Attempting Normal (5 page)

I didn’t do that. I married her. I married her for the wrong reason—because it was safe. I believed at that time that people got married when they had that moment, when they’re looking at themselves in the mirror and say, “Holy shit. I’m going to compromise my dreams, get fat, sick, old, and die. I kind of want to have someone around for that.” You don’t want to be sixty, fat, sick, and alone saying to your reflection, “Look at me. I’m a fat failure.” No, you kind of want someone around to say, “It’s okay, baby. You look great. Let’s go get some Tasti D-Lite, cowboy.” You’re thinking, “I’m not a cowboy. I missed that window. Ah, Mexico.”

We were living in Manhattan but when we got married we moved out to Astoria, Queens, to be married people.

Right away I started to bust out. I had a barrel of monkeys on my back. I liked cocaine, I liked pot, I liked drinking. I was trying to keep it all under control. I was married to a woman who wouldn’t tolerate it but it started to sneak up on me. I was going on the road hanging out with gypsies and freaks and pirates and
I’d come back all sweaty and broken saying, “I don’t know. I think I caught the flu on the plane.” It was nuts.

Yes, pirates. Real pirates. I don’t know what your experience is, but if you’re on a three-day blow bender, you’re going to meet a pirate. At some point after you’ve been up for about seventy-six hours in a strange apartment or hotel room you’re going to hear yourself say to someone else in the room, “Dude, why is there a pirate here?” and that person is going to say, “Be cool. He brought the coke.” And you’re gonna say, “Okay, he’s cool, but does the talking parrot have to stay? Because I’m fucked-up, man. It’s freaking me out.”

“Marc, there’s no parrot. You have a drug problem.”

“That’s what the fucking parrot said! Are you two working together? Why don’t you both get the fuck out of here and I’ll talk to the pirate for six hours.”

I was starting to bring the drugs home. I was not a weekend cocaine user. I’d say I was more like a half-a-week cocaine user. It’s amazing how much you can rationalize when you’re on drugs. I could actually say to myself, “Look, I’m only doing blow Wednesday through Saturday.” I didn’t think I had a problem. I thought I was completely under control. I thought, “I have parameters here. I have a schedule. It’s Wednesday through Saturday.” It took me a long time to realize, “Wednesday through Saturday? You know what, Marc? Regular people
never do coke
! It doesn’t even cross their minds.” I would get to the drug dealer’s house early because I thought if I started early I could be done with it by nine or ten and get on with my day. Like that ever worked. Have you ever heard anyone say, “No, no, I’m good. I’ve had enough blow. Time to get on with my day”?

One day I got to the coke dealer’s house in the late afternoon, before it was dark. I was the Early Bird Special guy. When I got
there he was pulling down the shades and then there was a knock on the door. A short old Colombian man with a ponytail walked in. He handed my dealer a wad of tinfoil in exchange for some cash. He was the source. I said, “Let me do some of that!” My dealer said, “Okay, just a line.”

He opened the foil to reveal what seemed to be a jewel of blow. He flaked some off the rock into two lines. I snorted them. I felt a tingling behind my eyes that spread up through my brain like a wildfire of joy coursing through my nervous system. Apparently I had never felt the effects of pure cocaine. I said, “Holy shit! Why don’t you just sell that?” He said, “Because people would never leave me alone.” Then he crushed the gemstone and dumped it into a Baggie of last night’s stepped-on crud. It was heartbreaking.

My comedy career was stalled. Dramatically stalled. I was all bloated and sweaty and fucked-up. I was hosting segments on a local TV program on the Metro Channel, which I don’t think even exists anymore. It was awful. I would interview people on the street at a desk we would haul around the city. It was a “talk show on the street” segment. It was cute but like being dead but accepting it. I was married to a woman who had just added prenatal vitamins to our kitchen vitamin lineup. I was thinking, “That can’t happen.”

I’d surrendered. I’d given up. I would lie in bed blasted on coke with my heart exploding out of my chest, next to somebody sleeping comfortably, and I wanted to wake her up to tell her I was dying but I would’ve rather just died.

