by Kris Bertin
We were close.
That year, 2011, was the year we were among the top five self-help organizations in Canada, and cracking the top twenty in the states, though there are no hard and fast numbers on this stuff. It’s all about buzz and feeling. Grant’s pseudoscientific jargon about the planet’s evolution and everyone’s interconnectivity with one another and the stars was a big part of it. While I had done what I did, Grant had finally found the right language to make everyone understand. He talked about common ancestors, about family trees, and about the cosmos. A glossary of inspiring words that were achieving potentency in the zeitgeist. He made claims that were difficult to disagree with, because they were so simple. He’d ask:
“Weren’t you delivered here by everything that happened before this very moment?”
And the people at the Marriott Conference Centres or convention floors or theatre auditoriums, they would agree. They had driven or taken taxis and buses to that very place, at that very moment. How can you disagree with that?
Every now and then, when we were in the right city, or when the conditions were just perfect, we’d be huge. We would sometimes get the turnout of an Eckhart Tolle or a Tony Robbins, sell out all our shows and have to book more the very next day. We were like an understaffed restaurant, unprepared for a massive influx of customers we didn’t know we had. But these were the events that made us, that blew us up, and helped us cross some weird word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer threshold we didn’t know existed. Soon we had a west coast, east coast, and burgeoning US office in Philadelphia, nearly three hundred employees across seven North American cities—from program directors to event leaders, all the way down to pamphleteers with rolling racks of literature—and three times as many volunteers. A special kind, too. Volunteers who would toil endlessly on anything from charity events to membership drives to scrubbing a location before and picking it clean after an appearance, with nothing more than a vegetable tray and a bucket of ice stuffed with bottled water as payment.
And, of course, a chance to see Grant Basso, founder of Brand New Day, to shake his hand, look at his straight, white teeth, and feel the various energies emanating from him. Maybe his warm hand on the small of your back. Maybe a glimpse of his hotel keycard, his fingers careful not to obscure the room number. That happened sometimes.
It’s all gone now. We’re down to zero paying members. All programs, speaking engagements, and forthcoming publications have been cancelled. No mail goes out. No one hands anyone any literature. No one talks to people about how their soul came from the sun, or how the sun might now offer them guidance. The company is still a registered corporation, but there’s nothing for us to do anymore without Grant.
Instead of managing a business, I take care of our single remaining property. Our headquarters—an enormous red-brick building with spires and stained glass, which was an Anglican church before we bought it—is now rented to people by the hour, week, and month.
Instead of living in a downtown open-concept loft, I’m living with Grant’s six hairless cats in his little custom-made futuristic dome house to ensure it isn’t foreclosed on while he’s in prison. Instead of managing people, I manage ad space and write copy for a chemical-manufacturing company. A great deal of the money I make goes towards the twelve storage units containing the disembodied organs that used to make Brand New Day work.
Instead of managing an entire organization and overseeing operations across the continent, I am a woman with keys who shows up to let you in to teach your own tai chi program. I spend my time explaining that I own the building and that, no, I don’t work for the church. People always like to think I’m some kind of modern Anglican with short hair and tattoos and cleavage, that I’m evidence of spiritual progress. They’re always so disappointed to hear the truth. They react like I’ve farted when I say:
This used to belong to my self-help company.
This is because some of them don’t understand, and also because some of them do. Some of them suddenly realize exactly who I am.
Instead of living in the present, I live far, far in the past.
Instead of being on Oprah, we were on Dateline NBC.
***
The day it happened, I had been focusing on the wrong people.
At this point in my life, I have spent years thinking about that day—September 23, the day in question, as everyone in the courtroom kept referring to it—and I have concluded that this was my biggest failure. We were in a provincial park. Grant, me, an assistant, and six of our most valuable members who had flown from Toronto, New York, Houston, Victoria, Fredericton, and Los Angeles to be with us. The hike—what we advertised as The Brand New Day Sojourn—cost $100,000 a pop, and was only for the big-time spenders. The multi-millionaires. Star Partners, a designation which really only meant they paid a lot of extra money to get a lot of extra time with Grant, something we created to keep regular people out. If it were open to everyone, there might be some who scrimped and saved and mortgaged their houses to be here, but that’s not what we were after. We were after the friends of Star Partners, the other magnates and oligarchs who might ask how they’d lost so much weight, or became so happy all of a sudden.
Grant called this kind of thing a fishing trip.
The reason things went wrong was because I was focused primarily on our one, for real, capital-B Billionaire, a woman named Rita who owned dozens of factories that produced high-grade chocolate. She had grown her business from a little sweet shop to a string of chocolate stores to overseas chocolate cultivation and manufacturing, but had built something so big and powerful she barely had anything to do with it anymore. She spent her time walking her Pomeranians around the city, looking up at buildings, wondering if there was more she could do with her life. The first time I saw her round little body and bad perm at one of Grant’s Las Vegas lectures and made a guess as to who she was, I settled on a three-way tie between nurse, church organist, and cafeteria worker. I assumed she was on holiday, giving all of her money to a casino. But later, when she signed up and my staff looked into her background, I was called immediately and told to Google her. I found her name and picture in Home and Garden and The Economist and Forbes Magazine.
