• A true story though many names have been changed to protect the innocent.

• “So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”

  Franz Kafka

   

  “Every man and every woman

  has a course, depending partly on

  the self, and partly on the

  environment, which is natural

  and necessary for each. Anyone

  who is forced from his own

  course, either through not

  understanding himself, or

  through external opposition,

  comes into conflict with the order

  of the universe, and suffers

  accordingly.”

  Aleister Crowley

   ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️

  I ponder this excerpt frequently

  in quiet desperation while looking

  out the window of my

  Malibu beachfront property. It is an excerpt by Aleister Crowley’s ‘Magic; in theory and practice.’ I believe in magic. Or rather I should say, I believe that you can

  get anything you want. You begin with intention, and then ride that horse all the way to the Kentucky Derby. Things come together,

  people appear, and

  synchronicities collide,

  combustible energies form that reduce alchemical base metals into gold, water into wine.

  And so it was, on that fateful day, way back in the late 70’s, where anything went. My claim to fame was as a dancer on the Vegas

  strip. A rocketeer, and my legs did the talking. But where had it led me? I was living in a small 3 bedroom house, Beverly Hills

  adjacent, a single mother, with 3 daughters to support. And I was pushing 40.! I’m sure I could have snagged some poor schmuck that would foot the bill for my current socio-economic status. But why? Why not think big?!

  As I breezed through The

  Beverly Hills Courier- a flimsy

  little magazine delivered to our door, graciously elevating us to the 90210 stratosphere, my eyes began to fixate on a black and white blurb, a small photo of a man playing tennis at the very exclusive hillcrest country club.

  Hmmmm…this might be that

  horse…I was momentarily

  interrupted by a knock on the

  door, and hurtled back into

  reality with my landlord’s request for the rent. He was a sleazy slick haired Italian and seemed to insinuate there were other methods of payment. And he always showed up when the kids

  were at school. I led him on, just enough to stall a week. I shut the door and picked up the phone.

  “Hillcrest country club? Yes, I’d like to sign up for tennis

  lessons.” !My gorgeous rocketeer legs were just hitting their final stride

  before their long descent and

  they went out with a bang, in

  those tiny tennis skirts I

  purchased at Fila. It worked like a charm. I had Frank Nicklepants in the palm of my hand.

  After a few weeks of dating I

  pinpointed his weakness. A

  weakness I would exploit until that rock was on my finger. Sex? No. He was past that stage and Viagra hadn’t been invented yet.

  No, it was very simple. Caveman simple. It was food. Food, a direct link to a man’s heart and stomach. And I knew just the little lady who would provide the service. Her name was Patrice and

  she owned a catering company in the valley called Food for thought. Patrice was no ordinary chef. She was an artist of the highest echelon. Her brownies alone could make a grown man

  whimper if denied, and she had a thirst for Hermes, an insatiable appetite for Georgio’s and Theodore’s. I knew she would chomp at the bit…and chomp hard she did.

  It started with cookies. She charged $80 a batch, equivalent to $200 in today’s market. It was a small price to pay, and besides, now I had my own charge accounts, and cash, courtesy of Frank. Soon it escalated to breads-$90 for a loaf, Bastia, Tortes, mind blowing pies and cakes~ $1000 a pop. Frank would ask me to entertain small dinner parties and I willingly obliged, with the help of my very own Cyrano de Bergerac. The cash and jewels started rolling in~ a Cartier necklace for this party, a diamond bracelet for that party. We hosted a dinner party one night for Ted Kennedy and Frank introduced me as not just the chef but a true artist. Patrice had delivered the goods early that morning and no one was the wiser.

  But as the romance came to a boiling point, with marriage now looming on the hot plate, woven tightly in a thick web of lies, my mind began to unravel. It started with a close call. Patrice’s husband Henry, delivering food early one morning, tripped up the sprinkler system and broke the clicker for the garage. I had given explicit directions for Henry to stash the food in our 2nd freezer, knowing Frank could not possibly hear the garage door open from our upstairs bedroom. Frank ran outside and demanded to know what was going on, thinking Henry was a thief. Henry stood there in soaking wet clothes with sprinklers splashing his face, and piles of Tupperware at his feet. He explained that I had been “nice enough” to let his wife use the freezer in the garage because theirs had broken down in the middle of the night. That was a close call. Then I found out that a housekeeper had been stealing from me. I threatened to call the police and she said that if I called the police she would tell Mr. Nickelpants exactly who did the cooking in the house. So I let her stay, and continue to steal. The food kept coming, each dish more exciting and exotic than the last. Frank bought my daughter a house, and soon I was hearing those wedding bells.

  Things were finally coming to

  fruition. Everything I had set my mind on achieving. But there was a problem. I was slowly beginning to experience multiple personality disorder. My lies

  were catching up with me.

  Someone at a dinner party would ask me the recipe for something. I would become paralyzed, frozen, scared stiff. I would stutter that I didn’t recall and would send it to them the next day. And so began the memorization of every speck used in the cookies, cakes, the bread. I was an actress playing

  the role of a lifetime and these were my lines. If I could just keep it together until we were married, then I’d simply say “I don’t feel like cooking, let’s go out.” One day Frank came home and wondered why there weren’t any smells in the kitchen if I had

  been cooking all day. So I

  arranged for aromas to be

  delivered, and brought home all the cooking utensils I would need. Then he wondered why  there wasnt any trash. So I began to

  have trash delivered, the

  wrappers from ingredients Patrice had used. I was living a double life and started to believe it myself. I would tell Patrice how exhausted I was from cooking all day. And I believed it. The day finally came when Frank

  and I tied the knot, and I could stop the shenanigans. But at what cost? I would have to lie to Frank

  for the rest of my life, and now I had grown to love this man. I wanted our marriage to be pure and honest, but that was impossible now. It would be based on lies, and those lies have kept me fragmented, all thes

  years, split from myself, from my center.

