Walking Wisdom

by Gotham Chopra

  “Eh.” I shrugged, half a world away, resigned to letting the kid figure it out. It was consistent with my larger parenting philosophy. Eventually, either because it just felt uncomfortable or because of the inevitable cultural awkwardness of being a teenager who shat in his pants, Krishu would beg us to be potty trained. I felt the same way about his eating and sleeping. When he got hungry enough, he’d eat. When he got tired enough, he’d sleep. Why such pressure to create elaborate rituals and routines to trick him into stuff he instinctively defied? Alas, more theories that never stood a chance with my wife.

  “Does he miss me?” I asked.

  “Do you want me to lie to you or tell you the truth?”

  “Go ahead and lie.”

  “He’s really missing you and asking for you constantly.” Impressive.

  I knew in fact that with Wai pó in the house, he’d hardly have noticed I was gone. “What about Cleo?”

  This time Candice didn’t even bother to lay out the options. “She’s really missing you and asking for you constantly!”

  “She’d better . . . Ungrateful bitch.”

  Candice laughed and then added affectionately, “You are, aren’t you?” Clearly Cleo had rolled over by Candice’s side and was reaping loving rubs.

  “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” Candice reminded me. “You know Cleo. As soon as you’re back, she’ll love you more than ever. Her mind works on what’s right in front of her.”

  “Yeah,” I lamented. “But why can’t she be like those dogs you always hear about? You know, that sit in front of the door waiting for their master? That get all depressed and moody because the thing they care most about in the world is that one person who’s not there?”

  “Ha! Cleo? Think again.”

  “I guess.” I shrugged. It’s actually one of Cleo’s greatest attributes—her ability to focus her attention on the present moment without being distracted by anything else.

  “I miss you,” Candice said, her voice once again suspiciously seductive.

  “Liar!”

  “Watch it, Lance!” she warned. “You’d better get some sleep for that big ride tomorrow that we can’t talk about and you shouldn’t think about.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Ciao.”

  “Ooh,” she purred. “Very Italian.”

  AS I SETTLED into my cozy hotel room in Bormio, Italy, my cell phone rang. I picked it up to find my father on the other end of the line.

  “How was the flight?” he asked.

  “Expensive,” I replied. He laughed.

  “I talked to Mom.” He paused. “Nana’s doing much better. His condition is stable. He’ll probably go home in a few days.”

  Stable is such a strange term if you really think about it. Surely it’s better than “critical” or “life-threatening,” but far short of where you want to be, if you ask me.

  “Okay,” I said hesitantly. “What does that mean?”

  “It means let’s take one day at a time.” Papa reverted into doctor verbiage. “He should be fine. But I don’t want to say much.”

  Who knew Papa was such a voodoo doctor, as if what he said would somehow disrupt the delicate balance of Nana’s recovery.

  “Is Mom okay?” I asked, changing tack. If for some reason she wasn’t, it would be a telling sign. My mom is notoriously even-keeled.

  “She’s okay. A bit emotional, you know? It’s her father after all.”

  A curveball. On the one hand, the fact that my mother was “emotional” was concerning. The inclusion, however, of the “it’s her father after all” bit was a variable. I was unsure how to reconcile this.

  “Don’t get worked up about it.” Papa interrupted my thoughts. “No one can control the future. You’ll wear yourself out trying. Just have the intention that Nana will be fine and let go.”

  There it was again, the whole intention, attention, detachment equation. Sounded simple enough, yet enormously difficult in execution.

  “I’ll try,” I said unconvincingly.

  “Trying won’t work,” Papa reprimanded.

  Right, a fish doesn’t try to swim, it just does. A bird doesn’t try to fly, it just does. You don’t try to walk, you just do. Between Papa and Yoda, these were axioms I had grown up with. But it didn’t make things any easier.

  “How’s baby?” This had become my father’s new bailout move whenever he was unsure where to steer a conversation.

  “Good,” I said. “Potty training is not going so hot.”

  This too stumped him. I’d be willing to bet my every last penny that my father had no involvement in my potty training when I was a toddler.

  “Yeah, it’s never easy.” Wow—good recovery. “What about Cleo?” he asked.

  I laughed, impressed. The fact that he remembered her name, let alone was concerned about how she was doing, signified a genuine and growing connection between the two of them.

  “She’s great,” I answered. “Now that Candice’s mom is there, she’ll actually get to go on some long walks every day.”

  “How often does she see Candice’s mom?” Papa inquired.

  I thought about it. Candice’s mom visited us about every six months or so. I informed Papa.

  “Do you think,” Papa started, “that if you opened up Cleo’s skull and looked at her brain, you would find that memory of Candice’s mom?”

  I hoped it was a rhetorical question. “Don’t get any ideas.”

  “The brain, for both humans and dogs,” he noted, “does not store memories. There’s no archive system for them inside your brains. Memories exist as possibilities nonlocally in a central plain of existence.”

  “Let me give this a shot,” I offered. “It’s the difference between storing data on your hard drive versus storing it on the server.”

  Pause.

  “The real difference between Cleo and us is her ability to access the server with minimal disruption.”

  This time I demanded a translation.

