The Jerusalem Syndrome (4 page)

It was an awkward moment, standing there in a stranger’s bedroom over the motionless, still breathing body of the biggest star in comedy, who I barely knew and who Rick knew well and sold drugs to. I assumed he would just crash there.

“I guess I better split,” I said.

“Fuck no!” Rick said. “You gotta get him out of here. I don’t want him to pull a Belushi on me.”

Rick handed me a bindle of magic powder, and we lifted Sam up and into consciousness and walked him out the door. I was holding Sam up in the hallway.

“He’ll pay me later,” Rick said. “Nice meeting you, Maron.”

“Yeah, you too,” I said.

Then Rick shut the door.

I got Sam back into my car. I didn’t know what to do with him. I didn’t know where he lived. We drove back up to Cresthill. I walked him into the house and he made his way to the den, where he lay facedown on the floor in front of the fireplace and fell immediately asleep.

I sat down at the table and poured some magic powder onto the Freaks, did a couple of lines, and went into my room. I hung the picture back up over my bed, lay down, and listened to my heart pound. I tried to assess where I was, what had happened, and my new friends as I waited to die.

Monday nights were “no cover nights” at the club, and they usually lasted until Wednesday morning. It was Sam’s night. The dregs of Hollywood would pack The Comedy Store and wait for Sam to take the stage in the Main Room. He would usually show up at about 11:00, but you could feel him coming at 10:30. The place would become electric with anticipation. Even the pictures in the hallways looked excited. Sam filled the void between the past and the present. When he was around, the engine of the Hell-driven laugh mill fired on all pistons and the building came alive. He was the Devil’s clown prince.

I eventually became part of the inner circle. Once Sam arrived, it was my job to get enough money from him to stock Cresthill for a party that could last anywhere from two hours to three days. I would go to the 7-Eleven on La Cienega and get two fifths and four pints of Jack Daniel’s, a fifth of vodka, five or six packs of cigarettes, a case of beer, cranberry juice, and some O.J. I would go back to the house and put two fifths on the table and stash the pints in different places around the house for those who stayed the course. Around two o’clock Sam would show up with the magic powder and a crowd of freaks.

There were the regulars. There was Jumpstart Jimmy Schubert and his gimp leg that he had crushed under a motorcycle. He was my only real friend. There was Todd L., known as The Todd, a heavyset Jewish guy who was sure he was heir apparent to Kinison’s throne. He had very little of his own material but plenty of everyone else’s. Todd had dated both Samantha Strong and Christy Canyon, the porn queens, so they were around. He broke up with Samantha because she had had sex with another guy, off screen. There was Steve K, who would wander around The Comedy Store asking people, “Was I on yet?” If the answer was “yes,” he’d say, “How was I?” There was Sparky, the angry little red-haired rich kid who had no patience for any of it but still showed up. There was Carl, Sam’s Red West. There was, of course, Rick the hairdresser, until he was expelled when Sam thought he was cutting the magic powder with pancake mix. There was Dave the Satanist who looked liked Christopher Walken. He had a pentagram tattooed over his heart; an eye in a pyramid—what he called “the mark of the Illuminati”—tattooed on his arm, and a “666” tattooed on his hand. He wasn’t a bad guy, really, just annoying. Sam hated him. Hassan, the Arab, replaced Rick. The story was that Hassan had fought against the Israelis in the Six-Day War and then moved to America, was drafted, went to Vietnam, and then moved to Hollywood to sell drugs. Hassan had a deep, creepy charm. He never seemed flustered. He was prone to answering almost every question by saying, “It’s only rock ’n’ roll.”

There were others that came and went, but they were mostly casualties stopping by on their way down, weekend-warrior types or half-innocent onlookers at the scene of an ongoing accident.

Physical liabilities aside, the magic powder made me feel
more
special than I already thought I was. Eventually comedy became secondary and the sacred rituals of magic powder became primary. My confidence grew into a mystical grandiosity that was fueled by sleep deprivation. I began to feel as if I had clairvoyant powers, that unseen psychic tendrils were emanating from my head and I could feel the souls of buildings and read the minds of people coming toward me. “Don’t speak. I already know!” I would say to any approaching person.

