Episode 429 - Joey Diaz
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fuck's the bulls?
Marc:What the fuck a holics?
Marc:What the fuck'll Barry fins?
Marc:What the fuck a sugar knows?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:It is me.
Marc:It is I. It is Mark Marin.
Marc:I am the host and generator of this show WTF.
Marc:I appreciate you being here.
Marc:I'm going to be at the podcast festival here in Los Angeles this Friday.
Marc:It runs all weekend.
Marc:You go to LAPodFest.com.
Marc:On my podcast, I'm going to have Jimmy Pardo.
Marc:I'm going to have Paul Gilmartin.
Marc:I'm going to have Aisha Tyler.
Marc:I'm going to have Dana Gould.
Marc:And I'm going to have Dave Anthony.
Marc:But a lot of podcasters are there.
Marc:Also, on Sunday, I'm going to be at Public Citizen.
Marc:That's Citizen.org is doing a Stand Up for Main Street thing with me and Alan Havy and Carol Liefer and Greg Fitzsimmons.
Marc:Betsy Salkind, Ruben Paul.
Marc:We're going to be doing that at the Writers Guild Theater.
Marc:That's 630, October 6th on Sunday.
Marc:Just go to www.citizen.org.
Marc:If you want to go to that show, it should be a good show.
Marc:So what else is going on?
Marc:I'm feeling a little better.
Marc:Things are getting a little clearer.
Marc:uh again i'm not being as transparent as i'd like because i look folks i know we're close but jesus i got to keep a few things to myself don't i i can't just walk around like a complete open wound all day can i i'm just trying to show up for work right now and uh everything is uh is okay i'm having an okay few minutes do you understand
Marc:I'm not yelling at you.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I apologize for that tone.
Marc:I apologize for that tone today.
Marc:Joey Diaz, Joey Coco Diaz is on the show today and it's a it's a pretty big event.
Marc:You know, a lot of you guys and gals he added after he realized he was just going to say guys.
Marc:You know, you know, Joey from the death, the death squad crew.
Marc:You know, I know Joey from not too far back, but a little far back.
Marc:We've had a run in here and there.
Marc:I think we I try to make right on that.
Marc:He explained some stuff to me about me.
Marc:And then I let Joey talk because I don't know if you know my history.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, of course you do.
Marc:Of course you do.
Marc:But the one thing I want to tell you about what's happened to me over the course of WTF is it's sort of special.
Marc:And I'll explain a little bit about myself as if I'm just introducing myself to you.
Marc:Oh, by the way, you know, I know a lot of you guys are new listeners and there's no reason that you should be in the dark about the last, you know, the last 400 episodes or so.
Marc:You know, if you go to the site or you go to the app store, you get the WTF app for free and you upgrade for like seven bucks, eight bucks.
Marc:to premium you can stream all 430 whatever it is a lot of stuff back there you can also go to wtfpod.com slash guide to find out who's been on the show a lot of great guests have been on this show i've done a lot of work in this garage
Marc:I've broken it in with the pain, joy, struggle of many great thinkers and entertainers.
Marc:A lot of people are liking that.
Marc:So back to me, back to this show, Joey Diaz in just a few minutes.
Marc:I have a compulsion, attraction, a need to talk to people that seem to have a history.
Marc:Now, look, everybody's got a history.
Marc:But I was sort of wired early on by sort of beat up old guys, beat up old guys that used to hang around in my grandfather's appliance store.
Marc:Used to be a crew of them.
Marc:A guy named Pete.
Marc:Pete talked like this.
Marc:And you have to assume that anybody who talks like this and smokes cigarettes and looks 100 has got a story to tell you.
Marc:He's been places.
Marc:He's ridden the rails.
Marc:He's been beaten up by life, thrown down a few times, and gotten back up and just kicked life's ass.
Marc:So you got to assume that a guy who talks like this has got something to say.
Marc:And that guy's voice was wired into my brain.
Marc:I used to look up to these guys.
Marc:Now, you know, my father was a bit of a nutbag.
Marc:My father was a very charismatic, but but ultimately, you know, troubled man.
Marc:So I am sort of wired to engage with charismatic, troubled people.
Marc:I think it's a gift if I look at it in the right way, as opposed to a search for a better father.
Marc:I think it's a gift.
Marc:but because of that i was driven towards comedy i was driven towards people that seemed to have a handle on things i was driven driven towards people that had stories and could make sense of the world i was driven towards that by by when i was very young when we lived in alaska our neighbor her name was esther she looked as old as an as the the oldest tree she used to sit in this large chair in something that i remember as a kind of asian get up and she used to smoke cigarettes and talk about the birth of alaska
Marc:about her husband, the indigenous man, but I believe she used the word Eskimo then.
Marc:I don't even, Inuit.
Marc:I don't want to offend anybody.
Marc:But she had stories that seemed that they came from the beginning of time.
Marc:She gave me and my brother a silver dollar from the 1800s, an illustrious history of self.
Marc:I think that's all I ever wanted.
Marc:And I think I have one.
Marc:I don't know if I would call it illustrious, but it certainly has been somewhat complicated and troubling at times with a lot of ups and downs.
Marc:But what I'm telling you is when I talk to somebody like Joey Diaz, I'm like, holy shit, this guy's got some stories.
Marc:I mean, what kind of story do you want to hear?
Marc:You want to hear a setup that's like, you know, I was in a difficult situation.
Marc:I tried to figure out what the right thing to do was.
Marc:I think I made the right choice.
Marc:I don't know who the fuck wants to hear that story.
Marc:Maybe a classroom full of five-year-olds to 13-year-olds who need to learn something about making good decisions.
Marc:But, you know, give me the guy that made all the bad decisions.
Marc:That's the guy I want to hear.
Marc:Give me the guy that made so many wrong decisions that he was pounded flat.
Marc:by the repercussions of his own heart.
Marc:When I was in high school and I worked at a bagel restaurant down by the university, crazy people would come in.
Marc:And I'm not saying that to be condescending.
Marc:I mean bonafide crazy people.
Marc:There was this guy named Pete.
Marc:They used to wear these lace-up boots that went up to his knees with denim shorts and a buttoned
Marc:leather vest and he used to sit there and smoke winchesters in the back corner and drink coffee and draw very important diagrams with a lot of writing around them now you know when somebody's sitting in that get up and they're talking to themselves a bit and they're laughing occasionally and they're making illustrations with arrows and words that fill up an entire page at every angle it's a good chance you're dealing with a schizophrenic or a physicist and i don't think he was a physicist
Marc:So I took a liking to Pete and I'd sat down with him.
Marc:He seemed to be obsessed with drawing guns and the head of General Custer.
Marc:He occasionally mentioned his upbringing in New Jersey.
Marc:There were bits and fragments on these pieces of paper that were sort of like poems.
Marc:They were impulsive.
Marc:They were somewhat troubling.
Marc:But I took a liking to Pete.
Marc:Not unlike I like the deaf black cat or any of the cats I've collected.
Marc:I was into stray people as well.
Marc:Stray people were interesting to me.
Marc:It's like, well, that guy, he doesn't seem to fit in, but he seems to have figured it out for himself.
Marc:I think that's the big key there.
Marc:You know, when I see a crazy guy who's got a certain series of movements that he's clearly using just to keep what little reality he has going in some sort of context, even if only he can understand it, I look at that guy as like, well, he's got something worked out.
Marc:You know, it involves that weird thing he's doing with his hand and two clicks of the head and a few words.
Marc:But he's got a system in place to move through life.
Marc:It obviously doesn't include many other people.
Marc:But, you know, it's working for him in this particular moment.
Marc:And I've seen him three days in a row and he's doing that exact same thing.
Marc:So I would call that a point of view.
Marc:what's that guy's point of view i don't know a couple of grumbly words a bit of a strange anger uh that he mixes up the words there and those two hand movements two clicks of the head and you know that's his point of view that's that person's creativity you can sit and judge from on high but that guy had but he might have more shit together than you do
Marc:So I took Pete under my wing.
Marc:Literally, I took him under my wing.
Marc:I got so fascinated with this schizophrenic that I used to drive him home.
Marc:I think he was squatting in a large house downtown.
Marc:He said the state was paying for it, but there was no running water.
Marc:He was doing some work on some holes in the walls that involved more diagrams.
Marc:I took him to my house.
Marc:I took this guy, Pete, to my house and I introduced him to my mother as if I said, you know, I literally it was almost as if mom, can we keep him?
Marc:Can we keep it?
Marc:I don't think, you know, we can just set him up outside or maybe in the laundry room we can make him a cot.
Marc:My mother got to like Pete.
Marc:She became sort of fascinated with him.
Marc:But then it went dark.
Marc:Pete went dark.
Marc:You know, that's the problem with a point of view that doesn't necessarily have much bearing on reality.
Marc:You don't know when that's going to spiral off.
Marc:When the system stops working for the schizophrenic who put it into place, you might not be able to bring that guy in the house anymore.
Marc:That's all I'm saying.
Marc:The diagrams got evil.
Marc:He was asked to leave the restaurant because he was yelling at a woman that he made up.
Marc:anyways pete had a good story and i like good stories and i'm certainly not being you know condescending in any way you want to figure out you know for yourself how to have that passion to engage in life in that way and sometimes that passion to engage in life is having no idea whatsoever and being tossed around a bit and certainly joey diaz has seen his uh his share of stuff let's talk to joey diaz
Marc:You do the thing.
Marc:I try to do the thing.
Marc:You got your own podcast?
Marc:Yeah, early morning.
Marc:You're on the Rogan Show?
Marc:Regular.
Marc:Not that regular, but regular when he does it.
Marc:From what I can understand, and this sort of stuck with me because I think you were right, and you're not going to remember, but I know that in passing, during one of Joe's, one of the periods where he was angry at me, I think we're okay now, that you had brought up a situation where I came to your house and
Marc:That's it on the podcast or was it?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I would talk to Ari about it.
Marc:Oh, is it Ari?
Marc:Me and Ari were talking about it.
Marc:And I think you're right.
Marc:But let's set it up.
Marc:I'm talking to Joey Diaz here.
Marc:And I was in town.
Marc:It must have been 1998.
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:98, 97.
Marc:97, 98, right?
Marc:So I'm in town.
Marc:I don't live here.
Marc:Now, I'm just going to tell you who I was then.
Marc:At that point, I was coming here.
Marc:I think I was still married.
Marc:My wife did not tolerate the drugs.
Marc:And I used to come out.
Marc:And my guy was, Baker was my guy.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then I came out and Baker wasn't around.
Marc:I saw you at the store.
Marc:You're like, what are you doing?
Marc:And I'm like, well, I don't know.
Marc:I got nothing to do.
Marc:And was it my birthday or something?
Marc:It was your birthday.
Marc:And I got nothing to do.
Marc:I got no Coke.
Marc:I don't know what I'm going to do.
Marc:It's my birthday.
Marc:I got no friends.
Marc:And you invite me over.
Marc:And like a fucking gypsy asshole, you know, I'm like, oh, my God, this is great.
Marc:What am I?
Marc:I don't know this guy.
Marc:I'm going to go to his house.
Marc:It was very nice.
Marc:Your girl at the time was very nice.
Marc:And I didn't bring a bottle of wine.
Marc:And, you know, in retrospect, I apologize.
Guest:It was the right thing.
Guest:No, no, no, no, no.
Guest:Let me explain this back to you.
Guest:All right.
Guest:The story that was told to Ari was not about a bottle of wine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was about addictions.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:We were talking about addictions.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And we were talking about the whole thing of addictions.
Guest:And I had gone to Miami and I had gotten some mojito shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That you pour on chicken and you cook it.
Guest:And you were telling me, we were talking about Rick Kearns.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I said, come over for your birthday.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you came over and you go, I'm not hungry right now, whatever.
Guest:And we were drinking something or eating.
Guest:And we didn't eat.
Guest:And you went in the bathroom and you're doing a couple bumps.
Guest:And that afternoon I went there and I go, is it fucking me or am I crazy?
Guest:He didn't offer me.
Guest:But I wouldn't have done it anyway.
Guest:Do you follow me?
Guest:Because it was the afternoon.
Guest:I had a spot.
Guest:And that's what the story I told Ari.
Marc:Oh, I thought it was just about being like a guy who comes to something.
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:It was about addictions.
Marc:So it was about not sharing my blow or offering it to you.
Marc:Offering it to me.
Guest:So here I'm sitting there.
Guest:I'm mad, but I'm happy.
Guest:It was the weirdest thing.
Guest:When you're an addict, you're mad and happy.
Guest:I was all fucked up.
Guest:I'm like, that cocksucker didn't offer me a blast in my own house.
Guest:But then again, I wouldn't have done it because I wanted to eat the Cuban chicken and rice and beans.
Guest:So do you understand that?
Marc:Let me reframe the apology.
Marc:I'm sorry that I didn't eat the chicken.
Marc:I'm sure it was wonderful, but I was jacked out of my fucking mind and I just had enough for me.
Marc:And I apologize that.
Guest:I want to ask you, what was the guy's name that had the club in Florida?
Guest:that sold it and came up, checked himself into the Sunset Palm Hotel across from the grouse that we were all friends with, Bob Baker and yourself.
Guest:What was his name?
Guest:He came out with an envelope full of cash, and he didn't leave until he had like $300.
Marc:I don't remember that guy.
Marc:I didn't work in Florida that much, and I met Baker here.
Marc:So my experience with Florida is limited.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Did you live there?
Marc:Never.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I'm a Cuban kid from Jersey, northern New Jersey.
Guest:Right, from Bergen County.
Guest:From Hudson County.
Guest:Hudson County.
Guest:Right.
Guest:What happened was, and before the revolution, if you went to Miami, they spoke about that there was freedom in New Jersey.
Yeah.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah, that there was an embroidery boom, and they needed Cubans.
Guest:So if you notice, northern New Jersey is very embroidery.
Guest:Heavy?
Guest:It's embroidery heavy?
Guest:Heavy.
Guest:It's embroidery heavy.
Guest:So my father was one of the first Cuban committee men, like in 59.
Guest:So we were there way before the revolution.
Guest:I was born in 66 in Cuba.
Guest:So he got out before the revolution.
Guest:Yes, him and my mother came over, opened up a business.
Guest:So it was no problem to get out?
Guest:It was no problem.
Guest:You moved.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was like before 59, Cuba was like Atlantic City.
Guest:What do you want to do this weekend?
Guest:Well, I'm going to bum around.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Fuck it, Mark.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Let's get your plane for Cuba.
