Episode 114 - Jonathan Ames
Marc:Lock the gates!
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Marc Maron.
Marc:Are we doing this?
Marc:Let's do this.
Marc:Okay, what the fuckers, what the fucking ears, what the fuck buddies, what the fuck nicks, whatever the fuck you want to call yourself.
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:I've spent, you know, I didn't spend that long watching the Chilean miners being extracted from the hole.
Marc:But I thought that if you were a little out of touch, it would have looked like some sort of new game show that I'm not sure what the rules are, but I guess everybody wins.
Marc:They come out of the hole.
Marc:They come out of the machine.
Marc:They are embraced by their loved ones.
Marc:And everyone's a winner.
Marc:This is one of those rare things.
Marc:I think what provoked me to think about this was really...
Marc:Yesterday, I heard on NPR that they had decided an order as to who would go out first, which minor would go out first out of the 30 some odd minors that were in there.
Marc:And an order was decided.
Marc:I'm not sure how it went, but in the story that I heard.
Marc:I thought it was interesting that they were actually fighting about who would be the last one out of the hole.
Marc:Who would be the last one out?
Marc:Which means someone was gunning for the record.
Marc:Who would hold the record of being trapped in a mine for the longest amount of time and living in the history of the world?
Marc:Someone was going for the record.
Marc:So it was a game show to a certain degree in that someone wanted to win that title.
Marc:I assume that the guys who got out first are the guys who were like, let's just get the fuck out of the hole, didn't really give a shit about that record and probably told the guy, it's like, all right, dude, whatever you want to do.
Marc:I just want to get the fuck out of the hole.
Marc:And this is one of the most exploited disasters I've seen in a while because it's a rare disaster where everybody lives, where everybody gets out and they know everyone's going to get out once that hole was drilled.
Marc:They got equipment in place.
Marc:And it is so exploited to the fact that apparently they sent down a book a couple weeks ago in training people how to speak publicly.
Marc:They wanted these guys to be good for the press.
Marc:The world's press is there.
Marc:Oakley donated some expensive sunglasses, so they get a plug.
Marc:I heard for about 10 minutes yesterday...
Marc:You know, where the machine that they made, the elevator that was created to pull the guys out of the hole.
Marc:That was a California company.
Marc:I mean, it's just a rare opportunity where a disaster can be branded so efficiently because they know that everyone's going to live.
Marc:You don't see this kind of stuff where they're sending boats out and pulling bodies out of water after plane crashes.
Marc:Well, that boat, you see that claw that was manufactured right here in San Rafael, California, pulling that half a torso out of the ocean.
Marc:It's a wonderful machine.
Marc:We're going to talk to the creators that that doesn't happen.
Marc:And it also is weird to me that they have this self-centered sort of.
Marc:of competitiveness that's just based on publicity that does the fact that somebody was fighting for the opportunity to be last out of that hole is some sort of weird corruption of the competitive spirit in my mind i mean i guess it's a good record to hold but that for that to transcend the idea that you just want to get out of the fucking hole to me is is baffling
Marc:Needless to say, I would rather be first out of the hole.
Marc:I would rather be first just about anywhere.
Marc:I have that problem.
Marc:I need to be places early.
Marc:I go to the airport three or four hours early.
Marc:I go if there's a if there's a restaurant.
Marc:that has a buffet i'll be there early i i don't know what it is i i need to be first it's it's stupid it's embarrassing i was at my um my brother's uh kids bar mitzvah last weekend and you know they opened it was the the party was at a zoo it was a zoo themed party it was at night but they basically just had cold cuts and you know shitty food kids food because it's a kids party and after some little event they had the party they announced the food was out and i literally ran for the food and
Marc:And I was the only adult on a line of about 20, 25 kids first in line to get food.
Marc:Not a proud moment.
Marc:But let me tell you, man, that that event was something else.
Marc:I could not believe the possibilities for emotional and family chaos.
Marc:I could not.
Marc:But I couldn't even fathom it.
Marc:Now, this was the interesting revelation about the about the the two days that I was there, the three days I was there.
Marc:A couple of things happened.
Marc:was that I went over on the Saturday.
Marc:We had the day off after the service.
Marc:I went over to see my dad, and I said, look, Pop, why don't we go over and hang out with the grandkids?
Marc:You want to go see the grandkids?
Marc:My father literally said, what do I need it for?
Marc:What do I need that for?
Marc:I'm like, well, I don't know.
Marc:They're your grandkids, so you may want to spend some time with it.
Marc:My father literally goes, you know, a lot of people, they get something out of that.
Marc:It does nothing for me.
Marc:I get nothing out of it.
Marc:I'm like, okay.
Marc:That's good to know.
Marc:I guess I could have assumed that dad.
Marc:Well, so what do you want to do?
Marc:He says, look, I called about three or four places in town.
Marc:I'm looking for mustard slacks.
Marc:You're very hard to find mustard slacks.
Marc:I need to, you know, mustard colored pants.
Marc:I'm like pants like dress pants.
Marc:Yeah, but mustard colored.
Marc:I had a pair.
Marc:I love them.
Marc:Now, you have to understand my father is a borderline hoarder, and I don't know what defines hoarding.
Marc:Is it still hoarding if you build literally a wing onto your house to put the shit that you are hoarding in in an organized fashion?
Marc:Is it still hoarding if it is relatively organized?
Marc:My father lives in a small house.
Marc:He built literally a two level cedar closet in the middle of a house that took up half a bedroom so he could put all his suits in there.
Marc:that he doesn't wear, but he claims to wear all of them.
Marc:So he needs mustard pants.
Marc:And in my mind, I'm thinking, how the fuck could you not have mustard pants?
Marc:You have 900 whatever.
Marc:But I said, OK, mustard pants.
Marc:If this is how we're going to repress our emotions, if this is what the focus is, literally, we're there for a family event.
Marc:I go see my father.
Marc:He's like, we're going to get mustard pants.
Marc:With everything going on, with all the other stress, he wants to get mustard pants.
Marc:So we go to a mall and we go looking for mustard pants.
Marc:And he finds something similar to mustard pants.
Marc:They're not quite mustard pants.
Marc:He drops 300 bucks on a pair of pants that aren't even quite mustard.
Marc:And we leave the mall and he feels placated somewhat.
Marc:Is that disturbing?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Am I kind of like that?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Look around.
Marc:I'm surrounded by 9000 books in a room full of clutter.
Marc:Am I a hoarder?
Marc:Is this just a museum to my inability to experience emotions fully?
Marc:Is this just a museum to my need for control to feel like I have an empire of some kind, an empire of half read books?
Marc:Am I just like that guy?
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:It's those moments where you just realize, like, holy shit.
Marc:I want to spend time with my dad only so I can try to figure out what not to do from this point on.
Marc:But the kid had a good time and, you know, everything worked out all right.
Marc:Truly the high point for me, and this is between us, but one of the high points was I had to take a cab from my brother's house to the airport in Phoenix.
Marc:And he had called...
Marc:He had called a cab, and I walk out, and a half hour later, there's a discount yellow cab.
Marc:He thought he had called the yellow cab.
Marc:And this car was like maybe a, I'd like to say it was a Nova or some ridiculous old shitty car that had the discount yellow cab on the side.
Marc:There was a couple driving it, a man and a woman.
Marc:They throw my stuff in the trunk.
Marc:I get in.
Marc:The air conditioner doesn't work.
Marc:It smells like cigarettes, and these two are in the front.
