Resilience

by Jessie Close

  “That don’t work here. You got to have an invitation!” he snarled.

  Just then I spotted Jimmy Messina, of rock group Buffalo Springfield and Loggins and Messina fame.

  “Jimmy,” I screamed. I knew him from our cable radio station days.

  “Let her in!” he hollered.

  The bouncer stepped aside, and within seconds I was smoking a joint. I noticed a correspondent from 60 Minutes smoking, too. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t get on my feet, so I simply groaned and rolled back over.

  Kandy had arranged for me to interview Lillian, Rosalynn, and Amy Carter that morning. We were supposed to ride in a horse-drawn carriage from the convention to Central Park and back, and my job was to ask the three generations of Carter women about their impressions of Manhattan. I was specifically told to not ask anything political or controversial. Pabulum.

  I wouldn’t be able to interview anyone in my condition, I realized, especially a possible future First Lady, her elderly mother-in-law, and her young daughter while riding in a horse-drawn buggy during a muggy summer Manhattan morning. The very thought made me vomit, literally; I just made it to the bathroom. I fell back in bed and went to sleep.

  Kandy fired me that same day. I caught a train back to our nation’s capital. My journalism career hadn’t lasted long.

  Anyone else would have been thrilled to interview the Carters and been excited about covering a convention. What was wrong with me? Glenn had called me completely irresponsible.

  Back in my dank apartment, I tried to focus on classwork but found myself easily distracted. One night, I felt someone staring at me. I was sitting at my desk, reading in my apartment, when I felt a pair of eyes boring into my skin. I needed to turn my head to see who was there. But I was afraid to look, afraid of what I might see, so I stared harder at the textbook in front of me and tried to ignore that intense feeling of being watched.

  It didn’t work. I had to look. Mustering my courage, I turned my head, and my heart began beating faster. There was a young woman sitting on my bed, and she was looking directly at me.

  I forced myself to look at her face.

  It was me.

  I was watching myself.

  I closed my eyes and reopened them. I was still there.

  I’d done so much acid in Los Angeles, snorted so much coke and smoked so much pot, that my first thought was that I was having a drug-induced hallucination. There was only one problem. I hadn’t dropped acid, snorted coke, or even smoked weed that day, and this was different from any acid trip I’d ever taken.

  Maybe I was sitting on my bed, I thought. Maybe I was—I am—watching myself at my desk. Looking down, I checked my hands and feet to make certain I was still sitting at my desk. I was. When I looked back at the bed, I was gone.

  I tried to convince myself that I was exhausted. Once I got a good night’s sleep, everything would be fine. I went to bed hopeful.

  The next day wasn’t better. Something was wrong. I began feeling as if someone or something was waiting outside my apartment door. I wasn’t certain what or who was outside, but whatever was there, it wasn’t good, and I couldn’t risk opening the door and facing it. The only safe thing to do was to stay hidden in my apartment.

  I soon ran out of food except for a single head of lettuce. I took my time eating it raw, as I would an apple, because once it was gone, I knew I would have to get groceries. I wasn’t sure I would be able to unlock the door and leave. Late that night, I took the final bite.

  The next morning, I got dressed and began telling myself, over and over, that I had nothing to fear. I told myself there was no bogeyman waiting outside my door, poised to attack. I walked to the door but hesitated before touching the knob. When I reached for it, I suddenly jerked back my hand. I couldn’t do it. I had to do it. I couldn’t do it. I had to do it. It was as if my mind were having its own argument. My rational and irrational selves were wrestling for control. I forced myself to reach down and grasp the knob. With every bit of strength that I could conjure, I turned it and opened the door.

  As I forced myself out onto the street, I kept reminding myself that everything was fine, but inside, each step filled me with more and more dread. I didn’t relax until I had made it to the store, bought groceries, and returned to the safety of my apartment.

  That day, I decided it wasn’t good for me to live alone. I needed to be around other people.

