Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [7]
I can’t remember the name of the film, but it was a sixteen-millimeter feature. It opens with a guy on a bus pulling into a strange town. He meets a woman, and they end up at her place on her bed. She takes off his clothes. She takes off her clothes and on her belly is a tattoo of the Devil’s face and the mouth and beard of the Devil is her vaginal region. During sex she kept screaming, “Fuck me. Fuck the Devil. Fuck me. Fuck the Devil.” The only other thing I remember is that the movie ends with a woman on all fours on an altar. She was naked except for a hood that covered her head, and there was a lit candle stuck in her ass. People holding candles wearing hooded robes surrounded her. They were chanting, “All hail Uranus. All hail Uranus.” I don’t really think the movie helped me in any way understand what needed to be done, but I’ve never forgotten it.
Sometimes on cold, clear winter days Dave and I would take the Firebird up old 14 behind the Sandia Mountains, cruising into the sun at 140 miles an hour, barely shaking. When the road bent west toward Santa Fe, the valleys and mesas spread out vast before us and the huge gold and orange sky was a wash of light that hit my face and shot right through to my soul. It made time stop and it made me feel like there was nothing better than being alive and in the world. I stashed that light beside the Gray in my heart as a companion.
Sophomore year I got my own car, and Dave and I became distant. I got a job at a restaurant called The Posh Bagel. It was owned by a balding, morally bankrupt, twenty-five-year-old obsessive-compulsive, nail-biting, Jewish New Yorker who looked forty. His name was Eddie Waxman. I learned much under his tutelage within the secular confines of his New York Jewish theme restaurant. It was directly across from the University of New Mexico. I was fifteen when I became a shift manager. I learned how to count out a drawer and cook on a grill. I learned how to smoke pot and do cocaine. I learned how to hate my boss and focus my subversion. It was like an advance placement in noncurricular activities, which is where I excelled.
There was a constant influx of lunatics into The Posh Bagel on a day-to-day basis. There was Pete, who always wore shorts and lace-up boots to his knees. He would sit and smoke Winchester cigarillos like they were cigarettes and draw pictures of guns with schizophrenic poem headings that I believed at the time implied a deep wisdom. There was Sunshine, who seemed to have gotten lost on his way home from Woodstock. It was then 1979, so he looked real lost. He had long, tangled blond hair and a beard and mustache. He wore ripped-up jeans and accessorized himself with no less than twenty scarves that hung from him in different places like he was a display rack for used scarves. Sunshine didn’t speak. There was a guy we called Tree Man, because he was tall and the hair of his beard was matted together with the hair on his head by a green grime that covered his entire body and had a foliage-like quality to it. I was fascinated with the insane. Their uniqueness and their fragmented attempts to make sense of the world intrigued me. I thought they possessed the keys to understanding.
There were the students, my coworkers, and my teachers. There was Mike, one of the managers, who once took three Quaaludes