By the time this journey is over, I hope you will see how an act of kindness really can change the world. You will meet Tony, the homeless man who taught me that true riches don’t reside in our wallets but in our hearts. You will see the courage shown by my friend in Cambodia, whose life was ravaged by illness, loss, and natural disaster. You will meet a doctor whose passion for service restores the sight of the poor. You will see how one well-intentioned, but flawed human being can travel around the globe on the kindness of others and be reborn. And there are many others whom you will not meet: strangers who for a moment became friends, passing quickly through the day to offer me food, gas, and the means to keep going.
Salman Rushdie once wrote, “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” We don’t have to travel this entire blue planet of ours to have that experience. We just have to be willing to see each other. I see you, and you see me. Then the masks of who we think we should be fall away. And we greet one another in ways that need no language, that require no masks. We set out on the journey of life, getting to partake in this brief but beautiful adventure together.
Chapter One
“You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.”
—Mary Manin Morrissey
There’s always that moment before the big moment. Those last sixty seconds before an actor steps out on stage when he forgets his lines, sweat breaking through his costume, and he wonders why he ever thought this was a good idea in the first place. But then he steps out, and he knows in the very core of his being: this is what he was meant to do.
The night before I left, I wondered whether leaving LA was such a good idea after all. Work, relationships, routine—they have their trappings as much as they can make one feel trapped.
“So don’t go,” Lina suggested casually, but I could hear the tightness in her voice even as she tried to play it cool. That’s one of the downsides of loving someone: You always know what they’re thinking. Or at least you think you do.
It might have seemed like a nonchalant enough suggestion, but in it, I heard, “Marry me now, or I will leave you forever.”
It’s no wonder I failed as a mind reader. Because though Lina didn’t want me to go, she believed in my dreams. I just couldn’t see that yet. What followed Lina’s suggestion was what most people in relationships call a fight—although I prefer “minor disagreement.” By the time we went to bed, we had attempted to make up, but all I could think was, “Tomorrow, it will just be me and Kindness One.”
The next morning I could hear Lina in the kitchen as I got dressed. My dog, Winston, chased me around the house as I packed the final contents into my small black bag: a computer, a couple of changes of clothes, and some motorbike tools. In the back pocket of my bag, I tucked a postcard I had picked up on my previous journey across America. It read, “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” Other than a bright yellow gas canister, that was all the luggage I would be bringing with me.
I had a globe to cross and a motorbike to ride, which sat outside my house, taunting me with my lack of mechanic skills.
I had bought the bike in Vegas only two weeks earlier. Unfortunately, it hadn’t made it all the way home without incident. In Pasadena, only thirty miles from my house, the bike had revolted, breaking down on one of the busiest freeways in America. That’s right, you heard me. On my first day of riding the damn thing, it couldn’t even make it to LA from Vegas—and this was the bike I was trusting to get me around the world. I had to pay $450 just for it to be towed from Pasadena to Los Angeles. I wouldn’t have $450 out there on the road. I wouldn’t even have one dollar.
But perhaps even more troubling was the knowledge that though Kindness One looked good (and even had a new engine), the rest of it was built in 1978. Probably one of the only guarantees on this trip was that the bike would break down. I had taken a two-hour class on motorcycle maintenance, but failed to get any of the Zen. I bought the book, as the instructor suggested, but never got around to reading it. Sadly, the class didn’t help too much, either.
On top of worrying about the bike malfunctioning, I was still not confirmed on a ship to cross the Atlantic (and I couldn’t even begin to think about the Pacific crossing). Every day I made phone calls to shipping companies across the world. I had been put on hold for hours; I had begged people in foreign languages; I had friends begging people in foreign languages; I had cajoled, and once, just a little bit, for like a second, I had cried.
And then I spoke to Robert, who worked at a shipping company based overseas. He didn’t tell me that I had safe passage, but he told me the next-best word to yes—maybe.
“You mean if I call you in two weeks, I might be able to get on a ship?” I asked.
“Yeah, it would be on a ship going from New York to Tarragona, Spain. . . . Maybe,” Robert repeated the word as though I hadn’t heard him the first time.
Lina opened the door to the bedroom and stood for a moment in the doorway. The sunlight hit her face and bounced off her blonde hair like a halo. I could tell she had been crying.
We both said the words at the same time, “I’m sorry.”
I grabbed her tight, and whispered, “Don’t worry. I’ll be home soon.”
I could feel her as she nodded into my shoulder, and I felt bad for conjuring up yet another adventure right after we had moved in together. I knew Lina had been hoping for one that centered more on wedding bells than yellow motorbikes. Finally, we let go of one another as she looked around the room, and said, “Well, I guess it’s almost time.”
Now, it was my turn to nod. What else could I say? I was leaving for six months, and as she walked out and back downstairs, I could only hope that she would still be there when I returned. Because part of me wanted to say yes to that adventure with her. The only problem was that every time I was home, I couldn’t help but dream of where I might go next.
