Attempting Normal (4 page)

That first gig I worked with Frankie we had to drive a couple of hours into Connecticut to do a show at a bar and dance club. The entire way down Frankie laid down the law. He kept saying, “The most important thing is doing your time.” He also recited to me a poem called “The Road,” about being a road comic. I can’t recall what it was but it was earnest and celebratory, like a pirate shanty.

I was nervous about doing my time. I had not done many gigs and was just getting up to around a half hour. The club was packed. There was a disco ball hanging over the crowd and lots of mirrors around. I took the stage and did all the jokes I had.

When I’d finished my act, I said, “Thank you very much. You’re a great crowd. Now, let’s welcome your headliner to the stage. He does clubs and colleges all over … Frankie Bastille.” The crowd cheered but Frankie did not take the stage. The clapping tapered off and I was still standing at the mic. No Frankie in sight. I tried again: “Please welcome, Frankie Bastille …” Nothing. The room is starting to get that awkward tension. I am not sure what to do. Then a voice comes out of the darkness, from the back of the room.

“Twenty-six.”

It was Frankie.

“What?” I said, panicked, squinting into the darkness.

“You did twenty-six minutes. You have four minutes left.”

“Uh …”

I scrambled and did a street joke and then brought Frankie up.
He did his forty-five and we got in the car to drive home. I started to apologize but he cut me off.

“You gotta do your time, man,” he said, and that was it.

I did not aspire to be Frankie. He was infamous in certain comedy circles but not really respected or liked. No one really knew him and he liked it like that. In the eighties there were a lot of people doing comedy who just seemed to be keeping a few steps ahead of the IRS, ex-wives, and parole officers. Frankie was one of them. There was a story that he was arrested walking off stage for a parole violation and the cops found out because they had heard him on the radio plugging his weekend show. He learned his lesson. From that point on he didn’t give out head shots. He didn’t want to be on the marquee or in the paper. He didn’t stay in any one town very long. He always had people after him for one reason or another.

I figured Frankie liked drugs but I had no idea what he was really up to until we took a trip down to Cape Cod. The gig down there was at a massive Chinese restaurant called Johnny Yee’s. The comedy show followed a Polynesian dance show. The restaurant had a huge stage that they pulled out for the dancers and then rolled back in when they were done. The stage that was left for us was six feet high and you had to walk up some stairs to get on it. There was a moat of a dance floor between you and the first row of tables.

It was in Yarmouth, so it was about an hour-and-a-half drive. I picked up Frankie, we looked for his tooth, and hit the road. Once we got onto the Cape Frankie asked me for a dollar bill. I gave him one. He rolled it up. He pulled a small packet out of his pocket. It was a bundle of what looked to be ten smaller packets. I know now these were dime bags. He ripped one open, stuck one end of the bill in the bag and one in his nose, and snorted the
contents. He sniffed a bit, looked at me, smiled, and said, “You ever try heroin?”

“No,” I said, concerned but curious.

“You want to?”

“Not right now. Maybe later,” I said. I was driving a car.

Then Frankie started to nod off. I watched his body drift and sway with the car. He was in and out of consciousness. I stopped for gas and while I was filling up the car he woke up, stumbled into the office of the gas station, and stole a stack of the station’s business cards. He started scratching out “Joe’s Shell” with a pen and putting his name on there. He thought this was hilarious. I still have one of the cards. When we were about fifteen minutes from the gig he passed out cold. When we got to Johnny Yee’s I had to walk him into the club and lay him out in a booth. The guy who booked the place, this three-hundred-pound guy in a Hawaiian shirt named Wayne, asked me if he was okay. I said I thought so but I wasn’t sure. I had never dealt with a guy on the deep nod before.

Since I was opening the show I couldn’t really keep my eye on Frankie. I got up onstage and did my time, all of it. When I introduced Frankie I wasn’t afraid of him shouting out my time. I was afraid of him not coming onstage at all. The last I saw him he was hunched in a booth. I announced his name with a slight inflection at the end—“Frankie Bastille?”—and he bounded onto the stage, took the mic, thanked me, and proceeded to do one of the most engaging, animated live stand-up shows I have ever seen. He worked the stage, he acted out his bits, and he sweated profusely, like no one I had ever seen onstage sweat. He finished and got a standing ovation.

I sat in the booth in the back baffled and amazed. All I could think was
that guy is a fucking pro
.

We got into the car after the show and within seconds Frankie was back on the nod. He stayed that way for the entire trip home.
I didn’t want to be Frankie, but I didn’t mind being with him, watching him nod off in the car seat next to me after a killer set. That, I thought, is a comic.

The only plan I’ve ever had in life was to be a comedian. I’ve never been sure why, but as I get older I’m starting to think it was because I needed to finish the construction of myself. Why I chose comedy for this undertaking is confusing but is starting to make sense to me.

When I was a kid I believed that I wasn’t like anyone else. That everyone else knew how to get along and move easily through life. I was alone in a world with no definition, surrounded by the clutter of purpose. My life has been a series of attempts at creating a self that fit somewhere, that engaged easily with others, that people liked or could at least
see
. Something defined. I fed on the acknowledgment, approval, and acceptance of others. Then I resented people for accepting the charade.

I only felt comfortable with people who were missing the same pieces of themselves that I was. I’ve always been happiest around
characters
. Well-defined and brash personalities. Focused charisma and intensity. Rage. Humor. Flaming self-destructiveness. Missing teeth and tattoos and Baggies in the glove compartment.