I thought that was the only way to get out of my situation. I wanted my heart to explode. I didn’t have the guts to leave her. I didn’t have the guts to be honest. I was fucked. My career was done. I was bitter.

Then a miracle happened, I guess you can call it a miracle. I’m going to go ahead and call it that even though it ended up the disaster with which I opened this chapter. But at the time it seemed like a miracle, a silver lining. Maybe it was just foil.

I’m at the Comedy Cellar in New York. I’m hanging out. I’m sweating. I’m talking to a few young comics. I’m probably having one of these conversations: “Well, I think if you really want to talk about the history of it, Pryor was really the first.…” You know the rap. Holding court. And this woman comes up to me. This woman like a spirit, an apparition. I didn’t know who she was. What she was. But this six-foot-tall, spectacular-looking being walks up to me and says, “Hey, you’re Marc Maron, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am,” I say, defensive but as charming as possible.

“What happened to you? You look like you’re going to die.”

“Huh? Yeah, well … what? I’m cool, I’m good. What do you mean? What’s the deal?”

“I’m just a big fan, and I don’t know, you look like you’re in trouble. If you want to get sober I can help you get sober.”

“What? You mean like meetings, AA and that kind of shit? Like the God thing? Are you a God person?”

“I can just point you in that direction.”

“Uh, okay,” I say.

In my mind I had no desire to get sober or even live, but every part of my mind and body wanted to be as close to her as possible, so I said, “Yeah. Hell yeah, I want to get sober. I need to get sober.” But in my mind all I was thinking was, “I’ll do anything with you. I’ll go anywhere. I’m going to follow you home now even if you don’t want me to follow you home.” And I did.

We walked thirty-five blocks. I smoked. We talked about cigarettes and about addiction and about comedy and about everything else. We got to her apartment. It was a walk-up on Forty-sixth Street. I’m in her living room smoking a joint, holding a Foster’s, and saying, “So, get me sober! Come on. What do you got?”

I start going to meetings, to lunch, to dinner, to wherever this perfect woman wanted to go. I fell in love as much as a newly sober, insane, angry bastard who was miserable and married could be in love, but I was in love, which meant I was going to hang every one of my hopes on this twenty-three-year-old girl. I was thirty-five.

Of course, I was married to another woman. That put a crimp in things a little bit. Courting is difficult when it has to be shrouded in mystery and secret pager codes. There was no texting then, just pagers. So we had numbers that meant, “I love you,” “I miss you,” “What are you doing?” I was running around the city, sweating and beeping.

Love is love and being in love is being in love. Wherever your loyalty is, whatever rules you think you won’t break in your life, sometimes you just can’t fight being in love. Some of the best memories of my life are moments like following her up the stairs of that Forty-sixth Street fourth-floor walk-up apartment. Watching her move up the stairs in a plaid skirt, watching her smoking cigarettes, and then laughing on her old couch, lying in her bed after we had sex and listening to her piss, feeling impressed and ecstatic, like, “Holy shit! Listen to that! It’s so powerful!” I told my friend Sam about my fascination with the power of her stream and he said it sounded like I was talking about a Thoroughbred horse. I think I was. I thought, “Maybe this is my chance to disrupt my bipolar Jew gene line.”

I didn’t know what to do. I’m in love with this woman, I’m married to this other woman, and I’m in trouble, so I call my two friends. That’s all I need, two. I need the main guy and the guy I go to when I drain the main guy.

The guys at that time were Sam, a bitter and brilliant writer, who was married and had just had a kid, and Dave, a comic and borderline sexual predator. I call Sam first and I say, “Dude, I’m in love. This is crazy. Things have been over with Kim and me for
years. What should I do, man? This woman is perfect. I’m getting sober. It’s everything I wanted.” He says, “Man, you’re married. Be responsible. You made a commitment. Try to honor it. This thing will pass.” I say, “You know what, man? Take a day off.” Then I call Dave. “Hey, Dave! What’s going on? Take a break from pursuing eighteen-year-olds online and talk to me. I’m in love with this woman. She’s twenty-three and I’m married but I’m getting sober and I think it’s the right thing.” And Dave, thank God, says, “Ah, dude … you gotta go for it! What the fuck, man?! You only live once. This is it! This might be it!” And I’m like, “You’re right, man, thanks. I knew I could count on you.”

