The Jerusalem Syndrome Read Online Free PDF Page A

forty thousand dollars for them to spend four years at college thinking they are Beatniks.
    As for the rituals themselves, there must be coffee, cigarettes, and beer, you must read good poetry and write bad poetry and then read that aloud. You must smoke reefer and listen to jazz and stay up all night. There is also room within the Beat religion to call and ask your parents for money.
    There must be deep philosophical discussions that go on for hours and hours about
nothing
. Every gathering must end at three or four in the morning with some drunken friend in your face yelling, “But you still haven’t proven that you exist, man.”
    “Well, I’m tired, drunk, and high. I’m going to sleep now. Let’s see if I exist tomorrow. Don’t climb into bed with me again. It makes me uncomfortable.”
    That’s another ritual. There must be two or more awkward sexual situations with two or more people that don’t really culminate in anything but one person crying, “Am I gay? I think I’m gay.” Then it’s not really a sexual situation as much as it’s a baby-sitting crisis.
    There must also be a few occasions when you look down into your palm at a very small square piece of paper with maybe a Disney character, Mr. Natural, or a star printed on it and say, “Are you sure you know the guy you got this from? It’s cool, right? I am not afraid. I’m going to do it. You’re going to hang out, right? ’Cause the last time I did this I forgot my name.”
    There are also pilgrimages within the Beatnik religion. Of course, any car ride with another person, music, reefer, and no real destination can be a Beatnik pilgrimage. Some turn out to be more important than others.
    In order to go on the pilgrimages, you must choose your Beatnik brother from your crew. You must find your Jack or your Neal. My Jack was a guy named Jim. I met him during my freshman year of college. Jim was an Irish kid. He had long blond hair and wore a faded Levi’s jacket that had a red and white yin and yang symbol on the back that he had hand painted there one night.
    Jim was angry but sweet. He’d been in the Boston area all his life. His father lived in Cambridge and his mother lived in Brookline. He spent a good part of his childhood on Cape Cod. Jim liked to drink. At dorm room parties he would usually consume a six pack of Genesee Cream Ale as he railed about politics, rants that fell on the deaf ears of drunken dyslexics and party kids. Toward the end of the evening Jim would stand up, hammered, and break into a flawless Jim Morrison impression and sing the first verse of “Break On Through,” then pass out on the floor. This was a ritual. The second part of the ritual was that all the people in the room would gather around Jim’s body and draw on his face with a pen.
    Jim would brood around the quad, chain-smoking Marlboros and ranting about the Vietnam War as if he had been there.
    “Da Nang was a mistake, man. We shouldn’t have
been
there, man. It wasn’t our war, Marc.”
    “Jim,” I would say, “you weren’t there. You’re twenty. It’s 1982. Take it easy. It’s over. I can still see the peace sign on your cheek.”
    Jim was the kind of kid who would go away for the weekend and come back three weeks later and say, “Uhm, we went down to the Cape and I lost my watch. What did I miss? Can I check out your notes, man?”
    Jim was my running buddy. We made the pilgrimages. The most important was the pilgrimage to Jack Kerouac’s grave. It was a beautiful fall day in Boston. The air had an electric chill. I called Jim and said, “We’re going to visit Jack.”
    He said, “Alright, man, swing by.”
    I remember the Gray came over me. I was present, alive, in the moment, connected to all things.
    (Author’s instructions: Dim the lights in the room you’re in, put on Coltrane, and read this aloud, standing.)

    We climbed behind the helm of a 1979 Honda five-speed, foreign car,
    A heresy, not really Beat, but it was my dad’s