The Jerusalem Syndrome

by Marc Maron

  I had one more day to indulge in my vacation. We drove back down through Jordan and Elat, down into the Sinai to a small town on the coast of the Red Sea called Terebin. Oriella had visited there when she was a child, and it was still part of Israel. It wasn’t so much a town as it was a dirt-cheap, run-down, low-rent tourist outpost. There was snorkeling and pedal boats, strewn garbage, dusty sand, broken-down trucks, stray dogs, and camels. There were three or four small, one-story hostels in a row. In front of each hostel was an open seating area with pillows, couches, low tables, and thatched roofs right at the edge of the water. Bedouin men served you as you sat. Mint tea, hummus, and tabouli.

  We checked ourselves into a hostel. I was shattered and had surrendered. I felt the way the town looked. My spiritual journey was over. I hated my camcorder, and I wasn’t too happy with God or myself. Once we got settled in, we went out to sit. I tried to get reacquainted with my wife and friends.

  While Jim, Kim, and Oriella were talking, I stepped away and pulled one of the Bedouin guys aside. I looked into his eyes and pinched my thumb and forefinger together and brought them to my lips and made the toke sound, the sucking in a joint noise, the universal sign language for “Can you get us some pot?”

  He looked at me and said, “Yes, I get for you.”

  I said, “That would be great.” I thought if I could score some reefer, it might make up for what an asshole I’d been the entire trip, and besides, I needed the relief.

  It must have been about two in the afternoon when he told me he could get some. We snorkeled, rode the pedal boats, ate twice, napped, and chatted, but still no pot. Around seven I was getting irritated and every time I saw the guy, I kicked my chin up at him with the secret What’s up with what we talked about? head jerk. He would say, “I get. I get. No worry.”

  I eventually gave up hope and settled into a cranky disappointment that my wife could not understand. I told her I was trying to get us all some pot and it didn’t pan out. She was pissed that I hadn’t told her earlier.

  It was like one-thirty in the morning. It was our last night in the Middle East. I was lying outside on the ground, looking up at the stars of Egypt, festering about a pot deal that didn’t go down, when I felt a tug on my arm. It was the little Arab guy. He said, “It is time.”

  I shook Kim, who had dozed off. I said, “Honey, it is time.” Oriella was still awake, so she came with us. Jim was out cold. We followed the guy up a hill behind the hostel. On the top of the hill there were three women and four men sitting around a campfire talking and eating. They were passing around what looked like two hubcaps. One was filled with stew and the other with bread. The Arab guy told us it was chicken, and it had been cooking in the ground all day. We found an open place in the circle and sat beside the fire. The people greeted us in broken English. We were handed the hubcaps and we took some chicken with the bread and ate. It was delicious.

  It became clear that no one could speak English, and I was getting antsy. Then one of the men took a bag of pot and a pouch of tobacco out of his pocket, dumped some of each into his hand, crumbled it, and rolled two large conical joints. The only other time I had seen joints that looked like that was in the centerfold of High Times magazine when I was in high school. He lit one up and started passing it around. The other he gave to our friend, the little Arab guy, who then gave it to us. I lit it and took a deep hit and passed to Kim. She took a hit. We got really high.

  Kim and Oriella tried to communicate with the others. One of the women knew Hebrew, so Oriella was able to translate. It became a group effort to understand the most mundane elements of life: Where are you from? What’s your name? What do you do? I sat and watched the cinders crackle and float up lit into the pitch-black sky and trail off as ashes. There was a timelessness to it. The Middle East, Egypt, a campfire, Bedouins: It was real Beat, primitive Beat, tribal. Whether there was a God or not or which God it was if there was one didn’t matter. There had always been people sitting around fires, laughing and telling stories, intoxicated and alive, explaining who they were by making pictures with their hands.