We all have the right to cherry-pick the advice given us in order to do exactly what we wanted to do in the first place.

As I said, courting is a little difficult when you’re married and when you’re newly sober and when the woman’s only twenty-three and you’re a dozen years older. I just know that in traditional courting this is not a conversation you should have after sex:

Me [
yelling
]: So, are we doing this, or what? Because I’m going to fucking leave her. Are we doing this? Do you fucking love me? Do you fucking love me? Are you taking me? Are we doing this?

Her [
crying
]: I don’t know!

Me [
still yelling
]: What the fuck!? Yes or no? Are we doing this?

Her: I guess so.

Me: Good enough. I’m on it.

If you don’t believe in magic, if you don’t believe that there are phrases, incantations, mantras, that can change the universe completely, literally change the entire course and trajectory of your life, even the objects in your periphery, you are wrong. There are. This is one of them: “Honey, I’m in love with someone else, and I’m having an affair with her.” Abracadabra! Locks are changed. Objects are moved and missing. You are dispatched into exile to a sublet on the Lower East Side, where you will remain
alone, isolated, broken off from the world you knew. You deserve it. You have cut yourself off from a wife, a family, a future, your money. Everything.

But I had that girl. Yes. I had that girl. And she was enough.

We embark on this crazy thing, this girl and I. I’m getting sober. I’m going to meetings all the time. I’m writing a book. I’m doing a one-man show. Things are okay. I know some of you are thinking, “What about that other woman, you heartless fuck?” Yeah, what about her? She was a good person, I know. I felt like shit, but I had to do what I had to do. And some of you may think, “Well, you didn’t have to do that.” Well, yeah, I did. I did have to do that. It saved my life. I divorced that woman and married that girl and she eventually left me. Karma? Sure. She got me sober, though. I am still sober. I have her to thank for that.

I actually use sobriety to try to frame the pain of my second divorce. I was at the Comedy Cellar one night, miserable and in the middle of it. I was talking to the late Greg Giraldo, who was always struggling with drugs and alcohol. A struggle he eventually lost. I asked him how much money he had spent over the years on rehabs. He said, “About two hundred and fifty grand.”

My divorce cost me less than that. And I am still sober.

In the middle of my second divorce, from this once-magical woman, I was a broken man. I was fucked-up on all levels. I was on my way to my mother’s in Florida, which means I was in real trouble because she is really the last person I ever want to lean on. Not that she’s a bad person; she’s just a bit boundaryless and draining. I’m at the airport in Los Angeles. I’m walking through the terminal to my gate, trying to catch a 6
A.M
. flight. Shattered. My duffel bag was even sad as it bounced off my butt as I walked. I was about four months into my separation from Mishna. I looked up from my drudging and that’s when I saw her: Kim and
her new husband, standing with their luggage at the gate I was passing.

I think, “I can’t handle this. There’s no way.” So I do that thing where you put your hand up over your forehead, look the other way, and think, “There, I’m invisible.”

I know she knows everything. Her best friend is my brother’s wife. She has to know all about the disaster that my life’s become. I get past the gate and I think I’m out of the woods but then I hear, “Marc!”

I turn around and there’s nine years of history running toward me with a very familiar gait. She gets to me and asks, concern in her eyes, “How are you doing?”

I explode in tears and uncontrollable blubbering. I cannot stop it. And without missing a beat, my first wife says, “Not so good, huh?”

I was so happy she had that moment. I deserved it, she deserved it. And the sick thing about me is that right after we had that exchange there was a part of me that thought, “So, are we good? Can I go with you now?”

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