Seven Years In: Sobriety and Salvation through WTF, HDTGM, and David Berman

Rte 133 Sabrevois, Quebec —photo by Mike Spry

The years I spent in prison with Marc Maron were transformative. Sure, that sentence is missing an important conjunction, but it reads better the way it is. It’s all true, though it seems like a lifetime ago. Between 2017 and 2020, I taught writing and lit in prisons, and during those years, the person I hung out with the most—other than the incarcerated gentlemen at the Osborn Correctional Institution and the Cybulski Correctional Institute—was Marc Maron. Towards the end, Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, and June Diane Raphael were around, too. And David Berman, but in a lot of ways, he’s always been there.

But let’s go back.

In 2017, I was trapped in a bad relationship. It had gotten dark. I had gotten dark. I was living in Amherst, MA, and I wasn’t in a good place geographically or emotionally. I didn’t have much left in the tank. I was removed from my family and community, and I leaned too hard on the friends I had. So I started driving. A lot. Like, a lot. I would find myself in the car under the guise of making grocery runs, booze runs, drug runs, any runs, really—anything to get away from the nightmare of home. Sometimes, there wasn’t even a destination or purpose, I’d just weave the backroads around the Seven Sisters, park in the cornfields and disappear in the stocks, dream of elsewhere.

On these drives, I listened to WTF with Marc Maron. I was a bit of a late adopter, not a full-timer Whatthefuckian, Whatthefuckinadian, Whatthefuckigonian (that one’s mine), until late 2015. But I really bought in on my drives of desertion. And a few things became apparent as Maron worked his way through investigations of the lives of artists and confrontations of his; I needed to get the fuck out of my relationship, I needed to get sober, and I needed to get my oil changed more often. Maron’s stark and brutal honesty, both with himself and his guests, often in interrogation of some real or imagined past they had, began to permeate my consciousness. But it was the interrogation of the self that struck me as both familiar and honest, something I used to do in writing but had stopped because my partner had said no one needed my straight white male perspective. When Maron told tales of his past, of his own assholery, of his mistakes—with booze, drugs, career, and friends—I was forced to consider mine. And I realized that who I had become, a person I didn’t like very much, a person who had made mistakes, was not a life sentence, that art and expression should be more than just a modality for accountability and reconciliation, but an avenue for a change—personal, cultural, political—that my writing hadn’t yet aspired to. That I hadn’t yet aspired to.

And I got out. And I got sober. I listened to Silver Jews again. And WTF took on a whole new meaning, a new relationship. It was comforting to spend time with someone who also quit the stuff, joined the secret society (briefly), and did the work.

But my drives got longer. I had planned on moving back to Canada for good, but I was mid-semester teaching college writing and English literature in medium-high security prisons in Connecticut through the Pell Grant Second Chance Program, the kind of initiative DOGE will cut because they’re pro-high recidivism. It’s good for business. The men in my classes had changed my life and had kept me honest and grounded, much like Maron had. Most of them were imprisoned for crimes I had committed, but I was a middle-class white guy from Ottawa and they were poor Black and Latino men from East Hartford and Bridgeport and New Haven. So I got an apartment in the Gay Village in Montreal, a city that I loved but often tried to kill me with late nights, Jack Daniels, and bad decisions. Certainly, not the best place to attempt sobriety, but it was all I knew, and the four-hour drive to Connecticut was just manageable enough that I could commute to teach my classes. And in the Village, I was hidden from the people from my Montreal days who would surely pull me back into booze and chaos. I thought I’d do it for the rest of the semester and then get a job in Montreal. But the gigs never came, and the commutes got…weirder.

In 2018, my brother-in-law had some debilitating health problems, so I sublet my Montreal apartment to a friend and moved in with my sister in Toronto to help out with her amazing kiddos, and drive (more driving) my BIL to doctors’ appointments and various institutions, manny™ in any way I could to help. Be a silly uncle. Keep things light.

