The Jerusalem Syndrome (5 page)

There was a counter at the back of the store, facing the door. Behind the counter were shelves filled with jars of herbs. In the display part of the counter there were crystals, trinkets, and the ceremonial hardware of ritual. The smell of incense permeated the air. I was the only person in the place besides the two trolls that were perched behind the counter on separate stools. They had shaggy long hair and blank expressions on their faces.

There were shelves of books throughout the store. I had never seen those books or heard of the authors before. I pulled Aleister Crowley’s
The Book of Lies
off the shelf and randomly popped it open to a poem numbered 23 in some kind of series. It was called “Skidoo.” I read aloud to myself.

What man is at ease in his Inn?

Get out.

Wide is the world and cold.

Get out.

Thou has become an in-itiate.

Get out.

But thou canst not get out by the way thou camest in. The Way out is THE WAY.

Get out.

For OUT is Love and Wisdom and Power.

Get OUT.

If thou hast T already, first get UT

Then get O.

And so at last get OUT.

I had no idea what it meant in the context of the book, but there are no coincidences. I felt like I was in the eye of a storm and deliverance was upon me. The store was swirling with the momentum of my thoughts. Then, almost as if I had conjured it, the door blew open and a man lurched into the store. He was a very tall person. He had flaming red hair and a frenetically baffled energy about him. His gangling arms were folded tightly over his chest, as if he were trying to stop himself from exploding. His voiced wavered in volume when he spoke. “Hey, wow, this is a really great store. I had no idea it was here. How long has it been here?”

The trolls behind the counter remained expressionless.

It felt like that moment when a film sticks in the projector—that split second before the image burns up from the middle.

A folded American flag slipped out from under the man’s shirt. He grabbed it, retucked it away, and pressed it to himself with his arms.

One of the trolls eased forward on his stool and said, “Why do you have an American flag folded up under your shirt?”

The man, tripping over his words in discomfort said, “It, uh, m-m-m-makes me f-f-f-feel, uh, safe.”

The troll pulled his hair back over his ears, widened his eyes, and focused a gaze on the man that could radiate through walls.

“You’re acting too weird,” he said. “Please leave now.”

“Ah, we-we-well, okay.” The man seemed to melt into himself and crackle upon hearing this, and he sheepishly lurched back out the door, holding himself tightly.

The film regrooved itself. I walked up to the counter and looked in the display case. The speaking troll was eyeing me passively.

“Hey, let’s be honest here,” I said halfheartedly. “What’s the validity of all this magic stuff,
really
?”

He looked at me with the earnestness of a rock and said, “You don’t want to open any doors you can’t close.”

I felt all my fears congeal around this statement. That was it. I had my special power. I would be the opener and closer of doors. I mean, I was the head doorman. A doorman of the head.

“Thanks,” I said to the troll, holding eye contact long enough to get a magical jolt from his intensity. “Don’t open any doors I can’t close.”

I felt empowered as I walked out into the half-hardened gelatin air of the Hollywood day.

That night I performed the magic powder ritual myself and went down to The Comedy Store. The cabal was there and they were ostracizing me. I was panicky. I felt as if I had no friends anymore. I walked out into the parking lot where Jumpstart Jimmy tried to comfort me. He said, “You just fucked up, man. It’ll be alright in a couple of days.”

I was coming unglued.

“No, you fucked up,” I screamed. “You’re one of them. I was
never
one of them. I came here to understand and learn. To see! You’re just a pawn of the illusion. You believe that Sam’s the Beast. He’s not. He’s just another fucking fat bully spreading hate around. You’re all just sheep on a dead-end path. Fuck you.”

I slammed the glass I was drinking from down onto the asphalt, and it shattered all over the parking lot.

Jimmy went back into the club as Hassan drove up in a red convertible. I walked over to him as he was getting out of the car. I was a bit tweaked out, wired, and scared.

“Hey, Hassan,” I said. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“What can I do for you, Marc?” he said.

“What should I do? Things are all fucked up.”

In
his
eyes lay the
real
Beast. He looked at me with that cool thousand-yard stare, smiled, and said, “You should go do your own thing. You should
get out
.”

23 Skidoo.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “Thanks.”

Hassan started to walk toward the back door of The Comedy Store. He turned around and shouted, “It’s only rock ’n’ roll!” as he disappeared through the door into the black and red darkness, his home in Hollywood for the last seventy years.

When the drug dealer tells you to leave, it’s
really
time to leave.

At about 3:00
A
.
M
. I was alone in my closet, where I spent a lot of time during the last days of my stay in L.A. The hangers kept the voices at bay and my bed had been branded.

As some of you know, the first few hours of magic powder are great, but the following eight to twenty can be a little trying. My heart was pounding itself out of my chest. My lungs were struggling to keep themselves fueled with oxygen. I was sweating and scared.

