I can't say I've ever been a fan of biographies, and biographies of comedians even less so. But being a huge fan of Norm Macdonald compelled me to read this one. Maybe I should have read it way before, certainly before the man died, but what's done is done, I suppose. Regardless, I knew I had to read it, and the final impulse for that was reading a random comment somewhere that consisted of a specific paragraph from the book. I say comment, but it was more of a quote, really... I'll get to that shortly, but for now, what is the book like? Well, first of all it's funny, you can't expect anything less from Norm, but it's also kinda sad, what with him channeling his inner Rodney Dangerfield and pouring on and on about all the losses in his life. Then again, you never know what's true and what ain't, because after all, Based on a True Story ends up being more like a title than a description. What you do get instead is an image, true or false, of a wandering funny man who traveled all over the USA performing in dingy bars, constantly waiting for his big break and whiling away the time with a few substances here and there, maybe the most important of which being games of luck. In many ways Norm was born in the wrong era, and in many other ways he was the ultimate hustler, because even after reading his book I know nothing about him, except that he was smarter than all of us. The fact that he became a comedian instead of a professor of logic is just his own private joke, and thus humanity suffers less with his great genius having gone to waste, but the trade-off is that we laugh way more.
You’re never in one place long enough to experience anything but the shabbiest of love.
Now, the gimmick of the book is all about Norm taking Adam Eget, his trusty sidekick and lackey, on a trip to Vegas to fulfill a great plan – gambling their way into great wealth so that they can then live out the rest of their days on a farm. Because Adam Eget is such an obedient fella he immediately obeys, and thus drives Norm all through the night. When he gets sleepy, Norm keeps him awake by telling him stories of his childhood, stories that come to him in a very proustian sort of way, as he lights up a cigarette soaked in morphine from which his memories resurface, like an abandoned child wondering when Old Norm will be back with that pack of cigarettes. His words, not mine... The way Norm then writes about these experiences is almost philosophical, with him feeling as though he is suddenly there, reliving every moment in all its detail, and at the end of the memory he finds himself as a something that looks back at him. It was a time of simply existing and of being praised for it, praise that young Norm wouldn't reject, all surrounded by his family and old friends. In this regard Norm channels some Faulkner too, what with life on a farm, the stoic grandparents and even more stoic father telling him a man is born with a debt, and also the caring and protective mother, the rowdy brothers, and a host of quirky friends and neighbors. In remembering all these years Norm fishes a memory wherein his cat seemingly played with a mouse shortly before eating it, and it is here that he reaches what might be the greatest moment in the book – the hardscrabble truth that there's a difference between what a thing is and what it appears to be. Again, his words, not mine.
Once I learned this truth, I began to see examples of it everywhere. A picture hung on the wall of our parlor. In it, a woman was taking a shirt from a clothesline. She had clothespins in her teeth and it was windy and a boy was tugging at her dress. The woman looked like she was in a hurry and the whole scene gave me the idea that, just outside the frame, full, dark clouds were gathering. But that was not what it was.
It was paint.
So I decided right then and there to see the picture as it really was. I stared at the thing long and hard, trying to only see the paint. But it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine. The boy was crying, as if afraid, and the woman was weaker than I had first believed. I finally gave up. I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is.
That is the quote that some fella shared somewheres and it made me wanna read the book. So I'll leave it here, for myself for now, hoping someone else comes along, reads it, and goes for a tussle with Norm's book as well. That's all about insight, which Norm very rarely gave throughout his life, but when he did it was always in full effect. I can't be too sure what it means and I don't imagine Norm would care to explain in any great depth even if he were around to do so now, but it's a theme that keeps coming up. Firstly, it comes up with death when young Norm attended the funeral of Old Jack, one of the friends of the family, a man whose existence I prefer to see as imaginary, or maybe imaginary is how it felt when Norm saw the man gone as his body lied there inside his casket, now a strange thing that filled a suit, merely resembling the man who once wore it.
