Based on a True Story: A Memoir

224 Pages·2016·4.11 MB·English

by  Norm Macdonald

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Job Interview
Chapter 2: A Debt Unpaid
Chapter 3: My First Five Years
Chapter 4: Six Years Old to Eight Years Old
Chapter 5: Eight Years Old to Thirteen Years Old
Chapter 6: Thirteen Years Old
Chapter 7: Driving to Las Vegas
Chapter 8: Starting Out
Chapter 9: My Greatest Gig
Chapter 10: Star Search
Chapter 11: The Plan
Chapter 12: Me, Gabe Veltri, and a Squid
Chapter 13: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
Chapter 14: Live from New York
Chapter 15: A Little Fame
Chapter 16: Winning Big
Chapter 17: First Week at Work
Chapter 18: The Trial
Chapter 19: Doing Time
Chapter 20: The Devil, You Say
Chapter 21: The Lost Days
Chapter 22: Meeting God
Chapter 23: Make a Wish
Chapter 24: Heading North
Chapter 25: A Wish Fulfilled
Chapter 26: Tiny White Coffin
Chapter 27: Leaving Las Vegas
Chapter 28: Weekend Update
Chapter 29: The Update Team
Chapter 30: Top 25 Weekend Update Jokes of All Time
Chapter 31: The Fat Man with the Artificial Hair
Chapter 32: Word for Word
Chapter 33: Way Outta Line: The Making of Dirty Work
Chapter 34: Mr. Warmth
Chapter 35: The Shoot
Chapter 36: Torn Apart
Chapter 37: The Bright White Light
Chapter 38: Fired from Update
Chapter 39: A Debt Incurred
Chapter 40: Flipping Coins
Chapter 41: After the Fall
Chapter 42: A Fancy Name for a Filthy Thing
Chapter 43: Escape!
Chapter 44: The Final Chapter
Chapter 45: Me, Myself, and I
The Last Part of the Whole Book
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Three fingers whiskey pleasures the drinkers, Moving does more
than that drinking for me.
Willy, he tells me that doers and thinkers Say moving’s the closest
thing to being free.
—BILLY JOE SHAVER, “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me”
To live outside the law you must be honest.
—BOB DYLAN, “Absolutely Sweet Marie”
I know of only two very real evils in life: remorse and illness.
—LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace
FOREWORD
LOUIS C.K.
I first saw Norm Macdonald onstage in 1988. I was twenty-one years old and he
came to headline a club in Boston where I had been doing stand-up for three
years. Me and my friends had heard about him, so I went to check him out.
Within two minutes I was astonished by how goddamn funny he was. Just
blown away. I laughed harder that night than I had in my life. I remember my
comedian friends and I just sat and talked about him for hours after the show. I
went back to see him five times during the week he was at that club. He instantly
became my favorite comedian, and in the thirty years since, he has never
stumbled far from that rank. Every time I see or hear Norm, he’s doing
something new and better than the last time—he gives me a new favorite
comedy bit.
The thing that drives me nuts about Norm is the powerful simplicity of his
style. A lot of comics (myself included) swagger around the stage and fly into
contrived bits of anger that give them an air of dynamic importance. Norm has a
beguiling humility that sneaks up and grabs you by the throat. There is
something about how simply Norm says things onstage. Just lays words end to
end with such elegance. And then you just explode with laughter and you just
can’t stop. He’s just standing there talking and you’re howling and trying to
breathe, your head in your lap. The power in that is amazing.
Norm is brilliant and thoughtful, and there is sensitivity and creative insight
in his observations and stories. But really he’s just talking. Just a guy talking and
somehow shredding everything he talks about.
He mildly dives into dark and light subjects alike and fabricates them with
his hand in his pocket and his wry look. And he leaves you limp. How does he
do it? I don’t know. I have been a student of comedy my whole life and I
honestly don’t know how he does any of it. He has a fastball and a slider and
about fifty arm angles.
A lot of comics over the years have been compared to Mark Twain, but I
think Norm is the only one who actually matches the guy in terms of his voice
and ability.
I listened to Norm on the radio once with my fourteen-year-old daughter,
and he was doing a bit about how he would go about stalking, abducting,
murdering, and burying a woman. Just politely explaining what would be his
logistical plan. My daughter and I were dying laughing. Just cackling and
howling. How do you get a forty-eight-year-old man and a fourteen-year-old girl
to laugh like that together? And he could have told that same bit to a bunch of
ladies at a church and they would have laughed just as hard.
I really could go on and on about Norm. He’s a brilliant comedian. One of
the greatest of all time. I put him in my top five.
The last thing is that there is not one single other comedian like him. He
falls into no genre or category. Just comedian.
I seriously fucking love Norm Macdonald. Please buy his book. He
probably needs the cash. He’s really bad with money.
INTRODUCTION
FOUND ALIVE IN A HOTEL ROOM IN EDMONTON
“You’re dead.”
“The hell I am!” They’ll see.
I’ve heard this kind of talk before. How I’m finished, through, obsolete,
passé, yesterday’s news, a has-been, a fossil.
“I’ll have you know I’m just as relevant today as I was twenty-five years
ago.”
“No, no,” my agent laughs through the phone, like it’s the greatest joke in
the world. “Check your Wikipedia page. You’re dead all right.”
I look around the room and see the small bottles that are scattered
everywhere, those small bottles that make me feel so big. They’re empty now, of
