Attempting Normal (14 page)

Inner Good Marc: Hey, buddy, just let it go. It isn’t worth it. So what? She did the thing that upsets you. It’s really not that big a deal.

Inner Bad Marc: Shut up. I can’t sleep. I thought I killed you in high school. I’m tired of being taken advantage of.

Inner Good Marc: You aren’t. This is just one of those little things that really don’t matter. She has to be able to do things. You can’t control everything.

Inner Bad Marc: You’re a pussy. This is important. She disrespects me all the time and it keeps happening.

Inner Good Marc: Disrespect is a bit much. Maybe she just doesn’t know how to communicate with you because you are so pissed-off all the time and she does covert things to get back at you for stifling her.

Inner Bad Marc: Exactly. That’s why I’m going to bring it up!

(Marc exits his head and enters the bed. His wife is falling asleep.)

Marc: Hey, baby. Why did you do that thing today?

Marc’s Wife: What thing?

Marc: You know, that thing that pisses me off because it’s rude.

Marc’s Wife: I don’t want to do this right now.

Marc: Do what? We’re having a conversation.

Marc’s Wife: No, we’re not. You are starting a fight and I don’t want to cry tonight. I want to go to sleep.

Marc: I just don’t understand why you did that thing. You keep doing it.

Marc’s Wife: (getting out of bed) I don’t want to do this again. (She goes into her office room, slams the door, and starts dressing.) I’m leaving.

Marc: (following her, aggressively pushing door open) Wait. I just wanted to talk about it.

Marc’s Wife: No, you didn’t. I just want to leave. Please let me leave. I don’t want to do this anymore.

Marc: Wait, don’t leave.

Marc’s Wife: Please let me leave. (She starts crying.)

Marc: No, don’t leave. What do you mean leave? For how long? Why?

Marc’s Wife: (Hysterical) Just let me leave.

(Marc picks up the orange chair like he is going to move it. Lifts it a foot off the ground and slams it on the floor for effect. The chair, in an almost cartoonlike way, falls apart in three pieces. First one side, then the other, then the center falls out. Marc’s wife is crying hysterically.)

Marc’s Wife: You’re breaking things. It’s not safe. I’m leaving. I’m leaving.

Marc: What are you talking about? It broke itself. What a piece of shit. You could’ve hurt yourself on this thing.

(She makes a run for the front door. Marc stops her. Grabs her arms. Looks at her.)

Marc: Please don’t leave.

(He sees for the first time she is terrified and doesn’t like him at all. His heart drops. He has gone too far.)

Marc: I’ll leave. I should leave.

(Marc prepares to leave.)

My wife sat down on the couch. Crying. I floundered around. Trying to worm out of leaving. I knew that I should be the one to leave. I am the man. I fucked up. I didn’t want to run her out of the house but I also didn’t want her to leave because I didn’t know if or when she would come back and I couldn’t live with that. I thought I had control over that. That is the core of emotional abuse.

“You want me to leave?”

She looked exhausted and destroyed.

“Can’t we just get past this?”

She wasn’t talking. Despondent.

“Okay, I guess I’m leaving. It’s one in the morning. Are you sure you want me to go?”

I started to collect my things. Keys, I put my jacket on, I opened the door.

“Shit, toothbrush.” I turned around to go back in the house. She stood up from the couch and with an intensity and focus of anger I had never seen from her before said, “Just get the fuck out.”

I did. She slammed the door behind me.

I get in my car. It’s one-thirty in the morning, I’m in Los Angeles, and I don’t know where I’m going to go. I’m scared and crazy. My first thought is, “I don’t know any hotels. Maybe I’ll just go downtown and go to the Standard. That’s nice. Maybe they put a little mint on the pillow. Take a swim tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get a good breakfast.” Then there is that part of me that thinks, “Marc, this is a dark night of the soul. You have to go to a dark night of the soul hotel.”

I decide that is the way to go: sleazy and self-punishing. I drive around the shitty part of L.A. where I live and I find this crappy hotel. It’s weird. It’s got bulletproof glass where you get your key and pay for the room in advance.

There’s a couple of transvestite hookers there. I’m walking up to my room thinking, “Well, this is it. It’s the dark night of the soul.” One of the tranny hookers says, “Hey, you wanna date?”