Even if inspired by Marcel Proust, this Norm fella is way more brief than him. The retelling of his childhood days ends soon as he then starts talking about his professional life. Norm's first jobs were unspecified instances of physical labor, or as he puts it, jobs that required boots. And in a classically simple joke that I will henceforth steal, he claims it was unskilled labor, which he was good at. In a way I thought I'd understand and agree, but when I started working odd jobs I came to realize I really didn't... Norm did appreciate these jobs because they allowed him to work automatically and let his mind roam free. This bit I never understood though, because such jobs just made me depressed and made me feel that the whole thing weren't nothing but a big waste of time... Norm, however, liked it, and it was when thinking up jokes during work and then telling them to his co-workers on break that he birthed the idea of stand-up comedy. From here on out come the stories, stories that I have no clue whether they're true or false, and it kinda don't matter. Maybe a lot of it is false, such as a story of Norm violently bombing at a gig in a mental hospital, or bombing even harder a star search program or some such, which apparently was a show where they searched for stars, and then maybe the worst of all, going on and on about joining SNL and developing an unrequited love with Sarah Silverman of all people.
“You’re dreadful pretty, Sarah,” I said, “and I’d be honored if you would lay down with me. And not in the restroom either. I will take you out to a restaurant and you can order beefsteak that I will pay for. We will coo and whisper and smile meaningful smiles and we will reduce the whole world and its people to our small table and the two of us. And then, afterward, I will take you to my bed and we will be like swine.”
The man got a talent for words, that much is clear. Of course he would be the one to take her out to dinner since, apparently, SNL took out thirty percent juice from Sarah's paycheck on account of her being a lady. Seems a tad unfair to me but what do I know. All I know is Norm had me running around all the time, and so one of his six read books must have been the dictionary. For example, the word “luxuriated” which I understood came from “luxury” yet I never seen it, especially in the sense of – The cat luxuriated on the hard wooden floor. Same with “unsmiled” as in – Then he unsmiled and got real plural on me. Then there's also a bunch of weird ones like squidbilly, canoodling, hoosegow, coupla, dog-tired, doggone, and rodney as a common noun, all weird stuff that sometimes means something and other times it don't seem to mean much. I can understand “coupla” as in a couple of, and I can also understand Norm having written it that way because, as I said before, which I stole from Conan, Norm seems to truly have been born in the wrong decade, as he was pretty much something taken out of a good Paul Newman movie. Indeed, he describes Chris Farley having that “big Chris laugh” which is decidedly reminiscent of Cool Hand Luke having that Luke smile... And then in general you get that relaxed southern drawl in expressions like,
But that's not how things work in this here life.
I've been on the road a pickler's fortnight and I'm dog-tired.
There was Bill Delaney, who could fix anything needed fixing.
Lori Jo was the smartest and funniest woman I had ever met, and she was hotter than a two-dollar pistol to boot.
But anyway, Norm's passion for this particular lady gets him into trouble with the law, and after a weird stint in prison for a brief forty years, he runs into the Devil at a bar and sells his soul for Sarah's love. It would have worked if he was funny because he always thought women liked funny guys, but apparently they only laugh at what handsome guys say. That's one of those Norm things I love to hear but this one I mercifully hope to be untrue. Anyway, turned out that weren't the Devil, only kinda looked like an ugly man, and so Norm, not being all that handsome apparently, goes without Sarah's love and instead focuses on his odyssey of gambling.
Traveling with Adam Eget is always a bit of an annoyance for Norm but fun for any reader, and indeed any fan of their podcast. Adam is such a nice guy and takes more abuse than he took underneath that godforsaken bridge. Norm is absolutely relentless and Adam never fights back, not once, which is all well and good since the travel can be a bit of a downer, with Norm constantly reminiscing about his failures in the joke he calls his life. Some moments involve Norm getting vaguely recognized by someone in a diner, and though he's wearing full Dirty Work gear, the person can't quite come up with a name. Then again there was another instance in which Norm was called a different name by a neighborly acquaintance and never bothered correcting it because any name is as good as any other, something I'm inclined to agree and something I've done in my own life, as I'm sure we all have at one point or another.