course, just like me. My suitcase is in the corner—same one I’ve had my whole
career—and it’s all beat to hell, stitching coming outta the sides, but it still does
its job. Sorta.
Stand-up comedy is a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me
who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find
funny. You show up in a strange town, and next thing, you’re gone. Then
another town, and another, and another. Then a thousand more. Then another.
You’re moving, always moving, like a criminal drifter, getting what you can
from a place and then getting out. You’re never in one place long enough to
experience anything but the shabbiest of love.
I turn to look at the girl next to me in bed. I must have met her last night at
the comedy club, where they had a great tall picture of me leaning against the
door to remind the people what a bigshot I once was. Her hair is bright yellow,
her lips are bright red, and she’ll wake up soon and I’ll pretend that I remember
her. I make my way quietly through the dim room to the wide-open minibar. It’s
empty but for one tiny bottle way at the back. I always leave one. I drink her dry,
the way a man puts gas in his car when the tank’s near empty. Just to keep going
a little longer down the endless road.
Damn near fifty.
Over at the table I hit a couple of buttons on my computer and discover
what my agent found so funny. Some joker has changed my Wikipedia page, all
right, and he’s left me for dead. “Norm Macdonald (October 17, 1963–May 12,
2013) was a comedian and actor who was known from…” I read on and on till
the final sentence. The death sentence. “Mr. Macdonald was found dead in an
Edmonton hotel room from an overdose of morphine.”
Well, that’s a sight to see, all right, with all the authority of the Internet
behind it! I’m standing stock-still in the very same Edmonton hotel room where
I’d died the night before. And then I start to laugh and I laugh to beat all get-out,
just like my agent did, just because I’m alive and I can. Then a thought comes to
me in a sudden, a thought that stops all my laughing, makes me real cold, and
has me craving a couple of grains of morphine, or at least some whiskey. And
the thought is this: The preposterous lie on the screen before me isn’t that far off.
After all, the only thing this joker really did was change tenses, turned “does” to
“did” and “is” to “was.” He got the date of my passing wrong, for sure, but
nothing else. To misquote Twain, it turns out the rumor of my death is only
slightly exaggerated.
So now I start to read this thing on the computer again, only this time I read
it the way I imagine a stranger will in a few years or a few decades. When it’s
true. In the future, when I was Norm Macdonald. So this is my life, then, these
words on this screen? Well, it doesn’t add up to much, just a series of facts, and I
suppose that’s what a man’s life is, after all, but it’s more than that too. I mean,
it has to be, doesn’t it? And so I decide I will write an account of my life my
own self. My side of the story.
Damn near fifty.
The girl on the bed is beginning to stir now and I feel sorry for her, the
same way I feel sorry for myself every time I have to wake up. I struggle to
remember her name, but it’s no good. And as I look at her and wonder who we
were last night, I come up with a title for my book. I’ll call it Based on a True
Story, because it comes to me that there’s no way of telling a true story. I mean a
really true one, because of memory. It’s just no good.
It’s like when a guy is telling a story and he’s way off and you know he is
because the whole story is about you. But he’s changing it all around, leaving
out important parts and making up others from whole cloth, doing whatever he
has to do to turn the dead stuff of life into something worth telling. And you’d
correct him, but the thing is, you’re not sure you remember it a hundred percent
accurately yourself. It turns out your memory isn’t the precise court stenographer
you think it is, getting every word down just so. It’s more like the sketch artist
way at the back of the courtroom who is doing his level best to capture images
that no longer are.
So it won’t be a true story. It’ll be based on a true story, like every story
I’ve ever told. But I promise you this: It’ll be the truth, every word of it, to the
best of my memory. And I won’t just scratch the surface either, no sirree, Bob.
I’ll claw and tear into this showbiz career of mine and I’ll let the filth fly, like a
mad dog digging up bones he buried deep and long ago. And I’ll name names.
And I’ll drop bombshells. I bet they’ll pay good money for that kinda thing. For
the straight dope on the Hollywood crowd, and the SNLers too. And I need
money. I need money to live.
Damn near fifty.
I open the curtains and it’s raining outside. I catch an image of myself in the
window, and the rain blurs my thin reflection as if I’m barely there at all. And I
see there’s a bruise under my left eye and some dried blood. I look down at my
hand, and the heel of my thumb is swollen purple and hurts like a bastard and
that makes me happy. It means the girl on the bed was fought for and not bought.
She’s full awake now, and she’s holding her head and squinting and I watch
her as she sees me. I can tell she doesn’t remember anything either. Well, that’s
okay. I’ll hear all about it later from the guy who runs the comedy club and I’ll
sit and listen, transfixed, to the forgotten details of last night and shake my head,
bewildered, feeling like a trespasser in my own life.
I look at the girl squarely. “I’ll get us a bottle.”
She has a pretty smile.