I dropped a big sip of hot coffee onto my pants when I saw her little hamster face in an online magazine outlining female billionaires numbers 79–86. She was number 83. In the world.
There were five other members on the hike. Two young people: Roy, the son of a recently deceased film producer, and Lucy, who was some kind of high-born socialite who had plenty of her parents’ money and used it to run avant-garde art galleries which sold virtually nothing. Then there was the other old lady—Rita’s friend Marguerite, whose husband ran a coast-to-coast dental walk-in business—and the old men, JR and Turbo. JR owned restaurants, time-shares, and all kinds of rental and real-estate properties. Turbo owned a single Harley-Davidson store, but never had any problem paying us. Wherever else his money came from, it wasn’t discussed.
After Rita, Turbo was my secondary concern. The Brand New Day Sojourn was going to take us on an all-day hike through forest, down a series of cliffs towards one of those natural attractions—a balancing rock. It wasn’t a terribly trying journey, but before we got started, in the parking lot, when I collected everyone’s keys and purses and cellphones in a Tupperware and was about to lock them in the company van, Grant tapped a Brand New Day pen on Turbo’s prosthetic hands and said:
“You won’t be needing those.”
And then, instead of acknowledging the troubled look on Turbo’s face, Grant turned to the crowd and elaborated:
“You guys want to see real strength today? Keep your eyes on Turbo, folks.”
Turbo—whose real name was Barry—had lost his hands in a motorcycle accident. He had been hit head-on by a truck, which launched his broken body into a ravine, where he stayed for forty-eight hours until he was rescued. At that point it was too late for
his hands, which had been shattered and were already purple and dead from a lack of circulation. He told the story often, adding detail or leaving it out, depending if it was time for the long version or the short one. I think it was a true story. He said that the injury wasn’t uncommon for motorcyclists.
When my assistant—a six-one butch amazon named Mary Alpoort—took the prosthetics from him and they came my way, I could see the concern on Turbo’s face hadn’t waned. The hands seemed almost real, with simulated cuticles and fingernails and even veins on the back. I immediately saw how precious they were to him. They weren’t just a pair of forceps or those Band-Aid-coloured mannequin-looking ones like I saw when I was a little girl at the Legion with my father. You put these on, and maybe you can almost forget everything that’s happened to you. They even had fake tattoos that connected with the real ones on his forearms. Without them, his stumps were uneven, purple-grey knobs, and when everyone took turns staring at them, I remember looking at Grant instead. Trying to convey to him that this was a mistake.
But Grant smiled at me.
I didn’t know if it was something he’d planned in advance or if it was a spur-of-the-moment decision—what he called a Sunrise Moment—to take Turbo’s hands away, but it bothered me. Bothered me that I hadn’t been consulted, and bothered me at a human level, too. It seemed too invasive, too cruel.
I should say, too, that Grant and I were fighting. Actually, we’d just stopped fighting, which was worse. Both of us didn’t want to upset the other, so instead we weren’t saying much at all. I had gradually been phasing myself out of these kinds of events, but this one was so important that I felt I had to be there. But because of how I had been feeling, and because of what had gone on between Grant and me, I didn’t do very much of anything.
Even when written affidavits were produced in the lead-up to the trial, descriptions of what I was doing at the time of the accident were inconsistent. The Star Partners knew I took some pictures, that I spoke to Grant every now and then, but that was it. No one had been paying attention to me, and when the prosecution tried to ascertain what it was that I did do at events like this, the members interviewed had no answers. My job was to remind Grant of small things, to keep track of lunches and the clock and all the other parts, while remaining unobtrusive.
But that day I was so inconspicuous I was barely even there. I was an observer, immaterial. A ghost. For a while I thought about what would have happened if I wasn’t there, and later, I concluded it would have been the same.
Every warning sign passed by and through me, and I did nothing about it.
***
Our callousness was something the prosecution pointed to from the start, that we were indifferent to the larger, emotional suffering of our clientele. An indifference that I, in my cold and cynical execution of programming, was a representative of. They said our lack of regard for the emotional state of our customers was evidence of negligence, in and of itself.
Which wasn’t true. The truth was worse: the inner turmoil of the customer wasn’t something we were indifferent to—it was what our work hinged on. The kinds of people who attended these things were always in need of so much from us. For the first few years I couldn’t even stomach it, and was glad I wasn’t the one who had to deal them directly, the one who had to try and guide them away from their own delusions and hang-ups (and toward Grant). But even after I had been at it for a decade, even after I was used to it, I was still capable of seeing some emotional display and being chilled by it. These weren’t normal people. There were consequences to dealing with them, to interfering with them, and to being around them. It took a toll. I knew it had affected me, that it had inspired in me a coarsening towards others.