“I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. Please slow down. Don’t die,” I said to the darkness. Words were falling and ricocheting around my mind. Images were falling and flashing behind my eyelids like white noise.

The pristine surface of a gray steel slab appeared and faded into a perspective point far off in my mental landscape. I was on a conveyor, moving like a car on the incline of a roller-coaster. Then came the drop-off. It was like the bad part of the boat ride in
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
, overaccelerated, faces, fragments of scenes, Belushi walking toward me, light for eyes.

“Hey, John. What the fuck happened to your eyes?”

Lenny Bruce flying.

I don’t want to die
.

Fatty Arbuckle as a dirigible floating in the air.

I don’t want to die.

The cast of
Freaks
dancing down the slab toward me at silent-film speed, singing, “One of us, one of us, one of us.”

I don’t want to die.

Hassan laughing, pentagrams spinning into the stars on Hollywood Boulevard, Sam turning into a dog and pissing all over space.

No, no, fuck, no. I don’t want to be at this party. Fuck. How far out can I go?

Then, in my right ear, a voice that was as clear as a bell loudly said, “You’ve gone far enough.”

Then the ride stopped. My heart stopped in a flash of white. I gasped the gasp of a drowning man who had just surfaced and sucked life back into his lungs.

It was the voice of God. God was reaching out to me.

That was the moment my Jerusalem Syndrome became proactive.

The following day I packed everything I had into my car and whatever didn’t fit I gave to Steve K. I went by Rick’s and evened up with him and I picked up an eight ball for the trip. I hadn’t slept in what seemed like weeks. I left Hollywood on instructions from God. I was heading to the desert with no plan other than to
Get Out.

As I drove, the sun was beating down and my eyes were squinting. Just outside of Palm Springs I saw the wreckage of the worst car accident I had ever seen. There were cops, ambulances, fire trucks, and covered bodies all over the highway. I saw it as a sign to pull off. I checked into a hotel and waited for more instructions from God. They were not forthcoming.

That was a long couple of days at the Motel Six in Palm Springs. I walked through the streets thinking I was invisible. It was okay, though. Palm Springs is a fine place to be invisible. That’s sort of what it’s for. Besides, I had doors to close.

8

W
HEN
I arrived in Albuquerque, I didn’t tell anyone I was there. I went and had photos taken and renewed my passport. I had the feeling I might need to leave the country on very short notice. It felt like the world was closing in on me or, at the very least, following me around. It was as if day-to-day reality was a sham and everyone involved in it who saw me knew I was onto them. I believed that I could move things with my mind, that I could tell if people were evil by looking in their eyes, and most of them were.

I stayed with my parents, who, surprisingly, weren’t evil. I tried to give them the impression that everything was fine and I was just taking a little break. I spent a month at home. I got clean, I bought some cowboy boots, and I had a brief affair with a witch.

I went by The Living Batch to see if Gus was evil and I came across Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s
The
Illuminatus! Trilogy
. On the cover was the eye in the pyramid, the mark of the Illuminati. I brought the book up to the counter and Gus said, “Why waste your time with such utter bullshit?”

I thought he might be one of them.

I bought the book and read it cover to cover. It is a convoluted, satirical novel about magical and political secret societies, the primary one being the Illuminati, and their manifest destiny of controlling the world and the minds of its occupants on all levels. I read the book with no sense of its irony. I believed it and saw it as my Bible, a primer for productive paranoia. There was definitely an evil conspiracy at hand. It had roots in ancient Egypt, Bavaria, and perhaps the lost city of Atlantis. Aliens might have been involved at some point, but that’s really conjecture. The conspiracy had moved through the people and institutions that have controlled the world for centuries. I decided it was my duty to seek it out in reality and present it to the world. It was what God wanted. I could begin to label the signs and hang them on the doors. This would be my secret mission. I moved back to Boston to restart my comedy career, a perfect cover.

When I got back east, I got a job pulling espresso at a pre-Starbucks coffee shop in Harvard Square. It was a haven for young, confused, aspiring everythings. Faux Bohemians dressed in vintage clothes. If they couldn’t find integrity in their own time, maybe they could find it in the pants of another time. I was the paranoid, bitter guy working the steamer, talking about himself. “I used to hang out with Kinison. I am an outlaw visionary. I can see the future.” A
whoosh
of steam would cloud my face as I pulled the nozzle out of the frothy milk and poured it into the coffee. “You want shaved chocolate or cinnamon on this?”

I got a room in the attic of a large house in Somerville, a working-class town next to Cambridge. It was one of those group houses that people who had no idea what they were going to do with their lives passed through on their way to themselves. The room I rented was entirely covered in sky-blue paint. There are no coincidences. Within days of moving in I did some research on the color blue’s mystical connotations in a book on colorology. “Blue is the color of depth, spiritual searching, serenity, change, and moon issues.” Four out of five ain’t bad. I was anything but serene, and I was willing to deal with my moon issues as soon as I figured out what the fuck they were.