But my income was still in the US, in the prisons and the exchange rate/Montreal’s affordability provided a decent life, despite the commute. And so I’d drive the 9.5 hours from Toronto to Enfield, CT, a nearly straight shot on the 90 from Buffalo to Springfield (you think that’s where Neil and Stills got the band name?). But I needed more to listen to, and the beautiful melancholy and madness of Silver Jews lulled me, took me to places dark and distant, and soon I thought about driving off the road. So I got the WTF premium, I can’t recall if it was Stitcher or whatever, pre-ACast. And I’d hang out with Maron for even more hours than I had been.

I’d get on the road at 5am and drive straight to the prison—listening to WTFs with Louis, Jasons Segel and Bateman, Garofalo, Jeff Bridges, Nolte—then teach the incarcerated about James Baldwin and Hanif Abdurraqib and David Berman and Joan Didion, about how to form arguments, about how to maybe forget the walls for a few hours. Then I’d crash at a Red Roof Inn, because my union could get me a room for $38, and get up the next morning and teach another three hours in prison, then drive back to Toronto with Maron and the cats.

Sobriety was new and difficult on the road. It would’ve been easy to fall off. I started smoking again. The roadside bars called. Who would know? And I was running out of Maron. So I tried How Did This Get Made, again as a late adopter. Thing is, my knowledge of Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas was through The League, and I fucking despised their characters so much that I couldn’t imagine spending time with the actors. But I was desperate and I gave HTDGM a chance.

The podcast provided a different community than Maron did. With Maron, I found myself demanding accountability and introspection. With HDTGM, I found escapism. The show exists in a kind of liminal space, absent of global context or much engagement with politics or the chaos of the hour. And it made me laugh. Turned out that Scheer and Manzoukas (and Jooooooooon) were not their characters but intelligent, thoughtful, and empathetic people. Their deconstruction of “bad” films isn’t just a vehicle for laughs, but a way to discuss narrative, the construction of humor and plot, and the realities of their artistic disciplines.

What HDTGM and Maron have in common, what I believe drew me to them, is both how the shows have organically built out communities and that the hosts of the shows have taken ambitious and singular creative routes to success within their art forms. Maron, I can identify with. I was (and am) inspired by his journey to sobriety and how open he is about it, as well as his late-in-life career recovery/resurgence. I was a writer at some point. I still am I guess, but early on, I had some success. I published a few books. Got some radio and TV gigs. At some point, it went away. Part of it was the booze. A lot of it was the booze. It was the booze. It was me. But Maron’s comeback story, rooted in the creation of WTF but also the self-reflection, accountability, and vulnerability that propels it, encouraged me to write again, and slowly, I started putting pen to paper. I’m still working on it. I think I’m almost there.

HDTGM allowed working-class actors and comedians to find new audiences and revenue streams, as well as community. I’m not an online forum guy. I never had virtual friends. I think I’m a generation late for that relationship with the internet. But the podcast got me into their subreddit and even the Discord, though I’m too old to fully understand how the latter works. And I’ve been to see the show live four or five times, and finding that community has been a revelation.

In the spaces between episodes, or when the time left in the drive betrayed a full episode, I’d listen to Silver Jews. To have David Berman back in my life was everything. There’s no artist I identify with more, of whom I am more inspired.

The first time I heard a Silver Jews song, and I’ve written about this in more detail before, I was living in Vancouver for the second time. The first stint didn’t end well. I walked in on my roommate and my girlfriend. I hit him with a phone. It was the 90s, so with each strike, the thing would ring like a call was coming in. At least, that’s the story I tell. It could be apocryphal. It’s what I remember. What’s the difference?

But the girlfriend left me with more than trauma. She introduced me to Will Oldham through Viva Last Blues. And so years later, on that second go on the West Coast, I came across a CD that came with an Uncut magazine a roommate had discarded. Will was on it, and so was Vic Chesnutt, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Emmylou Harris, Lambchop, Berman’s classmate at UMass, Joe Pernice, Calexico, and others. And I loved the sound, the new discovery.

The Silver Jews song “How to Rent a Room” was the standout. And I’ve never been the same. I don’t really wanna die, I only wanna die in your eyes.

