The Jerusalem Syndrome

by Marc Maron

  My brother and I would lie out in the back bed of the station wagon and look out the rear window, up at the clouds. It happened as we drove through the Arizona desert. I don’t know if I was in waking consciousness or if it was a dream, but I saw this huge guy standing over the clouds with his arms crossed like someone overseeing fieldwork. He was about the size of the Jolly Green Giant. He had no shirt on and he was wearing satiny Turkish-looking pants that ruffled in the wind like a hot-air balloon being inflated. I couldn’t see his face because there was pure light emanating from it and a cloud in the way, but he looked like a giant genie. It was clear to me at that moment that he was God, the grand instigator of earthquakes, snow, and death. As I remember, I was squinting, trying to see his face, and I heard a booming voice say, “What are you looking at? What are you going to do about it?” He was challenging me. That was the moment I was infected with Jerusalem Syndrome.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m eight.”

  Then the montage of roadside signs flew by on the sides of the car and my consciousness: McDonald’s, Arby’s, 7-Eleven. Civilization, context, consistency, food. Then my brother yelled, “McDonald’s, McDonald’s, let’s go to McDonald’s.”

  Eight years old, eight-tracks, rock ’n’ roll, death, and God in the desert.

  Once we got planted in the Land of Enchantment, being a Jew became a part of my life. My father opened his medical practice and worked. My mother went back to school and painted pictures. There were other Jewish families in Albuquerque, and in time we got to know most of them. Most of us went to the same synagogue and all the kids went to the same Hebrew school, which is where I began to understand my unique talent for driving people to the edge. In my mind, the entire Hebrew school concept had nothing to do with learning about Judaism. It was there to let me blow off the steam and rage that accumulated in my being during regular school. Why not? It just seemed that there was less on the line. So what if they kicked me out of Hebrew school? What could happen? I wouldn’t be allowed to be a Jew? So, twice a week, at four in the afternoon, I would go to Congregation B’nai Israel and redefine the phrase “the Jewish problem.”

  I verbally abused the teachers, constantly cracked jokes, and cussed. I generated as much anarchy as possible via spitballs, farts, fights, and preadolescent sexual outbursts. I was very proud to have pushed two of my Hebrew school teachers to tears. One of them actually quit because of my behavior. I relentlessly made fun of this kid who sat in the back of the room picking his nose with a crochet needle. I swear, he did it every Monday and Wednesday for three years, until one day he bled and had to be sent to the hospital. I mocked all rituals and traditions at every opportunity and I laughed during services.

  The first time I got loaded was at a friend’s bar mitzvah party in the social hall, after which I projectile-vomited all over the stall of the boys’ room. The first time I smoked a whole cigarette was in the back parking lot of the temple with Herb, the gentile shul janitor from Brooklyn, who wore cowboy boots and told tales of pain about his ex-wife to dizzy twelve-year-olds. His entire face seemed to wrap around each draw on his filterless Camel. He resonated a reality of a life lived and left. Herb was the first heart-hardened man I ever knew and I listened to him because he let me smoke.

  The only things I remember actually learning about Judaism and Hebrew prior to my bar mitzvah were that kelev meant dog, adonai meant God, your head had to be covered in the sanctuary, mezuzahs have a rolled-up piece of paper in them, Hitler and the Germans once bulldozed piles of dead Jews into holes and the ones they didn’t they made into soap and lampshades, Golda Meir and the guy with the eyepatch were important in Israel, and Jews were different from everyone else and that’s why nobody likes us. Holidays meant presents on Hanukkah; honey-dipped apples on Rosh Hashanah; a long, draining meal on Passover, with symbolic crackers and questions during which we left the door open for a ghost to come in and get drunk; no food and no school on Yom Kippur (introducing the idea that all good things are grounded in some kind of suffering); strange desert fruits hung from the ceiling on Sukkoth; triangular prune cookies shaped like a bad guy’s hat for Purim. They were delicious.

