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would have been okay, but I am not capable of doing any of those things. We were fighting the odds from the beginning. When I met her I was a miserable drunk and she was just a kid. I was also married.
    My first wife, Kim, was a nice woman. I loved her. I shouldn’t have married her. I did it because I didn’t know how to break upwith her. I was too scared. It was too comfortable. She was a bit naïve. I was a bit out of my mind. I thought that’s what marriage was rooted in: fear, comfort, and lies. The triumvirate. I had grown to believe that I would never be happy but if I at least were married I could rest my chaos on a firm emotional mattress, that marriage would make things okay, normal-ish. They weren’t. I felt like I was drowning in my bed.
    I understood exactly what I was getting into with my first marriage. It was 1995. I was a thirty-two-year-old comic. When I met her, six years before we got married, I was just starting out. Comedians in their infancy are generally selfish, irresponsible, emotionally retarded, morally dubious, substance-addicted animals who live out of boxes and milk crates. They are plagued with feelings of failure and fraudulence. They are prone to fleeting fits of manic grandiosity and are completely dependent on the acceptance and approval of rooms full of strangers, strangers the comedian resents until he feels sufficiently loved and embraced.
    Perhaps I am only speaking for myself here.
    I was looking for something that would make sense of things. I didn’t know what. It was vague to me. I had an itchy soul.
    My brother was getting married. He asked me to be the best man. I was all fucked-up on drugs at the time. I go to the wedding and it’s a big Jewish event. We’re all under the chuppah. My brother’s marrying this woman. She’s got a hot Jewish maid of honor who is giving me some heat. I’m looking at the bride-to-be through the haze of a cocaine and booze hangover and thinking to myself, “If she’s going to take my brother, I’m going to take her friend.” That’s sort of like love at first sight.
    So I charmed her friend, aggressively. Fortunately for me, she lived in the same city, Boston. So within a few weeks, I’d moved my boxes into her apartment and terrorized her into loving me, sweetly. I was the black sheep, the brother failing rehab who had hung his hopes on a dream of show business, and was nothingbut fucking trouble. Somehow, she found all of that very appealing. I was her ticket out of middle-class Jeweyness. She was my ticket back in.
    I was with her for about six years before I asked her to marry me, which only means one thing: I shouldn’t have done it! If you wait six years to get engaged, you are on the fence. I should have known that. I should have known when I bought her a ring and proposed to her in front of the Phoenix airport. She got off a plane, she got in the car, I took out the ring, I said, “So you wanna break up or do this?” I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like that. And she agreed to marry me.
    From the minute I got engaged to that woman I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I was not stable, I loved her but was not really in love with her, I was not a good man. I was just looking for something that would make me normal; make everything make sense. I figured: bourgeois, middle class, Jews. That should do it. Her dad was a psychiatrist. In retrospect he must not have been a very good one. I mean, he let her marry me. How did he misread the signs so badly? Or maybe I’m that good an actor.
    As soon as I put that ring on her finger a switch was thrown. Rooms were being rented, bakers called, invitations sent out; family members were bickering and I might as well have been standing on a dock waving goodbye to a boat sailing off without me. Or maybe my body was on board, dead-eyed and vacant, but my mind was still on the dock, waving.
    At first I thought we were going to get married on a mountain at sunset. But there were Jews