07/19/2013 In Podcast Episodes
Baron Vaughn
Episode notes:
Visit Baron's website www.baronvaughn.com
Follow him on Twitter @barvonblaq
Episode Transcript:
Paul: Welcome to episode 123 with my guest, Baron Vaughn. I’m Paul Gilmartin, this is the Mental Illness Happy Hour, an hour or two of honesty about all the battles in our heads, from medically diagnosed conditions and past traumas to everyday compulsive negative thinking. This show is not meant to be a substitute for professional mental counseling – it’s not a doctor’s office, it’s more like a waiting room that doesn’t suck. The website for this show is mentalpod.com. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do there: you can join the forum, you can support the show financially, you can take one of the many surveys that we have or you can see how other people responded to surveys, so please go—and you can read blogs by me and a ton of guests that have written blogs.
What did I want to say? I think I mentioned this in the last episode but I’ve got an offer to do a couple of live versions of this show at a mental health – I don’t know what you would call it – event in Toronto in the middle of November of this year. I’m probably going to do it and if you are—I’ve created a thread in the forum called, underneath the thread, “Is a Mental Illness Happy Hour event feasible in your area?” Then there’s a Toronto sub-thread underneath that, and there’s a poll, so if you think you would come or possible come to that Toronto show, it would be on the 15th and 16th of November. It would be probably a group listener recording on the night of the 15th and then a live interview with a single guest in an audience in the afternoon of the 16th. Could I have stumbled through that more? I don’t think so!
Let’s get to the show. Before we do that I want to read an email that I got from a guy who calls himself David. He writes, “Thank you for having Valerie on. Sadly the whole topic of adoption seems a little taboo in the United States and it’s nice to hear a story of a mother who decided what was best for her child. I could not stop laughing when you were talking about abortion and said that only people who have a house full of adopted kids and volunteer in an orphanage might have a right to say something about abortion. Well, my house is full of adopted kids. My wife and I are foster parents and worked in orphanages overseas. While I do not believe abortion is a good thing, I don’t think it’s my place to push my belief on other people. There are millions of orphans and children in foster care that need families and too few people that stand up and take these children into their homes. Anything that can help people gain empathy for all the people involved in the adoption is greatly appreciated.” Thank you for that, David.
And then I just want to read one survey, this is a Happy Moment filled out by a person who calls themself Seahawk, and they write, “It was my first semester in college. I lived in a dorm. I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school, and none of those few attended the same university as I did. I had been in the dorm for about a month and was starting to build a small group of friends. My roommate was really into 311. It was 1995. One day we had our door open and he was playing the song Purpose from their album on his stereo. Another guy we knew happened to be walking by and he stopped in the doorway and started dancing to the song. Just a goofy short dance. We all laughed a bit and smiled. I remember feeling so comfortable in that moment, and content. I felt as if the strangers I had been cohabiting with were becoming friends. I felt that maybe I could do a goofy dance and not be ostracized. I felt like I belonged.”
[SHOW PREAMBLE]
Paul: I’m here with Baron Vaughn, who some of you know as a stand-up comedian, some of you know him on a USA Network TV-show – give me the name of it again?
Baron: Fairly Cancelled.
Paul: Oh, has it been cancelled?
Baron: Yeah, yeah, it was called Fairly Legal but yeah, we got cancelled.
Paul: Oh, I’m so sorry!
Baron: Shit-canned, as they say.
Paul: I’m so sorry.
Baron: It’s no problem.
Paul: Did you enjoy being on that?
Baron: I did enjoy it actually. There’s a lot I didn’t enjoy, which was being in Vancouver – even though I love the city of Vancouver – I was incredibly isolated and probably had—it’s when I realized that I get depressed. I had never considered that as an option for my life.
Paul: Really?
Baron: And then when I was describing it to someone they were like, “I think you’re depressed,” and it was like this light bulb, like “What?! That’s what this is? This whole ‘I don’t want to get out of bed to Cheerios at the grocery store because the idea of walking back uphill to this apartment I’m staying at is too overwhelming for me,’ that’s depression? That’s what that is?”
Paul: Yeah, wow. So—and I love, by the way, when somebody is working, that they’re getting depressed, because people out there have this illusion out there that if your career goals are coming true, that depression is eliminated – in fact, sometimes I think it exacerbates it, because you then feel like an ingrate for not being happy.
Baron: Exactly. I was gainfully employed during the height of the recession and I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to be grateful, and then I couldn’t find it. The isolation was really hard.
Paul: Were there not people to hang out with?
Baron: Well, here’s what I did. Do you know Vancouver at all?
Paul: A little bit, I was there once for a day.
Baron: Well, there’s—you know Boston?
Paul: Yeah.
Baron: Okay. There’s Boston and there’s Cambridge.
Paul: I was there once for a day.
Baron: (Laughs)
Paul: I only go to cities for a day.
Baron: Where are you from again?
Paul: I’m from Chicago.
Baron: Okay. Hmm. There’s—there’s Chicago and there’s Indiana.
Paul: Yeah.
Baron: (Laughs)
Paul: Where I went to school.
Baron: Technically you could cross the street and then you’re in Indiana, right?
Paul: Yes.
Baron: So, Vancouver is—probably main suburb is Burnaby, and that’s where the show was shot, but we shot the pilot in downtown Vancouver, so I strategically picked a place equidistant from those two places, a neighborhood called The Drive, Commercial Drive. I also didn’t want to stay downtown because I knew it was going to be really downtowny, and I thought it’d be cool to stay in area that was residential and had houses and parks and trees and stuff, and no one else I knew lived over there. And I was a good, maybe, 20 minutes away from anyone that I knew at any moment, and the thing about wanting to have that authentic Vancouver experience is you need to know people that live in your neighborhood to have that. I don’t know families, so I was just in this apartment by myself all of the time, incredibly isolated, and it is Canada so I was afraid to use my phone because I was getting insane roaming charges and just like getting $700 bills a month—
Paul: Wow!
Baron: —so I was just afraid to use it, and I would email a little bit but the place I was staying at didn’t have the best Wi-Fi, so I was just kind of like there, all the time, with my thoughts. So I was incredibly isolated the first season, and it was summer, that was the other thing. Canadian summer is gorgeous but then there was that feeling of like ‘it’s beautiful outside, I’m supposed to be happy, right?’ so that all kind of compounded it.
Paul: It’s raining in my soul!
Baron: (Laughs) It’s beautiful outside but it’s raining in here! I’ve got the cloud.
Paul: I think that’s why rainy days are so comforting on a certain level because it’s like, ‘aah, the outside matches the inside.’
Baron: Yeah, and I do prefer rainy days. Rainy days and Mondays actually make me happy instead of getting me down.
Paul: There’s something so stinky and comforting about a sad, rainy Monday.
Baron: A sad, rainy Monday, yeah, because you know everyone feels… (Laughs)
Paul: Yeah, the world has come to you for a moment.
Baron: Exactly. That’s exactly right.
Paul: Before we move on to your personal story, people may also know your standup, you’ve performed on Conan, Jimmy Fallon, all over Comedy Central, Festivals Galore, and you’ve acted in a couple of movies, you were in Cloverfield – what was the other one?
Baron: I was in a bit part in Cloverfield and I had a scene in The Other Guys, which was cut, which was great to brag to all my friends, like ‘I’m in this movie!’ and then people would be like ‘We’re you in the background somewhere?’ But I was in the number 1 deleted scene in The Other Guys, and I did a part in this movie called Black Dynamite, which is a cult classic.
Paul: Okay.
Baron: It’s become a cult classic.
Paul: You’re African-American—
Baron: You can say black, I’d prefer.
Paul: Alright.
Baron: (Laughs) I prefer black.
Paul: How about charcoal, how do you feel about that?
Baron: Definitely not.
Paul: Yeah. And the reason I bring that up is—I don’t know why I bring that up. Maybe I want the listeners to send me the occasional email that are like ‘Love the show, how about some more color,’ I guess I want them to know.
Baron: Well, here I am.
Paul: Yeah.
(Laughter)
Baron: But that has also been the ongoing struggle of my existence, the black identity. What the hell is it and how is it that I fit around it? It’s kind of always been—actually, I’m working on a chunk of material about black depression, because it’s something that I feel like—okay so a lot of my friends are like, ‘you should go to therapy, you should go to therapy,’ right? And I only recently realized—was able to pinpoint my resistance, which is to me it’s the final step into whiteness.
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: Once I go to therapy, I am claiming this land for Caucasian. (Laughs) So I was just thinking about that, so I started working on this chunk of material like, figuring out that I get depressed and that I never thought of it as something that black people do. It was always like, that’s what white people do, they get depressed; we’re just angry.
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: And that’s it! You know, we don’t talk about depression; we talk about oppression. That’s the joke, we’re just a different -pression.
Paul: By the way, I love the idea of a bit about that. Do you ever feel like when you watch Death Comedy Jam and you see—I mean, I see people on Death Comedy Jam breaking new ground, like I remember seeing Bernie Mac the first time and, like, ‘Oh, this guy is special, he’s got his own voice, he’s not doing what other people do,’ but so often it seems like the black evening at the improve where it’s like ‘…and now he’s going to go to the part where he’s pumping his hips and he’s talking about eating pussy and then he’s going to drop the mic.’
Baron: Right, right.
Paul: What does it bring up in you when you see comedy like that? You just feel like, other comedians?
Baron: Well, yeah… I mean, generally I’m harder on black comedians because I am one. Especially because my black identity isn’t the one that is generally sought after, you know, it’s not like—I’m not a Death Jam comedian, and I know plenty of comedians that aren’t Death Jam comedians but did do Death Jam and did well on Death Jam, and then the people like the Bernie Macs and the Dave Chappelles and people who did Death Jam and really stand out as original voices, and then of course the great cloud without number. My favorite, favorite thing – Dick Gregory said it, I think, in a documentary about Pryor – he said that if you took away Pryor’s language, the expletives, his genius is still apparent. But the problem was this generation of comedians came that thought that the surface was the key to the genius.
Paul: Exactly, like, when people compare Eddie Murphy to Richard Pryor I just want to say, they couldn’t be more different.
Baron: They couldn’t be, and Pryor says that. He says that in his autobiography, he thought that Eddie Murphy’s comedy was mean, that it was just lash-out.
Paul: Absolutely, there was no vulnerability at all in Eddie Murphy’s, it was all about being a showman, and I suppose because there weren’t a variety of black comedians when Eddie Murphy came out, at least to white America that comparison was natural, but there was a poetry to Richard Pryor’s vulnerability that still sticks with me today. He to me is the benchmark of just opening up your ribcage and here is my fear, my vulnerability, my flaws, and—
Baron: Well, I feel like the question under Pryor was like, ‘I don’t know,’ like he didn’t know, and ‘come with me while I try to find out.’
Paul: Absolutely, and I could tell you as a white guy in the 70s who wanted to know more about black culture, but also—you know, all I knew about it was Huggy Bear and the pimps and the other shit that was portrayed in the media, and it was like, I wanted more of that, I couldn’t get enough of that because he was cool—
Baron: Pryor you’re talking about?
Paul: Yeah, he was cool and it was—it wasn’t threatening. He shared his experience in a way that didn’t feel like he hates me because I’m white.
