Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [6]
My Grandma Goldy gave me a gold-plated Elgin pocket watch to mark the occasion. The date 8-20-76 was engraved on the inside of the cover. My best friend, Dan, gave me an antique collapsible top hat and a cane. Show Time—high school—the need to belong and the quest to be different.
5
FRESHMAN year of high school I attended Sandia Preparatory. It wasn’t the private school of the region, but it was the private school that the students who couldn’t get into the private school went to. I had been at Sandia since seventh grade, and it took the faculty three years before they asked me to leave. My offenses ranged from the standard disruption of classes (pushing one elderly teacher to the point of slapping me in the face), cheating, smoking (which I was doing regularly—Marlboros, because Keith Richards smoked Marlboros), being sent home from a class trip after being caught with Patty Ryan’s breasts in my hands, and general instigation of chaos. I believe that most of the teachers actually liked me because I was entertaining, but they had to do what was right for the school. A teacher whose last name was Liberty rallied the faculty against me, and they asked me to leave after my freshman year. The letter said, “We suggest a military school or a boarding school for Marc. He possesses the wrong kind of leadership qualities.” It was the best thing that could have happened to me. Liberty.
Public high school was really the most humbling punishment for a leader in exile. I went from a school with an easily led student body of 900 to a school of 3,400 students, and my power dissipated. The possibilities for a coup d’etat and the implementation of a clown junta were diminished. There is a freedom to anonymity. I became follower, a pupil, an adept of adolescent rebellion, and I joined forces with this guy named Dave because he had a car.
It was a 1971 gold Pontiac Firebird with a twin cam, a Holly double-pumping carb, and mag wheels. It could go 150 miles an hour. Dave had a reckless lack of fear that I admired and aspired to. He also had a compulsive, contagious laugh that made me want to be around him as much as possible. Dave’s laugh made everything okay. We would go out on weekends and sit in front of liquor stores until we found someone to buy something for us. Dave drank beer and I drank Jack Daniel’s because I didn’t like beer. We would get ripped and drive around Albuquerque looking for girls and trouble. We rarely found girls. When Dave couldn’t get into a fight, we would go to the parking lot of the Winrock shopping center (named for Winthrop Rockefeller, who was the developer) late at night and put shopping carts in front of the Firebird. We’d get them going about 60 miles an hour and let them slam into an embankment or a curb and watch them tumble into a mangled mess of chrome and wheels. I’d like to think of this as an early anticonsumerism action, an attack on the corporate elite, but it was really just pent-up sexual energy and rage.
Dave and I, along with my friends Bob and Brian, eventually got fake IDs. We were at a party, and there was a guy there making them. He had a large board that was an exact replica of a New Mexico driver’s license. The corner was cut where the picture was supposed to be. Each of us held the board in front of our bodies and put our head in the corner. The guy stepped back a specific distance from the board. He judged the distance by a string he attached to the subject’s foot. Then he shot a Polaroid. He would then give you the image and you took it home, trimmed it, and had it laminated. The only drawback was that he couldn’t change the information on the board. We all had the same fake ID: same name, same height, same birthdate, same color eyes, and same Social Security number. We were a pack of Tom Bines. If we went to a bar, we would space ourselves between people going in and hope that the bouncer only looked at the birthdate. It usually worked.
Sometimes we would go to the Pyramid Theater