I find something compelling about them for reasons I don’t understand but my plate is a little full and I decide it isn’t the night to wade into these waters.

“No, thanks,” I say, slightly frightened of myself.

The room is just a shitty hotel room. Two shitty beds. Wood paneling. A TV with no cable. It’s hard to have a dark night of the soul when you don’t drink or do drugs or fuck trannies. The drama is limited. I just sit there rocking on the end of the bed talking to myself and crying.

“Fuck her! Maybe not! I dunno! Maybe it’s me!”

I’m just in there weeping on a shitty bed with two channels of
TV thinking maybe I should get one of those trannies in here and talk to her. I don’t know what I would have said.

“Well, you seem to have worked shit out. You’ve made some pretty dramatic decisions for your own wholeness. Can you help me?”

I don’t. I just sit there. I don’t sleep. I cry. I watch the clock, wondering when it will officially be a whole night. When?

When the sun comes up I decide it’s official, a night has passed. It’s 5:30
A.M
. I’m going back. I drive back to my house in the cutting light of an up-all-night morning. I pull up my street to see she’s already put the chair out in front of the house. It sits there barely put together like a shame throne. An example to the rest of the neighborhood. I feel like Lance Kerwin in that movie
The Loneliest Runner
from when I was a kid. He was a bed wetter and he learned to run because his mom would put out his piss-stained sheets for all to see and he’d have to run home before his friends saw them and pull them down.

I park the car and scurry over to the chair, pick it up, hold it together, and run it into the backyard. It isn’t garbage day. It is already bad enough that I am sure that the entire neighborhood has heard us fighting all the time. When I would run into my neighbors while putting out our garbage I would fight the urge to say, “Hey, I’m not hitting her.”

I knock. I think it was my feeble attempt at showing respect and having boundaries. My wife opens the door. I walk in.

“Hi. Sorry. Are we going to be okay?”

I am weepy and contrite. It is predictable at this point. She is detached.

“I really don’t know.”

“Damnit!”

There is nothing worse than the feeling that you have lost your love and she is standing right in front of you.

“Maybe we should go to couples counseling.”

She had suggested this many times before and I just pushed it off into the future. Well, the future was here and it was too late. We went but at that point it was really an ambush that I paid for. I paid someone three hundred dollars to watch my wife call me an asshole for an hour. I sat there and said, “I know. I know! I acted like an asshole. Asshole. Wait, now. What about you?” I had no right to that question by the time we got there, according to her.

Soon after this turning point I was invited to perform at the Aspen Comedy Festival to be part of an event featuring the Moth, a New York–based storytelling group. The theme was “On Thin Ice.” So I thought there was no better tale to tell than that of the breaking of the chair. I mean, I was on thin ice, no doubt. Our anniversary also fell on one of the dates we were there. I made dinner plans and my wife said I shouldn’t worry about it, that we didn’t have to go out and make a big deal about it. I’m pretty sure now that she was already emotionally involved with another man and she was just stringing me along getting her ducks in a row.

I’m about to do the Moth show and I’m freaking out because I’m not sure what story to tell.

“I don’t know what story to tell,” I said. My best thinking at the time led me to ask her this: “Hey, would you mind if I told the story about the chair? Breaking the chair? It’s a good story.”

She said, “I don’t care, Marc.”

“No, seriously. I’m asking your permission because it’s pretty hairy. I’ll make sure I look like the asshole because I was the asshole. I’ll make that clear. It’s funny, it’s deep, it’s real, it’s fucking awful.”

“Do what you want.”

“Okay. You sure? You cool? Because I can do a cat thing.”

“No. Do the chair story. That will be good.”

I think she was either unconsciously or maybe intentionally setting me up to do as much stupid shit as possible so she could
make an undeniable case for herself to leave me. Despite how I make myself look, here I tried to give her whatever she wanted. I tried to love her properly but I was incapable and scared. I was obsessed with her leaving to such a degree that I made it happen. I didn’t take responsibility for my anger and it sank me. All I really wanted for her was to be successful and realize her dreams. Which she did, after she left me.

