The Jerusalem Syndrome (3 page)

6

I
’VE
never
really
practiced Judaism, I’ve never
really
believed in or had faith in the Jewish God or any God. I never
really
believed in
anything
other than self-expression and the deep desire to understand. I didn’t think I needed to believe in anything else. Within a month of being at Curry, a black sheep from a rich European family named Rene introduced me to the work of the Beats. I began to read them and I saw a way I could engage all of my desires: rebellion, expression, intoxication, the search for answers, and individuality. The gates of Heaven opened and I looked inside. It was surprisingly dark, and all the angels were snapping their fingers to a walking bass line. Finally, something to believe in. I didn’t want to be a Jew. I wanted to be a Bohemian. A Beatnik. Theirs was a religion I could have faith in. And it was a religion.

There are the sacred texts.
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac covers the ritual elements of the religion.
Naked Lunch
by William Burroughs covers the moral and the metaphysical elements of the religion, and
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg covers the gay poetry elements of the religion. All religions have a gay poetry element. I urge you to read the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament with a lilt in your voice. You will find that there is definitely a gay man behind that poem. It just wasn’t as popular to be an out gay poet in the time of King David.

There are tenets to the Beat religion. It is a spiritual system built on searching, pushing the limits, embracing life, being awake and wasted to be aware, being Beat, freeing your mind, questioning everything. The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Nothing is true and everything is permitted. To be Beat is to be holy, man, and to be holy is to be closer to God. When asked by John Wingate on TV what exactly he was looking for, Jack Kerouac said, “I’m waiting for God to show me his face.” Then he threw up on himself during a commercial.

There are rituals in the Beatnik religion. In order to partake in the rituals you must form a Bohemian crew. This is essentially five to seven disenfranchised upper-middle-class white kids whose parents can afford to lay out forty thousand dollars for them to spend four years at college thinking they are Beatniks.

As for the rituals themselves, there must be coffee, cigarettes, and beer, you must read good poetry and write bad poetry and then read that aloud. You must smoke reefer and listen to jazz and stay up all night. There is also room within the Beat religion to call and ask your parents for money.

There must be deep philosophical discussions that go on for hours and hours about
nothing
. Every gathering must end at three or four in the morning with some drunken friend in your face yelling, “But you still haven’t proven that you exist, man.”

“Well, I’m tired, drunk, and high. I’m going to sleep now. Let’s see if I exist tomorrow. Don’t climb into bed with me again. It makes me uncomfortable.”

That’s another ritual. There must be two or more awkward sexual situations with two or more people that don’t really culminate in anything but one person crying, “Am I gay? I think I’m gay.” Then it’s not really a sexual situation as much as it’s a baby-sitting crisis.

There must also be a few occasions when you look down into your palm at a very small square piece of paper with maybe a Disney character, Mr. Natural, or a star printed on it and say, “Are you sure you know the guy you got this from? It’s cool, right? I am not afraid. I’m going to do it. You’re going to hang out, right? ’Cause the last time I did this I forgot my name.”

There are also pilgrimages within the Beatnik religion. Of course, any car ride with another person, music, reefer, and no real destination can be a Beatnik pilgrimage. Some turn out to be more important than others.

In order to go on the pilgrimages, you must choose your Beatnik brother from your crew. You must find your Jack or your Neal. My Jack was a guy named Jim. I met him during my freshman year of college. Jim was an Irish kid. He had long blond hair and wore a faded Levi’s jacket that had a red and white yin and yang symbol on the back that he had hand painted there one night.

Jim was angry but sweet. He’d been in the Boston area all his life. His father lived in Cambridge and his mother lived in Brookline. He spent a good part of his childhood on Cape Cod. Jim liked to drink. At dorm room parties he would usually consume a six pack of Genesee Cream Ale as he railed about politics, rants that fell on the deaf ears of drunken dyslexics and party kids. Toward the end of the evening Jim would stand up, hammered, and break into a flawless Jim Morrison impression and sing the first verse of “Break On Through,” then pass out on the floor. This was a ritual. The second part of the ritual was that all the people in the room would gather around Jim’s body and draw on his face with a pen.