Marc:And I start talking about comedy and the woman's like, I want to do comedy once I was in Los Angeles and I have this joke.
Marc:And she goes on this long joke about the Pillsbury Doughboy and the keyboard elves basically dealing drugs and that people need, you know, the it was a very ornate, elaborate theory slash routine about the Pillsbury Doughboy basically being a crystal meth dealer.
Marc:And then the guy tells me a couple of off-color jokes, a bad gay joke and some other joke.
Marc:And then I notice at night there's one good tooth between the two of them.
Marc:All their teeth are rotting out.
Marc:And then I realize I'm fucking being driven to the airport by tweakers.
Marc:I'm in a tweaker taxi.
Marc:And she's noodling on about these big theories about politics and Pillsbury Doughboy.
Marc:And I'm like, holy shit.
Marc:I think that a better time to call that cab company would be in the middle of the night.
Marc:So they're peaking.
Marc:But I wish I had the fucking mics on.
Marc:I wish I could have just pulled it out.
Marc:Literally, all their teeth were rotten.
Marc:And it took me a few minutes to realize I didn't even want to give them my credit card.
Marc:So I didn't.
Marc:And I thanked them.
Marc:And I gave them like 50 bucks.
Marc:And I know where that went.
Marc:Into more theories, I'm guessing.
Marc:So, look, on the show today, we have Jonathan Ames.
Marc:Now, Jonathan Ames is someone I've known of and worked with over the years, and I didn't know his writing until I got an opportunity to interview him.
Marc:He created the show Bored to Death, which is now on HBO, but he's also written a few books that...
Marc:He's very known for being very revealing about just about everything.
Marc:He's definitely a too much information kind of guy, which I am as well, in terms of using his own life and his own experiences to to to entertain and to to provide you with.
Marc:literary content i you know i don't know how else to say it but it was interesting to talk to him because i had not really talked to him and i and one thing i didn't talk to him about which i really want to bring to your attention because he gave me a copy of it he gave me a copy of his books as well is a graphic novel called the alcoholic which is really a masterpiece of graphic novelism if a graphic novel location graphic novelizing
Marc:And it's about an alcoholic and it's somewhat autobiographical.
Marc:And after I read it, I'm like, shit, I wish I could have talked to him about this.
Marc:But I do recommend you purchase it.
Marc:Quick reminder, tomorrow night, UCB Theater, Los Angeles, California, live WTF with the amazing and infamous Charles Fleischer.
Marc:I don't know if you remember him from back in the day, but one of the great, peculiar, absurd wizards of comedy.
Marc:We also have Brendan Burns, who you heard here from Australia.
Marc:We also have Aaron Foley.
Marc:Very funny comedian who was in Almost Famous with me.
Marc:Andrew Daly, who was on Eastbound and Down right now.
Marc:Very funny guy.
Marc:And of course, Jim Earl.
Marc:And those of you in Texas, I want to remind you that on October 18th in Austin, Texas at the parish, we're doing a live WTF with some Texan comedians.
Marc:Many of who you may know if you're from out there, Lucas Melandas, Martha Kelly, Eric Krug, Bryson Turner, Brian Guttman.
Marc:Those names ring a bell.
Marc:That will be the same crew as well in Dallas on Tuesday night at Trees.
Marc:That's October 19th.
Marc:We're adding Paul Varghese or Varghese.
Marc:I'm not sure how to pronounce his name.
Marc:I feel bad about that.
Marc:But those are the Texas shows.
Marc:And of course, Wednesday, October 20th.
Marc:we will be at Comics in New York.
Marc:Big shows, great shows.
Marc:7.30 show, we've got Eugene Merman, Kristen Schaal, Jesse Klein, John Glazer, Sam Seder, maybe John Benjamin, maybe Will Arnett will stop by, I'm not sure.
Marc:9.30 show, we have Mike DeStefano, Rich Voss, Bonnie McFarlane, and Louis Black.
Marc:Exciting.
Marc:Please come to those.
Guest:I was at this huge HBO party and I have a cat on my lap now.
Guest:His name is Minimus.
Guest:I think I'll toss him off because he'll distract me the whole time.
Guest:Are you allergic to cats?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I've got like three of them.
Guest:He's my landlord's cat, but he loves to come up here and hang out, which causes...
Guest:Some of my landlords are very sweet, but he loves to be up here.
Guest:And so I'm like his like naughty older brother that who's like third floor attic, you know, room he hangs out in.
Guest:Does your landlord get upset or jealous or is he fine with it?
Guest:well they're fine with it they're like oh we knew we know you were out of town because minimus was hanging out with us again uh-huh seeing he gets full reign on all my bad furniture to just rip it up yeah you know yeah i always wonder why i chose to have these feral cats yeah i find i resent uh people that like me too much or anything that likes me too much so i like the struggle
Guest:Mm hmm.
Guest:And well, yeah, I imagine.
Guest:Well, maybe.
Guest:You know, I am listening to just a little bit of your podcast.
Guest:I mean, and just since you've been here, you love the word resentment and resent.
Guest:So it's like these cats must be like a mirror, you know, like tough.
Guest:Don't come near me.
Guest:I'll come near you when I want to.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you might like you admire them.
Marc:Well, I wish I wasn't like that.
Marc:The weird thing about about my relationship with you is that and I'm talking to Jonathan Ames, by the way.
Marc:is that we've been on the peripheries of each other for probably 25 years.
Marc:I don't know that long.
Guest:20, maybe?
Guest:Well, let's see.
Guest:2010, I didn't start really performing in New York until... But that was on my own, early 90s.
Guest:And people didn't start dragging me into stuff until late 90s.
Guest:But I've known, I think, at least 12 years.
Guest:So I'm into linear stuff.
Guest:So performance-wise, I think we first started leading parallel lives, late 90s maybe.
Guest:Yeah, that's about right.
Guest:What were the first performance things you were doing?
Guest:My first performance things, I was doing my own shows at the Fez.
Guest:This started in 93.
Guest:I was working the door there, and I started doing my own monologue shows at the Fez, and I would have college friends.
Guest:read or do some weird little acts and i did that for years um up until the time the fez closed in 2002 i believe and it was always written stuff well my monologues were never written right i would do uh outlines of them right you know yeah sure that's the way i like the way spaulding gray i think might have done it or yeah um but you know him
Guest:I did, yeah.
Guest:And I acted in this play based on his life, this posthumous play that his wife put together, which went on to Off-Broadway.
Guest:I didn't make it to the Off-Broadway part, but I was part of the initial group.
Guest:And so I got really intimate with his stuff.
Guest:And I met him a few times, and he was very much a hero to me.
Marc:Yeah, I think that in retrospect, he is to me too.
Marc:And I think you are as well.
Marc:And that's why, you know, somehow or another, like despite the fact that I've known who you are, I've chosen to get a sense of who you are by gossip and hearsay.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:Like you were just listening to my Robin Williams interview and I'm sitting up cramming on your books.
Marc:Like I've known this guy kind of for like 20 years or whatever it's been.
Marc:And the things I always heard, like my assumptions are, and now after reading the books, that
Marc:because I do pretty honest stuff, but I don't have the balls that you do in living my life, you know?
Marc:And, and, and, uh, so I'm reading your stuff thinking like it's going to be this, uh, like, you know, really hard edge kind of like, you know, I'm out there fucking everything in the world.
Marc:And then it, uh, the humility of it is fucking, uh, is fucking awesome.
Guest:Oh, well, thank you.
