Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  I was surprised that she hadn’t already figured that out for herself. I hate being the bearer of bad news, so rather than tell her it was because she didn’t have hands, I played along and agreed to help her. I felt so guilty about my repulsion toward this woman, who after all was still a human being with feelings like the rest of us, that I was determined to treat her just like anyone else. We spent the next hour, just Amanda and me, attempting to figure out how she might learn to juggle without mentioning or even alluding to her obvious handicap.

  It was particularly difficult because she kept asking me, “Why can’t I do this? I don’t understand why I can’t do this.”

  Christ, what was I supposed to say? Lying seemed like the easiest way out at the time, so taking a cue from my dad, I said, “Sure you can do it. Anyone can. It just takes a little confidence, that’s all…”

  We were getting to the end of our two hours, and I hadn’t been able to help anyone else. Jack and one other staff member who knew how to juggle were helping as much as they could, but it wasn’t going well. The conference hall was a mess of flying balls and people chasing after them. I didn’t know what to do with Amanda. The truth—as uncomfortable as it was—would have gotten me away from this woman, but I couldn’t find the courage to tell her. There seemed to be only one way out of this mess. It was going to take all my strength, but Amanda was going to juggle. Facing her, I grabbed on to what was left of her hands. With some effort, we eventually managed to throw the ball back and forth a few times. I held on to her stumps and caught the ball with my fingers wrapped around them. Then together, we made a jerky upward motion to get the ball back to the other hand.

  “See? That was great. I told you you could do it!” I felt terrible about lying to this poor woman, but that’s what this seminar seemed to be all about: give them some false self-confidence for a week and they’ll be sure to come back. I had timed it up perfectly with the end of the exercise, so she couldn’t try again on her own, but my hour with Amanda left at least 70 percent of the room still struggling with two balls. The real lesson that day was that anything might be a bit out of reach.

  I continued to give people pointers on how to juggle as the seminar went on, but mostly I was expected to participate in the workshop and work on my “issues.” As far as I could tell, my only issue at the time was that I was being forced to participate in the seminar. I pretended to go along with it by coming up with variations on the writing exercises, or drawing in the workbook to make it look as if I were taking part.

  It was easy to fake my way through until we started doing group exercises.

  Jack would say, “I want you all to turn to the person on your right and tell them, ‘I love you. You’re an amazing person.’” Or we would get in a group of six people and he would say, “Now I want you to go around the circle and tell everyone one thing you find special about them. We are so used to people at work telling us what we did wrong, or our spouses and parents telling us, ‘if only you were more like so and so…’ We’ve heard this so much throughout our lives that we start to believe these things about ourselves…that we’re ugly, or can’t do anything right. This exercise can help us realize that we’re all beautiful.”

  Even with all my acting classes, auditions, and performance experience, this was a stretch. Although I didn’t know anything about these people, I managed to compliment Sherry from Reseda on her nice earrings and tell Frank from Occidental what a great smile he had.

  The group activities always ended with a hug and a long meaningful look into your exercise partner’s eyes. I wasn’t into hugs or looking into people’s eyes and discovered that the only thing creepier than a fifty-year-old “consultant” telling you he loves you just the way you are is saying, “I love you, too,” followed by a hug and thirty seconds of uninterrupted eye contact. I tried to fool them by gazing deeply past their heads or focusing on their mouths, but it didn’t help much. I started making myself scarce by sneaking out back of the hotel for a cigarette every time I thought a new group exercise was coming up.

  It was during one of these cigarette breaks that Bob, the staff member who could “relate” to me, found me hiding out by the Dumpsters and said it was really important that I come back in. Something special was about to happen. I had a very bad premonition about this.

