8:30 P.M . and wake up at 2:30 A.M . to get it together to get to the studio by 4:00 A.M . Then I would start crunching the news with my staff and partnerto get on the air with something to say by 6:00 A.M . After a few weeks of that schedule I became completely detached from regular life or my version of the same. There was no going out, there was no staying up, there was no real socializing except on the air and with my staff. I did stand-up on weekends. I never really felt rested. I was walking around like I’d just been in a long pillow fight, dazed but not hurt. All my energy went into keeping alert enough to function.
So now I was doing morning radio in New York while my wife was learning how to stop loving me in Los Angeles. The hours and distance were straining my marriage. The only time we could talk was right before I left the house. It would be 3 A.M . my time and midnight in L.A. and I would spend most of the conversation berating her for her imagined betrayals and unwillingness to do the only thing I wanted her to do: to care for me. It was deeply awful and I could feel the marriage disintegrating. I was a jealous, angry person. I knew that what was going on in my mind was not real but I could not stop it from coming out of my mouth. I kept finding myself at that horrible moment when you are about to say something hurtful to someone you love and you know you shouldn’t but can’t seem to stop it. You just watch it leave your mouth, hang in the air, and mold itself into a rock that plows into your lover’s face. The phone connection was like a transcontinental slingshot. That was my marriage.
Then I would take a car into work, stopping on the way to pick up a large silo of liquid crack at Dunkin’ Donuts and two packages of M&Ms. I would then caff einate and sweeten myself into a mania amplified by exhaustion, by the angry fear that I was destroying my marriage, and by a deep hatred of all things Republican during the bleakest years of the Bush administration.
A few months into the job I got a call at the office at 4 A.M . from Mishna. She told me Butch had died. I was furious. She had been telling me for days that Butch seemed sick. I guess her large heartgot too heavy and Mishna never got around to taking her to the vet. In my mind she had killed my cat. It confirmed my worst suspicions about our marriage. She only cared about herself and wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a hurt animal. Me, or the cat. My cat was dead and my wife was a coldhearted child. She buried Butch with the help of Ernie the fix-it guy, in the same backyard that we’d gotten married in. I still regret missing the funeral of my cat. I think our marriage was buried that day, too. I hated Mishna.
As the months went by, things just deteriorated. Mishna would come to New York for a few days or I would go home for a few days but the distance between us became hard to navigate. I was lost, angry, and tired. About this time I began noticing a pack of stray kittens in the back of my building. I would go out in the middle of the night to put my trash in the bins and these five kittens would be scrambling around eating the garbage in the dark. They were so clean, cute, and focused. Like most of life, the scene was simultaneously adorable and awful. I thought to myself, “Someone better deal with this or these cats are going to fuck each other and we’ll have an army of incested kitties out here.”
This went on for a couple of weeks and I began to fall in love with these cats. There was this orange tabby with a tuft of hair on its nose that was a little asymmetrical and made him look like a monkey. There was a calico, a black-and-white longhair, a mean-looking, skittish striped cat, and this gray and white dwarfy fist of feline beauty that I would eventually name LaFonda. LaFonda is crazy, like Vietnam crazy. It’s my fault.
Their mother was also around. The slut. I really didn’t know what to do with the cats. They
So now I was doing morning radio in New York while my wife was learning how to stop loving me in Los Angeles. The hours and distance were straining my marriage. The only time we could talk was right before I left the house. It would be 3 A.M . my time and midnight in L.A. and I would spend most of the conversation berating her for her imagined betrayals and unwillingness to do the only thing I wanted her to do: to care for me. It was deeply awful and I could feel the marriage disintegrating. I was a jealous, angry person. I knew that what was going on in my mind was not real but I could not stop it from coming out of my mouth. I kept finding myself at that horrible moment when you are about to say something hurtful to someone you love and you know you shouldn’t but can’t seem to stop it. You just watch it leave your mouth, hang in the air, and mold itself into a rock that plows into your lover’s face. The phone connection was like a transcontinental slingshot. That was my marriage.
Then I would take a car into work, stopping on the way to pick up a large silo of liquid crack at Dunkin’ Donuts and two packages of M&Ms. I would then caff einate and sweeten myself into a mania amplified by exhaustion, by the angry fear that I was destroying my marriage, and by a deep hatred of all things Republican during the bleakest years of the Bush administration.
A few months into the job I got a call at the office at 4 A.M . from Mishna. She told me Butch had died. I was furious. She had been telling me for days that Butch seemed sick. I guess her large heartgot too heavy and Mishna never got around to taking her to the vet. In my mind she had killed my cat. It confirmed my worst suspicions about our marriage. She only cared about herself and wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a hurt animal. Me, or the cat. My cat was dead and my wife was a coldhearted child. She buried Butch with the help of Ernie the fix-it guy, in the same backyard that we’d gotten married in. I still regret missing the funeral of my cat. I think our marriage was buried that day, too. I hated Mishna.
As the months went by, things just deteriorated. Mishna would come to New York for a few days or I would go home for a few days but the distance between us became hard to navigate. I was lost, angry, and tired. About this time I began noticing a pack of stray kittens in the back of my building. I would go out in the middle of the night to put my trash in the bins and these five kittens would be scrambling around eating the garbage in the dark. They were so clean, cute, and focused. Like most of life, the scene was simultaneously adorable and awful. I thought to myself, “Someone better deal with this or these cats are going to fuck each other and we’ll have an army of incested kitties out here.”
This went on for a couple of weeks and I began to fall in love with these cats. There was this orange tabby with a tuft of hair on its nose that was a little asymmetrical and made him look like a monkey. There was a calico, a black-and-white longhair, a mean-looking, skittish striped cat, and this gray and white dwarfy fist of feline beauty that I would eventually name LaFonda. LaFonda is crazy, like Vietnam crazy. It’s my fault.
Their mother was also around. The slut. I really didn’t know what to do with the cats. They
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