Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [47]
“We’re also going to advertise in the paper so anyone can come,” she said, still selling.
“Let me call you back.” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it.
“I need to know soon, honey,” Rosalie said.
“Right, I’ll call you back.”
“Today, okay, sweetie?”
“Yes, yes, today. Bye.”
I hadn’t heard or even thought about Congregation B’nai Israel in at least fifteen years. I thought it over for a few minutes. It would be a free trip back to Albuquerque. It had been a long time since I had been back home. There was really no reason to go before, because my parents had split up and left there. I was excited. I would be able to see Gus and a few other people I had kept in touch with over the years. I could drive in the mountains. I called Rosalie back. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”
“Oh, great, everyone will be thrilled,” she said, excited. She knew the deal was sealed before she even picked up the phone to call me the first time.
“Good,” I said with some surrender in my voice.
“You just need to watch your language, and don’t do anything raunchy. I know you can do that. For me, you’ll do that.”
I felt like I had just made a horrible but good decision. I really had no choice. It was the right thing to do.
When I flew to Albuquerque a few weeks later, I was restless on the plane. I was overwhelmed with anxiety about performing at the synagogue. The picture that Rosalie had painted of the Jewish community I had grown up in was grim, and I began to think I couldn’t pull it off. It all felt awkward and I wanted to go back to New York and forget about the whole thing.
When I arrived at the Albuquerque airport, I called Gus and asked him to meet me. I picked up my rental car and drove to the center of the universe, the Frontier Restaurant. I needed to ground myself. It had always worked in the past. It was an odd feeling to walk into a place that was so important to me at a time in my life that seemed so far behind me. The familiarity, the comfort—I walked around expecting to see someone I knew. Maybe I was expecting to see myself as I was in high school, sitting with my friends talking, smoking, and laughing. All of us full of the excited curiosity and bravado of acting jaded and being innocent. I did see some of the lunatics I knew as a kid still hanging around. That gave me hope.
Gus showed up and we caught up a bit. It was great to see him. We talked about movies, art, family, poetry, and what I had been doing. He said he was definitely coming to the show. That made me nervous. He had seen it advertised in the paper along with an article about me. It was the standard “hometown boy makes good, comes home to help” piece. I had a cheeseburger with green chilies on it and tried to relax. The interaction between us was different. It was the first time I really noticed that I wasn’t some hyper, anxiety-ridden, insecure high school student looking for approval from someone I respected. I had changed. I was a hyper, anxiety-ridden, insecure adult looking for approval from someone I respected.
I left Gus and went to meet Rosalie at the synagogue. Driving around the streets of Albuquerque activated a grid of emotions in my heart and I moved through it. At every corner were ghosts of my experience, moments that had defined me. I could see the outside of Congregation B’nai Israel from a mile away because the roof of the sanctuary looked like the top of a large, opened, light brown umbrella. When I was growing up it was gray. Driving into the parking lot of the shul triggered all the memories of all the times I had arrived there as a kid for Hebrew school, for services, for my bar mitzvah. I walked in and was greeted by Rosalie. “Hi, sweetie. Everything okay?” She kissed me and smiled with her whole round face. Her hair was forever red. “You should look around. They renovated everything.”
“Let’s go over what’s going to happen tomorrow night,” I said, anxious.
We walked down the hallway to the social hall. Even with the changes, everything seemed enough the same for me to feel my childhood