THE SACRAMENT OF HIGHER SELVES

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Ina comes to me, which is actually not a very good thing because my mom, unlike Paul’s mom, was a hot mess who never met a situation that she couldn’t make far worse by overreacting and throwing a Scarlett O’Hara-worthy clot.

Due to a personal tragedy that happened to my mom when she was very young (and never properly dealt with either emotionally or mentally) my mom lived on the slippery edge, plugged directly into the outlet of her early warning system that went off with such regularity that it ultimately became the soundtrack of my life whose greatest hits included “You Did What??,” “Oh My God!,” and her biggest tune, “How Can You Do That to Me??”

You didn’t have to know all the lyrics to feel the full impact of her songs. And trust me, you could not dance to any of them unless you knew all the intricate steps of the dance of death.

My siblings were panic, inevitability, and doom. Most of the time.  But not all.  

When my mom was off duty from her job at Crazy World, she was someone else completely. She was lovely, twirly, carefree, smart, witty, fun.  My friends adored her and could not possibly have known that Dr. Jekyll at home was Mrs. Hide My True Self.   When I was little, maybe 5 or 6, I was always on full alert, because I was never quite sure which mom I was going to get.

To make it even more complicated, my mom could make the transition from normal to nuts in under 2 seconds.   She would be cheerful and bedazzling, doing her make up at the bathroom mirror, singing a song from “The King and I,” and then suddenly she would turn to me and would look like the werewolf version of Michael Jackson in the “Thriller” video and growl, “GET OUT!”

My go-to escape pod was my limitless imagination bubble, which I could call up like room service from behind my BOLTED bedroom door. Once I heard the CLICK, I could exhale like a surviving Normandy Beach soldier, strip down and slap on any number of fantasy outfits, from Superman to Peter Pan, and from the launching pad of tranquility base, off I’d fly into the friendly skies of safety.

Now while this simple practice worked like gangbusters in the day, the problem was that sadly, I unconsciously kept up this practice for the next four decades or so.

My life as a Hollywood sitcom writer perfectly funhouse mirrored my already distorted childhood.  For years, I sat in small closed off rooms, where I let my imagination do the walking and got rewarded for it.  

The drug of choice in that world is immediate gratification and the grand Bunuel illusion that you will be able to forever retain your papers of citizenship to Neverland.

The big cosmos joke was that Hollywood was exactly like my mom.  

On one level it was warm and full of heavenly stars, especially during the seventies when there was no traffic, no car or house alarms.  We would sleep with our front doors splayed wide open in order to allow the trusting, tropical Pacific-born breezes to flow in like pirouetting ghosts which landed on us as gently as a there-there mommy kiss or the marshmallow fall of a weightless duvet.

But it was also cruel, temperamental and voracious.  

Hollywood flirts with you shamelessly, like the young Gloria Graham in “It’s A Wonderful Life” hiking its skirt to unimaginable levels, keeping you narcissistically mesmerized.

At the end of each and every year,  it lies on its sprawling servant-surrounded divan to do its annual jewelry inventory, to decide what it wants to keep and what it wants to blithely toss out because there is always something shinier and prettier to buy.  Always.

This is all about Eve and Hollywood Days.   It’s just the way it is.  Since its inception, Hollywood has had its invisible, written-in-tablet stone commandments which everyone follows slavishly.   What makes Sammy run? Fear. Uncertainty.  Inevitability. 

Age and rejection are the metastasized malignancies of my industry.

It really is no different than professional sports.  In baseball, for example, you are considered “old” if you are in your mid-thirties.  Sooner or later your body or your team will betray you.

My Hollywood therapist told me years ago, that depression is a crisis of faith and I would say the same thing about my industry.  It becomes a crisis of faith.

If you spend too much time praying to false idols, sooner or later, the temple is going to self-destruct and your heart and soul are going to get crushed.

I sound like a bitter old writer and I’m actually anything but.  The truth is I am still very much alive, writing and thriving.  In f,act I have a new show that I co-created with Paul Reiser that is currently streaming on HULU (There’s Johnny), I have a new play which just premiered and I have a half dozen scripts in all genres making the studio line dance rounds.