Guest:Yeah, party.
Guest:Yeah, you check into whatever the Ritz, whatever hotel they have.
Guest:It's like Vegas.
Marc:It's like Godfather 2.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It's like Vegas.
Guest:So they would keep coming back and forth.
Guest:A lot of people always like Dom.
Guest:A lot of people think I was raised in Miami.
Guest:Not at all.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I guess that's what it is.
Marc:But I guess there's a very fine line between Jersey and Miami.
Marc:Yes, there is.
Marc:Because most of New Jersey eventually ends up in Miami.
Marc:They have a summer home where they retire there, whether they're Italian, Cuban, Jewish.
Marc:Yeah, they all go to Miami.
Marc:There's something about Florida.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So you grew up.
Marc:Which part of Jersey?
Marc:Because I grew up.
Marc:I didn't grow up.
Marc:My family's from Passaic County.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I'm close to you.
Guest:We would have played together against each other in high school.
Guest:We would have if I played anything.
Guest:I grew four.
Guest:I played whatever I could.
Guest:Baseball.
Guest:I ran cross-country tracks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What the hell happened?
Guest:You know, drugs and abuse and life.
Guest:Yeah, right?
Guest:Beats you down.
Guest:Yeah, so I, yeah, Passaic.
Marc:I'm Hudson County.
Marc:You're Bergen County?
Marc:I think it was Passaic County because my mother's from Pompton Lakes, which is where, you know where that is?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You do?
Marc:Very nice.
Marc:Very nice.
Marc:Yeah, she grew up there.
Marc:My father's from Jersey City.
Marc:Like, I'm Jersey in my blood.
Marc:My jean line's from Jersey.
Marc:But I grew up, they moved when I was like seven.
Marc:Jersey City is a very interesting place.
Marc:Now or always?
Marc:It always has been.
Guest:It always has been.
Marc:But you really grew up in Jersey.
Marc:You go back to Jersey.
Guest:You have family to Jersey.
Guest:You feel tied in to Jersey.
Guest:No, I have nothing in Jersey.
Guest:I have no family.
Guest:They're gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I have the kids I grew up with, I have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I still go back.
Guest:But I got to tell you something, Mark.
Guest:I have a hard time performing in New Jersey.
Guest:Why?
Why?
Guest:Because my friends from high school come and I don't know how to act.
Guest:That's the only time.
Guest:Listen, I don't know how to act in front of two sets of people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The reason why I don't drink, I've never drank and drive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you know why?
Guest:Why?
Guest:When I'm straight, I don't like a cop behind me.
Guest:I can't handle it.
Guest:Yeah, you can't handle it.
Guest:I don't either.
Guest:And it's just the drink and drive thing, and I hate...
Guest:Performing for them.
Guest:I can't keep it together because they know you from yeah, I keep talking like that in front of them I hate you know I have a hard time so I go back very limited.
Guest:I play Long Island Yeah, I'll play like Manhattan, but I won't put it on Twitter or Facebook.
Guest:Yeah, you know just so they don't ask me
Marc:Well, what happens when they show up?
Marc:What do you regress?
Marc:It's painful.
Marc:You regress into something?
Guest:Yeah, I don't know.
Guest:And they all say to me, you know, we knew you in high school.
Guest:Like, I started my comedy career on the number one bus from Jersey City to the high school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's get the fuck out the basics.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:On that bus, we got on the bus, and our job was to torment that fucking bus driver.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We'd start with the theme from The Odd Couple.
Guest:You know, Madison's wife deserved to, he never returned.
Guest:And then we'd start doing commercials and, you know, jokes.
Guest:And then somebody would hit the bus with a snowball.
Guest:And that was our entertainment.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:And then you moved on to a deli.
Guest:But I didn't have an idea in front of the deli, the chick that walked by with the limp.
Guest:You know the fucking D or the guy that's African.
Guest:It's just something.
Guest:And that's how you evolve.
Guest:And I never knew.
Guest:And then I listened to a Richard Pryor album.
Guest:And I'm from Cuba.
Guest:And I spoke Spanish in the house.
Guest:And you heard all these things about Cuba.
Guest:And I'm listening to Is It Something I Said.
Guest:And I'm listening to these words he's saying.
Guest:And I'm dying inside.
Guest:Because when I was 10, I looked at America a lot different than somebody who was born in
Guest:born here i looked at america as the end all be all like this is just fucking too much my head's gonna blow up because your father was like that he was kind of put into you like this is the land of opportunity this is it this is fucking for all the marbles this is you know when you're a kid there's nothing you know i didn't learn to speak english in school i learned to speak english watching dick van dyke right you know and then you evolve that didn't van dyke the in-laws right i love lucy you know and you mixed it all together and it was uh it's something different for me
Guest:I get emotional talking about it.
Guest:Baseball is different for me.
Guest:I'm not even a fucking Pittsburgh Steelers fan.
Guest:When I watch Pittsburgh Steelers against Dallas, that makes me feel like a fucking American.
Guest:You have an immigrant mentality.
Guest:Yes, it's just an immigrant.
Guest:You're proud to be here.
Guest:Every day for me is, God damn.
Guest:I know my cousins in Cuba are sharing an egg right now for breakfast.
Guest:One fucking egg between four of them and going, this is delicious.
Guest:Here I am.
Marc:Do you have cousins in Cuba?
Guest:No.
Guest:put their video on my cousins are in the national rock band in cuba so my cousin is like the heavy metal cuban guy they opened up for chris cornell yeah they opened up for yes in cuba in cuba huh and my other cousin emmy i found so yeah is this beautiful sade type girl shit they're all in show business they're all in show business i'm the only comedian but that's something isn't it it's weird right it's uh first cousins first cousins
Marc:Do you ever go there?
Guest:No.
Guest:Once I left, they yanked my passport.
Guest:So you're probably afraid to go there.
Guest:No.
Guest:I think if I go there, I would just break down and stay inside.
Guest:I have a sister that got stuck there.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:When my father died, they sent them back there.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was really heavy duty.
Guest:I didn't join.
Guest:I don't even know I didn't join the Marines or something.
Guest:My mother wouldn't let me speak English.
Guest:Spanish outside the house.
Guest:But you were brought up speaking Spanish.
Guest:Oh, in the house, you had to speak Spanish.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But outside the house, this was America.
Guest:Because you had to pass.
Guest:You wanted to be part of America.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, you didn't want to embarrass yourself.
Guest:My mother stressed it.
Guest:Like, listen, motherfucker.
Guest:This is America.
Guest:When you're out there, you don't hablo español.
Guest:You're an American.
Guest:Be proud.
Guest:Motherfucker.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, my mother loved Price is Right.
Guest:That was her favorite.
Guest:Come on down.
Guest:Coco Diaz, come on down, motherfucker.
Guest:And I grew up going to the Mets.
Marc:But they sent your father's body back to Cuba on a request?
Marc:66.
Marc:There's two types of Cubans.
Guest:So you're the same age as me.
Guest:You were born in 62?
Guest:63.
Guest:I was born in 63.
Guest:There's two types of Cubans.
Guest:The ones they know that got black blood in them and the ones that
Guest:know but they don't want to know they live in Pasadena those type of Cubans you put Mambo music on and they dom 9-1-1 so my father's family thought that they were they didn't have black blood in them yeah so they were like from Spain they were Cubans like they spoke like this aristocratic yes like very you know they read books and glasses no fucking deal
Guest:And my mother's side of the family, they're just musicians.
Guest:They're just rogues.
Guest:So my mother said, you want the fucking body?
Guest:Take the fucking body.
Guest:So she went all the way to Mexico with the body and shipped them.
Guest:At that time, it was 66.
Guest:So Castro had a firm grip.
Guest:Real firm.
Guest:Real firm.
Guest:It was funny, because I was born in Cuba.
Guest:And my grandmother was raising me and my sister.
Guest:And my mother would come on the weekends.
Guest:and hang out, and then she'd go back and run her bar.
Guest:They had a bar, a restaurant, and they had a restaurant.
Guest:You were brought up with your mother?
Guest:I was brought up with my grandmother until I was three, pretty much.
Guest:Well, where was the old man?
Guest:The old man was in New York with my mother.
Guest:They would come down on the weekends for long weekends, hang out.
Guest:Why'd they give you the grandmother?
Guest:Because it was easier for them.
Guest:They had no babysitter.
Guest:They had no cousins in Cuba.
Guest:It was easier for them to get around New York City.
Guest:My parents were- Did they get their citizenship here?
Guest:Everything.
Guest:They had everything.
Guest:They were legit.
Guest:They were straight up legit.
Guest:Unbelievable.
Guest:Straight up American citizens.
Guest:I'm an American citizen, the whole fucking deal.
Marc:But they're just leaving you in Cuba.
Marc:Weren't they scared?
Marc:I mean, Jesus Christ.
Guest:No, you're with grandma.
Guest:You're at the beach every fucking day.
Guest:What about Castro?
Guest:At that time, Castro didn't really know.
Guest:He didn't claim communism until like 61, I think.
Guest:I don't know what the fucking deal was.
Guest:But they knew people in Cuba.
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:I was locked in at that time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then once they brought me, they brought me like in 65, the beginning of 66, and my dad dies.
Guest:So they ship his fucking ass back.
Guest:Because the family wanted him.
Guest:The family was like, you know, we can't eat Sunday dinner without knowing he's two miles away.
Guest:You know, those fucking douchebags.
Guest:I've never spoken to them ever.
Guest:I had a conversation with my grandmother when I was eight, and I knew that this was not going to work out.
Guest:She wasn't lovey-dovey.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:She'd be like, you have dirty knees type shit.
Guest:You can't sit on me.
Guest:So he died.
Marc:What did he die?
Marc:He just dropped dead?
Marc:Yeah, he just died.
Marc:37.
Marc:Holy fuck.
Marc:That's scary.
Marc:37.
Marc:And you were three?
Guest:Three.
Guest:Just turned three.
Guest:Now what happens?
Guest:My mom sells the sandwich shop and takes the bar and fucking makes it into this tremendous Spanish bar that Celia Cruz would play at.
Guest:Anytime somebody came into the city.
Guest:In the city.
Guest:In the city, they would shoot over to Union City and close the bar out there.
Guest:It was in Union City.
Guest:Union City, which is a very big Cuban community.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They build their neighborhood.
Marc:They all come from Italy or wherever.
Marc:And they're on Jersey.
Guest:So it's very interesting.
Guest:There's a lot of people who knew each other in the old country.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Because their fathers grew up together.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:So they're like Short Hills, New Jersey.
Guest:I had a friend that was Jewish and he lived in Short Hills.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he was telling me that his whole fucking tribe from Israel lived in that whatever.
Guest:I don't know if it's a tribe.
Guest:It's all right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Twelve tribes of David or whatever.
Guest:That was very interesting that he had said.
Guest:I never knew that.
Guest:I was like, oh, that's interesting.
Guest:I was watching a TV show, and they said a lot of people from that Italian neighborhood settled in that place.
Guest:So with Cuba, it was the same.
Guest:My mother mingled.
Guest:The doctor I had on 37th Street, classic motherfucker.
Guest:This was when doctors were doctors.
Guest:His name was Orlando Del Valle.
Guest:He made house calls.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now, my mother partied.
Guest:Had the bag.
Guest:My mother partied.
Guest:My dad partied also.
Guest:They partied.
Guest:They did everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They tried to keep it from me, but I figured it out.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, their front business was the restaurants.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The underling business was the numbers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They sold numbers in Harlem.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And they had banks.
Guest:Number runners?
Guest:Yeah, they took the numbers.
Guest:So that was their underlying business.
Guest:But they weren't affiliated with the mob?
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:They were Cuban.
Guest:Yeah, they probably kicked in somewhere, but no.
Guest:My mom had the bar.
Guest:The bar was her love.
Guest:She wanted to bring that Cuban.
Guest:I remember being a kid, and she would cook and give away the lunches.
Guest:And she'd say, I got to show these motherfuckers what's really crazy.
Guest:And it was all mailmen and bus drivers from across the street.
Guest:What'd she make?
Guest:Uh...
Guest:You know, the Cuban pot roast, the potatoes, white rice.
Guest:Listen, I don't give a fuck what you hate spicks or not.
Guest:When they give you a dish with black beans and fried bananas, you're going down, bitch.
Guest:That's just the way it works.
Guest:There's just certain foods that you're going down.
Guest:Hummus, you're going down.
Guest:Spaghetti and meatballs, you're going down.
Guest:There's certain food that you taste, you go, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This food's pretty good.
Guest:I hate these specks.
Marc:But whatever.
Marc:That was always amazing.
Marc:I used to talk about it.
Marc:I tried to do a joke once about Pakistan and India.
Marc:I'm like, but they have such wonderful breads.
Marc:Why don't they get along?
Marc:I mean, it's a fucking good thing.
Marc:Eat some chicken.
Marc:They have Pakistani breads.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's all the same.
Marc:But yeah, go ahead.
Marc:So they used to party hard at the doctor.
Guest:And we had this doctor named Orlando Del Valle.
Guest:Bad motherfucker.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And in those days, they made house calls.
Guest:If you're growing up now, you'll never see a doctor in the apartment.
Guest:Get a vet to come over, maybe.
Guest:Oh, yeah, for 9,000.
Guest:Those motherfuckers.
Guest:Don't go to them Christmas week.
Guest:You'll get fucked two times.
Guest:And they would come over.
Guest:And this was after my mom remarried.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Would she marry a good guy?
Guest:Yeah, he was a really good guy.
Guest:The doctor would come over.
Guest:and they'd go in the room, and he'd check my tonsils, and he'd go, all right, until today, I hate needles.
Guest:Some people hate snakes, some people hate flying.
Guest:I even go to acupuncture once a week to get to fear.
Guest:I've been seven years.
Guest:So I'm not bad now, Mark, but from time to time, I'll faint.
Guest:Really?
Guest:With a needle?
Guest:Oh, please, just seeing it.
Guest:Just seeing it.
Guest:Sometimes on acupuncture, I'll feel it going into the skin, and I'll go down.
Guest:She's used to it.
Guest:She just gives me the immune.
Guest:So I go down.
Guest:I used to go down maybe 15 times a year.
Guest:Now I go down maybe four times a year.
Guest:From the needle.
Guest:From the needle.
Guest:Just going in.
Guest:You know, at our age now, you got to get checked out.
Guest:No, I don't.
Guest:We have to go to SAG building and see Dr. Wexler.
Guest:Wexler's your guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I go to the one on, I go to Bob Hope on La Brea.
