It turns out, he really did see me.
He saw that I was special and that my own family and friends did not recognize who I really was (a fact I had suspected for as long as I could remember). I was not only smart, but also probably a genius. I was almost unbearably beautiful. And, most relevant of all, I was a very high being on the brink of enlightenment. Randy Sanders offered to take me over the edge and then personally shepherd me through my full ripening into an incarnation of the Divine Mother. In fact, this was most likely the reason he was born.
All I had to do was put my trust in him a hundred percent—nothing held back—and do exactly as he told me. Only my unconditional assent would open the gate to what was meant to be. What had to be. For the sake of all beings.
I took a deep breath and made the cosmic agreement.
The new school year began, and I took my place among a circle of eleven other ragamuffins at the feet of Randy Sanders. I tried to be the perfect student to my new spiritual teacher disguised as my high school teacher. After all, the well-being of the whole world was balanced on my unquestioning surrender to his teachings. Randy Sanders described our connection as a vital energetic pole that maintained the balance of the universe. I was not about to mess with such a delicate and crucial mechanism. If he directed me to stay up all night chanting Hare Krishna and visualizing Randy Sanders, it was the least I could do.
But it wasn’t easy. (“The way to God is not for the faint of heart,” Randy Sanders would say.) Fasting was torture. By day two of ten I felt like I was going to throw up and pass out, and I wanted to kill someone. I would sneak sips of apple cider and handfuls of raisins and then beg for forgiveness. He assigned me “holy silence” exactly when my beloved grandmother was visiting from Miami, and she was not pleased when I pulled a little notebook out of my pouch and scribbled on it, “On silence. Please ask yes or no questions only.”
Academically, it was not such a good fit. Randy Sanders was into math and science. I was a poet and an artist. Randy Sanders assigned us a weekly journal, in which he encouraged us to unburden our hearts and tell him everything. It would just be between Randy Sanders and each of us. Also, we should ask any questions we might have—from quantum physics to masturbation—and he would answer them all.
Not only did Randy Sanders address my most esoteric spiritual queries and write comments about how unconscious my various parents were, but he also got me to punctuate my poetry and hone my discursive language skills, which all my other Da Nahazli teachers had intentionally minimized in favor of unfettered creativity. On principle, for instance, I never capitalized my personal pronouns. Randy Sanders would patiently change all my lowercase Is to upper. I could understand making corrections like this on a punctuation exam, but in my journal? Randy Sanders explained that he was doing me a favor.
Another clash, one that unfolded on the secret battlefield of my own heart, was between Randy Sanders, our homeroom teacher, and Natalie Goldberg, our English teacher. This was connected to the math and science versus art and poetry issue. I don’t think the two of them had any particular animosity toward each other—in fact, except as colleagues, they had pretty much a non-relationship—but I was torn between them at a very deep level. Natalie drew out my edge, my original and unconventional thoughts. Randy Sanders demanded purity and devotion. Where Natalie fed me a feast of twentieth-century women’s literature (Ballad of the Sad Café, The Bell Jar, The Journals of Anaïs Nin), Randy Sanders insisted I read only “spiritual books” (Gesture of Balance, Autobiography of a Yogi, Mount Analogue). I found most of these to be dry and tedious, but, like sipping a bitter herbal tincture brewed to heal, I read every word, and my consciousness did begin to stir and stretch.
Tot and I used to buy half-sized spiral notebooks at El Mercado, the hardware store on Taos Plaza, and we would write together on the weekends and then read to each other—poems, short stories, song lyrics. By the time Randy Sanders came along, we had been keeping these “notebooks” for two years. Under the heat of Randy Sanders’s disapproval, I stopped writing with Tot, confining all self-expression to my journal for Randy Sanders, which had shifted from a stream-of-consciousness flow to a serious exploration of the path of awakening. This writing was more of a dialogue between Randy Sanders and me than a forum for my literary aspirations. Pretentions, Randy Sanders would call my dreams of becoming a writer.