I began to believe I had a divine purpose and was working for some unseen mystical force; that I had been assigned to Hollywood to understand the evil that resided there. An evil that was there before the film industry, before the Spanish missionaries. The evil had always been there. It was in the ground, waiting to be born.

I would stand out on the patio of The Comedy Store and people would walk up to me and I would say, “Have you seen the Hollywood sign?”

“Yeah,” they’d say.

“But do you
get
it?” I’d scream.

That’s where my head was at.

I saw Hollywood as a mystical Jewish city. It was like the anti-Jerusalem. Think about it. It was built on the same idea as the real Jerusalem. A small group of Jewish kings went into the desert with a crew of crack Jewish writers and created the kabala of the American myth. The movies!

They harnessed an almost Promethean power and it illuminated a sacred sequence of celluloid images run at a specific speed to generate an illusion and people would
pay money
to judge themselves against that illusion.

That’s a religious idea.

Then they built a factory to mass-produce the illusion. That factory became Hollywood. To this day, passionate, talented, charismatic, but very stupid young people fuel that factory. They go to Hollywood in hordes to try to become the mythic occupants of the illusion. Myself included. This machine, this factory, creates an exhaust that hangs over Los Angeles. That’s not smog. It’s vaporized disappointment. It’s like oxygen for the demons that live there.

I couldn’t share my insights because I saw myself as a mystic spy behind enemy lines and I believed Sam was onto me. He was getting annoyed. I kept saying things like “Tell me about the dark side, man.”

There was very little downtime between parties. I began hoping Sam would clutch his chest and fall facedown onto the cast of
Freaks
. I needed some sleep. Call me Judas. One Monday night the recurring Last Supper was under way. Some of the regulars were there, and sitting beside me was an incredibly drunken unidentified female object who had drifted in with one of Sam’s gypsy entourages that had come and gone. She was nodding off and babbling, “I’ve got to be in court tomorrow.”

“Why?” I said.

“Drunk driving homicide,” she said, her head falling back. I looked down and noticed that one of her wrists was bandaged.

“What happened to your wrist?” I asked.

“I tried to kill myself,” the woman said.

“Why didn’t you do the other wrist?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t want to fuck up my watch.”

Then she passed out on the table and someone dragged her into Todd’s room. The party kept on. Sam got up from the table and disappeared for a while, then came back. Sparky had been out checking around the house, making sure nothing was amiss. He walked up to me and whispered in my ear, “I think the Beast did something weird.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“I think he pissed all over that girl on Todd’s bed,” Sparky said.

He had. It was getting too sick, too dark, and too weird. Sam was out of control. My conscience was deteriorating. The branded door in my mind had creaked open and the Gray was turning to black. I had the ominous feeling that someone was going to die and it might be me.

Then the voices started to come. The membrane that surrounds my brain had become some kind of receiver of mystical transmissions. I’m sure you’ve all heard of people who hear voices in their head, but I’m here to tell you that when you do, it’s never one; it’s always many, and you spend a lot of time trying to get them to pick a leader. “If someone’s got something to say step to the front of the head.”

I was standing out on the patio of The Comedy Store one night and I came to believe that the St. James Hotel, catty-corner to The Comedy Store, was transmitting the voices. The St. James Hotel is now the Argyle, but it was originally the Sunset Tower apartment building. Built in 1929, it was one of the first high-rises on the Sunset Strip. The likes of Jean Harlow, John Wayne, ZaSu Pitts, Howard Hughes, Joseph Schenk, Marilyn Monroe, and Bugsy Siegel had residences there at one time or another. It was a Deco monolith that has looked over Hollywood since the beginning. It had overseen all that had gone on. It saw Peg Entwhistle leap to her death off the “H” in the
HOLLYWOOD
sign in 1932. It watched Charlie Chaplin’s dwarf-like physique grunt and twitch atop another teenage girl. It saw Elizabeth Short, “The Black Dahlia,” her body severed, in half, left in a vacant lot in 1947. It heard Lenny Bruce’s face smack down on the tiles in 1966. It watched as members of the Manson family drove up through the hills to Sharon Tate’s home in the summer of 1969. It heard John Belushi’s last breath and watched his soul drift up and out of Bungalow 3 at the Chateau Marmont in 1982. It watched Andy Dick drive his car into a telephone pole in 1999. When I was there it was being renovated and it was completely gutted. I thought it was providing a nesting place for the lost souls of Hollywood’s Golden Era and I was picking up their chatter. They needed me. I thought perhaps they wanted me to destroy The Comedy Store so the gate to Hell would be open and they could return home.