I was given a series of dates to do stand-up in a basement in Allston at a club called Play It Again Sams. The old-movie theme didn’t elude me. The coincidences were coming down like hail. Two Tuesdays a month for six months opening for an X-rated hypnotist who could make people act like strippers or dogs.

At home I put in the research. I bought the literature of the hard-core conspiracy theorists.
The Unseen Hand
and
The New World Order
by Ralph Epperson, the first edition of
Apocalypse Culture
edited by Parfrey out of Amok Press in Los Angeles, and, of course, the daily newspapers.

The thing about conspiracy literature is that it’s perfect for stupid people who want to seem smart and ground their hatred in something completely mystical and confusing, and it’s good for smart people who are too lazy to do their homework. People can’t argue with it without possibly implicating themselves.

Facts play only a minor role in any conspiracy theory. The proximity of one series of facts to an event that might connect those facts to another series of facts is what it’s really about. The object of the game is to connect the disparate facts in any way possible to get the outcome of “We’re fucked.” Events can be broad, shady, real, unreal, preferably convoluted, and hard to deconstruct in any one way. This leaves them open to endless possible interpretations. An event can be broken down in many ways—as long as it serves as a doorway to the facts that you want to connect. An event can revolve around a person involved, a color, a time, a government, a number, a date, a code, a logo, a distant relative, a passing moment at a point in time other than the time of the event, a bullet, an institution, forces of nature that are suspect in their timing, a sexual encounter, a coworker, or basically anything that will enable you to construct your own arcane projectile riff that you can ride to your version of the truth. That’s really a matter of style.

Within a few weeks my room looked like the Son of Sam’s apartment. There were holes in the walls, writing on the ceiling; books were strewn about and charts were pinned up. I was diagramming something. I was connecting the dots of the grand puzzle. One incident that I recall occurred over morning coffee. I had bought the
Boston Globe
and on the front page was a picture of then President George Bush. I cut it out and pinned it on the wall.

Bush, of course, was the vice president under Reagan and the ex–head of the National Republican Committee, the CIA, and Eli Lilly and Co. He was a member of the Skull and Bones club at Yale and probably performed their secret mock-death ritual during which the participants lie in a coffin, blindfolded, and share their sexual history with the other members. He belonged to the Freemasons and the Trilateral Commission. He was involved with the Bay of Pigs and the Iran-Contra affair. The image in the paper was of Bush attending a Texas Longhorns game. Both his hands were up in the air, his thumbs holding down his two middle fingers, thus forming a two-fisted Satan sign popular with heavy metal fans. So, of course, I thought,
How clear does it have to be? He’s the Devil. The illuminated one. The bringer of light. A thousand points of light!

I dismissed the fact that it was also the hand sign of the Texas Longhorns. Does it really matter? A cow, Satan; signs are signs. They are open to interpretation.

I called the
Boston Globe
and asked them what it would take to get a copy of the picture. The woman on the phone told me it would be $250 and asked me what I’d be using the photograph for and I said, “Evidence.”

She said, “What does that mean?”

That was the end of the conversation. I hung up. I wasn’t ready to get into it with the press.

I
was
ready to go to Washington, D.C. Jim, my Beatnik brother from college, was there. The Vietnam War obsession usually leads to some sort of engagement with the political charade. He had worked on the advance team for the Dukakis campaign and was freelancing in Washington. I thought Jim might’ve gotten himself in over his head. I was worried about what he didn’t know. I had to go see if he was okay. I needed to explain to him what was really going on in the nation’s capital.

I got on the road to Washington and tried to plan what I would say. When I got there, I immediately called Jim.

“Jim, it’s Marc. What’s up, man? You okay?”

“Marc!” He was excited. “What’s up? Where have you been? What are you up to, man?”

“Jim, I need to talk to you about some stuff.”

“What? What’s going on? Are you alright?” He was concerned.

“I’m fine. Are you alright?” I probed.

“Yeah, I’m great, really great. I love doing advance.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.” I was saddened by the idea that I might be too late.

“What?”

“Well, I don’t think we should talk about it over the phone. We need to meet in person.”

“Umm, alright.”

“It really couldn’t be more important.”

“Well, I’m not going to be up there for—” I cut him off.

“I’m here, man. I’m in Washington.”

“You’re here? Great, swing by.”

“No, I really can’t do that, not now. Pick a place and I’ll meet you.”

An hour later we met on the mall in front of the Washington Monument. I gave my old friend a hug. I started to feel Jim out a bit as we walked.

“This place has a weird energy to it,” I said. “It’s bigger than I thought it was.”

“That’s right, I forgot,” Jim said. “You’ve never been here. I’ll give you the tour. It’ll be great.”