Marc:Me too.
Marc:That's my guy.
Marc:Yeah, well, my guy used to be Heichman.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They're great people.
Marc:He's not there anymore.
Marc:Now I got Watson, and she's this African-American lady.
Marc:So it's very funny because I went in there the other day and had some problem with gas.
Marc:And I'm trying to tell her, like, you know, I don't know.
Marc:It's more gas than I think is necessary.
Marc:So I got to tell this doctor, this nice black lady who's standing there giving me this look.
Marc:I'm like, but, like, I don't know if it's food-related because it's not coming out burping.
Marc:It's coming out of my ass.
Marc:I'm telling her this woman.
Marc:She's just looking at me.
Marc:She figured it out.
Marc:It's these fucking nicotine lozenges.
Marc:Got mannitol in them, like what they used to cut the blow with that made you fart.
Marc:That shit in there that you put in these lozenges.
Marc:And she's like, that's it.
Marc:And I'm like, well, what are you?
Marc:And she goes, stop those.
Marc:I'm like, well, how the fuck am I going to get my nicotine?
Marc:She just gave me this look like, I don't know.
Guest:Not to take off the subject, but do you remember when you'd call the guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he'd tell you he was coming over and you had to take a shit.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Like, Joey, hold the 50.
Guest:When he shows up, give it to him.
Guest:Don't take nothing out of the envelope.
Guest:I'll be right down.
Guest:When I quit doing blow, I didn't shit for like a month.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That stuff will always get you going.
Guest:Like a month.
Guest:One minute.
Guest:I remember doing it, running upstairs, and then doing the other half while I was sitting on the throne looking out the window.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You stay right there, cop sucker.
Marc:That's a real party.
Marc:Just you and your cat while you're on the shitter wondering if someone's coming to get you.
Marc:That's when you know it's time to stop doing blow.
Guest:I locked the motherfucker out one night because I had a cat that when I'd come in, he'd run out.
Guest:But I'd have to run into shit because I do have to package in the car.
Guest:So I run in, he runs out, Finney, my favorite motherfucker in the world.
Guest:He passed in January.
Guest:I'm sitting on the throne.
Guest:I hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Guest:So I do the rest of the package.
Guest:I go, it's a DEA.
Guest:So I do the rest of the package.
Guest:I put my sleep apnea machine on.
Guest:I lay in there for like four hours.
Guest:Nothing happened.
Guest:I go, that motherfucker's Finney.
Guest:I open the door.
Guest:He's out there sweating, profusiously hissing at me.
Marc:It was a cat?
Guest:Yeah, it was all his style and shit.
Guest:I can't imagine you all jacked up pretending to be asleep with an apnea machine.
Guest:Sweating.
Guest:Oh, and it's going one way and I'm blowing the other and we're at war.
Guest:Bad breath.
Guest:It's fucking tremendous.
Guest:So it was fun.
Guest:It was Dr. Del Valle.
Guest:We'd come over and it'd be like three in the afternoon.
Guest:I always had a problem with my tonsils growing up until I got them yanked out.
Guest:And he would say, you know, lay down on your tonsils.
Guest:We're going to have to give you a needle.
Guest:And I'd say, let me think about it.
Guest:And my mother had zero patience.
Guest:She was ready to throw the fucking ashtray at me.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then I go, let me think about it.
Guest:And Lovalle knew that if I thought about it, that's the answer he wanted, because my mother would offer him a beer.
Guest:And after the beer, he could ask for a bump, and the party would start.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:And I never knew this, Mark.
Guest:So the doctor was at your house for the rest of the afternoon?
Guest:He'd go out there with my mom and my stepdad and whoever else was over there.
Guest:He'd come back all bumped up.
Guest:And I used to say to my mom, what's wrong with his fucking jaw?
Guest:Nothing, nothing.
Guest:And I didn't figure it out until 15 years later.
Guest:I went to him and he would ask me, can you get me some blow?
Guest:No.
Guest:Like in the 80s.
Guest:Really?
Guest:He had two kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And one of his kids, it was the 80s.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:And one kid got hooked on powder.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And was stealing the prescriptions and was writing Valiums.
Guest:Oh, that's bad.
Guest:So he lost his license.
Guest:He's in Miami now.
Guest:He's about 80.
Guest:And I still call him like twice a year.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's a good dude, man.
Guest:So then what happened to the kid who put him out of business?
Guest:He's somewhere in New York.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Snuffing fucking Valiums and assholes part time.
Marc:Oh, look at that.
Guest:Yeah, so it was really weird.
Guest:Orlando Del Valle would give me.
Guest:Those are the days when a doctor would come over, and for $35, not only would they give you a shot and a prescription, they'd leave a syringe and a little vial of fucking penicillin so if something happened overnight, your mom could blast you.
Guest:Because my mom would have that shit in the purse with her.
Guest:She'd shoot you up.
Guest:Oh, she'd shoot me right at Shea Stadium.
Guest:Any fucking prom.
Guest:Right there at Shea Stadium, I'd be crying.
Guest:Ten Puerto Ricans holding me.
Guest:She'd be giving me the fucking knee on me.
Marc:You have no recollection of them doing bumps when you were a kid?
Marc:You just put it together later?
Guest:I knew probably when I was about 9 or 10 that they were up to something.
Guest:And then on my birthday, it was really big.
Guest:My mom on my birthday really threw down.
Guest:She would have an afternoon party for myself and the kids.
Guest:And then at 7, the kids would abandon ship and she'd have a party for the adults.
Guest:And Tito Puente would show up at the bar.
Guest:Tito Puente, you saw him when you were a kid?
Guest:As a kid, I knew the motherfucker.
Guest:He would come to the bar and they'd get all gacked up.
Guest:So I would sit there.
Guest:And potato and tortico, this other tremendous Cuban combination.
Guest:And I remember being a kid, and the first piñata was for the kids, and the second piñata was the special one for the adults.
Guest:And my mother would grab me and go, if you see aluminum foil, pick them up.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I swear to my mother's grave.
Guest:And I get pissed off.
Guest:It just rocks?
Guest:These are the days when you got it in aluminum.
Guest:I'm talking about this is 71, 72.
Guest:So it was still just this rock of shit and a piece of aluminum foil.
Guest:I didn't look in there, Mark.
Guest:I just would give her the aluminum foil.
Guest:And then I had a crazy uncle.
Guest:I had a crazy uncle who would take me into New York.
Guest:He'd take me to 54th and 7th to get a haircut.
Guest:In the 70s, it was 75 bucks for the haircut.
Guest:That was like paying $3,000 for a fucking haircut.
Guest:He would take me over there.
Guest:He was like an old school guy.
Guest:I was like 12.
Guest:He'd say, listen.
Guest:If you're going to ever suck some chick's pussy, you got to put Coke rocks in the pussy.
Guest:And I go, what are you talking about?
Guest:So he'd give me a little container, a few things.
Guest:And I'd take them home and hide them.
Guest:I didn't even know what the fuck this was.
Guest:You were 12?
Guest:About a month later, my mom would come home.
Guest:They thought they'd give you something.
Guest:Yeah, give me that.
Guest:What is wrong with that man giving you Coke?
Guest:I don't know, mom.
Guest:He said to put it on some chick's pussy.
Guest:Don't even say those things to me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's a hell of a childhood.
Guest:And that's your 12?
Guest:About 12, 13.
Guest:And I was a geek then.
Guest:I was into models.
Guest:I was into basketball.
Guest:I was always into sports.
Guest:I was really into sports.
Guest:And then what got me jacked up in the seventh grade, I discovered pussy.
Guest:That fucked me up.
Guest:I love pussy so much I got left back.
Guest:Yeah, really?
Guest:Yeah, I got left back because I just stopped focusing.
Guest:I was in karate.
Guest:I did all these things.
Guest:Her name was New Yorker.
Guest:She was pretty hot.
Guest:And she didn't even let me fuck her, Mark.
Guest:I was just dry humping her.
Guest:Yeah, I did that for years.
Guest:Just listen to Earth from the Fire with dry humping her.
Guest:But she promised me that she was going to give me a taste, like in June.
Guest:So I was all fucked up.
Guest:You're going to call your uncle to get the rocks.
Guest:No.
Guest:I got to put those in her pussy.
Guest:It's not going to work out.
Guest:Look at Mark doing callbacks at 2 in the afternoon.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:So it was really weird.
Guest:That fucked me up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When did you finally get laid?
Guest:I got laid like a year later.
Guest:At what, 14, 15?
Guest:Something like that.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:In Jersey, I fucked up behind the grammar school after a basketball game.
Guest:CYO basketball.
Guest:That's where you got your first taste was behind like a church.
Guest:You suck some titties and shit.
Marc:Junior high, probably?
Guest:Eighth grade.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And that was a mistake.
Marc:I felt my first boob.
Marc:I think I put my finger in a pussy.
Marc:It must have been eighth grade.
Guest:And your face gets ragged.
Guest:Remember the first time you fingered somebody?
Guest:You couldn't even focus.
Guest:You were like Al Pacino in The Godfather.
Guest:He comes out of that bathroom and he heard the train.
Guest:Remember he was all fucking discombobulated.
Guest:Like what the fuck?
Guest:Just before he shot the police chief.
Guest:Tremendous.
Guest:He was all fucked up.
Marc:That's exactly what I felt like after I did.
Guest:Yes, she did.
Guest:You're like, what the fuck?
Marc:I don't know what's going on.
Marc:I'm about to kill somebody.
Guest:I gotta go shoot somebody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what happened when... No, your mom's not alive now, right?
Guest:No, I snapped when I was about 14.
Guest:I used to always go to karate and stuff.
Guest:And I discovered pot.
Guest:And my freshman year, I liked it, but I was still a jock.
Guest:And then...
Guest:I don't know what happened.
Guest:I started doing THC Crystal in those days, which AKA is fucking Gorilla Biscuits, AKA Angel Dust, AKA Jonestown 2020, whatever you want to fucking call it.
Guest:In those days, you went to 118th Street, and you bought a dime bag of chocolate Thai weed, and you bought a tray.
Guest:That's what they called them, a tray of Jonestown.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Of Gorilla Biscuits.
Guest:What, come like heroin, like in a little... And it came in a little thing, and you rolled the joint, and you sprinkled that in there, and you smoked, and you were gone for 12 hours.
Guest:Just like fucking hours.
Guest:But in Jersey City, we would take the bus down to Hudson Catholic, and there was this little Puerto Ricans dude, Hudson Catholic, great school, the home of Michael Cohen and Jim Spinarco.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And there was two little Puerto Rican dudes on there, and they would sell you THC Crystal, which you snorted.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So for 10 bucks, you did three people got high.
Guest:You were in the fucking ninth grade.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you went home and had to ask your mom for five hours.
Guest:What kind of high was that shit?
Guest:Gumby dust.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we were crazy.
Guest:We'd take a bus into the city and go, all right,
Guest:We're going to fucking get lost and we're going to meet on 178th on Port Authority.
Guest:And we play three-card Monty.
Guest:We go to those fucking houses where you had to sit next to a stripper and buy like a $10 bottle of champagne.
Guest:And we'd say, fuck you.
Guest:And then we'd run out of there.
Guest:I mean, we were hell on wheels.
Guest:We're lucky we didn't get stabbed.
Marc:And this is what?
Marc:You're 15, 16?
Marc:14 still.
Marc:15.
Marc:Do you remember the city was different?
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Just take a bus in if you wanted.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Did you drive?
Marc:No.
Marc:You took a bus in, right?
Guest:The train.
Guest:You took a bus.
Guest:35 fucking cents.
Marc:And it was crazy.
Guest:Everything was dirty, and it was full of pirates and nuts.
Guest:$10 for it.
Guest:I paid, like, what, $15 to see Black Sabbath and Van Halen.
Guest:I paid, like, $7 because you stubbed your way in.
Guest:The garden that day, they had the levels.
Guest:You had the whatever, the red, the orange, the green, the yellow.
Guest:And then you set up.
Marc:Like, $78, $79, $77.
Guest:Yeah, $77.
Guest:I used to go to Julius Irving games against the Philadelphia 76 against the Knicks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I never paid a scalp.
Guest:You stuck your way in.
Guest:So when you bought a regular ticket, you gave it to the guy.
Guest:He ripped it in half, right?
Guest:No.
Guest:We took a fucking finster LaRue, put it under the ticket.
Guest:You give it to the usher.
Guest:He don't give a fuck.
Guest:He's Irish.
Guest:He's on the clock, and he's union.
Guest:He's got a pension coming.
Guest:Now you're in there.
Guest:Now the rest is up to you.
Guest:You didn't get a ticket, but you're in there.
Guest:You're like at Dallas Stadium for $5.
Guest:Now you got to walk around that motherfucking finagle.
Guest:And sometimes it took a fin.
Guest:Sometimes there were two seats that were open.
Guest:There was always something.
Marc:You had to move.
Guest:Here's our seat.
Guest:All right, we'll go move another seat.
Guest:Yeah, we'll go somewhere else.
Guest:Who gives a fuck?
Guest:But you're in the game.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And listen, you were 14.
Guest:I went to a Dodger game.
Guest:I go to a lot of Dodger games.
Guest:My uncle lives here.
Guest:He's 78.
Guest:I take him to Dodger games.
Guest:I can't fucking sit at those things for more than four innings.
Guest:I'm a comic.
Guest:I got shit going through my mind.
Guest:But I take him, and I see he has a good time.
Guest:I go to Costco.
Guest:I get 50 bucks.
Guest:You get two tickets, two sodas, and two hot dogs.
Guest:It means the world to him.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:When I was 10, I'd come out, and he'd take me to SeaWorld in San Diego.
Guest:He's trying to bang chicks.
Guest:I'm cock-blocking.
Guest:So I got to take care of my uncle.
Guest:So I went to a Laker game this year.
Guest:somebody took me one time and this year I said let me buy four tickets for these kids that I know and I took them and the father and Mark it was $140 a ticket I'm not complaining but really how does a kid growing up in this country who's a fan go to a fucking game yeah
Guest:It's fucking wrong.
Guest:It's unimaginable.
Guest:I used to get to these games for five bucks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you went with the... I was such a geek.
Guest:I'd go with the basketball under my arm.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, maybe I saw somebody who'd sign the ball or just touch it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was my life at that age, you know?
Guest:And now these kids don't even...
Guest:Twitter and Facebook, they don't go to a fucking game with a ball and you run down.
Guest:And I did it without a seat.
Guest:I can't imagine with a fucking seat.