Jim would brood around the quad, chain-smoking Marlboros and ranting about the Vietnam War as if he had been there.

“Da Nang was a mistake, man. We shouldn’t have
been
there, man. It wasn’t our war, Marc.”

“Jim,” I would say, “you weren’t there. You’re twenty. It’s 1982. Take it easy. It’s over. I can still see the peace sign on your cheek.”

Jim was the kind of kid who would go away for the weekend and come back three weeks later and say, “Uhm, we went down to the Cape and I lost my watch. What did I miss? Can I check out your notes, man?”

Jim was my running buddy. We made the pilgrimages. The most important was the pilgrimage to Jack Kerouac’s grave. It was a beautiful fall day in Boston. The air had an electric chill. I called Jim and said, “We’re going to visit Jack.”

He said, “Alright, man, swing by.”

I remember the Gray came over me. I was present, alive, in the moment, connected to all things.

(Author’s instructions: Dim the lights in the room you’re in, put on Coltrane, and read this aloud, standing.)

We climbed behind the helm of a 1979 Honda five-speed, foreign car,

A heresy, not really Beat, but it was my dad’s and it was free.

The mellow hum of Japanese machinery propelled us toward our destiny.

Boston to Lowell, all forty-five miles, we didn’t fall asleep once.

We talked about art, politics, philosophy, and what to have for lunch.

We jammed to jazz and beat our hands on the dash. I think we had made it through half of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” when we pulled onto the path

to the angelic, holy, hipster cemetery and the tomb of St. Jack.

We were led to the gravesite by an ancient guide wearing a hat with earflaps. We assumed he was the caretaker. He told us that it was the most popular grave in the cemetery. When he spoke, the top plate of his dentures would slip in his mouth. It looked like he had an extra set of teeth where his tongue should’ve been. He said, “Bobby Die-lin and Joan Bry-ez once came up to visit.” When we got to the grave, we thanked him and he wandered away, kicking leaves off the path, talking to himself.

I think we had the same moment most pilgrims have at the grave of Kerouac. We gazed down at the headstone, awed to be in the presence of Jack. We were there to pay our respects. We were there because we drove there. We were there because part of our journey was to bear witness to the place where his journey ended. We were there to earn some Beat creds. My brain was trying to calculate significance, manufacture some meaning. My soul was a dry sponge craving to absorb some residual greatness out of the sod. I lit a joint, sucked in a deep hit, held it, and from my constricted throat I said, “You know what, man? We’ve gotta get on the road.”

“Yeah,” Jim said, “I know what you mean.”

There was a moment of deep silence between us as I exhaled slowly and watched the smoke dissipate into the gray, cold air of Lowell.

“No, I mean
now
, I’ve gotta be back for class in an hour. It’s Romantic lit and if I miss it again, I won’t be able to major in English.”

Sometimes pilgrimages have their limitations.

We left an offering at the grave because that’s what you do at the tombs of your heroes. We set a small bottle of gin in front of the headstone. Codependency doesn’t need to stop just because someone’s dead.

Freshman year I lived in a house owned by the college. It was called the Green House and it was the “art dorm.” The concept was to put seven socially retarded creative people in one living environment in the hopes that by giving them the freedom to do their art, they wouldn’t drop out and the money would keep flowing through the halls of higher education.

I was a poet; a very important poet.

I lived on the first floor and in the attic lived a huge angry Jewish girl with wild, frizzy hair. Her name was Nancy and I believe she was the modern manifestation of Lilith. I felt she was holding the house down, both spiritually and physically. She would hole up in her room and frantically write poetry. She would sit at her typewriter scowling and smoking, and somehow it would all come out flowers.

A watershed in my spiritual development took place one night in the Green House. I wasn’t expecting it, but I had done the work. I was living the Beat ideal as best I could, and I was rewarded. I remember I barged into Nancy’s room. I was a freshman, so I must have been pestering her.

