Notes For My One-Man Play

WHAT IS THE FIRST IMAGE PEOPLE SEE IN A POSTER OF MY STORY?
Headline: “Eroticized Rage: One Man’s Struggle With Sex Addiction” And pair that provocative headline with the most happy tranquil innocent photo of my present self.
WHAT DO WE SEE IN THE FIRST GALLERY OF MY ART EXHIBIT FOR MY PLAY?
Photos of me from childhood, photos of innocence lost, looking like a Holocaust survivor, fear, rage, loneliness, confusion, awkwardness, exclusion, alienation, struggle, squashed, battered, ostracized, beaten dog, uncool, needy, longing, yearning, questioning, wondering, searching, running, climbing, flying, leaping, swimming, seeking. Acting out followed by shame, remorse, seclusion followed by ritualizing, acting out and the repeat of the addictive cycle. The highs and lows of addiction without any need for substances such as drugs or alcohol. Process addictions.
SECOND GALLERY
The teenager increasingly out of his father’s shadow and family’s influence, edging outside, losing his religion, falling in love, the first reciprocation, frolicking at the Pacific Union College swimming pool in the summer of 1982, the first awkward touch, embrace, holding of hands, going public, forced to part, my jealousy when she goes out with others, refusing to answer her letter. Reconciliation. Making out. Leaving her behind in vengeance.
FINAL GALLERY
Photos of psycho-therapy, Google research on “eroticized rage”, the first 12-step meeting for sex addiction, realizing I am not alone, realizing that porn is not my problem, it’s just a symptom of how I act out, avoiding the 13th Step. I sit in Starbucks working through the Fourth Step, taking a complete and fearless moral inventory, writing out my resentment list, it goes on for pages, my fear list, my sexual inventory list, making amends to those I’ve hurt.
WHAT DO I WANT MY AUDIENCE TO EXPERIENCE AS THEY WALK THROUGH THE GALLERIES?
Some people will identify as sex and love addicts. For others, it will just be weirdly fascinating. Some will say these things are universal, not an addiction, just a failure of moral will. As long as every photo is spontaneous and raw, none of them posed, people will be moved.
WHY AM I DOING THIS SHOW?
Because so many people suffer from the same problems I have and they should know that help is available. There are groups they can go to where they won’t be judged. You are not alone.
WHAT IS THE GIFT TO ME FROM DOING THIS SHOW?
I face my demons. I go public with them. I sketch them out, explain them, and find the strength to face myself as I am.

MY DIARY

I read stories from this workshop to my therapist Friday. He said, “That sounds like eroticized rage.” He said there is a difference between intimacy and eroticized rage.
I have a lot of eroticized rage.
Social disapproval, judgment, and shame aid my sexual arousal. That’s why I love traditional religion. More things are sinful and hence exciting. A religion such as Orthodox Judaism with its thousands of rules is particularly awesome.
As I Googled “eroticized rage” this weekend, I found this advice from Dr. Patrick Carnes, who seems to be the expert in this field: “First, I ask my patients to make explicit their sexual arousal template. What experiences, scenarios, Eroticized Rage objects, preferences, beliefs, and feelings go into arousal for the patient? Is there an “ideal” fantasy, which can be made explicit? The therapist then assists the client in examining arousal and where it comes from.”

I don’t judge myself for having these fantasies. I don’t think I’m a bad person because I have bad thoughts. I take care to treat other people as I would want to be treated and I think I’ve had more success with this commitment than the average bloke.
Acting like a mentch is essential to me, but my fantasies run free.

I think that power differential is essential to my strongest fantasies.
I often feel vulnerable to women. One thousand have rejected me for every one who has accepted me.
I have always struggled financially and rarely felt powerful in my relationships, except with pathetically loving chicks who I can’t respect.

I often felt powerless as a kid. My step-mother had raging Pre-Menstrual Syndrome half of the month and was completely unreasonable. There was nothing I could do but stay out of her way and keep quiet. When I spoke up, she’d often slap me so hard, I’d go flying across the room.
I grew to hate my mother, meaning my step-mother. Half the month she was great, but the other half she was a maniac and nobody could control her.
She says that as a teenager I basically stopped speaking to her as I formed my own identity. Yet I fear that that identity is profoundly affected by my feeling powerless as a kid and this has fueled my anger at women and my desire to be predatory and powerful, as though that would even the score. Sex with attractive women feels completing. That hot chick, she’s the missing piece in my puzzle. If only I could have her, use her, conquer her. I’d feel powerful and I’d have another story for my writing workshop.
I’m a preacher’s kid who converted to Orthodox Judaism. My obsessions are religion and sex.
Blood never plays a role in my fantasies. I hate any sexual violence beyond a pinch or a playful slap.
I never fantasize about loving sex within a committed relationship.
I tend to have relationships with two types of women — strong ones and weak ones. The weak ones tend to be nice and sweet and pathetic. They can’t hold down decent jobs. They’re not reliable. They’re not on time. But they’re easy. They cling to me. By contrast to them, I am strong. I have more money. I have more success. I have more going on in my life. I take them into my world. And for a while that feels good to me that I am able to do so many good things for her and to take care of her.
In the end though, I feel contempt for her, just like the strong women in my life have felt contempt for me. I start to bully my weaker girlfriends just like my strong girlfriends have bullied me. I bully because I can. They bully me because they can. I’m so desperate to keep the relationship that I compromise my integrity and they lose even more respect for me and things tumble downhill.

Three Meetings

I’m stunned by how a few sex addiction meetings have affected me.
I don’t walk around with the predatory fantasies that normally afflict me.
Please know that these are fantasies only! I don’t act them out. I’m a good Orthodox Jew, a light on the Hollywood Hills, a shining example for the world of ethical monotheism.
My fantasy life is almost 100% eroticized rage. I don’t dream about intimacy within a committed relationship (though I rationally desire this). I dream about being a big swinging dick.
I don’t judge myself as a bad man for my fantasies. Like Judaism, I distinguish between thought and behavior, but I think my dreams are a mirror to my psyche, and that this psyche needs repair.
So I’ve done some meetings and shared my creepy thoughts and I’m different. Just as watching porn made me different in the opposite direction. It influenced me to treat sex like sport.
Twelve-step meetings sober me. I’m not walking around this week imagining myself a superstar with unlimited access to hot women. I’m not dreaming about being on the front page of the New York Times. I’m not wondering why nobody is making a documentary about my life.
In short, I’m not walking around in my normal narcissistic daydream. I’ve talked to too many people now whose lives have been rendered miserable by pursuing these delusions.
So, I feel more rooted in reality. When I’m with people I care about, I’m softer. I think my writing has changed.
It’s hard to go from davening or Torah study to the heedless pursuit of lust. And it’s hard to go from a 12-step meeting to treating people like objects.

