Long Past Stopping (32 page)

Dawn and I had to keep our make-out sessions under wraps, and having sex would have been difficult but possible if Dawn had been willing. I had all sorts of creative ideas to work around the rules, but whenever it got to that point, she flat-out refused.

“What's up? What's the problem?” I asked almost daily.

“I'm sorry, I can't. I'm not ready yet.”

At eighteen, Dawn had already been through rehab four times, twice for bulimia and once for alcohol, and this time she was in for heroin. Apart from that, I didn't know much about her except that she was a third-degree black belt in karate, her mom worked for a porn magazine, and her refusal to have sex with me was the result of a childhood trauma she was unwilling to discuss. I'd never experienced anything close to this level of sexual frustration, but whenever I brought up the subject of leaving, she would start making out with me and tell me that she would be ready soon.

“I just have to work some stuff out,” she said.

 

S
URPRISINGLY, THE ONLY
thing saving me from going crazy in Oxnard was a daily 10:00 a.m. AA meeting. Not only did it fulfill my daily meeting requirement from the rehab, but I actually began looking forward to it. I could smoke in it, and I was totally fascinated by the characters who showed up. They were all probably at one time the sorts of people who went around wearing tucked-in shirts and slacks and called themselves consultants, but they'd dropped out of the system even more than I had. None of them were employed, and most of their stories seemed to take place in a nearby trailer park. At first glance, I would have put them in the white trash category and left it at that, but after listening to them, my opinion began to change. Considering their circumstances, they seemed to have a sense of gratitude I would have never thought possible.

“I thought I knew all about desperation until I went to India a few years ago…which is why, even though the welfare people are pissing me off with their fucking bullshit, I can still be grateful they haven't thrown me out of my trailer yet. I guess if they do, though, it means I'm not supposed to have a trailer,” an older guy said one day. This was the
first time I had seen the spiritual tools of sobriety used to not only justify defeat, but seemingly contribute to it. This guy was not going to get a job,
period,
and that being an absolute truth, he didn't seem to mind one bit that he was one step away from being homeless, as a few of the others seemed to be.

“But you know, it's funny. When I was drinking and smoking crack, I had the house, the car, and the career. Shit…I even had the wife and the girlfriend at the same time, but I was a miserable piece of shit. I lost all that stuff in sobriety, and I wouldn't trade what I have now to get any of that back.”

He was wearing a grayish sweat suit, which had been white once, and I actually believed him…that he was happier now. I wasn't sure why, but I did—maybe because he wasn't trying to sell me anything. Not one thing seemed good about his life, yet he appeared to be happier than me. I didn't even know what the welfare office had done to him, but I think I was more pissed off about it than he was.

I never joined in or felt as though I was one of them. It was more like I had become caught up in the drama of a really good TV show and would show up every morning at ten to catch the next episode. While I genuinely liked the characters, I wasn't about to move into the trailer park with them. In the meantime, I had been talking to a few friends who were living in L.A. After three months of unsuccessfully trying to get Dawn to sleep with me, L.A. started sounding like a better option.

I
WAS FINISHING UP
my junior year in Arizona, discussing with my mom what I was going to do over summer vacation, when she told me that Jack was going to be doing one of his seminars in L.A. and suggested that I could work for him.

“Doing what?” I asked. “Showing his clients what a great job he did on me? Jesus, I don't think I can handle that scene.”

“Well, you have to come up with something, and he said he'd give you his old car if you can figure out a way to pick it up. If not, he's going to donate it to charity.” I wasn't yet old enough to drive, but I would be sixteen by the time school ended. I did want the car. Badly. I just wasn't sure if I could handle seeing the self-help guru in his own element for a week straight.

“I'll think about it,” I said.

“Really? You mean you don't want the car?”

“Okay! I'll give him a fucking call!”

With Mom I always had to have a plan, always had to be doing something. Simply spending my summer at home was out of the question, which was probably part of the reason I liked high school so much. No matter what I did, be it silk-screening huge penises on the girls' volleyball team uniforms or getting into screaming matches with my English teacher about why I thought
On the Road
was the worst book I had ever
read, the faculty were all pretty supportive of my efforts to stir things up. Our new headmaster, however, didn't turn out to be a whole lot better than the old one, Joe. Hardly a week went by when I wasn't called into his office for something, but there wasn't much he could do.

“What were you thinking, printing penises on the volleyball uniforms?” the headmaster asked me after a game against our rival school.

“Why? Is there a rule against it?” I asked, using my stock response anytime he called me in.

“What am I supposed to do? Make a rule that you can't put penises on the team uniforms? Then you would probably print a pair of breasts on them.”

“That's a pretty good idea.” I pretended to contemplate it.

“Come on, man. Work with me. I can't start making up new rules every time you come up with some ‘art project.' Just tell me you won't do it again.”