Guest:I'd be on the court telling motherfuckers to suck my dick.
Guest:Like, Spike Lee, get over here, cocksucker.
Marc:For that cost.
Marc:For that cost.
Marc:But they don't go unless the team throws a charity event.
Marc:You'll bring the kids down who've got nothing on the bus, and we'll let them walk around the court, and then they send them home.
Guest:That's an episode of Marin next season.
Guest:You take the kids, a couple blind kids, a couple Puerto Ricans to the game.
Marc:I wish I had family and kids around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:These guys have three boys.
Guest:They're into basketball.
Guest:How do you know them?
Guest:My wife works with their wife.
Guest:Okay, now this isn't the woman I met years ago, right?
Guest:No, that was a stripper.
Guest:She's back in Florida stripping.
Guest:She's a millionaire.
Guest:Is she?
Guest:And she's still stripping at 43.
Guest:How's she a millionaire?
Guest:From stripping?
Guest:She married an Indian guy that was like 150, and he died a week later from a good tongue up the ass.
Guest:Left her like a million, and she bought... It's a true story, man.
Guest:She ended up buying... I remember her being a very nice person.
Guest:Very nice.
Guest:She was a stripper, a star stripper.
Guest:She was crazy.
Guest:But she ended up buying those women's gyms
Guest:Curves.
Guest:Very early on in Michigan.
Guest:She bought the whole region.
Guest:The franchise for Curves, probably, yeah.
Guest:Curves, and somebody came to her, dumped the fucking mill.
Guest:She went to Florida, bought a house, and is still stripping at 43.
Guest:She got two kids.
Guest:Stripping for fun and because she needs to.
Guest:Because she's a filthy animal.
Guest:There's a certain need.
Guest:Some people get the itch.
Guest:She's one of the funniest people ever.
Guest:She called me about six months ago, and we were talking, and I go, where are you coming from?
Guest:She goes, I'm coming home from the doctor.
Guest:He says I got carpal tunnel.
Guest:It's from giving handjobs for 100 bucks.
Guest:She said it to me.
Guest:When she said carpal tunnel, I thought about it, but she just rattled it on.
Guest:She goes, I think it's from giving handjobs and shit like that.
Marc:So now she's got to wear a brace when she jerks a guy off.
Guest:Yeah, she jerks a guy off.
Guest:$100, she said, for a jerk off, and like a blowjob's $200 or something.
Marc:Yeah, there you go.
Guest:It's a great fucking living.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:So, all right, so now you're running around 14 years old.
Marc:Now, where's the shift happen?
Marc:So you're getting gacked up on fucking angel dust and bullshit.
Guest:Angel dust and reefer, and I'm playing sports.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I get hit with paraquat.
Guest:Summer of 79, I get hit in the fucking lung with Paraquat.
Guest:The government spraying fucking Paraquat on weed.
Guest:I start spitting up blood.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I end up 13 days at Christ Hospital in Jersey City.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Spitting up fucking chunks of blood every time my heart beat.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:So anytime I got emotional, I ran a sprint.
Guest:That's how they ratted me out at football practice.
Guest:Listen, I wasn't even going to go to the doctor.
Guest:I knew I was spitting blood for a month.
Guest:That's how crazy I was then, because they would have fucking known the THC.
Guest:I didn't know what it was.
Guest:You didn't go back to the Cuban doctor?
Guest:No, fuck him.
Guest:He would have ratted me out.
Guest:No, he found out.
Guest:By this time, I'm doing acid.
Guest:I'm not doing blow yet, and I'm not doing nothing like that.
Guest:I'm doing acid.
Guest:I'm doing no mushrooms, nothing like that.
Guest:And one night I do acid.
Guest:I go out.
Guest:I go out with a bunch of buddies of mine.
Guest:I come home.
Guest:And at that time, I was sleeping.
Guest:We had the house in North Bergen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I woke up in the middle of the night to get water, and I found my mom dead.
Guest:She had a heart attack in the middle of the night.
Guest:So I was in a bad place.
Guest:We buried her.
Guest:You were 15?
Guest:I was 15.
Guest:We buried her.
Guest:My stepfather came over.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My stepfather and her had gotten divorced a year earlier.
Guest:Him and I had a great relationship.
Guest:My mother left money, but she didn't leave a will.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's where it gets icky and wicky.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So from there on, I lost faith, and I just got fucking crazy for 10, 15 years.
Guest:Where'd the money go?
Guest:He took the Guinness.
Guest:He sold the house.
Guest:There was some jewelry.
Guest:The divorced stepfather.
Guest:The divorced stepfather.
Guest:There was a property in Miami that she had bought.
Guest:in the 50s that now FLA was buying, MIA was buying.
Guest:That's what she was in the process of selling.
Guest:That was like her retirement fund in her mind, in her mind-fucked mind.
Guest:But that happened, and then, you know... So you got screwed out of everything.
Guest:You lose faith.
Guest:And you got nothing.
Marc:And you had no power.
Guest:No power.
Marc:So then it was like, fuck you.
Guest:Not even Social Security.
Guest:I had the kiss of death put on me because my mother never worked under her real name.
Guest:She worked under an alias, which was Sophia.
Guest:And my dad worked under his name and only had nine quarters.
Guest:So I didn't have enough for Social Security.
Guest:I would have had to argue.
Guest:I said, fuck it.
Guest:I'll just go steal for a living.
Guest:And that's exactly what I went and did for like, you know, I didn't really steal.
Guest:Where'd you live?
Guest:This Italian family took me in, the Benders.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then- How'd you know them?
Guest:Grew up with them.
Guest:Grew up with the family on the street.
Guest:So down the street kind of thing?
Guest:Down the street.
Guest:Yeah, those are the people.
Guest:I grew up in a great neighborhood.
Guest:I grew up in a neighborhood, and it was very weird.
Guest:And I tell people, at that time, it was the 70s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were the Arabs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The Cubans were Arabs in those days.
Guest:We were the Spicks down the corner.
Guest:Right.
Guest:right you know and these Italian people dug me you know I was I hung out with everybody and it was time to throw down I had their backs right and if you know the Italians and the Jews and the Irish like that shit yeah you know so that was your hand with everybody even though he's a spick fucker he's alright his mom makes nice rice and beans and
Guest:A lot of fighting?
Guest:No, nothing like that.
Guest:A lot of tricky situations.
Guest:You're not afraid of it?
Guest:No, like, you know, we would rob trains.
Guest:We used to rob the trains in Jersey.
Guest:Okay, so you're moving with this family.
Guest:This was before we were still.
Guest:This neighborhood was a very white-collar, blue-collar neighborhood.
Guest:Like, the parents were white-collar, but the kids were blue-collar.
Guest:They were dirty Irish kids and Italian kids.
Guest:You know, it was like our gang, you know?
Guest:And we had different, like, first we would go down there when we were 12 and steal the punks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Remember punks from the swamps and you sold them to people?
Guest:The light shit, you know?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they would light them on fire to keep the mosquitoes away.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:So we'd sell them for a dollar a punch.
Marc:Or use them to light firecrackers too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So can you imagine that?
Guest:Like we stole the newspapers out of a thing and sold them on the street corner.
Guest:We did every scam.
Guest:These kids were amazing little fucking gangsters.
Guest:We stole the artificial turf from Giant Stadium and walked it up to fucking Route 3 and put it in our garage.
Guest:I don't know why.
Guest:We just had to steal it.
Guest:You know, when I came here, you were looking at Spider-Man.
Guest:And when we were kids, we were comic book geeks.
Guest:But we had this guy, like this Arnold De Palma type guy that lived in his mother's house.
Guest:He was like 90, but he lived in his mother's house, one of those guys with the wig.
Guest:But he was a comic book guy.
Guest:And he had a bit hit in the head with a pipe somewhere, so he really wasn't into it.
Guest:And we'd send him for Superman, and we'd steal the Fantastic Four.
Guest:Then we'd bring it back and clip the other ones.
Guest:And then we'd take him into the city and do the conferences.
Guest:I mean, growing up in that area of Jersey at that time was badass.
Guest:And then we got hooked on the trains.
Guest:And we started stealing minibikes.
Guest:In those days, the popular one was Honda Minitrail.
Guest:It was three.
Guest:What do you mean on the trains?
Guest:You just go down the yard?
Guest:Go right down there to Sea Corkers and get on these fucking things.
Guest:And the train would go by and the skinniest guy would jump on the train, break the seal.
Guest:And then once the thing opened, you start throwing the boxes off.
Guest:Because in those days, the motorcycles came in a box.
Guest:They threw them off.
Guest:And then you'd have to run home, leave.
Guest:Somebody would choose.
Guest:The 21st finger is it.
Guest:Your mother told me.
Guest:You got to stay.
Guest:Leave them some punks.
Guest:Leave them some punks.
Guest:It's going to be dark.
Guest:But you're in for fucking 50 points.
Guest:So in those days, those motorcycles were 340 new up the corner at Kawasaki.
Guest:We sold them to you for 100.
Guest:So we'd have to get somebody's brother.
Guest:and put them together.
Guest:Dog, empty the trunk of the Cadillac, you know?
Guest:Come on, I'm on a date.
Guest:I just got a new cologne on.
Guest:Come on, dog, we'll give you 200.
Guest:We gotta go down there, load the, carry the fucking motorcycles through the sea caucus, get bit.
Guest:You know, in those days, they were just starting to drop out.
Guest:Stinky swamp.
Marc:Oh, this was way before they dropped the cancer in the alligators.
Marc:Right.
Marc:This was way before that.
Marc:We used to drive by there with my grandmother, and she'd say, you smell that?
Marc:That's from the pigs.
Marc:It was all pig farms.
Guest:Pig farms.
Guest:Sea caucus.
Guest:Sea caucus was all the pig farms.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Absolutely right.
Marc:Elizabeth, that's where my grandfather comes from.
Marc:So you were just hustling shit.
Marc:Those kids, they were fucking nuts.
Marc:Okay, so now you're 15, you're living with this family.
Marc:Do they know you're up to this shit or what?
Guest:It was tremendous.
Guest:They were like one of the best people because the reason why I had a chance to move with the Balzanos, who he was a gangster cop.
Guest:He would smack people in the neighborhood.
Guest:If you knew them, you got away with murder.
Guest:And I was tight with them.
Guest:And they lost a son, which made it even the odds of me moving in.
Guest:At my mother's funeral, I was like a free agent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was like, I'm waiting for good offers here.
Guest:Like people come up to me.
Guest:Like I had air conditioning.
Guest:I had cable TV.
Guest:Seriously, my mother had dough and she spoiled me.
Guest:I was an only child.
Guest:It was me and her.
Guest:So I was looking for the back carpeting.
Guest:I had my own bedroom.
Guest:And I was looking for the best deal.
Guest:And it's a joke, but in reality.
Guest:And the Benders, they were like this family that was very loose.
Guest:They had no... They're not Jews or they were Jews?
Guest:No, no, they were loose.
Guest:They were very loose, but they didn't have a curfew.
Guest:And the one that was my age, it was hysterical.
Guest:I loved the way the mom made traditional Italian food.
Guest:So if I was out on a Friday or Saturday night and I'd see John, that was his name,
Guest:I go, what are you doing?
Guest:He goes, I'm over here with this girl.
Guest:John didn't drink nor smoke.
Guest:John just liked to get his dick sucked.
Guest:He was like a perv.
Guest:So I said, you got to be out for a few hours?
Guest:He's like, yeah, I'm not going back home.
Guest:I go, perfect.
Guest:When I go to his house, because I knew the father loved the cooking shit.
Guest:It was like Goodfellas.
Guest:And I knock on the door.
Guest:How you doing, Mr. Bender?
Guest:Is John home?
Guest:They're like, nah, he's out, coax.
Guest:And he'd take like a pause and he'd go, you hungry?
Guest:And I'd go, yeah.
Guest:Come on in, let's cook.
Guest:And me and him would cook.
Guest:So they had this guy downstairs.
Guest:It was the Benders lived upstairs and Uncle Vito lived downstairs.
Guest:And their son was Dennis.
Guest:Dennis was a Vietnam vet and he hung out with other Vietnam vets.
Guest:And they were into Hendrix and poking themselves.
Guest:This is a fucking great one.
Guest:Banging dope.
Guest:And I would see this.
Guest:And I loved Uncle Dennis.
Guest:He was a tough guy.
Guest:So I was with him one night.
Guest:We were eating.
Guest:And all of a sudden, somebody knocks.
Guest:No, Jimmy, Jimmy.
Guest:Uncle Jimmy, one of the guys downstairs is a little drunk.
Guest:And he knew what it was.
Guest:He's like, I hope it's not what I think it is.
Guest:He goes, come on.
Guest:He's eating like a sandwich, right?
Guest:The guy's blue.
Guest:We walked downstairs.
Guest:The guy's blue, foaming from the mouth.
Guest:He's like, drunk my ass.
Guest:This motherfucker's on heroin.
Guest:Coco, hold the sandwich.
Guest:He starts kicking the guy in the lung.
Guest:He starts kicking him.
Guest:All of a sudden, he's like, pick up a leg.
Guest:Put him on the street.
Guest:He ain't dying on my property.
Guest:Jesus Christ.
Guest:You can't tell that to someone.
Guest:That's Jersey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, put him on the street.
Guest:As long as he don't die in here, we're fine.
Guest:We put that motherfucker on the street with garbage, and we just walked upstairs.
Guest:Finally, his uncle came and got him.
Guest:Did he live?
Guest:Yeah, he lived, buddy.
Guest:He had, like, a limp.
Guest:He was fucked up.
Guest:Just throwing punches at the air for years after that.
Guest:Oh, shit.
Guest:Just hysterical fucking neighborhood.
Guest:Oh my god.
Guest:Carmine Balzano ended up shooting a guy in his house seven times in self-defense in the back.
Guest:Which guy's this?
Guest:The guy I was gonna live with.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The cop.
Guest:The cop.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Ended up inviting a guy over for dinner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then shooting him in the back seven times in self-defense.
Guest:In the back.
Guest:He got thrown off the force.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he got his pension.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And at the end, that's all that fucking matters.
Guest:He's still around I still like still call him once a week once a week.
Guest:I still call Carmine once a week any of those motherfuckers who helped me I still call once a week.
Guest:I really respect Absolutely the shit they put up with every fucking week.
Guest:They come up.
Guest:Can you imagine Mark?
Guest:Can I talk to you Mark?
Guest:Yeah, listen Joey Diaz Yeah, he went down to improv.
