Attempting Normal (25 page)

I didn’t want that.

As I fell asleep I couldn’t help but think I was being taught a lesson. I felt like I deserved it, like I was paying some reparation for being nervous at Prince’s, for succumbing to racial mythology and not ordering the extra hot, for not getting Slim his fucking amp back from that racist restaurant owner who treated him like the help.

I rode it out. I didn’t die.

  22  

Running away works. Sometimes you have to change it up: new people, new restaurants, new Laundromat, new barista, new life. Yeah, the adage is true—that wherever you go, there you are—but you in an entirely new setting is a new you, or at least the old you in a new context, and that’s not nothing.

That is why I’ve grown to like the road. There is a freedom that comes through the loneliness of being stranded by work in another town or country. My freedom initially takes the form of self-abuse of some kind: food, sex, masturbation, drugs, making a mess, or oversleeping. My impulse: “I can make this mess here. It doesn’t count. This is planet road.”

I am a homeowner, which means that a good part of my brain is always consumed with all the little anxieties and tasks that go along with owning a home, a list too long to make here without afflicting myself with paralyzing stress. The minute I walk into a clean hotel room and realize that I am not responsible for anything other than not destroying it, all my other worries melt away.
I hook up my computer, see what the room has to offer (a special shower fixture, a view), and sit down in my temporary furnished box and relax on a strange, expertly made bed. I then lie down on that bed and masturbate.

As real-life anxieties melt away, my suddenly free mind starts to piece together everything that led up to me being in that hotel room. Within a few hours I land on the question, “Who am I, really? No one knows me. Do I know myself?” That’s when I go outside, untethered from my life, and start shopping around—for love or at least a functional identity.

That can be hard depending on where the hotel is located. Downtown areas usually suck because after five they are ghost towns and you just become a lone stranger wandering around wondering if you are going to be murdered in the street or if anyone else is alive in this city and if so where are they. University towns are okay, for a few hours, before you realize that you are old and silly. I try to seek out places that make me feel connected: coffee shops, record stores, hipster blocks, malls (ironically), indigenous food. Anything that will connect me to other people, a culture, life. I want to do what locals do. I am living there for a few days. I can also justify just about anything as professional research. I have to try new things so I can make them funny.

Running away works, but it doesn’t work as well for me abroad. I am a little xenophobic. It’s not limited to other countries or people from other cultures. I can feel out of place standing in my driveway. I feel that way with my neighbors. I feel that way at the Mexican supermarket down the street. The feeling is just compounded when I am in another country.

On a recent trip to Glasgow, Scotland, I was determined not to freak out about being in another country. As an American I am always threatened by smaller, culturally well-defined countries.
The Scottish have a cultural identity that has lasted centuries. They have different cereals, cakes, and brands. Everything is really old. I convinced myself that it would be fine, that they’d get me. They speak English, after all. That turned out to be arguable.

But I decided to enter Glasgow without fear, and within hours I was feeling very comfortable. The Scots I came in contact with were nothing but pleasant. The audiences were great. I felt like I was turning a corner on my feelings of awkwardness and loneliness abroad. I did
Scorching the Earth
, the big divorce show I put together after I went through that horrible time in my life. I was nervous about it because
Scorching
is devoted to a single story; one that runs through a lot of painful stuff. I had a hard enough time doing it in the States. But the Glaswegians were a great audience. I realized that there’s a different tradition to comedy here. There is a storytelling tradition in the United Kingdom. They can listen to jokes and they like jokes, but they can also be completely compelled by a longer story, even without the constant payoff in punch lines you get with a series of loosely connected jokes. It was so refreshing and encouraging. It was the best performance of that show I had ever done.

My first morning there I got up and went to the complimentary breakfast buffet off the lobby. They had sausages and things I had never seen before. Blood pudding, black pudding, haggis patties, sausage links, thick-cut English bacon, Lorne sausage, which is a square patty of what seemed to be deep-fried particle meat. I wanted to eat them all. I couldn’t have been more excited to cram what they call the square sausage right into my face. I ate a little bit of all this stuff. I had heard about haggis but I had never eaten it before. I was still frightened of that. I only took a little taste of it but I couldn’t intellectually overcome what it is—lamb’s heart, liver, lungs, and suet. For some reason I could eat the black pudding with no problem and loved it. I guess coagulated blood was simpler to wrap my head around. The point was, I wanted to
eat like a local. I wanted to be accepted there, even on the inside. I shoved it all into my face hole.

I then went walking around Glasgow smelling the air around me and thinking, “Are they frying food everywhere here?” And then I realized the smell was coming off me. I was sweating broken-down animal fat for two days. That night I woke up thinking there was somebody else in my bed, perhaps an animal trainer or farmer, then I realized it was me. It smelled weird. I thought this must be what it is like to be Scottish on the inside.

I talked to a Glaswegian and asked, “Do you eat this way every day, because if this is the way you do it, I’m going to try. I’m going to run with you.”

“Of course we don’t eat that every day. What do you think, we’re fucking stupid?” he said.

“Well, how do you it?” I asked, slightly desperate.