“What are you writing, Nancy? What are you writing? I want to read it. Come on, let me read it. I want to write but I can’t. I’m so high. I’m blocked. Let me see it Nancy, come on. I don’t know what I should do.”

Nancy looked up from her typewriter and flipped her mane of hair back with her hand with a momentum that started in her lower back and whipped her entire upper body around to reveal her face.

“I don’t care what you do. Just get out of my room. You should go write, go sleep, go meditate. I don’t care. Just go.” Her hair fell and she refocused on her typewriter.

Something about meditating clicked in little Beat Marc’s head. “I’ll meditate. Yeah. I’ve never tried that.”

So, I went down to my room. I turned off the lights. I put on this music that Steve LaRue had turned me on to. It used water as a percussion instrument.
Very deep
.

I got into what I thought was a lotus position and I guess I improvised a mantra. It was probably something like, “Fuck yes! Fuck yeah! Here we go! Inner peace! Bring it on! Whoo!”

I was breathing deeply. At that point in my life it was most likely anxiety-related hyperventilation, but I was breathing deeply nonetheless. I remember I was slowly rocking back and forth.
Then something started to happen.
I heard a high-pitched tone in my ears. It sounded like that noise that came out of the television when programming used to stop for the night. The color bars of the test pattern appeared, floating over my head in a blue mist. I felt myself rising up out of myself. I felt my inner self slowly disengage from my body and rise to the ceiling. There I was, hovering over my body, looking down at myself listening to very pretentious music. I felt that I was being drawn toward something eternal. I thought,
Hey, this is amazing. I could go anywhere. I’m gonna go look God in the face.

That thought was followed immediately by
I might be in trouble here. What if I can’t get back into my body? That would be awkward and I would miss class.
So, I jumped back into my body,
hard
. I got in. Thank God. Then I ran upstairs to Nancy’s room and pounded on the door.

In one fluid motion Nancy whipped the door open, went into a hair flip, and screamed, “What, Marc?”

I was gasping and out of breath. “I just meditated like you suggested. I was sitting on the floor and I left my body and rose up to the ceiling and looked down on myself sitting on the floor.”

Nancy took a drag off her cigarette and said, concerned and scolding, “Really? That’s called astral projection. Don’t fuck with that.” Then she slammed the door in my face.

I knew that was the end of the first phase of my mystical training. It was a gift of enlightenment. I had pushed myself to the limit and I felt closer to some eternal truth. I knew there was something out there trying to reach me. At least on an astral level. I had a belief system in place and it was working for me. My Jerusalem Syndrome had become symptomatic. Sophomore year I transferred to Boston University.

During my four years at Boston University I was a true Beat adept. I took a course in existentialism during which, with the help of my professor, I erased myself completely and had to rebuild from scratch. I drank. I fell in love with a girl who was coming out of a relationship with a girl and learned the true deep fury of jealousy because I was in a position to be jealous of both sexes. I drank. I had threesomes and took drugs. I drank. I had a sexual identity crisis. I drank. I wrote poems and short stories and was an editor of the literary journal. I drank. I had a nervous breakdown. I drank. I wrote, directed, and acted in plays. I drank. I had sex with enough women to be hated in several social circles. I drank. I was a film critic for the newspaper. I drank. I wrecked a car. I drank. I started doing comedy because I thought it was the purest expression of truth. I drank.

Some way or another I managed to graduate
cum laude
. The two people that most changed the way I saw the world during my time at B.U. were Carl Chiarenza and Lauren Osmolski. Chiarenza taught a yearlong survey in the history of photography that focused on defining a reproduced image, the artistic integrity of the reproduced image, and how the corruption of reproducing technology could be used to create an illusionary reality that could overshadow reality itself. Lauren taught me how to fuck.

7

A
FTER
I graduated from college I decided I was gunning for the Buddha. I would be a Beatnik warrior in search of the truth, the real truth, the
deep
truth. So, I moved to Hollywood, where the truth remains well hidden. I should mention that I also wanted to be a star. Sometimes I forget to mention that because I think it undermines my credibility as a seer.