  I contacted my relatives in Washington, DC, and asked if I could move in with them. They agreed, and at first I felt better. But the change in scene didn’t change the problem, which was me. I soon was engaging in more promiscuous behavior, which alarmed my relatives. It was time for me to move on. I had worn out my welcome.

  More bad behavior.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Washington Post classified ad caught my eye: ROOM FOR LEASE AT POTOMAC LODGE. The vacancy was inside a six-bedroom, million-dollar-plus house within a stone’s throw of the Potomac River in Glen Echo, a picturesque hamlet across the DC border in Maryland.

  Potomac Lodge? Million-dollar house? It sounded too good to be true.

  I drove there and rang the doorbell.

  “C’mon in,” a husky voice hollered from inside.

  I pushed the door, which was lighter than I imagined, and it flew open, striking against an interior wall with a loud bang. The sun shining behind me caused the man standing inside to squint.

  “You make quite a dramatic entrance,” he declared.

  “Sorry,” I said in apology. “I’m Jessie.”

  “I’m James Thompson. Welcome to Potomac Lodge.”

  He had a firm, confident handshake and was handsome in his tight denim jeans and a polo shirt that accentuated his muscular build.

  “Was this really a lodge?” I asked.

  “No,” he said with a chuckle. “My cousin Roger and I gave it that name. We like to think of it as a retreat from the world.”

  I liked that.

  Cousin Roger was Roger Glen Brown, and he was at work. “He’s an analyst for the CIA,” James volunteered. Nodding to the east, he said, “The agency is located directly across the river from us.”

  So much for CIA secrecy, I thought. “What do you do for a living?” I asked.

  “I’m a healer,” James replied.

  “What?”

  “I help heal people.”

  James sized me up as a possible tenant as he showed me through Potomac Lodge, and I sized him up as a landlord. James and Roger were from Texas. Their mothers were sisters, and each of the boys had been an only child. They considered themselves to be more like brothers than cousins. James had gone into the army directly out of high school and fought in Vietnam, returning home in 1967. He’d worked with Xerox Corporation long enough to build up a nest egg and then quit.

  “Why’d you quit a good job?” I asked.

  “It was interfering with my reading,” he said.

  “Your reading?”

  “Yes.”

  James was thirty-two years old—nine years older than I was. Roger was about the same age. Roger had earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and had gone to work as a China expert “across the river.”

  James and I were both Washington newcomers. “I was on my way to India,” James confided, “when I stopped a few months ago to visit Roger, and he asked me to stay.” Roger was in the midst of a messy divorce, James explained.

  “Aren’t they all messy?” I asked, making conversation.

  It turned out that James and I both were divorced.

  James said he and Roger were leasing Potomac Lodge from one of Roger’s CIA colleagues, who’d been sent to some exotic capital to be a station chief. They’d rented all the bedrooms except for one.

  “We’re pretty picky,” James warned. He and Roger each had a room; a third was rented to a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, and another was rented to a Securities and Exchange Commission employee. The fifth bedroom, off the kitchen, wa
s going to be used by a housekeeper, whom they hadn’t hired yet.

  “We’ve gotten a lot of responses from the ad,” he added. Potomac Lodge was built on a hill, with the front facing east and lower level, or basement, dropping down an embankment that led to the Potomac. The downstairs featured a spacious living area, two bedrooms, and a bath. A large window had been installed in one of the walls to show the soil and rocks behind it. Someone had placed little plastic men in space suits on the dirt behind the glass so it looked as if they were walking on the moon. I loved it.

  “Who lives downstairs?” I asked.

  “Me,” James replied. “And whoever we choose as our final tenant.”

  I liked James and really liked the house, so I was happy when Roger called me later that night for a telephone interview.

  “James already told me that he wants to rent our empty downstairs bedroom to you,” Roger announced. “But I feel obligated to ask a few questions.”