ONEITIS

When I meet a great girl, I tend to moon about her for weeks and months. This mooning, this fantasizing, this attaching of magical qualities to her does not generally endear me to the object of my desire and just hastens her rejection and my subsequent depression.
When I attain the object of my desire, what then? I feel deliriously happy. I float for weeks, even months. Then I come back to earth and realize the work ahead.
I often think that one woman is special and that I don’t want to live without her. I call her often, think about her often, and read lovesick stories about her to my writing group until they cry uncle and challenge me to write from her perspective.
Oneitis is my natural state. I prefer to be fixated on one woman. Being an equal opportunity predator is not my style.
A normal burst of oneitis hits me for months. I’m down for the count as far as other women are concerned.
I won’t call oneitis love. I won’t call it anything. I’ll just say that I tend to get fixated on one woman to the exclusion of all others. When this is part of a relationship, it’s is a good thing. When not, it sucks.
I wonder if oneitis is an escape from intimacy? If I can’t be with the one I love, I’m not much interested in anyone else. I’d rather be on my own with my Air Supply DVDs and my blog.
PS. I’ve dated many women of quality who did not prove to be disappointments. They contained all the magic I ascribed to them. In the end, I either decided we were not compatible or she did.

I remember that around 1999, when I became notorious for writing on the porn industry at lukeford.com, my father emailed that it was hard to imagine that the sweet boy they all remembered was now immersed in the filth.
I wasn’t eager for my dad to find out what I was doing but I steeled myself against it. I was going to lead my own life. After six years on the sick bed and then carrying around afterward the omnipresent fear that my illness could return at any time, I wanted to do everything I could in life right now.
In 2005, I dated a high functioning alcoholic for a few months. It only increased my loathing of alcoholics and addicts.
I wrote about the sex industry from 1995 to 2007. Many of the people in it were degenerates. I started to be able to spot a degenerate from a 100 paces. They have more lines on their faces and a shifty look to their eyes. By the time you’re 40, the life you’ve led is written across your face. Everything you do leaves a mark on your face and on your bearing. If you live in truth, you can see the truth in others, but if you live a lie, you’ll be blind to others.
My step-mom warned me that I was headed for the fate of the Jack Nicholson character in Carnal Knowledge. I knew she was right. I sometimes looked in the mirror and saw a budding degenerate looking back at me.
I feared that the people in my program would be icky. When I first stepped through the door that Sunday afternoon, the first person I saw was a young woman who was an obvious sex worker. If you do drugs, if you sell your body for money, it gets written across your face fast and forever.
I was afraid that my program would be really gay filled with really gay guys talking about the really gay things they wanted to do with other guys. I have no problem with gays just like I have no problem with defecation, but I don’t like to hear the details about defecation and I don’t like to hear about gay male sex or any sex (unless I’m in a particular mood).
I had this girlfriend who’d tell me about her struggles with constipation and the ups and downs of her menstrual cycle and it was just too much information. She destroyed my fantasy. After our chess life burned out after six months, we were done.
When I was young, I thought that no knowledge was forbidden. It was all good, all delicious. I’d press my girlfriends to tell me all about their love lives prior to meeting me. Then, in a relationship in 1993 that included a few months of living together, I realized I had learned more than was good for me and that the knowledge was eating me up. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. Now I no longer want to know intimate details of my love’s past.
I was a nice polite middle-class sex addict (middle class in my values, not in my income). I was not a rapist nor a flasher nor a child molester nor a sex worker. I hadn’t sunk so low. I just had some cyclical problems in my relationships. I wasn’t a dirty addict.
I’d long known I had an addictive personality but never thought it through. I didn’t see clearly that I had the fundamental beliefs of the addict — that I was irretrievably bad, that normal interactions with other people couldn’t make me feel whole, but that there was a process (romance) that made me feel whole and I could use it to medicate pain.
In an away stage of my relationship with an alcoholic in 2005, she told me that she was a “love addict.” I immediately Googled the term and saw that many of its characteristics applied to me. I checked out a couple of books on the topic from the library. I thought, hmm.
In September of 2008, I interviewed Rachel Resnick about her memoir Love Junkie. I saw similarities in her story with my story. I found myself discussing “love addiction” with friends. But I didn’t think I had a problem that necessitated a 12-step program and a spiritual transformation.
In January 2010, I interviewed a sex addiction therapist. Following that, I had an increasing sense that this problem might have my name on it.
Still, my main belief on this topic was that every guy was a sex addict. Every guy had an insatiable desire for sex with more and more attractive women. We just have to control ourselves. I can control myself. I’m not acting out in this regard. I’m ok.
And now here I was at my first 12-step meeting. The main speaker shared his story of regular cyclical problems in his relationships. I immediately identified with him and with many of the shorter shares in the room. I opened up and spoke to the group for my three minutes about my journey and why I had come to the room.
Afterward, a guy with a similar story to mine came up to me. He seemed like a great guy. A group of us, including the main speaker, then stood around the parking lot and talked.
“I’m a sucker for self-help,” I confessed. “I’m always looking for transformation. I keep taking up things to change myself and it never works.”
“Twelve step work isn’t self help,” said the speaker. “It’s about transcending the self. The answer is in service.”
I felt like I had found a new community. And so I kept coming to meetings.
I quickly felt commonality with others in the program, even if they were drunks or drug addicts or flashers or sexually compulsive gay men. We all had the same underlying intimacy disorder. The ways we wanted to act out were different. Many of us, including myself, didn’t act out. I’d quit looking at porn months before I came to my first meeting. I was doing no acting out beyond solitary masturbation. But I was a dry drunk. The craving remained to fill the hole in my soul through romantic and sexual escapades, a craving so strong that it overwhelmed my every day, taking over my thinking and wasting my times in unproductive fantasies that did me no favors in the day to day task of ordinary human connection.
Being a sex addict didn’t mean I’d been out chasing sex. I was way too lazy for that. I had too many other interests and higher concerns. Being a sex and love addict meant that the process of being in a relationship made me feel whole so that I forgot about taking care of myself and focused obsessively on my partner and made her my higher power.
Some 12-step programs for sex addiction legislate bottom line behaviors to avoid (such as no masturbation and no pre-marital sex for members of Sexaholics Anonymous) while other 12-step programs, such as the one I went to, allowed you to set your own bottom lines. My bottom lines were to not violate my ethical standards in the pursuit of sex, and no sex with anyone who’d make me feel disgusted afterward. And no porn and eventually no masturbation. I quit that in April of 2012.
What would happen if I masturbated? Would I spontaneously combust and go up to Heaven?
No, what would happen is that I would fall back into that nightly ritual and because those few minutes would likely be the most pleasurable moments in my schedule, the one thing I’d do that would fire off my endorphins, I’d go through my day seeking out scenarios to play out in my mind at night during this sexy time, and so more and more of my spare thinking would go to contemplating stories of eroticized rage. This would affect the way I looked at people and spoke to them. And it would be a violation of my parole.
So do people get well from sex and love addiction and go on to fulfilling relationships? Yes, but you wouldn’t know it from going to meetings because when people get into relationships, they usually stop going to meetings because they’re so busy. And if they do come to meetings, they don’t talk about their relationship. So 12-step meetings for sex and love addiction and the like are not usually places where people discuss their current relationships.
I feared that without doing 12-step work, I’d repeat my relationships with unavailable women. My hold on life would go more tenuous. Every time you lose an important connection, it hacks away at the wires keeping your balloon tethered to the ground. I don’t have an excess of wires keeping my balloon tethered to reality.
I feared growing more isolated from other people, from God, and from my best self. I feared throwing away my life for delusions of grandeur, for thinking I was a big man on the internet. That’s what my long-time therapist said to me once. “I’d hate to see you throw away your life for delusion.”
I’ve often had this fear I’d destroy myself. I’d make a bad decision on the road and my life would flash before my eyes. I’d allow my peers to encourage me as a teenager to swing from a bridge hundreds of yards from the earth. I’d say something smart and piss off very dangerous people. I felt my grasp on life was tenuous and that it could all end with one mistake.
I noticed that when it came to sex, it was easy to get unhinged and to lose your sanity. I almost lost my mind several times over women who’d cheat on me. I felt myself stretched to psychic breaking. I wanted to die from the pain.
I feared that if I didn’t change, I’d keep isolating myself to the point I floated away from sanity.
When I walk down the street and see mentally ill homeless people muttering to themselves and begging for handouts, I see myself in the not too distant future.
Homeless people already see me as one of them. Some homeless people have seen me walk by in my typical outfits and offered me money. I looked that pathetic. Maybe it was not the clothes and my foot-long beard. Maybe it was the wild glint in my eye.
I remember one day in 2009 I ran across Colorado Blvd in Santa Monica and dropped my phone on the street. I ran back and picked it up and by the time I got to the sidewalk, this homeless man with a full shopping cart of his worldly possessions had stopped. He dug into his trash and came out with a phone holder and gave it to me. “Here you go,” he said.
In the summer of 2009, I was reading a biography of novelist Gabrial Garcia Marquez at the Los Angeles County Library in Norwalk and this older woman sitting next to me dug into her purse and gave me $2. She said she had a special feeling about me. I tried once to refuse but she insisted and I acquiesced. It made me feel cared for.
I’ve walked down Pico Blvd and homeless men have come out of shul after collecting charity and offering me some. I just give off that vibe. I suspect that various women have slept with me out of pity.
When I had the beard for almost three years, why did I look more homeless than pious? I guess you can change your trappings but you can’t change who you are. I have an attenuated relationship to reality. I live in my head much of the time. I live in fantasy. I’m not bonded to people. I feel disposable. That nobody (outside of family and a few friends) would miss me when I die.