Guest:Um, I don't, yeah, I mean, I don't know about having balls because I feel like most of us... We talk about them.
Guest:Well, yeah, how tiny they are.
Guest:Um, yeah, the whole thing is tiny.
Guest:You know, I just did, um...
Guest:Well, I think I'm average and sometimes, I mean, girls have been nice about it, but they might be, you know, lying.
Guest:And that's always the advice I give to women in a relationship.
Guest:I tell women, if you want to hold on to a guy, just like every three weeks or so, just tell him he's got a beautiful cock.
Guest:Like every three weeks.
Guest:So beautiful is the word.
Guest:Well, beautiful or not, whatever they want to say.
Guest:Oh, God, I just love your cock.
Guest:Just say it every three weeks or so.
Guest:Not too often so the guy gets cocky.
Guest:But just enough to keep him coming back for more.
Guest:And I think that a woman will hold on to a man.
Guest:Because a lot of women do have a hard time holding on to guys.
Marc:Yeah, I don't know what it is.
Marc:I have a hard time holding on to women.
Marc:yeah but i don't know uh but like the spalding gray thing because when i look back at who he was and what you do and what i try to do that you know his honesty was certainly different than the type of honesty you were after isn't it well you know i was um uh i was just in scotland edinburgh scotland at the film festival there you didn't perform there did you i didn't perform no it's a little rough
Guest:Yeah, no, I didn't.
Guest:Yeah, I did do a Q&A that seemed to go over well, probably because I was enunciating.
Guest:And I probably sounded completely crude to them.
Guest:So I saw this Steven Soderbergh documentary about Spalding.
Guest:And there because it was at the festival and I actually watched it like a little video thing.
Guest:And I cried the whole time because I knew him and I knew how it ended and I had been in his work.
Guest:But they showed some of his early stuff and there was some like some raw honesty in there that I had I had not seen.
Guest:Like he talked about sucking some guy's cock.
Guest:And I did not know that Spalding Gray, like, on stage.
Guest:And he was, he started doing this bobbing motion with his head.
Guest:And I was like, fucking Spalding.
Guest:Like, that is so great.
Guest:Because, like, I don't know, he must have been in his early 30s.
Guest:He was in Europe.
Guest:Somehow, like, he was traveling with this gay guy.
Guest:He thought he should try it.
Guest:And he went in there.
Guest:And then he was just doing this thing.
Guest:And suddenly I'm sucking it.
Guest:I'm going, I'm gay.
Guest:I'm gay.
Guest:And he's like...
Guest:I was just like, oh man, because the Spalding usually was just like, and so my eye was moving to the right and I thought of my mother swimming, you know, Providence, Rhode Island and how her eye would move to the right.
Guest:I mean, that was very bad Spalding impersonation.
Guest:No, no, no, that was close.
Guest:Because we're in my kitchen and...
Guest:But you were saying, so you've known me for a long time.
Marc:Right, and my assumptions about you.
Guest:What was the gossip and hearsay, though?
Guest:I'm curious.
Marc:Well, no, it's not really gossip and hearsay.
Marc:It's like, you know, from what I gleaned, you know, because I know Reverend Jen, you know, and I've known, you know, a few people that we know in common.
Marc:And that, like, I started to feel bad that I missed these points in your life and in your performance and also reading your stuff as much as I should because, you know, it's great and it's got a lot of heart to it and it's very honest.
Marc:So it was really stuff like, you know, when I talked to Reverend Jen, she talked about the Mangina period, which I didn't know nothing about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was a good period in my performance career.
Guest:What was that about?
Guest:Well, there was one of the later phases is that he would stump me on stage.
Guest:This was a guy that calls himself Mangina.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And he wears a Mangina.
Guest:He's kind of retired because he realized it was a flawed project, but he put about a decade of his life into it.
Marc:What was the project exactly?
Guest:Well, he would wear this prosthetic vagina.
Guest:Early on, he claimed he thought he might sell it to prison populations and cross-dressers.
Guest:It was a wild, ongoing performance art piece.
Guest:insane i mean he was fingered by like a thousand people you know because he made this hole out of which he would pull the his scrotum and he would call this um it looked like it did look like labia yeah and he would make these craft these beautiful vaginas sometimes getting the molds of real women
Guest:and he would mold their vagina if they shaved and then he would wear their vagina make a little hole and pull out his scrotum so it looked like another level of labia and people would finger that a lot of times girls would finger him and think that it was all plastic and not realize they were fingering his balls he actually has a smaller cock than mine so like if they even hit the root part of it i don't think they even noticed yeah you know
Guest:but so he did this for years he's also missing a foot he's a great painter in fact his paintings you can see those are two of his paintings he's a wonderful painter yeah yeah yeah nice um but he's missing a foot which led to his fascination with prosthesis he's a true great bohemian and anyway a few years ago just two years or so ago three years ago we were both going through an out of control phase
Guest:and i couldn't i don't really perform that much anymore once in a while monologues and i can hardly read from my books anymore but i just needed to be more outrageous or i just had i didn't have i didn't i didn't want to make people listen to me anymore but i liked having uh mangina attack me on stage and he this it all and he would take off his um
Guest:prosthetic foot and stump me because his his foot is missing but his shin bone looks like a huge phallus but a really scary one looks like a big bone and it's got this knob at the end they were able to hold on to his heel yeah you know when they sawed off his foot and he would stump me like i would bend over he would wrestle people like he wrestled this blind woman with the with the mangina he would be wearing the mangina nothing else really sometimes nothing else weird hats he might put on that he would build
Guest:Sometimes the foot would be off.
Guest:So one time we had this wrestling match against this blind woman who I think studies jujitsu and he snuck around from behind and tried to attack her from behind as I was going on the count of three.
Guest:And he snuck around and then he would lose though.
Guest:He was a good sport that way.
Guest:But this other time we did this little performance.
Guest:This was like two years ago.
Guest:I wrote about it in my most recent book.
Guest:I sent an email to friends and this girl who...
Guest:Well, she puts on these shows that nobody comes to.
Guest:So there was about seven people in the audience, right?
Guest:Is that what we said?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It wasn't Reverend Jen.
Guest:No, it wasn't Reverend Jen.
Guest:I don't want to say the woman's name.
Guest:She's very sweet in case she hears this.
Guest:But seven people come to this thing.
Guest:She's dragged me into it.
Guest:We're backstage, Patrick smoking pot, taking pills, drinking wine, mangina.
Guest:And he's going to wrestle this other girl, right?
Guest:And he's wearing this full see-through weird skin tone body suit.
Guest:He's got the mangina on.
Guest:He's got garish makeup, a wild wig.
Guest:He's all hopped up on eight different chemicals, you know.
Guest:And I'm to be the ref of the match.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So the match starts in front of this audience of seven in this tiny little space is about two years ago.
Guest:And he goes berserk on the girl.
Guest:And he actually does almost kind of try to body slam her.
Guest:And she gets upset, runs into the audience.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he then sees me and he goes nuts, rips off his foot, begins chasing me and begins to hit me with this thing that he wraps his foot in.
Guest:It's called a stump sock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this thing smells.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:At the time he's living in Queens.
Guest:He'd be on like the subway for an hour and a half.
Guest:So his stump sock just reeked of like the thousand insides of like a high school basketball team's pairs of sneakers.
Guest:I mean, he starts hitting me with this stump sock and I used to start laughing.
Guest:The smell is so bad that I became paralyzed by laughter and the stink.
Guest:I fell to the ground.
