Marc Spitz

Nobody needs to explain what went wrong with the Yankees last night. Even my dog sent me a text that read “Rill Rughes ras ro ritching rontrol.” When I was a drunk (and I mean like, a pint a day before even leaving the apartment to start trouble drunk) my friend and I used to call Jim Beam “Failure.” “Let’s go get a bottle of failure.” Last night was a bottle of failure. Brian Bruney just smells like failure when he goes up to the mound. What the fuck are these people doing? I hope I will eat my words later. Another game. Another show. The final three before the play closes. Last night was a good one but a weird audience. Sometimes they’re like sports fans, whooping and woo-ing. Other times they’re like a fucking oil painting (of an assemblage of douchebags at that). The dudes who were in my most obscure and certainly strangest play were there (the play, called The Hobo Got too High is from the “Failure” era let’s say, as I was often mixing my “Failure” with blow and valium… which is probably one of a half dozen reasons why I’m not… well, rich and famous… but at least I’m alive because you know… there were times). It’s my friend Maureen’s favorite play of mine. She was one of maybe thirty people who saw it at Todo Con Nada on Ludlow Street. It’s basically about a fucked up “Failure” who is in love with a girl but can’t swing it, and has conversations with Marvin Gaye while he gets high alone (the title is from a Dylan song… back then I was naming plays about Joy Division after Stone Roses songs). So I saw this dude during the file out and he says, “Are you Marc Spitz,” and I said, “Well, yes I am.” And he said, “I was in a play of yours,” and I was like, “Marvin Gaye!” I guess I’m old enough and have written enough plays now that people are starting to step to me and say things like, “I was in a play of yours.” Old enough that some mirthless crank from Time Out can refer to my theater career this way: “In a way, it’s sweet that when punk ages, it doesn’t go goth—it goes Restoration. Downtown playwright Marc Spitz has spent a decade sniping at pop culture and its discontents, imagining an afterlife for Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and getting a tidy reputation for sloppy plays about the rock mindset. But in his flaccidly produced, Viagra-inspired Up for Anything, Spitz—apparently trying to create the most disposable entertainment imaginable—recalls nothing so much as the bawdy, silly comedies of Sheridan and Congreve, in which characters exist only to issue cutting remarks and tumble into shallow liaisons.” I guess I need to read Sheridan and Congreve now. The first thing I thought of when I read that review, and pretty much the only ting was, “wow, I have a context now.” Fuck me for wanting to try something different. This woman was there at Newport booing Dylan. I saw her. I was there woo’ing! I think I’m going to listen to Marvin Gaye while wiki-ing Sheridan. It’s a Gaye, gray day and Marvin, he was a friend of mine (friend of mine). That dude knew the Brian Bruney stink of “Failure,” and the flipside, the joyful cry, the “woo” that I sometimes hear in the crowds at my play, the one Cameron Crowe writes about in the long version of Almost Famous, Oh, what someone CAN explain to me, since I like pretty much every other writer I know especially those with new books, have started compulsively checking Amazon for Bowie numbers even though I and nobody I know can decipher what it means to be number 5,000 (which I am, give or take) or like 5,000,000 (which I am sure a couple of my other books are). Where is Casey K. to break it down for me. Seriously if you know the formula, “hip” me. Feet on ground. Reaching for stars. Rooting for Yankees. Here comes Success.