  When I walked back into the conference hall, the staff members were busy passing out hundreds of Wiffleball bats. I had heard of this exercise before. You get a pillow or pad that you designate as your mom, dad, husband, wife, girlfriend, or whomever—and then you proceed to beat the shit out of it with the bat. Rather than Wiffleball bats, my mom had a pair of red Styrofoam clubs called “boffers,” which she kept around her office for couples therapy. She didn’t see the value of beating up a pillow when you could take your aggression straight to the source. She tried it with Kyle and me a few times when she caught us fighting, but it always ended up with Kyle dropping the boffer and going for the nearest chair or lamp. I don’t know how it worked out for her married clients, but we weren’t interested in safe-alternative fighting, we wanted to fucking kill each other.

  What I wasn’t expecting was all the screaming and yelling that was involved in this exercise: a cacophony of rage. I guess to be truly effective you have to call your mom a fucking bitch for not giving you enough love or your dad an asshole for telling you you wouldn’t amount to shit, all at the top of your lungs. I hadn’t been scared like this since I first heard people speaking in tongues at the born-again Christian church I had gone to as a kid. I couldn’t help but think about the similarities because, just as with that experience, I knew that I was expected to take part. They wanted me to beat the shit out of a pillow, but the real culprit was right here in the room.

  “I know this seems weird, but you obviously have a lot of anger toward me, and you have every right to be pissed off, but you need to do this in order to release some of that anger, and move on with your life,” Jack came over to tell me.

  Before he decided to coach me on beating up his stand-in, I mostly just felt uncomfortable and annoyed by the whole thing. Now I was pissed. It was as if he were telling me it was my responsibility to get over the fact that he was a shitty dad. That all I needed to do was hit the pillow and he would be off the hook. I got the sense that, in between outbursts, people were glancing in my direction to see what would happen when I released my anger toward my dad and cleared the air of my resentment and bad feelings. Reluctantly, and with the most pained expression I could muster, I hit the pillow halfheartedly and, imitating the shouts I heard coming from all over the room, muttered, “I hate you, Jack. I hate you, Jack.” I was only able to keep it up for about thirty seconds before I put down the bat and walked out for another cigarette. I couldn’t do it anymore.

  The final event at the seminar had to do with a book Jack was selling. It hadn’t yet been written, and they hadn’t found a publisher, but it had a title. It was going to be called Chicken Soup for the Soul and would cost about twelve dollars in the store, but as a seminar special, you could pre-order one now for ten. It blew my mind when people started lining up to hand over money for an unwritten, unpublished book that, as far as I could tell, wasn’t even about anything.

  A WEEK AT THE Culver City Marriott surrounded by hundreds of self-help freaks had been tough, but it was the Wiffleball bat exercise that finally pushed me over the edge. I was proud of myself for keeping my feelings locked deep inside for as long as I had, but maybe all the talk of letting them out finally had some effect on me. Eating lunch at the Sizzler next door to the hotel, I could no longer control myself. For the first time since this workshop began, I found myself alone with my dad. The rest of the participants were all feeling so happy and full of self-worth that they were all exchanging phone numbers and making plans to consult and facilitate with one another in the future.

  Finally getting him alone, I proceeded to very calmly tell him what I thought of his profession as a self-help guru.

  “Jack,
” I started—as far as I could remember I had never called him Dad—“you know that this stuff doesn’t actually help anyone, right? Obviously these people are so lonely and desperate that they’re willing to pay any price to have someone to fix them. Sure, they’re all out there exchanging numbers, having a great time with all their new best friends right now, but tomorrow they have to go back to their shitty little lives. What happens when you’re not around to tell them how great they are? Before you know it, they’re going to be right back where they were. Lonely and miserable.”

  Jack seemed to be listening, but he didn’t respond. He just nodded his head, so I went on and explained how the self-help industry was like a drug, and that he was essentially a drug dealer peddling temporary relief from a permanent problem.

  “For twenty-five hundred dollars, you provide these people with a temporary escape from the pain of being human. All they have to do is give you some money, and they’ve got three hundred people telling them how great they are, how beautiful they are, giving them standing ovations for no reason…you can do anything…Of course they feel good for a minute! But once they leave this hotel, it’s not like that. It’s back to their bosses yelling at them, their wives nagging them, until they can’t take it anymore and it’s time for another seminar. I don’t see how that’s any different from being a drug dealer.”