I got on the road and drove to California. I stopped off in Albuquerque to check in with my parents and friends and had a brief affair with a woman who’d recently divorced a CIA agent. I stopped by The Living Batch to tell Gus what I was doing. When I walked into the store I saw a poster on the bulletin board for a Beat conference at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. All the Beats that were still alive were going to be there: Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Snyder.

“I gotta get up there for that,” I said.

“Why would you want to go up there and see those geriatrics?” Gus asked. “I know those guys. It would be a bore.” This was new information for me.

“You know them? Did you know Kerouac?”

“I met him once at a party in Berkeley.”

I was excited.

“Really?” I said. “What was he like?”

“He was standing in a corner, drunk,” Gus said, “with his arm around Neal Cassady, slurring ’Live like a tree, Neal.’ ”

It didn’t matter if it was true or a joke. I understood.

Then Gus said, “Go do what
you’re
going to do.”

It was time for me to have a go at my own life. I was tired of always assuming that everyone but myself possessed secret information; like some common code of understanding, some idea that tethered their soul and enabled them to get through life with some degree of grace, as opposed to the panic-ridden, angry, tumbling down the pipe that I had experienced.

I really believed that when I rolled into Hollywood a welcoming committee of producers and directors would be there to greet me. They’d flag down my car and say, “Are you Marc Maron? We’ve been waiting for you. Hey, everyone, gather around! Marc Maron is here. Your Grandma Goldy called ahead and said you wanted to be in the movies. Is that true, kid? Well, it’s your lucky day. We’ve begun production. There’s your trailer. The script’s inside. If you want to make any changes, feel free and take your time. Oh, and Marc, there’s a bowl of dietetic coffee candy in the cabinet above the sink. Who loves you, baby? We’ll see you on set!”

Strangely, that didn’t happen. Instead, I hooked up with a friend and spent two months on his couch in Culver City. We were working on a screenplay. I think that’s what it was. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of it on paper.

I also auditioned at The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard and I got the job as a doorman. You had to be a comic to be a doorman and vice versa. Within a month I became head doorman.

If you don’t already know it, The Comedy Store is a dark temple of fear and pain that to this day I believe is built over one of the existing gates to Hell. Evil emanates up through the floors of the place and passes into the souls of all who work there. The good ones make it funny. I was thrilled to have that opportunity.

My first night at work I became enchanted. I felt like a part of me was home. Somewhere in my soul I knew the place. I could feel what had gone on there. The current that crackled in the air of The Comedy Store was the sentient residue of an arcane period of old Hollywood indulgence. The ghosts of dark fun occupied every inch of the place, and they welcomed me like a friend who had been lost.

The structure’s first incarnation was called the Clover Club. It was a drinking joint and illegal gambling parlor that was frequented by David O. Selznick and Harry Cohn. The vice squad shut it down in the late thirties. The most significant occupant of the building (besides the Devil who was always there) was Ciro’s. It opened in 1940 and it was the hottest club on the strip. Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday, Martin and Lewis and Mae West all performed there. After recovering from his car wreck, a pre–Satan-worshiping Sammy Davis, Jr., debuted his new glass eye in a comeback performance at Ciro’s. All of Hollywood’s royalty partied there: Bogart, Gable, and Cooper. There were rumors that both a murder and an abortion had taken place in a back room of the club and that the ghost of one, the other, or both was always floating about. There were also rumors of black magic and ritualistic sex. It was where what lurked behind the black and white stills I was obsessed with in my youth would come out and cut loose. Ciro’s closed in 1957.

The building lay dormant until a maternal Jewish succubus named Mitzi Shore joined forces with the Devil in a philanthropic joint venture and opened The Comedy Store in 1970. The Comedy Store is the Devil’s way of giving back to the world. He understands the pain of being alienated for being a smart-ass. He wanted to give others the opportunity to try to make it work for them. Through Mitzi, he provided a venue for that purpose.