  I studied for weeks preparing for my bar mitzvah. The Torah reading was Deuteronomy 11:26–16:17 which began with these words:

  See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.

  My haftorah was Isaiah 54:11–55:5, which began with these words:

  Unhappy, storm-tossed one, uncomforted!

  I will lay carbuncles as your building stones

  And make your foundations of Sapphires.

  I understood none of it then because it was in Hebrew and I don’t remember ever reading it in English. Now it seems to prophesy my entire spiritual life.

  I wore a light-blue leisure suit on Friday night and a navy three-piece suit on Saturday morning. My speech, as I remember it, was essentially an overview of my haftorah and what it meant to me, via the cantor who made me write it. It also included a long apology to the congregation for my past behavior. I was never confirmed and I wasn’t convinced.

  My Grandma Goldy gave me a gold-plated Elgin pocket watch to mark the occasion. The date 8-20-76 was engraved on the inside of the cover. My best friend, Dan, gave me an antique collapsible top hat and a cane. Show Time—high school—the need to belong and the quest to be different.

  5

  FRESHMAN year of high school I attended Sandia Preparatory. It wasn’t the private school of the region, but it was the private school that the students who couldn’t get into the private school went to. I had been at Sandia since seventh grade, and it took the faculty three years before they asked me to leave. My offenses ranged from the standard disruption of classes (pushing one elderly teacher to the point of slapping me in the face), cheating, smoking (which I was doing regularly—Marlboros, because Keith Richards smoked Marlboros), being sent home from a class trip after being caught with Patty Ryan’s breasts in my hands, and general instigation of chaos. I believe that most of the teachers actually liked me because I was entertaining, but they had to do what was right for the school. A teacher whose last name was Liberty rallied the faculty against me, and they asked me to leave after my freshman year. The letter said, “We suggest a military school or a boarding school for Marc. He possesses the wrong kind of leadership qualities.” It was the best thing that could have happened to me. Liberty.

  Public high school was really the most humbling punishment for a leader in exile. I went from a school with an easily led student body of 900 to a school of 3,400 students, and my power dissipated. The possibilities for a coup d’etat and the implementation of a clown junta were diminished. There is a freedom to anonymity. I became follower, a pupil, an adept of adolescent rebellion, and I joined forces with this guy named Dave because he had a car.

  It was a 1971 gold Pontiac Firebird with a twin cam, a Holly double-pumping carb, and mag wheels. It could go 150 miles an hour. Dave had a reckless lack of fear that I admired and aspired to. He also had a compulsive, contagious laugh that made me want to be around him as much as possible. Dave’s laugh made everything okay. We would go out on weekends and sit in front of liquor stores until we found someone to buy something for us. Dave drank beer and I drank Jack Daniel’s because I didn’t like beer. We would get ripped and drive around Albuquerque looking for girls and trouble. We rarely found girls. When Dave couldn’t get into a fight, we would go to the parking lot of the Winrock shopping center (named for Winthrop Rockefeller, who was the developer) late at night and put shopping carts in front of the Firebird. We’d get them going about 60 miles an hour and let them slam into an embankment or a curb and watch them tumble into a mangled mess of chrome and wheels. I’d like to think of this as an early antico
nsumerism action, an attack on the corporate elite, but it was really just pent-up sexual energy and rage.

  Dave and I, along with my friends Bob and Brian, eventually got fake IDs. We were at a party, and there was a guy there making them. He had a large board that was an exact replica of a New Mexico driver’s license. The corner was cut where the picture was supposed to be. Each of us held the board in front of our bodies and put our head in the corner. The guy stepped back a specific distance from the board. He judged the distance by a string he attached to the subject’s foot. Then he shot a Polaroid. He would then give you the image and you took it home, trimmed it, and had it laminated. The only drawback was that he couldn’t change the information on the board. We all had the same fake ID: same name, same height, same birthdate, same color eyes, and same Social Security number. We were a pack of Tom Bines. If we went to a bar, we would space ourselves between people going in and hope that the bouncer only looked at the birthdate. It usually worked.

