Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [4]
The pilot invited my brother and me into the cockpit. He showed us the controls of the plane and explained the radar screens. He told us that the rectangular boxes in the back held the bodies of soldiers being sent home from Vietnam. When we sat back down and strapped ourselves into our seats against the wall, I felt the dense deep fear from sharing space in the air with death. I pictured soldiers and war. I thought about God bringing them home and men who could fly ships at night guided by blips of light carrying a cargo of stories that ended in boxes of shattered remains. It was all so overwhelming that I cried at the thought that I could die. A living soldier told me it would be alright and gave me a boxed meal of a sandwich, a banana, some cookies, and a V-8. It was the first time I ever drank a V-8. It was an adult drink and it was good. Now when I see a can on a grocery shelf, it’s like a psychic trigger: V-8, almost eight years old, Vietnam, death, God’s cargo, a box of food.
I have no recollections of my Jewishness in Alaska, other than knowing that I was a Jew and getting in trouble for drawing a picture of Hitler in Hebrew school. Not that I knew who he was or what he did. I had just seen pictures of him in a book and his mustache made him easy to draw. The swastika was an enchanting, brain-twisting symbol and also very easy to draw. I liked to draw. My drawings made grown-ups mad.
4
THE first time I had actual words with God, he started it. We moved to Albuquerque in 1972. My mom, my dad, my brother, myself, and an old English sheepdog named Mac crammed into a Caprice station wagon and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” blared through the back speakers and my father was laughing and singing. Buddy Holly: A Rock ’n’ Roll Collection was his favorite eight-track. We heard it over and over again. He told us Holly had been killed in a plane crash at the peak of his powers. I would stare at the picture on the tape, trying to connect the man with the voice and the horrible end he met. For years the human manifestation of death in my mind wore black horn-rimmed glasses. It was also then I realized that sometimes God took some people home for being too damn good.
My brother and I would lie out in the back bed of the station wagon and look out the rear window, up at the clouds. It happened as we drove through the Arizona desert. I don’t know if I was in waking consciousness or if it was a dream, but I saw this huge guy standing over the clouds with his arms crossed like someone overseeing fieldwork. He was about the size of the Jolly Green Giant. He had no shirt on and he was wearing satiny Turkish-looking pants that ruffled in the wind like a hot-air balloon being inflated. I couldn’t see his face because there was pure light emanating from it and a cloud in the way, but he looked like a giant genie. It was clear to me at that moment that he was God, the grand instigator of earthquakes, snow, and death. As I remember, I was squinting, trying to see his face, and I heard a booming voice say, “What are you looking at? What are you going to do about it?” He was challenging me. That was the moment I was infected with Jerusalem Syndrome.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m eight.”
Then the montage of roadside signs flew by on the sides of the car and my consciousness: McDonald’s, Arby’s, 7-Eleven. Civilization, context, consistency, food. Then my brother yelled, “McDonald’s, McDonald’s, let’s go to McDonald’s.”
Eight years old, eight-tracks, rock ’n’ roll, death, and God in the desert.
Once we got planted in the Land of Enchantment, being a Jew became a part of my life. My father opened his medical