  “It’s pretty simple. Animals react and do not reflect on their reactions. They draw on their own memories and the memories of their species, but they are not tainted by nor twisted around emotions.”

  It made me think. Even if a few months or a year had passed, as soon as Candice’s mom walked through the door, Cleo was all over her, leaping up onto her, excitedly seeking affection.

  “So you don’t think Cleo is motivated by memories?” I inquired. “I mean, she clearly reacts instinctively to a lot of things.”

  “There’s a big difference,” Papa responded quickly. “To be reactive to your past, to memories, is to be a prisoner of them. That’s what most people do—play victim to their past experiences. Being instinctive is totally different.

  “Instincts are based on our collective memory or karma. The alchemy of all of our past experiences manifests in the instincts of our species. Instincts rely on that reservoir of past experiences.

  “Even humans—no one has to teach us how to fall in love for the first time. Not because we have any memory of it or how great the experience is, but because at the right moment, it feels right.

  “The problem is that we create barriers in our own lives, condition ourselves. That first moment of falling in love creates a memory that we then will go back to for the rest of our lives. It creates an expectation of what love should be like in the future. That’s when things get complicated.

  “Cleo’s beyond the complications,” Papa concluded.

  It was a lot to digest. “Do you really think humans are capable of that?” I asked.

  This time Papa didn’t respond with the hesitation as he had before. In fact, he didn’t respond at all.

  “Papa?” I prodded. “Are you there?”

  Another beat passed before he finally spoke. “Turn on your TV,” Papa said, his tone decidedly altered.

  “Why?” I scrambled to locate the remote. “What?”

  Another pause. “They’re saying that Michael Jackson may be dead.”

 
. . .

  I FIRST MET Michael when I was fifteen. My father had been introduced to him by Elizabeth Taylor, who was a frequent visitor to an alternative health center in western Massachusetts where my father had become the medical director. The more Ms. Taylor learned about my father and the spiritual material that he was engaged in, the more she became convinced that Michael would be fascinated by him. While she was most interested in the spa-like resources that the health center offered, not to mention the fact that it was so removed from Hollywood and the chaos that came with it, my father recalled that she thought Michael would be more attracted to “all that other magical stuff ” that my father spoke about—like meditation, consciousness, and karma.

  She was right. Michael became family from the moment he and Papa met. And it wasn’t just the “magic stuff ” that he was attracted to; it was the “normal stuff ” as well. Just a few months after my father and Michael met, Michael invited him to his Neverland ranch just near Santa Barbara.

  Papa mentioned his upcoming trip one night over dinner. He was so casual he might have been discussing the weather.

  “How long a drive is it from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara? I have a meeting in LA next week and then might make a trip to Michael Jackson’s ranch. He wants to see me.”

  Mallika and I stared at him in disbelief.

  “What?” he asked as we struggled to find words.

  “Michael . . . ?” I uttered.

  “Jackson . . . ?” she completed.

  Papa nodded. “Do you want to come with me?”

  Mallika was heartbroken. She desperately wanted to go, but was scheduled to leave the following morning on some do-gooder mission to the Dominican Republic. Something about spending the summer digging latrines. I, on the other hand, had no such philanthropic agenda. My plans centered around a summer’s worth of bleacher bumming at Fenway Park.

  I played it cool, though. After all, I was fifteen, the pinnacle of teen arrogance and attitude. I wore Cross Colors and Adidas. I played varsity basketball and totally felt J. D. Salinger. I couldn’t react the way I wanted to: “Are you f’ing kidding me? Hell yes, I’ll go with you to meet Michael f’ing Jackson.”

  Instead, I shrugged. “Yeah, that sounds cool. I’ll come with . . .”

  Like many in my generation, I had grown up as a devotee of Michael Jackson. It wasn’t just his music that I obsessed over, it was him. It was the Thriller video that inspired a consecutive string of seven Halloween costumes and the purchase of a red leather jacket that I sliced up to resemble the one MJ wore in the iconic video. It was the Billie Jean performance at the Motown twenty-fifth Anniversary special that inspired the purchase of half a dozen penny loafers. It was the glove he wore that prompted me to buy a skier’s insulation glove—the closest thing I could find to resemble the one he wore. And there was the black fedora that I made my parents buy me and that I wore constantly until it resembled something more suited to Indiana Jones than Michael Jackson. I looked like a real idiot wearing that oversized hat at the age of eleven and yet, because almost everyone else also idolized Michael Jackson, it was cool.

  Michael Jackson was cool. The way he mastered the stage or rocked out a stadium with such superhero-like power and sheer talent, but then seemed so vulnerable and human off it . . . cool.

  Having grown up with the guru to the stars, I’ve been lucky to meet a lot of famous people. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that they’re usually not as intimidating in person as their celebrity may have made them out to be. Over time, I guess I realized that it was less about them and more about us and our expectations. We idolize celebrities, create icons out of them, and are disappointed, even angered, when they don’t live up to the standards we’ve created.