The entire outside of the club was painted black and covered with names written in cursive in white paint. These were the names of the comics who had performed at the Store regularly throughout its history. It was like a goofy rendition of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., only the names on the walls of the Store had died a different kind of death, and it could be repeated anytime they’d get on stage. There was also a patio bar in front of the club, facing Sunset Boulevard. It was usually occupied by a huddle of comics waiting to go on and hangers-on waiting to get off.

The inside of the club was labyrinthine and done in a red and black theme with no other variations. There were three performance rooms with different seating capacities. I lifted the velvet rope in all of them at one point or another. The largest, called the Main Room, was a Vegas-style showroom with high ceilings and a large red stage with black curtains. The Original Room was smaller, box-like and black. Audience members were seated right up to the lip of the stage. This is the classic comedy club setup. The Belly Room was upstairs. It was a small red venue used for special shows. There were hidden rooms behind all of the stages, stairways, a kitchen, lighting booths, cubbyholes, and offices upstairs. The beautiful, Gothic, Deco tone of the original Ciro’s was eerily maintained. There were neon caricatures of old movie stars on the walls of the Original and Main rooms. The comic on stage in the Main Room knew it was time to get off when the bow in Fanny Brice’s hair lit up. In the Original Room, it was Eddie Cantor’s eyes.

The hallways were lined with the headshots of the hundreds of comics that had appeared there; some known, some unknown. A headshot differs from a portrait in that a good portrait captures the stature and spirit of its subject as a testament of who he or she is in the world. A headshot is a desperate cry for attention. It’s an image designed to mask the subject’s need for work and love with an attitude, gesture, or look that might be marketable. Since the headshots were all of comics, the collective neediness was hard to hide, to the point that I believed the photos on the wall were feeding on and draining the emanations of the club’s illustrious dark history. It was a gallery of broken dreams. They were the pictures of people who had tried to catalyze their pain into living mirrors with which audiences could reflect their own flaws back at themselves and laugh. They were the black and white images of broken hearts in the shapes of the faces of clowns.

I moved into a small Old Spanish–style mansion that sat up on the hill behind The Comedy Store. It was called Cresthill. Mitzi owned it and rented it out to comics. It had a dark vibe as well; not as insidious as the club, but Raymond Burr had once lived there, so it possessed its own unique weird residue. There were five bedrooms, all occupied by comics. There was a full kitchen that no one ever used. There was a gas-powered fireplace in the den. I lived in a small green room with its own bathroom that had once been occupied by Andrew Dice Clay. I had no furniture other than a futon on the floor. My clothes, books, notepads, and guitars were scattered around my bed. It looked like the nest of a large animal that scavenged for building materials at a college. There was nothing on the walls except a framed still of the cast of Tod Browning’s
Freaks
, which I had procured at a movie paraphernalia store in Hollywood. It hung over my bed.

Off the back of the house was a large balcony patio that was perched high over the club and looked out over the city. On mornings after long, sleepless nights of partying, some of us would piss over the balcony as the sun rose through the haze above Los Angeles. It was a glorious declaration of that strange feeling of victory that comes after surviving a night of indulgent insanity.

From here on in the story, I will be referring to the drug cocaine as “magic powder.” I don’t want you to judge me. I don’t want you saying, “The book was interesting, but he had a drug problem.”

It wasn’t a “drug problem.” It was the research and rituals of the religion of my choice. I was a high-level Beat adept doing deep inner-space exploration. I was journeying to the outer regions of the soul, out there where
wrong
lives.

At The Comedy Store I met many people with the magic powder. These weren’t the young, shiny, upper-middle-class white kids I knew in college. No. All I’m saying is that when you’re doing a lot of magic powder, generally you’re not hanging out with
winners
. My new friends were the dignitaries of Hollywood’s underbelly: Satanists, porn stars, hustlers, pirates—
actual
pirates—wannabes of all kinds, washed-up child actors, drug dealers, bikers, rock stars, and evil Buddhas. Sam Kinison was the reigning king of comedy at the time. I looked up to him (I always pick the wrong Daddy figures). This wasn’t a Bohemian crew. It was more like a coven of witches, or maybe the Manson family.