When it comes to the gambling itself, Norm did reveal another rare piece of proper insight. He has spoken before about absolutely stumping a psychiatrist who told him he only gambles to escape the reality of life. Norm countered by simply saying that's why anyone does everything, to which the fella had no response. Pretty funny story, especially if you hear it from Norm instead of from me, but in this here book Norm goes further, here he ponders a bit more and comes up with an answer. Because to him the winning brings only relief, which is a mighty fine thing but not fine enough to waste half your life and double your life's savings chasing. No, what Norm chased in his gambling, and the feeling that could only have been described by a man who experienced it and who knows how to think about things, is hope.
It is a particular moment. A magic moment that occurs after the placing of a bet and before the result of that bet. It is after the red dice are thrown but before they lie still on the green felt where they fall. It is when the dice are in the air, and as long as they are there, time stops. As long as the red dice are in the air, the gambler has hope. And hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.
After this bit, Norm gambles a whole lot of money away and puts phase B of his great plan into practice... by dying. Only he doesn't quite die, he meets God, who he has previously said to, like the Devil, also be in the details, which is an idea I have more and more come to internalize... But carrying on, in what seemed to me a strange mix of biblical details with Norm's own brand of awkward, dry and almost bizarre humor, God sends Norm back into the world with a message, but he throws it away because he's not a great scribe. In fact, he didn't even know the word “scribe” until recently, and so not understanding his handwriting he ditches the parchment, only to then wake up in his hotel room and watch a weird movie called Tank Girl four times in a row. I actually have seen that movie before, but only because I had a crush on Naomi Watts. Well, I kinda still have it but not as much since I got a bit too old. As for Naomi, she's alright, I don't blame her for getting old. I blame only myself.
In the meantime, Norm writes brief paragraphs that consist of the inner thoughts of his ghostwriter, who in the context of the story is a depressed, unfulfilled author made to write for someone less talented, but in reality it's all Norm writing about himself in the third person, yet again adding confusion as to what is real and what isn't. In these chapters confusion abounds as he vents about his past, specifically when one of his books, that was set to be a hit, was swiftly ended when it turned out this fella picked the wrong pen name – Charles Manson. In this sense and a few others, Norm carries on with this theme of mistaken identity and of wondering, what's in a name really? A Norm by any other name would be just as funny, and would likewise tell long drawn-out stories in his you-didn't-have-to-be-there kind of way. His expression, not mine. I just added the hyphens.
Upon waking up from his attempt, Norm now has a new lease of life. He now sees it for all its potential and constant offerings of things, whatever they may be, and with the theme of death still on his mind he tells Adam Eget a story about making a dying boy's dream come true. The boy was a terminally ill patient, and Norm talks about visiting him in the hospital but first having a strange encounter with a doctor, to whom Norm attributes the most literary version of his infamous moth going into a podiatrist's office joke, or at least his version of it, with all the traits of tragic russian literature therein. So if Norm only read six books, one of them has to be some Dostoyevsky, as he describes this moth living in a deep existential nightmare, only feeling happy in that moment when he wakes up and doesn't know who he is. And even more in line with Dostoyevsky, he writes a detail that was almost reminiscent of the famous onion parable in The Brothers Karamazov, as the moth, after releasing itself from a spider's web, flies away only to realize that the strand of web is still clung to it, and so is the spider, as if dragging both of them down to hell.
Was I to die high in the sky, where no spider should be? I flew this way, then that, and finally I freed myself from the strand and watched as it floated earthward with the spider. But days later a strange feeling descended upon my soul, Doc. I began to feel that my life was that single strand of silk, with a deadly spider racing up it and toward me. And I felt that I had already been bitten by his venomous fangs and that I was living in a state of paralysis, as life devoured me whole.