“Fine. I won't print any more penises on the volleyball jerseys,” I said, standing up.

He wasn't done, though.

“And for God's sakes, would you please get rid of that mustache?”

“Why?” I asked, trying to keep a straight face. I had been waiting a whole week for him to bring it up.

“Don't give me that. What am I going to say if a Jewish family comes here with a prospective student and they see you walking around with that thing on your face? Seriously. Try to put yourself in my position,” he pleaded.

“Why would anyone care about a Charlie Chaplin mustache?”

“Very funny,” he said sarcastically. “In that case, either start wearing a bowler hat or get rid of it!”

 

J
ACK WAS OPEN
to the idea of letting me work at the seminar until I brought up money.

“What do you mean, ‘how much can I pay you?' I'm giving you a car, for Christ's sake.”

“Well, how am I going to get the car back to Berkeley if I don't have any gas money?”

“Okay,” he said with a sigh. “How much would you need to get back home?”

“How's three hundred bucks?”

“Three hundred for gas? You've got to be out of your mind.”

“No. Three hundred for a week's work. I need the money to visit my friend in San Diego afterward.”

“Sheeze! Okay,” he said, giving up.

Waiting for Jack at the L.A. airport was like showing up on the first day of a new job after completely lying on the job application. The last time I had seen him I was cranky and coming down from my first acid trip. So, in an effort to make a better impression and fit in with the self-help fanatics, I was wearing a nice button-down shirt, Gap jeans, and a pair of white Reeboks. I had also managed to cultivate a pretty impressive beard for a sixteen-year-old, and I wasn't about to shave it off, even though I had heard him say beards were just another way of hiding from the world. (He had a foot-long one for seventeen years himself, so he was an expert.)

As he pulled up to the curb, I threw the Pall Mall I had been smoking into the gutter and prepared myself for one of his hugs—firm but not uncomfortable, and long but not awkward. If I were into hugs, I'm certain he'd get a ten, but I had always disdained most physical contact. For me, it was just a father-son formality, no different from getting my cheek pinched every time I saw my grandmother.

“Hello, number one son,” he said, getting out of the car. I put down my bag and spread my arms for the inevitable hug.

I knew this guy was my dad, but his life of khakis, tucked-in shirts, and self-improvement was much more foreign to me than that of the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Hopis I had spent time with on my field trips—usually poor working people who were trying to just survive. How could anyone with an extra two thousand dollars for a self-help seminar have any real problems? I started having major doubts about whether I was really up to the task of spending a week straight with Jack, when he finally let go of me and we got into his new minivan.

Jack's house in West L.A. was like the set from a TV family. He made the money, while his second wife, Georgia, stayed home all day, cleaned the house, and cooked dinner. They even had the white picket fence. Georgia was always extremely quiet around me. I assumed it was because she felt guilty about stealing Jack from Kyle and me, but maybe she just didn't have anything to say. Spending time at the house just made me nervous and tongue-tied, and I didn't have much to say to them either. I felt so out of place that, when we weren't at the seminar, I drove around L.A. in the Honda looking for record stores, or sat in cafés and drew.

Anything not to have to hang out at that house.

Far more unnerving, though, was the seminar itself, which was simul
taneously exactly what I expected and scarier than I could imagine. Other than sitting next to strangers on airplanes, I had never really interacted with nicely dressed, normal-looking people, people who had job titles like “consultant,” “analyst,” and “facilitator.” Jobs that sounded so vague that I quickly learned not to ask about them. Even when they gave me a full description, I still couldn't figure out what the hell they did. Of course, the ones at the seminar only looked normal. Underneath the khakis and pastel sweaters, they were seething with self-hatred and memories of fucked-up childhoods. Luckily this was offset by the anticipation that in the next seven days, they were going to work through these traumas and become the perfect beings God intended them to be. They were ready to take back their lives!

The whole thing started with Jack getting onstage and saying, “Okay! Before we do anything, I want to know: Who out there wants a round of applause?” He seemed to catch everyone off guard with that one, because nobody made a move. “Who feels like coming up on stage and getting a round of applause? You're probably saying to yourself, ‘I don't deserve a round of applause, I didn't do anything…' But you did do something! You got up today, and took time out of your busy schedules to come here, do some hard work, and improve your lives. If that doesn't deserve a round of applause, I don't know what does! So I'll ask again, who wants a round of applause?”

Very timidly a few people got up and walked to the stage.

“Okay, everyone! Let's really hear it for these folks! They made a decision to turn their lives around. In fact, I think they deserve a standing ovation, don't you?”

It freaked me out see Jack up there striding around the stage, gaining momentum. The last thing I wanted to do was take part in this, but since everyone else was standing up, I felt I had to do the same.