Guest:He is very strong from having lost his foot.
Guest:The rest of his body got great strength.
Guest:he also worked on the railroad at one time pounding ties he's a very strong guy he's had like you know 47 restaurant jobs bartending he's powerful yeah very skinny though yeah and you know smokes like two packs a day they're less now because he's pretty broke so anyway he manages to rip my pants down and he got and got his stump against my butt for real now we had faked this once or twice at bowery poetry club like
Guest:Hey, Mangina's going to stump me.
Guest:But now on whatever pills he was on, he was rabid.
Guest:He got that stump against my ass and began pounding.
Guest:And I was laughing, but I was really getting violated.
Guest:And the girl, the nice girl who was hosting, who was, of course, hosting naked, jumps on Mangina.
Guest:He swats her away.
Guest:I can't fight.
Guest:My pants are down.
Guest:The stump is against my butt.
Guest:The nude girl jumps on him again, momentarily distracts him.
Guest:I crawl away.
Guest:My underwear is ripped.
Guest:My pants are ripped.
Guest:And I stagger backstage.
Guest:And then he's so rabid.
Guest:He comes backstage.
Guest:Then he comes back out to the audience and begins to finger himself maniacally.
Guest:you know like is he hopping or does he hopping he's able to hop on that one foot pretty well or maybe put his foot back it was it was the i said and so i wrote in this email to a bunch of friends i'm like we had our greatest performance ever last night you know yeah this was beyond punk rock right you know what i mean yeah i was stumped by mangina in a wig with garish makeup going completely nuts and the next morning when i went to the bathroom now he didn't actually penetrate but he must have pounded against me it hurt yeah
Guest:It hurt.
Guest:I wish I can't.
Guest:Because by the next morning I was, you know, maybe forgotten about him.
Guest:Why is it hurting me to go to the bathroom?
Guest:I'm like, oh, my God.
Guest:He really pounded against it.
Guest:You know, he went nuts.
Guest:He wanted in.
Guest:He overwhelmed me.
Yeah.
Guest:And that was the last performance?
Guest:Yeah, I didn't let him.
Guest:We haven't done a stumping since.
Guest:Or maybe we did at Bowery Poetry, but I didn't trust him not to go completely nuts again because I think he wanted to set, again, his book of world records of terrible art of having stumped his best friend or one of his best friends.
Guest:So at that point, when you say you're out of control, you're just fucking, you know...
Guest:I was out of control.
Guest:I won't go beyond that.
Guest:I was, you know, misbehaving on stage and off stage.
Marc:And now, in terms of that scene, because I think that I'm about the same age as you, do you feel that that whole Lower East Side, you know, art, punk...
Guest:performance art thing I think by the time you got there wasn't it sort of already hadn't it sort of passed well when I you know I kind of was getting into it you know mid late 90s PS 122 and I think it was still thriving you know who was working then well Spalding Gray was still doing stuff he would still do stuff he would still open shows at PS 122 I even saw Boghossian there right you know late 90s PS 122
Guest:um but yeah it was and karen finley would still do stuff you know it was like they were like the last three you know danny hawk was doing his shows there but yeah it was starting to wind down and by now it really i don't know of the scene maybe there's young kids doing really cool stuff i'm not aware of it the bowery poetry club remains the one last place of some good deep manhattan nuttiness i think
Guest:I don't know what's happening in Harlem or some of the new neighborhoods that maybe have a little bit of an art scene.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:But Bowery Poetry Club is still pretty wild.
Guest:Reverend Jen still has an open mic there.
Guest:And, you know, the people still holding on in Manhattan, though a lot of them are in Brooklyn, you know, will come out and just get up there.
Guest:And I love those open mics.
Guest:Do you think that's something about... And there's another one called Skits and Tits on Monday nights.
Guest:And what's that?
Guest:That's also open mic.
Guest:It's the same crowd.
Guest:It's like, you know, it's just this Bowery Poetry Club open mic free for all.
Marc:And I always, I think I was, you know, because I was a comic that there was some part of me that condescended to that, that there was, to me, I couldn't really tell the difference between, you know, somebody who really wanted to be funny and couldn't quite figure out how and was just, you know, pushing these limits, you know, poorly for effect, but yet they weren't fundamentally talented.
Marc:But I think that that was me being condescending because I think the raw humanness of wanting...
Marc:you know, any kind of attention and pushing those limits is pretty exciting.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's, I mean, like you go to a night of these open mics and I've done it the last few years.
Guest:And then sometimes when I've been busy, I don't go for months, but you know, you'll have like three hours, sometimes four hours.
Guest:I'll go really late.
Guest:People sign up and you know,
Guest:People will be raw, boring, not great.
Guest:But then there'll be this gem-like thing, some nutty guy who maybe is autistic, you know, who will just dance wildly and run up and down.
Guest:And it's just fun.
Guest:And the whole thing gets very lively.
Guest:And the whole cast of characters, you know, this guy who's...
Guest:you know, he's sometimes called touching you or mayor Brodeur, you know, this guy, um, Bloomberg had him thrown in jail for basically being a pest.
Guest:He, he harassed Giuliani and Bloomberg for years.
Guest:He's, he's completely mad, but he claims have written 2000, you know, pop songs and, and, and, you know, he, he's often getting thrown in jail for harassing people.
Guest:And this one time he came out of Rikers after a week and he showed up at the open mic and it was like the returning anti-hero because everybody hates him there.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:But I, I happen to love
Guest:it yeah yeah yeah you know he'd just come out of rikers and reverend jen brought him on stage and they used to be boyfriend and girlfriend but she can't stand him i mean like a decade ago and so there's still kind of a raw vital scene there it's the last bit of it um and i don't i just i i haven't been on stage there myself probably since a stumping like two years ago
Marc:And you talked about that in the newest book, which is Essays, and it's The Double Life is Twice as Good.
Guest:Yeah, which isn't a very good book.
Guest:I got into this fetish a little bit of just wanting to put out books every year, every two years.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:It's working.
Guest:It's working.
Guest:I know, but I guess it was that thing.
Guest:I wanted to be the writer who had a lot of books.
Guest:And so even if some of them were mediocre, there might be one good piece in there, you know, because I mean, I like that.
Guest:I like writers that have a lot of books that I can just delve into them for a while.
Guest:But I kind of lately have been regretting that book, The Double Life is Twice as Good.
Guest:It's a good cover.
Guest:Yeah, well, thank you.
Guest:I mean, I just there's a lot of piece in there I'm embarrassed about now.
Marc:You're embarrassed about something?
Guest:yeah well i mean i don't really remember what i've written like when you say oh you were so honest but i was maybe honest a long time ago but maybe also i know that it's not honesty because i i'll tell certain truths to not have to tell greater truths well i think i well that's a it's sort of something i want to talk to you about because when i in reading the first uh collection of essays what's not to love
Marc:yeah yeah that's a half decent but would you consider that at that time when I mean you're out of Princeton you did some graduate work and you're working odd jobs but you know you want to be a writer you know that I mean that's what you want to do yeah and you know how to write yeah now your heroes at that time were who well that book what's not to love is composed of columns that I wrote for the New York Press yeah right so every two weeks I would have to produce a column and
Guest:And at that point, too, I had written two novels, but now I was doing all this nonfiction, which kind of which I hadn't done before.
Guest:But I had also I've been performing nonfiction.
Guest:I've been doing the monologues since 92.
Guest:So when I got this column like in 97, I sort of took what I'd been doing on stage and started turning it into prose.