“It’s got a
really
weird energy to it,” I said. “It’s the way it’s built. You know about that, right?”

“What, the monument?” he asked.

“Yeah, the monument is on a grid with the Capitol that’s separated by the reflecting pool. It’s based on an ancient ritual plan from Atlantis. As long as this stays intact, they’ll have control of the world, now that the implementation of television was successful,” I said like a scientist.

Jim laughed. “Yeah, it’s all a big evil thing, Marc.” He was being sarcastic. He thought I was joking.

“I think we’re all in trouble with Bush.”

“Yeah, well, he won,” Jim said. “He won’t be there forever.”

“He’s a Trilateralist, you know?” I said. “He kisses Bilderberger ass and does the monkey dance for the insiders at the Bohemian club.”

“Yeah,” Jim said and laughed. “You’re not one of those people now, are you?” Jim asked.

“What kind of people are you talking about? What kind of person are
you
now, Jim? Hey, do you think we can go to the Illuminati office while we’re here? I’d like to take a tour of that place.”

Jim gave me a puzzled look and ignored the question. I pulled back for a while. We toured the city and Jim pointed out the sights, but everything started to come together and break apart simultaneously as we walked around the rotunda of the Capitol.

I said, “Come on, man, are we going to walk around office buildings all day?”

Jim was honestly shocked and said, “This isn’t an office building. This is the Capitol of the United States of America.”

We were standing in front of busts of the founding fathers and dead senators, silly haircuts captured in stone and I lunged. “Jim, do you understand what’s going on here? These guys?” I said, pointing at the statues behind me. “These guys were a cabal of renegade deist freaks. They used to have ritual circle jerks, kill goats, wear the silly hats and chant incantations. That’s why they all left England. Because they couldn’t practice Satanism. Then they came here and built a government based on it. I mean, come on, the Pentagon! Pen-ta-gon. The Military Industrial Complex is in the business of round-the-clock human sacrifice with the U.N. security force. Wake up, my friend. Listen to me, I know.”

“What are you talking about?” Jim said. “The founding fathers had nothing to do with the Pentagon. It was built much later.”

“Yeah, but it’s
all
built on the great secret keepers’ original mystical momentum,” I said confidently.

“What
momentum
?”

“The founding fathers knew it. They rode the momentum. They were all out of control. How could they not be? Think about it, Jim. After the Revolutionary War, when all the leftover soldiers and mercenaries went up into the hills to fuck Indians and create hillbillies, these guys had all the land. They were partying because they knew they would run the world. Ben Franklin was a freak! Every other day he’d send his boy out. Picture it, Jimmy.”

I pulled my glasses down to the end of my nose like Ben Franklin.

“I want you to go over to George Washington’s place and pick up some reefer. Tell him you want the good shit and not the kind he makes rope from. Tell him Benny sent you and he’ll set you up with a nice bag. Then stop by Tommy Jefferson’s. If he’s coming, tell him to bring the black chicks. Hurry now. If you get back here before the party, I’ll hook you up to the kite again. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Toby? Now go, score, Godspeed.”

“Come on, Marc. That just isn’t true,” Jim said.

“You come on, man. They were all Masons, all of them. Dirty, dark Freemason spin-offs of Weishapt’s Order of the Illuminati. Ben Franklin was an old-school Hellfire Club kinky Mason. Jesus, Jim, you want me to pull a dollar bill out of my pocket and show you?! The fucking eye in the pyramid is the mark of the Illuminati. Get it? FDR put it on the dollar. Roosevelt was Mr. New Deal modern Mason, ushering in the one-world government, opening the door for Trilateralism. You gotta listen to me, man. It’s true. I read this in a book written by a guy who writes books.”

“I don’t think you really understand how politics works,” Jim said dismissively.

“So what?” I yelled. “Is that what this is really about? Politics?”

“No, Marc. Why don’t you tell me what it’s all about?” he said, trying to provoke and placate me simultaneously.

“Wake up and feel the momentum, Jimmy! It pacifies the masses with entertaining psychic terrorism delivered by the media industrial complex until no one knows what’s real or who they are anymore. They go on thinking they know, but they are unable to care about anything. It leaves them walking through life as controllable husks in search of their souls, with ghost limbs for hearts to guide them. Then Big Business and the big banks sell them back to themselves piecemeal in the form of products and designed ways of life. Then the excited husks will begin to feel as though they are whole again, but they will only regain as much as they can afford to buy back, yet still be in debt. That’s the core of it. The hope of getting all of themselves back keeps control intact and self-actualization nearly impossible. That’s what democracy is protecting now, Jim, hungry fear. That is the American way. That is the pursuit of happiness. The President of the United States is just the highest level of middle management. This government is just placating the people and keeping them lost so the insiders—their families, their friends, business associates—can feed. It’s the momentum, man!” I smiled, knowingly.