Guest:He put the tab on what the fuck Yeah, you know control every week somebody comes to you like that these people tolerated the vendors do you talk to them?
Guest:Oh
Guest:No.
Guest:Mr. Bender died.
Guest:I talked to Bobby.
Guest:I talked to Bobby.
Guest:That didn't end.
Guest:That's the kid?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the one kid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:John is still kind of weird with me.
Guest:They were weird with me because I got hooked on drugs there.
Guest:What were you doing?
Guest:Blow?
Guest:It was the beginning.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or dope.
Guest:I was doing coke then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dope wasn't even a thought or process.
Guest:I didn't do dope till later.
Guest:I tried the heroin later.
Marc:Snorting it.
Guest:Smoking it.
Marc:Snorting it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Three or four times.
Guest:In New York.
Guest:A couple times out here.
Guest:I got it sent out here.
Guest:Because you can't get that white shit out here.
Guest:This is how I got off blow.
Guest:I got off blow in 2007.
Guest:But the process started in February.
Guest:And I got a hold of a buddy of mine.
Guest:He used to drive me into the city.
Guest:I'd get pills.
Guest:He'd get blow.
Guest:He'd get heroin.
Guest:He moved back home after 9-11.
Guest:And he was telling me after 9-11 they were selling $7 bags of H in Newark.
Guest:It had resurfaced.
Marc:Well, that's right.
Marc:Because before 9-11, when I was on the Lower East Side, they were selling dime bags of really good shit.
Marc:I mean, they realized that all these kids, they don't want to shoot it.
Marc:So they're selling this China white stuff that you could snort and get just as much of a kick.
Marc:And it was crazy.
Marc:It was crazy.
Marc:Because I hear from my understanding of it, you know, it was only that brown tar shit, that Mexican unprocessed shit, but the white stuff that you could snort was New York.
Guest:The white stuff was tremendous.
Guest:That's New York.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That's really good stuff.
Guest:You got a hard on, it's good shit.
Guest:You got a good fucking hard on, you get evil, you spit in her mouth, you rub Bengay on her feet, you know what I'm saying?
Guest:You get evil and shit.
Marc:Yeah, any drug will make you a little evil.
Marc:Oh, fuck.
Marc:You get evil with bitches.
Guest:I don't believe them there.
Guest:With heroin, though, at least you can still fuck.
Guest:Oh, you get fucking crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The first time I did heroin was this dude named Gunther Brown.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had stolen like an ottoman, and he was like a beetle collection.
Guest:This guy was like a...
Guest:How old were you here?
Guest:This is probably like 17.
Guest:My buddies, I had a crazy buddy, Didi Quintero, walking down the street and we seen like an Ottoman where people put dishes in.
Guest:And it was in the box still.
Guest:Like they had left it out there.
Guest:So I'm like, Didi, pick it up.
Guest:We had a friend that used to collect lunch boxes.
Guest:His parents left him like millions.
Guest:And all this guy bought was Beatles.
Guest:Lunchboxes.
Guest:Paraphernalia, lunchboxes, anything Beatles.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He had anything Beatles, alarm systems.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, at that time, he had the smoke, like the Pink Panther.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He had that much Beatles stuff, but he was a complete junkie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we'd go over there, and we're like, Gunter.
Guest:We found it, because his name was Gunter Brunner.
Guest:He'd stutter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we'd fuck with him.
Guest:He'd go, fuck you, motherfucker.
Guest:And he was white.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we'd drop the thing off, and he goes, come back later.
Guest:I'll give you the money.
Guest:So I went back a little while later.
Guest:And he goes, come on in.
Guest:He got like a robe on.
Guest:He got seen in fucking the porno movie with the guy with the robe where they ended up shooting people.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Boogie nights.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I go in there.
Guest:And he's like, hey, listen, I was like a young kid then.
Guest:And I hadn't had like crazy sex.
Guest:He's like, you want your dick sucked.
Guest:He's like, there's this lady in the bathroom that'll suck your dick.
Guest:She's like 65.
Guest:She was.
Guest:She likes to suck dick when you're taking a shit.
Guest:You need to take a shit.
Guest:I'm like, come on, guy.
Guest:Just give me the fucking $60.
Guest:I just want to get out of here.
Guest:I didn't want it to be weird.
Guest:You changed my life.
Guest:I just want the money.
Guest:I just want the fucking money.
Guest:I didn't want to change the course of my fucking brain.
Guest:So he gave me the 60 bucks and he asked me, did you want to do a line of heroin?
Guest:And it was fucking tremendous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It really took me from one.
Guest:And that's when I thought I was gone.
Guest:After that, I had in my mind, I had crossed a line when I did that heroin.
Guest:But at that point, I didn't care.
Guest:I didn't have a mother.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I lived with people.
Guest:Every corner I turned to, everything was closed.
Guest:The only thing I had available to me was school, football, which at that time I was too gone to play football.
Guest:I still was getting great grades in school, though.
Guest:Under all this shit, I still kept it together at school.
Guest:I had no parents.
Guest:So this is all on my own.
Guest:I bought my own clothes.
Guest:The benders didn't charge me any rent.
Guest:I just bought my own shit.
Guest:You were working or you just hustling?
Guest:I worked at a lumber yard.
Guest:I worked at a lumber yard in high school.
Guest:So I was part of the COP work-study program.
Guest:So I went to school from 7.15 to 12.30.
Guest:Then I worked at the lumber yard from 1 to 5.
Marc:And you got people looking out for you because your parents died.
Guest:So I had a lot of people looking out for me.
Guest:And this is why I call those people.
Guest:Every day I call one person.
Guest:I just went back to do Artie.
Guest:And I know a friend of mine likes Artie Lang, so I took him with me.
Guest:He was in the fuck.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:When I did the premiere of Longest Yard, I brought 10 of my buddies from high school.
Guest:Any of those motherfuckers that fed me, I brought them.
Guest:They're the ones that put up with all this shit over the years.
Guest:Loyalty is important.
Marc:And sometimes it's blind loyalty, but if you don't have that, you have nothing.
Marc:Yeah, well, sometimes loyalty has got to be very forgiving.
Guest:Yeah, man, we all grew up together, and we've seen ourselves go.
Guest:You know, I'm 50, and Mark, come on, I'll be honest with you.
Guest:At 17, I was banking for 24.
Guest:I was banking that I would die at 24, or I would get involved in something and do 40 years, which you're pretty much dead.
Guest:You're pretty much dead.
Guest:I knew that at that age.
Guest:But when did you get in trouble?
Guest:At 27 was when I finally ended up.
Guest:I went 10 fucking hard years of living, trying to be Don Johnson.
Guest:And then I had nothing.
Guest:But here's the fucked up thing.
Guest:At the time when I got arrested, I had three semesters of college.
Guest:Because even though I was fucking up and doing drugs, I was always taking classes.
Guest:I started at Colorado Mountain College, taking like stupid history.
Guest:In Colorado?
Guest:In Colorado.
Guest:I ended up in Colorado.
Guest:After high school, I said, fuck it.
Guest:I'm going to end up dead.
Guest:It was just too heavy.
Guest:I had robbed a jewelry store with some buddies.
Guest:Guns?
Guest:Guns, everything.
Guest:At that time, I didn't carry a gun.
Guest:I didn't know about guns, but I was so cold inside that I just wanted to kill.
Guest:I was ready to kill.
Guest:I was hooked on the movie The Mechanic with Charles Bronson, which is a fucking classic.
Guest:I wanted to ice people like that.
Guest:I just didn't know where to start.
Guest:Well, if you want to kill motherfuckers, move to Colorado.
Guest:You'll learn.
Guest:That's what they teach you.
Guest:That's the capital debt there.
Guest:I moved to Basalt.
Guest:And within three weeks, I met this girl and her husband.
Guest:They had no kids.
Guest:And he didn't want to come over and watch movies.
Guest:We went over.
Guest:I knew the brother.
Guest:And they were all cool.
Guest:And she used to throw barbecues.
Guest:And one night, we're watching Rambo.
Guest:And we're talking.
Guest:And one conversation leads to another.
Guest:And I told him that I shot a gun like that one time.
Guest:And he goes, hold on.
Guest:He fucking pulls out his couch and under there he's got a fucking arsenal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And from there on I would go every Friday night sleepover and on Saturdays he'd take me gunning and he showed me everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he wanted his big heist was to train me so we could rob the bank on Christmas Day on snowmobiles.
Guest:That was a big action bank.
Guest:Yeah, because that's the day it had the most money ever It was like a it was like when the Yankees come to Boston and Aspen's a little town little town you right do it Three mums could fucking do it.
Guest:So you're doing you're making diagrams and shit making diagrams the whole thing Wow, I'm going nuts by this point I moved to snowmass village I had already gotten picked up hitchhiking by Don Henley and fucking Bob Denver I mean snowmass village at the time.
Guest:It's 83 at the time you look it up.
Guest:It was the cocaine cow
Guest:Dude I went I used to go ski there with my family kidding me that was it I know I know nobody knew yeah, they were sucking dick up there in 69 and Way before that's where it got invented.
Guest:Yeah, patty Bugatti's was a bar that was in the 80s that was surround around the pool Yeah, you stood around the pool.
Guest:Yeah, so when you wanted to jump in the pool you jumped in the fucking pool because you what you were gonna lose it from standing there from all the jaw and shit and
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:People would jump in with clothes, with everything.
Guest:There was no cell phones then.
Guest:People didn't give a fuck about it.
Guest:They gave a paper license.
Guest:You didn't give a fuck.
Guest:You wouldn't go to the next one.
Marc:We used to go to Snowmass every year when I was a kid because my dad had a convention.
Marc:But I didn't do any of that shit.
Guest:No, nobody did.
Guest:You just went up there and you got it.
Guest:It was crazy.
Guest:I was up there.
Guest:I had nothing going on in Jersey.
Guest:I had a buddy who had gotten thrown out of the Air Force Academy.
Guest:And what are you doing for a job?
Guest:I'm shoveling snow, but I'm really casing out joints.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I got a three-mountain ski pass.
Guest:I had never skied before.
Guest:I went to the Playboy Club.
Guest:That's not skiing.
Guest:That's brutality.
Guest:Did you ski?
Guest:Up in New York when it was 10 degrees?
Guest:No.
Guest:When I went to Colorado, fuck yeah.
Guest:Once I got to Snowmass Village, I lived right there two minutes away.
Guest:So my first season, I had a job called
Guest:Shoveling snow for $12.50 an hour plus a ski pass.
Guest:So you shovel from 7 to 12.
Guest:You made whatever.
Guest:And then I washed dishes at the point.
Guest:It was Bob Denver's restaurant.
Guest:Bob Gilligan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Bob, the other one.
Guest:John Denver.
Guest:John Denver.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:They had a magician in there.
Guest:He was a coke head.
Guest:And his big trick was, I forget what his name is.
Guest:His big trick was he'd get a card.
Guest:As a tourist, you had to put like a $50 bill in the card with a thumbtack.
Guest:And there was a fan.
Guest:And he'd throw it in between the fan.
Guest:If it stuck, he kept the $50.
Guest:But there was a little part in the restaurant.
Guest:We'd go over at the end of the night and jump up and take the money from the .. I mean, it was a complete fucking scam.
Guest:So I worked there Monday nights and Tuesdays because it was prime rib nights.
Guest:And the chefs knew me, so they'd give me all the mistakes.
Guest:They knew I was into swimming and skiing and all this shit.
Guest:And we'd steal shrimp and everybody sold blow.
Guest:I mean, that was the worst place you wanted to go if you wanted to get off blow.
Guest:And it's seasonal.
Guest:It's every day up there.
Guest:At this time, then there was a guy named Dan Grabo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:who was like, he's done books now and stuff, but fuck all that shit.
Guest:I never met him.
Guest:But you would hear about this guy that would go into restaurants and give you 50 grand and say, tell me when it's over.
Guest:He'd come in for like a $3 sandwich.
Guest:He was gonna eat there from his afterlife.
Guest:He was doing this everywhere.
Guest:And one day they arrested him.
Guest:Like the first season I was there, 84, they arrested him.
Guest:Or 83, they arrested him with like a million dollars, three different cars.
Guest:He was the kingpin.
Guest:He was making $6 million every six weeks.
Guest:Of coke.
Guest:Of coke.
Guest:This is in the fucking paper.
Guest:He's telling Don Johnson to suck his dick.
Guest:Woody Creek at the time, which is underneath.
Guest:I used to go down there to get bags of weed.
Guest:And that's where I seen the man.
Guest:At the Woody Creek motherfucking tavern.
Guest:And one time I went in there and I seen him smoking his little cigarette.
Guest:And then another time I went in there and he was in there with...
Guest:Bill, when he was doing Where the Buffalo Roam.
Guest:Oh, Hunter Thompson.
Guest:I seen Hunter Thompson.
Guest:Oh, Bill Murray.
Guest:I seen Hunter Thompson, Bill Murray.
Guest:And then another time I went down there, I seen Don Johnson in there.
Guest:And I would go in there to buy bags of weed.
Guest:But the other thing was they had real chorizo in there, nachos.
Guest:which was mind-boggling in 1983.
Guest:And I would go down to get the nachos, and I would look at fucking Hunter Thompson.
Guest:And I knew who he was, but not really.
Guest:Now Bill Murray, and where the buffalo are.
Guest:I was seeing all this shit.
Guest:I didn't really even know what it was at that time.
Guest:I didn't know.
Guest:I remember one time being in... And you're like 19?
Guest:This is, I'm 1920.
Guest:I'm 1920.
Guest:And I'm working, I'm keeping it together, but I'm burglarizing little drug dealers at the time.
Guest:Taking the blow and sending it back east.
Guest:Fucking crazy.
Guest:Fucking crazy.
Marc:You're burglarizing like the third or fourth guy down on the chain, just running around with a gun.
Guest:No, no guns yet.
Guest:No guns.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:No guns.
Guest:No guns.
Guest:You know what, man?
Guest:Even at that age, I knew.
Guest:I was around people that carry guns.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I knew in the back of my mind it was never a good idea.
Guest:It just I knew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And these are the things that kept me the fucking life.
Marc:You're just scaring him.
Marc:You're threatening him.
Marc:What are you going with the back?
Guest:No, no, no, no, no.
Guest:At this time, I wasn't doing nothing like that.
Guest:How did you burglarize him?
Guest:B&E is a guy like you would leave this door open with a scale and an ounce of blow.
Guest:And I'd kick the window and take your blow on the scale and leave.
Guest:And then I'd see you at the bar.