But before I went anywhere, I needed to find a tank of gas. I knew gas would probably be my greatest challenge. Food and water are actually easier to come by than most people realize, and if worst came to worst, I could always sleep in the sidecar of Kindness One, but the one thing that could definitely stall my journey on any given day, in any given location, was a lack of gas.
Lina might have called it running, but as I stepped outside my house and onto the street, the energy that coursed through me spoke to a far different word: freedom. The freedom of not knowing what lay ahead, whom I might meet, whom I might help, and the shocking realization that this truly outlandish idea was about to become reality.
I headed to Hollywood Boulevard, not far from where I had first seen the homeless man who had inspired the light-bulb moment in the first place, but he was nowhere to be found. Instead, I found far less generous people. Maybe they had just never seen the sign, “Kindness is the best medicine.”
The first people I approached were two young men sporting fedora hats and what looked like their sister’s jeans.
“Dude,” the taller of the two admonished me, “You need to stop dreaming. Go home. You’re wasting my time and your time.”
Really, dude? You’re wearing a fedora hat in the middle of summer. But I moved on, finding a young couple, walking with two Louis Vuitton shopping bags in hand. There you go, I thought, they’ve already opened their wallets today—and it looked like some pretty sizable wallets. Maybe they will open them to me.
“Sorry,” they replied, assuming I was begging for money, which at this point, I kind of was. “We don’t have anything.”
Sadly, I too have made the same reply to a homeless person on the street, refusing to help when I knew that I could.
The next guy I asked appeared to be a tourist, or at least I hoped he was, as he was in the middle of paying Iron Man for a photo. Not the real Iron Man, just one of the many struggling actors who dress up in character and roam Hollywood Boulevard. Once
the photo op was done, I explained my journey.
He just shook his head at me like a disappointed father, “Stop mooching off the land, bro!”
Okay, then. Now I knew why I had been doubting myself the night before. I felt like a fool. I was walking around Hollywood Boulevard with a bright yellow gas canister, telling people about my journey, and they were ridiculing me. This wasn’t in the script. Or at least not in the one I had written.
I left the jungle that is Hollywood Boulevard and decided that I might have better luck at a nearby gas station. I sat down on a bus-stop bench in front of the closest one, and tried to relax. And by relax, I mean I sat down to question how was I ever going to make it across the world when I couldn’t even make it out of Los Angeles. Was Lina right? Was this whole scheme just another means of escape?
Years before I met Lina, I dated a beautiful, smart, sophisticated, and kind woman named Michelle. I was lucky in fact to have found all those same qualities in Lina. But the comparison didn’t end there. Michelle and I were together for five years. We lived together. We made dinner together. We adopted a dog together. But the one thing we didn’t do—or rather, the one thing I couldn’t do—was get married.
After five years, Michelle had had enough. She threatened to leave. I managed to convince her that before we threw it all away, maybe we should see a therapist, someone who, I thought, would naturally see my side, explaining to Michelle why being married is no guarantee of commitment.
By the end of our fourth session, Michelle and I were refusing to speak to one another, and the therapist was tired of talking. She sat back and suggested we do some more work on our own before we came back to her office.
“Are you breaking up with us?” I asked her.
“No,” the therapist nervously laughed, “I just don’t think you’re ready to do the work that this takes. Getting married isn’t just about a wedding. It’s about creating a connection that can withstand whatever life might throw at it. That takes a lot of commitment. It takes a lot of effort. It takes patience.”
As I sat on that bench, I wondered if I was simply being impatient. Something doesn’t work out in my life, so I find something else. I don’t stick around to fix it; I just replace it. I wondered if this trip was quickly going the same way. Would I have the patience to wait for kindness?
I looked up to see a man walking toward me. That man was Dwight. I will say it here, right now, to make it official: Dwight was my first angel. Resembling a young Jamie Foxx, with his cool mirrored sunglasses and a white towel inexplicably thrown over one shoulder like a boxing coach (which in many ways he was for me), Dwight noticed me sitting on the bus-stop bench and nodded in my direction.
That was enough interaction for me. I jumped up and hastily explained my adventure: “I’m driving across the world, on a yellow motorbike, basically, well, on the kindness of strangers. This is my gas can. I need gas. But I won’t even be able to leave my house if I don’t get this first tank of gas.”
I’m sure that elevator speech would have gotten me an “F” in any Marketing 101 class, but it caught Dwight’s attention. “You are traveling around the world on kindness? On a yellow motorbike? Really?” he asked, repeating my story.
“Really,” I confirmed.
“Really, really?”
“Yes, I know it sounds nuts, but I am, and I need help.” And then I waited.
“All right,” he said with a shrug.
I jumped and hugged him, nearly knocking us both off balance.
“I could kiss you,” I cried.
“Please don’t,” Dwight laughed as we walked to the pump with my empty gas canister. The irony was Dwight was not even getting gas. He didn’t even have a car. But what he did have was a dream. I found out that Dwight had once worked as a truck driver, driving all over the country, but never had the chance to stop and get to know the cities and towns that dotted his route.