1. A true story.

I was on a bus one day, a long time ago. I saw this man, sitting directly across from me. He was maybe 60, 65….bald, fat, and special. He was wearing rainbow suspenders, like the electro-magnetic spectrum. He seemed superimposed with special colored molecules flying all around him. I followed him off the bus on Main St. in Santa Monica.  I asked if he wanted to come over to my house for lunch. He said “OK” and we both took a bus back to my house in West Hollywood.

 As we entered the house my roommates took notice of this flamboyant stranger and were very upset. They asked me to please make him leave. I guess they couldn’t see the molecules. I told them that they brought friends over, so why couldn’t I? They said it was different, meeting a stranger on the bus and taking him home. 

 I said that he was staying, and I began to prepare our lunch. He pulled out from the refrigerator the few remnants  of leftovers I had. He began to assemble them, creating penguins with hard boiled eggs, olives for the feathers, and a tiny carrot for the beak. Then he looked at me seriously. He asked that we hum the sound “Aum” together and so we did. Then he tapped my forehead and did the same to his. I felt our minds converge on the second floor…in the same space. He just smiled. Then he took out an old photograph from the 1960’s. It appeared to be a bunch of hippies behind an old school bus, laughing. I felt like this photograph was a dream I have had before, and in it I had planted seeds to metaphorically bloom decades later. He simply showed me the photograph and then put it back in his pocket not saying a word. He took out another photo of himself with Henry Miller in Big Sur. He said they had been great friends. He said he also helped Terry Southern write Easy Rider and he took out a photo of them together. I wondered why he wasn’t on the credits but that seemed an inappropriate question to ask, and when I was with him, in that moment, it didn’t seem to matter “who got credit” for ideas generating from the same source.

Then, suddenly, he said it was time to go…and so we said good bye. 

 I watched those rainbow suspenders walk away until I couldn’t see them anymore.

 I can’t say exactly what happened that day except that it seemed to change me and has compelled me to tell you, the reader, all these years later, about that man on the bus…with the rainbow suspenders.

This is a true story from a long long time ago.

I was on my way to Chinatown one day, searching for red slippers. I had just come from yoga where our teacher had stressed the importance of breath. A long time ago prophets seemed to know what a special concept breathing was and made a point to cover it in the Bible. “God has made the breath to serve as the subtle link between body and soul. The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

So I was trying to remember this, and to be calm….when suddenly this enormous bus was at an awkwardly inappropriate angle in the middle of the road. I quickly forgot my peaceful state and honked for the bus move. I was in the middle of the road turning left, with cars from the other side now approaching.  I carefully tried to slide by the bus within an inch, but something didn’t feel right. Patience. But I had to make a move, so I continued to slide by the bus.

Underneath that bus I saw a woman lying there on the ground. I quickly pulled over to the side of the road and got out. I was wearing paramedic pants which immediately gave me a backstage pass. I started to approach this woman on the ground, this small Chinese woman. I noticed a crowd gathering on the street corner, staring. I was almost at her feet when I watched the bus begin to move. Tons of people at the corner screamed “STOP!” but the bus kept going. It rolled over her stomach and legs, crushing them like pancakes. A yellow fluid (bile) rushed from her belly. A disbursement of blood and other items formed patterns around her. Frightening screams echoed in the streets, penetrating the air. I was calm. I said to her, “breathe” and took her hand, although directions weren’t necessary because her breath appeared to be on auto~pilot. It was a fast deep constant rush of inhalation, although her legs had been torn apart, and her stomach ripped open and splattered on the pavement, looking like Kung pao chicken.  She continued to breathe but I knew she would die and hoped it would be soon. I felt a stillness in the center of hysterics; and it felt natural to help her leave peacefully, with love. As I held her hand, her deep deep breathing continued for another minute, and then it all stopped. The connection broke just as the police and paramedics arrived. They asked me to step to the corner, that they would take over from there. They taped the area, leaving my vehicle inside the accident scene. I walked away to purchase the red slippers I had gone to Chinatown to buy. I attempted to act normal as all citizens in Chinatown became Chinese blurs. Red slippers. She was going home.

I wondered if this woman had led a life that somehow warranted a complete stranger to stop her car and hold her hand while she died. To feel compelled to give her the healing presence of love that I’m sure makes our transition more receptive to the changing circumstances. She must have.

I went to work that afternoon at a telecine facility called company 3. I assisted clients with their requests and no one had guessed that my hands had just held a woman who had her stomach and legs torn apart and rolled over by a bus. Some clients were impatient, as I had been earlier that day when the bus wouldn’t move. But I had just learned the secret of timing. Patience changes timing. and experience is based on timing.

“Till armageddon no shalam, no shalom
Then the father hen will call his chickens home
The wise man will bow down before the throne
And at his feet they’ll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around“

Johnny Cash