Natalie did not seem to notice that her most dedicated disciple was drifting away. She had matters of her own to grapple with: falling in love with a musician while simultaneously falling in love with Zen, making the Taos shift from earnest graduate student in English lit to hippie chick living in a house made from recycled beer cans on the mesa. Besides, we still met as a class twice a week beside the woodstove in the Da Nahazli hogan, where Natalie gave us wrinkled apples to eat from an orchard in Talpa and directed us to describe the images the experience evoked. She called these sessions “writing practice,” which rendered it kosher for me. Writing practice as a spiritual exercise was preferable to writing as a worldly indulgence, which was the way Randy Sanders saw what it was I used to do.
Tot, on the other hand, was bewildered and heartsick. Her best friend was slipping away without a word of explanation.
“He has that girl in his clutches,” Tot’s mother, Naomi, told Tot, who told me.
I was furious. I stopped talking to Tot, my childhood soul mate. Randy Sanders approved.
After Christmas, Tot transferred to Taos Junior High, and I moved up to Lama full time.
Early that spring, Randy Sanders took our little group of twelve on a camping trip through the Southwest. We would be studying desert flora and fauna, geology and astronomy, Anasazi archaeology, and Ice Age paleontology. We would also be exploring the shamanic path of the native peoples, and must therefore (according to Randy Sanders), “be willing to leave behind everything we thought we knew.”
To prepare me for the “inner plane” aspect of our expedition, Randy Sanders had assigned me to read A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda, which described the author’s spiritual adventures with Don Juan, a Yaqui medicine man and enlightened trickster from the Sonoran Desert. The first night on the road, after a meal of hot dogs, Randy Sanders offered to walk me to my campsite. I ate carrots and potato chips for dinner. Randy Sanders had me on a vegetarian diet, so that my energy would be more “satvic,” though he continued to eat meat himself, because it “grounded” him. (Otherwise, presumably, Randy Sanders would not be able to stay tethered to this material world. His soul was that elevated.) Earlier that day, soon after we pulled into the campground at Cochise Stronghold in Southern Arizona and Randy Sanders had paid the ranger, he had guided me in selecting the place where I would sleep. He said that I was to walk around and find my “power spot” and that I would know it when I encountered it.
But I didn’t. Each time I found a place that looked right, he would cross his arms and shake his head. I walked farther and farther from the center of camp, and Randy Sanders followed silently. Finally, I pointed to a secluded site between two granite boulders. Randy Sanders nodded and smiled. I felt a rush of pride, followed by dread. I did not want to be so far away from everyone else. I would be scared and lonely. A mountain lion might attack me. Or a wolf. But I could not admit this to Randy Sanders. I was in training as a “spiritual warrior,” and this was my first real test.
After we had cleaned up from dinner, Randy Sanders handed me the flashlight and followed me as I endeavored to find the power spot I had located in the light of day. I crashed around amid the mesquite and ephedra, turning myself in helpless circles. I had no idea where my camping spot was.
“Feel it,” Randy Sanders coaxed. But I could not feel a thing except a rising tide of panic. Finally I began to cry. Randy Sanders chuckled and took the flashlight from my hand. He led me right to the place where I had laid out my bedding. He patted my head, and feeling more like a puppy who had accidentally peed on the carpet than a shamanic apprentice
, I untied my tennis shoes and climbed into my sleeping bag.
“Good night,” Randy Sanders said.
“Good night.”
It took me forever to fall asleep. I could not get warm. My down bag was thin and old. I’d found it in the Gypsy Wagon—Lama’s free box—and my only jacket was an oversized fisherman’s knit sweater I had inherited from one of my father’s drinking buddies, which I wore to bed. The sweater was part of my image: it went down to my knees, and I had to roll up the sleeves a half a dozen times and still they reached my knuckles. The rest of my costume consisted of a floppy felt hat, moccasins from Taos Pueblo, strings of puka shells and tiny brass bells, and a moon and star I drew with ballpoint pen on my forehead and also on the place where my thumb met the rest of my hand.