Guest:And you're like, somebody broke in my house.
Guest:What a fucking shame.
Guest:Oh, shit.
Guest:Let's get to the bottom of this.
Guest:And you're sending the blowback east to move?
Guest:No, I would snort half of it and send the other half back and keep the cash.
Guest:This is fucking crap.
Guest:But at the same time, I'm taking six credits a semester.
Guest:Yeah, at the college.
Guest:Colorado Mountain College.
Guest:I'm taking American political systems.
Guest:I'm taking all this shit.
Guest:So in the process, I go back east.
Guest:Why?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I go back east, and it's the fucking heyday of blow.
Guest:Gone is cocaine and weed.
Guest:It's all crack.
Guest:From 140th up to 181st, it's straight up crack.
Guest:You don't even know what the fuck this is.
Guest:I remember getting coked up one night and going into the city with a buddy of mine.
Guest:I'm in the back seat.
Guest:He's driving.
Guest:I'll never forget this.
Guest:I'm in the back just like foaming from the fucking mouth.
Guest:And he pulls up next to his hooker, and she's smoking this pipe.
Guest:And he pulls up next to him.
Guest:He goes, what are you smoking?
Guest:And she goes, crack or whatever.
Guest:And he goes, give me some.
Guest:This guy was crazy.
Guest:He gave him like 100 bucks.
Guest:And the dealer came home and goes, open your hand.
Guest:And he opened his hand.
Guest:They just like dropped like 10 vials or whatever.
Guest:And he looked at the hook.
Guest:And he bought the crack pipe from the hook.
Guest:I don't know if he smoked.
Guest:I didn't know what he thought.
Guest:But this is how crazy it had become.
Guest:And I tell people, it's like I saw that.
Guest:Like people talk about the weed in California now.
Guest:I'm that old that I saw how cocaine took over.
Guest:Just took over.
Guest:People were doing mescaline, blotter acid.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Pink Floyd, the wall, that type of shit.
Guest:And all of a sudden one day.
Guest:yeah everybody and yes and if you sniffled you were fucking it puts you into a different level it's like basketball players that put glasses on now to look intellectual and they have 20 20 vision yeah because they look intellectual that's what cocaine was in the 80s if you did that you were better to seek cocaine wasn't sold on a drug it was sold on a it made you it elevated you as a human being that's how they got you you didn't pay more than for you broke yeah I remember a kid my cousin my mother's cousin he was in the fashion business and at that time
Marc:Like, you know, they pull it right out the table.
Marc:You know, with older people there, they do a fucking bump, and they didn't give a shit.
Marc:And also, like, there was, do you remember, like, of course you do, like, when you go into a place, you didn't have any blow, and then you'd just be at a bar in a town you don't know, and you're kind of like, someone's got to have it.
Marc:And you see some guy just go, and you'd be like, oh, that's a guy, that's a guy.
Marc:And nine times out of ten, it wasn't the guy, and you go over there trying to talk.
Marc:So what do you got going on?
Marc:What are you talking about?
Marc:Terrible, terrible.
Marc:So, okay, so anyways, the place at New York was on fire.
Guest:It was completely different.
Guest:And then crack made it, like, violent.
Guest:Crack started coming in, like, in the winter of 84, and by 85, it was everywhere.
Guest:Like, you went into the city, and you're like, I want to buy weed.
Guest:No weed.
Guest:Crack.
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:You know, you had to go down another 10 blocks.
Guest:Do you like to crack?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I didn't get hooked on crack.
Guest:I got hooked on crack for like two months.
Guest:And it was because they sold it on Selma and Orange on the way home.
Guest:I used to live on Selma and whatever.
Guest:And I'd have to drive that way because if you're on Sunset, there's cops.
Guest:I'm coming home from the Comedy Store.
Guest:I'm not drinking, but I got a package in my pocket.
Guest:But just in case, you know, because when you're driving home at 2 in the morning and a freak's coming over, a gram might not be enough.
Guest:So now you might just, another quarter would set you perfect.
Guest:Because even if you do the gram, you always got the quarter for backup.
Guest:So I'd see Flocko on the corner.
Guest:I'd pull over.
Guest:What do you got?
Guest:So one night he gave me this Coke rock.
Guest:I didn't know what it was.
Guest:I took it home.
Guest:I'm trying to chop it up.
Guest:I got fucking sick.
Guest:I got dizzy.
Guest:And then my buddy's like, no, that's not Coke.
Guest:That's crack, you fucking dummy.
Guest:So So you go with the you go to New York and lose it lose it Lose it coach that lose roll 84 lose it lose it get in trouble not arrested Just get in trouble with my friends.
Guest:I end up moving to a Crescule with a high school teacher Yeah, yeah started going to AA meetings with him.
Guest:Yeah, I still wasn't clean I was still smoking dope and I was just plotting my next Crescule, New Jersey Crescule, New Jersey by Dumont.
Guest:Yeah, and I would take the bus into the city I was still bartending on 52nd and 7th.
Guest:Yeah
Guest:Comedy was nowhere in my fucking future.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I loved movies.
Guest:I loved comedy.
Guest:You know, that was a special thing about growing up in New York those days.
Guest:For $2, you saw your fucking 19 movies.
Guest:You saw all three Clint Eastwood movies.
Guest:You went in there at 11.
Guest:So I always loved that.
Guest:And I always thought I would figure out a way.
Guest:And then I went back to Colorado in 85.
Guest:And I was clean and sober.
Guest:And I started making my way around.
Guest:And all of a sudden, I started, you know, cocaine was 1,800 an ounce in Snowmass.
Guest:And my buddies, I'm talking to them on the phone.
Guest:They're getting there for 800 an ounce.
Guest:So I said, fuck it.
Guest:I might as well start flying back and bringing it back.
Guest:So I started doing that stupid shit.
Guest:And then I got really greedy.
Guest:Since in those days, you could go into 7-Eleven in those days and go, you guys got guns here.
Guest:Let me get 10 of them.
Guest:I started buying guns in Colorado and bringing them back to Jersey and then picking up the coke with the gun profits and bringing that back to Colorado.
Guest:So I didn't make them two for one.
Guest:I was crazy, Mark, man.
Guest:Crazy, you know?
Guest:And I did that for a while and I moved to Boulder, which I hated at the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in Boulder, I got it together for a while.
Guest:I went back to continuing ed in Boulder.
Guest:And after a month, they get back to me and go, no, you're out.
Guest:You have too many credits.
Guest:You've got to transfer to the University of Colorado, or you've got to figure something out.
Guest:And I'm like, OK.
Guest:And I sold Subarus.
Guest:I had this girlfriend.
Guest:And I wasn't doing bad.
Guest:I was making like $4,000 or $5,000 a month.
Guest:Went to school at night, six credits.
Guest:Here I am in the University of Colorado.
Guest:I transfer.
Guest:They won't accept me as Joey Diaz.
Guest:Why?
Guest:But then I got a letter the next day that if I was Jose Diaz, I would get a CUOP scholarship and all this shit, which I really am Jose Diaz.
Guest:I just didn't want to cheat my way in there.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:They said I could transfer.
Guest:This is a dream of a lifetime.
Guest:My mother was dead.
Guest:This is her lifelong passion for me to be an attorney.
Guest:And here I am, bitches.
Guest:Here I am, motherfucker, with my dick out.
Guest:I'm here.
Guest:And all of a sudden, they go, no, no, no, if your name is Jose Diaz.
Guest:So I went back, reapplied.
Guest:They gave me $2,000 per semester, a Pell Grant.
Guest:I had to keep a C fucking grade, and all I had to do was show up.
Guest:I had to listen.
Guest:I could listen, take a few notes, and I could bang out a B. After I got left back, I said, fuck it.
Guest:This is easy for me.
Guest:And I went back, and I was on my way.
Guest:I was taking history classes.
Guest:I was talking to a law school about maybe going in there and being a fucking attorney.
Guest:And one day, my greed took over.
Guest:And some kid comes in, a half a mook, and he comes in telling me how he's going to go to jail, and his roommate's got two kilos of blow in the apartment.
Guest:Two keys.
Guest:Two keys.
Guest:And here I am selling cars for four grand a month talking to these fucking professors, asking me what the weight, velocity of the car.
Guest:Because I don't know if you've ever dealt with people in Boulder, they're very intelligent for their own...
Guest:Very white really yeah stupidity in a way, but I love them I still love them respect you know Boulder you have this intelligence in Boulder you have astronauts yeah, yeah, but the pub I think that was the name of it of the hub of Boulder is a bank one day people went to the bank on Monday morning make deposits and there was a Yellow tape around the bank and it said do not make deposits drop in this box and people actually drop the deposits in that box and finally at 1 o'clock and
Guest:The driving window realized, fuck, we haven't had too many customers today.
Guest:What the fuck is going on?
Guest:And they went out there and they had been robbed.
Guest:And people were actually putting their fucking deposits in there.
Guest:These are astronauts, Marc Maron.
Guest:Putting their fucking, you understand me?
Guest:So you can mug these people at will.
Guest:You can fucking hypnotize them.
Guest:A moron can fucking hypnotize these people.
Guest:This is what they did.
Guest:A box.
Guest:A fucking astronaut.
Guest:You dropped the fucking deposit in the box because a sign said so.
Guest:Did they find out who did that?
Guest:No, this is the scam of the year, and here I am trying to get a fucking B in geography, and some guy's running around getting fake fucking Gitas on the bank of cash to boot.
Guest:So I love Boulder, and I'm working at this place, and I meet this guy, and...
Guest:He tells me this, and I called New York, and I couldn't find anybody to help me pull this off.
Marc:With two kilos.
Guest:Two kilos.
Guest:It's four pounds at the time.
Guest:That's $100,000, which I was going to snort the whole amount, probably.
Guest:I was probably going to save a dollar.
Guest:And reality, you know, that's reality.
Guest:I was going to go back and be Johnny Bananas and blow the whole thing.
Guest:Then you're out there with people looking for you, and now you've got a complete different situation.
Guest:And I go to the deal was me and this biker guy that I detail cars with.
Guest:His dilemma was he was dating a stripper who lived with him but wouldn't let him sleep in the bedroom because she was still married.
Guest:And she was a nude stripper.
Guest:But because she was Catholic, Catholicism said you can't sleep with a man you're not married with.
Guest:So it's like a girl moving into your house and saying, you're sleeping on the couch, Mark.
Guest:I'm taking the bedroom.
Guest:Because of God.
Guest:You can't fucking fuck me until God says so, or you give me the $10,000 for the divorce.
Guest:So he was making a move to pay for this girl's divorce so he could fuck her.
Guest:This is my business partner.
Guest:This is how clear I was fucking thinking at the time.
Guest:We go with a machine gun.
Guest:And it's a series of events, which I don't have enough time to.
Guest:I sent him over to get the blow.
Guest:He went over and said there was nothing there.
Guest:I knew it was there.
Guest:I told the guy, fuck you.
Guest:I went over, kicked the door down, took the four kilos, the four pounds, put them under one of those newspaper things.
Guest:You ever go to those newspaper things?
Guest:You put a quarter in, look underneath, cocksucker.
Guest:They've built cities with cocaine under those things or money that they drop off.
Guest:That's an old school thing.
Guest:Under the newspaper, there's a slot there.
Guest:There's a reason why there's a slot there.
Guest:For Coke.
Guest:Put it under there for Coke and other things.
Guest:And I took it and...
Guest:The genius biker guy put the guy in the trunk of a car.
Guest:Which guy?
Guest:The guy with the Coke?
Guest:The guy with the Coke.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And was going to drive him to the bus station to put him on a bus to Arizona.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He gets pulled over because he's driving with no headlights on.
Guest:He didn't even wrap me up.
Guest:They, like, license and registration.
Guest:They open up the trunk.
Guest:He's all bandaged up.
Guest:The driver tells him Joey Diaz was my helper.
Guest:I eluded him for, like, four days, right?
Guest:Like, open to the hills.
Guest:I'm smoking dope.
Guest:I finally came down because it was the day Don Johnson was going to marry...
Guest:The chick on Miami Vice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were going to have a big wedding.
Guest:So I said, fuck it.
Guest:I'll go in there, turn myself in, I'll be out.
Guest:This is how demented I was.
Guest:I just, I got to turn myself in and they charged me with kidnapping, aggravated robbery, accessory to a felony.
Guest:The feds want to talk to me about three other related fucking things.
Guest:But they didn't find the coke.
Guest:No, they didn't find the coke.
Guest:So the coke was out of the... Gone.
Guest:Gone.
Gone.
Guest:So, you know what I ended saying in there for 30 days, bailed out.
Guest:I stayed out for eight months, still retarded, wouldn't claim responsibility.
Guest:They threw me away for four years.
Guest:And when I was in there, the good thing was that- On the kidnapping, right?
Guest:On the kidnapping.
Guest:But I ended up pleading to second-degree burglary because it was nonviolent.
Guest:I had a legal attorney and shit because I wouldn't have drama later.
Guest:And I did that.
Guest:But the good thing was, when I was in there on Thursday nights, I would go up in front of a bunch of people.
Guest:The projector would always break.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would go up there and, you know, they'd say- On movie night.
Guest:On movie night, the shit would break.
Guest:And just from talk, I was in charge of the stock clerk.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was the only one who had a driver's license.
Guest:So I was a stock clerk, which I hid the steroids for people.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I had weed and speed.
Guest:The bikers would give me speed.
Guest:I'd charge them rent like a dollar a week to hide that crank.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:I ran this shit, Mark Merritt.
Guest:And, uh...
Guest:It was an experience.
Guest:It really was.
Guest:Four years.
Guest:I ended up doing like altogether like eight months.
Guest:There's holes in the system that society doesn't know about.
Guest:That's why when they tell you they give some 40, 48 years, don't believe it.
Guest:Because at that time, if you didn't have a felony before that, you were eligible for House Bill 1,200.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:which cuts your sentence in half.
Guest:So I cut it right to two years, which is basically 24 months.
Guest:You're eligible for a halfway house at 18.
Guest:You'll be sent to a halfway house at 16.
Guest:So no matter what law and order tells you, you're only doing eight months on two years.
Guest:And if your mother knows the judge and you get people to write letters, you're in a halfway house even quicker.
Marc:So in that experience of being in there just eight months, which prison were you in?
Marc:Colorado.
Marc:A bad one.
Guest:Camp George West.
Guest:A real one?
Guest:No.
Guest:And it was so weird.
Guest:It was like a blessing because everything was, they told me I was backed up, that they were going to ship me to Texas.