  As dawn began to break we walked back down to the hut. Oriella went to sleep. Kim sat down on the beach. The sun was beginning to rise over Saudi Arabia. I took off my Nikes and left them at the edge of the water and walked out into the Red Sea. Everything about my life seemed so distant and unimportant, ridiculous. The sky was a pale purple, the mountains were humped shadows in the distance. I felt full, whole, beat. I looked down and saw my feet moving along the floor of the sea through the clear water.

  14

  IT’S been three years since I went to Israel. I no longer have Jerusalem Syndrome. I found that the cure for it was essentially living life. Nothing seems to have turned out the way I thought it would.

  Since the trip, I have separated from my wife. I have given up smoking, drugs, and booze. I am no more Jewy than I was before. I am painfully present most of the time. Being on stage seems to be the only reprieve from my insanity that I have left. I still believe there are no coincidences, but I no longer think I am the chosen one. I think the path of my life has been to follow a trail of crumbs being dropped unintentionally by a God eating a piece of cake as he walks quickly away from a dinner I wasn’t invited to on his way to deal with the end of the world.

  I recently received a strange request. My mother’s friend Rosalie called me. I have known her since I was a kid. “Marc, hi. It’s Rosalie. How are you doing, sweetheart?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Everything’s great. I have a question for you. Would you be interested in coming to Albuquerque and performing a benefit for the synagogue?”

  “I don’t know. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Well,” she said, “the temple isn’t doing so well. The rabbi has Parkinson’s, the cantor quit, membership is very low, and all the kids from your group are gone. Only the older people are left.”

  “Sounds sad,” I said. “I don’t know. It would be weird.”

  “Oh, come on, Marc. We thought it would be wonderful if you came out and did your routine,” she said in that tone that made me realize I was being told that I was doing the show. “We could raise some money, give the congregation a little morale boost, and maybe some of your old friends would come out.”

  “I don’t know. I need to check my schedule.” I knew I had nothing on the books.

  “We’re also going to advertise in the paper so anyone can come,” she said, still selling.

  “Let me call you back.” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it.

  “I need to know soon, honey,” Rosalie said.

  “Right, I’ll call you back.”

  “Today, okay, sweetie?”

  “Yes, yes, today. Bye.”

  I hadn’t heard or even thought about Congregation B’nai Israel in at least fifteen years. I thought it over for a few minutes. It would be a free trip back to Albuquerque. It had been a long time since I had been back home. There was really no reason to go before, because my parents had split up and left there. I was excited. I would be able to see Gus and a few other people I had kept in touch with over the years. I could drive in the mountains. I called Rosalie back. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

  “Oh, great, everyone will be thrilled,” she said, excited. She knew the deal was sealed before she even picked up the phone to call me the first time.

  “Good,” I said with some surrender in my voice.

  “You just need to watch your language, and don’t do anything raunchy. I know you can do that. For me, you’ll do that.”

  I felt like I had just made a horrible but good decision. I really had no choice. It was the right thing to do.

  When I flew to Albuquerque a few weeks later, I was restless on the plane. I was overwhelmed with anxiety about performing at the synagogue. The picture that Rosalie had painted of the Jewish community I had grown up in was grim, and I began to think I couldn’t pull it off. It all felt awkward and I wanted to go back to N
ew York and forget about the whole thing.

  When I arrived at the Albuquerque airport, I called Gus and asked him to meet me. I picked up my rental car and drove to the center of the universe, the Frontier Restaurant. I needed to ground myself. It had always worked in the past. It was an odd feeling to walk into a place that was so important to me at a time in my life that seemed so far behind me. The familiarity, the comfort—I walked around expecting to see someone I knew. Maybe I was expecting to see myself as I was in high school, sitting with my friends talking, smoking, and laughing. All of us full of the excited curiosity and bravado of acting jaded and being innocent. I did see some of the lunatics I knew as a kid still hanging around. That gave me hope.