The rebels and outlaws, fuckups and con men—comics—had figured it out. They knew the tricks to get by and get life and get what they needed through charm and device, without feeling the pain of not being whole or the injustice of need. They were, like all artists, masters of the mathematics of relief, which was just the sort of thing I was looking for: a book, a movie, a crazy person, a kiss, a drug, a commitment, a song, a phrase, a joke. I thought that shit was magic.

They were my people. And that’s why comedy.

  3  

I guess we can start at the end but it’s really the middle. Let’s just call it the really bad part. My second wife, Mishna, brought it to my attention that I had an anger problem. She didn’t say it like that. What she said was, “I’m leaving.”

Then she took her vagina and left.

I had it coming, I guess. I knew from the start that all I was doing was trying to hold on to her because she gave my life purpose and she was fucking stunning. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a person. Maybe if I had just relaxed, trusted myself, trusted her, didn’t freak out, everything would have been okay, but I am not capable of doing any of those things. We were fighting the odds from the beginning. When I met her I was a miserable drunk and she was just a kid. I was also married.

My first wife, Kim, was a nice woman. I loved her. I shouldn’t have married her. I did it because I didn’t know how to break up
with her. I was too scared. It was too comfortable. She was a bit naïve. I was a bit out of my mind. I thought that’s what marriage was rooted in: fear, comfort, and lies. The triumvirate. I had grown to believe that I would never be happy but if I at least were married I could rest my chaos on a firm emotional mattress, that marriage would make things okay, normal-ish. They weren’t. I felt like I was drowning in my bed.

I understood exactly what I was getting into with my first marriage. It was 1995. I was a thirty-two-year-old comic. When I met her, six years before we got married, I was just starting out. Comedians in their infancy are generally selfish, irresponsible, emotionally retarded, morally dubious, substance-addicted animals who live out of boxes and milk crates. They are plagued with feelings of failure and fraudulence. They are prone to fleeting fits of manic grandiosity and are completely dependent on the acceptance and approval of rooms full of strangers, strangers the comedian resents until he feels sufficiently loved and embraced.

Perhaps I am only speaking for myself here.

I was looking for something that would make sense of things. I didn’t know what. It was vague to me. I had an itchy soul.

My brother was getting married. He asked me to be the best man. I was all fucked-up on drugs at the time. I go to the wedding and it’s a big Jewish event. We’re all under the chuppah. My brother’s marrying this woman. She’s got a hot Jewish maid of honor who is giving me some heat. I’m looking at the bride-to-be through the haze of a cocaine and booze hangover and thinking to myself, “If she’s going to take my brother, I’m going to take her friend.” That’s sort of like love at first sight.

So I charmed her friend, aggressively. Fortunately for me, she lived in the same city, Boston. So within a few weeks, I’d moved my boxes into her apartment and terrorized her into loving me, sweetly. I was the black sheep, the brother failing rehab who had hung his hopes on a dream of show business, and was nothing
but fucking trouble. Somehow, she found all of that very appealing. I was her ticket out of middle-class Jeweyness. She was my ticket back in.

I was with her for about six years before I asked her to marry me, which only means one thing: I shouldn’t have done it! If you wait six years to get engaged, you are on the fence. I should have known that. I should have known when I bought her a ring and proposed to her in front of the Phoenix airport. She got off a plane, she got in the car, I took out the ring, I said, “So you wanna break up or do this?” I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like that. And she agreed to marry me.

From the minute I got engaged to that woman I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I was not stable, I loved her but was not really in love with her, I was not a good man. I was just looking for something that would make me normal; make everything make sense. I figured: bourgeois, middle class, Jews. That should do it. Her dad was a psychiatrist. In retrospect he must not have been a very good one. I mean, he let her marry me. How did he misread the signs so badly? Or maybe I’m that good an actor.

As soon as I put that ring on her finger a switch was thrown. Rooms were being rented, bakers called, invitations sent out; family members were bickering and I might as well have been standing on a dock waving goodbye to a boat sailing off without me. Or maybe my body was on board, dead-eyed and vacant, but my mind was still on the dock, waving.

At first I thought we were going to get married on a mountain at sunset. But there were Jews involved, so that wasn’t going to happen. Her mother put the kibosh on that plan with one sentence: “Esther can’t make it up the hill.” There’s always an Esther and she’s not going up the hill.

The other switch that got thrown the moment I got engaged was the one in my head that dropped the needle into this groove:
How the fuck did I get into this? Why am I in this? How do I get out
of this?
Right up to the day of our wedding I was thinking, “I can’t do this.”

As I got closer, the fantasy started to take shape: “What if I just walk out on the altar?” That would’ve been amazing.

Can you imagine if you were up on the altar and the rabbi said, “Do you take this woman?” and you said, “You know what, I don’t! HA HA HA!!!” What a cathartic, profound moment that would be. At that moment everyone you know in your life would think you were a fuckin’ asshole and you would be truly free. How often do you get that opportunity? “Yeah, fuck all of you!” You could just step out from under the chuppah, walk slowly past a crowd of stunned faces, climb onto a horse, ride to Mexico, and become a cowboy. That’s how real cowboys are made. Show up at a bar in Juarez and say, “Hola, amigo. What can I get for this ring?” Clink.