Guest:But that was great because those days count for two for one.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I would have been out of there in four fucking months.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I didn't give a fuck, but they ended up sending me to the best jail ever.
Guest:Like I wanted to go to Rifle.
Guest:because they had pools, and you could be a lifeguard and shit, and you'd go to the movies.
Guest:But they ended up sending me to the place by Golden.
Guest:It was Army Barracks, Camp George Wetz, which has cores next to it.
Guest:And you were allowed off the premises for 20 minutes a day.
Guest:And there was a Chinese restaurant, so I would call the Chinese place.
Guest:Nobody could figure out how I was getting Chinese food, Marc Maron.
Guest:I'd get to the bodega.
Guest:I'd get a Coke, get the Chinese food, and walk back in.
Guest:And I met this Italian gangster guy that was retired, and he had a bookmaking operation in there, and he couldn't sell shit.
Guest:So since I spoke Spanish, he goes, take over.
Guest:And I became his partner.
Guest:I started selling to the blacks, the Latinos, the whites.
Guest:I was like a one-man operation in there.
Guest:And I realized a lot.
Guest:I didn't do blow in there.
Guest:I did acid a few times.
Guest:In prison.
Guest:It was a very intellectual.
Guest:Was that fun?
Guest:Yes, there was a very intellectual guy who ran the library.
Guest:He had murdered his wife and her boyfriend.
Guest:Great guy, though.
Guest:I loved him solid.
Guest:And he was very... Who's the guy that sneezes on the coke?
Guest:The great movie guy?
Guest:Oh, yeah, Woody Allen.
Guest:Woody Allen.
Guest:Very Woody Allen.
Guest:I just love this sense of humor.
Guest:You could see Woody Allen murdering somebody after you met this guy.
Guest:You follow me?
Guest:That's how keen and intelligent this guy was.
Guest:This guy would drop Nietzsche on me.
Guest:He'd drop philosophers.
Guest:He'd drop Michael Jackson on me.
Guest:He was very broad.
Guest:Very broad.
Guest:He was from Buffalo, New York.
Guest:And he gave me a notebook once.
Guest:And he goes, it's very important that you write your jokes.
Guest:And I got no fucking jokes.
Marc:This is after you start doing the Thursday nights.
Guest:And he goes, uh...
Guest:You have no jokes.
Guest:You don't write.
Guest:And I go, no.
Guest:I go up there on Thursdays and I just talk about the black people and the white people.
Guest:He goes, dog, you got to try comedy when you get out.
Guest:He goes, trust me, I've seen some comics in my day.
Guest:And he put the bug in my ear right in there.
Guest:And he made you get a notebook.
Guest:Yeah, he gave me one of those black and white notebooks, which was like $10 in those days in a prison.
Guest:They're really fucking big time together.
Guest:He was a writer, this guy.
Guest:He was in there for life.
Guest:And if you see this guy, it really taught me about life.
Guest:Because if I saw him, I didn't think he'd be threatening at all.
Guest:He went home, caught his wife cheating.
Guest:That was it.
Guest:It was over.
Guest:That's why people kill people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we did acid.
Guest:I did acid with him.
Guest:Which really was, fuck, he rolled his own cigarettes.
Guest:Guy was solid white.
Guest:Solid.
Guest:No tattoos.
Guest:He didn't hate nobody.
Guest:He was just a solid white dude, you know?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he just taught me a lot.
Guest:He was a really fucking sharp guy.
Guest:And he talked me into comedy, man.
Guest:Do you keep in touch with Dak?
Guest:No, I tried.
Guest:He's not on Facebook, you know?
Guest:These motherfuckers don't believe in Facebook 20 years later.
Guest:You know, I was 20 years.
Guest:I was 87 when all this went through.
Guest:So you don't even know if he's alive.
Guest:No.
Guest:You know, I had one guy approach me after I got out of a crip.
Guest:I became friends with a crip in there.
Guest:I was a bad motherfucker.
Guest:He used to get nutter butters, same thing.
Guest:When you get nut of butters sent in, you're a bad motherfucker.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:He would get boxes.
Guest:That was his shit.
Guest:Nut of butters.
Guest:He didn't give a fuck.
Guest:He reached out to you after he got out?
Guest:One time.
Guest:And then he shot up like a 16 and over club or something over drugs in Boulder.
Guest:I couldn't hang out with him on my probation.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:Luckily.
Guest:It was a probation violation.
Marc:That's lucky.
Marc:That's lucky.
Marc:Yeah, a couple of lucky strokes there, man.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:They didn't find those keys to Coke.
Marc:That would have changed your fucking... That would have changed that story, right?
Marc:It would have changed everything.
Marc:So you get out of the can.
Guest:I get out of there.
Guest:I get married.
Guest:That don't work out.
Guest:But right before that doesn't work out, I go to the comedy works and I get on stage one night.
Guest:That's a good room.
Guest:And I just went there.
Guest:I took a comedy class and got a job at Wits End.
Guest:and hooked up with George McKelvey, and he pushed me down.
Guest:And I went down there, and I did it.
Guest:In those days, it was three minutes once a month.
Guest:You had to go to all these fucking Buffalo rooms.
Guest:And it was a great experience.
Guest:And I went to New York in 94 when I got divorced.
Guest:And I did it there for a while.
Guest:And then from there, I went back.
Guest:I had a baby with that woman, and I wanted to be a father.
Guest:The woman I married.
Marc:You divorced her and then went back and then had a baby.
Guest:No, I had a childhood.
Guest:I went to New York just to get my bearings back.
Guest:After divorce, it's very tough.
Guest:Oh, so you had a kid already.
Guest:Yeah, I had a kid.
Guest:She was 18 months old when we got separated, and that didn't work out.
Guest:And I went back and gave it a try for like three years to be a dad.
Guest:It just got worse and worse, Mark Maron.
Guest:It just got worse and worse.
Guest:And I met a girl in Michigan, and she was going to go to Seattle.
Guest:And I had been told that Seattle was a great comedy market.
Guest:So I said, I'm going to take a chance.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm just going to go up there.
Guest:I'm going to try to be the best dad I can long distance.
Guest:I kept an apartment for as long as I could.
Guest:And then it kept getting uglier and uglier.
Guest:With the ex?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Every time I'd go back, she wouldn't give me the kid.
Guest:I ended up smacking the ex one time because he called my daughter a speck, and then he wouldn't cop to it.
Guest:And that's interesting because I smacked him in front of a Safeway supermarket.
Guest:Her new husband?
Guest:Yeah, the guy in baseline.
Guest:I gave him a chance to get out.
Guest:I said, you called my little cousin.
Guest:My little girl asked me, what's a speck?
Guest:And I go, where'd you hear this?
Guest:And she goes, that's what he says whenever you call the house.
Guest:So I said, that's an East Coast word.
Guest:I didn't say nothing to my daughter what it meant.
Guest:And I got out of the car, and I asked him.
Guest:It was in front of a Safeway.
Guest:I got out of the car.
Guest:And I had two felonies at the time.
Guest:At this time, I was so fucking jacked up.
Guest:Not on the blow.
Guest:I was jacked up on my life.
Guest:It was going on with his daughter and all this shit that I had a plan, Mark Maron.
Guest:My plan was to kill these motherfuckers and get a fax machine to take it to prison and fax jokes to Jay Leno.
Guest:That was the plan?
Guest:That was the plan.
Guest:You were going to kill your ex-wife and the guy?
Guest:And the guy, and 35 bucks a joke.
Guest:I was going to fucking bang it out, me and Jean Perrette, motherfucker.
Guest:We were going to bang it out and Judy Carter.
Marc:The part of the plan where it's sort of like, I can live in prison as long as I can get jokes today.
Guest:Yeah, Jay Leno, as long as I can get jokes, me, Jean Perrette, and fucking Judy Carter, we're going to make this happen.
Guest:We're going to write a sitcom fucking right from behind the walls.
Guest:And I...
Guest:And I smacked them.
Guest:And my machismo, Latin-spic, demented world, it felt good for 10 seconds till I turned around and I seen my daughter crying.
Guest:And I didn't want her to grow up like I kind of grew up.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:There was always drama at the bar.
Guest:I didn't need to see that shit go out.
Guest:And it was funny because the cops that came, I knew.
Guest:At the time, I was a host at a car wash part-time.
Guest:So I knew these motherfuckers.
Guest:I'm like, what happened?
Guest:I told them.
Guest:They gave me a ticket.
Guest:And the next day I had to answer in court.
Guest:He's with a black eye.
Guest:And the beauty of it was I got thrown out of court because he called me a racial slur in the city limits of Boulder.
Guest:Who's better than me?
Guest:The judge threw it out of court because it happened on 30th and baseline.
Guest:If it would have happened across the street, I wouldn't be here having this conversation.
Marc:Who figured that out?
Marc:Your lawyer?
Guest:The Lord.
Guest:The judge, okay?
Guest:The Lord.
Guest:That's all.
Guest:When somebody tells you, and you're looking at the guy, and he's got a black eye, and it's red inside, and he's looking at you like this, and he don't know what hablo is.
Guest:He don't know when the judge is saying this shit.
Guest:You don't even know what the fuck's going on.
Guest:But for once, I caught a break.
Guest:And I knew right then and there, I can't even have these thoughts in my mind.
Guest:Because every time, if somebody would cut me off, I'd want to pull the car around and go stab these people.
Guest:That was the root of everything that had gone on.
Guest:and at that time i had uh 20 minutes 22 of it was garbage yeah you know i was minus two points of material but i had a you could be on stage you had to be on i had nothing you know when you have nothing i was like richard gee and office and gentlemen i had nowhere else to go yeah you know people say to me oh you know you're doing well with the podcast you know and it's like mark maron we had nowhere else to go we came to l.a
Guest:We bit into it and we evolved.
Guest:And this is what fucking happened, okay?
Guest:I don't know where we're going to go.
Guest:You went to Israel.
Guest:You went to New York.
Guest:You snorted in Boston.
Guest:You were in Ireland with Dom Herrera.
Guest:Where the fuck are you going to go?
Guest:You got to settle in somewhere and look at your fucking journey and go, this is it, motherfucker.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:You know, this isn't happening because we're better than anybody else.
Guest:This is happening now.
Guest:I'm 50.
Guest:I just had a kid.
Guest:This is happening because I stuck it out.
Guest:Because seven years ago, I went to visit a friend that had cancer in the middle of her tirade about how if she ever made it back to the stage, she was never going to curse because God told her.
Guest:She stopped and she goes, you got to stop doing blow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought about it, and it was about a cat.
Guest:My whole cocaine thing is about a cat.
Guest:I stopped doing blow.
Guest:People go spend millions.
Guest:They go to therapy, and they lay there, and they get hit in the tines.
Guest:My promise was to a cat.
Guest:My promise was to a cat that I was gonna die.
Guest:You know, I never liked doing coke in my house.
Guest:And the night I brought the coke upstairs, there was two kittens.
Guest:And there was one that I loved, DJ.
Guest:I had this cat colony in the back of my building.
Guest:And, you know, people, these fucking scumbags, oh, I'll take that guy, take that cat.
Guest:And all of a sudden, the cats get big.
Guest:And they're like, well, we have allergies.
Guest:You didn't know that when you fucking said that.
Guest:So now somebody's got to save these fucking cats.
Guest:So I would try to take them and put signs up and play with these fucking cats.
Guest:And I've got nine of them.
Guest:I got six of them from the same Siamese father.
Guest:That guy's worse than Sean Kemp.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:That guy don't pay child support.
Guest:He don't even show up.
Guest:That guy was a Siamese killer that had big black fucking balls.
Guest:Siamese, dark, beautiful.
Guest:His face was hanging.
Guest:You know, he was a killer.
Guest:He killed the kittens.
Guest:He would kill them.
Guest:If they grew a certain age, he'd kill them.
Guest:Because they'd go back to not sucking titty, and he could fuck the cat again.
Guest:He had every cat back then.
Guest:And she was a whore.
Guest:She was the dirtiest, filtiest whore of all time.
Guest:She was getting fucked by two different cats, the Siamese and the black and white cat.
Guest:So she was getting litters from every fucking body, because they could get two litters at once.
Guest:Yeah, I know, yeah.
Guest:So it was just amazing.
Guest:And I'm taking these cats in.
Guest:My wife is fucking saving cats, you know, and we're saving them, because they would get anemia or some shit outside.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was all fucked up at this time.
Guest:By this time, I'm doing heroin the whole summer.
Guest:And I hadn't done blow the whole summer.
Marc:And you think you're doing good.
Guest:And I'm like, no, no, no, no.
Guest:I was ready to call 60 Minutes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because I was doing a line of heroin every Monday night.
Guest:And it was stopping me from doing blow.
Guest:I was on to something.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:I was on to something, Mark.
Guest:I got it.
Guest:I got it.
Guest:I got this, people.
Guest:This is it.
Guest:I just got to get it out there.
Guest:A little bit of heroin from Newark.
Guest:On Monday.
Guest:Just go to Newark on Monday, get a little bag of heroin, do a half a black, whack off, puke, and you're back like ACDC in 84.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:You're back.
Guest:So this whole event went on.
Guest:She had this last batch of little Siamese.
Guest:There's three Siamese's and one black and white one.
Guest:I love the three Siamese's, but the black and white one I had no use for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he'd take the male Siamese and make them climb windows.
Guest:And I love DJ.
Guest:I had Demi upstairs.
Guest:You know, Demi, why you do this to me?
Guest:I had him upstairs.
Guest:He was a cocksucker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But this guy was just like him.
Guest:Siamese, you know how they're fucking quirky?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was not really Siamese.
Guest:They had the white paws with the whole.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he kept taking them up to the roof.
Guest:And I would call that black and white cat Superbad.
Guest:And I would say, Superbad, at least I'm going to fucking kill you.
Guest:And I would catch myself like, well, now I'm going to get the gun and shoot this motherfucker.
Guest:And I go, what's wrong with me?
Guest:I'm going to shoot a fucking kitten.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:Because he scares the other kitten into the ghetto there.
Guest:So the two girls would stay close.
Guest:So things happened.
Guest:The two girls started getting sick.
Guest:And I took DJ up, the Siamese.
Guest:His leg was strong.
Guest:Once their leg starts swelling, it's all over the shouting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They get this anemia in their blood, and you got to give them penicillin.
Guest:I never had that.
Guest:And then the other fucking white and black one, the one I hated was going to kill.
Guest:He got sick.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So on the way home that night, my wife calls me.
Guest:She goes, both cats are in the bathroom.