Baron: Well, yeah, and he hated white people but he hated himself just as much. (Laughs) But like, he was a mutual hater but a mutual lover, and that’s what he did, you know, if you want to say like, Pryor really popularized white people/black people material, but when you look at his as opposed to what the 90s paradigm of white people/black people material was, his was the celebration of the differences, and put-downs and build-ups in both cultures: these are the things we both do well, these are the things we don’t do well. Someone said he divided his audience and somehow united them at the same time, which is why he is one of my biggest influences. I think that him and like, you know, Bill Cosby are like the two sides of a coin, where Richard Pryor was so open about race and Cosby was so absent about race. His comment on race was how race-less his act was, in my opinion. Anyway, back to your question, though, which is, I almost feel like my audience, the black people—because I love black people and I want black people to love me back. I almost feel like my audience for my black comedy are the black audience that has become disillusioned with black comedy. Like the people who just, ‘uh, I don’t really care for that,’ those are the people that, when they happen upon a comedy show and I’m there, they’re like ‘You’re so different, I didn’t know this was.’ And I feel like I’m the first generation of black comic – and this is a lofty generalization – I feel like I’m the first generation of black comic that didn’t have to do the urban rooms, I didn’t have to do the chitlin circuit. And I did some of those shows but I just didn’t really—I’m like, I always get this extra issue of ‘We don’t think you’re funny, and also you’re a traitor to our race’ from a black audience and it’s overwhelming.
Paul: Have you ever felt the feeling in you that you want to express to them but you don’t understand these other comics are so condescending about your intelligence because they don’t want to go to a place that I go to?
Baron: Yeah, and that’s the thing, like we’ve taught the audience what to expect, so it’s like I get this, my intelligence is white. That intelligence is whiteness. That’s what white people do, is be smart. Which makes absolutely no sense to me, right? So sometimes when I’m in front of a black audience they look at me like I’m trying to be something I’m not, when in fact if I was trying to do the thing that they thought was authentic, that would be the fakest thing that I could possibly do. But then again, then I start going like, ‘I’m generalizing now, and who knows, blah blah blah…,’ you know?
Paul: Do you ever think to yourself that the thing that puts you between these two cultures is the very thing that is the uniqueness that all comedians seek?
Baron: Yeah, I do. And that’s a big thing because my early jokes were all about ‘what you expect from me,’ not only as a black man but as a black comedian specific. But the thing about uniqueness is it’s unique. (Laughs) So it’s like, if I want a lot of people to like me in one show, you know, sometimes that’s too much uniqueness for them to ask. Especially because I feel like they say—you could say that Death Jam is the best/worst thing that ever happened for comedy. And you could say that Comedy Central is the best/worst thing that ever happened for comedy, because it was like suddenly there was a place for all these people to get seen but then suddenly there was too many people never being seen, and then the crowd, the mediocrity, kind of, is all mixed together. And so, in that sense, there’s this expectation that comedy is supposed to look and feel a certain way and sometimes I feel like I don’t fit into that in a black paradigm, that sometimes black people are like ‘Wait a minute, that’s not what comedy is, comedy is supposed to be, you fuck the stool’—
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: —‘you talk about bitches’ feets, and then you do an impression of an old black preacher! What’s he doing? Doesn’t he know those other tropes?’ I was saying to somebody the other day, when it comes down to it I had an authentically black childhood but I can’t even talk about it, because the elements that make it up are hack. It’s basically like, I grew up in a black neighborhood, gangs, and I didn’t have a dad – it’s like airplane food jokes.
Paul: Yeah.
Baron: It’s like the same territory in a way.
Paul: Do you feel like expressing—you know, as I’m sitting here listening to you talk about what you feel being caught between these two cultures, in your mind, it just seems to me like if you were on stage and you were opening up your heart to the degree that Richard Pryor did about that, I would be fascinated to watch comedy about that, because I don’t think there’s anything more compelling than hearing somebody open up their soul about an experience that I haven’t experienced. But that’s got to be—I don’t know about you, but that was the scariest thing in the world to me in a club of drunk people, was to do that. Do you feel like you are being—do you feel like vulnerability is something that you want to bring to your act or is it something that you are hesitant to, or where do you feel, about…?
Baron: Well, I’m riding in that direction right now, trying to get more vulnerable, but even find out what it is that I feel vulnerable about, you know? Because I sometimes think I get in the web of ‘I’ve got nothing original to say, all my vulnerabilities are hack,’ and I also have this mental block about storytelling, like I’m convinced that nothing interesting has happened to me. I see myself as the protagonist in the movie of my own life, you know, so I’m trying to find those stories because someone – this girl I dated, she was a young comic too – accused me of hiding behind my intellect. And whilst I disagree with her, whilst I disagree with her—
Paul: Enough said.
Baron: Yeah! It’s still, you know, I always go ‘well, maybe I am wrong,’ you know, like I have to entertain that someone’s observation of me could be true, because we all have our blind spots. So let me think about this, and let me try to find stories and things I want to say on stage in which I am being an idiot or I am in a position where I don’t understand or don’t know how to react to things or don’t know how to feel about them, so I’ve been trying to head in that direction, to see if she was right, but I think it’s yielded a lot of interesting stuff hopefully.
Paul: You know, my thought on that is, it all depends on what you want to mean to the audience. If you want to mean to the audience that you are a clever joke-writer who works this shit out of an audience’s brain when they watch you, and then she’s wrong, but if you want to mean to the audience that here’s a guy that touches something emotionally in people, then I think she’s right. And I would add that you can be both those things, because the intellect part and the clever joke-writing is already there. You bring the vulnerability to it and to me you’ve got the best of both worlds and it doesn’t have to be either/or. The intellectual stuff is naturally going to be there, and you’re a warm guy, there’s a likeability instantly about you that invites people in, so I think they’re at the door of your soul waiting to get in.
Baron: Isn’t likeability code for boring? (Laughs)
Paul: No!
Baron: Sometimes I feel like that.
Paul: Richard Pryor was likeable.
Baron: Yes, that’s true – on stage.
Paul: Yes. (Laughs)
Baron: On stage. Let’s ask some of his ex-wives how they feel about that. Well, I appreciate that, and personally I think that’s kind of the point of stand-up, is to figure it out. You know, like ‘which one am I?’ Like, I feel like I’m more interested in that question than taking a stand to be like ‘I’m this!’ and holding steadfast to it no matter what experiences happen, no matter what changes happen internally.
Paul: Well, I can’t wait to see what happens in the next five years with your writing and where you go, because to me that’s the most exciting part of being an artist, is pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. When I got sober in 2003 I was suddenly taking chances because my opinion of myself had so greatly increased, I didn’t feel like a piece of shit all the time, so the thought of doing a character on stage was no longer terrifying. And even if an audience didn’t get it, I still felt like ‘no, this is funny shit that I’m doing, it’s just not their cup of tea,’ but the thought of doing that before I got sober, before I went deep into my fear and my resentment and my confusion about who I am in this world, in a million years I would never have done it. So when you talk about possibly going to therapy, I’m just sitting here in my head screaming ‘Go! Go! Go!’
Baron: (Chuckles) There’s a part of me that’s like, well, what if my funny is inside this confusion? And that if I start to feel better in myself, will the funny go away? And I know that—I’ve heard people talk about that, like ‘no, it’s a different thing, it doesn’t work that way,’ right? But here’s my other link to this, and I want to get your opinion on this. And I’ve said this before so if anyone listening has heard me on a different podcast ask this question it’s because it’s a fascinating question to me. I think, Paul, you’re an experienced comedian, and I’ve been doing stand-up for about 12 years and I feel like there’s this younger generation that is a little after me that really looks up to your generation, and sees that a lot of the heroes have this damage, and some issue that they have, some fire in their loins of their souls that makes them do stand-up that they address on stage that gives them interesting uniqueness. And I think there’s a lot of people in this younger generation who have had incredible childhoods and supportive families that are like “Well, I’ve got to manufacture some damage here.’ There was a comic once, I won’t say his name but I remember saying on his show, I said ‘How are you?’ which was the wrong question. I was like ‘Hey, how are you?’ and he was like ‘uurgh.’ That was his first answer, and I’m like ‘uh-oh.’ All these comics that I look up to, and he named a couple of people, he was like ‘They’re awful people, and I am aspiring to be an awful person, what does that mean I am?’ I’m like ‘Dude, no one’s here yet! I don’t know if I can deal with this conversation right now. I’ve got some jokes about squirrels that I want to do tonight, so I can’t think about anything deep.’
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: So I’m just wondering, do you see or do you think that about some of the younger generations where like I feel like there are certain tropes that I’m starting to hear. Like, you know, every now and then there’s certain punchlines that every comedian starts doing, like unicorns, suddenly everyone has a unicorn joke. I feel like I’m starting to hear, ‘…and then I went home and cried,’ as kind of a nice tag, a tag that I keep hearing a lot. And I’m like, is everybody going home and crying? When did this pain become like, ‘Haha, I get it, because we’re all depressed! High fives! Abilify!' You know?
Paul: Yeah. (Laughs)
Baron: That sort of thing. Do you have a thought on that?
Paul: You know, my thought is, every person has some type of pain, anxiety, confusion inside them, clearly some more than others, and every person can always go deeper into what’s going on with them and it doesn’t—your pain or whatever doesn’t have to be dramatic. Just the fact that you have anxiety about not—and by the way, I used to think that my life—that I didn’’t have the Richard Pryor experience, so how could I ever mean anything to people? Turns out I had to stop doing it in comedy clubs to express what I had to say, because it was too dark, I didn’t know how to make it palatable. But I didn’t think I had any valid pain inside me until I really started going deep. So I would say, don’t try to assume that there isn’t something inside there, a vein of some rich, emotional experience until you’ve gone in there, until you’ve routed around. You describing what you experienced in Vancouver—I don’t know, it tells me that yes, situationally you might have been in a place that the average person would have started to feel that way, but very few people I think get into comedy just purely because they love the craft of writing jokes and they’re happy, contended people. I think there’s a desperate—the fact that your dad wasn’t around, how is there not pain in that?
Baron: Well, for me—I mean, I feel like there’s some young guys who are just like, they just like putting some words together. Which is fine, but the words that they’re putting together are—they’re like playing at pain as opposed to they actually may have it.
Paul: I agree, and you can usually tell in a second that it’s not coming from a place that is real, but it’s so hard to get vulnerable in front of an audience – especially if they’re drunk – to show that, that true pain. So I don’t really know the answer to the question. I can tell you this much – and I hate to use this analogy because it’s so cliché, but – when you don’t go deep into the root causes of what is driving you, what’s driving the bus, what’s causing your actions – especially off-stage – the way you can express yourself is a limited number of colors in a pallet. When you’ve gone into that pain and begun to make sense of it, there’s probably still some anger there, there’s definitely way more perspectives on it, and those are different colors that you can use to express what you’re feeling. I can always tap into my anger, that will always be there, but my act used to be consistently hostile and angry and just about suicide and fucking. It was limited, you know, I would do a little chunk where I talked about politics and stuff but there was nothing about me and what made me so angry about people that wanted to control other people, until I realized that was my experience as a child, was being somebody’s object and being controlled. So it completely changes, and it may change your desire to want to be a straight monologist in comedy clubs on the road but you will probably feel so much more fulfilled as an artist, and whatever the jump may be to the next expression of yourself may not clear right away and it might be confusing but if you keep working at it, especially with podcasting and, you know, the alternative scene, I think it’s so much easier for somebody to explore that part of themselves than it was in the 80s when people weren’t talking about that except maybe Richard Pryor and Louie Anderson, but even then Richard Pryor was kind of at the tail end of his relevance, he was really kind of being destroyed by his demons and his addictions.
Baron: Right.
Paul: So that’s kind of my thought on that, it just brings more colors to how you can express yourself.