  Sometimes we would go to the Pyramid Theater on Central Avenue, which was the old Route 66. The front of the building, which faced Central, had a mural on it. It was a painting of a pyramid that had an eye in the top of it. It was set on a psychedelic background. There was a marquee above the eye that always said ADULT FILMS ALL NIGHT. The entrance of the theater was around the back. There was a small box office next to a room that had a beaded curtain and a sign on top of the door that said NUDE BODY PAINTING. We never asked any questions. We’d pay ten bucks and they wouldn’t even card us. It was a small, dirty, musky-smelling place. There were probably forty seats, and no more than ten of them were ever occupied. You could smoke in there. It was where I saw sex for the first time.

  I can’t remember the name of the film, but it was a sixteen-millimeter feature. It opens with a guy on a bus pulling into a strange town. He meets a woman, and they end up at her place on her bed. She takes off his clothes. She takes off her clothes and on her belly is a tattoo of the Devil’s face and the mouth and beard of the Devil is her vaginal region. During sex she kept screaming, “Fuck me. Fuck the Devil. Fuck me. Fuck the Devil.” The only other thing I remember is that the movie ends with a woman on all fours on an altar. She was naked except for a hood that covered her head, and there was a lit candle stuck in her ass. People holding candles wearing hooded robes surrounded her. They were chanting, “All hail Uranus. All hail Uranus.” I don’t really think the movie helped me in any way understand what needed to be done, but I’ve never forgotten it.

  Sometimes on cold, clear winter days Dave and I would take the Firebird up old 14 behind the Sandia Mountains, cruising into the sun at 140 miles an hour, barely shaking. When the road bent west toward Santa Fe, the valleys and mesas spread out vast before us and the huge gold and orange sky was a wash of light that hit my face and shot right through to my soul. It made time stop and it made me feel like there was nothing better than being alive and in the world. I stashed that light beside the Gray in my heart as a companion.

  Sophomore year I got my own car, and Dave and I became distant. I got a job at a restaurant called The Posh Bagel. It was owned by a balding, morally bankrupt, twenty-five-year-old obsessive-compulsive, nail-biting, Jewish New Yorker who looked forty. His name was Eddie Waxman. I learned much under his tutelage within the secular confines of his New York Jewish theme restaurant. It was directly across from the University of New Mexico. I was fifteen when I became a shift manager. I learned how to count out a drawer and cook on a grill. I learned how to smoke pot and do cocaine. I learned how to hate my boss and focus my subversion. It was like an advance placement in noncurricular activities, which is where I excelled.

  There was a constant influx of lunatics into The Posh Bagel on a day-to-day basis. There was Pete, who always wore shorts and lace-up boots to his knees. He would sit and smoke Winchester cigarillos like they were cigarettes and draw pictures of guns with schizophrenic poem headings that I believed at the time implied a deep wisdom. There was Sunshine, who seemed to have gotten lost on his way home from Woodstock. It was then 1979, so he looked real lost. He had long, tangled blond hair and a beard and mustache. He wore ripped-up jeans and accessorized himself with no less than twenty scarves that hung from him in different places like he was a display rack for used scarves. Sunshine didn’t speak. There was a guy we called Tree Man, because he was tall and the hair of his beard was matted together with the hair on his head by a green grime that covered his entire body and had a foliage-like quality to it. I was fascinated with the insane. Their uniqueness and their fragmented attempts to make sense of the world intrigued me. I thought they possessed the keys to understanding.

  There were the students, my coworkers, and my teachers. There was Mike, one of the managers, who once took three Quaaludes before he counted the money and found that he couldn’t count the money and all he wanted to do was mop the floors, which he did with a goofy, waltzing carelessness for two hours. I counted the money. There was John G, who insisted on putting sliced-up hot dogs in the vegetarian minestrone soup. There was Tracy and her boyfriend, Hugs, and their VW bus. There was the arrogant chef with sideburns, who came to work tripping on mushrooms and invented the best salsa I ever tasted. There was Judson, with his strange teeth and punk band. There was Suzanne and her birthmark, and Frances the bitch. There was Anna and her sad eyes, and Laurie the Latina.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but Eddie offered the waitress staff a bonus to the first one who took my virginity. So, the first time I got laid was by a waitress named Diamond. It was awkward, but a relief to get it out of the way. I guess that’s a jewel.