Even before the hike, in the parking lot, I watched Lucy crouch down and pretend to look for something and instead start to cry into her Gucci handbag. She and I watched her five single tears get absorbed and disappear into an expensive pashmina scarf that she petted like a dog when she was finished, and I had the same pang I’d had for years, watching people like this. I remembered that I thought about what I might’ve said to her if I had gone over—if I were the kind of person who would go over to her—but I didn’t have any answers to offer. All I had were questions. About what she even had to cry about. About why she couldn’t hide it better, and what she thought Grant could possibly do for her.
That I had these thoughts didn’t mean much. I had them all the time; they were the natural result of being in my position. But these weren’t the kind of things that would impress the courtroom or prove the prosecution wrong if I even bothered to mention them. So much of what they said was so hurtful, difficult, or impossible to deny, and even when it was incorrect, it still felt true. Our position was untenable, and it felt like whatever we did was wrong. The sterner we were, the more we proved we were heartless. The more down to earth, the more we seemed unprofessional. They were killing us.
We were only on trial for three days before Grant met with the other side and agreed to plead guilty of all counts of wrongdoing. His only request was that all charges against me be dropped. They were.
I can’t really explain the enormity of the pain that a wrongful death produces.
It’s sort of like being suffocated from the inside, like your lungs and throat are all at once filling up with some fast-growing spongy tissue. A panic mixed with dread that will come out of nowhere when you’re having a normal day. A voice that will say:
You killed someone.
An echo that can come to you when you’re outside, when you’re at the bank, or when you’re eating homemade popcorn and watching Netflix. What’s been happening lately, for the last two years or so, is that I can feel myself downgrading it. Diminishing my guilt—my role in the accident—little by little. By shifting the story around. By thinking of it as an accident to begin with. Other times I catch myself thinking about it as Grant’s failure—Grant’s accident—as if I had nothing to do with it. One time, early on in the first six months following the day in question, when I was just waking up I heard a little voice in my own head say:
It’s nobody’s fault.
Which felt like a lie my body had produced for me to believe—a kind of self-forgiveness it had dreamed up to make myself feel better. A phrase to help reduce my cortisol levels. But I knew it wasn’t true. I knew what the truth was, which was that I was the negligent one; I was the only responsible, sane party there, and I was the one who had caused JR’s death.
And all of that hurts, of course.
But what hurts more is something more personal. How it feels when I think back and catch a glimpse of myself then, to think about the kind of person I was. It’s not merely that I’m different—that I dressed in pantsuits and was in and out of meetings all day and now I wear discount-bin tops and jeans—or that my day is different. It’s not that I’m no longer obsessed with my weight and nails and hair and clothing. It’s not merely that sales and members were 80 percent of the things I spoke about back then. It’s not even that I was indifferent to the suffering of the people we worked with, or that I was deeply cynical and had built little mental compartments to justify my taking their money. It’s not even that I had let someone die.
What really hurts is that I’m only different because it’s all gone.
I’m not different because I made a change. I’m not different because I looked at myself and decided I didn’t like what I saw. I’m not different because I came to some big, important realization after an arduous journey. I’m different for the worst reason. Different simply because my old lifestyle is no longer available to me.
It hurts to think about 2011 because I know I miss being that person, and that if I could have it all back, I would. Not so I could do things differently, not so I could get Grant out of prison, not even so I could wield the power I used to. I only want it back because I was so comfortable being that person, and now my comfort is gone. It’s as s
imple, and disappointing, as that.
***
About an hour into the journey, when Grant finally saw that Turbo was upset, he stopped everyone mid-hike to go to him.
Normally, when Grant would kneel and help to focus their meditative journey, he’d take their hands. But instead of touching Turbo’s stumps, Grant held the space where his hands used to be—as if they were still there, as if he were holding onto something instead of nothing whatsoever. Grant stared into him, his eyes flashing with that special kind of intensity he has, the kind he can use to dial the energy up or down in any room he enters, and he used it to make Turbo burst into tears.
I think about this part often. The entire day has taken on multiple significances over time, growing into symbols and metaphors to hurt myself with, but I come to this moment almost without thinking, as a placeholder:
Grant, Turbo, all of us watching. Other than the sound of Turbo’s sobbing, other than the birds singing in the trees, the trees moving in the wind—silence.
I remember thinking that everyone knew not to speak, not to do anything except take it in, because this was what they were here for. What they had shelled out money for, filled out six pages of forms to come and see. What they wanted to see, what they would recall and treasure and use to give shape to their own lives. Pain. Struggle. Some gentle redemption.
But I was worried. Worried and wanted to stop it.
I remember the exact string of thoughts I had as I looked at my wet sneakers and talked myself out of doing something. It was that these people loved to cry, that crying was normal for them, and that the only reason Turbo’s tears mattered to me was because he wasn’t like the rest of them. Crying went against everything he believed about himself, about how he should act and what kind of man you were if you didn’t act that way. I told myself he reminded me of my father, and that this was a big part of why I cared. Sometimes, when I dreamed about the day in question—because I do dream about it, of course—Turbo was played by my father.