Baron: Right, right. The palatability is a big concern for me, because there is that—
Paul: Talk about that then.
Baron: What?
Paul: Your palatability, about your anxiety. You know, always go to—one of the things I learned in improv was, always use what is right there. When I first started doing my TV gig my co-host and I clashed like crazy, because I had an idea of how it should be and then a lightbulb went off with what I had learned in learning improv which was, use what is right in front of you, and all of a sudden I had a goldmine of moments to play because I used it. And I think you’ve got a unique experience in front of you that you’re afraid to use because you think it’s not valid or edgy enough, but—
Baron: (Laughs) That sounds very true, yeah.
Paul: —the degree to which you express the part of yourself that you want to hide is the edginess.
Baron: Okay, I like that.
Paul: Just my thoughts. Just my thoughts.
Baron: Yeah. I once had a teacher—I went to theater school, and I once had a teacher tell me, she said ‘I think that you are afraid that if you open yourself up, that there is nothing in there.’
Paul: Yes!
Baron: And her punchline was, ‘but I’m telling you that’s not true.’ And I’m still like, that still haunts me, I’m like ‘What does that mean?’
Paul: Yeah. And I don’t even know you that well, Baron, we met each other for five minutes before you came in here.
Baron: True. We saw each other in an elevator in Chicago recently, right?
Paul: Umm…
Baron: Were you at the JFL? You were at the JFL.
Paul: No.
Baron: No. In Montreal?
Paul: I haven’t been to Montreal in—
Baron: Bridgetown.
Paul: Bridgetown, that’s right.
Baron: Bridgetown or Moontower.
Paul: No, Bridgetown.
Baron: Bridgetown. So we saw each other in an elephor—elephor?
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: You know, elephor… it’s a combination of elephant and elevator. And I was like, ‘Oh, Paul Gilmartin,’ and you were like ‘Oh hey’… That’s my impersonation, ‘oh ohhheuh.’
Paul: Well, I had heard you on someone else’s podcast and I wanted to get you—did I ask you then to come do my podcast?
Baron: Uuh… I feel like it was pretty soon after we had run into each other again recently that you emailed me, yeah, but I’m not exactly sure.
Paul: Yeah. I had heard you on somebody else’s podcast and I thought I should get him as a guest, I think he’d be interesting. And so far, so good!
Baron: Oh I thought you were going to say so far, so disappointing.
(Laughter)
Paul: But yeah, I think every person has something unique that is about them and what sets them apart from connecting to other people is their ability to express it, and by going to therapy and by going to support groups you hone that ability to express what’s going on inside yourself so it can only help you as a stand-up comedian. I think one of the questions is, how comfortable are you possibly making less money for a period of time while you find that new thing?
Baron: Right this moment, not that comfortable.
Paul: Yeah.
Baron: I couldn’t be more broke. (Laughs) More broke and more people wanting money from me than I have.
Paul: You know, I think I only need to point to somebody like Marc Maron to say here’s a guy who was ready—I remember him saying to me about six months before he started doing his podcast, ‘What’s the fucking point? I’m just ready to give up and get a day job.’ And I remember saying to him, ‘You have something unique about you.’ I didn’t dream that it would be the podcast but he’s somebody I felt had a voice and when I would watch him do stand-up I would be envious of the places that he would go, and I mean, Christ, he’s the standard. He inspired me to start this podcast, because I was like ‘Wow, people do want to hear about pain, and they do want to hear that kind of stuff,’ so I think the world is changing in terms of what they want to hear. I think what you’re afraid to leave, people are wanting less of. I think podcasts are raising the standard by which the audiences expect some type of emotional expression. So, let’s switch gears to talk about your shallow childhood.
Baron: (Laughs) So shallow! So shallow.
Paul: Yeah. Start off with the whining, would you?
Baron: Yeah. (Wails) Well, where would you want me to start?
Paul: What was your childhood like? Where were you raised?
Baron: I was born in Tupelo, Mississippi – which is right near Onepelo.
Paul: (Chuckles)
Baron: Okay, I was born in Portales, New Mexico, incredibly small town that I don’t remember. My mother was 19 when she had me. She turned 20 three days later; her birthday is right after mine. She was in college at the time, and my great-grandparents, her grandparents, were upset because she had had sex outside of marriage, that’s how oldschool they were. My grandmother was upset that my mum wasn’t get an abortion, because that’s how progressive she was. So my mother had me, and then my great-grandparents raised me until I was probably about six, in a different town called Tucumcari. Route 66 goes smack down through the middle of it. My father is a man named Kenneth – that’s about as much as I know. They were 19 and, as far as I understand it, he was out the moment he found out she was pregnant. He was like, ‘What? I’m out!’ The details are sketchy to me. It’s only been recently – I’d say the last five years – that I’ve been recently interested about my family’s past, my mother’s past and my grandmother’s past, because we just never talked about that stuff. And I don’t know that it was in a sense of ‘Ooh, don’t talk about it, it’s evil secrets,’ just as much as it wasn’t a priority. Nobody was really that interested in it until the people who had the information died and they were like, ‘Where is that, has anyone written that down? We don’t know where it is!’ So the details of where my dad went, how he left, how he disconnected from my mother—because when I think about it, like, well, he was 19 – college. Did he just leave college? Did he just move out of town, like skip town? So I don’t know.
Paul: What does your mum say when you ask her these questions?
Baron: Um… I haven’t really asked. I’m afraid to ask, I think. I don’t know exactly how painful it is or isn’t for her, and again I became curious about it because—I’ve never been curious about my dad in general, I just heard he wasn’t a good guy. I heard he was abusive, physically abusive. But it’s only been recently that I’ve been curious about, like, what qualities do I share with him, you know, because I don’t know.
Paul: What’s the fear that comes up in asking your mum? What do you picture in your head going wrong?
Baron: I guess just the mere idea that I might make her cry upsets me. And I know she won’t, she’s a strong person, you know? She’s become a very strong person.
Paul: What was she busy doing that she couldn’t raise you at 19? Was she still studying?
Baron: School, yeah.
Paul: Yeah.
Baron: She was going to school and she was working a full-time job at the same time. As I remember it, it took her six years to finish college, to get a degree.
Paul: And then you moved back in with her?
Baron: Well, I was in Tucumcari, New Mexico, with my great-grandparents, Gladys and Robert – very churchy people, you know, Southern – they had come from Oklahoma but the roots go back to North Carolina and Tennessee, and they were just very oldschool classic kind of Southern black people. Southern Baptist Church, very important to them, church every single day of the week, something to do, whether it was clean the drapes or have a sing, there’s something to be done at the church, let’s go to the church. And so my mother was in college the entire time and I was with them until probably five or six, and I remember the moment my mother drove up. I specifically remember, I was in this living room of this house, this little house in Tucumcari, New Mexico. I feel like I was in a little boy suit. (Chuckles) I don’t remember why. And I remember her car, Chevy Nova, a baby blue Chevy Nova pulling up to the front and her getting out of it. I was looking out of this screen door at her and I had this dual moment of I remember, that’s my mother, and also ‘I don’t know this woman.’ I felt both those things, like, ‘I don’t know who that is, but that’s my mum.’ I remember feeling in that moment, I don’t know how to react right now, should I run to her, should I hug her, should I stand and wait until she says hi… (Chuckles) I remember feeling that in that—
Paul: That must have been incredibly confusing.
Baron: It was very confusing but I didn’t have the, like, ‘I’ll see how this plays out.’ I remember yes-anding the situation.
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: That’s my mother, yes, and I’m going to see how this plays out.
Paul: Would it be fair to say that you were happy and nervous?
Baron: Yeah, probably more nervous. It was probably more nerves than happiness. I wasn’t like excited or joyful as much as I was like, ‘Oh, what’s happening right now?’ Just kind of like, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’ That’s what I remember feeling.
Paul: Why was being raised by your grandmother never an option?
Baron: Well, my grandmother was a busy woman, and she—because my mum got me—we lived in Tucumcari, New Mexico for another year I believe, which is one of the most – at the time especially – one of the most impoverished states in the country and there was just no work, while my grandmother was in Las Vegas, Nevada, which was, until this recession started, the fastest-growing city in the United States for like a good two decades strong. So we moved there because there was all this work to be done.
Paul: Does that statistic mean outside of VD?
Baron: Yes, yes, outside of us, literal employment.
(Laughter)
Baron: You mean Vegas Disease?! (Laughs) That’s what I caught. But yes, so my grandmother was in Vegas. She didn’t live in New Mexico. And my mother was in a different city in New Mexico, so my grandmother was further away and she—and that’s very sketchy to me what was going on with my grandmother, because she was living in Vegas by herself. My grandmother, her husband, the father of my mother lived in Des Moines, Iowa and they were not together. I do not remember them being together but I remember them being friends through my youth, and we went to see him once when I was a kid and that’s the only time I remember really being around him. But they maintained this friendship and I have theories about my grandmother now that she is gone of like, perhaps she was gay, perhaps she was asexual even. It was never this priority to be in a marriage or to be near a man; she liked being alone. Sometimes I think that she had my mother almost as a sense of duty, like ‘I gotta put something on this planet,’ that’s biological. So, ‘Hi, nice to meet you, Charlotte.’
Paul: (Chuckles)
Baron: She would visit a lot, so I had this really good relationship with her before I knew my mum, I feel like. Me and my grandmother always had a great relationship. Probably the most influential person on me, in my life, and it was in the middle of third grade that we relocated to Vegas. So we didn’t live in that neighborhood that long, and we moved to Vegas to be with my grandmother, and then it was me, my mother and my grandmother, which was my dynamic until I was 12 when my stepfather came into the picture. But yeah, you know, it was a culture-shock as well. I was like, ‘Oh, desert to a hotter desert!’ But of course Vegas is like this idea, and even as a kid I had this sense that Vegas was some magical other place, other things happen there, I don’t know what’ll happen.
Paul: Las Vegas, Des Moines, and New Mexico. What is it genetically that makes your family afraid to be around other black people?
Baron: (Laughs) Well, my neighborhood growing up in Tucumcari was very culturally mixed. When we moved to Vegas we were first in north Las Vegas which is the ghetto. Do you know Kyle Grooms at all?
Paul: Uh-uh.
Baron: Kyle Grooms is a New York comedian. He’s the first person that when I said north Las Vegas said ‘Oh yeah, that’s the ghetto.’ He’s the first person that has ever recognized that Vegas had a ghetto and that I grew up in it, and then there was this moment, I’m like ‘He has just legitimized my blackness! This is the first time this has ever happened!’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the ghetto, I know the ghetto of Vegas.’ So my growing up, it was like white people, black people, Asians, Latinos, and the evasive Native American we also had in Tucumcari, New Mexico.
Paul: Why do you say evasive?
Baron: Because there’s not a lot of neighborhoods with Native American people that are living there.
Paul: Are they mostly on reservations?
Baron: They’re mostly on reservations and they are far and few between, but I grew up with a couple of kids that were Native American kids in my neighborhood, and I have never experienced that ever since, that there were Native American kids in my neighborhood.
Paul: Except for the jackass that tells you they’re one sixteenth Cherokee. (Chuckles)
Baron: Yes, exactly, that jackass. If your percentage is lower than 50%... (Chuckles) And I was higher than 50% when I was a kid, you know, 80%! You might even say 100%! And so I was always in this culturally diverse neighborhood, and when we moved to Vegas, black and Latin, that was it. And then we moved to a different side of Vegas, which was white.