That was it. I was in. There was something about how Berman is able to be funny and sad and introspective and clever, but not too clever, that I loved. I went to Zulu Records in Kitsilano and bought all the Joos I could, which at the time must’ve been Starlite Walker, Natural Bridge, and maybe Bright Flight. I wasn’t yet a writer. I was in film school doing drugs and falling in love with women who were way cooler than me. But I had to play Silver Jews for all of them. To mixed results, lol.

I don’t know when I found out about his poetry collection Actual Air. It was the late 90s, and I was still fairly analog. Maybe I read about it. Or maybe one of the cooler women gave it to me? There’s a five-year window of possibilities. I felt at this point in my life I had a friendship with Berman, though we had never met. And ultimately, sadly, we never will. But he has changed who I am. He’s why I’m a writer. He’s the soundtrack to most of my days.

I remember Actual Air with me at all times in my first days in Montreal when I thought I had already become a writer, and I remember reading “Self-Portrait at 28” first, and second, and third, and then daily for several years. I spoke at a conference once, and someone asked what I wanted from a career, and I said, “If I could write something half as beautiful as ‘Self-Portrait at 28,’ I could die happy,” I said.

And I meant it. I still mean it.

And, this, this man, this is everything to me:

It is a certain hill
the one I imagine when I hear the word "hill"
and if the apocalypse turns out
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown
if our five billion minds collapse at once
well I'd call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful
a place I wouldn't mind dying
alone or with you.

It’s funny, years after he passed (I’ve written about that before, why revisit it? He left us Purple Mountains, though none of us got to say goodbye.) I realized I had his email address for years. Some mailing list of writers. I could’ve reached out. I could’ve said thank you.

I’ve reached out to Maron just once. I wrote him an email.

Hey Marc,

I hope this finds you well. I'm a somewhat longtime listener/fan, and very much appreciate your work on stage and WTF. I actually wrote about the podcast for FLOOD magazine a while back and you were kind enough to retweet it (thanks!).

After listening to your tale of Buster Kitten's escape, I wondered if you had ever read the incredible essay "Lost Cat" by Mary Gaitskill. If not, you can find it here on Granta (with a subscription) or I've attached the PDF I share with my students. Hope you love it as much as I do.

I look forward to GLOW and whatever you're doing next!

Listen soon,

Mike

It’s the only time I’ve ever written to someone in the zeitgeist I admire. I never heard back. I don’t think I wanted to. Our relationship isn’t a dialogue but rather a series of monologues, mostly one-sided. But it’s important to me. It’s a part of me.

In 2023 I went to New York to see a recording of HDTGM. I was supposed to spend a week hanging out with a buddy there, going to Brooklyn Cyclones Star Wars Night, seeing Coney Island, sitting in cafes in Park Slope, and writing bad poems. But my buddy tore his ACL, and I couldn’t get a refund for the AirBnb. But, I really wanted to see HDTGM live. I wanted to be in a room with the people who loved what I loved and who had found a community where I had. I wanted to scream “Zooooooooooooooks” and be asked, “What’s up, jerks?” So I went to New York anyway. And the show was amazing. And the next day I went to the Whitney, and there was a woman there snickering at the Jeff Koontz installation. And we made fun of him and spent the rest of the day together. Last December, we got married.

These relationships have provided me with community, places to be present and sober and interested and challenged and aware. They’ve given me a soundtrack. They’ve given me hope. I want to build sustainable communities that support each other, that laugh with each other, that are honest with each other. I want to do for others what WTF, HDTGM, and Berman have done for me. And truly, any time I get close to relapse or get hit hard by the day, I think about Marc Maron and Lynn Shelton and how not even that horrific, unthinkable tragedy could derail him. I think about Scheer’s childhood. I think about the challenges of being in your 50s and an artist and still trying to break through like Mantzoukas is. I think about Berman’s death by suicide, and Maron’s recollections of a diner conversation they had had. I think about all of these things, all at once, and I believe there’s a chance at a better day tomorrow. And, because of all of them, I have a tomorrow.