The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (9 page)

Dean taught me everything about interior design. He took me to markets in Dallas and Carolina. I was rarely, if ever, high on any of our trips, and Dean and I had some of the best times of my life together. Joyce, Dean’s wife, was on our trips, too, and tried to like me, but she was perceptive and knew I was not fully trustworthy. Bless her heart, she was spot-on.

I’d taken flower arranging in college on my way to flunking out, and I loved flowers. Dean owned the biggest flower store in Kansas, which was, and still is, on the bottom level of his design/furniture store. Dean let me hang around the professional flower arrangers, probably called florists, but that word reminds me of funerals, so I never use it.

During Mother’s Day and holidays, Dean—who was a flower arranger extraordinaire—would come hang with me and teach me, again, everything he knew. I learned to make huge Christmas bows that to this day my friends beg me to make. I learned how to stick flowers in Oasis foam and how to effortlessly remove rose thorns with my bare hands.

I used to create the most delicious floral arrangements in teacups: delicate lilies of the valley flown in from Switzerland, accompanied by violets. They were superb—tiny masterpieces. Dean would ooh and aah over them, but then break into a roaring laugh and announce “Jesus! You’re looking at a two-hundred-dollar arrangement! Jammed in this tiny-assed teacup!” My arrangements were not cost effective, not even close.

I worked for Dean White for almost four years. He never got angry with me and never found fault with a single thing I did, even though he had grounds to fire me, even jail me.

Dean is the kind of man who doesn’t think anyone is “quite right,” but he doesn’t care. He never judges people. He himself is eccentric and wild. He’s held court with kings and queens, nobility, trailer trash, and bums. Dean is the Kansas version of Will Rogers: he never met a man he didn’t like.

Dean opened all kinds of doors to me. He introduced me to anyone in his path and told them how swell I was. Before Dean came into my life, I had the confidence of a wallflower at a cotillion. Dean believed in me, he validated all of my rightnesses, and ignored the wrongs. Dean was the first man in my life to give me a taste of how exciting life could be. He was by far the best boss I ever had.

Dean is a beloved family man with three sharp, productive children, Mark, Brad, and Michelle. He was a devoted husband to his wife, Joyce, for over 30 years. Sadly, Joyce passed away from a brain tumor.

I was filming a movie in Canada when it happened, so I flew Dean in to be with me for a week. He was in bad shape when he came to me, sort of like I was when I came to him. We have remained lifelong friends, and he goes down in the annals of my life as the first man to give me hope, confidence, and a glimpse of what was possible. He was the guiding light that let me know I could be, do, or have anything I wanted.

Everyone needs a mentor in their life, that person who sees your potential buried deep underneath the rubble. That person who is willing to water you long enough to see you bloom.

For me that person was Deano.

I never told my own religion nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a conflict, nor wished to change another’s creed. I am satisfied that yours must be an excellent religion to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives and not from our words that our religion must be judged.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON

The Art of
Not Dying

I
’D DONE enough cocaine to kill several people. I weighed 112 pounds. I couldn’t
be
anywhere comfortably. It was 1979 and I was engaged to Jake. I had the most gorgeous eternity ring, chockfull of half-carat diamonds circling the band. We didn’t have the term in 1979, but I was a hot mess. I looked sexy and cool, but I was a complete lunatic.

Paranoia had set into my life and I was losing my mind. I couldn’t stop doing cocaine, yet I would sit around like a frenetic Chihuahua taking my pulse between each line to see if I was going to die. I called in sick to work three times a week. The high from the coke lasted less than 30 seconds, but I persevered for the high I’d gotten when I first snorted it. My eyes looked like a cat being chased by a dog—glassy, wild, and involuntarily quivering in the light. I was fucked up.

I lived in lazy Wichita, Kansas, but was pacing like a caged tiger, so I drove to my friend’s farm 50 miles away in Harper. When I say I couldn’t be anywhere, I mean it literally. I was crawling out of my skin. I couldn’t be in the yard, bedroom, or kitchen, agitated and wringing my hands, feeling the anxiety of not belonging anywhere. Every space was too big. Every space was overwhelming. My friends Carmen and Dick helped me pitch a canvas tent on their living room floor, and that’s where I resided for four days, eating Beanie Weenies, a gone-mad camper who couldn’t exist outside of the tiny green canvas walls.

