The Jerusalem Syndrome Read Online Free PDF

and it was free.
    The mellow hum of Japanese machinery propelled us toward our destiny.
    Boston to Lowell, all forty-five miles, we didn’t fall asleep once.
    We talked about art, politics, philosophy, and what to have for lunch.
    We jammed to jazz and beat our hands on the dash. I think we had made it through half of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” when we pulled onto the path
    to the angelic, holy, hipster cemetery and the tomb of St. Jack.

    We were led to the gravesite by an ancient guide wearing a hat with earflaps. We assumed he was the caretaker. He told us that it was the most popular grave in the cemetery. When he spoke, the top plate of his dentures would slip in his mouth. It looked like he had an extra set of teeth where his tongue should’ve been. He said, “Bobby Die-lin and Joan Bry-ez once came up to visit.” When we got to the grave, we thanked him and he wandered away, kicking leaves off the path, talking to himself.
    I think we had the same moment most pilgrims have at the grave of Kerouac. We gazed down at the headstone, awed to be in the presence of Jack. We were there to pay our respects. We were there because we drove there. We were there because part of our journey was to bear witness to the place where his journey ended. We were there to earn some Beat creds. My brain was trying to calculate significance, manufacture some meaning. My soul was a dry sponge craving to absorb some residual greatness out of the sod. I lit a joint, sucked in a deep hit, held it, and from my constricted throat I said, “You know what, man? We’ve gotta get on the road.”
    “Yeah,” Jim said, “I know what you mean.”
    There was a moment of deep silence between us as I exhaled slowly and watched the smoke dissipate into the gray, cold air of Lowell.
    “No, I mean
now
, I’ve gotta be back for class in an hour. It’s Romantic lit and if I miss it again, I won’t be able to major in English.”
    Sometimes pilgrimages have their limitations.
    We left an offering at the grave because that’s what you do at the tombs of your heroes. We set a small bottle of gin in front of the headstone. Codependency doesn’t need to stop just because someone’s dead.
    Freshman year I lived in a house owned by the college. It was called the Green House and it was the “art dorm.” The concept was to put seven socially retarded creative people in one living environment in the hopes that by giving them the freedom to do their art, they wouldn’t drop out and the money would keep flowing through the halls of higher education.
    I was a poet; a very important poet.
    I lived on the first floor and in the attic lived a huge angry Jewish girl with wild, frizzy hair. Her name was Nancy and I believe she was the modern manifestation of Lilith. I felt she was holding the house down, both spiritually and physically. She would hole up in her room and frantically write poetry. She would sit at her typewriter scowling and smoking, and somehow it would all come out flowers.
    A watershed in my spiritual development took place one night in the Green House. I wasn’t expecting it, but I had done the work. I was living the Beat ideal as best I could, and I was rewarded. I remember I barged into Nancy’s room. I was a freshman, so I must have been pestering her.
    “What are you writing, Nancy? What are you writing? I want to read it. Come on, let me read it. I want to write but I can’t. I’m so high. I’m blocked. Let me see it Nancy, come on. I don’t know what I should do.”
    Nancy looked up from her typewriter and flipped her mane of hair back with her hand with a momentum that started in her lower back and whipped her entire upper body around to reveal her face.
    “I don’t care what you do. Just get out of my room. You should go write, go sleep, go meditate. I don’t care. Just go.” Her hair fell and she refocused on her typewriter.
    Something about meditating clicked in little Beat Marc’s head. “I’ll meditate. Yeah.