12 STEPS HAS BEEN FUN

In the past, I’ve often made fun of 12-step programs because I don’t believe that addiction is a medical illness as much as a failure of moral will.
But after some first-hand experience, I’ve come to think that everybody should go to 12-step meetings. It’s a great way to take a fearless moral inventory of your life and to begin making reparations to those you’ve needlessly hurt.
The sharing is amazing. We all get a few minutes to talk and the quality of the personal disclosure is unlike anything I’ve experienced. Twelve-step programs are the one place I know of where people are likely to discuss their own responsibility for their problems. What a pleasant change from listening to people blame everyone but themselves for their woes.
I’ve gotta say that in my experience, women are the least likely sex to own up to how they abuse people. Every healthy man with half a clue knows he has a rapist and a murderer inside of him and that without self-control this monster will erupt.
You ask women about their moral struggles and you usually get answers like, “I’m too nice. I give too much. I’m too loving. I care too much. I try too hard. I’m too interested in other people. I can’t sit by while innocent people suffer. I’m too vulnerable. I share too much. I’m just too wonderful. I’m a victim. Let me count the ways.”
I know several men whose adult children stopped speaking to them when they remarried. Why? Because the ex set the kids against them. I don’t know any situations in the reverse. Men are much less likely to set the kids against the ex-wife.
Men are used to competition and they they tend to play by the rules. Women don’t like competition. It frightens them because it threatens their connectivity. So when women are forced to compete, they don’t play by the rules. They’ll turn the kids against the ex. They’ll try to get a man fired from his job. I don’t know any man who’s tried to get a woman he had a fling with fired from her job. I don’t know any man who has faxed the woman’s family or employer or other vulnerable connection to try to destroy her life. Only women do this.
It’s not worth getting into a fight with a woman because she’s likely to fight dirty in ways that would never even occur to you.
I remember when I broke up with a girlfriend in 1993, she proceeded to call Dennis Prager’s office to tell him I’m a jerk. She wrote my parents a letter that destroyed my relationship with them for many years. She did everything she could think of to wreck my life.
Not only have I never heard about any man doing anything like this, I’ve never even heard of any man considering doing things like this. It’s just not the way we men think.
If a boy behaved like a whiny little bitch, he’d be punched in the face right quick and would be unlikely to repeat the behavior, but girls can behave badly and unfortunately no one is going to punch them in the face for it, even when they deserve it.
So I love 12-step programs because you hear about real moral struggles. There’s very little aggrandizement. It’s men and women admitting that they have out-of-control compulsions that have repeatedly destroyed their relationships and that if they continue as they are, they’ll doom themselves to isolation and unhappiness.

My first time in a 12-step meeting? Far less daunting than my first time in yoga. My first time in temple? Now that was daunting. I chose to go to 12-step, nobody pushed me, so it was easy. I showed up the first time on a Sunday afternoon. The speaker talked about how he went through these cycles with his relationships until he finally realized that he might be the problem. I got that. I concurred with many of the shares. I loved some of the people (didn’t bonk ‘em). I kept coming to meetings. They made me feel happy. Eventually, I started working the 12-steps because they made sense. I didn’t want no freakin’ sponsor. I used my therapist as my sponsor. I’d quit porn six months before I stepped into 12-steps, so I just had to give up wanking, and that wasn’t so hard. I keep listening to 12-step talks and studying 12-step literature because it improves my life and my relationships with others. Converting to Reform Judaism was hard, converting to Orthodox Judaism was much harder, but 12-steps has been fun.

I’ve been going to 12-step groups for the past 18 months to find recovery from my emotional addictions.
An integral part of meetings is the “share.” Many meetings will have a lead speaker who’ll give a share from 8-15 minutes on average. He’ll talk about how his addictions ruined his life and how he found recovery through working the program.
A good share is brutally honest. The person talks about his own struggles and which specific parts of the program helped him. A mediocre share is filled with advice-giving, theory and quotations from spiritual masters.
Advice-giving is not the 12-step way. Instead people are encouraged to speak about their own experience and to not give cross-talk commentary on others shares.
Two months ago, for the first time, I was asked to give the lead share. Then a couple of weeks ago, I walked into a meeting and five minutes before it was due to start, I was asked if I would mind substituting for the scheduled speaker who couldn’t make it.
On my first talk, I had a few days to prepare. This time I had but a few minutes. My talk wasn’t as smooth, but I just spoke from the heart, shared what I had struggled with, and related how I had worked the 12-steps and which ones were the most difficult for me, starting with step one.
I grew up a preacher’s kid. I heard hundreds of sermons. Some were inspiring, some were boring. Right now, I prefer the 12-step share where people open up about how their addictions have destroyed their lives and then describe how a power greater than themselves restored them to sanity.
As a writer, I rarely feel comfortable prescribing for others. I’m much more comfortable sharing my own struggles and things that have helped me. Take it or leave it. Your mileage may vary.
My personality, my writing style, my life position, all feel much more comfortable with sharing rather than preaching.