It was an odd show. Billy Baldwin was also performing. The Aspen Comedy Festival was a prestigious event. Everyone from the comedy industry was there. It was sponsored by HBO. I get onstage in front of everybody in show business and I tell the story. I stand before almost every one of our peers, most of the comedy industry, and say, “I’m an emotionally abusive douche bag and she’s the one I fucking make cry all the time.” Billy Baldwin came up to me after the show and said, “You don’t deserve her.”

If a Baldwin is giving me relationship advice I must be pretty far gone. I get offstage, I look at my wife, and she’s upset, she’s crying, she’s livid.

“What do you think this makes me look like?” she sputtered out as soon as I reached her.

“Well, I asked you!”

“Goddamnit, Marc!”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m embarrassed. You made a fool of me in front of all these people.”

I didn’t see it that way. I thought if I could frame it as a story, as a piece of comedy with me as the butt of the joke, I would be absolved in her eyes. I thought that publicly showing my faults and my desire to change would work. I also thought if I could make this horror story funny it would be a profound example of what I could do as a comic. This is the risk of living your art. If your life is disintegrating, saying so publicly doesn’t necessarily reverse the rot. Usually the opposite is true, especially if the bit works.

When we get back to the hotel room she’s completely detached. I can’t sleep. I feel bad and I have to do a political panel show in the morning. I fall asleep for a second and I have this horrible dream. It isn’t a narrative dream, more of a feeling. There is a setting but it is uneventful: I’m outside, the sky is gray. There are no mandalas unless they are hiding in a vague cloud of terror. All I know is that I am alone. That is all the dream was. The realization that I am alone. I wake up and say, “I can’t … I can’t sleep. I’m freakin’ out, baby. Baby, baby …”

Waking up she says, “What? What do you want? I have a ski race tomorrow.”

“Well, I’m fucking losin’ it.”

“Yeah, so what’s new?”

“Well, can we just talk? Help me out!”

“You want me to blow you?”

“Okay.”

I knew that would take my mind off the end of my marriage and the stress of the show. She was angry and I think in her mind blowing me would be easier than talking to me. Have you ever had a spiteful, detached blowjob? Have you ever had one that had the subtext of
this is it
. Not a happy ending. She avoided me the entire next day.

We get back from Aspen. Obviously it’s strained and stressed. I didn’t know she was moving toward somebody else. I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that there’s not a lot of fucking going on. There are other forms of sex, but not fucking. Hand jobs were never my bag. To me they’re a struggle. I can do that myself. But all of a sudden she’s decided, “I just want to do that now.”

“Really?”

She was presenting it like it was a great option, her new thing. In retrospect what she was telling me was, “That thing you’ve got there is not going anywhere near my vagina ever again. This arm’s
length is the distance that will always exist, between that thing and me. This is as far as it goes.”

It was completely naïve and insensitive of me not to realize how far away my behavior had forced her. It really wasn’t until I came back from a week’s work in New York and she left me that I really got it. It was about a month after the Aspen festival. I had been out doing shows with Henry Rollins and Janeane Garofalo. My wife picked me up at LAX, gave me a bottle of water, and drove me home. During the ride I was telling her about the show. She seemed detached but that wasn’t unusual by that point. In the middle of that ride from the airport, out of nowhere, my wife said, “Marc, you really are a genius.” Her tone was odd and the sentiment seemed to come out of nowhere. Unsolicited. Usually a statement like that is preceded by me pacing around beating the shit out of myself, yelling, “I’m a fraud! I am a fucking loser!” But this came out of nowhere in a dead voice and for no reason.

“Thanks,” I said. “Why did you say that?”

“Because you are.”

We got to the house and walked in. I put my bags down and she went into the kitchen, sat at the table, and started crying. I walked into the kitchen and said, “What’s wrong?”

“I want a trial separation,” she said.

“Why?” I said.

I knew why. I didn’t know what else to say. It was just an impulse to dialogue. When I heard her speak and I looked at her face it was clear that she was done and was now pleading for some kind of permission from herself. Not me. I watched her walk out with no luggage and I said, “What am I supposed to do?” She said, “I don’t know. Call someone.”

That was it.

Months later, after it became apparent that she wasn’t coming back, I entered some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Everything was emotionally heightened and dead simultaneously. It
was confusing and exhausting. I was a functioning catatonic on fire on the inside. I was surrounded by a haze of pain.