Paul: I was just going to say, you know, it just occurred to me that people that always feel it necessary to let you know that they’re a sliver of Native American now makes sense to me because it’s a way of saying, ‘My people were here first.’
Baron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I own one sixteenth of this land.
(Laughter)
Baron: One sixteenth of one sixteenth of this land is mine.
Paul: Yeah, ‘I’m not as big of an oppressor as you are, genetically.’
Baron: You thought I was just white! Turns out I’m oppressed! (Laughs)
Paul: Yeah, ‘My folks killed each other.’ I’m sorry I cut you off, I just felt the need to share that.
Baron: That’s fine. It’s your podcast.
(Laughter)
Paul: This would be a good time to plug your podcast, which is called Deep Shit.
Baron: Yeah, Deep Shit.
Paul: And you have your guest pick a topic from their life and then you guys go deep into that.
Baron: Yes, as deep as we possibly can. I’m very tangential, me and my guest. I like to have people on more than once as well, because I think it’s interesting to hear the evolution of the relationship between the two people, especially with someone I don’t really know that well, then I start to find a rhythm with them and always the dynamics are different and interesting to me. And so yeah, I’ll have like I just did, Johnny Pemberton was on and we did belonging. I just did human nature with somebody, mortality, heroes… My writing partner, Benari Poulten is his name, wrote his thesis on Superman, and so we had both seen Man of Steel. Have you seen it?
Paul: Uh-uh.
Baron: It’s fascinating! A lot of people have been talking about it but his response was ‘It’s very telling about what America is right now, that this movie exists, that we have no problem believing a guy can fly, but when it comes to him giving a shit about anyone besides himself we need to be hit over the head with the reasons for that. It’s like, ‘Why would he… He’s got powers! What does he care?’
Paul: ‘What does he tweet?!’
Baron: ‘If I had powers I’d just rob banks and fuck bitches! What is he doing?!’ So we talked about heroes just as an idea and what we need from heroes as a cultural society, stuff like that.
Paul: You know, as you’re sharing this stuff and your passion for wanting to go deeper, I just keep thinking, mine that shit in your stand-up!
Baron: Well, that’s why I started the podcast. I’m trying to reveal to myself how I actually feel about these things, so that I can figure it out on stage.
Paul: Yeah, that’s great, that’s great.
Baron: Well, thanks Paul. (Chuckles) I try.
Paul: So, to Vegas. Then you’re living with your grandmother and your mum and your stepdad.
Baron: Well, before my stepdad we were in this part of Vegas called North Las Vegas, Northtown. We were relatively close to Nellis Air Force Base. Kind of a rough neighborhood, very gangy. That was a big thing; we didn’t really have gangs in New Mexico, we had just poor, but then moving to Vegas, now there was this—especially in the early 90s when it was like every day on the news, ‘He’s young, he’s black, he has no ideology, he’s angry, and he’s coming for you!’ And I’m like, ‘That’s everyone I know!’
Paul: (Chuckles)
Baron: I look in the mirror and I’m like, ‘That’s me! Who are they talking about?!’ So there was this constant feeling, this essence of fear. Something is going to happen, a drive-by shooting, this thing that is a shark that is out there, and it will attack and it will happen and you will not be prepared! It is impossible to know, and you will probably die, or someone you know will die. There was always that feeling, was there.
Paul: That’s fucking intense! How is your experience not valid? You just shared that!
Baron: Well, there’s the thing, okay, so this is where I started to go. So—but there are black people who I know that have been shot, you know? I haven’t been shot, I wasn’t shot or stabbed, because I stayed inside! All that stuff is outside. The shooting and the stabbings are outside – I’m going to stay indoors and watch Nick at Night as the day is long!
Paul: By the way, did the gang members all wear pinky rings, because it was Vegas?
Baron: Yeah, basically. No. Well, the mafia at least has respect, you know what I’m talking about? (Chuckles) Vegas has imported the Los Angeles gangs, so everyone was very aware of the bloods and crips and I still am unclear as to how many actual gangs there’s always around, as opposed to how many wannabes. Because the wannabes were sometimes worse to me, because the wannabes were so desperate to prove that they were gangsters, but they don’t know anyone, but they want to stab somebody, they want to rob somebody, and the people that they’re most likely to do that to are the people that they knew. I had friends rob me all the time.
Paul: Really!
Baron: They would just take shit. Like, I would be at home hanging with some friends, and then my grandmother would come home and would be like, ‘Hey, what happened to my’—my grandmother gambled but, like, won. Like, she didn’t have a gambling problem because she knew when to stop. And so she would have just buckets of change all the time. That was one of her favorite things to do, just like count change and watch television. So she would have big fat buckets of quarters, $50, $60, sometimes $100 worth of quarters under her bed. And she didn’t keep them very well hidden, and so if I had friends over sometimes and they were in my room – because I shared with my grandmother for most of my young life – they would just take it. And she would be like, ‘What happened to my quarters?’ And I’d be like, ‘What? Your quarters are gone?’ And then of course all my friends would just be like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Paul: (Chuckles) Jingle, jingle, jingle…
Baron: Yeah, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about…’ Jingle, jingle, jingle… ‘Anyway, we’re gonna go put some money in meters and play arcade games, we just got all these quarters out of nowhere.’
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: But they were like—but also I was like, these are the only people I know, I can’t not—who am I going to be friends with? I have to be friends with the kids that are robbing me. Until I found some nerdy kids.
Paul: What was that like?
Baron: Finding nerdy kids?
Paul: Yeah.
Baron: Well, we moved from the rougher part of Vegas to a less rough part. It became rougher. When I go back to Vegas now sometimes I drive around the neighborhood I spent more of my life in – because I was probably in North Las Vegas from third to fifth grade. Then we moved to a part that was closer to The Mirage, because when The Mirage opened my mum got a job there. So once we moved to that side we were in this apartment complex and I kind of stumbled upon some kids and I don’t remember how it happened, I almost feel like it was just—I almost want to say that I was on a school bus and just kids were declaring out loud to no one at all the things that they liked, and we kind of gravitated towards each other. ‘I ENJOY SEGA GENESIS!’ I’m like, ‘Ah, I’ll sit next to you then! Hello, what’s your name?’ ‘I’m José.’ And then I started becoming friends with kids that liked videogames and stuff like that. I had my nerdy phases, like I was really into videogames, I was really into comic books, I was really into comic book trading cards, but never at the same time. I just kind of jumped from one to another and then—like, my love affair with comic books ended because I walked one hour, no it was more like 35-40 minutes, from my place to the comic book store that was closest to me, and then one day when I got there it was just closed for business. I was like, ‘What?!’ And next door was a place called Pool Sharks, and I’m like, ‘I guess I’m into billiards now!’
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: And I just walked in there and started trying to, because I had a pocket full of quarters from my grandma, I was going to buy some comic books but now I can play some pool I guess. And then I didn’t read a comic book until a couple of years ago when Jackie Kashian insisted I read this particular thing, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I like comics again! Hooray, I’m an adult!’ So I found these kids, Norman and Fred. There was José 1, then there was Raimundo, then there was José 2, and—José 2 was after Norman and Fred, so there was José 1 and Raimundo and those were my friends, and then there was Norman and Fred and they were into Dungeons and Dragons, they were into it. And also Eddie Murphy – they were into Eddie Murphy and Dungeons and Dragons.
Paul: What a combination.
Baron: I know, exactly! And we played ghetto D&D as I described it, because we didn’t fill out sheets of my charisma and my strength and my stamina, it was all about rolling dice, these invented ways to use dice to simulate fighting. That was all we ever really did and that’s all I was ever really concerned about. And also maybe there was a sense of like, ‘We’re in Vegas and we’re using dice! This all makes sense! 10-sided!’ And also, again, there were still a lot of, like—I felt like the sense of gangs started showing up in that neighborhood, but then it kind of just ended. I mean, what was that book, Freakonomics, that claims it was like, ‘Oh, we legalized abortion, that’s why gang violence has kind of dropped off.’ But it did drop off. I remember the—it was like ’93 or ’94, like in eighth grade there was suddenly this threat of drive-bys are gonna happen, we’re gonna get stabbed, we’re gonna get shot, was just lessened and I felt the tension kind of fall off of people’s shoulders. I remember feeling it in the air, like it just felt less humid or something in some way.
Paul: Wow.
Baron: This pall of inevitable dangers just kind of had lifted and everything was a little lighter. And it could also have been that by the time I went to high school, in eighth grade—I think I started playing the violin when I was in third or fourth grade or something, and—because when I was in middle school, elementary school middle school, I got put in like the gifted education programs, because I was so smart… (Chuckles) I wasn’t a straight A student because I was generally bored by things, but I guess the teachers had determined from my demeanor and my ability to engage in class and engage in discussions, that even though I wasn’t turning in the homework, perhaps I just wasn’t interested in homework. So when I got to middle school I was playing violin and stuff like that. I was in an orchestra. And in eighth grade the librarian of my middle school was the wife of the principal of this brand new performing arts high school that had opened in Las Vegas. And I was the class clown because I could make kids laugh and I was always getting sent to the principal’s office for talking, but also I had the ability to read directly off a page without messing up words, so it was like ‘Baron, can you read that chapter for us?’ and I can put something into it, and then some kids were like ‘You should go to this high school I’ve been hearing about,’ like this performing arts, ‘you should go talk to Miss Gary about it.’ So I went to talk to the school librarian and she was like, ‘Yeah, here’s an application.’ And then I ended up auditioning and going to this performing arts high school. Even though I was still living in the same neighborhood, I just kind of disconnected myself from the entire neighborhood. Like, my high school friends became my friends and they lived in completely different parts of Vegas, so they’d drive to me, pick me up and take me somewhere else. But when I was in my own neighborhood I didn’t go—I just stayed at home, and sometimes I would walk to this 7/11, so perhaps this pall of danger, I was just less in the world in a sense and maybe that’s why I felt it as well.
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Paul: Have you, you know, as you describe your stories of things like switching on and off in a kind of binary way, have you always been kind of a binary person where things just end abruptly and another thing begins, or is that just because of the circumstances of what your life was and it’s like, ‘Okay, this is more convenient, I’ll do this now.’
Baron: Wow, I don’t know. I mean, it always has felt ‘This is more convenient, this is more logical,’ in that sense. Like, ‘This other thing I was doing no longer makes sense, I can’t justify it, therefore, vis-à-vis, I will partake in this thing.’
Paul: I gotcha. Okay.
Baron: But it was kind of like… It’s expensive to be a nerd. (Laughs) As a kid, I liked these nerdy things and I was envious of all the kids that had ALL the trading cards and ALL the comic books, and I’m like ‘I can’t afford that stuff.’ So there was a point where I’m just like, ‘I just can’t keep company, I just can’t keep up with these kids.’ So I detached from those things and maybe some of those people as well.
Paul: I see.
Baron: My grandmother surprised me by getting me a Sega Genesis when I was in third, fourth grade, so I had that early, earlier than some of the other kids in my neighborhood, and I was the cool kid, I had videogames. Even though I couldn’t afford all the videogames, I had to rent the games, I was like ‘Ah, I’ll rent this for three days.’ But yeah, so it just kind of like, it did kind of switch for me, where I just kind of got interested in something else and the other thing didn’t hold my interest anymore or it became too cost prohibitive to pursue that interest.
Paul: Do you remember, was there a moment when you realized you wanted to be a performer for a living?
