The Jerusalem Syndrome by Marc Maron Read Free Book Online Page B

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