More than two months ago, I gave up masturbation. (About 16 years ago, I gave up promiscuity and about two years ago, I gave up porn and any kind of visual aid to masturbation.)
In 1990-1991, I gave it up for more than a year.
I notice with my new sobriety that I have more time. I save 20 minutes a day. I notice that I have more focus because I don’t have so many options. Whenever I had time on my hands in the past or when I felt anxious or wanted to escape or to get high, I thought about masturbating. Now I don’t.
I think I have more passion and direction. I don’t have as many options, so I just flow into my diminished choices and give more commitment to them — to work, to writing, to Torah, to friends.
I don’t store up erotic thoughts during the day to use at night. There’s this hot woman in my building and I could get drunk thinking about getting with her. When I walk down the street, I’ll often see a female with a particularly fine butt and my whole being becomes convinced that if I can just caress that part of her, my life will be awesome and my problems will disappear. Now that I can’t use these fantasies, can’t stoke them, I might spend less time in fantasy land and more time in reality.
I used to set myself limits with my masturbating. I determined that I wouldn’t masturbate to any fantasies that were cruel and exploitive. I had mixed success with this. I found that every time I masturbated, I was just ingraining my eroticized rage that much deeper.
It’s wonderful to have more sanity and dignity in my life.
I feel like I have more confidence because I conquer my beastly nature every day.
When people use certain words and phrases such as “I’m spiritual, not religious” and “inclusive”, I tend to dismiss them.
I’m not into touchy feely talk. Healing the wounded inner child within gives me the willies.
In my experience, most people who proclaim themselves spiritual but not religious are wanting the benefits of belonging to an organized religion without paying the price of its behavioral constraints.
I decided to convert to Judaism at the end of 1989. Since then, I’ve noticed that most of my fellow seekers wanted spirituality. They wanted to feel intoxicated with God.
My concerns were more pragmatic. What would make the world a better place? What would make me a better man?
I tended to dismiss spirituality as narcissism.
Over the past few months, however, I’ve come to see that my addictive emotional needs distort my noble intentions. I may tell myself that I want to be a good man, but when push comes to shove and I have the opportunity to get high (not from drugs or alcohol, but from romance and sex), I seize the highs, even if they’re not good for me and for others.
So according to the 12-step literature I read, I need spirituality.
I’ve swapped one organized religion for another and my addictions and my tendencies to use people are unchanged.
I hate the term “spirituality”, but without it, apparently, I am lost.
Where do I go from here?

Over the past year, I’ve been going to 12-step meetings for love addiction, sex addiction, co-dependency and the like. I’m trying to figure out when I hit bottom. Perhaps it was the evening 13 years ago that I went searching the internet for beastie vids. Or perhaps it was the time in 2009 that the Torah lecture was so powerful that I just had to Google “rape videos.” Maybe it was my perverse multi-year fearful fascination with white supremacist and Jew-hater William Pierce. I’ve indulged in many depraved pursuits.
On the surface, I’m an upstanding guy. I’ve never been violent. I’ve never committed major theft (a few sloppy time cards, cheating in high school and college, and the like) I’ve never been arrested and never broken a serious law. I’ve never hired a hooker. I’ve never tried illegal drugs. I’ve never tried to seduce an under-age girl and never tried anything illegal in the sex department.
Going to 12-step programs was my idea, not my therapist’s (though he endorsed it). Nobody in my life was pushing it (though some people close to me had suggested it at various times over the years).
For many years, I’d say from 1994-2007, I was frightened by how easily I became unmoored from any moral foundations. Throughout my blogging career, I’ve scared myself with my unhinged postings, like this one. “What will people say?” I wonder when they read about my latest depravity.
I remember my tortured relationship with a photographer and a few months in she told me, “My therapist says I’m a love addict.” I immediately Googled the term and checked out some books from the library on it and recognized a few such tendencies in myself.
I think I got afraid of perpetuating the same type of relationships (which never lasted much longer than a year). I think I realized that religion and therapy and Alexander Technique were not enough. My hatred of women was hardly changed by such noble pursuits. I had to go deeper.
Throughout my life, I’ve had painful flashes of moral clarity where for a few minutes, sometimes hours, I became cognizant of the pain I was wreaking all around me and I felt some of the suffering I was causing.
As a consequence, I’d try to become more empathic in my daily behavior, particularly with my blogging. But this would only last days. Eventually I’d feel a surge inside and go back to my f*** everybody mentality. And then the tide would recede and I’d conclude, it’s hopeless. I’m hopeless.
Having a job is a great thing. This is my first time in 15 years where I report to an office every weekday and work alongside the same people. I can’t be as carelessly cruel in such circumstances (as opposed to when I live alone and communicate primarily through my blogs).
Here’s one amazing thing I’ve encountered through 12-step work — it has even changed my fantasies. Normally, I could go through an elevated day, but when night fell and I crawled into bed, my desires would be as filthy as ever. But after I go to a 12-step meeting or immerse myself in a 12-step book, I find that even my longings –much of the time — are less cruel. I feel less need for women to be humiliated and degraded for me to feel happy. Their loss isn’t necessarily my gain.
I love bigotry (much of the time). I am terribly amused by much racial and religious humor, the crueler the better.