Guest:I go, what cats?
Guest:And she goes, super bad.
Guest:That motherfucker.
Guest:Let him die.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she goes, DJ, Demi Jr.
Guest:So I come upstairs.
Guest:I got my little package of Coke, which was a rule breaker for me.
Guest:I like to do it outside.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I never liked doing the Coke inside.
Guest:This is just my addicted, disgusted mind.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:do the powder in the bathroom as I'm looking at these two fucking cats, one that I love and the other cocksucker I can't stand.
Guest:And I pet the one that I fucking like, and I'm looking at the other guy going.
Guest:You're getting nothing.
Guest:And I go out to the kitchen, jerk off, and I go on Google or whatever fucking mind fuck I had that night.
Guest:And I go to bed, and three hours later, my wife wakes me up.
Guest:And she didn't know what I was doing.
Guest:She knew, but she didn't know.
Guest:She goes, DJ died.
Guest:The good kid.
Guest:The good kid.
Guest:And I looked at her, and I go, don't even tell me that.
Guest:Don't even tell me that.
Guest:And she goes, he died.
Guest:And I go, you know what?
Guest:Close the fucking door.
Guest:Because I knew it killed him.
Guest:It was that coke I brought upstairs.
Guest:I never brought it upstairs.
Guest:It was bad luck.
Guest:It was such bad luck at my mind.
Guest:And I got there, and I go, this motherfucker should die next.
Guest:Fuck it.
Guest:Let's just make it complete.
Guest:And then my mind fucked.
Guest:Right there, I said, no, he can't die.
Marc:The black and white.
Guest:The black and white motherfucker can't die.
Guest:And I went in and I knelt and I pet him and I kissed him and I prayed.
Guest:I go, God, please save this motherfucker.
Guest:If he lives, I'll never do blow again.
Guest:In the back of my mind, this promise meant nothing.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:I was just saying this.
Guest:Just saying it from my own cocaine addicted mind.
Guest:And I tell you, the next night, I couldn't go, Martin.
Guest:And the night after that, I couldn't go.
Guest:And I kept saying, die.
Guest:The quicker you die, the quicker you go back.
Guest:I kept saying it to myself.
Guest:I wasn't saying this to the cat.
Guest:By this point, I'm going.
Guest:He wouldn't let me touch him outside.
Guest:By the third day, I would touch him, and he'd purr at me.
Guest:He was living, bro.
Guest:And I started giving him cream pies with the oatmeal cookie.
Guest:And he started fucking living.
Guest:And then like a week later, he came out.
Guest:And I was done.
Guest:And every night at 8 o'clock,
Guest:I would get this anxiety.
Guest:Like, my spot was a 1040 at the store.
Guest:But I didn't give a fuck.
Guest:I needed it in my pocket.
Guest:I didn't want to do it.
Guest:I needed it in my pocket.
Guest:And nobody knows the feeling of getting in your car and going to Bank of America not remembering, blacking out.
Guest:That's what my addiction was.
Guest:I was blacking out on the way to Bank of America.
Guest:There was no red lights in my life.
Guest:I would get on that Selma.
Guest:I would cut motherfuckers off on Highland.
Guest:I didn't give a fuck where they were going.
Guest:And I ended up...
Guest:You know, going to that Bank of America there, and I would just black out.
Guest:And all of a sudden, here I am a week without that anxiety feeling no more.
Guest:I would leave the coke in the car and go do my spot.
Guest:And as soon as I'd walk off in those days, I'd just go in the car.
Guest:I didn't give a fuck if Marc Maron had to say what tag Danny Boy had.
Guest:You know, everybody's always got a tag or an idea for a show.
Guest:I got to go.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would get on that street, go down to Fountain.
Guest:And when I made that left, I would be cracking the rock in my hand, driving, steering it with my knee and shit.
Guest:And I'd be rolling the dollar bill.
Guest:And at each light, I'd blast off.
Guest:And it was a week, and I didn't do it.
Guest:And by that point, I'm like, this motherfucker's got to die.
Guest:I'm going to have to kill him.
Guest:because you want to blow yeah at that point it was weird it was weird well i don't think people will understand that when you have your blow and you love blow you feel whole oh just to know that package in your pocket yeah yeah just as long as the package is in there i'm gonna be yeah i'm okay you know and at that time i had three different dealers i had an armenian yeah i had a mexican at all compadre yeah and i had this fucking mexican dude that lives on uh sunset and western by that very king of those bushes
Guest:Like, you didn't even have to call him or nothing.
Guest:He just drove around Western and Sunset, and he come running behind you.
Guest:It was classic.
Guest:And you just put your hand out.
Guest:He put a Coke rock in your nose to make sure you weren't a cop.
Guest:That was his.
Guest:You know how some people are like, I got to ask you this by law.
Guest:Are you DEA?
Guest:Fuck you, stupid.
Guest:This guy didn't even play that shit.
Guest:He just put the Coke rock in your nose.
Guest:And you go, get it.
Guest:And you tell him, $40.
Guest:And he give you a rock.
Guest:And you drove home.
Guest:No baggie, no bindle, no aluminum foil, no nothing.
Guest:You got to drive home at La Mano on sunset like a pizza delivery boy.
Guest:Sorry.
Guest:So you go.
Guest:Never did blow again.
Guest:I got the movie offer for 18 days.
Guest:And the people knew I was a coke fiend.
Guest:The taxi movie?
Guest:No, this was a movie called Boilermaker about a
Guest:an AA that got robbed in the early 80s.
Guest:It didn't get robbed.
Guest:They did a bank robbery, and they went into an AA, which will leave anonymous, and hid out with the people.
Guest:And they got shot or something.
Guest:This was like some similar story to it.
Guest:And the people knew I was a fiend, and they called me like men.
Guest:They go, you know, we know you're a coke fiend, but we're giving you the first shot.
Guest:It's 100 a day, but you got to work 18 days straight.
Guest:So in my seventh day, I go, this is perfect.
Guest:If I can make that and this.
Guest:What are you doing on the set?
Guest:Uh, I was, uh, you know, it was an actor.
Marc:Oh, for 100 days?
Guest:Yeah, that was a low-budget, those guys.
Guest:It was a low-budget movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it was, uh, I did that, and by the time I finished, I was clean 30 days, and I was like, this is the first time since 19... Totally clean.
Guest:When you smoke weed or what?
Guest:Now I smoke weed.
Guest:No, at that time, I was still doing weed.
Guest:No more pills.
Guest:You go down to these doctors, and I didn't know what I was suffering from.
Guest:At that time, I had such an anxiety in my mind.
Guest:At that time, I was doing the blow, and I was getting sharks in my spine.
Guest:At the end of the night, I knew it was time.
Guest:I knew something was going to go down.
Guest:I was 400 fucking pounds, Mark.
Guest:I was smoking three packs of cigarettes before the blow.
Guest:On the way home, I'd stop and get a two-pack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Of camel lights and water.
Guest:You were dying.
Guest:You were dying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, Mark, you know what?
Guest:Fuck you.
Guest:I'm doing an eight ball, but I'm drinking water.
Guest:Okay?
Guest:What are you doing for your health?
Guest:And if I ate sushi the next day?
Guest:Oh, I was Johnny Atlas.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Had some soup if you felt a little under the weather.
Marc:Oh, miso soup and water?
Marc:I'm not an addict, all right?
Marc:It's amazing.
Marc:It's amazing what you think miso soup can do when you're that fucked up.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, miso soup.
Marc:You got a system.
Guest:I have the Thai hot spicy soup the day after.
Guest:It cleans it out.
Guest:Cleans it out.
Guest:Amazing.
Guest:Hot and sour because it's got vinegar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it cleans out the system so the cocaine is gone.
Guest:Yeah, all good, all good.
Guest:Two days and I go back to it.
Guest:I would stay clean for maybe 72 hours and I'd lose my mind.
Guest:But the road was like you to get your shit off.
Guest:The road meant- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And you'd only go to places- It's not real.
Guest:You'd even call the guy like Monday.
Guest:Hey, Flacco, how you doing?
Guest:Yeah, I'm coming in Friday, but have it ready Thursday, just in case I fly in early Thursday.
Guest:Yeah, you're like Lumberg.
Guest:Yeah, that's your plan.
Guest:And it's just, and now it's, I always, I got off to the, I remember I had these anxiety pills they gave me.
Guest:I said, Mark, I would do the anxiety and the depression pills, and I would snort with them and then say they wouldn't work.
Guest:Like, they ain't working.
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Guest:So I had this black friend that I used to get coke from, the worst coke in the world.
Guest:But he fronted to me.
Guest:So in the mornings, I go, dog, how much protein powder you put in this fucking coke?
Guest:And every night, it was in the motorcycle.
Guest:So I'd have to go in his backyard and take it from the motorcycle.
Guest:And he'd go, did you leave the money?
Guest:I would never leave the money.
Guest:And he'd go, where's the money?
Guest:I left it there.
Guest:What are you talking about?
Guest:It's there.
Guest:I left you that one and the one from before.
Guest:So much fun in the world to blow.
Guest:But he used to eat 100 Valiums in a night.
Guest:So one night I called him and I said, hey, man, do me a favor.
Guest:Come by.
Guest:I got these pills.
Guest:This is the future.
Guest:And there were antidepressants that I'd gotten from the doctor and an anxiety pill.
Guest:And I gave them both.
Guest:This is a guy that was eating 15 Percodans.
Guest:I'm exaggerating.
Guest:He's probably eating 10.
Guest:10 Vs a night.
Guest:He was probably doing a gram or two a night.
Guest:He was probably eating those things that were hot in those days, Oxycontins, because I remember him mentioning.
Guest:I remember three days later, he called me.
Guest:He goes, hey, man, whatever the fuck you gave me, that shit is wrong, brother.
Guest:And I was like, I was right.
Guest:So I went to acupuncture for my anxiety.
Guest:And that was seven fucking years ago.
Guest:I don't have anxiety no more.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I don't do powder no more.
Guest:And you're feeling better.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I go to acupuncture every Tuesday.
Guest:I get cupped.
Guest:A couple needles in my neck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A couple needles everywhere else in my knee if I'm having problems.
Guest:You know, I try to go to the water.
Guest:No meds?
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:Just marijuana.
Marc:So now look at you, man.
Marc:You're doing good.
Marc:You go on the road a lot by yourself.
Marc:You go out with Joe sometimes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We all go out.
Marc:You're at the store.
Marc:You got friends.
Marc:You're feeling healthy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you got a baby?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Listen, I was going to tell you the recipe, but don't tell nobody.
Guest:How to have a baby?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You ready?
Guest:I had knee surgery.
Guest:So the doctor asked me if I wanted an Anivar to do the recovery, which is like a mild steroid to make your muscle strong.
Guest:And I didn't want the Anivar.
Guest:A friend of mine just said, just get some protein powder and do some lifting on your own and go to physical therapy.
Guest:So I went to GNC, and I bought the $80 protein.
Guest:That shit made me fucking horny as fuck.
Guest:It's like putting a Coke rock in your asshole.
Guest:I went nuts.
Guest:I gave mom a stabbing.
Guest:She's 43.
Guest:I've been with my wife for 10 years, 12 years.
Guest:Nothing ever happened.
Guest:That's why we got the cats.
Guest:Because after like six years, I thought I was damaged goods, my past, whatever.
Guest:She's a beautiful little baby girl.
Guest:She's healthy.
Guest:She's four months old.
Guest:And I feel good, Mark, because finally I made somebody happy.
Guest:She's in another fucking planet, my wife.
Guest:And there's nothing like living your life.
Guest:I fucked up when I was first married, when I got out of prison.
Guest:What happened to that daughter?
Guest:That daughter in me stopped talking about 10 years ago.
Guest:And it was basically the mother wanted to change her name and my ego and this and that and child support.
Guest:And it went back and forth.
Guest:Today, everything's done.
Guest:There's no drama.
Guest:I just decided not to talk to them just years ago.
Guest:What I'd do for a living, especially 10 years ago when I lived in a car, was tough, Mark.
Guest:And I would send child support and call and not even a fucking Father's Day card.
Guest:I remember I got a commercial for Taco Bell.
Guest:And I would go back to Boulder, which is expensive in those days.
Guest:And we were making $15 at the fucking store guy.
Guest:It's $300 plus $200 a night to stay at the broker, plus I got to rent the car.
Guest:And I get there, and she's too busy this week.
Guest:What can a 10-year-old be doing?
Guest:I didn't have money to go back to an attorney.
Guest:I was sick and tired of going to court over this.
Guest:Sick and tired.
Guest:And one day I decided, you just put a dream out there and say, you know what?
Guest:Someday we're going to talk.
Guest:A couple of years ago, I contacted her on Facebook.
Guest:I sent Christmas cards.
Guest:I hear nothing.
Guest:Do I want to talk to the mother?
Guest:You know, Mark, there's just something about this.
Guest:She tried to cut my legs off that I can't come to grips with it today.
Guest:And I think in time I will.
Guest:But loving this baby makes me realize how bad the addiction was when I first had the first kid.
Guest:You can't really do anything when you're addicted.
Guest:No, you're tied up in it.
Guest:You really can't do dick, whether it's comedy, whether it's fucking being a plumber, whether it's being a father.
Guest:And you didn't realize until 50.
Guest:Now, I'm just, listen, every man, the average age is 74.
Guest:I smoke some cigarettes.
Guest:I ate some badass in Cleveland.
Guest:You know, shit happened to you.
Guest:That's about 68.
Guest:That means my daughter will be 18.
Guest:All you can do is be the best father I can, you know, at this point.
Marc:Beautiful story, dude.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:Congratulations.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Marc:Yeah, it's good to see you.
Guest:Good to see you, and I'm happy you got me on.
Marc:Yeah, thanks for talking.
Marc:Thank you for having me.
Marc:Wow, how's that for a story?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:You got any good stories?
Marc:I don't think so.
Marc:I love Joey Diaz.
Marc:I really appreciate him coming down, and it was great to spend some time with him.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:Thank you for listening to my show.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Get on the mailing list, kick in a few shekels, leave a few comments.
Marc:Don't be a dick.
Marc:Get the app.
Marc:Do yourself a favor.
Marc:I know you got a lot of newbies out there.
Marc:Go.
Marc:Go get the app.
Marc:Go look at the merch.
Marc:I think there's a new shirt or two up there.
Marc:Things are happening.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Aren't they?
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:Please.
Marc:Please.
Marc:Please let me get through this weekend.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:No crying.
Marc:Boomer lives!
you