  I’d experienced this up close and personal. There was the best-selling author I’d idolized in high school, whom I met at a dinner party and who became rankled when talking about Barnes & Noble and how they didn’t place his books at eye level on their shelves. As if that wasn’t enough, all through dinner he just bitched and moaned about Amazon’s shipping policies to the point that it was really tragic. Knowing how much he despised the good people who brought his books to the public—and worse, seeing just how petty he was—made it hard to appreciate the words he put on a page after that. There was the sexy actress whom I fantasized about until I overheard her refer to the health center staff as “hired help not worth minimum wage.” After that I could never, well, fantasize about her in the same way.

  In the “self-help” world, which over the years we had become even more embedded in, the ironies were even more intense. Relationship experts whose embattled marriages were full of scandal and infidelity. Nutrition gurus who hid out in the back of restaurants carb loading, chasing them down with soft drinks. Advocates of “simplifying one’s life” who traveled with entourages that made pro athletes look like amateurs.

  Not so with Michael.

  He was everything I had ever imagined and so much more. We became friends over the years. Family. I would learn that not only was he an incredibly dynamic and brilliant artist, a celebration of divine-like talent, but also a deeply conflicted and agonized soul. Michael may have been a man whose head was often in the clouds, so disconnected from the reality that “ordinary people” experienced, but he was also someone who felt human emotions in the deepest way I’d ever witnessed.

  Years after I met him, I matriculated at the prestigious Ivy League school Columbia University—largely because of a college recommendation he wrote. Michael lived mostly in New York City, high atop the Four Seasons Hotel in the penthouse, and I’d visit him regularly, just hanging out, sometimes collaborating on some projects he was working on, constantly trying to draw him out from the isolating cocoon that he and his advisers had wrapped around him. Usually I’d fail. To compensate me for some of the contributions I’d made to his projects, he’d pay me in cash, pulling a literal sack of bills from behind the toilet where he kept it hidden, and slipping me a couple grand. I’d proceed to call my college friends, who’d hop on the subway and meet me downtown so we could spend that same cash on what mattered most to us at the time: strippers.

  More time passed. Michael went from iconic rock star, the greatest talent the world may have ever seen, to scandal-plagued celebrity. His face was literally falling apart—the result of not only self-inflicted surgeries to combat some of his deeper psychological issues, but a skin disease that few knew about. The press alleged that he was a race-hater or a freak, charges that made Michael alternatively melancholy and furious. And of course there were the even more devastating allegations of sexual impropriety with young boys that would for a time taint all of his past glories. For me, where I once proudly showed off that I had met MJ when I was fifteen years old, it was now a sheepish throwaway line that I muttered under my breath for fear of the raised eyebrows and smirks it would trigger.

  After the storm clouds of the scandals passed, Michael entered a new stage of his life, and I soon followed: fatherhood. We took decidedly different roads to the same destination. Whereas I did it the old-fashioned way, Michael literally manufactured a family, one that would love him in a way that no one else ever had. It was easy to see from the way he was with his three kids that they were the one thing in his life he valued above all else. Years after he had already started his family, Candice gave birth to Krishu. Michael called me and said, “See—I told you so, Igger” (his nickname for me. He had nicknames for everyone. “Starbucks,” you know who you are), “it’s the greatest thing you’ll ever know.”

  I actually asked him to be Krishu’s godfather, but ominously he said he didn’t think he’d be a good one. “I think you should find someone who’d be better at it,” he confessed. “There are too many bad things in my life he shouldn’t learn.”

  He did nickname Krishu “the Chindian,” though, and checked in once every few weeks to make sure that Candice and I were speaking multiple languages around him.

  “Michael,” I
’d tell him early on, “he’s just a few months old.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he’d respond, “he’s smarter than all of us. Make sure you keep it that way.”

  All the while in the last few years of his life, even as he was gaining greater emotional and spiritual fulfillment than he ever had through his life with his children, Michael was struggling. Those close to him knew it, and yet, despite repeated attempts, there wasn’t much anyone could really do. Once again, he had become exceedingly skillful at building that cocoon of isolation around him, especially because he thought he had a secret he didn’t want anyone to know.

  Just a few weeks before I had left for Italy, he had called me in the middle of the night, as he often did. He sounded clearheaded and on point. He’d heard about the fate of my journalist friend Laura Ling, imprisoned in North Korea, and wanted to know if I knew any details the news was not reporting. (Based on his own experiences with many journalists, he didn’t trust them all that much.) When I told him there wasn’t much information to be had, that North Korea was ruled over by a totalitarian regime that controlled the press, he paused. He told me he’d seen pictures of Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader” of North Korea who ruled the isolated nation with an iron fist. He noticed that he often wore military jackets, similar to the ones that Michael wore when he went out in public or performed.

  “Do you think he’s a fan of mine?” Michael proposed.

  I shrugged in the darkness of my room. “I don’t know.”

  “If so, maybe I can help in some way.”

  I promised him I’d look into it.

  “Okay.” He thanked me. “I hope they’re doing all right.” He had read somewhere that both Laura and her colleague Euna were likely being kept in isolation. “Being by yourself like that is not easy, isolated from people, from time.”

  I nodded, not knowing really what to say.

  “Say hi to the Chindian,” he whispered. “Good night.”