MY OBJECTIONS TO 12-STEP PROGRAMS

I never held with 12-step programs. Sure, I was glad that they worked for some people, but I didn’t take them seriously. I didn’t respect them.
Why not? Chiefly because of the First Step where participants admitted that they were powerless before their addiction.
I didn’t buy that. I felt completely in control of my life.
Second, I found the notion that addiction was a disease to be absurd. You mean a bloke who can’t stop drinking has an illness like cancer?
I didn’t see excess drinking and drugging and the like as a disease. I saw them as a failure of moral will.
Third, I didn’t buy that having this disease and being helpless in front of your addiction was a valid excuse for bad behavior. I didn’t buy that you could go around and apologize to people for hurting them because “you were sick.”
As Genesis says, “Sin crouches at the door but you can rule over it.”
Since elementary school (probably since eighth grade), however, I’ve had the conviction that I have an addictive personality. I just didn’t think deeply about what that meant.
I would never try drugs or alcohol (when I became Jewish, I’d swallow the requisite mouthful of wine for kiddish but that was it, I never drank alcohol for pleasure and I’ve never tried any type of illegal drug nor ever taken a prescription drug for escape or for pleasure). While my peers got wasted, I abstained. I knew it would destroy me. While others could dabble in vice, I knew that I’d get hooked.
It was a big reason I never purchased the services of a prostitute. I feared I’d like it too much. I never bought a lap dance for the same reason.
I got into gambling in high school. I loved the rush. It made me forget my misery, my lack of comfort in my own skin. I would bet with my friends over everything possible. One day in 1982 I met a new friend, a neighbor. I bet him over a game of golf in his back yard. I won $5. To my horror, he asked his dad for the money. He said he had lost it to me in a bet. I immediately forgave him. His dad said to me, “That was very wise.”
I bet with other students at Placer High School. One took me for about $1400 on horse racing. I was graduating and leaving for Australia. I paid him off about $200 and asked him to forgive me the rest. He did.
After that, I resolved to never bet again. I fell down once when in Australia I succumbed to social pressure and put a bet down on the Melbourne Cup horse race. That was my last bet with my own money.
When I was in Las Vegas circa 2007, a friend gave me $20 to play the slots and I did because it was her money. I won’t bet my own.
Early on in my psycho-therapy, in 1998, my therapist asked me if I thought I might be a sex addict. I was certainly out to get all the sex I could with attractive women, but anything I did get, with few exceptions, took place within relationships that usually lasted from a few months to a year.
I said no, I wasn’t a sex addict, because I never did anything out of control. I never did anything criminal. I never felt in the grip of a compulsion so strong that I ignored consequences. I never avoided reality so that I could masturbate. I never patronized hookers or strips clubs. I didn’t look at pornography every day. I was just a normal bloke.
In April of 2011, my psycho-therapist said that it sounded like I had eroticized rage. I went home, Googled the term, and realized he was right and even though I only expressed my rage in socially acceptable terms, the rage was a sickness in my soul and holding back my life. I needed to get help. I needed 12-step work.
I told my therapist this at our next session and he recommended a program. A couple of weeks later, I went to my first ever 12-step meeting.
I wasn’t freaked out. I felt a tad awkward but simply accepted that this was the next logical step for my life and all beginnings were difficult. This seemed easier than my first yoga class. Now that was weird. Everyone had white turbans.
By this point, I had been porn-free for about six months. I was on a good trajectory.
I’ve got a strong pragmatic streak. I’ll try anything if it can’t hurt me. And if something helps me, I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense.
By living in so many different homes during my first four years of life, I learned flexibility. That I had ideological objections to 12-Steps wasn’t going to stop me from exploring if they could help me. When I was thinking about converting to Judaism in the early 1990s, I had all sorts of questions and objections, but I put them on the back burner when I saw that becoming Jewish was what I needed to do.
When I decided to explore yoga in 2009, it didn’t stop me that much of it seemed weird and dangerous and culty. When I met attractive women, it didn’t stop me if we had different political and religious views. I’m willing to go along with a lot of things I don’t agree with if I think they can benefit my life.
At my first 12-Step meeting, an even mixture of men and women, the speaker talked about how all of his relationships went through predictable patterns. They started off great and then they fell apart. He realized it might have something to do with him. And so he found this program and it had turned his life around.
I gave a three-minute share at that first meeting. Afterward, I met people who’d ready about me in the LA Weekly. They knew my story. I met a guy who came from the same type of Seventh-Day Adventist upbringing I had.
I said I was a sucker for self-help. I was willing to try anything. I was told that 12-Steps wasn’t self-help. It was about self-transcendence. The answer to our addictions was service to others.
I kept coming to meetings. I liked many of the people I met there. I got a lot of wisdom from them.
I remember a conversation with one guy after a meeting. He had the same predilections as me. We liked our women to dress up in certain ways. We pursued intensity more than intimacy.
“You know that this stuff we’re talking about isn’t our problem,” he said. “It’s just how we act out. Our problem is an intimacy disorder.”
He recommended to me the books of Pia Mellody.
It took me a while to find a sponsor because all the guys who were potential sponsors seemed like Nazis. I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do.
The longer I stayed in the program, the more impressed I became. I saw how it changed people’s lives for the good. I let my objections fall away and started working the 12-Steps. The more work I did, the more I realized how the sickness of my emotional addictions were reducing my life.
Instead of feeling hopeless, tormented and ill at ease much of the time, I found greater degrees of peace with myself, with God and with others.
Fifteen months into my work, I was asked to be the lead speaker to a meeting. That shook me up and spurred me to work harder on the 12 Steps, to up my bottom lines (behavior I wanted to avoid) to include a complete cessation from masturbation, and to more diligently pursue the program.
I knew I had pursued a lot of great things in my life but usually in such a half-assed way that they brought no glory to what I publicly espoused. Now I was convinced that this was caused by the corruption of my emotional addictions and that 12-step work would help me.
Yet I feared that I was a serial enthusiast and that many other times in my life, I though I had found the answer, found the key that would unlock my highest self, only to quickly fall back to my self-destructive patterns.
Why would this time be any different?
Where do I stand on my old objections to 12-Step programs? I’ve let them go. I see the program helping me and others. I don’t think the labels of “addiction” and “disease” matter. If working the program works for you, if it helps you to use these labels, then use them. There’s no need to argue over them if that prevents you from getting 12-step help. If you want to work any program, you have to accept its fundamental premises or to at least be willing to act as if they are true.
As we say in the program, take actions you don’t believe in and you’ll get results you can’t imagine.

LOVE ADDICTION WITH GUYS

My Love Addict has come out in relationships with guys. Not because I had any kind of romantic or sexual feelings for them, but because being with them made me feel whole. When these friendships ended, it was as wrenching as the end of a romantic relationship.
I remember after one died a few years ago, my friend told me: “Here’s the feeling in this house — I don’t trust you, my wife hates you, and my kids fear you.”
I was so devastated that I missed our friendship for more than a year. Every day I thought about our time together. I sketched out notes for a novel about it but never wrote it.
Eventually we became friends again and then that died and I haven’t spoken to him in years.
Still, there was that one Shabbos afternoon when I was running down Pico Blvd for Mincha. It was cold and rainy. I ran past my friend in my thin suit and he said, “We have to get you a coat.”
I know I could get myself a coat, but that would not mean anything to me. However, the idea that someone else would get me a coat to make sure I was warm made me feel great.
In the end, he never got me a coat and I never got me a coat. I live in Los Angeles after all. But I have that wonderful memory of being cared for.
I know I’ve been seeking out substitute father figures all of my life. That’s probably my Love Addict.
It’s hard to disentangle all my neuroses.
If you don’t get nurturing in your first few years, you’ll likely go through your life feeling worthless and longing for a rescuer. You’ll meet powerful busy people and you just get a feeling that they can fix you.