The first time I met Sam Kinison was at the club. I had seen him on television, but I didn’t think he was that funny. Sam had heard that I was a potential initiate from his friend Carl, who I had met days before. Carl told me that he and Sam had both been doormen at the Store. Carl took a liking to me when we met, and took off his watch and gave it to me as a gift, an offering, an invitation. When I met Sam, he knew I needed to be tested. We went back to Cresthill and went one-on-one for hours. I pulled the framed photograph of the cast of
Freaks
off my wall and Sam pulled an eight ball out of his pocket. He poured the magic powder out onto the glass that covered the image of the likes of Zip the Pinhead and Johnny Eck, the legless wonder. We sat at the large dining room table with a bottle of vodka, and Sam told me the history of Sam. He had intensely focused, beady eyes. At any point during the conversation, if he thought my attention was drifting he would say, “Look me in the eyes, Maron. I like a man who can look me in the eyes.”

Sam fancied himself a combination of Jesus, Elvis, and Satan. They were his heroes. He was a lapsed Baptist preacher with a bone to pick with God. He thought of himself as the
Beast
. You really had to see him live to get the full effect. He had the charisma and momentum of a human meteor. He was the comedic equivalent of pure rock ’n’ roll. He elevated the frustrated suffering of the brokenhearted mortal man to anarchic hilarity. He could push an audience over the edge of their own moral parameters, throw them a line, pull them back, then push them farther off the second time. This was the technique that most interested me. It was the reason I became an aspiring adept in the Sam school. I wanted to hone the antisocial part of my personality into a craft that could earn me a living.

After about five hours of looking Sam in the eyes and listening to his bullshit, there was a lull in the conversation. So, he pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and asked, “You ever burned money, Maron?”

“No,” I said.

Sam gave me a one-hundred-dollar bill, took one for himself, and said, “Spark them up. This is great.” I set the two bills on fire and Sam and I watched them burn until we couldn’t hold them.

“Feels great doesn’t it?” he said.

It did feel great, but that might’ve been because it was
his
money.

About 4:00
A
.
M
. we ran out of magic powder, and of course we needed more. We got into my car and drove through the Hollywood night. Sam was going in and out of consciousness as he gave me directions. At one point he bolted up in his seat and said, “I don’t even know you, Maron. You could kill me.”

In retrospect, he was much more likely to do that to himself.

We arrived at a modern apartment building in Crescent Heights. Sam rang the bell. After a few minutes of ringing, a groggy voice was emitted from the intercom. “What? Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Sam said. “Let us up.”

“Who’s us?” the voice asked.

“Me and this kid Maron,” Sam said. “He’s alright.”

The door buzzed.

We took the elevator up and walked down a hall, and Sam knocked on a door. It opened and there was a guy in a bathrobe standing in the doorway. He looked normal, long blond hair, mustache, wiping sleep out of his eyes.

“What the fuck? It’s four-thirty,” he said.

Sam barged in through the door and I followed him.

“Rick, this is Maron,” Sam said. “He’s the new doorman at the Store.”

“Hey,” Rick said.

“Hey,” I said apologetically.

I later found out that Rick was a hairdresser during the day.

“You got anything?” Sam asked as he started rummaging through the kitchen like an obsessed troll.

“Yeah,” Rick said. “You guys are insane.”

“Any booze around?” Sam asked, opening cabinets.

“Just come into my bedroom. Be cool. I don’t want to wake up my roommate.”

We went into his bedroom. Sam sat down on the floor and started passing out. I stood. Rick walked into his bathroom and came back out holding two Smirnoff miniatures. He gave them to Sam.

“Here. This is all I have. I stole them off the plane.”

Sam poured them, one after the other, into his mouth. He didn’t do it like someone drinking. He shot them down his throat like Orson Welles did in
Touch of Evil
. It was a dull, passive motion, a necessity, fuel for a dying machine. Then Sam went out cold.