Guest:So in a sense, an early hero was Spalding Gray.
Guest:But prose wise, Bukowski had a column for the L.A.
Guest:Free Press.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I very much based the terse style, the honesty, the creating a persona based on myself, based on Bukowski's columns that were collected in a book called Notes from a Dirty Old Man, which was the title of his column.
Guest:Right.
Guest:My column was called City Slicker, though better.
Guest:What's not to love would have been a good title for the column, which became the title for the book.
Guest:City Slicker was so, so title.
Marc:Do you ever get that thing, though?
Marc:Because it seems that as weird and dark as some of this stuff gets, and it's not that dark, the stuff I read, because you sort of counter it with humor and your own realization of who you are.
Marc:I mean, when you write, is there a bleakness happening now?
Guest:um well not really because i'm i'm all i'm really writing these days is the tv show yeah i want to talk about that and so um sometimes i'll let the characters you know like in this new season ted dance yeah has a speech that about his mortality and
Guest:gets you know verges on bleak but ted does it so beautifully and it felt wasn't it was more human and sad um but yeah i mean if i wrote a novel now maybe it would be bleak but i'm just not thinking in terms of of writing books and
Guest:I mean, I want to write a thriller.
Guest:I mean, I want to write just genre stuff now.
Guest:I feel like I don't... I think I can't expose myself again for a while.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like, I don't remember exposing myself in the eight books I've published, but I do... I want to hide.
Guest:I don't want to put myself out there anymore.
Guest:I don't want to use myself as a narrator or a...
Guest:character anymore i mean in bored to death the character has my name but it's a very fictionalized comedic exuberant version it's pretty sweet um yeah so i i don't know i don't know that i could ever go completely dark my first novel uh is pretty dark that was
Guest:I was kind of a, it's called I Pass Like Night.
Guest:And that was, I wrote that when I was like 22 to 24.
Guest:And I was very inspired by Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby.
Guest:And so that was kind of a dark novel, though I guess there were funny moments.
Guest:And then my mom said to me, you're so funny.
Guest:Not that I am, but you know, she thought I was or something.
Guest:So she said, so funny, why don't you, you should write funny things.
Guest:So then my second novel, The Extra Man, was a long comedic novel.
Guest:with some darkness, I guess.
Marc:I want to ask you, in advice, what you have learned about the male gender and putting yourself together.
Guest:What I've learned about the male and putting myself together.
Marc:Because it seems to me that when I read the books, your reflections on your cock, your reflections on your balls, the size of it, your reflections on your hair, your decisions to not medicate in a way that you wouldn't have control over it or feel it.
Marc:your decisions to take up boxing, to spend time with transvestites, that there has to be some overview at this point, whether you want to be honest or not, about sexuality, about gender, and about what it is to be a man.
Guest:Okay, that's a big question.
Guest:I mean, using myself as a case study, I don't think I could talk about men.
Guest:I could talk about me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But basically, I mean, and I guess I was writing a blog for the TV show and I've said this before.
Guest:My all most of my sexuality comes out of, you know, psychological trauma and things that may have gone on in childhood.
Guest:Specifically, what do you pin it to?
Guest:Well, relationship with your mother?
Guest:no i mean both parents yeah both of whom i love yeah and so so i feel sexuality for me has been um it's an easy phrase acting out but acting out pain yeah and trying to recreate psychodynamics usually of humiliation um to get to a place of
Guest:profound self-loathing but at sometimes though there is a great comfort in the humiliation because okay now i'm at that place that i want to be i can't get any lower i'm here yeah you know but there's also an aspect to it i was reading some book on people with sexual problems and i only read the introduction i tend to only enjoy genre fiction so once i pick up non-fiction i peter out after the intros
Guest:He's learned enough.
Guest:You get it.
Guest:Yeah, I guess, you know, but I feel bad that way.
Guest:But anyway, this doctor wrote about people seeking an obliteration of self.
Guest:And he was into the idea of people with fetishes because he thought that they might be able to achieve ecstasy.
Guest:through the obliteration of self like a man who's so into just shoes that he will completely lose himself and i think in normal heterosexual coupling you can have perhaps obliteration of self let's say you're going down on a woman and you completely lose yourself in it and just the carnality and just how beautiful she is and how sexy and you're down there and i don't know you lose yourself you're like on another planet
Guest:And but I think fetishes or perversions sometimes like maybe it's more maybe you get there faster or or maybe just going down on women is the same thing as licking a shoe.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I mean, I'm not saying it's the same thing for the women in the audience, but I'm talking about like.
Guest:the obliteration of self.
Guest:And I think that's what I've sought out was the obliteration of self.
Guest:Like I just, I had to get away from myself.
Guest:And these things are like Alice in Wonderland things.
Guest:These, the things that might be outside the norm of human sexuality.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I always refer to people that were all just transsexuals, but not necessarily that.
Guest:I'm talking more in vague terms, I guess, but just the seeking, like, just losing yourself because...
Guest:you know i mean i'm familiar with your work and we're very lucky guys you know right we're middle class clowns who have the luxury of trying to figure our brains out you know most of the planet doesn't get to do that
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:This is a very elite position.
Guest:So I'm very lucky that I've like ended up in motels outside the Lincoln Tunnel trying to obliterate myself.
Guest:Oh, poor me.
Guest:You know, nice Jewish boy.
Guest:He's never gone hungry.
Guest:So he's so troubled.
Guest:He's got to obliterate himself.
Guest:But that said, there's probably an elite audience who has iPods that can listen to this.
Guest:And so they can identify.
Guest:I mean, this is our struggle.
Guest:I mean, Neil Young, you know, had a good line, you know,
Guest:You know, when you feel embarrassed about your problems, they're your problems.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And so I think one of the things I try to address in the TV show, I guess in my own world view is.
Guest:But maybe this is a weakening of the male species as expressed through my intellect.
Guest:You know, maybe men are getting weaker and weaker and all this estrogen in the water.
Guest:But maybe a weakening of the male is a good thing since men are so destructive.
Guest:I mean, they're good at building highways, but they're also good at blowing up highways.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I guess what I've been moving towards in my two seconds on the planet would be greater parameters for masculinity or maleness.
Guest:Now, I don't think I'll achieve it in my life.
Marc:But like the Neil Young quote, at some point, you are who you are.
Marc:I get to this point where the example I have recently from a therapist, the only thing that blew my mind recently in terms of an intellectual idea in relation to my own
Marc:self-loathing and the obliteration thing i think is something we share in the sense that i think that my parents had no real capacity for for nurturing in a proper way so there was no emotional boundaries so in order for me to even define myself as an individual there was a struggle against them so the boundarylessness was obliterating so i seek that and then when when someone starts to push through my boundaries i react with hostility that's how i fight obliteration and
Marc:And then ultimately you obliterate yourself because you're sitting there alone and you're angry.
Marc:And then the self-loathing comes.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But the guy who said to me, he said, what you're in search of is primal union.
Guest:Hmm.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that sounds similar to that obliteration itself.
Guest:And, and that's what I was talking about.
Guest:Like going down on a woman, you know, that's going to be a primal union.
Guest:And that's why I like armpits also.
Guest:I like to get in there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, um, and actual, and I like intercourse also.
Guest:Sometimes I, um, well, anyway, I, I feel like I tend to be more oral, but,
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Anyway, it's all right.
Marc:But the thing about going, can I just be specific?
Marc:Is there something about going down on a woman that, you know, the connection of that and knowing that they're losing themselves and you doing that is a complete turn on?