It was easy for me to go to my first 12-step meeting in April 2011 because it was entirely my own idea. Nobody pushed me. My life didn’t push me. I wasn’t at rock bottom. I was on a steady path upward, helped by my years of psycho-therapy and Alexander Technique and Orthodox Judaism.
I looked at 12-step work as another method for self-improvement.
When a few years previous, a rabbi said he’d go with me to a 12-step meeting for sex addiction, I thought that was a ridiculous suggestion because I couldn’t think of any behavior I couldn’t stop. I rarely, if ever, felt out of control.
When my therapist said that my sexual fantasies sounded like eroticized rage, I was intrigued. I spent a couple of hours Googling the topic and saw that even if I kept expression of my eroticized rage within socially acceptable limits, only acting out when it was in the form of a consensual game, it was still a problem that was detracting from my ability to love, and from my ability to live to the full an ordinary day. Eroticized rage was powering my jokes and many of the socially acceptable 100% legal ways I habitually interacted with people.
I’m not sure I ever hit rock bottom with my sex addiction.
Let’s talk about my porn addiction. There were times as a teenager that I’d spend hours a day looking at porn and masturbating to my limit, about three pops a day. But these were just individual days, probably no more than a dozen in my life.
The porn fed my sex fever that has periodically swept over me and convinced me viscerally that there was nothing more important, more pleasurable, and more healing for me than great sex.
There are certain forms of pornography that yank my chain at times. I love the extended group sex in Rocco Siffredi’s movie Never Say Never To Rocco Siffredi and in John Thompson’s bukkake flicks. I love that stuff. I love watching a dozen guys ejaculating on a beautiful woman’s face.
These porn fevers have swept over me for days and weeks at a time so that every day, at least once, but sometimes several times, I had to watch some of this, but these fevers always burned out in days, or at most a couple of weeks and then my life would be porn free for months, even years at a time.
As a teenager, I kept some magazines around, but as an adult I’ve never had a porn collection. When I got the fever, I ran with it, knowing it would burn out in days and I’d be sober for months afterward and free of these inclinations.
I’ve never committed criminal acts, not for sex nor for anything else. I’ve never risked my health, never engaged in dangerous sexual activities. I’ve never had anonymous sex. Everyone I’ve hooked up with, I’ve spoken to for hours. With pleasure.
So why did I embrace the label sex addict? Because I saw that I had low-grade eroticized rage, that it contaminated my life and reduced my ability to love and played a big role in my pattern of serial monogamy.
With the exception of my first year in Los Angeles, I’ve never been promiscuous. That year, I was with about 20 women. Over the rest of my life, another 20 women, almost all in the context of a relationship.
Stepping into my first 12-step meeting for sex addiction was no more difficult than stepping into my first yoga class.
Yoga was daunting. My yoga studio attracted a lot of committed Sikhs and at times I felt like I was joining a cult. Also, I’m not flexible, so yoga doesn’t come easily. And the touchy feely yoga talk is not my natural mode of communication. So when I joined a yoga studio and plunked down a $1,000 for unlimited yoga for a year, that was a big step.
So I stepped into my first 12-step meeting. It was awkward, like starting a job or some other commitment. I quickly got the hang of things. I enjoyed the main speaker and enjoyed chatting with him afterward. He knew who I was from reading about me in the media in years past. I made a couple of good connections that first meeting. I recognized myself in others’ stories. The main speaker spoke about his relationships, how they went in predictable cycles and how he was always convinced it was the fault of his partners, but now he’s seen how his own addictive emotional tendencies were limiting his life. I could totally embrace that message.
How did the term “eroticized rage” empower me? Because upon hearing the term, I immediately recognized its truth. It explained my cruel rapacious sexual tendencies. Many people told me I was angry, that I was filled with rage, but “eroticized rage” was more specific. I knew I had rage and a limitless yearning for a subtly cruel eroticism, but to see that the yearnings were not just connected but one thing, made me say, yes! Eureka! That’s it. That’s the name for what’s sickening me. I know the problem now. Just two little words sums up my inner life.
I have the problem. What’s the solution? Psycho-therapy and 12-step work. I’m fully committed to therapy. Let me add the 12-step work. Got it.
There were many times over the course of my life that I was convinced that because of my rapacious sexual nature, I was irretrievably bad and incapable of decency and marriage.
It was a shame that I got this revelation about “eroticized rage” just a month after getting a great new computer monitor so I could watch my porn in high fidelity, but I had been porn-free for three weeks when I first stepped into a meeting. Then I quickly resolved to cut the umbilical cord between porn and masturbation, thereby ending the primary purpose of watching porn, and setting me on a path to completely giving up masturbation and leading a life without shame.
The masturbatory act was not the shameful thing, it was my whole cycle of going through the day collecting eroticized rage scenarios to play out in my quiet time before bed, and how that just perpetuated and deepened my rage at women, polluting my ordinary day interactions.
Shame and depression are so omnipresent for me that I don’t notice them unless they increase in intensity from the baseline.

WORKING THROUGH RESENTMENT

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been returning again and again to the Fourth of the Twelve Steps (“making a complete and fearless moral inventory”). A key part of this step is the resentment list. You write out the people and things you resent, why you resent them, the harm you think they’ve done you and how that has hurt your life. Then you move on to examine what part you played in this trouble. Then you consciously give your resentment to God. If you find you can’t let go of resenting somebody, then you start praying for them every day.
So I was relaying this to my therapist and we started talking and then we hit a wall. I couldn’t admit that I resented certain people. Well, I just can’t resent them, I said. They’ve done so much for me. They did the best they could. I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t want to heal the wounded inner child within. Blah, blah, blah.
I was raised a Seventh-Day Adventist. You weren’t supposed to resent in my upbringing. You weren’t supposed to have negative emotions. They showed that you hadn’t truly accepted what Jesus did for you on the cross. They showed you weren’t saved.
To this day, despite my conversion to Orthodox Judaism, I have certain blocks against admitting some of my resentment and jealousy and other unpretty emotions.
So my therapist explained that it might help me to bring my hidden resentment to the surface so that I could get a good look at it, truly experience it, and then move on beyond it. To deny this resentment, to put up a wall against it, does no good. The resentment just eats away at you, poisoning your life as long as you deny it exists. You can’t fix a problem you don’t admit you have.
For my first eight years of therapy, I did not want to talk about my childhood beyond a few well rehearsed details. I had a wall up against going there. Perhaps it was too painful? I wonder where I go from here?

I fear I’ll get sick and I won’t be able to afford medical care. So I’ve taken that fear and I’ve given it to God. I say, God, You handle this. I’m just going to do the best I can to go about my life in a careful and sober manner, avoiding accidents the best I can. You take my fear.
I resent various people for doing me wrong. So I take these resentments, and I say, God, You take my resentments. I’m turning them over to You. I’m unplugging my resentment replay machine and my how-do-I-get-even? machine (12 Steps).
I say, God, my will is corrupt. Self-discipline, self-help and lofty goals are not enough for me. Religion as I’ve been practicing it is not enough for me. I have to turn my will over to You. It’s not my will I’m going to do today, it’s Your will be done.
God, I can’t figure out this person. God, I can’t figure out this situation. I’m licked. So I’m turning this over to You to guide me.

The core of my story is how I realized I was addicted to certain kinds of unhealthy relationships, certain kinds of unhealthy fantasies, and how I discovered in five minutes of therapy last April that my fantasies were not only dooming my relationships, they were poisoning my whole life. Not necessarily the fantasies in and of themselves, but what they reflected — rage at women.
Once I heard the term “eroticized rage” from my therapist, I realized I was sick and needed to get help beyond religion and psycho-therapy, I needed a 12-step program. I realized I had a previously unconscious anger that was interfering with the way I related to people, not just the intimate relationships but all relationships were sickened by my desire to humiliate others. What I found funny, what I found energizing, what I found charged and exciting in life was sick, was disguised rage, was vengeance, particularly vengeance against those who reminded me of things from childhood. There was a thru-line from my jokes to my fantasies to my acting going back to my earliest years, a rebellion against things my conscious mind has no argument with, only gratitude.