  Gus showed up and we caught up a bit. It was great to see him. We talked about movies, art, family, poetry, and what I had been doing. He said he was definitely coming to the show. That made me nervous. He had seen it advertised in the paper along with an article about me. It was the standard “hometown boy makes good, comes home to help” piece. I had a cheeseburger with green chilies on it and tried to relax. The interaction between us was different. It was the first time I really noticed that I wasn’t some hyper, anxiety-ridden, insecure high school student looking for approval from someone I respected. I had changed. I was a hyper, anxiety-ridden, insecure adult looking for approval from someone I respected.

  I left Gus and went to meet Rosalie at the synagogue. Driving around the streets of Albuquerque activated a grid of emotions in my heart and I moved through it. At every corner were ghosts of my experience, moments that had defined me. I could see the outside of Congregation B’nai Israel from a mile away because the roof of the sanctuary looked like the top of a large, opened, light brown umbrella. When I was growing up it was gray. Driving into the parking lot of the shul triggered all the memories of all the times I had arrived there as a kid for Hebrew school, for services, for my bar mitzvah. I walked in and was greeted by Rosalie. “Hi, sweetie. Everything okay?” She kissed me and smiled with her whole round face. Her hair was forever red. “You should look around. They renovated everything.”

  “Let’s go over what’s going to happen tomorrow night,” I said, anxious.

  We walked down the hallway to the social hall. Even with the changes, everything seemed enough the same for me to feel my childhood creeping out of every room of the building. I walked by the classrooms where I threw spitballs and wrote Hebrew on the blackboard. We walked into the social hall where my friends and I would do shots of Mogen David after services and smoke cigarettes with Herb out back. It was all fancy, with large tables and about two hundred place settings with flowers. There was a podium set up and a screen.

  “I can’t do comedy at a podium. What’s the screen for?” I asked, panicking.

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? We’re having a fundraising dinner before the show for Marilyn Rienman in honor of her service in the community. We thought you would emcee it. You could pep it up. They’re usually so boring. Did you have Marilyn as a teacher?”

  “Yeah, third grade, I think. She was one of the only Hebrew school teachers I liked.”

  “See? This is going to be so wonderful,” she said, surveying the room. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “I wish you would have told me about the dinner. I should prepare some stuff.”

  “You’ll be fine,” she said with mommy confidence.

  “So, the show will be in here after the dinner?” I said, trying to figure out the logistics.

  “No,” she said frankly. “After dinner everyone will move up to the sanctuary for the comedy show.”

  “You want me to do comedy in the sanctuary?” I was freaking out a bit. “Is that okay? It seems like that would be wrong somehow. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”

  “Look, you’ll get comfortable. There are no other options. It’ll have to be fine.” She said this in that tone that suggested that there would be no other way to be other than fine.

  “Do I have to wear a yarmulke?” I blurted.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to check with Mr. Ross.”

  “Mr. Ross is still here? Wow, yeah, you better check.”

  Mr. Ross was the brooding, bearded moral custodian of the synagogue. I’m not really sure what his job was, but he was always around when I was a kid. He acted as the bad cop to the rabbi’s good cop. He was an authoritarian and a strict disciplinarian when it came to troublemakers, and the thought of him used to scare me.

  “Marc, there are going to be two hundred people at the dinner and three hundred at the show. This is the biggest event of this kind we have ever had here. It’s all because of you,” Rosalie said, layering the guilt on top of the expectation beautifully; she was a real pro. “Just don’t be filthy, sweetie,” she said, and walked away to deal with the caterers.

  I was momentarily terrified. I would be doing comedy on the same bema that I was bar mitzvahed on. I would do my jokes on the altar in front of the arc that contained the Torahs that I read from as a boy. It was too weird. It was almost as if I was getting a second chance to do it right. There was a moment when I thought I should actually read my haftorah. I had the same fear I had felt before my bar mitzvah, for roughly the same reasons.