Baron: Yes. My jokey answer, even though it’s absolutely true: in church back in New Mexico. I was cast as Wise Man no. 3 in an activity play and I was immediately upset that I was number 3. No lines! No lines. Only Wise Man no. 1 spoke, and he spoke for all three of us. All three of us, frankincense, gold and myrrh, right? He said it, “We brought you frankincense, gold and myrrh,” or whatever order. I remember thinking, why isn’t gold first? Isn’t that the most important thing? And I remember doing the play in front of the church and he said the line and I just remember thinking ‘Oh, I could do that so much better!’
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: And my great-grandmother used to think that I was going to be a preacher because I was so interested in church, but I was always interested in the theatricality of it. And the preacher was a guy on a stage talking, everyone was with him. So I was like ‘Yes, I want that!’ And I guess when I was a kid I saw that you had to be a preacher. That was the guy that did that.
Paul: Was there a feeling as a kid that made that so enticing to you? Was there a feeling that the real you wasn’t being seen or heard by people that were important in your life? Or am I reading too much into it?
Baron: Hmm. At first—that’s a possibility. At first when I became interested in performing, not so much, but then after that, once we moved to Vegas I would say that became more of the situation. At first my great-grandparents, like I said, they were old school, they were kind of ‘children are meant to be seen, not heard,’ although they did engage me and they were always matter-of-fact about things. They didn’t give me the answers you would give to a kid, you know, about, like, ‘Where do babies comes from?’ ‘There’s a stork!’, you know. I don’t think I ever asked where do babies come from, but I think if I would have asked, I think I was afraid to ask because I knew they would have told me. I would have been the kid that knew. I figured out that there was no Santa Claus very early because it’s easy to figure that out when you’re poor, when you’re like ‘I didn’t get any presents, so does Santa Claus hate me or is my mum buying presents and she can’t afford them?’ Right? So I figured that out, and I remember when I figured out on my own that there was no Santa, and feeling sorry for the kids that still thought there was a Santa Claus. ‘Santa brought me all these things!’ I was like, ‘Your parents bought you all those things, that’s very lucky for you, but there is no Santa Claus. I would know. See you later.’
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: Because when we moved to Vegas and, you know, I’ll tease that actually I don’t want to interrupt your structure. I don’t know what your structure is necessarily.
Paul: There really isn’t.
Baron: It’s a structural structure, for orderly chaos. My mother is a recovering alcoholic, so when we moved to Vegas she was dealing with that but I didn’t really understand it until middle school when it really began to affect me. And so she would go to work, she would come home, she would lock herself in the bathroom, and when she came out she was this other person. And at first I didn’t really get it. I didn’t get that she was drinking a lot, you know, I just thought that she was funner. (Laughs) You know, suddenly she was upset, she was angry, she would come home, she would come out of the bathroom and be like ‘Heeey, let’s do some stuff!’ and I’m like ‘Alright! Hooray!’ And then it wasn’t until when we moved closer to The Mirage and around when my stepfather came into my life and a little bit before that and during him there is when it got darker, when it became like ‘She’s my enemy.’ It was like, she was friend and suddenly it was like she was trying to exert some sort of control over me, to change me. So I wouldn’t go down this path and—and sometimes I think and I wonder, is this connected to my father? Did she see possibly the qualities in me that she saw in my father, and she didn’t want me to be that guy?
Paul: What do you think she saw in you? Because you sounded like such a non-threatening, sweet kid.
Baron: But… I may have been enigmatic. And mysterious. And you couldn’t really tell what I thought about things, you know, about what I did and didn’t like. And from the outside perspective I dropped interest in things so quickly, maybe to her, where I was like really into this thing and suddenly I didn’t care about it anymore, which I just think, that’s what a kid does. ‘Hooray new toy! Meh, it’s old now.’ But before, that’s what I wonder, you know, we haven’t really talked about that specific part of our life. But then my grandmother was such a good buffer because she was there and she was so wise always, I felt.
Paul: Would you grandmother ever say anything to your mother about your mother’s drinking?
Baron: This is where I feel my grandmother wasn’t so wise. I think that my grandmother was too dismissive to my mother. She used to say ‘That’s just drunk talk,’ is what she would say. My mother was very inebriated and my grandmother just kind of dismissed it all as ‘drunk talk’ and ‘don’t listen to her’ and I didn’t really know how to take it. It wasn’t until later when I look back at those times that my mother was just classic crying for help, that she wanted some help, she needed some help. But even when she was saying specifically those things, ‘but she was drunk,’ my grandmother kind of just—it was a wash.
Paul: Like what things would she say?
Baron: She would say things like ‘I hurt, I’m hurting, I’m upset, I do want help.’ She was clear about it.
Paul: She was saying this to her mum, or to you?
Baron: Both of us. She was saying it to my mother but I was there, I was present. And maybe my grandmother as a mean to try to protect me, because I was witnessing these conversations, I was just there, there wasn’t a lot of place in the apartment, there wasn’t a lot of places to go.
Paul: That’s such heavy shit for a kid to be around.
Baron: Perhaps. I mean, I guess I grew up relatively early in that way, so it was like—because at first she was fun and then it did get dark and it did get a little, sometimes, a little physical abuse, which I never really—because my grandparents were old school Southern and they were spankers, and any time I got spanked by my great-grandparents I knew why. I cannot say, even to this day, that they were wrong at any point. I disobeyed them, I specifically did something they told me not to do, I got spanked. Suit the crime to the punishment, or punishment to the crime. But then it was me and my mother and she got physical with me, it was always unclear as to why. And I was like ‘I don’t know that I did anything wrong to deserve this,’ but there was always a part of me that’s like ‘She thinks she’s disciplining me, just let her have this,’ in a sort of way.
Paul: You know, as you talk about this I think of that classic thing where the child feels like the parent so often.
Baron: And I did feel that way. Honestly, the biggest fight we got into when she would get physical with me was when – it’s almost like the TV movie – I would find where she hid her alcohol and I would get rid of it. I would poor it out. I would go and find all the beer and pour it down the drain. I’d find where she hid her vodka and pour it down the drain. And then I would leave it out for her to see that I did these things. You know, ‘I poured your vodka out. I found it, I know where—I’m gonna find it! I’m the alcoholic buster.’ (Laughs) ‘I’m gonna find your alcohol!’
Paul: It sounds to me like your cry for help. You know, like ‘Fuck, I’m a kid here!’ You know?
Baron: ‘I see what you’re doing.’
Paul: ‘Yeah.’
Baron: Maybe, maybe. But I was just like, I almost want to say it was more like me standing my ground. It was like, ‘Look, I know what you’re doing, I’m not gonna take it, I poured it out and I want you to see that I poured it out.’
Paul: What—I don’t think any person listening to this thinks you did wrong by doing that, but what do you remember thinking or feeling when you would pour it out? Was it because you were solely concerned for her safety or do you feel like she wasn’t showing up as your mum, or both?
Baron: Hmm.
Paul: Or some other reason.
Baron: Probably more that she wasn’t showing up as my mum, and that—you know when I said it got dark, I didn’t like how—I wasn’t a fan of who she was anymore when she was drunk.
Paul: Did she start getting mean?
Baron: She got very mean. And like I said, we got physical, we got into physical altercations. Very verbally abusive all of the time. Here’s a specific memory I remember. I’m not dirty but I’m not clean. I’m messy. There’s a difference between messy and dirty. Dirty is just like, everything is disgusting, but I cleaned up after myself, but I’m messy because I’ll put things in piles, and I’ll know what’s in the piles. And that’s how I kept my room when I was a kid, but like I said, I shared a room with my grandmother, so there was two people’s things in there, but usually my grandmother kept her stuff in a very specific area because she was an adult and she knew how to do that, and I would just put things into piles. And my mother did not like how my room looked and I never understood because it wasn’t her room, she didn’t have to come in there. But when she did come in there she was upset about it. Well then, don’t come in! Tell me to come out of the room. Or when you come in, accept that this is how the room will look, right? But maybe she was like ‘No! I’m the disciplinarian, you have to do what I say.’ I remember getting into some fight with her about cleaning my room and I was ignoring her and then I went to sleep, and I remember waking up and, like, my eyes kind of opening, like ‘Why is the light on in my room?’ And then hearing a vacuum cleaner. My mother was just running a vacuum cleaner over anything that was in the room and I remember thinking ‘That’s how a vacuum cleaner works! You’re gonna break this vacuum cleaner.’ And I calmly got out of the bed, took the vacuum cleaner from her, unplugged it from the wall, went to the sliding door of our apartment complex and did a spin and just threw it out into the parking lot. This was probably 11.30 at night. And just threw it.
Paul: And how old were you at that point?
Baron: I think this was probably high school. Maybe a freshman or a sophomore in high school. And I just threw it. And she was standing there just looking at me, kind of with a drunk wobble, or her eyes were kinda open and she was just kinda looking at me and then I went back to sleep. That’s a very specific memory.
Paul: How could that not be?
(Laughter)
Paul: I’m going to remember that for the rest of my life.
Baron: Yeah! But yeah, she was very, just, I disobeyed her, I didn’t heat her, I always just kind of took everything in stride and I wrote her off, and then I decided she was not to be listened to, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and that there was also no talking to her. There was a moment where I got kicked out of the house. That was interesting. Should I go?
Paul: Yeah!
Baron: My grandmother, she taped things, she was never intimidated by electronics as an older woman, programming every VCR, ‘Oh, they’ve got VCRs that tape two programs at the same time!’ She just knew it all, right? And she saw that I was interested in television and interested in performing perhaps, and one day, I think because she was a custodian for the Clark County school district, and she brought home a camcorder one day. Maybe it was because the school was getting rid of it and she was like ‘I’ll take this to Baron,’ and she had this camcorder you could pop in a VHS tape, a regular VHS tape straight into it, and tape stuff. I remember trying to make movies with my friends and stuff like that. And so one day—but it was our camcorder, it was the family’s camcorder, it wasn’t specifically for me, even though my grandmother—I felt like she knew I would the one that used it the most because I like to tape crap for no reason. I came home from school one day and my mother was messing with the camcorder and I remember seeing her sitting on the couch with the camcorder, and she was just messing with it. And she thought I had broken it. The person who probably took care of it more than anything else, and was sober at the time, I had broken the camcorder. Sure, mum! I don’t remember what—I said something that was very monotone and direct, and she didn’t like it. So I went into the kitchen and I said whatever I said to her, I don’t remember exactly what it was, and then I went into the kitchen and went to drink another two liters of Sprite, and she pushed me. She came out of nowhere from behind and just pushed me and the Sprite spilled everywhere, and I remember feeling just crazy in that moment. And I was like ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ and she’s like ‘Who are you talking to?!’ and I’m like ‘I’m talking to you, bitch! What the fuck are you doing?!’ And then a wrestling match happened. (Laughs) She kinda tried to push me up against the wall, tried to give me an elbow to the throat, and I pushed her off, overpowered her, and then I ran to my room. By this time my stepfather was in my life. Really, we’ve never had the best relationship. She courted me for the year that he was courting my mother, and then once they were married it just kind of flipped. It was like ‘Now I’m your father and I need to teach you how to be a man,’ and I was like ‘I’m not interested in anything you’re interested in.’ But he, I want to say by all means was an enabler, and I ran to my room. Because he was convinced that I was the problem as well in some way, and I ran to my room and they—my room had no door knob and neither did the bathroom in the hallway that was “my” bathroom. Because I woke up really early to get ready for school, because school was at 7 and I had to wake up at 4.30 to get ready to leave.
Paul: Jesus!
Baron: Because the bus left at 6.30 and it was a 30 minute walk from the bus, so if I didn’t walk out of my home at 6AM I would miss the bus.