THE POPULAR IMAGE OF 12-STEP PROGRAMS

In her 1997 book Twelve Step Programs: A Contemporary American Quest for Meaning and Spiritual Renewal, Ann Marie Minnick writes: “…the popular image of Twelve Step Programs as addiction-centered, victim-producing, and narcissism-generating”…
That has not been my experience of such programs. As Winnick points out, identifying addiction is only the beginning of the program, not the end.
In every meeting, I find people in great pain, even agony, over their long-term inability to deal with themselves, other people and the world. They’re unhappy, isolated, ashamed and stuck in patterns that don’t serve them and others. Before they began working the program, they were a menace to themselves and to others. All those I’ve met who’ve worked the program are recovered from their destructive addictions.
There’s a quality of honesty in these rooms that I have not encountered elsewhere. The nearest parallel is a support group. Because of this honesty, people feel unburdened and they can bond quickly with others who share their problems.
In my experience, the ratio of honesty to showing off is about 100 to 1.
In 12-Step Programs, people learn to let go of their resentment against others and their desire to get even (the Fourth Step). If you’re feeling tortured, guilty and ashamed, you’re not going to be a blessing to others. It’s hard to have turmoil on the inside and tranquility on the outside.
At the end of every meeting, I’ve felt — and noticed these qualities in others — an increased sense of calm, well-being and hope. This translates into us being more pleasant generally.
Religious liturgy rarely speaks to me with the power of 12-Step prayers, which feel more relevant, direct and useful.
As far as being victim-producing, the focus in 12-Step work is self-transformation through God’s help, not on blaming others. It’s rare to hear a 12-Step share that’s primarily about blaming others. Most 12-Steppers use their share to talk about their own struggles.
If 12-Step Programs were narcissism-generating, why would they help people? Why would shares focus on what we’re struggling with? Why would we confess our deepest shame and support each other?

One of my earliest memories of my father finding me at age five flinging manure at other kids and screaming, “I hate you! I hate you!”
I’m rarely out of control, but I can get pretty thin-skinned about teasing. I love to tease others, but I can’t always take it gracefully.
What do I remember about that incident at age five? Just being out of control and reacting with pure rage, trying to dirty other people so that they would match what I was feeling.
I remember that every time my parents put me down for a nap, I would scream and rage until falling asleep.
When I get into an intimate relationship, I have emotional responses that get out of control.
There was that time in seventh grade when my classmates started teasing me. So I got all emotional, stood up in the middle of class, yelled “Shut up!” and walked out.
While I was gone, the teacher asked the kids why they were teasing me. They said, “He teases us all the time.”
I was embarrassed by my reaction, by my inability to take teasing, but even though I knew I should be gracious, I couldn’t handle the ribbing.
Well, my own will is not sufficient. I’m turning my vulnerabilities, my fears, my resentments, over to God.
I’ve done this many times before. Why should now be any different? Well, now I have the 12-step plan for character transformation. I have a specific community me to help. But I could’ve said that 20 years ago as I was starting my Jewish journey. Why is this time any different?
Judaism never asked me to turn my will and my life over to God. It didn’t say that I couldn’t rely on my flawed will power. I can’t rely on just performing my religion. I need a transformation of the heart, even though that sounds Christian. Maybe different strokes work for different folks?
Judaism emphasizes changing specific deeds and that will change your heart. Christian emphasizes changing the heart and then the deeds will follow. The 12-step model is more Christian than Jewish in this respect.
It’s humbling that after my long journey from home I’ve returned to the spiritual emphasis of my childhood on accepting divine grace.
I want to let go of my resentments. They’re perverting my life. I was crude with some girls 18 years ago. I groped them without their consent. Why can’t they let this go? Why do they keep trying to hurt me? I resent the Jews who hate me more than I deserve to be hated. It’s just like second grade when the cool kids didn’t invite me to the cool parties. Why do the cool kids shun me? How do I break into their crowd? I resent being a Palestinian of the soul, living in the Gaza Strip of social opprobrium. I understand suicide bombers. They’re losers who want to feel important. Community leaders come to them and say they can be important, their families can have honor, if they only blow themselves up amidst the enemy.
Resentment leaves no room in my life for God. I can’t be of service to others when I’m full of resentment. If I don’t turn this crap over to God, I’ll remain miserable.
How frustrating I must’ve been for various rabbis and shuls. I flagrantly and publicly violated their standards while simultaneously trying to secure my Orthodox conversion. I was gross. I was crude. I spoiled many a Shabbat with my antics. I just pursued my own will, my own desires, my own wants, my own ends, without consideration of others. I’m constantly grasping for attention. That might get me into more trouble than any other character defect. Self-seeking. That’s the thread that runs through my whole life. Trying to put myself ahead of others usually results in placing me behind them. My bids for glory get me into the most trouble.
What do I fear? Dying alone. Social ostracism. Illness. Death. Waste of my potential. Loneliness. Shame. Harming innocent people. Embarrassment. Being revealed as a fraud. Letting down people who’ve been good to me. Poverty. Homelessness. Dependence. Bankruptcy. Pursuing my own desires without limit, without conscience. When I’m afraid, I tend to lie.

STEP ONE

I admitted that my life had become unmanageable.
This took me many years to admit. Though I was rarely thrilled with my life, it never occurred to me to 12-step because I thought that such programs were for the weak-willed and I was not weak willed. I did nothing that I could not control. I was the master of my destiny.
Early on in my life, I developed bottom-line behaviors that I would avoid. I did not call them “bottom line behaviors”. I’d never heard of such a term. But I knew there were things that were bad for me.
Many of my classmates at primary school at Avondale College in Australia were into buggering each other and animals. Though I was eager to explore sex, I decided early on that such activity was not for me.
I grew up a little. I decided I would not wait until marriage to have sex, but I would always behave ethically. No married women. No cheating. Nobody under-age. Nothing illegal. And I stuck to that.
Looking back, I see that I was just managing my addictions.
With the exception of my years 18-22, I’ve always felt a need for God. After falling into the morass of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at age 22, I knew that I would destroy myself if left to my own devices. I needed not just God but organized religion.
So I converted to Judaism. But my demons remained. They weren’t even tamed. I took my addictions into the synagogue and after hundreds of hours studying Torah, they were still untamed.
I had converted to Judaism so that I could chase shiksas.
Then the internet came along and all the things I had fantasized about, I could now find video of them online. I knew I needed to do something about this problem, so I decided to write about the industry, investigate it, and thereby innoculate myself from its charms. And I felt like that largely worked, even as it socially isolated me and left me unfit to marry any decent girl.
When I stopped writing on XXX in 2007, the demons returned stronger than ever.
In 2009, I had what I regarded as my best relationship ever, but like the rest of them, it didn’t last beyond a year and was filled with me idealizing somebody who wasn’t there, blaming her for failing to live up to my projections. I obsessed about her and became dependent on her and in the end I wasn’t man enough for her.
Since 2008 I’ve been in therapy (and intermittently during the years before that). Twelve step was an after-thought. I came to it by accident. My defenses were down. I stopped intellectualizing about it and decided to try it on pragmatic grounds. I didn’t worry about buying the program. I just wanted to try the program. And as soon as I did, I felt better.
As the 12-steppers say, going to meetings makes you feel better, but only working the steps helps you to get better.
So step one is just a clear declaration of something I’ve known since I was 22. I need not just God and organized religion, but a community of 12-steppers who grapple with similar problems to what ail me.
My addictions to romantic and sexual obsession were warping my practice of religion, my choice of profession, and the way I interacted with people.
My addiction keeps shifting. I notice that when I feel bereft, I often tune into Facebook to get a hit of connection. I make a provocative status update to get some attention.
Why have I always felt most alive when looking at porn?
I was stuck in two types of romantic relationships — with pathetic irresponsible girls and those high-achieving types who had contempt for me. Neither worked.

