Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [30]
The show was supposed to be taking place in the vault of Comedy Central. Every episode opened with my sidekick, the elevator operator, and me going down to the vault in an elevator. The set was supposed to be a basement with shelves cluttered with reels, files, and boxes with funny labels. Right in the middle of the set there was a pyramid of twelve televisions that were turned on. It was my background. I stood in front of it every day. I was on TV, I was in the TV, and TVs that I was on surrounded me. I wish my Grandpa Jack had been alive to see me really on the TV. It was as if the series of photographs I took in high school were some kind of personal prophecy.
The most significant event that occurred during my tenure as host of SAST, other than interviewing Lily Tomlin, happened on a press junket. I was flown by Comedy Central to Los Angeles to help announce their new season. They had booked me a room at the St. James Hotel. I couldn’t believe it. I was so freaked out and excited. I was going to be inside the hotel that communicated with me when I had lived in Hollywood years before, during what seemed like another life. I could barely contain myself when I got there. When I walked into the St. James, tingles ran through my body. All the doors started to creak open again.
The first night there, after I had done all my press conferences, I walked over to The Comedy Store. I didn’t see anyone I knew, so I walked back over to the St. James. I went up into my room and lay on my bed. The décor was beautiful—delicate Deco glassware and picture frames and polished chrome fixtures in the bathroom. The furniture and the bed were 1920s reproductions. Everything about it just brought my mind back to those pictures in Irv’s books; to that feeling of royalty and radiation that came off of those film stills mixed with the darkness of the hotel’s past, of my past. I just took in the energy of the place. It was so important to me from the outside when I was crazy. I could still feel something.
At about twelve-thirty that night, I couldn’t help myself. I was driven by a compulsion much bigger than I was. I went up the stairs to the roof door. There was no alarm, so I went out onto the roof. There was another door and a ladder that went up to the altar. The altar. I pulled the door open and went up the ladder. I stood beneath the altar. I looked down at Los Angeles. I looked down at the hills and The Comedy Store. It was oddly windy up there and the sky seemed to be crackling with electricity. I felt as if I were finishing a ritual that I had inadvertently started years before. I felt transcendent. I was possessed by a madness for closure. I took some deep breaths and yelled at the sky, “Where are you now?” There was no immediate response.
I went back down to my room and went to sleep. I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of tinkling glass. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first, because I was half asleep. Then I heard another layer of sound: The building was creaking. Then I heard the muffled voices of panic, people scrambling around in the hallway, trying to figure out what to do. Beneath it all was an even deeper layer of sound, the shifting of the Earth’s plates. It was the best experimental music I had ever heard, except that it was being spontaneously generated by an earthquake in progress. God was jamming—just for me. I bolted out of bed. The building was swaying back and forth. I was in my underwear and I didn’t know what to do. I thought I should stand in the doorway, that’s what I remember my dad saying,