I tried to relax, but my mind had a mind of its own. I was sure I heard a bear snuffling in the bushes a few feet away. I had forgotten to stash my bag of dried apricots in the van with everyone else’s snacks, as Randy Sanders had instructed. I was doomed. Finally, I must have drifted off, because I woke with a start. There was a creature crouched beside me, eyes glittering in the starlight. I leapt from my bed.
It was Randy Sanders.
“This is the hour of the saints and masters,” he said. “Three a.m. The most potent time of day—a portal into other planes of existence—only most people are too lazy to stay awake, and so they forgo the opportunity.”
“The opportunity for what?”
“You’ll see. Sit down.”
I obeyed. I grabbed my bag and wrapped it around my shoulders, then settled onto my threadbare InsuLite pad.
Randy Sanders guided me in a kundalini breathing practice. We started with slow, mindful breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Then he directed me to close my mouth and just breathe through my nose in strong, sharp snorts.
“Faster! Faster!” Randy Sanders commanded. “Harder! Harder!”
I was breathing with all my might. I never knew such a natural function could be so difficult. Sparks began to shoot from the crown of my head. The ground was spinning in rhythm with my breath. I felt my body twisting on its axis—my left side turning one direction and my right side the other—but when I managed to open my eyes a slit and look down, I saw that I was sitting still. Suddenly my body went rigid. My hands contracted into claws, my toes curled, and my face contorted in a grimace. I could not move. I could not cry out.
“That’s it.” Randy Sanders’s voice was far away. “Go up and out.”
I tried. I tried to ascend through the layers of the material plane, to the astral plane, to the causal plane, as he had taught me. But it was hopeless. I was trapped in between the worlds, paralyzed, utterly inept. I had failed the most basic breathing practice.
When at last I could feel my body again, Randy Sanders was stroking my hair.
“There,” he crooned. “Come back. It’s time.”
I tried to apologize, to ask him how I could do better next time, but all I could do was whimper. Randy Sanders took me in his arms and rocked me like a baby.
“Don’t cry, Sweetpea,” he said. Then he held me at arm’s length. “You have no idea, do you?” He laughed. “You just made love to an angel.”
The next night, I expected him. I lay awake in the dark and listened for his footsteps. It seemed as if he would never come, and I began to think my intuition was wrong. He had, after all, been paying a lot of attention to another girl that day. She was tall and dark-skinned, poised and confident—everything I was not. She had been born in Europe, educated in Canada, had a boyfriend in his twenties. Randy Sanders seemed to be considering her as another disciple. I was trying not to feel jealous, but it was no use. How could I possibly compete with such exotic beauty and worldly wisdom?
Finally, I heard the approach of my master. Or a bobcat—I couldn’t be sure. It was him! It was Randy Sanders! I sat up and almost sobbed in relief.
“May I?” he asked, indicating the ground beside me with the beam of his flashlight.
“Yes!”
Randy Sanders sat on his knees next to my sleeping bag. I reached out to hug him, but he shrugged away from me.
Oh no! He had switched his allegiance from me to the tall brown girl. Who could blame him? I was a shitty student. Not to mention short, and a little plump, with freckles all over my body.
Randy Sanders turned his head away from me in the darkness. I heard him breathing. His breath was shallow and rapid.
“Are you okay?” I asked, alarmed.
“Not really, no.”
“What’s wrong?” I gripped my hands between my quivering thighs.
“I cannot be your teacher anymore.”
“What? Why?” My heart was pounding. I felt like I would faint. Phillip’s death was nothing in comparison to the prospect of Randy Sanders’s abandonment.
He pulled out a rumpled pack of Camels and lit one with his Zippo. Cigarettes, too, grounded Randy Sanders. Without them, he informed us, he would not be able to stay in his body. This made sense, and we all nodded our heads.
“I have to confess something,” Randy Sanders said, and he wedged the Camel between his teeth and took my hand in both of his, giving it a squeeze and then releasing. “I am attracted to you. It’s getting in the way of our spiritual work. I have to let you go.”
“No!” I shrieked.
“Shhh.” He placed his hand on my mouth. It smelled like tobacco. Familiar, masculine, comforting.
“I don’t care! It doesn’t matter! You can still be my teacher. Please.”