He told me that the Lorne sausage is a quick-breakfast type of food that is usually ordered as a sausage sandwich served on a roll, along with a potato scone, which is like a pancake or a piece of chapati bread.

I looked up Lorne sausage on Wikipedia to find out what part of Scottish history I was digesting. I learned that it’s a brick of ground-up pig cut with a little bit of Rusk filler. After I ate it, later in the day, I talked to another guy about it and he said you put it on a roll and top it with ketchup or tomato chutney. I asked about mustard and he said you would never put mustard on that, so I felt like an idiot. I had to fight the urge to do it all again with ketchup. I just couldn’t handle it anymore. The next day I ate some muesli and fruit instead. I’d had enough.

That didn’t stop me that night from wandering alone into a curry shop looking to reward myself for a good show. This is another lesson that I learned about the United Kingdom. I’m used
to eating Middle Eastern or Indian food in America. You order a kebab, you get one kebab. So I went in and ordered two shish kebabs and some pakoras and they gave me three mountains of food in Styrofoam cases—tandoori chicken, kebabs smothered in onions and a syrupy, sugary sauce, and a whole box of pakoras. I shoveled it all into my hole.

I think it should be known that I have an eating disorder that involves intense shame over eating almost anything. The muesli wasn’t enough to erase that deep guilt. Alone again in my room I felt stranded, fat, and wrong. Because I was thinking about fat, I started thinking about how I hadn’t gone to the gym in months, and even though I had my running shoes with me, I hadn’t actually worn them yet. My New Balances have been around the world, but they don’t get out much. I looked at my running shoes on the floor. I looked at my computer on the desk. I knew porn was just two clicks away. And I thought: Am I going to be that guy? Am I going to sit in my room in shame masturbating and napping?

In that moment I really understood how David Carradine hung himself while he was masturbating in a hotel room on the road. Because is that something you can do at home? I don’t think so. That’s a hotel room thing, hanging yourself with a belt off a closet door while you jerk off. Why would anyone do that at home? Many times sitting in a hotel room somewhere I’ve thought, “I want to kill myself.” Then, within a few minutes I think, “Fuck it, I’ll jerk off.” I suppose combining the two, cheating one to amplify the other, would make perfect sense eventually. I’m not saying I’d do it. I don’t want to risk my life masturbating. I am saying it crossed my mind sitting there in Scotland sweating slightly curried lard on a strange bed. I’m glad I didn’t know the procedure and I had forgotten my belt. I settled for masturbating and napping. Then I put on my running
shoes and walked around Glasgow. I didn’t run but I wanted them to get out.

Ireland was another challenge for me. I’ve got to be honest with you. I used to have an aversion to Irish people. This was back when I was in college. I lived in Boston, so I guess my problem was specifically with American Irish people. I felt that they were all out to get me. It all revolved around a traffic incident.

I remember the day; it was the day John Belushi died. I was devastated. I was driving around in my car, in grief. One of my favorite comedians was dead. I got pulled over. The officer’s name was O’Brien. I don’t remember why he pulled me over, but I didn’t have a current insurance card so they towed my car and sent me home.

I remember O’Brien looking at my license and expired insurance card and saying, “You can’t drive this vehicle.”

“Okay, I’ll drive it home and I won’t drive until I get my new insurance card. I promise.”

“No, you can’t drive it at all. Get out now. I am having it towed.”

“John Belushi is dead,” I said.

“Get out of the vehicle.”

I stood at the side of the road, sad, with the name O’Brien ringing in my ears. O’Brien, O’Brien, O’Brien. With every angry repetition, the voice in my head spoke with a thicker brogue until it sounded like the evil leprechaun in those horror movies.
O’Brien
. All it took was one O’Brien to make me feel like the Irish were against me and had been for centuries. Officer O’Brien sparked a several- year- long paranoia.

I had to go to some sort of arraignment to get the ticket dismissed and O’Brien was there. I was before a magistrate of some kind; let’s say his name was Malloy. I told them I got my insurance
back. They looked at me and Malloy said he’d let me off because this coming Sunday was Easter Sunday. Then O’Brien looked at me and said, “Yeah, it’s Passover, too.”

From that point I got a little uncomfortable around the Irish. I’d go to bars and have too much to drink and think there was an Irish conspiracy to take me down. I was a pretty sensitive guy and I was a Jew. There was a type of Irish townie in New England that scared the shit out of me. They just liked to fight for fighting’s sake and they were menacing. I found them threatening but I also envied them in a slightly condescending way because they seemed to know exactly who they were. They were angry, usually wasted, and clearly not without issues, but they were consistent in their disposition and seemed to have full, active social lives, mostly revolving around terrorizing college students and being thrown in jail for being drunk and disorderly. I respected their spirit. In my mind they were a rugged, tough bunch that got shit done and weren’t afraid. My opposites.

I made a tremendous faux pas years later while interviewing the author Roddy Doyle on a radio show. It revealed a racism that I had not really thought through. Someone had told me an Irish joke that I thought was a perfect representation of what I respected about the Irish in a general way, that rugged spirit and determinism. I told the joke to him to his face, excited: