The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (10 page)

“So you’re thinking it’s a good idea to do
that
again?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I miss her. This might be my last chance to work things out. I want to have a plan.”

Lynn thought about it for a while. “Do you really have to decide about this today? Or tomorrow? What if you just allowed yourself not to make any decisions? Hell, you don’t even have to decide what to order from the menu. You can just ask for the sampler plate.”

For some reason this struck me as tremendously funny. I left Unity smiling, trying to hold on to this sense of levity, but it left me the moment I sat down across from Nicole at the Rio, a Mexican place we used to go for margaritas and combo plates on warm summer nights. I could barely look her in the eye, much less speak. She was and is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known: sea-green eyes and impossibly long lashes, olive complexion, an aquiline nose and thick dark hair. And she’s such an essentially good person—an accomplished grade school teacher who gives thoughtful gifts and loves animals, and who is well loved by everyone who knows her. Sitting there across from her, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we couldn’t make it work, how I’d transformed her love into what seemed now like barely contained spite.

“Please don’t just sit there and look at me,” Nicole said. “You have to at least attempt a normal conversation.”

After a long, uncomfortable silence, I finally managed to speak. “I’ve changed a lot in the past six months,” I said.

“So have I,” she said.

“I’ve actually been going to church. I think it’s helping.”

“Church, huh? I’m not surprised.”

“It’s not like you think. It’s a different kind of church, with progressive politics.”

“Okay, cool, I’m happy for you. But why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ve just … changed.”

“You
change
every time we break up. But nothing about
us
ever changes, not really.”

“But this time it’s different. I can be different.”

She turned and looked out the window. “I knew you’d try this again,” she said. “But the thing is: I’m happy. Things are working out for me. And I can’t spend the rest of my life thinking about tattoos and rock shows and skateboarding. Or
church
.”

I sat there nodding, the brick walls and bright Mexican murals and cute waitresses with trays of margaritas going all blurry as Nicole collected her things and walked out.

I drove myself home in a state of semishock. I wanted to scream. I wanted to sleep with three women at the same time, smoke cigarettes, beat the shit out of someone twice my size, put my fist through a plate glass window, pour whiskey on the wounds. I wanted to tear free from my skin and bury my bones in another state, as far from my own heart as I could get.

I wanted to sleep but I couldn’t.

Dawn came and I was still wide-awake. I felt shaky and hollow and sick, as if I hadn’t eaten for days. I tried standing up but my vision erupted with sparks. Something dark was descending upon me—
God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee
. I thought about calling my mother. I thought about calling Nicole, or 911, or the psychic hotline, or every woman in the phone book until someone came to help me. I fell to my hands and knees and crawled to the bathroom, where it all came spilling out.

Please help me, I said, over and over again. Please help me.
God
, please help me.

I thought of that scene in
Boogie Nights
, when Mark Wahlberg’s character, after taking too much coke and then getting chased by a half-naked maniac drug dealer with a shotgun, and subsequently having hit absolute rock-fucking-bottom, comes begging Burt Reynolds’s character for help. Who knew Burt Reynolds could be so god like? But that’s what he is, a white-bearded, divine pornographer who takes his blubbering prodigal son in his arms and welcomes him home. Prostrate, my face in my hands, I wept harder than I’d ever wept, begging for help, saying it over and over again, my Mark Wahlberg mantra.

Something cracked apart down in my core—a slow tectonic shift finally reaching its apotheosis, and then up from this raw, superheated fissure rose a tiny seed of a voice, small and still and warm. It was my own voice, of course, but also something larger, transcendent. The Sufis refer to God as the Friend, and that’s how it felt, like an ancient friend who’d always been there, since the beginning of time—the atman, my true self. What it said:
You’re going to be just fine
. How it said it: with the deepest tenderness I’d ever experienced from my own self-condemning heart. And in repetition, the same way I’d repeatedly pleaded, so that I was sure to hear and know this was the answer. So that I’d know for certain.

I stayed there in child’s pose, listening. I could’ve stayed there forever, but eventually I got myself up into a hot shower. The water felt like a million tiny, sparkling hands reaching out to hold me, like liquid grace, like the rain that follows in the path of a hurricane.

I dried off and called Lynn, saying that it was important, I needed to talk to her right away. I could tell that I was imposing on her schedule—she’d just seen me the day before, and she had a whole church to run.

She gave me fifteen minutes.

I rushed over to Unity, driving like a maniac, like the Blues Brothers on their divine mission. When I told her I thought maybe I’d had an encounter with God, she smiled, like it was no big deal.

“You mean the
holy spirit
,” she said.

“Like ‘father, son, and holy ghost’?” I asked.

“No,” she said, smiling, “that makes it sound so supernatural. What I’m talking about is special but also mundane. It’s the spirit of holiness and love that lives in all of us, that saves us when we ask it to. That’s what you experienced. Plus you really needed a goddamned good cry. So congratulations,” she said, collecting her things for her next meeting.

“Congratulations? That’s it?”

“Yes,” she said. “You’re back in the world of the living. And don’t forget what the Zen masters say.”

“What’s that?”

“First enlightenment, then the dishes. Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said, “you’re not the only one in spiritual crisis.”

L
ynn was right about the dishes. I was still the same person with mostly the same feelings and fears and hopes. And yet, after a white-light moment, I’d been transformed in subtle ways. That summer I went back to work as the head skateboard coach at my old summer camp on Mount Hood, Oregon—a place that I’d worked for many years beforehand and that was like paradise to me, with nothing to do but skate, swim in mountain lakes, hang out with the campers, and host breakdancing contests on the miniramp flatbottom. For some reason, camp was staffed that year by a large contingency of young, fashionable snowboarders who happened also to be evangelical Christians. During a trip to deliver an injured camper to the hospital, one of them explained to me that the Bible was the “absolute truth,” and that since the “absolute truth” was that all non-Christians were going to hell—courtesy of that oft-quoted and widely misunderstood Bible phrase “No one comes to the Father except through me”—he felt it was his God-given duty to convert as many non believers as he could. I pointed out that this was a form of spiritual imperialism, one that assumed the logistical improbability that of the six and a half billion people on the planet, only a fraction would make it to heaven, if a “place” called heaven even exists. He avoided me the rest of the summer, and certainly never invited me to Thursday-night Bible study, which was just fine with me.

A few nights later, I was standing on the deck of the skate bowl, just about to drop in, when a girl named Karissa Vasquez walked up and invited me to Taco Night at a bar down the hill. I’d met Karissa a few times in Colorado and then bumped into her randomly at a Fourth of July party at an indoor skatepark in Portland, where we climbed up on the domed roof and watched fireworks bloom over the Willamette River.

It just so happened we were both working on Mount Hood for the summer, both skateboarders, both single. At Taco Night, we drank beer and played Putt-Putt golf out on the large patio, trading quotes from the film
Office Space
. Her chestnut hair fell halfway down her back in two thick braids; she had dark eyes and a sweet, shy smile. Before driving home a couple hours later, we shared a stray can of PBR I found in the backseat of her Honda Accord.

“You might not know it from looking at me, but I’m full-blooded Mexican,” she said. She told me all about her big family, her favorite
abuela
in Arizona—the one who belts out traditional Mexican songs at weddings—and her darker-skinned brother and all her crazy cousins. I asked what her grandmother thought of her tattoos.

“She told me that if she was young again, she’d get a Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on her chest. When she passes away, I’ll get
La Virgen
in her honor.” Using our PBR like a microphone, Karissa then broke into an animated lip-synch to an Ugly Casanova song about dressed-up alligators and cum-stained pianos.

Back at camp we met up with some friends at her summer rental, a canary-yellow Swiss chalet with a beer bong hanging off the balcony that Karissa swore belonged to her younger roommates. Up in her loft bedroom she showed us her black hardcover journals, filled with Polaroids of her and her friends skateboarding, a trip to Pacific Beach in San Diego, cool line drawings of trees and birds interspersed with poetic journal entries and a few Bible quotes—
In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy
. Something lit up inside me when I flipped through her journals, but I was also worried at first she might be one of the evangelicals, especially when she explained that she’d attended a mega church service with a friend on their trip out from Colorado to Oregon.

“There was nothing church-like about it,” she said. “It was a bunch of people sitting around talking about how they’re right and everyone else is going to hell. There’s no soul in that.” It turned out that Karissa was an occasional Unity-goer; that she and her closest friends sometimes attended the Unity in Boulder, a place I’d been a few times with my parents. It was a revelation—a sort of miracle. What were the odds of finding this kind of soul connection at a skateboard camp, of all places?

After she hugged me good night, I floated back to my cabin, chanting
thank you thank you thank you
in my head.

Karissa and I drove down to the Oregon coast the next weekend. During the ride, she complained about one of her roommates, a twenty-year-old snowboarder named Richie.

“He’s just an all around filthy person,” she said.

“You mean he doesn’t clean up after himself?”

“None of my roommates do. But it’s more than that with Richie. There’s something not right with him. He never showers. He spends his evenings reading dirty magazines and making lewd comments about women. I think he actually has dirt
in his heart
.”

We laughed about this for the rest of the ride, until we reached the parking lot at Short Sands and took the long path through a rain forest down to the beach, holding hands. Lying in the sun, Karissa snapped Polaroids of our friends surfing, then drew a series of hearts with the letters DLH on the inside.

It stood for Dirty Little Hearts, the name of our new two-person crew. We spent the rest of the summer skateboarding, making art, making out. We tagged DLH everywhere—in huge letters on the sand, on our skateboards, on a cinder-block wall in a Portland alleyway.

Our first night together, Karissa woke me up before dawn. “I feel perfect when I’m with you,” she said.

At the end of August we carpooled home, heading back to our new life together in Colorado. During the journey I prepared the reading list for the college literature class I was signed up to teach in the fall. On a foggy stretch of Utah desert, I read Karissa the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, a piece that somehow I’d never encountered, though I’d just finished my MFA in creative writing. Reading the story’s epiphanic climax—a skeptical, broken man has a spiritual awakening while he’s helping a blind man draw a cathedral—it felt like the top of my head blew off, because what Carver described felt so close to what I’d experienced in my own bathroom several months earlier, and because my awakening had all come to fruition with this person sitting next to me who understood, and because there was a chapel full of people back home who also knew. Like the narrator in “Cathedral,” I’d found a way out of the isolation chamber of my own ego. It was a deep feeling of homecoming, like falling into your own bed after one too many nights on the road.

B
ack at All Souls Unitarian in New York, I feel a little melancholy after Galen Guengerich’s service about the importance of community. After all, I had a spiritual community and deep connection with Karissa back in Colorado, but I gave it all up to move to New York and try to make it as a writer. I’m fortunate to have such a large group of friends in the city and roommates who share my new surfing obsession, but I still suffer from a constant, low-level homesickness and insecurity around my fellow New Yorkers. So I accept when, at the end of his talk and apropos its theme, Guengerich invites everyone downstairs to mingle with the All Souls congregation.

Feeling shy as usual, I hover around the literature table, drinking tea and checking out pamphlets about Unitarianism and compelling books by the All Souls head minister, Forrest Church. I strike up a conversation with an older gentlemen who explains how he originally came to All Souls not from any sense of need or trouble—which he clearly feels are inferior motivations—but because he “wanted to be challenged.” Before I can ask what that means, he introduces me to a clean-cut Asian guy named Steven who looks to be in his mid twenties, and who gives me a tepid handshake and a quasi crystalline smile. In typical East Coast fashion, the first thing Steven asks is what I do for a living. When I tell him I’m a writer working in publishing, he asks if I’ve read David Rakoff’s “Lush Life,” an essay about the particular indignities of working as an editorial assistant in New York.