Guest:well yes i mean i mean i actually wrote a line that didn't make it into the show which is like someone asked the ted danson character um something like you know how many women have you been with and he's been like a lot of women but he said but you know but the thing is i he goes i've always my saving grace is that i like to go down on women you know it's but then and then but then i forget how i wrote it but he said but then again you know
Guest:it's even that is selfish because i enjoy doing it and i enjoy pleasing them and he's like is there nothing decent in the world can't that at least be a selfless act but you know what i mean because but it comes down to i you know we're the we're these prisoners and these bodies and everything does sometimes come back to self even acts of charity even acts of kindness like going down on a woman
Guest:so what about the boxing then that seems to be uh the opposite boxing um well what was your boxing name uh the herring wonder yeah um yeah well that came about this guy challenged me in 99 a performance artist and long history but um and from the moment he challenged me i thought i'll call myself the herring wonder i was living on in the east village at the time i had two years there i got a rent controlled apartment from a friend or something and
Guest:And Russ and Daughters, the herring shop, was like two blocks away.
Guest:And when I could afford it, I'd get herring there once a month or something.
Guest:Which kind?
Guest:I just always liked it with cream sauce.
Guest:But I've since gotten all kinds.
Marc:You like the Magis herring?
Guest:um is that the very uh salty it's it's a little weird it's almost sweet and spicy it's got no real sauce on it it's marinated in almost a red vinegar yeah that one maybe i don't go for as much but i've had sometimes just like you know just not even in cream sauce i get it at the russian baths i don't know the kinds of herring even though i'm called the herring wonder yeah but i do like it though it's a good fish um
Guest:and so i i thought it would you know i just thought i'll be a reincarnated lower east side jewish boxer called the herring wonder you know of course comedic because i'm not a boxer you know what i mean so i didn't want to seem like i was tough so i gave myself kind of an untough name yeah but um so anyway but i boxed twice in my life because maybe this is part of your question about being a man and
Guest:I also have fantasies of being heroic, you know, and again, like I don't maybe have the guts to be a fireman.
Guest:I'm not good with tools anyways.
Guest:I wouldn't be able to unfurl the hose.
Guest:I would like to get wrapped around my head.
Marc:You can't be the herring wonder as a fireman.
Guest:Yeah, but I'm not bad at sports.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I can't operate a hammer, but I've been good at tennis and other sports for whatever reason.
Guest:Like that part of my brain functions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I, I wanted to box cause I wanted to be heroic and, and boxing, you know, the way it's captured in cinema and, and on TV, you know, so I got into boxing for that reason.
Guest:And then, you know, it's very painful.
Guest:I mean, when you get hit in the head, I'm a little worried about it.
Guest:See, worried about it.
Guest:See, those words came out funny, you know, cause I probably got concussions and that leads to dementia and all these NFL players.
Marc:You really think you did?
Guest:I mean, I mean, you boxed that much.
Guest:um i definitely got um i probably got two or three concussions just training you know i mean it doesn't take much i realize now to probably get a concussion but definitely in my fight in 99 that was four hard rounds three minute rounds and i fought with a broken nose because i had broken my nose a week before in training probably got a concussion then it was such a i mean it was an obliterating shot in the
Guest:And the guy pounded me pretty bad in that fight.
Guest:It was like four rounds of beating.
Guest:Now, I got him pretty good, but he outweighed me like 25 pounds.
Guest:He did bleed, though.
Guest:It was a wild night, though.
Guest:Matthew Barney, the, you know, performance artist par excellence, was one of the judges.
Guest:And I was supposed to come into Havana Gila, you know, and I was carrying a jar of herring.
Guest:But for some reason, the CD jammed.
Guest:So it seemed like everything was against me.
Guest:And it was in a synagogue, though.
Guest:The Angel Lauren Sons, a converted synagogue.
Guest:and uh and then in the second fight though eight years later um i luckily the guy didn't hit me in the head once and he was a huge guy i don't know i just lucked out though in training my head had gotten fucked up pretty bad because my jaw was out of line for like two months and i was really paranoid that this big guy i fought in 2007 would because my jaw was like this is a little bit like a typewriter yeah
Guest:And I had sparred with a number of guys and including some good, you know, Gleason's kind of gym fighters.
Guest:And I kept getting hit in the jaw.
Guest:My jaw was out of line.
Guest:And so I went into the fight without a line.
Guest:I thought, shit, one more blow and maybe it's going to break.
Guest:And my trainer there...
Guest:and i was wearing this headgear this kind of old headgear yeah protect my nose so my nose wouldn't get broken again because my nose sticks out so much so i had this headgear that had a bar down the middle but the thing was so old it was about 25 years old it was like a worn leather mask so i think it was increasing the force of the blows against me yeah and this trainer said yeah i think that thing's up your jaw you better get another kind of headgear and i said well but then i'll probably get my nose broken again he said
Guest:Better to get your nose broken than your jaw broken.
Guest:But I was scared to change my headgear going into the fight.
Guest:Like, you know, he told me this the day before the fight.
Guest:I tried to get a fancy mouthpiece maybe to help my jaw.
Guest:And it was right before an HBO meeting.
Guest:The day of my fight, I think I had an HBO meeting
Guest:In the afternoon.
Marc:About the first project?
Marc:About Bored to Death.
Marc:About Bored to Death?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just like, but I had a fight that night, but I thought I can't cancel the meeting because I have a boxing match.
Guest:I don't want to seem totally unstable.
Marc:But you didn't think about canceling the boxing match?
Marc:No.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I've been training for two months.
Guest:So I went to like that nice sporting goods store on Broadway near Union Square.
Guest:Paragon?
Guest:Yeah, Paragon to get a better mouth guard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they showed this diagram of why you need a mouth guard.
Guest:because actually the tip of the jaw touches the brain, right?
Guest:And so you need to keep the jawline, so that's why guys get knocked out when they're hit here, because you got brain right here.
Guest:Like the brain is a little bit shaped like Florida, it comes down, and so like the tip of the brain is down by the jaw,
Guest:And I read that right before my fight and I see this diagram and I didn't buy that fancy mouth guard and I end up fighting with this old leather thing.
Guest:And the guy I fought, Craig Davidson, nice guy, big guy.
Guest:He'd once been on steroids.
Guest:He was huge.
Guest:Somehow he never hit me in the head the whole fight.
Guest:That was only three rounds, two minute rounds.
Guest:It was only a six minute fight.
Guest:And I did beat him pretty well.
Guest:But...
Guest:I felt bad when I hit him hard in the head and I saw his eyes blink and he wobbled and I said, sorry.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I wasn't really cut out to be a boxer.
Guest:You okay, buddy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when I would train, I would hit people and I'd say, sorry.
Guest:The trainer kept saying,
Guest:Stop saying you're sorry.
Guest:So I recreated one of my boxing matches in Bored to Death.
Guest:And Jason Schwartzman, when he knocks out John Hodgman, says, I'm sorry.
Guest:And the trainer says, don't say you're sorry.
Guest:So that was from real life.
Guest:So the whole boxing thing is about a hero fantasy.
Guest:I mean, when I was a kid, I used to play war and escape from prison.
Guest:And I had this nice woods near my house.
Guest:And I just always liked to play the hero in my childhood games.
Guest:And I think the boxing was like an adult version of that.
Marc:How did it feel to get beat up, though?
Guest:That sucked.
Guest:The fight in 99, I was depressed for a long time because I probably had a concussion.