Paul: You would walk a half hour to the bus?
Baron: Yes. 25 minutes specifically, I timed it. If I left at 6 I had to walk pretty briskly to get there in time.
Paul: So what would happen if you missed the bus, just go home?
Baron: I would go home and 9 out of 10 times my grandmother would wake up and drive me to school. That’s what would happen. Because she worked nights, she worked like 3-11 when school was out. She didn’t want to be around the kids, she wanted to clean up and I’m not going into the classroom that has a snake in it, that was her one rule, the end. So yeah, most of the time she would wake up and drive me to school. So when I get home from school was when she was leaving, during the night, the normal hours, my mum would get home at 5 and that’s when all the stuff would happen. My grandmother was never present for it because she was at work. So I ran into my room. This might have been a time when my grandmother was staying somewhere else, because there were times when she would take long respites from my family and stay with a friend. I ran into my room after this physical altercation with my mum in the kitchen, ran to my bedroom and—so, because I woke up so early they were so, like, ‘You were slamming every single door, you were slamming every door!’ and I was so ginger with these doors because I knew it was early and I knew that sound travels more because everything is quiet, and I would always turn them very softly and close the doors very softly and they were like ‘No! You’re slamming the doors!’ So they took all the door knobs off my door, my bedroom door, and the door to the bathroom that I used. So there was no way to close my door. So when I ran into my room I had to hold it closed with my shoulder. And then I heard my stepfather’s voice, I remember him saying, ‘Oh I’m fired up now!’ or something like that. And then he pushed the door open, of course he was an older man so he was stronger than me, pushed the door open and kind of slammed me against the wall with the door, and castigated me for talking to my mother the way I talk to her or whatever, and then I climbed out of my bedroom window – we were on the first floor – and went over to the payphone in the center of the apartment complex. Put a couple of quarters in and I called my friend Tina, who was the girl I was in love with at the time, although nothing ever ended up happening between us, and kind of told her what happened, I just needed to tell someone. And then I went back home. And it was nighttime. I had left the light in my bedroom on, so when I walked up to the window I saw the light turn off. So I was like, ‘Oh, they went into my bedroom.’ Then when I tried the window, the window was locked. Then I went over to the front of the apartment, the door, and there was a trash bag—
Paul: With all your shit.
Baron: With all my clothes in it. Not all of them, they just took a bunch of clothes and threw them in a bag, and then I took that trash bag – no you know what, it wasn’t Tina, it was Danielle. I had a girlfriend at this time. Yes, I actually had a girlfriend at this time, so I went and told her what happened. I took the trash bag and I went upstairs to José 2’s place, stayed the night, and I took the trash bag to school with me that day. And all the jokes—that’s the other thing, like, kids make jokes but I was never bothered by the jokes because I was always funnier than most of the kids. And also it was my trump card, that you can’t say anything that’s gonna make me go ‘What, um, but, um…’ ‘That was not good,’ that’s what I would say to kids when they were playing in the dozens and they would insult someone, like, ‘That’s not good.’ I would stop the game. ‘That is not good.’ And we’d be like ‘Ooh, no, no, that is Undo Award to this guy who just said the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and what are you talking about!’ So I remember going to the bus stop with the trash bag and it was like, ‘What’s that? Are you moving?’ and all the dumb jokes, and I would just stare at people, like ‘Oh, you don’t have anything.’ Just all the hack jokes. ‘Oh, your name’s Baron Vaughn! Baron Vaughn what?’ Right? Basically that equivalent but about a trash bag. So I got on the bus and then went to school and this guy Danny, who now lives in Chicago who I saw recently in Vegas, he knew there was stuff going on at my place, my home. I was never that forthright about it at school. I would talk about it a little bit but also I guess there was a part of me that was like I want attention, but I don’t want attention from this. If I’m gonna get attention from people it’s gonna be on my terms.
Paul: That’s what I’ve heard people say about comedians. We control when people laugh at us, how they laugh at us.
Baron: Exactly. And that’s exactly how I felt about it, is that if I was gonna have attention on me and be popular or whatever, it was gonna be on my terms, it wasn’t gonna be because I’m talking about like, I didn’t want to be a drama queen and just be like ‘Uuuh, my mum, and all these things, waah,’ right? That’s how I saw it at least. So, Danny was someone that I trusted. Of course there was a couple of kids that I trusted. And I told him what had gone on, very matter-of-factly, and he was like, ‘We have an extra bedroom,’ and I lived with him for maybe two months.
Paul: And did you have contact with your mum and your stepdad during that time?
Baron: A little bit. Not a lot.
Paul: And did they ask you to come home?
Baron: No. I think that they knew—or maybe my mum did, my stepdad didn’t really express any—I don’t know how much concern he did or didn’t express. My mother was concerned.
Paul: Was she still drinking at that point?
Baron: Yes. I remember being at school at a date had been set for me to talk to my mum on the phone and I said I will call you after school on this day. I was in the school production of Little Shop of Horrors because I’m amaaazing.
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: And using the office phone at the theatre to call my mum, and I had this explosion that I was embarrassed about because it happened in front of a lot of the kids at school. I was talking to her on the phone, when she answered she was drunk. I was upset about this because I specifically told her when I was going to call and I thought that she would have the decency to not be drunk, right? Now of course, later I’m like, it’s a disease! It’s a disease, she doesn’t really have that much control. I mean, she has control over it but she was probably afraid and scared and in pain, and what’s the one thing that makes her feel better? Now I know that, now, later I figured that out. But then I was like, ‘How dare she! She should not…’ Blah, right.
Paul: In her mind she was probably also – and I know because I’m a recovered alcoholic – in your mind you’re going to have one or two, but the chemical process in an alcoholic is different because it creates the craving for more.
Baron: Right, right. So, when I talked to her she was drunk, I was upset, I yelled so much and—I just remember, I was in this office and somehow I suddenly wasn’t in the office, like it was too small for me to get—I needed to walk around and I went into the lobby, and there was a lot of kids that were in the play that were there and I had this scene on the phone in front of them. I remember hanging up and like—I don’t remember what I said but everybody laughed. I have no idea, I want to say I just like, I hung up and, ‘And scene! Thank you very much everybody! You can catch me next week.’ I remember hanging up the phone and just, I don’t know, I never—see, I’m not a big crier, which I regret. I wish I did, because that stuff has to come out, right?
Paul: It does.
Baron: I’m more of a processor. I’ll sit and I’ll stew, and I’ll be like ‘Okay, how do I feel? I feel this, I feel that, it’s okay, feel those things, but you still got shit to do.’ That’s kind of where I’ve always been. So it didn’t happen, and I lived with my girlfriend for the majority of my senior year of high school. This was junior year that this fight happen, so I did go home, but then I decided—
Paul: She must have had pretty liberal parents.
Baron: She did, actually my two girlfriends in high school liked me so much, they had no problem with me spending the night at their house in their daughters’ room in their daughters’ bed. That’s how much parents trust me. They are so wrong…
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: No, but I think maybe they knew I was going to be respectful, like I wasn’t going to make their daughter do anything that she didn’t want to do or that—parents liked me, I don’t know why, I still don’t know why. They’re just kind of like, ‘Oh, this kid is cool, he’s funny, he can carry a conversation…’
Paul: You’re a likeable guy!
Baron: Alright Paul, I get it!
Paul: (Laughs)
Baron: I’m not funny, I get it!
Paul: Did that make you uncomfortable?
Baron: Yeah, of course, what are you talking about? I’m horrible at compliments. So yeah, I lived with my girlfriend for most of high school. I stayed in her room and her mum drove us to school and that was pretty much my senior year, and then I would go home sporadically to pick something up that I needed until I had kind of a little suitcase. I lived out of a suitcase most of my senior year of high school, until I went to college and then I went as—I went to Boston, as far away as I could possibly get, and having these awkward conversations with my mum where she would call my dorm room and I felt I needed to talk to her because I think that I missed her in my own way, even though I had decided that I didn’t love her. I remember saying out loud in high school, ‘I don’t love my mother, that is not a feeling that I am capable of, love for my mother.’ Right? And then going to college and feeling that I needed to let her talk to me. I knew it was important to her to talk to me, as much as I didn’t want to talk to her. And it’s awkward, just her talking and I’m like ‘mhm, yeah’ until 15 minutes went by. I remember I would look at a clock until it was 15 minutes to feel like this was a long enough conversation for her, ‘Hey, I gotta go do some stuff,’ and I would find some reason to get off the phone. Honestly, a theater class is where my perspective of my mother flipped. It was once in my sophomore year of college. There was this one exercise where we had to – two lines of students across from each other – we had to envision the person we were looking at as our oppressor, a time when we were oppressed. I envisioned that fight with my mum over the camcorder, and I looked at this girl, it was a girl too, as if she was my mother, and we had to physically recreate our bodies in that moment, how we felt physically when we were being oppressed. So I remember this cowering anger, it was like all contorted and ready to fight and afraid at the same time, which is how I felt. Then she said, ‘Now become the body of the person that oppressed you. Now look at the person you are looking at as if they are you and become the body of your oppressor.’ And I remember standing up and trying to take my mum’s body and remember her in that moment, and it was in that moment in that body that—shit, here it comes. It was in that moment in that body that I felt her fear, and I felt her pain. And I said, fuck, she’s just a woman. She was a single mother with a son in a city she didn’t know, and she was afraid. I have to give her some fucking credit. And that was the beginning of when it changed for us. Because I felt I was her in that moment. I felt her fear and her pain and I was like, ‘I’ve been unfair,’ is what I thought to myself. That I do love her. She’s my fucking mother, right? So, I don’t exactly know how it started, but it was like, over the summer after my sophomore year of college where I think I went back to Vegas or something, and I told her I wanted to take her dinner. She did show up drunk, and I let it go this time, because this time I knew it wasn’t about me, you know. I almost want to say that I said something as simple as ‘I forgive you,’ and she was going through some shit because she started showing up to work drunk, then when she lost her job—but it’s not clear to me because I was in Boston, that she went to some center and detoxed and got sober and I finally felt it was my mission to help her, and that—that’s where I say, like, my grandmother write her off, I’m like I can’t do that; my stepfather I felt was enabling her, I can’t do that. This woman just needs to be loved. I can do that. I can give her that. And I think that we repaired a lot of stuff that summer between my sophomore junior years of college, which is one year before I started doing stand-up. The end. (Laughs)
Paul: Wow.
Baron: Wow, I did it! I’m so proud of myself, Paul! (Laughs)
Paul: Dude… I’m speechless in so many ways. The first thing that strikes me is, what an innately compassionate person you are, and at that age to be able to put yourself in her shoes, I mean, I’m awestruck as a 50-year-old who’s been working on myself for 20 years, at the place that you were able to get to—in college, in your sophomore year of college, I mean that’s—I’m just, I’m speechless.
Baron: You shouldn’t be, that’s bad for the podcast. (Laughs)
Paul: Let me finish – I’m speechless at what a baby you are.
Baron: Oh, okay, that’s what it was.
Paul: No, dude… You know, it’s moments like that, that you just shared, that make me feel like this is the greatest job in the world.
