcoital union to mean one in which both parties are giddy with love day and night, forever, until they die. (Or until the end of time, whichever comes first.) If things get Grumpy or Sleepy or Dopey (or any of the seven dwarfs except Happy), a Greek chorus of empathetic friends and relatives of the dissatisfied couple—most of whom are several times divorced—steps forward from the shadows to helpfully chant, “You’re too good for this. Leave.” That’s because American humans now live in the Age of Perpetual High School. It’s the first time in human history in which two-thirds of the over-eighteen population feel that they do not yet have the credits they need to matriculate to adulthood. Twenty has become an extension of the teens, thirty is “postadolescent,” and forty is “still a kid getting started.”

  When my last relationship ended, and I was just a kid starting out, about to turn forty, I was as eager to begin to search for another perfect soul mate as I was to volunteer for hard labor in a North Korean prison camp. The world seemed to be broken down into two factions: those who were twitching from horrible divorces and those who were still pretending to be seventeen.

  On the rare occasions when I would send a periscope up to survey the possibilities around the edges of the dating pool, no one looked as tanned and glowing as they did the last time I had checked.

  So there we all were, sallow, grouchy, sunburned survivors of a million rancid romantic entanglements, shivering in the shallow end of the pool and pissed off that I was using swimming pool metaphors because it meant we all had to look at each other in swimwear. Even worse was the realization that our only choices were forcing ourselves to date again or total abstinence.

  And now that we’d reached this crossroads, the only thing the bunch of us had in common was our very specific egocentrically derived lists of the things we could no longer tolerate.

  Obviously, a lot of the older males had decided they preferred younger women. Their motivation needed no explanation not covered by the word “duh.” There was also a less obvious second reason that these geezers sought out the youngsters. Young women, bless their little pinheads, manage to convince themselves that once the word “Love” is in play, they can single-handedly fix any problems that may arise by making a few simple hair and wardrobe adjustments. Only women under twenty-five believe that working your way through a women’s magazine’s list of “102 new things that he says turn him on” will affect anything except that magazine’s advertising rates.

  Older women, even by their mid-thirties, have their own strategies for eliminating candidates. Many have been to therapy, read a few self-help books, or watched a lot of Oprah. Thus they stare grim-faced, eyes rolling, when confronting men their own age who are trying to recycle the antique repertoire of vintage relationship bullshit they got away with in their twenties. The counterarguments these men like (for example, “How was I supposed to know?” or “I don’t get why that is such a big deal”) sound a lot more pathetic coming from a dude who looks like someone’s corny father.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me” is not the response these men want to hear.

  In my own case, by the time I was attempting resocialization, I had consumed and digested so much therapeutic advice via shrinks, books, radio, television, and the Internet that I couldn’t lay eyes on a new man without making a mental catalogue of his flaws. Halfway through his first sentence, I would have him filed by psychological and emotional dysfunction. I would have decided whether he was a primary or secondary narcissist or sociopath, a substance abuser, a depressive, bipolar, an obsessive-compulsive, a hysteric, a neurotic, or a delightful combination of them all. I would also be looking for the iceberg tips of dangerous issues lurking in his mannerisms, his facial expressions, his vocal inflections, and the contents of his refrigerator.

  So specific and extensive was my checklist of human frailty that for the next twelve years I shared my home only with a large herd of dogs and their tumbleweed-sized wads of floating hair. It was lonely, but not all that lonely. My dogs were enthusiastic supporters of everything I did. They not only overlooked my flaws, they embraced and celebrated them. My weakest, most halfhearted attempts at cooking were greeted as though they were culinary achievements. When I was too lazy to shower, they liked that better than when I dressed up.

  I began to see myself as their alpha, a canine-pack-dwelling Jane Goodall (minus all the tedious research and charity work). And in those years of solitude and contemplation, I tried to pursue a regimen of peace, maturity, and self-esteem (by which I mean attempting to limit myself to two despondent statements per day about “not having a life�
��).

  Eventually, though, I hit critical mass and had to admit that I really did want to be a part of another tiny unit of humans, even if it meant setting myself up for a possible emotional slaughter. I’m not sure what constituted the last straw. It may have been sheer exhaustion from trying to talk the other single women I knew into clearing spaces in their busy schedules in order to attend things meant to get me out of the house. Or maybe it was the way the dogs just kept snoring through my pleas for help with bringing stuff in from the car.

  Either way, my edict of “Never again” gradually morphed into “Never again unless I get married.” My thinking was that if I could take that additional step toward greater permanence, a step that had always eluded me, I would undergo an almost mystical transformation from confused member of the minority of loners and weirdos into the safer territory of the majority, with their holy matrimony, lawsuits, divorces, and mutual restraining orders.

  Someplace in the middle of my confusion about what step I needed to take next, and long after I had given up entirely, I attended a theatrical event where I met a man who seemed funny and smart. We began exchanging quippy emails. Because this guy was in a happy relationship at the time, the emails weren’t flirtatious, just entertaining, especially after they escalated into a storytelling contest to see who could rightfully claim the title of the all-time biggest idiot in the name of love. I began the contest knowing I would win, but became alarmed when I realized that his stories were turning out to be a lot more dire and catastrophe-filled than mine. Still, I knew I would triumph anyway, because I planned to claim to have been an accomplice to a homicidal crime of passion. Why not? This guy didn’t know me. He didn’t know my history. How could he prove me wrong?