  I walked out of the social hall and up into the sanctuary alone. It wasn’t much different than I remembered it. There was another panel of Yahrzeit plaques in the entrance, but aside from that it was pretty much the same. It was a large semicircular room with red carpet. About four hundred seats fanned out in sections around a semicircular bema that was elevated by two steps. There was a podium in the middle of the bema and a large arc behind the podium with chairs on each side. The roof was pitched, like the underside of a giant umbrella. In the center of the roof was a large circular skylight with a cylindrical lip cut at an angle that protruded into the room. It looked like the end of a giant organ pipe. A tube that light passed through. When I was a kid I thought that God listened through that hole.

  I walked up the stairs and stood on the bema. The spiritual importance of the place had been hammered into my brain, so it felt holy. I vaguely remembered being up there and looking down at my Grandma Goldy smiling in the front row. My voice cracking through an overstudied adolescent rendition of the service. I stood alone in the quiet only a sanctuary can offer and I looked up, took a deep breath, and said, “God, I really need to get this out of the way. Forgive me.” Then I yelled, “Fuck, shit, damn it, cock, pussy, motherfucker.” I took another breath. “Look, I had to do that. I’m sorry. I don’t want any of that coming out tomorrow night during the show. Save the old people some aggravation. You understand? That was between me and you, I, and thou, dig?” I felt relieved.

  I walked out of the sanctuary and I was about to leave, but Rosalie stopped me. “The rabbi is in his office. He’s been looking forward to seeing you,” she said.

  “Really? Right now?” I said. “I don’t know. Is he alright?”

  “He has his good days and his bad days. Today seems to be a good day. He’s on a new medicine that seems to work, but it makes his face somewhat expressionless.” She walked me to the door of his office.

  Rabbi Celnik was sitting at his desk, and when he saw me he stood up. I had forgotten he was like six foot five. He wasn’t that old, maybe fifty-five. He had the same gray hair he always had, even when he was younger. He had a soft, friendly face and wore glasses. He walked over to me in the same peaceful, humble, warm lope I remembered as a kid when he walked up beside me as I prepared to read from the Torah. We shook hands.

  “How are you?” he asked with no expression. “It’s great to see you.” I could see how he felt in his eyes. He was happy.

  “Thanks. It’s really great to see you too,” I said. We sat down.

  “Tell me what you’ve been up to,” he said.

  I had never really spoken to the rabbi as an adult before. I didn’t know what to talk about, so I immediately started whining. I told him that my career wasn’t working out the way I
wanted it to. I told him about the end of my marriage. I told him about my family annoying me. I told him how it had been a rough year for me. I just blah-blah-blahed like a little baby. He listened and seemed to understand. I felt comforted by him even though I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years.

  I felt selfish, so I asked him how he was doing. He told me about his Parkinson’s and how the new medicine he was on was helping. He told me about his new marriage. His first had ended after his wife had an affair with a member of the congregation. He told me that his new wife was ill with cancer but doing alright and that they had a beautiful new baby. He talked proudly about his older children from the first marriage. It was all very heartbreaking and bittersweet.

  When I got up to leave he said, “What you do, Marc, provides a tremendous service to people. We are happy to have you here. You are performing a mitzvah by being here.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad I’m here,” I said. “It’s been really great talking to you.” We shook hands.

  “Before I leave,” I said, “do you remember my haftorah?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “It was Re’eh. It is a very beautiful one.”

  “Can you tell me what it’s about, basically?”

  “Basically,” he said through the side of his mouth, “it’s about having faith in the face of disappointment.”

  “How’s your faith?” I said.

  “Stronger than ever,” he said, eyes smiling.

  The night of the performance I was nervous. During the dinner I sat at a table with the rabbi and my old friends Dave and Steve, who had come to see me. I had known them since I was nine. We were all in Mrs. Reinman’s class together. During the dinner Mr. Ross came up to me and whispered in my ear, “You will need to wear a kippa in the sanctuary.”

  I said, “Really?”

  He shot me a look.