Baron: Well, I can’t say that I was expecting this to happen but it’s like, I do not tell this story often. I can’t even remember the last time I told it. Probably it was in a relationship where me and this girl were obviously getting very serious and we were just talking about a lot of stuff and this stuff came up one day and it very rarely does. I rarely tell this story. And there’s a part of me also when it comes to stand-up that I’m like, I don’t know if it’s a fear of wanting to talk—I want to talk about some of this stuff on stage, but you know what I have gotten, I’ve gotten ‘aaw’ at shows, just at like a dark joke sometimes. I yelled at a girl once, I’m like ‘You can’t do that!’ But there’s also a part of me that’s like, me and my mother got through this, like I said. She’s probably the first person I run jokes by now. Where I’m like, I call her—
Paul: When did she get sober?
Baron: It was in February… I’m trying to remember the exact—it may have been… Yes, 13 years.
Paul: So shortly after that?
Baron: Um, yeah. Shortly before that or shortly after that. No, you’re right, it was shortly after that, because I was still in school, it was the first semester of school, and February is the second semester.
Paul: Has she ever apologized to you about the stuff that she put you through.
Baron: Yeah, we talked about it.
Paul: What did that feel like?
Baron: Um… I felt at peace with it. Like, I know that it’s from watching movies and watching TV, because I feel like—I was saying this to my girlfriend the other night, we were watching some show and I made some joke about ‘Oh no, this person’s gonna be concerned about something petty, and then that person’s gonna be concerned about something petty, and it’ll be hilarious! That’s how drama happens, everyone just has petty concerns.’ Sometimes in those shows, when someone wants to apologize, the person who is getting apology is petty, like, ‘It’s not good enough, you shouldn’t…!’ So I guess I had this consciousness that I see this scene, I’ve seen this scene in movies and people just can’t let the apology happen because they want to bring up all the stuff that they feel they should get an apology for. So when my mother apologized I think I simply said – and this is a credit to theater school and some teachers that taught me how to talk and taught me how to accept shit, you know – I want to say I said something to the effect of, ‘I know, and I accept your apology, and I am sorry as well.’ And I accepted her apology for everything and anything that it could possibly apply to. I don’t need to rehash everything, I don’t need to point at every single thing that you think you’re sorry for. I know that you are sorry, and I forgive you, again. And I was in Boston for the summer, that summer when we hashed it out, and there is NOTHING happening in Boston during the summer. It’s a college town, everyone is gone. I was spending a lot of time alone but it was good time alone, and I almost want to say that me and my mum talked on the phone every single day, even if it was only for ten minutes. We talked and we just kept—we got to know each other, like who we were in those moments, who I was then, who she was then. We got to know each other and that’s the relationship we have now. So there’s a part of me that feels like we’ve gone through this and since we’ve processed it, and I don’t necessarily feel the need to dwell on it. I’m reluctant to talk about it on stage. Because sometimes some people can talk about this stuff and they dwell on it. There’s a way to talk about it where you’re not just dwelling in it. I don’t know that I have figured out how to do that yet, so I’ve kind of stayed away from it.
Paul: Mm. You know, my thought on that is that there is—I think forgiving that person is so important, but it’s only a part of going back and looking at that stuff, because there’s almost always some part of our soul that we didn’t get all of that poison, whatever you want to call it, out, and hopefully – and I say this all the time on the podcast – hopefully we don’t re-examine our childhoods to make our abusers or our caregivers suffer; we do it so we can process the feelings we’ve been running from our whole lives so we can stop suffering. And I say that to you in the hope that you don’t minimize what you could get out of going back and processing that, not only personally but maybe even professionally and as a performer I think you can help other people by things you may glean from that, even if it only moves your personal peace a quarter of an inch, being an expressive, articulate person like you are, you could make lightbulbs go on for somebody sitting and just watching you at a show that you don’t even think much of, that could just be just another show to you. That’s my thought on that. I’m such a cheerleader for therapy and support groups, especially when I see somebody like you who I think can carry the message of emotional recovery and—yeah, that’s my thought on—
Baron: Well, my mother is, you know, her group is great, the people are great, and they are very strong together and tight-knit. They’re just fantastic for her, you know. And I’ve met them a couple of different times, people’s barbecues and stuff like that, and yeah, it’s good stuff. So it’s like, I’ve personally considered some groups myself. And you know, the thing about therapy that I come back to is, when will I find the time/money for it? Especially right now. And I know that there are places I can go that aren’t that expensive, or—
Paul: Sliding scale.
Baron: Yeah, and I’m figuring out—maybe I’ll figure that out. I mean, I’m still struggling with it, you know what I mean?
Paul: Mm.
Baron: I’m trying to figure out where—or what I can get out of it, when I can get something out of it.
Paul: You know, there’s this weird thing in the universe that I’ve discovered, where if we’re open to something and we kind of say, ‘I’m going to do that healing thing if an opportunity presents itself,’ the universe has this weird way of meeting us half-way in opportunities presenting themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if you kind of give in to that idea that something doesn’t roll your way to make it easier. It makes me a little uncomfortable to say that because I’m afraid people are gonna be going ‘Ooh, put your new-agey spirituality and the fucking box where it deserves,’ but that’s my truth, and I’m not going to apologize for speaking it.
Baron: Well, I’m sorry that’s your truth.
(Laughter)
Paul: Dude, I want to thank you so much for sharing your life. It’s been really great hearing it and seeing you just open up your ribcage and—
Baron: (Laughs) I’m surprised. I am surprised. This is very intimidating. (Laughs)
Paul: I suppose it is, because like, when I did Maron’s podcast and talked about stuff, I second-guessed myself. I secretly hoped that he wouldn’t air it because I thought I came across as just a blubbering mess. I didn’t even cry on it but I just talked about all my pain and I just felt so exposed and—
Baron: Well, I don’t even realize—like, I’m starting to get emails from listeners from my podcast and I don’t even realize how exposed I am, how much I’ve been sharing. Even friends of mine are like, ‘Man, I heard last week’s podcast, I can’t believe that stuff’ and I’m like ‘What, how did you…? Oh yeah, I guess I’m just talking and saying everything and I’m not even thinking about it.’
Paul: Your story is so much deeper than you think it is, and the abandonment that you experienced I think is so much deeper than you think it is. But I think that’s how we dealt with it, we had to deny that it was that big of a deal, and kids are pretty resilient too but it leaves some parts of us that are unhealed that goes beyond just forgiving that other person.
Baron: Well, they’ve been coming up recently. I think that, kind of as you said a little bit, certain things are starting to, as a teacher of mine used to say, demand attention.
Paul: Mhm.
Baron: So it was like, okay, so there’s The Alchemist, it’s The Alchemist. (Laughs) Derivative.
Paul: Yeah. Well, Baron, thank you so much for coming and doing this. And people can check out your podcast, it’s called Deep Shit and they can check out your website, baronvaughn.com, and I would imagine anything that they want to find out about you they can find out through—
Baron: Through the website, yeah.
Paul: And you’re Twitter handle is @barvonblaq.
Baron: Yeah, something I thought was clever but it’s always confusing.
Paul: (Laughs) Thank you so much.
Baron: Thank you.
Paul: As I said, many thanks to Baron. I really enjoyed that conversation and getting to know a little bit about his life. Before we take it out with a stack o’ surveys – I think we’re definitely going to be pushing the two-hour mark on this episode – I want to remind you that there are a couple of different ways to support this show if you feel so inclined. You can go to the website, mentalpod.com, and make you there a one-time PayPal donation or, my absolute favorite, a recurring monthly donation for as little as $5 a month. Once you set it up it just automatically gives me $5 to, you know, $50 a month depending on how much you want to contribute. I think you can do $50. And you don’t have to do anything to it, unless your credit card expires or you want to cancel. So please go do that. You can also support this show by, when you shop at Amazon, do it through the search portal on our homepage, it’s on the right-hand side about half-way down. You can also support us non-financially by spreading the word through social media or going to iTunes and writing a nice review and giving us a good rating, it boosts our ranking and brings more people to the show.
I think that is about it. Let’s get to the surveys. Actually, I’ve got a couple of emails I want to kick it off with first. This one is from Sandy and she says, “Let me start by saying thank you for making this podcast. I found it sometime in the last couple of months and have been listening to episodes randomly out of sequence. I was listening to episode 14 with Wendy Liebman and was disturbed to hear you ask her point blank for her height and weight when discussing her eating disorder. Perhaps other people have already emailed you about this but I paused my listening to let you know that “numbers” questions are not healthy for the eating disordered. One of the many issues is that the implications of your question was, ‘How sick were you?’ which tends to lead to disordered thinking for the interviewee and some listeners. Thank you for this podcast and your appreciation of feedback.” Thank you for sharing that, Sandy. As I say, I’m not a mental health professional and feedback is always appreciated.
This is an email from a guy named Ryan, and he writes “You mentioned in one of the last episodes you might not read the sexual parts of surveys. I feel it would be a loss to miss out on the sexual part. It is core to almost every living person. It is also one of the most haunting societal oppression tools. You diffuse that crushing societal judgment by reading out the rainbow of internal human sexual experience.” Thank you for that, Ryan.
This is just an excerpt from an email I got from a listener named Steve, and he writes “After repeatedly listening to people who, when asked whether or not they’ve been sexually abused, respond with “Some stuff happened but I’m not sure.” I had the thought, ‘boy, I’m lucky I never went through any of that,’ followed a second later by the thought, ‘What the fuck am I talking about? That’s exactly what happened to me!’” It’s crazy how our brains will bury shit.
This is from the Struggle in a Sentence survey filled out by a guy named Garrett. He’s between 16 and 19. About racial and cultural bias he writes, “I have shame that racism has made me want to be white more than anything in the world.”
This is from the same survey, a woman who calls herself Skynyrd – I’m holding my Bic lighter up right now – she’s in her 30s. About her depression she writes, “When I’m low I call myself such horrible names that if someone else were to call me them, I would beat them beyond recognition.” About her co-dependency she writes, “I beat other people down and call them out all the time because I’m too much of a pussy to be strong, so I fake it.” About being a sex crime victim she writes, “I’m pissed that this piece of shit robbed me and my boyfriend of having a healthy sex life. I could always fuck after I was raped, but I can’t make love anymore. I miss it.” That breaks my heart. Big hug to you, Skynyrd. I can’t imagine how hard that’s got to be to heal from.
This is also from the same survey, filled out by a woman who calls herself Mouse, she’s in her 20s. About her depression she writes, “The whole world outside my bed is scary, hard, complicated, it’s a haze that will never clear.” Oh my god, do I relate to that. About her anxiety she writes, “It’s like I’m driving a speeding car and no matter how hard I stretch, my foot can’t reach the breaks. The crash is imminent and there is nothing I can do to stop it.” About her panic attacks she writes, “Like I’m holding on to sanity by my fingertips and if I let go I will tumble head over heels into the abyss.”
Same survey filled out by a woman who calls herself Her. She’s in her 30s. About her love addiction she writes, “A fantasy or a way to take me back something.” About her sex addiction she writes, “Somehow that’s how I learned to take my power back.” About racial and cultural bias she writes, “Black men are aggressive and dirty, white men are dirty and weak, and women are red lips with jagged teeth, so who is left?”
This is a Happy Moments survey filled out by a woman who calls herself Molly. She writes, “This happy moment occurred recently. I have depression and anxiety and I rarely experience true joy. I was leaving the grocery store and walking through the half-empty parking lot. The sun was just beginning to go down and the sky was an amazing pinkish grey color. The temperature was perfect with a slight breeze and I just stopped in the middle of the parking lot and stared up at the sky. Generally I’m extremely self-conscious and anxious but at that moment I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. I stood there for about a minute just staring at the sky and it felt like I was smiling at the universe and it was smiling right back at me.” I love moments like that.
