Optimum Health #2

I got a lot of repressed positivity. I like to keep a lid on it because it's safer that way but sometimes it just leaks out. It got really bad about seven years ago when my life and career came back to me in earnest. I would be sitting in my colleague Latifa’s office and suddenly tears would rise in my throat as I talked about a scene in the Grinch movie (the Grinch movie!?). I was mystified by it then, but now I see it was all that buried love inside me, and it was going to come out whether I wanted it to or not. Started happening so often Latifa could sense it coming. She’d smile and say, "Are you going to cry again?"

It's been a while since I have experienced this phenomenon, and to be honest, I miss it. That huge flood of awe and tenderness we hold inside us if we're just willing to allow it. But I got myself a nice little blast of it down at OHI this week and it was the Friday night talent show that lit the fuse.

I was feeling good on Friday. The retreat had been strong and I was glad I’d made the move. Mostly I’d kept to myself, connecting with a couple of people here and there, my new comrade Christina (whom I wrote about in my last post), especially. Having been before, I avoided the daily classes devoutly ("food combining," elimination," "mental detox"). I did join in for the pre-meal “energy circles” but kept my mouth shut when they asked for volunteers to choose the daily reading or "word of the day" (“surrender,” “wisdom,” “generosity,” all the usual suspects). I was being moderately "part of," spending a majority of my first days in the garden, reading D.H. Lawrence beneath the lemon trees, an old Italian zadie with a taste for English literature.

On Tuesday the juice fast started and I took to it.  Wednesday morning, I began to turn my novel Straight Dope into a screenplay, making good on my desire to begin a longform project. In the afternoons I drove to a nearby park with a small lake/reservoir where two hundred mallard ducks hold their convention, and anyone under the age of fifteen is allowed to fish for rarely seen trout. I would amble along the dirt path, having my Tom Sawyer heart touched by twelve-year-old boys on the bank, their hopeful poles angling toward the water.  The first day I saw a heron who slowly extended her neck up… and up… and up… and up, and I was overcome by the majesty of it. It was a damn good week, yet still there was a separateness about me. I always made eye contact, offering my best soulful rabbi smile, but I was basically keeping to myself, most of my curiosity saved for me. Friday night changed that.

At heart I’m a performer, and if there's a talent show I'm going to get up there and do my thing (Rule #1. If you got a thing, do it!). The last time I was there I read my nectarine poem, but this time I had the piece I had just posted on Substack about OHI. I asked Christina if she would mind if I read it, as it contained some very personal information about her. “Go ahead brother,” she said, “put it out there." And so, I did.

Christina

Folks were really feeling what I read, but more importantly it opened the door to all kinds of connections I otherwise would have missed out on. One of them wasn’t due to my act, but to the opener. She was an Indian woman, a teacher of traditional dance from the bay area who did this charming Bollywood inspired lip sync dance number. Playful but soulful, modern but ancient, she brought the Bollywood ethos to the land of wheatgrass. I bum-rushed her after, telling her I loved it, and that I had written a script about a half-Indian kid who makes a Bollywood movie starring his separated parents in an attempt to keep them together. “The kid’s grandmother used to be a Bollywood choreographer, so when I was doing research, I got hooked up with this choreographer up in San Jose. Maybe you know her?”

She asked her name, but all I had was her 669 area code What’s App number.

“Let me see her profile picture?”

I showed her.

“Oh yes, Tai, I know her well, we have worked together a couple of times.”

It made me happy. To have my spoon in a tiny little corner of her Hindu soup.

After the show people came up to me smiling and open faced, saying they dug the piece. One was this kid named Elias, and when I say kid, I mean he’s thirty-five. We had traded a couple of words, as we were both carrying books around, him Tom Robbins and me D.H.. Elias is from Ashland Oregon and I’d overheard him talking about having “long covid” and trying to recalibrate with a week of sprouts and juice. There was a brown eyed sweetness to him, and a little Samurai bun on top. He caught my eye after I read, putting his hand to his heart to let me know it hit him square. The next day he cornered me. “I felt like you were telling my story.”

Turns out that the last time he had come he was addicted to both heroin and crack and spent the first three days kicking in his room. “You came here and kicked cold turkey by yourself?” I was both appalled and awed. This time he was getting off the dregs of a suboxone habit (suboxone is a synthetic opiate, the new doctor-prescribed methadone). He said he had always kept his addiction hidden, never discussing it with anyone, and that not only had the piece resonated with him, but he’d gone back to his room and googled me, spending two hours reading reviews of my film A Thousand Junkies, and watching interviews of me, TJ and Blake, press we did for the Tribeca film festival. In the interviews, we talk openly about our addiction, that we met in recovery and how the project was basically a big collective shadow own. An attempt to make gold from the lead of our lives.  He had tears in his eyes as he talked to me, and I got them in mine.

That morning at breakfast I had a completely different experience than I’d had the prior five days. Suddenly, I knew everyone and they knew me. People were asking me questions about my life, wanting to talk to me about all kinds of things. But I wasn’t the only one. I don’t know if it was the six days spent together or the “show and tell” vulnerability of the talent fest, but the usual gallows humor and ceaseless health talk (“it’s the best digestive enzyme on the market, bar none.”) had turned boisterous and lively, as if it were bacon and eggs we were chopping it up over, not fenugreek sprouts and raw cauliflower.

A bunch of folks made a plan to lunch at Peace Pie, some gourmet raw foods restaurant (gourmet meaning they use salt). They were meeting at 11:30 by the rejuvelac (quinoa fermented water) machine, but I was on a roll with my writing and didn’t get there ‘til 11:45.

Instead, I took my walk around the lake and when I got back there were a few of them around a table in the main room, Christina among them. They waved me in enthusiastically. I told them I got there late and was sorry I missed them, and Christina says “me too!” Then she whips out a big bag loaded with “to go” stuff she brought back for me. I’m a little bit floored by this kindness, and taste the gourmet, raw pizza, which is basically a bruschetta, but with real olives. After a week of hay and paste it takes like I’m in Naples.

There’s a woman sitting there I haven’t said boo to all week, but suddenly we’re talking up a storm. The elegant superiority of the Hungarian personality, all the different places she’s lived in L.A., how she comes every year for the last two weeks of December and the first of January, and most of all jazz. She boldly testifies to her Monk and Mingus love and as I look her at her bright-eyed, short gray-hair framed face I think to myself, how have I not been talking to this woman all week?  What is wrong with me? Have I not read the soul memo? Do I still hold onto some version of book by the cover judging, no one has anything interesting to say but me ridiculousness? I tell people my job is to pay very close attention but somehow, I was too self-obsessed to notice the subtle but obvious twinkle in her eye. And once again I am forced to remember that everyone has a story in them if we just engage them where they need to be engaged. We are story machines, each one of us highly charged with our unique experience and ready to blow! Sometimes like a bomb, sometimes like Coltrane.