So why this soul excavating piece?   

Because occasionally Hollywood eclipses my being and I suddenly find myself, lost in the the shadows, wanting to please LA like a saucer-eyed, needy orphan.

When that occasional lunar event happens, I momentarily forget that I am firmly entrenched here within the walls of my New York Fortress of Solitude and temporarily erase the words of my own personal Declaration of Independence which I wrote and signed in blood, in sweeping John Hancock cursive, in order to turn my back on the tyranny.

It’s like having a temporary stroke which leaves me both speechless and completely incapacitated, left to stare longingly at my glass menagerie while I wait like the crippled Laura, for my gentlemen caller.

The effects of the stroke can last seconds, minutes, days or even weeks at a time, until impatience or my inner cavalry finally shove me down into the rabbit hole where I spiral down, down, down, not hitting bottom for what feels like the like weeks beyond an eternity.

But thankfully there are remedies to literally pull me out of this.

I have east coast light, which is welcoming, rescuing  and curative.  

I have beautiful friends who know precisely which part of my ass to kick, Renaldo-style.

I have my music, The Beatles mostly, whose irresistible, propulsive, hand-clapping joy airlifted us out of the unbearable, funereal despair of the Kennedy Assassination (and Europe from the blood soaked rubble of World War II) who, to this day, still congenially and effortlessly re-instruct us that all we need is love.

I have my leaning Tower of Piza piles of books which are full of other writer’s voices which whisper to me, in the songs of true comrades, “Me too.”

I have my always-within-reach, most cherished and sustainable childhood memories, which feature long days of camp and frolic and pretty girls who loved me to their core.  I can still see the everywhere canvas of their satin white bare skin.  The fingers that linked with mine without instruction.  The bashful and contented smiles.  The lunar imprint of their resting heads which have been lovingly and permanently sculpted into the sinewy curve of my soft clay shoulder.

But most of all, I have my writing.   

My daily confessional, whose magical elixir I first sip and then, eventually swill like I have actually moved into the previously unreachable mirage that I have been crawling towards through the desert of my own sadness.

Writing for me is the voice which cannot, no matter how hard I try, be strangled.

Its muscle is stronger than my spine.  Stronger than my fears.  

Smarter than I will ever be.  I give myself fully to the holy trinity of my visions which visit me the minute that I sit down and give myself the gift of true flight.

In this era of lies and deception, which has become the counterfeit currency of our lives, where actual credit and accomplishment mean nothing,  where anger feels justified and civility and kindness feel quaint and exotic,  I find now that I have no choice but to depend fully and completely on my own brand of fire and brimstone honesty and full transparency to remind me of what the Talmud and Jesus and Mohammad and every other God have been whispering in our ears for thousands of years.

When you find yourselves in times of trouble, you need to not find the source of your bitterness, but the true source of your inner light.

You need to be the first candle lit in what seems like a storm of darkness.  Because once your inextinguishable wick has been lit, you can then turn to anyone else’s to help light their way too.

And that my friends is who we will relight the world.

None of this can come without pain.  Without first being petrified of the dark of the unknown.

Without feeling the raging torrents of torment which threaten to drown us.

Despite what it may feel like, disappointment is nothing more than the end of a round which you really should acknowledge by first bowing to it or by having another commemorative shot of Tito’s for further fortification and stability.

We cannot change the will of anyone but we can commandeer our own.

The truth is we are all a manifestation of what we hope God is really like in real life.

We all have a secret world; an interplanetary sacrament of higher selves, whose voices, I think, are the forever reverberation of every single person whose profound reason and care have touched us to the deepest fathoms of our being. 

They are the architects of our smiles, the designers of our dreams, the articulation of everything that we are scared to say but feel the most.

The illusion is that we are alone, occasionally unloved and worse, forgotten in our own time.

But none of that is true.

We remember everything.

We do not forget.

Or hearts won’t let us.