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For a while in college I shared a two bedroom basement apartment with three other guys. (For the sake of decorum, names have been changed.) Though two years older than me, Dan and I had grown up together, our parents playing cards once every week or two through our childhood. The two of us and our respective sisters had been thrown together to get along as we might, and we'd done quite well, staying in touch throughout adolescence. Somewhere along the way I'd taken a different path than Dan, and we no longer had much in common. This was at a time when there were heads--people who smoked pot--and boozers, or alkies--people who didn't. Dan and I fell on different sides of this divide. Still, there was the special connection two boys/men have when they've grown up together and don't have brothers, so when I needed a place to stay and Dan's other roommates moved out, he invited me in. I brought along my friend, Johnny. Dan had his friend, Stacy. The four us made up The Odd Couple, squared.
Let me preface the rest of this story with the disclaimer that this was a time of my life that, looked at in retrospect, I'm lucky to have survived. I didn't believe I deserved to be alive, and the price I paid to not kill myself was that I suffered constantly and medicated myself into various versions of occasional comfort.
One night with the apartment to ourselves, Johnny and I and a ne'er-do-well friend of our's took a rather large dose of a hallucinogenic. All I really remember of the trip itself was that we didn't ingest our substance until about 9 p.m., which was far too late for a school night; that Johnny became almost immediately paranoid, took over my new flashlight and proceeded to shine it on everything he found Pete or myself doing, and saying, "You're fucking up! You're fucking up!"; and that Pete started drinking gallons of water. Literally. At least three or four gallons of water until finally he threw up, then stood up out of the bathroom and said, "Hey, guys! I puked myself str____," at which point, the acid rebounded with a vengeance, he passed out against the wall and slid to the floor. I spent most of my time in a far corner, looking for secret messages in the order of the song titles of Stacy's Bob Marley records, and listening to snippets of his music and Steve Miller, my own Ebony and Ivory years before the McCartney/Jackson version.
Sometime after midnight, Dan came in with his girlfriend. He was sloshed. She was relatively sober. Johnny, Pete and I had settled into knowing none of us were going to die that night, but were still mightily stoned. Dan, sensing my vulnerability to his point of view, proceeded to have one of those drunken love experiences, overcame his prejudices and engaged with me, almost like an evangelist. He was trying, in his way, to pull me from my path of self-destruction and drug use, pulling things from the past and drunkenly associating them with things from the present. I, for my part, felt up to the challenge and jumped right in, even though I consistently lost my train of thought halfway through each sentence I attempted, but finishing them nonetheless. Though there was much humor and much chaos, our hearts were in the right places and, until Stacy came home and discovered his much-loved records in the wrong sleeves and covered with fingerprints, there was much love in our little basement home.
Dan's girlfriend, Jackie, was hell with a typewriter, and somewhere in the midst of our debate she began to transcribe our slurred, half-baked, unfinished dialogue, which in itself was so fascinating it took me out of the argument repeatedly just to watch her work.
Stacy's return did in fact break up the party; but next morning, after not having slept, as we got ready for class, I sat down at the kitchen table and the typewriter to read what had been written there. Many's the time since I've wished I had saved those papers. It was a brilliant dialogue. It made so much more sense than anyone actually had been making--peaking, flowing, traveling in waves of joy and laughter--and fully expressive of the love Dan and I had for each other.
The point of this story? It illustrates a few points in the Vedic world view quite well:
1) that love is stronger than anything. Stronger than time, stronger than chemistry, stronger than judgment and opinion;
2) that meditation changes us absolutely, and fully allows us to be exactly who we are, who we always have been. I look back at that time, remembering how miserable I was and how much trouble I needed to make just to be able to survive the misery, and I see in the guy I was then the man I am now. I've always wanted to live in joy. Always wanted to know how to love and to be loved. Back then, finding that experience was a passing moment, preceded by much pain and suffering and followed by a wicked come-down and many further years of being lost. Today, as a meditator who lives daily to expand my experience of Self, it is right here, in the room with me, wherever I go, wherever I am. It has become second nature, this idea of loving, such that when I slip out of it I feel off and I'm willing to do whatever I need do to get back to it, none of which involves substances, illicit or otherwise. And finally,
3) whenever we visit a past version of ourself with love, we heal some part of ourself in that moment. That moment of healing then travels down the stream of time to impact us here in the present moment from which we sent the love, and healing occurs on both ends of the equation; and
4) I know that in some way, as I write this, Dan is remembering this in his own way, and it wouldn't surprise me if we saw each other some time in the next month or so. And it wouldn't surprise me if we didn't.
And it's all love.
Today I will take a moment to remember a less-sophisticated version of myself with love, and know he was doing the best he knew how to do, and I will thank him for staying alive to help bring me to the here and now.
Crows, Studio City, CA
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Kober
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