*Are You There "God"? It's Me, "Weirdo".

I had met the famed “God” once, in a roundabout sort of way, when I was about six years old. Behind our apartment complex on Juniper Street, and about fifty yards from the enclosure in which all the children in the neighborhood would study a colorful assortment of porno magazines, was a quiet medical building, which contained within it a circular courtyard with a tree in the center and wooden benches that circled the tree. It was a hidden sanctuary, one of the first to be called my secret place. Vibrant flowers surrounded the lonely, prosaic, brown and white building and I had picked the most beautiful one—its colors resembled a deep amber sunset. I set my gift on the bench and spoke to Him. 

“God, if you’we weally weal, this flowo is fo you. I pwomise I won’t tell anyone I saw you if you take this flowo fwom me. Wheweva you awe, just please appeaw. I just want to see what you look like because I need to see you in my head when I pway and wight now it’s weally hawd. I can’t see you and I don’t believe the dwawings of you; I think people awe just guessing what you look like but I weally need to know. Sometimes I see you as a big face with a white beawd and utho times you look like Jesus with long bwown haiw and it’s just too confusing. Please, please, please come and sit with me. Please.”

I waited and waited. Looked around, kicked leaves, broke up a couple of dirt clots with my hands, sat on the bench and swung my legs. 

Darn it. No God. 

Mum had a way of getting us kids in the house, and quick, with a construction worker’s type whistle, two fingers in her mouth and everyone in the neighborhood knew it was dinner time in Apartment 10. I heard the familiar call and was disappointed that despite my plea and generous gift, God never showed. 

“OK, I know you’we busy, God. I undostand. I’m gonna go eat dinno and I’ll come back and see if you’we hewe. If the flowo is gone, I’ll know you took it, but I’d weally watho see you. I pwomise I’ll nevo tell anyone, even my mum, unless, of couwse you want me to. I pwomise. I just weally need to see you. Please, please be hewe when I get back.” 

After the usual wholesome Hamburger Helper, iceberg lettuce salad, and slice of American cheese cut into four pieces and placed on the plate ever so artistically, I returned to the barren bench only to find that the beautiful flower was still there, only now limp, lifeless, and wilted. I was at first saddened by God’s apparent neglect, then was faced with the thought that I might have uncovered a paramount truth: God was, in fact, only a myth. But slightly hesitant to give up all hope entirely, I stared at it for several minutes, then suddenly recalled a conversation I had recently with Frank about what happens to people when they die. Then it came to me: God dutifully took the soul from the flower and left the body. 

Genius.

I gasped, and somewhat satisfied with God’s cryptic, brilliant response, I looked up into the sky, smiled at Him, then buried the limp remains under a bit of loose dirt in a nearby flowerbed, skipping home before dark.

Excerpt from chapter twenty-one | shambala | Everything's Hunky Dory: A Memoir

*Free To Be Me

The place where answers are often found.

The next day, I was completely done with the church I had spent my late teens and twenties in. I contacted the church leaders, and with reasons and scriptures to back those reasons, I told them I was leaving. [ . . . ]

Upon entrance into reality, I felt like an alien visiting another planet, attempting to meet new people, date, and find things to do on the weekends. Guys wanted to make-out on a first date, people drank alcohol when meeting up together, and there was no common moral standard to live by or call one another to. Yikes.

I was then romantically pursued by an actor I had met in a Santa Monica health food store. I’d watched him on television and films, admiring him for years. Though he was older than I, and I was worried about what I was ‘supposed to do’ as an adult in a dating scenario, I agreed to go out with him, based on the fact that he was quite charming and funny, and a comedian. He must be trustworthy, I thought.

We dated for a few months, enjoyed each other’s company, watched hours of Liberace footage, wrote jokes, and learned a lot from one another. Until one fine day when a friend brought over a gossip magazine showing Mr. Charming kissing another woman on a beach in Malibu. A world-renowned groupie.

So, this is what the real world looks like?

Great.

That was the end of that.

It didn’t take long before I retreated and fell right back into my naturally introverted ways. I began studying Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism. I read books by Deepak Chopra, Chögyam Trungpa, Pema Chödrön, Eckhart Tolle, Swami Vivekananda, and Krishnamurti. I began studying the Bhagavad Gita, Tao te Ching, and Tibetan Book of the Dead. My brain was spinning with new knowledge and possibilities, yet leaving me with no sense of direction but in.

Most of my time then was spent alone, on a mountaintop, walking along the beach, driving up and down Topanga Canyon smelling the wild sage and listening to Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, or Bob Dylan, and sitting up at my old park bench in Brentwood with a hot tea in one hand, watching the sun set over the Westside of Los Angeles, feeling rather lonely, yet tentatively free to be me, whoever that may be.

Excerpt from chapter twenty-five | the seeker | Everything’sHunky Dory: A Memoir