  A few days later, I moved in, and from that moment on James, Roger, and I became best friends. The other two tenants kept to themselves, but we ate dinner together, smoked pot together, and spent hours philosophizing about our future and our lives. Sometimes our discussions turned into loud but good-natured arguments. At that point I would stand on a chair to be taller, explaining that my point of view was coming from a higher perspective. James thought that was hilarious. We would laugh and laugh, and I felt so free, so safe being myself with these two wonderful friends.

  The house was much too expensive for them, but James had convinced Roger they could afford it if they rented out the other rooms and got the tenants to pay the lion’s share of the rent.

  “I call it coasting uphill,” James said proudly. “If you use your wits, think outside the box, aren’t bound by convention, and are willing to take risks,” he explained, “you can live in a million-dollar house without paying much money.”

  James was smart, unique, and seemed to have life figured out. I admired that, because I was feeling adrift, especially after the Kandy Stroud fiasco and my out-of-body experience. I still felt very much like the lost problem child. Before moving into Potomac Lodge I had sought answers by trying est, an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training that its founder claimed was also the Latin word for “it is.”

  It was the brainchild of Werner Hans Erhard, who’d held his first seminar five years earlier in San Francisco, and the program was sweeping across the nation. Scores of Hollywood celebrities, eager to learn the secret of a happy life, had signed up, including Cher, Cloris Leachman, Joe Namath, Yoko Ono, John Denver, Jeff Bridges, and Peter Gabriel. During Erhard’s standard sixty-hour, two-week seminars, attendees were harangued about their empty and unfulfilled lives. Rather than chasing after happiness and success, est taught its followers how to live in the moment—or, as Erhard told one of his biographers, “The est training offers people the opportunity to free themselves from the past, rather than living a life enmeshed by their past.”

  Not being enmeshed in my past was one reason I had been drawn to est, and when Erhard came to DC to give a lecture, I got James and Roger tickets. They found Erhard interesting but not convincing.

  Besides, James had developed his own “coasting uphill” philosophy, which the three of us often discussed late at night while drinking wine and smoking weed.

  “A life should be lived in segments,” James explained one night.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Decide what you want to do—say, during your thirties. Maybe it’s travel or living abroad or some other adventure. Then go do it, and when you have done it, move to the next segment—the next thing that you want to experience.”

  Life wasn’t about work or even families. It was about experiences. James had no interest in having children, because they were a complication and an attachment. The same could be said about owning a house and establishing roots in a particular location. They could become encumbrances and could hinder the full enjoyment of life. The only reason to work was to earn enough money so you could afford to do whatever you wanted to do next. Moving up in a career didn’t matter. Having a career didn’t matter. All that mattered were worthwhile experiences that brought color, enjoyment, and knowledge into your life.

  I was enthralled with James’s “coasting uphill” philosophy except for one of its core tenets. He argued that an individual should choose when he would die, and he should then end his life on that day. James claimed that if a person chose a specific date, then that individual could optimize his life because he would know exactly how long he had to live. James had chosen his “exit” date. It would be on his fiftieth birthday. He didn’t have any interest in growing old or suffering from the various ailments that can inflict the aged.

  James asked me why I was searching for answers through est. When I told him about my deeply held feelings of rejection and abandonment by my father, he suggested that I free myself from my past in a symbolic way. One of the only belongings that I had brought with me to Potomac Lodge was an old wooden bedroom dresser that seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

  “You should bust it up and burn it,” James suggested.

  “Are you telling me that as a friend or as a healer?”

  “Both.”

  James helped me carry the dresser up from my bedroom into the foyer. Armed with a hammer, I began busting it into pieces, which James then carried into the living room fireplace to burn.

  Roger came home about midway through my healing ritual.

  “What the hell are you doing, Jessie?” he asked.

  “Getting rid of my past.”

  He walked into the living room, and seconds later I heard him and James talking rapidly. Putting down my hammer, I hurried to see what was happening.