“Who else wants to come up here? You all deserve it…” He was relentless. As more and more people started lining up to take the stage, the crowd really started getting into it, even throwing in a few whistles and yells. The more courageous participants did a pirouette or bowed. I was way in the back of the room, but I tried to get a good look at the people onstage so I knew whom to stay away from. As creepy as it all was, I couldn't have asked for a more amazing introduction to the world of self-help. But I was determined to keep my distance, especially from the more zealous types.

Even though I was supposedly there to work, I couldn't find anything to do. The rest of the staff seemed to have everything under control. Offi
cially I was here to teach juggling, but that was a two-hour job. I figured that, in the meantime, I would help out in other areas, but no one seemed to need anything. When the staff kept telling me, “Don't worry about it. Just join in for now,” a sense of doom started to set in. I began wondering whether there wasn't more to my being here than I was aware.

Right off the bat, a few of Jack's employees came up to me and said, “Oh, it's so great that you're able to be here for this,” before someone else cut in with, “You're so lucky to have Jack as a father. He's such an inspiration, and I can't begin to tell you how much he's helped me. This is going to be an amazing experience for you.” I couldn't grasp what was so wonderful about my being here if they didn't have anything for me to do.

One of the staff members, Bob, decided he could relate to me because he'd had a hard life and knew what I was going through. He would say “dude” and “man” a lot, and even throw in some swear words now and again just to let me know I could be comfortable talking to him.

For years, Bob had been a fucked-up speed-freak truck driver, until he met Jack, who essentially saved his life by showing him that he could be more than that. I grew to kind of like Bob when he started telling me some of his trucker stories.

“Man, I would be so high on speed that I would decide not to stop the truck at any cost.”

“How did you go to the bathroom?” I asked.

“Well, what I would do was I would piss into a Ziploc bag and throw it out the window. It would get all over me, but I didn't care. I didn't care about anything, man.”

 

I
HAD NO CHOICE
but to pretend I was taking part, until the time finally came for me to teach the three hundred participants how to juggle. The idea was that if you could learn to juggle, you could do anything you set your mind to. I could juggle seven balls, five clubs, torches, and machetes and ride a unicycle, and I hadn't even managed to lose my virginity. Was I the only one who saw a hole in this theory? What I really wanted to do was tell everyone that they would still be lonely, insecure, unattractive underachievers who knew how to juggle.

Jack called me onstage and gave me a lengthy introduction. “So now, I want you all to meet my eldest son, Oran. At sixteen years old he has already lived all over the world, been in the circus, won a juggling championship, and was just voted student body president of his high school. His juggling has taken him all over the country, and as a result he has a
huge ‘comfort zone,'” he said. “That means Oran can go anywhere, feel comfortable, and fit right in.”

His introduction got big applause, but he couldn't have been more wrong. Looking out at this sea of three hundred people staring at me, I wanted nothing more than to leave and get back to my real comfort zone, the seven-by-ten-foot room on my mom's porch. There was no way out, though. The staff was handing out nine hundred juggling balls, and it was time to do my thing.
Learn to juggle and you can do anything,
I said to myself.

I started off by showing everyone how to throw one ball back and forth, back and forth. As soon as I gave them the go-ahead, the melee began. Balls were flying everywhere, and just as many people were running around trying to catch them, pick them up, or find them in all the confusion.

Braving this mess, I went out into the audience to give tips and correct technique. “You're doing good, but try to keep the ball a little closer to you so you don't have to run after it,” or, “Your right-hand toss looks good, but you have to practice throwing from your left hand as well.”

Then it was time for two balls.

“Okay, so now when the first ball is just going over its arc, we release the second ball and catch the first ball in the second hand, and the second ball in the first. Everybody got that?”

Six hundred balls flew into the air, and landed all over the place.

It had taken me a week to learn how to juggle, but since I only had a couple hours to teach these people that they could do anything, it was soon time for three balls, whether they were ready or not. Of course most of them were not. After giving a little speech about adding the third ball in order to create a continuous cascade, I went back down amid nine hundred flying juggling balls to give people pointers.

That's when I came across Amanda. She was a burn victim who'd had over 80 percent of her body reconstructed. I felt terrible for her; so much of her face had been grafted that she was truly frightening to look at. She was missing all but her thumb and forefinger on one hand and had only a middle finger on the other. She was completely absorbed in throwing one ball in the air and attempting to bounce it off the hand with one finger and back into the other hand. Seeing what was obviously a lost cause, I tried to get away from her. But she had other plans. She made a beeline straight toward me, demanding to know why she couldn't even juggle just one ball.

I was surprised that she hadn't already figured that out for herself. I
hate being the bearer of bad news, so rather than tell her it was because she didn't have hands, I played along and agreed to help her. I felt so guilty about my repulsion toward this woman, who after all was still a human being with feelings like the rest of us, that I was determined to treat her just like anyone else. We spent the next hour, just Amanda and me, attempting to figure out how she might learn to juggle without mentioning or even alluding to her obvious handicap.