“Man,” he enthused. “I just wish I was doing something like you. I always wanted to just get out there, you know. Just take off, travel, see the world.”
“Why don’t you?” I asked, although I already knew the answer. For so many, finances trap us in worlds we can’t escape and deny us worlds we might never get the chance to know.
“It’s just hard, you know,” he explained. “You have to work to travel and then you can’t travel because you have to work.”
Dwight shrugged the statement off as though it didn’t mean anything to him, but I could see his mask drop for a moment, just long enough to see the yearning pass quickly across his eyes—a desire for the freedom that I was about to experience, especially now that I had my first tank of gas.
I took down Dwight’s details so I could share with him my trip across the world. It was why I had brought along the computer—to blog for anyone who wanted to listen, and to keep Lina and my friends and family up to date, but also to connect with all the new friends I met along the way.
After Kindness One and I left our street, it took about 45 minutes to work my way through LA traffic before the road opened up and I found my stride. I thought of Dwight as I rode, wishing that one day he would feel this exhilaration, the feeling that every cell in his body was electrified with hope. Sure, I was once again leaving behind my life and taking off into the sunset, and sure this was a totally insane idea with totally crazy possibilities, but as the sun reflected off the desert sands around me and I watched two hawks fly up ahead of me, the world had never looked more perfect.
I pulled over in The Mojave Desert, almost halfway to Vegas, as my gas tank was running low. There, I found another Good Samaritan, who filled me up in the scorching heat. Back on the road we went, and before I knew it, I was standing next to the world-famous Las Vegas sign. Welcome to Vegas, indeed.
I engaged in my first sinful act by parking the bike illegally, praying there were no parking enforcement officers on the prowl. I guess you can’t go to Vegas and be completely sin free. The first person I approached, seeking a place to stay for the night, was Gene Simmons. Okay, maybe not the Gene Simmons but a rather impressive lookalike. I thought for sure such a renowned man of the bedroom might have one to spare. I was wrong. I was also wrong about the three masked Mexican wrestlers. The afternoon was drawing to a close, and I was getting desperate.
I walked down Fremont Street, where Vegas locals were rumored to hang out. I found myself in a large outdoor shopping promenade, looking through the mass of people wandering by me in search of one that stood out. And then I saw him. I wasn’t sure if it was the elaborate moustache or the bright orange vest, but this guy screamed, “Talk to me!”
I took in a deep breath and felt another part of myself emerge—the court jester, the class clown, the boy who discovered that as long as he could make people laugh, he could also make them like him a little. It was a mask, but that’s the thing with masks: They can serve a purpose.
“My friend, that is quite a moustache. Is it real?” I asked, hoping my interest would spark a conversation.
“Of course it’s real,” he smiled.
“Really,” I feigned doubt. “Can I touch it?”
Thankfully, my new friend didn’t get totally unnerved by the request. He laughed, telling me, “Well, normally, only ladies are allowed to do that, but you can, real quick.”
Since this man was open enough to let me touch his face in the first few minutes of our exchange, I thought he might also be the kind of person who would appreciate a good story. After telling him only a bit of mine, he interrupted me with a hearty laugh, “I also believe in the kindness of strangers.” Maurice’s moustache moved in perfect unison with his mouth, like two synchronized swimmers dancing in a pool. “In the end only kindness matters.”
And then to my amazement he offered me a place to stay.
“Are you sure?” I asked him, thrilled and shocked by his proposal.
“Sure, I’m s
ure,” was his hearty reply.
Suddenly, that moment on the bench, that moment with Lina the previous night, that moment in the therapist’s office years ago, all seemed eons away. This was the adventure I was supposed to be on. Just as I had found gas in LA, I had found a place to stay in Las Vegas, kindness reminding me that everything was going according to plan. Maurice suggested I come to his house at 8:30 p.m. He gave me an improvised map before I headed back to Kindness One with a few hours to kill.
I walked around Vegas just as the temperature began to cool, coming down to a gentle 100 degrees. I watched a young skateboarder pull up to a kebab stand. Wait a second, kebab stand? All I had eaten that day was Lina’s breakfast. I walked up to the young chap hoping he would help. Though I had had terrible luck with twenty-something hipsters in Hollywood, I hoped their Vegas counterparts would be kinder. And sure enough, Vegas Hipsters: 1, Hollywood Hipsters: 0.
Richard was impressed with my journey around the world.
“Man,” he grunted, staring off into the approaching sunset of the Vegas sky, “I would love to do something like that.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, I mean, I’m trying to go pro,” he nodded down at the skateboard by his feet, “so I hope, you know, one day I might tour and shit.”
“Where would you like to go?”
“I don’t know,” Richard shrugged. “I never been out of Nevada, so anywhere I guess. Mexico, Jamaica. Where are you going?”
It was a hard question. I knew I was ultimately heading back to Los Angeles, I had secured visas in a number of countries, but I didn’t have much more of a concrete plan than that.
The Kindness Diaries: One Man's Quest to Ignite Goodwill and Transform Lives Around the World Page 2