Sam Kinison’s Night With Marc Maron Was Coke-Fueled Insanity
Did you know comedian Marc Maron has an advanced degree? As he recently explained on a Dr. Phil LIVE! podcast, he completed his graduate work in cocaine studies under the tutelage of the late Sam Kinison.
Back in the late 1980s, Maron was working as a doorman at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. “That was a fucking crazy time, man,” he said, remembering how he met Kinison at a house called Cresthill, a place Mitzi Shore owned where she put up vagabond comics.
Though Maron was just getting his start in comedy, he had already started snorting cocaine and figured he was getting the hang of it. He was on the way to becoming a “fucking professional blow guy,” he said. “And then I met fucking Sam.”
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Kinison was the true professional, a man of monstrous appetites as immense as his comedic talents. One night, he invited Maron to hang out and share some blow. “So we’re up there in that house, just me and Sam,” the comedian remembered. “It’s like one in the morning, and he’s cutting lines, and he’s saying shit like, ‘Look me in the eye, Maron! I don’t trust a man who can’t look me in the eye!’”
The two continued their blow binge for hours until Kinison came up with a new idea. “He goes, ‘You ever burned money, Maron?’”
“No, I haven’t burned money, Sam.”
Kinison took out a wad of twenties and proceeded to light them on fire. “We’re just burning his money, and I don’t know what the point of that was,” Maron said. “I’m just doing coke with this comedy star. I'm like, ‘I’ll burn your money, man. I don’t care.’”
Eventually, the cocaine ran out. Taking the money that had not yet been burned, the two comics hopped into Maron’s Toyota. It doesn’t sound like a joyride. “He’s fucked-up,” recalls Maron. “He’s drunk and he’s coked up and he’s kind of in and out of consciousness.”
“I’m like, Where the fuck are we going?”
Suddenly, Kinison came alive. “I don’t even know you, Maron!” he snarled. “You could kill me!”
Maron told his passenger to take it easy, and they found Kinison’s dealer, a hairdresser living in an apartment in Crescent Heights. After waking him, the comics retreated to a bedroom, trying to keep the noise down so as not to awaken the hairdresser’s roommate.
Forgetting about the cocaine, Kinison demanded alcohol. The dealer could only offer tiny bottles from an airline flight. “So big old fat Sam just sits on the floor with a miniature vodka. He’s just sitting there drinking it, and then he passes out.”
That left Maron and the hairdresser, two strangers, staring at each other over Kinison’s unconscious body. “He’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him. I’m like, ‘All right, I guess I’m going to go…’”
Not so fast. The dealer insisted Maron take Kinison with him, not wanting the out-cold comic to “do a Belushi” on him. Ah, the empathy of a coke dealer. Somehow, Maron was able to lug Kinison back to the Toyota and then to Cresthill, where the big man slept it off on the floor.
It was a hell of a night, and one giant step toward Maron’s master’s in cocaine studies under the renowned Professor Kinison.