  I went on like this for ten more minutes, eliciting only a few more understanding nods from Jack. I was so sure of myself, I half-expected him to tell me how smart I was for figuring him out.

  Without a trace of hurt feelings, he said, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” and finished his lunch.

  twenty-four

  Shows the disastrous consequences of a walk to the store

  THE PLAN AFTER leaving Oxnard was to move to L.A., but without any money, credit, or job, finding a place to live was not easy. I made a home base out of my dad’s house and couch surfed in L.A., staying mostly with my friend Claudia while I looked for my own place. I also started reconnecting with some other friends of mine who had moved down to L.A. from the Bay Area. We would usually meet up at some bar or another, and having managed to stay sober for almost three months, I decided it was now safe to start drinking again. In a stroke of luck, I ran into a guy whose band, The 400 Blows, I had recorded in my old basement, and he told me about a girl he knew who was looking for someone to help out at her performance space in exchange for a room.

  “How much is the rent?” I asked him.

  “Free, I think. She just wants someone to help out getting the place set up. I told her about your old space on Mission Street, and she said it sounded perfect.” It sounded too good to be true, and I called the number he gave me to find out for myself.

  The place was a gigantic first-floor storefront in the heart of downtown. I was surprised to see a thriving urban environment in L.A. I had thought the whole city was an endless one-dimensional sprawl. It was almost as if someone had taken a piece of Manhattan and plopped it down somewhere in Mexico.

  The girl’s name was Emily. I didn’t get a very good read on her in the ten minutes it took before she told me I could move in. The space was amazing, and my room was already built. It seemed that she was dedicated to turning the place into something of a creative hub for the growing “downtown scene,” but something gave me the impression that it was not going to be as perfect as it sounded.

  I moved in and Emily quickly put me to work building walls, hanging lights, and fixing the floors. I didn’t mind, and it helped keep my mind off dope. What had started out as having a few drinks at bars a couple nights a week eventually became more than a few every night, and I was starting to wake up with bad hangovers. It bothered me because I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic and that I didn’t even like drinking that much, but it kept getting worse.

  And then I found myself drinking in the morning. I didn’t give it much thought because it would have really bummed me out. It got hard to ignore, though, when this guy Mark, who did all the electrical work on the space, told me he was going to a noon meeting and that I should go with him.

  “Oh yeah? What kind of meeting?” I asked. I was bracing the twenty-foot ladder he was standing on with one hand and holding a Tecate in the other.

  “An AA meeting. I think you should come with me,” he said.

  “You mean today? Now? No. I’m not really into that stuff. Thanks, but I got to get these other lights up before tonight,” I said.

  He climbed down the ladder and tried again. “Dude. It’s only for an hour. I think you should check it out.”

  “It’s funny you brought it up. I’ve actually been before, but my thing was heroin. I’m really not much of a drinker,” I said, self-consciously holding the now-empty beer can at eleven thirty in the morning. “But thanks, man. I’ll totally let you know if I change my mind.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you in a few hours, then.”

  ASIDE FROM DRINKING a little too early in the morning, things were going okay. I had managed to join two bands in the short amount of time I had been there, was sort of seeing a girl I had met through living at the space, and still hadn’t shot heroin or smoked crack. It all looked good on paper. In reality, though, I didn’t like any of the music I was playing, the girl I was sort of seeing thought she could save me, and my hangovers were getting really bad. I did my best not to dwell on the negatives, taking solace in the idea that appearing to do well was all that really mattered. I had never in my life managed anything better than that.

  At least my friends back in San Francisco were talking to me again. My birthday was coming up, and I had managed to book a show for the Roofies, on a bill with the two other bands I was in. I couldn’t think of a better present or symbolic return to real life than playing with my friends on my twenty-sixth birthday.

