Attempting Normal by Marc Maron

sense of self-esteem left, and I really hadn’t had much to begin with.
    We left the coffee shop and went back to my apartment. We had insanely deep, amazing sex. We danced in my living room. I smoked a cigar naked in my kitchen and watched her do an improvised nude mambo to Tito Puente music coming out of the radio on top of the fridge. It was one of those moments I realized that I could be anywhere—a castle, a yacht, a private jet—but it wouldn’t get any better than that moment. It would not be any better than what was going on in my dirty beat-up Astoria kitchen. That is the power beautiful women have: They are portals into the timeless, into other worlds. And I had needed very badly to get out of this one.
    We spent a couple of days together. I knew that was all I had. Ifelt grateful and stupid. That is what beautiful women do to me even if I don’t know them. Does that make me shallow or just a man? I don’t know.
    The last day she was in town she and I were walking arm in arm down Fourteenth Street. We were just talking and laughing, knowing this would be our last day together. About a half block ahead of us I sensed a familiar frequency moving toward us, a form, a person whom I had motion memory of. It was my ex. This was the moment. Could there have been a better one? No. I see her just as she sees me. The woman and I move past her. The woman does not know what is happening. I am watching my ex-wife as she watches me and we pass each other. Nothing is said. I look back and she gives me a “what the fuck” look. I turn away and start giggling. The woman I was with asks, “What are you laughing at?”
    “An amazing thing just happened. That was my ex that just walked by. I haven’t seen her in over a year. The fear has been lifted! Thank you.”
    She didn’t quite know what I was talking about but I felt my heart open in relief. At least I could save a little face. Not that it mattered, really. In retrospect her look could have been shock that I didn’t stop and introduce her and not what I assumed and wished she was thinking at that moment, which was:
    “You have moved on and replaced me with someone just as beautiful.”
    It was all so shallow, so relieving, so petty, so perfect.

  9  
Guitar
    I play guitar. I play a lot. I play when feelings build up in me and I need to put them out in the world in a safe way. Guitar is the only method of meditation that I have. I do it alone. I do it well enough for it to work. I wasn’t always like that.
    I was forced to play guitar. When I was kid there was an old Harmony hollow-body guitar with f-holes lying around the house that belonged to my father, who, I assume, at some point got manic and obsessed over guitar, took some lessons, then abandoned it. Judging by the songbooks that were lying around my father wanted to be Pete Seeger. I guess he saw himself as an everyman lunatic bard, singing about the struggle of the self-obsessed.
    I was about ten years old when my brother and I started taking lessons. Like any other activity my mother encouraged, I don’t think it was about anything other than it meant she didn’t have to deal with us. This was the same incentive for her to send us tocamps (two different ones in one summer), swim team, Hebrew school, and actual school.
    I don’t know where my mom found our guitar instructor but he was a large, bearded, fat Christian hippie with horn-rimmed glasses named Brad and he had a tiny, portly wife named Claudia. Over the few years that he taught us guitar they became caretakers for us. My mother would build a day around keeping us out of the house. Brad and Claudia would pick us up from school or swim practice, take us out to dinner or prepare it for us, take us to their house for a lesson, and then take us home. It was odd.
    Brad collected records and Claudia was an artist. There was a lot of sitting on cushions and eating vegetarian food. Brad was not a great player but he was a patient teacher and he liked