Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [22]
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