From here on out Norm continues his mix of talking about death and comedy. This is because it turns out the boy's dream is, of all things, to kill a baby seal. And only now, while rereading that passage loosely, and hearing Norm's voice clear in my head, do I find it funny in that Norm way. I can almost visualize it all, Norm delivering that line, the dying boy's wish of killing a baby seal, with the same gusto as he did the famous turtle joke on Conan's show... But anyway, Norm apparently took Adam Eget and the boy hunting, and the boy did in fact kill a baby seal and made a miraculous recovery, only to one year later get struck by a New York City bus and die instantly. Afterwards, Norm makes a fool of himself at the boy's wake, bombing harder than he ever bombed before, talking about the boy's toughness in his fight against a disease that all the doctors said would take him. But it didn't take him, what took him was the full blast of a steel box moving at forty miles per hour. Again, it's funnier when Norm says it, but he also says something strange, maybe even yet again insightful, and this one I'm almost certain to be one hundred per cent true.
There was a small hole in the ground and some dirt beside it. We stood in a circle and the sad-faced pastor said some things in Latin and then we formed a line. The sun was directly overhead and made the tiny white coffin ever so bright, and I took a handful of dirt and flung it down on top. Then it was the next guy’s turn.
Afterward, I walked back alone down a long blacktop road, and it was cold, and in the sky there were white clouds, and they all looked like white clouds and nothing else.
And by the way, the reason the moth went into the podiatrist's office? Because the light was on, it turns out.
In the meantime the ghostwriter struggles to find Norm's essence, a process hindered by the fact that he looks at his own book sitting next to Norm's memoir, thinking of it, in his beautiful words, like gold beside sand, which is pretty funny considering Norm wrote it himself about himself. But if anything is funny Norm would know, as he talks about the process behind writing an SNL skit, even though he seems to attribute most of the proper info to other people, such as Lori Jo Hoekstra, the writer's assistant who got him the gig in the first place, credited as saying something I for one learned in college watching a stand-up gig of a famous portuguese comedian, namely that a joke should never elicit applause because it is voluntary. It should instead always elicit laughter, which is involuntary, and which this portuguese comedian in question didn't get much of. Anyway, as for me, after laughing and clapping at that line I kept reading to find an instance of Norm revealing one of his favorite kinds of jokes to be ones where the punchline is almost identical to the setup, a joke he attributes to Steve Lookner but that I think Rodney came up with first and better. But whatever the case may be, Norm then takes a chapter aside to list his twenty-five best Weekend Update jokes, one from Chevy Chase, and twenty-four from Norm himself, with my personal favorite being,
On Wednesday, World Chess champion Garry Kasparov tied Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that can examine 200 million positions per second, in the fourth game of their six-game series. Earlier in the week, Kasparov admitted he made a “catastrophic blunder” in game two when he failed to force a draw by moving rook to e8, opting instead for a Caro-Kann defense that soon transposed into a Pribyl defense, which, after Deep Blue moved bishop to e7, gave it the advantage with its ninth position. With all due respect to Mr. Kasparov… what the hell were you thinking?
As the story goes on, always shifting from Norm's old stories to present day, he borrows money from a mobster, thereby going into the beginning of the end. And here we also see the ghostwriter becoming more and more of a character, spiraling deeper into his crippling depression as the real Norm spirals deeper into debt. Maybe there's a bit of jealousy, or rather, there's almost certainly a lot of jealousy, quite as if the ghostwriter witnesses Norm getting all proustian about his past. And though it's not nothing that great, he's still jealous because it's a much better past than his own. And to be honest it's not easy being this ghostwriter, because the “real” Norm kinda sucks, insisting on writing a chapter himself, word for word, of how he met Andy Griffith. But then you read the chapter and it's all about how Norm once met Ben Matlock. And then you get to the end of the chapter and turns out it weren't even him, in fact, didn't even look like him...