This is from the Shouldn’t Feel This Way survey, and this was filled out by a guy who calls himself Plank and he’s in his 30s. What would you like people to say about you at your funeral: “He was a great guy.” How does writing that make you feel: “Assured.” If you had a time machine, how would you use it: “The usual, grassy knoll, video camera.” “I’m supposed to feel safe around my friends but I don’t, I still need to prove myself.” I really related to that one. How does it make you feel to write your feelings out: “Distantly uncomfortable.” Do you think you are abnormal for feeling what you do: “Yes.” I couldn’t disagree more. Would knowing other people feel the same way make you feel better about yourself: “Yes.” Well, rest assured, Plank. You are so normal in feeling and thinking those things.
Same survey, Shouldn’t Feel This Way survey. This was filled out by a woman who calls herself Kelly, and she is in her 30s, identifies as asexual. What would you like people to say about you at your funeral: “I don’t think I would like to have one, yet at the same time I fantasize about dying and seeing people finally seeing that I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t make it, and some sick part of me wants people to feel bad, to cry, to maybe toss a black rose on my coffin. I honestly don’t think I would even receive a funeral. How do I explain that?” I know it sounds like I probably am going overboard in telling people how I relate to their feelings but that feeling of wanting people to cry at my funeral, yes, I totally get that. I want them to be happy and I want them to cry. I want them to experience every emotion in the universe at my funeral. I want them to even experience ennui. I want them to just stare absent-mindedly through the window and think what might have been. The only thing I don’t agree with you or feel the same way is the black rose on the coffin. That to me sounds like it’s out of a bad movie or something. Not to criticize your funeral… (Chuckles) Your funeral fantasy. How does writing that make you feel: “Like I always do. That I’m alone with this pain and knowing I have the other half of my life ahead of me and not wanting to experience this pain anymore. It won’t stop in my head. It’s like a montage of horror movies made up of my past cycling through my head. It won’t stop and I search for things to make me numb.” Again, I so relate to that, wanting something to numb the pain when it comes up.
If you had a time machine, how would you use it: “I would like to see what my grandfather did to my mum. She was sexually, physically and emotionally abused. It would hurt, but I would understand. My mum has never hurt me but seems like it’s a vicious cycle with the women in my family. We seem to be victims.” “I’m supposed to feel grateful for having a caring husband and having time off from work to work on my PTSD but I don’t, I feel guilty and helpless.” “I’m supposed to feel angry at the people that hurt me throughout my life but I don’t, I just want them to go away, I just want peace.” How does writing that make you feel: “It makes me feel like I have so much more to say but the words are jumbled. I wish there was a way to record my thoughts. I just can’t get them out.” I highly recommend it, if you’re not in therapy already – it sounds like you might be – that and journaling would be a great way to get your thoughts out and, my old chestnut, support groups. There is nothing like hearing other people struggle to get their words out to let you know it’s okay for it to come out imperfectly.
Do you think you are abnormal for feeling what you do: “Yes. I don’t understand why after all these years at age 35 all the repressed memories of abuse are attacking me now. Why? I don’t understand.” Would knowing other people feel the same way make you feel better: “Oh god, yes.” Well, Kelly, I’m 50 and shit just came roaring back to me at 49 years old and I’m just processing it now, so you’ve got 15 years – clock’s ticking. (Chuckles) It’s a process. It is a process. Be patient with yourself. It comes out, it has its own timetable, and it’s one of the biggest ways of time is wishing that our processing of pain was different.
This is from the Shame and Secrets survey filled out by a woman who calls herself Raquel. She’s straight, she’s in her 20s, was raised in a stable and safe environment. Never been sexually abused. Deepest darkest thoughts: “Because of what happened at my previous job, on the one hand I feel like a liar and a fraud, on the other hand I feel pathetic that I let the opinion of one person, my ex-boss, have so much control over me. I feel like I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for lying about why I had to leave my job early but at the same time I feel bad about myself for deceiving people for months just so I can make some money. I wish I could get over this and stop obsessing around something I have no control over anymore.” Deepest darkest secrets: “I lied to my boss and co-workers about why I had to suddenly quit my previous job. At the time I was living abroad and working at an English Academy. I told the owner of the school that my fiancé had been accepted to a grad school program which is why I had to quit teaching at the school before classes ended in June. What really happened, though, is that we had planned to have our wedding in Chicago in April and I had known since September that I wouldn’t be finishing the school year. I waited until the last minute to tell my boss so that she would hire me on again in September and give me as many classes as possible. When I finally told her I was leaving she took it very personally and put a lot of guilt on me, so much so that I am still obsessing about it months later.” I wanted to read this, Raquel, because I think this might have been the least dark Shame and Secrets survey I have ever read. So I’ll be mailing a trophy to you shortly and with the envy of the rest of us, that our shame and our secrets could be so mild, so for the love of God, forgive yourself. That is such a—I know our feelings are our feelings, but my God, I think we all long for something like that to be our deepest darkest shame and secrets.
Her strongest sexual fantasies: “Feeling desired by older men.” Would you ever consider telling a partner or close friend: “Yes, my husband is both older and turned on by me.” You know what, Raquel? Fuck you. Fuck you for having such a good—(chuckles)—a good healthy life and rub it in our face. Of course I’m kidding. I like to read stuff across the spectrum.
This is Shame and Secrets survey filled out by a guy who calls himself Charlie. He’s 20, he’s straight, was raised in an environment that was a little dysfunctional. Ever been the victim of sexual abuse: “Some stuff happened but I don’t know if it counts as sexual abuse. Up until a few weeks ago I never thought I had been sexually abused. However, as I have been becoming more physically intimate I am starting to suspect that I was molested as a child and have repressed the memory. Whenever I get close to someone and they touch me in certain places on my body I begin having flashes of feelings and images of being molested by someone when I was a young child. I’m still trying to figure out what this means and when this happened and who did it to me.” I highly recommend getting into therapy and just starting to talk about it, instead of waiting to have clarity on it so you can go talk about it. It almost – in my opinion – always happens the other way around, as we begin talking about it, stuff begins coming back. And sometimes it doesn’t, and that doesn’t matter; it’s the feelings that are important to process.
Deepest darkest thoughts: “Many of my sexual fantasies involve me changing my gender and, by extension, life becoming infinitely better. I’m not transgender or anything, in fact I’m pretty secure and comfortable about being a guy. I’m just really confused where this comes from and how it affects my behavior when I meet certain women. Graphic sexual scenarios play out in my head whenever I meet a woman. As a result I don’t know where any of this comes from but I am making the effort to put it to an end. I don’t objectify women, I’m basically a feminist in my own right. I’m just having trouble reconciling these thoughts and how I really feel.” Man, you know, my thought is just, give in to it. We’re all unique, we’re all across the spectrum of sexuality and it’s such a waste of time wishing that we had different sexual fantasies. It’s like wishing that we had, you know, longer arms, it’s not changing, it’s not gonna happen, so we might as well find a way to live with it, and you know, it doesn’t sound like something to me that anybody should be embarrassed about.
Deepest darkest secrets: “I’m seriously starting to suspect that I was molested as a child and repressed the memory. I haven’t told anyone this. I’m afraid of telling my family because they have been very passive when it comes to issues I’ve had all my life. I have Asperger’s and am bipolar. I’m also unsure/hesitant of bringing it up to friends. I know I will need to tell someone soon because the knowledge that this happened to me is slowly tearing me apart from the inside. I’ve been lashing out at people more and more. I’ve been disconnecting from my social life and I’ve just become much more withdrawn from people as a result of this discovery. I haven’t given up hope and I know that with help I can get back on track. I’m just trying to figure out the first steps right now.”
Sexual fantasies most powerful to you: “Most fantasies I have come back to me changing my sex. The idea of changing my gender is the backbone of pretty much every sexual fantasy I have. They all follow the same pattern: my sex is changed for some reason and as a result my sex life/social life and overall quality of life is improved. I don’t know why this is the case. I’m fairly confident in saying that I’m a straight guy. I don’t want that to sound like I’m coming off as any kind of homophobe or bigot because I’m not; I’m just really perplexed why this seems to be the only fantasy that I have and nothing else ever seems to draw a response from me. I’m starting to wonder if there’s any connection between this and my most likely molestation as a child.” Would you ever consider telling a partner or close friend: “I don’t think so, mainly because I’m afraid of how they would respond if I told them. Frankly, I’m just as weirded out by this as they probably would be if I told them.” Do these secrets and thoughts generate any particular feelings towards yourself: “Mainly confusion more than anything else. I’m just really confused where this is coming from and what it really means. I know that I’m not transgender but this only leads to further confusion about why the fantasies play out.” I hope you can get to a place where you’re at peace with that.
This one is a little too long to read because the show is running a little bit long, but it was filled out by a girl named Jackie who—I think she’s 17, and she’s just really struggling and she has attempted suicide and is really having trouble finding someone to connect to that is emotionally capable of having the conversations with her that she needs to have. She had a bad experience or at least an unfulfilling – I don’t know what the word would be – experience with calling a suicide hotline and I just want to urge you to keep reaching out to people who are appropriate and have the emotional capacity to handle something this heavy. Most people aren’t equipped to be able to handle somebody saying ‘I attempted suicide and I’m in this terrible place,’ but a mental health professional should be equipped to do just that. And just know that you’re not alone, Jackie, and I’m sending you a big hug.
This is from the Happy Moments survey filled out by a guy who calls himself Jasper and this one just kinda made me chuckle. He writes, “I played in an awful punk band in high school. We had a gig with this shitty metal band at an event hall we rented out. It was a straight edge show because we were a straight edge punk band (cringe). During our set we played a song and our singer yelled out, ‘During Jasper’s bass solo, break something!’ The audience did. I felt great about that.” I wish I would have been there, that would have been fun.
This is also from the Happy Moments survey, and this was filled out by a guy named Dan who is in his 20s. This starts off depressing but bear with me. After getting bullied so much that I failed everything in high school, I dropped out and went to college. It was a really shit college that anyone could get into and it was a course that literally anyone could pass. For seven years people would verbally abuse me and tell me that I was destined to fail. I went into a major depression and dropped out of college. I then found this podcast. For ages it was the only thing I lived for, no word of it a lie. If I had never found this podcast, who knows where I would be right now. Anyway, once I had found this podcast I decided to seek medical help. Then, long story short, I woke up one day, said ‘fuck this shit’ and applied to a better college, passed the interview, got accepted, and two years later passed my course. I am now heading to university, something everyone laughed at the idea of, and I am the first person in my family to do so. The happy moment I am talking about is today, the proudest moment of my life.” Well, if this podcast played even a tiny bit in that, Dan, that makes me feel really good, but remember you are the one that did the work. And I thank the people that inspired me to go inside myself and walk towards the pain, and without them I wouldn’t be doing this podcast. So just thank that long chain of people that God knows when it started that have been sharing their pain with other people so that they can feel less alone.
And this final one from, again, the Happy Moments survey, filled out by a woman named Kendra. She writes, “I remember sitting in the middle of my mum’s garden and watching the bees zip around. We moved so often that I never really felt like I had a home but my mum always managed to have a garden. Sitting in the sunlight on the earth and watching the bees gave me a feeling of roots and peace that I didn’t experience elsewhere.”
I love these moments where people are just totally present and just seeing what’s around them and just soaking it in. I guess that’s what people call mindfulness and I think a lot of us who have been through traumatic or unpleasant episodes in our lives, we learn to go into our head for fantasy and there’s just nothing like being present. I hope we’ve said something today that helps you and just remember you’re not alone. Thanks for listening.
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