Lena
And a lot of people really like you.
Marc
Yeah, yeah. Trying to accept that now.
Lena
I feel really safe with a lot of the men in my life. I feel safe with my dad and I feel safe with my boyfriend Jack and I feel safe with Judd Apatow and I feel safe in my cast, but sometimes I feel like I go into a situation with a guy I don’t know ready to feel mistreated or manhandled and I’m pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t happen.
Marc
The way I’ve explored that lately is that I was in a relationship for three and a half years. I don’t even think she really liked me. There was an age difference and we both had other problems, but it became clear that I was interchangeable and that she didn’t really like me necessarily. The way I framed it in my head is that everything was going pretty well for me at that point, but I didn’t hate myself. So I needed to outsource that job.
NICK GRIFFIN—COMEDIAN, WRITER
Somebody was talking to me the other day about going to marriage counseling, and they said marriage counseling generally doesn’t help the marriage but it does point out what’s wrong with it by a third party. I remember we went to counseling and she said, “He doesn’t do this,” and I thought to myself, “I don’t do that. And I’m not going to.” I knew she was absolutely right and she hit it right on the head and I thought we’re not moving forward. There’s nowhere to go because I’m not going to do that.
It was my fault for the most part, I think, pretty much.
Once you walk out of marriage counseling, there’s no resolution and you don’t feel better, so even if you’re still married there’s just waiting until next week. There’s no having sex in between the sessions.
NATASHA LEGGERO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR
I met this guy who was Australian, and he was like forty-two and I was twenty-two. I gave up my New York apartment, my rent-controlled apartment. I moved to Australia to be with him. I thought he was so sophisticated. I got there and he was a con artist.
I was like, “God, these guys are so lame in New York! I want someone who knows what a wine list looks like and how to read a wine list.” I just wanted someone sophisticated.
So I meet this guy, and he kind of looked like Mick Jagger, he had this cool striped blazer and he was really soft-spoken. He was like, “I just came back from this new festival called Burning Man.” It was the first year of Burning Man. He was like, “I’m making a documentary on the information super highway,” which was the Internet, obviously. He was like, “I do book reviews for the Australian Financial.” He did book reviews, he was an intellectual property lawyer. He was just fascinating to me! I was like, “Oh my God! I can’t believe that I met this person.”
Then we had a few dates. He would take me to the Algonquin Hotel. We would meet at the Algonquin and eat at the Ivy!
He went back to Australia. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to be with this man!” My older friends were like, “Natasha, I’ve known people like this. I don’t think you should go.” I am like, “No, No. I am going to go.” Then finally, I gave up all of my stuff and I went there. I was, like, twenty-two. I got there and in my mind I was like, “We are going to literary parties!” Because he does book reviews, he’s a lawyer, and he must be rich.
I get there. First, he picks me up from the airport and he looks worried. I think he couldn’t believe that I came. It looked like he hadn’t slept.
I am like, “Oh, when are we going to start eating caviar?” And we go to his little shack. It’s a fine, little studio apartment. He draped purple felt all over the walls to try to make it fancy. There was IKEA furniture. I was kind of disoriented because of the flight to Australia. I was like, “I am just going to lie down.” I lay down, and I woke up to the Seinfeld theme song. He was like, “Seinfeld’s starting!” He watched television all day. I was in Australia with this guy who I thought was my dream man, and he would just want to watch television and John Candy movies.
Then it started. I couldn’t answer the phone. He was getting money from other women. He was just a crazy person. The signs were every day. We would get into three fights every day. He would be like, “Don’t use that! That is not the knife you use to butter the bread!” He would get really mad at me for stuff like that. I would bring him his coffee in the morning. He would be like, “How could you expect me to look at that much liquid this early in the morning! It’s too full!” I think I had Stockholm syndrome or something.
We didn’t have any money. I was like, “I thought you were a book reviewer?” Then I would see him reading the want ads. He was like, “Well, we need some money, Wiener.” He would call me Wiener. He was like, “We need some money! You need to go out and get a job.” I got this waitressing job and he would sit there and stare at me while I would wait tables! Then they fired me. Then I got a job at a brothel answering phones for, like, a day because he got really mad.
He would take the money. It would be, like, thirty or sixty dollars, and spend it all on champagne and picnic food. He was like, “We have to walk this way because the roses will be blowing. The eastern winds are right now. If we walk up this street, even though it’s longer, we will get the smell of the roses.”
I would be in his house, so I started digging through his shit. I was like, “What is happening here? I know something is wrong.” I remember getting on my hands and knees. I was like, “God, please give me a sign.” Then the phone rang. He was like, “Wiener, I need you to take your university money and put it in the mailbox.” I’m like, “Why? That’s my money! That’s $1,200!” He was like, “Just do as I say!”
I get down there, and there is this girl bawling. She’s like, “Give me that money!” I was like, “What? I thought it was for Alex?” She is like, “No! He needs to pay for my abortion!”
I asked him, “Did you have sex with her?” He would just say, “I was with no one.” I would be like, “No, but did you do it?” He would just keep repeating, “I was with no one.” I think that is a tactic that con artists use. I forget. It’s called something. You just keep repeating something until the person believes it.
Marc
It’s called lying.
Natasha
I believe he had some kind of antisocial personality disorder, maybe.
This is how people like that lie: I remember we were on a date at someone’s house back in New York, and they were playing Neil Young. I was like, “Oh, I love Neil Young. My favorite Neil Young album is Hawks and Doves.”
He was like, “You know Hawks and Doves?”
I was like, “Yes!”
In my head, in New York, I was like, “I have to move there! This man knows my favorite album!”