  •  •  •  

One day my drug buddy Bruce, who had access to prescription drugs because he was in med school, drove to Harper with Valiums to “take the edge off me.” Valium really works well for people on a short-term basis, when they have received a severe mental shock, like a death, or for people like me who’d shocked themselves into a drug-induced insanity.

The Valium cooled my drug-withdrawing jets as I began to unravel and sort out my whacked life.

I emerged from my Coleman tent on the fifth day. I’d come close to having a psychotic break, but thankfully didn’t go over that cliff. There were so many decisions to make. What the hell was I doing with my life? I was surrounded by druggies, destroying my body and my mind. When you’re at the bottom, the good news is there are only two options: death or life. I had to choose.

The first decision I made was to survive. I wanted to live, and I didn’t mean just breathe. I wanted to change. I wanted to be happy.

A friend had told me about this book,
Dianetics
. She sent it to me to read. You probably think this story goes on a straight path of organized sanity from this point forward; far from it. I decided to read it when I returned to Wichita, and I did—while I was snorting cocaine from a silver tray and drinking limeades.

Hadn’t I learned anything in Harper? Yes, I’d learned to always take Valium to come off the agitating high of cocaine.

I had a white bedroom: white walls, ceiling, carpet, and bath, and I draped myself on my white chaise longue with my white cocaine to read my new book,
Dianetics
, by L. Ron Hubbard.

I didn’t know L. Ron Hubbard from Adam, and the only thing I knew about Scientology was that they drove some rad cars that I’d seen parked in the lot of a Scientology place in Redondo Beach. Whenever my husband, Bob, and I would drive past it I’d make a mental note,
Scientology equals Porsches and Mercedeses
, while the Methodist church I was raised in equaled Chevys and Fords. If anyone had asked my opinion of Scientology in 1973 I could have commented, it’s the religion of nice rides.

Religion is a goofy subject. Religions are based on beliefs, faith, and teachings. All of them that I’ve looked into have been interesting. They fascinate me. I was raised Methodist, which, in our house, meant going to church occasionally and listening to the preacher’s stories. Baby Jesus was a hot item for me. Baby Jesus, conceived immaculately, was riveting and opened up all sorts of questions for me. I loved the Ten Commandments; they were definitely rules to live by. But my parents could answer none of my questions about Christianity, and when I asked my dad if he believed all this stuff, he said, “I don’t really know what I believe.”

As I sat there snorting line after line of cocaine and reading
Dianetics
, I began to wonder:
What was true? What was real?
All I knew was that I believed Jesus did exist. He was a good person. The things he did for mankind were on track with helping people live better lives, so I liked him. The concept of him being the son of God made sense. But the concept of accepting him as my savior or else I would be doomed to eternal hell didn’t. That sounded more like something a person made up. I’d read Revelations—God said he was the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I certainly believed in God and still do, so I liked that passage in particular.

It was curious to me because Jesus has only been around 2,012 years. What happened to all the billions of people who had lived and died before him? They didn’t have a savior, at least not Jesus, so did they all go to hell? Or was that a new concept that arrived with Jesus? My Christian friends have told me that if people are exposed to the word of God and don’t take Jesus as their savior, they will end up in hell. Maybe that’s not what all Christians believe, but it did concern me and provoked more questions. Did all those Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Muslims, all good people, go to hell just because they believed in something other than Christ being their savior? This seemed too cruel. This made no sense and seemed un-Godlike. That’s what led me to know I wasn’t a Christian. It may be true, but it wasn’t true for me.

I examined several religions and found I believed in parts of them but not all. It became evident to me that people believe what they believe, have faith in what or whom they have faith in, based on what is true for them. Not by indoctrination or by beating concepts into them but by free will and selection.

