Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [14]
The building lay dormant until a maternal Jewish succubus named Mitzi Shore joined forces with the Devil in a philanthropic joint venture and opened The Comedy Store in 1970. The Comedy Store is the Devil’s way of giving back to the world. He understands the pain of being alienated for being a smart-ass. He wanted to give others the opportunity to try to make it work for them. Through Mitzi, he provided a venue for that purpose.
The entire outside of the club was painted black and covered with names written in cursive in white paint. These were the names of the comics who had performed at the Store regularly throughout its history. It was like a goofy rendition of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., only the names on the walls of the Store had died a different kind of death, and it could be repeated anytime they’d get on stage. There was also a patio bar in front of the club, facing Sunset Boulevard. It was usually occupied by a huddle of comics waiting to go on and hangers-on waiting to get off.
The inside of the club was labyrinthine and done in a red and black theme with no other variations. There were three performance rooms with different seating capacities. I lifted the velvet rope in all of them at one point or another. The largest, called the Main Room, was a Vegas-style showroom with high ceilings and a large red stage with black curtains. The Original Room was smaller, box-like and black. Audience members were seated right up to the lip of the stage. This is the classic comedy club setup. The Belly Room was upstairs. It was a small red venue used for special shows. There were hidden rooms behind all of the stages, stairways, a kitchen, lighting booths, cubbyholes, and offices upstairs. The beautiful, Gothic, Deco tone of the original Ciro’s was eerily maintained. There were neon caricatures of old movie stars on the walls of the Original and Main rooms. The comic on stage in the Main Room knew it was time to get off when the bow in Fanny Brice’s hair lit up. In the Original Room, it was Eddie Cantor’s eyes.
The hallways were lined with the headshots of the hundreds of comics that had appeared there; some known, some unknown. A headshot differs from a portrait in that a good portrait captures the stature and spirit of its subject as a testament of who he or she is in the world. A headshot is a desperate cry for attention. It’s an image designed to mask the subject’s need for work and love with an attitude, gesture, or look that might be marketable. Since the headshots were all of comics, the collective neediness was hard to hide, to the point that I believed the photos on the wall were feeding on and draining the emanations of the club’s illustrious dark history. It was a gallery of broken dreams. They were the pictures of people who had tried to catalyze their pain into living mirrors with which audiences could reflect their own flaws back at themselves and laugh. They were the black and white images of broken hearts in the shapes of the faces of clowns.
I moved into a small Old Spanish–style mansion that sat up on the hill behind The Comedy Store. It was called Cresthill. Mitzi owned it and rented it out to comics. It had a dark vibe as well; not as insidious as the club, but Raymond Burr had once lived there, so it possessed its own unique weird residue. There were five bedrooms, all occupied by comics. There was a full kitchen that