Mr. Macdonald had a moment in the mid-’90s when he was a diamond, and I watched him on TV and thought he shone brilliantly and had facets. But it was a lie and we were all fooled. Mr. Macdonald was and is a sad, misshapen, crumbling chunk of the blackest coal.
Before I can walk once again in the sunshine of New York as an important author, before I am seen as the diamond I always have been, I must finish this damnable memoir. I must find Mr. Macdonald’s essence. And to that end I must become him.
I have begun donning his preposterous wardrobe.
I suppose nor I nor anyone can stay mad at the ghostwriter for being resentful then, because all in all this Norm Macdonald character is a real jerk, especially to his simple-minded fellow, Adam Eget, but at least that bit is funny. And even more than being resentful he feels he has to lose himself within someone worse, someone lesser, someone untalented and in his own spiral of dice... Now Norm's goal is Atlantic City to once again try to gamble big and win bigger. And for all these reasons, what with the gambling, the substances, the evil mistreatment of Adam and all that, it's easy to see why the ghostwriter would be resentful, even more so when he has to write beautiful things under Norm's name, such as,
We fill the Challenger with gasoline at a run-down station off Highway 111 and get the hell out of this apocalyptic wasteland. We’re driving east down Highway 8. The white Challenger is moving me toward my fate at the rate of 70 miles every hour. This will be the last of it. Win or lose, my twenty-year gambling spree will be over. It has all been such a waste. It’s not the wasted money that gets me, because money comes and goes. It’s the time.
It's almost cinematic, or maybe it really is cinematic. I'm not so sure because I don't know what the word means, I just heard it in TV shows and stuff. But there is a cool beauty to it, almost as if I'm watching a movie about Norm's life starring Paul Newman or James Dean, or maybe Marlon Brando, in profile and towards the end. Of course they'd get a handsome actor for the part, but then again, Norm was a handsome fella in his time too, so I don't know what that broad Sarah Silverman was thinking. Still, because time don't stop, his time is now a bit past him, as he constantly chases that gambling addiction in hopes to win the money he needs to pay off his debtors and to carry on living the rest of his days on a peaceful farm. His old man did tell him every man is born with a debt, and he certainly wouldn't have approved of the gambling, ergo, this kind of debt surely isn't what the man meant... But it is the debt Norm has, and as he was fond of saying, at least gambling addiction is the one illness that could make you very rich. No such luck with osteoarthritis.
Then again, no such luck with gambling neither, as Norm loses it all yet again. Sadly as does Adam, in a funny story I'm now too lazy to spoil for you youths. Suffice it to say that Norm's last chance becomes writing the book, through which he could finally become rich. I myself tried a bit of that, thrice too, and no luck so far, barely enough to cover the cost of the USB keyboard I used to write the damn things in the first place. A dirt-cheap keyboard too, but hey, enough about me, especially since the ghostwriter is now mirroring Norm himself as he comes to a similar realization that Norm did earlier in the story – to whack himself, but not in an Adam Eget way, more in a Sopranos way.
As you can see, I am not a romantic. No great writer is. But the public is a different story. A posthumous work can be highly appealing. A book that took twenty years to write, which was then summarily and callously rejected, causing its author to take his own life—now, that is downright irresistible. Add to this that the manuscript in question is top-notch literature and we have the makings of a tragedy. By ending my life, I will live forever.
At this point the case of mistaken identify is deepened as the ghostwriter's story merges with Norm's story. Both of them on a last-ditch effort to make it big, to win, to make something out of their lives, and yet both failing and resorting to ending their lives. It gets to a a point where the ghostwriter believes to have invented Norm and this Adam Eget character, the whole thing could well be fake and he can't tell no more, indeed, he might have already become Norm himself... He gets into some discount Dirty Work gear and runs away after a hilariously failed suicide attempt, only to end up in a bar and being maybe, kinda, sorta recognized by a group of people. Some of those people like him, others not so much, and none of them realize that the back of his jacket says “Macfonald” due to a printing mistake, hence the discount. Regardless, the moment serves to drown his cynicism a bit and he writes the last chapter of the book, an almost sad but mostly happy piece about remembering the past and accepting it.
