I know a girl who knows very well the wages of sin. She’s my bookkeeper. Early in life, she was surrounded by some seriously bad shit. She saw it with her own eyes, lived it every minute. If I told you how she lost her father (and how she found him), your eyes would bug out of your head. Then you’d cry a river. I did. But that’s not why I hired her. I hired her because she’s honest.
The choices this girl made weren’t based on theory, but fact. Most people are spared the facts. They have a system in place, good vs. evil, which serves them pretty well. They could live five times and not see the shit some people see before puberty. But they’re led to the same place, sooner or later. And it doesn’t matter if you draw the lesson from your father’s golf schedule or the number of tricks your mother turned in a night.
I told my sons not to get me wrong when I say that paradise is here and now. All the same rules apply, the golden rule being first. In paradise they don’t cotton to lying, cheating, and stealing. Selfishness they abhor. In paradise, there are no secrets. And one thing you can certainly count on, you don’t get in if you’re stoned. You’re in no shape to appreciate it, so the door is locked.
This is all in keeping with my religious belief, what AA calls my higher power, which is something I was forced to articulate last week at a five day retreat for people like me, sort of. I went to this place we called The Palace of Tears, Kleenex Castle, The Heartbreak Hotel, and a few other things, which is a shrink tank up in the mountains affiliated with my stepson’s rehab place. I loved it. It was a great deal. Five years of group therapy packed into a week.
It was like they took ten people off the subway, if everybody on the subway was white and relatively affluent, and kept them together for 18 hours a day. This was the hardest part for me. I’d have been much more comfortable with black people, Asians, or a Sikh and some Mexicans. But we were all from the same tribe of God fearing Christians, if not Jews, and we were all post grads.
So there was all my shit, on the table, with ten people to feast on it. (I’m sorry. Did you want mayo?) I made it clear from the beginning that I wasn’t going to play around with my grief. I wasn’t going to call it three pillows covered in a shroud, like a plush coffin, which we sat around in our socks, with drawings we made in crayon. And I wasn’t going to call it anger, and beat a large foam cube with a bat. I did, however, take that opportunity to imagine my stepson as a foam cube. I went last, as everybody was being asked to express their anger in turn. I gave that bag such a beating that you could call it a grand finale. My group was too scared to cry. They were too busy being scared.
But when we weren’t doing that stuff, we were talking to each other, about each other, with touchy topics and rules of engagement. So many confidentiality agreements were in place that ‘I dare you’ was a done deal going in, but I can tell you this: I have no interest in repeating any of it. Because if there’s one lesson I learned up there, it’s that we’re all the same. You aren’t a special case. You’re only one of many, any. I realized that I wasn’t Gregory Peck in The Omen. It was Village of The Damned.
So you appeal to your higher power. They make you name it. Look at me. I walked out on my sister’s funeral, turned my back to the altar. My son got Buddhists, my Dad an honor guard - since he was still covered as a Vet, proud to get a free funeral. So the only thing I could think to say to these people was: God is love. In paradise, love rules. Because you know what? I fell in love with those strangers, and believe me, you don’t know strange. I was there. So listen: I didn’t put the mayo. You don’t need it. I put a little oil and a splash of vinegar, which is not only good; it’s good for you.