There is a Grecian altar on top of the building. It sits up there now. You might think,
Yeah, so? It was a decorative decision by an architect.

Think what you want, but I believed that the end of the world was to begin on that altar.

I even knew how it was going to go down. I believed that Michael Jackson was going to drag the sacred red heifer from the Old Testament up the back stairs of the St. James Hotel—you
know
he has the animal. He’d lay the calf on the altar, put on a very special glove, raise a gold, jewel-encrusted dagger over his head, and plunge it into the heart of the calf. Then he’d do a moonwalk and begin the hundred-year period of darkness during which the illusion wins.

Okay, maybe I was doing too much magic powder, but who’s to say I’m wrong? Maybe it just hasn’t happened yet. Then again,
maybe it’s already happened
.

One night we had a big jam session on the back balcony of Cresthill. Sam brought all his guitars and amps over, and we set them up and played loud, hard rock ’n’ roll to the city of Los Angeles until the neighbors called the cops. Sam had to perform at the club, so we locked his equipment in my room. It was a Monday so the insanity commenced. Well into day two of that Monday night, Dave the Satanist showed up and sat down at the table. Within a few hours the tension between him and Sam built to the point that Dave leapt out of his chair and shouted at Sam, “You’re not a real Satanist. I’m going to report you to Anton LaVey.”

The vortex was opening as the chaos turned in on itself. Sam had been up for two days, and that was when the valve between impulse and action blew. No one was safe.

“Fuck Anton LaVey!” Sam said.

Sam threw a drink in Dave’s face and smacked him. This was Sam’s cowardly method of hand-to-hand combat. I’d seen him do it before. A small scrape ensued, and Dave’s shirt was ripped open, revealing the pentagram on his chest.

“Get the fuck out of here, freak,” Sam said.

I told Dave that he should get out of the house, but he wouldn’t leave. He was all shook up. I felt bad for him. I had to go meet my friend Bill, who was coming to Los Angeles for the first time. I didn’t want to deal with the dueling Satanists. I locked Dave in my room so things could settle down. I split to see my friend at his hotel. I wound up crashing in his room. I needed the break. I forgot about Dave.

The next morning at around eleven o’clock my friend Bill and I walked into Cresthill. We went to my room. The door had been kicked in and all the music equipment was gone. Dave was gone. I couldn’t even imagine what had transpired. There was no blood, which was good. We walked into the dining room, where Sam and a few others were still sitting at the table. I said, “What the fuck?”

Sam looked at the other people at the table and then looked at me as if he’d been waiting hours to say what he had to say. He screamed, “I pissed on your bed, Maron. You want to know why?”

“Why, Sam?” I said, surprisingly not surprised.

“Because you let that freak sleep in there with my guitars.”

There was a moment of awkward silence. I turned to my friend Bill and said, “I told you I knew him.”

That was the end of my training. I could no longer sleep in my bed because the Beast had peed on it. They were onto me. I had been expelled from the cabal. My paranoia became amplified to a mystical level. I saw everything as a sign connoting a grand conspiracy. I was sure that the evil forces of the universe were now after me in a very intimate and personal way. I had to try to evade them at every turn. I was living in a comic book, but I had no special powers.

I took a walk down Hollywood Boulevard the next day to assess and integrate my experiences into a life that was rapidly getting away from me. I was looking at the stars in the sidewalk, trying to find a place for their shape and meaning in my elaborate and always unfolding mythos. I cut down the side street where my car was parked. I walked by a small storefront mission church that was half filled with derelicts being preached to by a manic little man with a microphone. Two doors down from the church there was a magic store. Not the kind of magic store with fake doo-doo and coin tricks. It was the kind with candles and amulets. I hadn’t really investigated or practiced Black magic in any organized fashion, so I thought that maybe it was time. I went in to browse. I needed tools.