There is the way things are and then the way things appear, and it is the way things appear, even when false, that is often the truest.
He goes on about the details, about the little moments of getting recognized and feeling beloved by someone who then doesn't show up for his next gig when he's in town, almost waxing philosophically about how fickle people can be, especially in the world of comedy. All these things are enough to make a man bitter, or at least they're certainly enough for me, but looking back now at all his losses and misfortunes, at all the times his jokes went misunderstood, at all the times things could have gone way better, at all the times he could have been a contender instead of a bum which is what Norm was let's face it, Norm doesn't feel bitter – he feels lucky.
I guess even then, even in the little details, Norm felt lucky, he felt singularly happy to be alive doing his own thing in a world of possibilities. Because he really could have been a common laborer, working a job for which all he needed was boots, and even then he might have been a real funny guy, as I'm sure there are some real funny guys out there in those same occupations, and to those that there are I don't discourage them. Instead I salute them and wish to meet a few of them if my life don't turn out the way I want, or even if it do turn out the way I want, why not?... But then Norm did get famous, even if just a little bit, and people would approach him, tell him they love his dry comedy and that they get it even if countless other people don't, and they'd laugh and dance and feel like they won a prize for being at the right place at the right time, just when a comedy celebrity would happen to walk on by... And as for the gambling?
And as for my gambling, it’s true I lost it all a few times. But that’s because I always took the long shot and it never came in. But I still have some time before I cross that river. And if you’re at the table and you’re rolling them bones, then there’s no money in playing it safe. You have to take all your chips and put them on double six and watch as every eye goes to you and then to those red dice doing their wild dance and freezing time before finding the cruel green felt.
I’ve been lucky.
Turns out Norm really was lucky, because when he goes to search for the ghostwriter he emerges from the bar and they cross paths with the mobster who murders the ghostwriter fella, mistaking him for the real Norm. And as he lies dying his last thought is of a pizza place nearby, and because of how good it smells he concludes that life must be good too... But that leaves Norm in a bit of a pickle, what with his ghostwriter gone he needs to write the last chapter himself, which turns out to be a near incomprehensible joycean mess with little to no punctuation and almost all of it in lower-case, including the first person pronoun. Luckily it's only three pages or so and it gets right to the point, such as ramblings about Norm wanting to write as fast as possible to fill the book up with them words, and also an argument he has with Adam Eget as they sit in a diner and a waitress with a noticeable caboose walks past. Norm argues that aspect of the waitress isn't good enough to make it into the book, not even for ten lines of stream of consciousness madness... Then with a bit more luck the waiter recognizes him and offers him some chili for free. Norm gets happy with it, abuses Adam Eget some more and nobody cares because he's famous. But then some bad news...
i go back to my table and wait for my food and look around the bar to see where the waitresses ass went and then finally the waiter comes back and he says he is sorry but they are just out of chili but that if i want i can have a bowl of turkey chili. can you believe it. turkey fucking chili. story of my life.
So that's it, Norm's book... It ends with a page of thank yous to a variety of people. Adam Eget is nowhere to be found, sadly, but I'm sure Norm had his kind words to say to Adam in private, in a way that wouldn't ruin the joke, kinda like I am doing now. And of note I love how Norm thanks his son Dylan by calling him a good man and a better writer, but then there's an “about the author” page that describes Norm as the proud father of Devery. So who knows and who cares? At this point I'm just happy I'm done with this so I can do other stuff. I might grab me some frozen chili at the supermarket, see what's what, luckily I still have some of my stomach medicine, just in case. And I guess in the meantime I'll watch a ton of Norm clips because you can never have too many of those, especially because it kinda feels like the man is alive because of how timeless he was when he was, in fact, alive. I'll be damned, the man was born too late and died too soon, the fella just can't catch a break... But we can, and because Norm was around we've been lucky...
We've been lucky.
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