Dianetics
made me aware of one distinct factor: I was really fucked up and was killing myself spiritually even more so than physically. Not only was I betraying others, but I was giving my own moral code and integrity a thrashing. So the first thing I hoped to get out of
Dianetics
was a certainty of my own truths, and to become honest. I wanted to become sane and helpful, useful to the world around me. Of course I knew I’d made myself nuts by doing drugs. But what had provoked me to do them in the first place? That’s what I hoped I’d find out from Mr. L. Ron Hubbard by the end of
Dianetics
.

  •  •  •  

Scientology has been cloaked in mystery fabricated by the press, mostly. It’s actually analytical and easy to understand. It does not include aliens, although I’d love to meet a few and believe we are not alone in the vastness of the universe.

My goal is not to convert anyone. It is merely to tell you why I chose Scientology as my religion and how the man who founded it affected my life. If you’re just reading this book for funny stories and sexual escapades, skip this chapter!

All religions sound a little wacky if you take them literally and if they don’t happen to be your own. Take communion, for example: Wine symbolizes the participation in the blood of the Christ. Bread represents participation in the body of the Christ. That’s enough to scare the hell out of any kid who takes it literally. Believe me, if this were a Scientology practice, the front page of the tabloids would read “Scientologists Practice Cannibalism.”

People fear religions, and why wouldn’t they? People have been deceived and duped by religions throughout the history of man. They’ve been beaten, burned at the stake, gassed, eaten by lions, had their heads shrunken—just to name several atrocities—in the name of religion. Of course little of it was part of any religion. It was just based on man’s fear of other men and their ideas.

People don’t like when other people don’t do what they want them to do or believe differently than they do. It makes them nervous. It rattles their own sense of being right. Mankind feels safe around people of like mind, especially in regard to religion. They think something awful will happen to them if they find themselves not believing what they once believed. This makes them feel alone and lonely. It excludes them from their group. So they kill the people who are different or reduce their freedom or enslave them in an effort to make them comply. The funny thing is, humans are tough motherfuckers and even at risk of death, they will adhere to what is true for them. They will fight for freedom of thought. They will die fighting for it if they have to. But most wars are simply about money, power, greed, insanity, and control of territory. Instead of tolerating differences, wars became about eradicating people who were different.

Yet man continues to believe what he believes no matter the duress of the suppression and punishment. This is how you know that inside man’s body is a spiritual being seeking truth. I believe it’s not his first rodeo. He’s recycled himself in and out millions of times in search of his own answers. Each being is an individual, not a collective, so he therefore seeks his own individual truths about himself.

You can sometimes beat a man into submission if you beat him long enough and hard enough, but if someone rescues him and takes him to a safe place where he would not be punished any longer, he will tell his rescuer his deepest beliefs. They don’t vanish because he was persecuted. They are still there, unwavering. We really need to stop trying to squash people’s faiths and beliefs, mainly because it has never worked and never will. Man thrives on freedom and his own truth. And oh lord, I’m not defending crimes or insane actions in the name of truth, so don’t jump there. People who kill, steal, molest, rape, or commit any other crimes should be put somewhere to prevent them from harming the rest of us. But even criminals or the dangerously insane won’t get better if they are punished, beaten, and controlled in bad ways. How great would it be if people were actually rehabilitated? Economically it would be more cost effective. And for the sake of the idiot next time around, even if he weren’t released back into society this lifetime, he might come back a better human being.

  •  •  •  

Now on to demonstrating how L. Ron Hubbard influenced
my
life directly.

He taught me that I could change. He taught me that other people could change. He taught me humanity and responsibility. I learned that man is basically good, as opposed to basically evil. Although humans can get pretty screwed up, at their core they are good and trying to right their own wrongs. This gave me a different viewpoint of myself and others. It let me see that if man
was
basically good, he himself would seek to punish and stop himself from harming people. This seemed true—criminals leave behind all sorts of clues when they’ve stolen something or killed someone. They leave fingerprints when they could have just worn gloves like OJ. They leave trinkets, receipts, DNA, witnesses, and videos. They know what they’re doing is wrong, and because they are innately good, they set themselves up to be caught and punished. If man were truly evil, he wouldn’t be so careless and stupid. It’s evident, even if it’s vague, that he wants someone to stop him from committing harmful acts if he can’t or won’t stop himself.