  But, on my way to buy a sandwich one afternoon, a guy asked me if I was “looking,” and I instinctively reached into my pocket and handed him forty bucks. I didn’t even know what the fuck he was selling or why he had never asked me on any of my other countless trips to the deli. He spit eight little white things out of his mouth. I pocketed them and went to a liquor store to buy a pipe and a Brillo pad before turning around and going straight home. I had lost my appetite.

  The next morning I woke up with the crack pipe still hanging out of my mouth and saw a ten-year-old kid standing by my bed holding out a glass of water to me. I had no idea who he was, or why he was in my room, but what really bothered me the most was that he seemed to know exactly what I needed—as if this wasn’t the first time he had seen someone wake up with a crack pipe in his mouth. I grabbed the pipe, but it had stuck to my lips, and some of my skin came off with it. I couldn’t make sense of how sad the whole scene was. It was too sad for me to even cry about. Instead, it caused an almost infinite feeling of emptiness inside me. I reached out and took the water.

  “Thanks.” I handed the glass back. I still wasn’t ready to ask him who he was or why he was there.

  “You want another one?” he asked.

  I nodded to him and made an attempt to sit upright before he came back. I had passed out leaning against the wall at a weird angle, and my neck was all fucked up, not to mention how crappy I felt from having been seen by this kid.

  “What’s your name, buddy?” I asked him when he came back.

  “I’m Brian,” he said.

  “Ah. I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m Oran,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand. He was Emily’s son, whom she talked about all the time but I had never met. Brian lived with what Emily claimed was his “speed-freak” dad out in Venice Beach or something. Listening to her bitch about her ex-husband always kind of reminded me of my mom going on about Jack. I usually just tuned it out, but it didn’t seem like a good sign to me that he was so comfortable hanging around in the room of some crack smoker he had never even met.

  I didn’t know what to do about any of it. It was too big for me to make any sense of. More immediately, I wasn’t sure if Emily knew wha
t had happened or whether I even still had a room here.

  “Mom gave me this so we could go get some ice cream,” Brian said, pulling some money out of his pocket. Again I didn’t know what to do. I felt like a monster who shouldn’t be eating ice cream with kids. I even felt guilty about trying to make a good impression on him—it didn’t seem like a good idea for him to like me after what he’d seen. He reminded me of myself at that age, as if he’d been through too much shit for such a young kid. I didn’t know what I could do to help, but I decided to just go with it. After all, Brian was the one buying me ice cream. It was a sad state of affairs.

  Two days later, the same shit happened, but this time Emily woke me up holding a glass of water. Again, I took the pipe out of my mouth, taking some more of my lip with it, and drank the water that she offered me.

  “I don’t want this to sound like I’m kicking you out, but Nora across the street is subletting her place. It’s two hundred bucks a month, and I think you should take it,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Is that a yes? If that nod means yes, I can go upstairs and call her right now,” she said.

  “Yes,” I croaked, and she turned around and left.

  AFTER MOVING ACROSS the street, I went downhill quicker than ever. The crack dealer told me that the heroin guys were only two blocks away, and within a few days I was covering all the windows of Nora’s converted office space with cardboard and duct tape and ripping out a fair amount of the drywall looking for electronic devices that the cops were using to spy on me. Crossing a new line, I shaved most of my body hair off to get rid of the imaginary bugs that were crawling all over me. It was so goddamned unoriginal, yet I couldn’t stop thinking about them and scratching at myself.

  That’s what I was doing while I was supposed to be playing at that show I had set up down the street. The whole point was to prove to my friends, some of whom had driven down from San Francisco, how well I was doing at my big birthday party. My phone was ringing off the hook, and I could hear my friend Dave yelling up at me from the sidewalk. Turning off my phone and hiding in my apartment with the lights off, I cried, smoked more crack, shot more heroin, and thought about my friends who were only three blocks away. As the days went by, the phone rang less, and Dave’s attempts at visiting me became more infrequent. Every once in a while I listened to the messages Jack left every day telling me he didn’t care what I was doing, just that I needed to call him, and that he would come and get me.