  Budget Records was next door to The Posh Bagel. A guy named Steve LaRue managed it. He was a frustrated musician who played in a two-man experimental rock band called Jungle Red with a guy named Craig. They only played out twice a year, intentionally. I would spend hours in the record store with Steve. He shook me out of my commercial rock brainwash and threw me into the lexicon of experimental art music: Fripp, Eno, Fred Frith, Jon Hassel, The Residents, and a whole world of avant-garde noise noodling.

  The night I went to see one of Jungle Red’s semiannual performances I had been out drinking with some high school friends and I told them we were going to an art party over by the college. We got to the house near the campus and rang the bell. When the door opened, there was a man wearing a loincloth with the word HEATHEN written across his chest in lipstick, standing in the doorway. He threw his hands in the air as if presenting something on the ceiling and said, “Welcome.”

  I think we said, “Uh, where’s the keg?”

  The house was packed with the cutting edge of the Albuquerque art scene. Mostly gay guys, women in black, and a few people that looked like they might’ve been part of the A Flock of Seagulls entourage. The stage was set. There were a couple of guitars next to a keyboard. One of the guitars had a doll’s arm gaff-taped to the neck. Steve and Craig came out in surgical scrubs and proceeded to create a wall of chaotic sound. Steve was screaming and playing guitar, and Craig rocked back and forth, with his hands pounding the keyboard. Every few beats Steve would kick the guitar with the doll’s arm taped to it, causing a feedback that was deafening. In the middle of the performance Steve pulled out a box of vintage Fiestaware that he had been collecting for years, and in between lyrics he would violently break a piece with a hammer. Beneath the din of electric noise was the sound of delicate colorful plates, pitchers, and cups being shattered by Steve’s swift hand. As each piece fell into shards on the floor, one could hear a barely audible chorus of gay men groaning. It became an integral layer of the sound. It was an amazing show. Pure anger-infused rock ’n’ roll art that engaged and disturbed people. There was Truth there. I wanted in.

  The times, they were a changin’. The great war between disco and rock raged on the high school campus. Punk had surfaced as a legitimate disposition, and the freaks made some space available beside their perch for the new adolescent archetype. Soon after, new wave infused itself into the stu
dent population, so thin ties and poofy hair bobbed down the halls beside flannel-shirted long hairs, mohawks, and Britannia jean–clad dance-club kids. My sense of humor allowed me to walk freely through all the sectors. I had shifted my interests to the art department, where I immersed myself in the craft of photography. I played guitar. I began writing poetry. I no longer thought of myself as a high school student. I was an Emerging Artist.

  My most important body of work was a series of photographs that won the Best of Show honor in the Highland High School Art Exhibition. I had set up a ladder in the middle of a three-acre field of freshly tilled sod. I set three female torso mannequins in the sod leading up to the ladder. I set the camera on a tripod. With the help of my mother (who was always supportive of my creative ventures) I put together a series of photographs of me approaching the ladder carrying a television set that was plugged into a work light I had hanging from my belt. The TV was on. The last few photographs are of me leaving the TV beside the ladder, climbing the ladder, jumping off the ladder, and me frozen in midair as if I were flying away. The very last image is the television set on top of the ladder, alone and on, replacing me, a private audience with the idea of God.

  I made my headquarters the Frontier Restaurant on Central Avenue, down the street from The Posh Bagel. It was a huge Western theme restaurant that was famous for its homemade sweet rolls. It was the equivalent of an all-night diner, the meeting place of the dispossessed of all kinds. Some of my friends believed it was the center of the universe and would argue that point scientifically.