  Huge flames were shooting from our fireplace into the living room, threatening to ignite the furniture and carpet. The dresser had been painted so many times that it had become highly flammable. The flames were so hot that we couldn’t get close to them. We threw pots of water into the fireplace, then we simply had to wait for the fire to cool. Later that night, we all laughed because James’s healing advice had nearly set Potomac Lodge on fire.

  I was falling in love with both Roger and James. But with Roger it was the love of a best friend. With James it was deeper. I was in love with a man for the first time in my life. It was a new feeling for me. Even though I had been married to Brad, I’d never loved him in the way that I loved James. This felt genuine. It felt good.

  I knew from our conversations that Roger and James had an ironclad agreement that neither of them would become romantically involved with a tenant, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. After dinner one night, I excused myself to get ready for bed. I took a bath and shaved my legs. I knew James would want to use the bathroom that we shared. When I was finished getting ready, I stepped out into the small hall outside the bathroom just as James emerged from his bedroom. Our eyes locked. Spontaneously I lifted my leg and placed it along a wooden banister that was close by.

  “I just shaved,” I said innocently. “Feel how smooth this is.”

  He touched my calf, then ran his warm, dry palm up my thigh. He moved in and kissed me with the softest lips I’d ever kissed. I melted. That night, we became lovers.

  During the coming weeks, I fell deeper and deeper in love. James owned my heart. Every sense seemed brighter. One night we walked down to the Potomac River and were mesmerized by the fireflies in the trees. It was as if magic surrounded us.

  The yearlong lease on Potomac Lodge was coming to an end as New Year’s Day approached in 1977. James and I discussed what we wanted to do in the “next segment” of our lives—a segment that we wanted to spend together. We decided that his savings and my monthly trust-fund stipend would give us enough to embark on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

  James had been on his way to India when he’d stopped to visit Roger. We decided to go there. I no longer cared about finishing college. When we said good-bye to Roger, I
told myself that moving into Potomac Lodge had been one of the best decisions that I’d ever made. As long as I was around other people—people who cared about me and who loved me—I was not afraid to leave my room, nor was I having any out-of-body experiences.

  Just as James had said, he was a healer, and he had helped me heal.

  As we boarded our flight to India, I was sure of it. Good days lay ahead.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  If you travel about 180 miles east of Delhi, you’ll arrive at the banks of an eye-shaped lake tucked between seven hills in the Uttarakhand state of northern India. The lake is thought to be the home of lake gods and a holy place. In January of 1977, James and I couldn’t have found a more romantic locale than Naini Tal, the city of about forty thousand people that formed around the lake’s edges. We checked into a hotel and began searching for a house to rent. The hills of Naini Tal are steep. The climb to our hotel was at such a pitched angle that the tops of my feet threatened to touch my shinbones. I wasn’t sure I could live there, but that was in the beginning. I soon developed strong legs, but not as strong as the Nepalese men we saw carrying enormous logs up the mountain for fires and construction. I noted how they leaned into the hill, allowing gravity to assist them, and when I tried walking that way it helped.

  We found a large house named Pili Khoti, overlooking the city and the lake, and just as James had predicted, we were able to live free of financial burdens on his savings and my trust fund. We were like honeymooners, and our new exotic surroundings enhanced our feelings of romance and magic. I loved the wonderful sense of chaos that was Naini Tal, where simply buying a sari in the market was an adventure. When storms gathered we’d watch the small boats, called pirogues, all swept together in one place to ride out the rain, like leaves on the lake. On beautiful sunny days the sparkles on the water seemed loud. Crows were everywhere. They were huge and made a noise I’d never heard before—deafening, raucous, wonderful.

  James and I noticed that each night other strange-sounding birds would begin squawking and continue until dawn, when their incessant sounds would stop. I decided to ask Mukundi Lal, a wiry man of indeterminate age whom we’d hired as our houseman, about the racket.