Guest:I think my ribs were bruised.
Guest:Look at that.
Guest:See, I wanted to say ribs were bruised, and I said rubes.
Guest:Early Alzheimer's.
Guest:um my ribs were bruised my neck was all screwed up my jaw was screwed up then too my nose got re-broken it was this swollen like it was like a uni face in the middle my friend had sort of betrayed me who i fought because he wasn't supposed to go for my head so much because of the broken nose because no fighter would fight with a broken nose right i guess it's dangerous and and maybe i would have ended up looking you know like raymond kelly the police chief i saw him the other night at a thing
Guest:He's got a good boxer's nose.
Guest:But he went for my head immediately.
Guest:In fact, pinned my arm in the first round and hit me in the side of the head 12 times, like uncontested.
Guest:He was completely out of control.
Guest:So at the first round, like there's videotape of me like in the corner.
Guest:I already look depressed.
Guest:And my trainer named Harry Kite, who is in this Oscar nominated film against On the Ropes.
Guest:And he was just really, he'd sparred with Ali.
Guest:And I think he'd done...
Guest:time for manslaughter, but a beautiful guy from Bed-Stuy.
Guest:And he was like, Jonathan, get angry.
Guest:He's telling me, get angry.
Guest:And I'm like, what?
Guest:And I've often said, I go straight to depression.
Guest:Because when I hear you talking about hostility and stuff,
Guest:I have it, I'm sure, because I'm troubled, but I submerge it so much.
Guest:I never even, I don't get to hostility.
Guest:I need to work on that.
Guest:It might be too late, though, because, you know, I'm getting close to 50, but I need to get more hostile.
Marc:See, this is the thing I think about us, that there's this idea that like, you know, there's part of me that thinks like, you know, I'm going to have six pack abs someday still that, you know, that I'm going to resolve these issues that my anger will just dissipate as I get older.
Marc:And I talk about on stage now that you get to a point, if you do go to therapy,
Guest:if you have enough self-awareness you're like look i'm probably not going to unfuck myself before this thing is over so if we can temper this and it seems to me that what you're saying it's like being like obama i often think with my own personality i've got to manage myself like a country that's so screwed up and so you try to minimize the damage or something yeah or you go it's like go for the worst alternate i mean the best worst alternate
Marc:Be an emotional centrist.
Marc:There's going to be these warring factions that I can't really accommodate, but maybe if I stay somewhere in the middle, I can manage my life for the rest of it.
Guest:Or you'll make choices like, okay, this will cause pain and it's screwed up, but this is the best you can do considering that you're coming from a screwed up place.
Marc:Right.
Guest:right and you try to minimize the damage you're going to do to yourself yeah and others yeah and what's cool though and partly and i feel like when you're talking about spending all this time in your head it makes our days feel very long because also we're we're not nine to five people no we don't we don't have to go somewhere and like communicate with others we're just alone tormenting ourselves all day long i know and that's why like it feels like
Guest:one's been at one hand things are zipping by very quick yeah on the other hand it's like every year feels like a trauma because every day i've been this because i i don't have to go anywhere and yeah and you know i was broke for years but and now i'm not broke but the life is the same because i wasn't fit for a job yeah but you know what i mean but that but as it turns out that is our job
Guest:Right.
Guest:Our job is to torment and then try to be clowns, to make people laugh, to feel a little less alone, to, you know, try to make something.
Guest:You know, these are the things I cycle back around to.
Guest:But again, it's a very privileged life.
Marc:So let's talk about the show and how that came about.
Marc:Because when I saw it, it's a very unique show.
Marc:It's sweet.
Marc:And it's a curious and interesting story.
Marc:structure for what is essentially an episodic comedy.
Marc:And when I first saw it, I'm like, you know, Jonathan Ames did it.
Marc:This is going to be filthy.
Marc:But it's not because you've created this world that has a lot of refinement in it and an ability to get into grit, an ability to get into some modern problems and how people live their lives with the comic book artists and Schwartzman, who is
Marc:He's pretty innocent in a lot of ways.
Marc:Yeah, he's the innocent quester in my mind.
Marc:And it seems to be finding an audience.
Marc:Now, is this a way for you to honor this desire to do a genre piece and also to almost... It definitely seems like there's some resolve in it.
Marc:It's a happy show.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:Yeah, well, it's a comedy, but it's not a dark comedy.
Guest:I guess in that sense, it's light.
Guest:And I think that's the kind of comedy, ultimately, that I like.
Guest:I mean, I'm a big P.G.
Guest:Woodhouse fan.
Guest:I like the comedies from the 50s.
Guest:Some like it hot.
Guest:you know these things that feel like champagne right you know it's like champagne humor yeah is the kind of humor that i guess i like to put out and in terms of the filthy i guess i felt i had done that enough i didn't i didn't i didn't want to be filthy anymore i don't feel the need or it's filthy enough you might have grown up yeah and i mean like this book the subtitle was what's not to love the adventures of a mildly perverted young writer
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I, I, I kind of sort of came to regret that in this sort of funny way.
Guest:Not that any of this is meaningful because who cares and I'll be dead and no one will remember.
Guest:But for years it was like perverted writer, Jonathan Ames.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Perverted writer, Jonathan Ames will be at the New York public library.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I put that word perverted.
Guest:And at the time, you know, Edgar's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius had come out.
Guest:And I thought, well, this will be like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Guest:But in my mind, I'm like, The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer.
Guest:I thought people would like that.
Guest:You know, instead, I just got labeled for years.
Guest:And, you know, I'd be like, yes, perverted.
Guest:Every interview began with perverted writer, you know.
Guest:And then I mentioned a venereal wart that I had like in 1987.
Guest:And so recently, like last fall, the New York Magazine does a profile on me for Bored to Death.
Guest:John of the Names, who's written about his venereal warts, I was like, that's the opening sentence to this...
Guest:Profile?
Guest:I haven't had that wart.
Guest:It went away.
Guest:But it's upsetting to me because women can really get messed up by warts more than men.
Guest:But I had that wart a long time ago.
Guest:It's not come back.
Guest:I don't think I transmit it.
Guest:I tend to be very safe.
Guest:So sometimes these things haunt you.
Guest:And so with the show, I didn't want to be warty or filthy.
Guest:And I didn't feel the need to be.
Guest:Now the second season, I did push some of the sexual stuff a little bit more.
Guest:But not dirty, but just more in people struggling with odd sexual issues.
Guest:But nothing like what I had done in my essays.
Guest:Do you regret this?
Guest:I don't regret it, no, because first of all,
Guest:you know, people don't really pay attention too much to other people.
Guest:So, you know, nobody really reads my books.
Guest:It was nice of you to cram a little the night before, or they read it and they forget it.
Guest:And I don't know, I feel, no, I don't regret it.
Guest:I don't really regret, the present is so difficult.
Guest:I can't regret the past too much, though recent past things I'm pretty sad about.
Guest:But
Guest:Um, but no, I don't regret the books.
Guest:So, so the TV show has been rewarding.
Guest:You like working with Ted and Zach.
Guest:Oh, those guys are amazing.
Marc:Jason, um, Jason.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I, I, uh, you know, I know Zach and he's a sweet guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're, I mean, the funnest part about the show are those three guys.
