Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [29]
I let go of most of my conspiratorial ideas until my first television appearance was preempted by the Gulf War. It was An Evening at the Improv. I did this joke on that show: “Don’t you think calling George Bush the environmental president is kind of like saying, ’Well, you know Hitler was a vegetarian.’?” I was sure that Bush had seen it, he personally called A&E, and had them drop the show and I was put on a list.
Around this time I began seeing Kim, the woman I would eventually marry. I met her at my brother’s wedding. She was the maid of honor and I was the best man. She lived in Boston, I lived in Boston. It was almost like we had to get married. It was predestined. After my brother’s wedding I moved in with her. We came together in that perfect mixture of love and my need of a place to live. That lasted about a year.
We broke up for a while and Kim moved to San Francisco. I moved to New York and lived on the Lower East Side for a couple of years. I couldn’t really integrate myself into the New York scene. I was too angry for the New York clubs and alienated audiences. I would drive up to Boston on weekends to make money. I eventually started to come unglued and packed up everything I had into my car, again, except for my futon frame. I gave that to the Realist painter across the hall who had been sleeping on his floor and I left.
I got on the road to San Francisco to see if Kim would save me. I made the trip in three and a half days. The last stint of driving was from Wyoming to San Francisco, twenty-two hours straight through. My eyes were watering and lights were trailing when I drove over the Bay Bridge up into Bernal Heights, where I collapsed on Kim’s porch until she came home from work. She let me move in with her and we tried to rebuild our relationship while I tried to build a comedy career.
Within a few weeks of my being in San Francisco, my friend Stu called me from L.A. and told me Sam Kinison had been killed in a car accident. It was a head-on collision with a drunk teenager. Stu told me that Carl had been right behind him in another car and that Sam died in Carl’s arms. I was horrified, relieved, and incredibly insensitive. “I don’t care what middle act’s arms he died in. It should’ve happened when people gave a shit about him. Then maybe he could’ve become mythic.”
All I could really think about when I heard that Sam was dead was finding out where he was buried so I could go there and pee on his grave. I owed him that.
San Francisco was a great place to have coffee for a couple of years. The comedy scene was deeply rooted and the community was very supportive of its comics. I was able to do the kind of comedy I wanted to do, and it was received well. If it hadn’t been for San Francisco, I probably would’ve spontaneously combusted.
I had been living there a year when I got a call from my manager telling me that I was wanted in New York to host a show on Comedy Central. It was called Short Attention Span Theatre and the producers had chosen me to drive it. I couldn’t understand why. Here I was doing this angry, philosophical, rant-oriented comedy and they wanted me to host their happy little show that was on three times a day. I resisted at first, but when I looked at my nearly empty date book, I really had no choice. I took the job and eventually Kim and I moved back to New York.
Short Attention Span Theatre was a clip show. We showed clips of movies and TV shows usually organized under themes as broad as “Jews” or “the color blue.” We actually did both of those themes. We could only use clips that were the property of Comedy Central or those that had been provided by companies that were releasing a movie, a video, or TV show. That way it didn’t cost anything. I did a monologue and usually one sketch piece. I really hated doing the show. I thought it clipped my wings, never really allowing me to be me. I saw it as a hostage situation. I was being held paid prisoner