He pauses here, leans back in his chair, and shrugs. “The thread is unbroken in my life as to the difficulty of being who I am,” he says. “I’ve always had a relationship with being different. But the world needs me to be wacky, I need me to be wacky, I need me to stay wacky, and I’m never going to apologize for being wacky.” So there.
In his early days as a rock star, he made a big public deal about not going down the road to rock-star ruin that he’d seen so often while watching VH1’s
Behind the Music. To that end, he wasn’t going to drink, wasn’t going to smoke dope, and most especially wasn’t going to date celebrities. “At every level of the career, there are gonna be pitfalls,” he once said. “Level one is, like, don’t bang a celebrity.” Soon enough, however, all that changed. He started to drink (Scotch, though not heavily), smoke pot (through a vaporizer, though he soon quit), and, most especially, date celebrities (ongoing). He made these changes mainly because he wanted to be someone other than who he was, and who he was mainly had to do with those parts of his guitar-obsessed childhood that he’d rather keep closed off.
“Again, I don’t want to talk about it too much,” he says, “but when you’re alone a lot and it doesn’t go the way you want outside, you make it the way you want inside. You create comfort to make up for the outside world. You create, create, create, create. It’s all in your head, but you go to it, because it’s your safe place, and that’s what I did.”
One problem he had to deal with back then was his skin. Throughout his teen years and into his early twenties, he had terrible acne. “In Atlanta, I had acne so bad,” he says, “that I would cancel dates and plans and stay in the house. I would not go out. When I was a kid, I remember thinking,
Well, I’m not going to be a model, so I better get real good on the guitar.” So the guitar became it, his life, furiously and with a vengeance. “All I wanted to do was be a robot and kill it, kill it, kill it, and take people’s heads off. If my blood were alphabet soup, it would spell, ‘I’ll show you, motherf--ker.’ ” For a long while then, he felt he was nothing without his guitar, that he didn’t really exist except to the extent that his fingers continued to work their fret-board magic. He didn’t drink, smoke weed, or date celebs. All he did was play the guitar. And that was better than okay with him. It was what he wanted.
In his early twenties, however, something shifted inside that private little self-created world of his. He won’t say exactly what happened, only that on one specific day, he realized that “you can create dark neighborhoods in your mind as easily as you can create rural wonderlands. And the day I realized that was one of the worst days of my life. It sent me on quite a spin. I went on a bender. An anxiety bender.” Which is why he keeps Xanax in his pocket even now: “Because there are these incidental kinds of loopholes in my brain, where the wires can cross for a second and the hard drive crashes.” But the real turning point in Mayer’s internal life didn’t occur until 2006, when he met Jessica Simpson and decided to exchange the tension headaches he suffered in private for good times in public with his new girlfriend, paparazzi be damned.
“I’d been a famous touring musician who had also been a shut-in for a really long time, which was weird,” he says. “But I’d had it really, really good. I had hit song, hit song, hit song. ‘Did you hear about this kid?’ And I’m like,
Look at my respect. Look how credible my artistry is. I’m really perfect. I’m really doing it. It’s aces. And you get addicted to cultivating that thing and making it perfect. I’m telling you, man, I’m not f--king with you. But it stopped being perfect the day I said to myself,
Wow, my heart is involved in this. The one thing I’d never been in my life is a person without a guitar. I used to be really frightened that if I stopped, it would leave me. But I had to evolve. If I wanted to see Jessica more, I had to grow up. And that’s the day that I grew up. A lot of people say it’s the day I grew down. Too bad. It’s the day I grew up.”
One thing about Mayer is he’s courageous like that. He is always searching for new truths about himself and, once found, he’s unafraid to move toward them as best he can. It’s like that with stand-up comedy. He loves it, and while he might not be getting laughs all the time yet, he’s not about to stop trying. “I go onstage, I will keep going onstage, and nobody can tell me I can’t go onstage,” he says, “and that’s the thing. Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t. I’d just say, ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do, motherf--ker. Of course I can.’ I mean, look at what I’ve done in my life. I don’t have any reason to believe that anything I think of is impossible. That makes me annoying sometimes. But it has all come true. All of it.” Quite a guy, then, this Mayer. Although he is right, it does sometimes make him a little annoying.
Mayer is getting a bit antsy. A couple of big-name Italian watch collectors are in town, and he wants to go hang out with them and talk watches: Omega, Cartier, Patek Philippe…they call them
chronographs in that price range. “I know all the reference numbers,” he says. “I know exact market prices per day. I go home, I’m on all the message boards. I don’t talk sports, but I can talk watches all day long.”
Before leaving, however, he wants to clear up one thing about his future wife. He knows that it’s largely his fault that the girl of his dreams may be so hard to find.