Guest:I mean, and like the show, they've become very good friends and there's a lot of laughter and, um,
Marc:so laughter is great i just started it's one of the reasons i do this like i love watching my peers i love listening to people here still tell stories i like having conversations i like being yeah you're great at this man so um how do you make money off these podcasts or is there a way to make money things come in you get advertising i have people who donate um you know we're starting to sell some premium episodes it's difficult but yeah
Marc:It's not quite a living yet, but I seem to be doing something.
Marc:I'm an isolating kind of guy, but in my heart, and when I was a kid, I always loved talking to people and hearing people's stories, and somewhere in the middle of my life, I got jaded and cynical and distant and hostile, and it went away, and now this thing is sort of... Yeah, no, because you're really nice.
Guest:Because you were bringing up that we've known each other, and you were nice to me,
Guest:I always felt like maybe you didn't like me sometimes or, you know, and I figured you were lost in your own role because it was often in the context of performance.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Whether or not you felt you had done well, you know what I mean?
Marc:It wasn't anything necessary to do with me.
Guest:I was sort of a hostile guy earlier, you know, before.
Guest:But you're very good at this.
Guest:And so you should, I imagine this, you know, you get a radio show, which could be cool or just a talk show or you're just having fun with it.
Guest:That's the main thing.
Marc:I'm creating a library of something.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, the last time I met you, and now I know the story, but I was very surprised because we ran into each other on the street in front of John's Pizza over there on Sixth Avenue, and you introduced me to your son.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:When was... Oh, yeah.
Marc:It was just on the street, and I said, hi, and he said, this is my son.
Marc:I'm like, I had no idea he had a son.
Marc:Then I read the book, and there was this moment where... It was a couple of years ago, though, right?
Guest:Did I just park a car or something?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I can't remember time that well.
Marc:But you deal with something in your book that, in my mind, at that age, you found out that you had a child from a single sexual encounter.
Marc:And it didn't take you very long to accept responsibility and actually enjoy the fact that you were a father.
Marc:How is that relationship?
Guest:Um, it's, it's good.
Guest:You know, he's, um, he's going to be 25.
Marc:And you were 22 when you found out?
Guest:I was 23 when I found out.
Marc:It was a one-time thing with an older woman.
Guest:Yes, very nice woman.
Guest:Um, but yeah, one time and, um, and then I got a letter.
Guest:I got a letter when he was almost a year and a half old.
Guest:And I had just graduated from college, just sold my first novel, which I had to double in size.
Guest:And then I got this letter and kind of had a little bit version of my own breakdown and ended up in rehab and all that.
Guest:But...
Guest:um but then i became his dad and it's been you know a very wild path and there's regret there because i would have liked to have been not a part-time dad you know what i mean but i didn't have the circumstances the way the cards were dealt yeah to be a full-time dad to you know to give him everything that he needed emotionally and
Guest:Um, but he's in school now and, you know, lately we've been emailing, you know, like he was slow to get onto email.
Guest:He's not a very technological kid.
Guest:He's a really good kid, a solid young man, very good to my parents.
Guest:Um, and so, but it's interesting, like it's different phases.
Guest:Like, um,
Guest:you know, we used to, we went through a period where we're like, we were like brothers, you know, and we had this like shared language.
Guest:And for years we played this game called sabotage, you know, where we would just sabotage each other all the time, you know, and he was much better at it than me.
Guest:Well, he would, you know, we, I would do most of my parenting at my parents' house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I would be like in my childhood, my sister's room and he'd be in my childhood room and I must've had to go into New York for a day.
Guest:And he taped everything I had to like the,
Guest:you know if i had like a book by the bed yeah i went to lift it it was taped you know if i went to put on a slipper that was taped but he taped it so i couldn't see what was taped you know what i mean went to move the computer mouse that was taped you know what i mean yeah and then things under the sheets and then things would fall on me so this we would do this stuff constantly and you know and it was we we had this little coded language that we would use with each other and
Guest:and that's kind of disappeared in a way you know and i think we're both to feel sort of shy to bring it back up but you know one of the things we do is go to movies together whenever we go to movies like if he goes to the bathroom he'll come in and purposely knock my legs over or bang it
Guest:against me or he'll sprawl in the seat so that i have to squish over you know he'll fart on me you know what i mean so yeah there's still some of that but we're almost more shy because like he's a man now so and it's weird to maybe do that stuff which was just our playing you know has he come down to the set or anything or
Guest:He has both seasons and the pilot.
Guest:I think he's a little bored with it now, you know, because, you know, after the first one or two takes, it gets very redundant.
Guest:But he came this year, and I think he's proud of what I've been doing, you know, because I haven't felt like he's really very capable, you know, he can build things, and I have felt insecure and inadequate as a role model.
Guest:But I think...
Guest:And he's studying, like, leadership stuff in school.
Guest:And I was touched.
Guest:He said, well, you know, you're like a quiet leader.
Guest:You know, because he observed the dynamics on the set.
Guest:And I was really like, whoa, he does think something, you know, well of me.
Guest:You know, because I often just feel so... I've always been waiting for him to reject me.
Guest:So it's a difficult love relationship.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:It's not, you know, but...
Guest:anyway you're a sweet man jonathan ames you know i i could have done better um but i you know what's one cool thing about the show is like you know i'm able to take care of him financially in a way that when i was younger i couldn't and it was like good timing because like um he's in college and like a lot of kids nowadays it takes longer so i can pay for it now you know like you can see like i've still i've i mean this is a nice place but you know i mean
Guest:i'm still living the same way that i have for like 11 years i've been in here and i haven't really known what to do with my money yet because you know it's pretty new yeah like what i guess i could get new shoes you know so i had someone order me three because i only i've come to like one so i ordered three pairs now i never could have done that before but but i i don't like to shop so i got three pairs of shoes arrived same kind yeah the same kind i don't
Guest:You know, the comfortable... I think you could probably move into your own place if you want.
Guest:I know, but I would have to clean this place up.
Guest:I'm kind of trapped in a disorganized cycle of stupidity.
Guest:But anyway, so that's been one of the best benefits of the show is that I can... It doesn't make up for the hand he was dealt not having a full-time father, but at least I can sort of take care of him now.
Marc:And it seems like you can take care of yourself, too.
Marc:And it was...
Marc:It was great talking to you, man.
Guest:Oh, likewise.
Guest:It was really nice of you to come over.
Guest:Well, I'm happy for your success, man.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:That's Jonathan Ames, a very sweet guy, a very revealing guy, and his books are great.
Marc:Again, I can't recommend enough that graphic novel, The Alcoholic, which I didn't talk about because I didn't do my research.
Marc:Let's do a little business.
Marc:Of course, as always, we've got some...
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:Yeah, that's a mess.
Marc:JustCoffee.coop, available at WTFPod.com.
Marc:And I do want to, please, I want to try to get you guys to get on my mailing list.
Marc:If you go to WTFPod.com, get on the mailing list.
Marc:I'm doing that every week.
Marc:I guess I'm just so fucking proud of myself that I'm being responsible about keeping you guys aware of what's going on.
Marc:that I want you to be on the list.
Marc:And if you can make a donation, become a subscriber.
Marc:$10 a month will get you a t-shirt and some stickers and a signed thingy.
Marc:And if you do the $250 one-time premium donation, two t-shirts, my three CDs, a special WTF best of CD, access to all our premium content, some stickers, and you can be my friend forever.
Marc:But please, you know, open your hearts, open your wallets, help us out.
Marc:We do run on donations and we're happy you're enjoying the show.
Marc:I feel like I'm plugging a lot.
Marc:I gotta stop.
Marc:I gotta go.
Marc:Okay.