“You don’t care? It doesn’t matter? Well, thanks a lot.” Randy Sanders chuckled, and I felt safe again.
I grabbed his arms and wrapped them around my shoulders, and snuggled against his chest. “Please don’t give up on me,” I whispered.
He hugged me back, his breath coming faster, his lips against my ear. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll give it a try.”
8
DEFLOWERING
When we returned to Lama after the desert sojourn with Randy Sanders, we found that a foul-mouthed housewife from Brooklyn, purported to be an enlightened being, had infiltrated the spiritual landscape. Joya had become accidentally awakened when she signed up for a weight-loss class and was practicing a yogic breathing technique on her bathroom floor several years earlier. Her third eye had sprung open, and there, sitting in lotus position on the toilet seat, was Jesus Christ, followed by Nityananda of Ganeshpuri, and finally the holy man Ram Dass had revealed in Be Here Now, Neem Karoli Baba. Since then, Joya was forever slipping into deep states of samadhi, punctuated by all kinds of iconoclastic antics, such as uttering streams of profanity at hapless chelas (devotees) seeking her darshan (spiritual transmission) and demanding that seekers bring her gifts of gold—to keep her connected to the earth plane—whenever they came to visit.
Joya was being hailed as some kind of incarnation of Maharaj-ji, Ram Dass’s beloved guru who had left his body a couple of years earlier. She seemed to be the new center of gravity in Ram Dass’s world, and everyone around him tilted longingly toward her. Just as Ram Dass had drawn hundreds of seekers to India in search of Maharaj-ji, now the Maharaj-ji’s Western devotees were flocking to New York in hopes that Joya would turn out to be him.
Randy Sanders invited me to join him and his family on a road trip back East that spring—a pilgrimage to sit at the feet of the Divine Mother.
“What about school?”
Randy Sanders looked at me sadly. “I guess your spiritual awakening is not as important to you as your mundane goals.”
“It is!”
“Then be like Mirabai. Defy convention and follow the sound of Krishna’s flute.”
Ram Dass wired a couple of hundred bucks so that the Family Sanders could make the journey from New Mexico. Although my parents were cynical about organized religion and considered the “guru trip” just another trap, they agreed that this could be a life-changing adventure for me. My father had heard good things about Hilda, the el
derly white yogini who was said to be Joya’s handler, and they trusted Ram Dass, who would be receiving us.
Randy Sanders struck them as harmless. He had a wife and children my age. I would be living with a family. Besides, they reasoned, I had always been wise beyond my years—at least since Matty died. I clearly knew what was best for me.
The Family Sanders were a little on the dorky side for my taste. I was constantly irritated with the wife, alternately attracted to and turned off by the son, and frustrated to be the object of continuous disdain by the daughter. Plus I yearned to be alone with Randy Sanders, so that we could get on with the urgent task of my awakening, and it was almost impossible to have him to myself.
I had no interest in being anyone’s foster daughter. I did not mean to choose this awkward little family over my own. My family may have been fucked up, but they were interesting. So my father would shut himself up in his house with a fifth of something amber-colored and drink himself into oblivion every few days. He was a master of numerology, and the people of Taos revered him as a sage. So when Ramón would start drinking he would keep on drinking until his eyes glazed over, and then, with this x-ray psychic vision he seemed to develop once he had attained a certain level of drunkenness, he would see right into the most shameful part of my soul and expose it, and humiliate me in front of my friends. Maybe he was right. It certainly seemed likely to me that I was weak and pretentious. So my mother would not protect us against these slings and arrows. After having lost a child, what did we expect? Her heart was still broken.
It did not take long for Joya to kick us out.
When we arrived in New York, there was no room for a “family” of five in any of the communal houses in Brooklyn or Queens, and the cheapest apartment we could find was a one-bedroom flat on Staten Island. Every day we rode the ferry to Manhattan and took the subway to the various satsang houses where Joya gave darshan. Clutching our zafus, we would climb the stairs to some walk-up and cram into a room with the other Westerners dressed like Indians and then meditate until Joya made her entrance.
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