Marc Maron - The Jerusalem Syndrome: My Life as a Reluctant Messiah

BROADWAY BOOKS NEW YORK

Contents

This book is for my mother, Toby, who claims she did the best she could, and for my father, Barry, whose selfishness propelled me into the darkness.

WELCOME TO THE BOOK. MARC MARON HAS been brought to you by the following: Eastern Europe, a faulty diaphragm, Dr. and Mrs. Barry Maron, Similac (in 1963 women just didnt breastfeed), Gerber baby food, Sid and Marty Croft, Mark Twain Elementary School, Congregation Bnai Israel, Kelloggs Frosted Flakes, Mad magazine, Post Cereals Cocoa Pebbles, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Crest toothpaste, Aquafresh toothpaste, until the novelty wore off and then Crest again, Swanson frozen foods, Highland High Schools Class of 81, KQEO-AM, the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, and whatever CBS stands for, the Rolling Stonesa division of Rolling Stone Records, a division of Columbia Records, Boston University Classes of 85 and 86, City Lights Books, National Lampoon, The Grateful Dead, cotton, poultry, beefits whats for dinner, porkI know its wrong but come on, bacon?Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Co., Glaxo- SmithKline, Parke-Davis, Humboldt County, Mr. Pibb, Jack Daniels, several Third World dictatorships co-caine, General Electric, Wendys, General Dynamics, the Military Industrial Complex, the Museum of Modern Art, Schwinn, Hanes, Wisconsin cheese, Heinz Ketchup, The Comedy Store, Vivid Video, Clarkes desert boots, Fender guitars, Harvey Altman CPA, the Walt Disney Company, Philip Morris, Coca-Cola, Seagrams, United Synagogue Youth, 3 Arts Entertainment, the three branches of the United States Government, Nabisco, Rolling Rock beer from Latrobe Brewing Company, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Time-Warner Inc., Universal Studiosan MCA company, Chess Records, Fed Ex, Sprint, HBO, Datsun, Beatrice, AT&T, Bill Graham Presents, the American Psychiatric Association, and Fruit of the Loom.

D URING the summer of 1998 my wife and I took a trip to Israel. I know what youre thinking: Israel? Is this going to be heavy? I understand. Thats what our friends thought when we told them about our trip. When you tell people you are going to Israel it makes them nervous. It somehow implicates their lack of religion and they want to know why youre going. They get worried. Are you going to get Jewy?

They dont know what youre going to be like when you get back. People change. Am I going to walk off the plane davening down the gateway wearing a tallit and a yarmulke with payes bouncing beside my ears? Then theyre going to think, Now its weird. We cant go to their house anymore, certainly not on Saturdays. That pretorn toilet paper thing gives me the creeps.

We didnt go to Israel to get Jewy. We went because a friend of mine invited us.

It was only after we got back from Israel that I read about Jerusalem Syndrome. This is a psychological condition that occurs in some visitors to the Middle East. They get to Israel and just snap. They think they are a biblical or religious figure like Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad. Some think that they are in a direct communication with God on a one-to-one level. Some think that their being in the Middle East is one of the keys that unlocks the final unfolding, which is what I like to call Armageddon.

In retrospect, Im pretty sure I had a full-blown case of Jerusalem Syndrome. The catch is, I actually think I had it long before I left. Its hard for me to tell, because I always felt like I was special.

I was the first child of my parents and the first grandchild for both sets of grandparents. So, needless to say, I was special. For my entire life, until the day she died a few years ago, my Grandma Goldy would pull me aside from the rest of the brood, look me in the eyes, smiling, and say, Marc-y, youre my number one. Then she would slip me a piece of dietetic coffee candy.

The other reason I believe Im special is mystical. I was born on Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur. It is the holiest night in the Jewish religion. It was 8:10 P.M., September 27, 1963. A somber mood rippled through the Judaic collective unconscious. Jews around the world were repenting for their sins in shame, guilt, and fear. They were all asking God to write their names into the book of life for one more year as I slid out of my mother, covered in blood and crying in a Jersey City hospital. What does it mean? I dont know, but Jesus was born on Christmaswhat are the odds? And if there is any core to my faith at all it is in that there are no coincidences. [There is no word in Hebrew for coincidence.] Nothing happens in Gods world by chance.

My father-in-law, Marty, wanted to be a rabbi but instead became a psychiatrist, thus cutting out the middleman, God. I asked him if he had heard of Jerusalem Syndrome and told him the symptoms. He said he had never come across it but it sounded to him like a decompensating borderline personality disorder, paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of grandeur or mania, which is what I like to call the fun side of bipolarity. He was, all and all, very clinical.

Maybe if he had become a rabbi it wouldve been a longer conversation, had over a stack of sacred texts revolving around how God manifests himself in this world and how all Jews that follow the rules want and expect to experience revelation. The Hasidim believe that all behaviors of people and all events, good or bad, are manifestations of God on Earth. They are put before us so we may engage our free will and make a choice between life or death, good and evil, God or self. This illustrates one of the primary differences between Jews and Christians. In the Christian texts the wages of sin is death. In the Jewish texts the wages of sin are negotiable. There are those of us who dont follow the rules.

Im not a religious person. I was born in New Jersey. I was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My parents were of the first generation of Jews to move as far away from their parents as possible for reasons other than fleeing a country. They just had to get away. When people ask me what I am, I tell them, Im a Jew but Im not a Jew.

B EFORE we left New Jersey we lived in Pompton Lakes with my grandparents, Jack and Goldy. My father was never around because he was busy finishing medical school and my mother was never around because she was busy trying to finish becoming herselfa project she is still working on. She was twenty-two when she had me. For my formative years my soul and being were in the care of my Grandma Goldy.

She was a tall woman with a charming smile that could disarm anyone in seconds. She talked to everyone everywhere about everything in her life that made her proud, which was usually me. When Grandma looked down at me and smiled, it was one of the only times I really understood what it felt like to be loved. Godly Goldy was the keeper of an eternal stash of melon balls, boiled chicken, and soup. To me this was the holy trinity. One of the only objects of hers I took after her death was her melon baller. I use it in the summer as a device to go back in time.

My Grandpa Jack was an average-size man with a protruding round belly, thinning white hair and a strange bump on his forehead. He looked like a Jewish Buddha. He was always curious about how things worked and he could seemingly fix just about anything, if he could find a screwdriver and his glasses. Finding Jacks glasses was a frequent activity and one of the rituals that bonded my grandparents. Jacks disposition wavered among engaged, irritated, and amused. He had a nasal giggle that could stop time because time wanted to let Jack laugh. When Jack smiled, everything within a fifty-foot radius of him smiled. When Jack yelled, the same things ran for cover. He was a powerful man.