Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [9]
I made my headquarters the Frontier Restaurant on Central Avenue, down the street from The Posh Bagel. It was a huge Western theme restaurant that was famous for its homemade sweet rolls. It was the equivalent of an all-night diner, the meeting place of the dispossessed of all kinds. Some of my friends believed it was the center of the universe and would argue that point scientifically.
Around the corner from the Frontier was The Living Batch Bookstore and its proprietor, Gus Blaisdell. Gus was an intense, bearded man, a renegade intellectual with a dark past that included Stanford, two ex-wives, and alcohol. Sometimes he wrote books, sometimes he taught film at the university. He knew all the artists in the area and he knew everything about everything. He could reference art, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and theology with wit and bile. The Batch was his center of operations, but the Frontier was where he held court with professors, photographers, painters, writers, and wash-ups. When I began talking to him I was a junior in high school and very intimidated, but he accepted me, most of the time. We have a correspondence to this day. He was the smartest, funniest man I had ever met and I aspired to his level of brilliance. He inspired me to understand. I wanted to be jaded. He also made me want to go to college, which I wasn’t planning on doing.
I scrambled to get into a school. I wanted to get out of town. I wanted to go to Boston. It was two thousand miles away from my parents, and there were hundreds of colleges in the region. I thought one of them would accept me. My grades were shit other than in art-related classes and English. My senior year I actually did homework to get my GPA up, but it was too late. The only colleges that accepted me were Bunker Hill Community College and Curry College. I chose Curry, a small liberal arts school outside of Boston that was known for programs designed for dyslexic students and its lenience in accepting entitled high school fuck-ups. The slight difference in symptoms is sometimes difficult to discern, but I was definitely in the latter group.
6
I’VE never really practiced Judaism, I’ve never really believed in or had faith in the Jewish God or any God. I never really believed in anything other than self-expression and the deep desire to understand. I didn’t think I needed to believe in anything else. Within a month of being at Curry, a black sheep from a rich European family named Rene introduced me to the work of the Beats. I began to read them and I saw a way I could engage all of my desires: rebellion, expression, intoxication, the search for answers, and individuality. The gates of Heaven opened and I looked inside. It was surprisingly dark, and all the angels were snapping their fingers to a walking bass line. Finally, something to believe in. I didn’t want to be a Jew. I wanted to be a Bohemian. A Beatnik. Theirs was a religion I could have faith in. And it was a religion.
There are the sacred texts. On the Road by Jack Kerouac covers the ritual elements of the religion. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs covers the moral and the metaphysical elements of the religion, and Howl by Allen Ginsberg covers the gay poetry elements of the religion. All religions have a gay poetry element. I urge you to read the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament with a lilt in your voice.