STEP TWO

I accept that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.
When I was an atheist (from age 18-22), I had bosses in landscaping who were pentacostals. They thought I acted like a good Christian and couldn’t understand my atheism.
“I want to do what I want to do,” I told them. “I don’t want to subordinate myself to God.”
I’ve always been in rebellion against being told what to do. Only since I realized at age 22 that my own inclinations would destroy me have I been able to accept the dictates of organized religion. Only when I had no other choice.
God is the only ends you can pursue without limiting yourself, without worshiping an idol.
I notice that the religious people around me, Jewish and goyish, don’t have the problems that I do (most of which spring from my selfish desire to do what I want, screw everyone else).
I see this in movies and TV. When characters don’t have over-arching purpose, they’re highly likely to destroy themselves by pursuing their own desires.
I can look to people around to see what a God-centered life can achieve.
Much of who I am and what I do has been shaped by my addictions and most of the time, I did not even know it.
I need to keep returning to authentic human connection, the kind I had at Stephen S. Wise temple and Aish HaTorah.
Psycho-therapy is helping me with connection. I see how I’ve been needlessly cutting people out of my life because I don’t like to negotiate relationships, I don’t like to reveal my emotions, I don’t like to talk things out.
So much of my life has been working at cross-purposes. The porn vs the Torah. Now everything is working together.

STEP THREE

This has been one of my blocks to taking 12-steps seriously. Turning your life over to God? That sounds Christian. Oy vey!
But guess what? I changed religions, changed locations, changed professions, changed girlfriends, and my demons were not diminished. My addictions have so perverted my life that I have to empty myself and let go and let God, even if that sounds Christian.
It’s humbling to come back in my old age to an idea propounded throughout my childhood by my preacher daddy.
By the actuarial tables, I’m closer to death than to my birth.
I could use my prayer time to ask God to help me to stay free of addictive behavior.
Last night, I went to two James Bond films at LACMA and I met a woman named Christine who was slim but wore a low-cut shirt and a bra that made her look like the most voluptuous woman in the world.
Raised in Berkeley, she’d only once been inside a church (for a wedding) and never inside a synagogue.
Cleavage drives me crazy. Oy, I need to call my sponsor.
Instead of just saying my prayers by rote, I might actually try talking to God about what I’m battling.
Everybody I’ve known well I’ve exploited to satisfy my addictive needs. Even Dennis Prager.
I look back and I see that I’m a user and a manipulator. And I can’t simply will myself to stop doing that.
It’s imprinted in me that the breast will run dry and I have to suck every drop I can get right now.
Wow, I’ve pretty much used everybody I’ve known. Every rabbi. Every shul.
Wow, I just wrinkled my brain, man.
What are my favorite ways of manipulating people? Tell them that they’ve changed my life for the good. That makes ‘em want to adopt me.
Let them feel like they’ve made an impact on me. Then let them buy me dinner.

I’m reading about the sixth step — “We’re entirely ready for God remove all these defects of character.”
I am particularly struck by these sentences and how they applied to my own life:
Many of us, ourselves victims of emotional deprivation in our early years, had learned to survive by cultivating hatred, anger, and resentment as motivating forces, seeking to insulate ourselves from hurt and fear. Now we discovered that we had crippled ourselves by using this monotonous strategy of distrust and isolation in all relationships, whether they were inherently hostile or not.

Nobody has influenced me as much as my father.
Despite the best of my intentions, I constantly find myself measuring up against him. Most of the time, I’m not even conscious that I’m doing it. Consciously, I’m measuring myself up against Dennis Prager (and losing very badly).
Dad and I very alike. Of the three kids, I’m the most like dad. I have his tendencies towards ideological devotion, but I’ve made very different choices than he did.
In his teens, my father chose against journalism and for God.
At 23, I chose to dedicate myself to God and then found myself to my chagrin, pursuing something very different much of the time, well, honestly, most of the time, I found myself pursuing a cult of myself.
I had a wise asian girlfriend who told me when I was 23, “the more you try to be different from your father, the more you will be like him.”
A different girl, four years later, when I asked her if I was like my father, told me, “he’s not as pompous.”

So I keep borrowing from my friends and family. I am in this financial fix is because of my bad character.
Over the course of my life, I many times chose to not listen to good people around me. Instead, I chose to rebel and to self-destruct. I chose in school to not take a lot of classes seriously. I chose to not do my homework. I chose to not go along with social norms on hundreds of occasions leading to social isolation which is another word for death.
If you socially isolate yourself, you’re putting yourself in poverty and desperation and you are making your hold on life tenuous.
I made many bad choices in my life and these choices put me where I am today. My consistently most damaging choices have been those that have severed my connections with the good people around me.

MY MOM’S TESTIMONY

Shortly before my mother died from cancer in 1970, she wrote this testimony:

Then came vomiting—consistent and persistent and uncontrollable. There were hospital tests, plenty of them, and then, after weeks, the verdict. It was bone cancer, in the ribs and hips and spine. There was no known cure. My husband broke the news to me through a Bible reading which was used of the Spirit of God to take away shock and fear.
Two years have come and gone since then. Mostly it has meant confinement to bed, inability to walk, pain, innumerable vomitings, and consequent reduction to virtually a skeleton.

What then of the future? Medically speaking, the bone cancer is expected to spread until finally the liver or lungs are affected, and the end is thus hastened. The prayers of God’s people, while not effecting a miracle of healing, have done something much greater—they have kept me in perfect peace, and through God’s grace I have been able to bear much suffering.
I feel very awed, grateful, and rich when I consider what the Lord has done for me. The Lord has given me this message and a wonderful husband and turned my life into a heaven.

1977 MY FIRST POP SONG

One day in 1978, I think, when I was about 12, I was in the living room of our apartment at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley and the radio was on and across the airwaves came Sing a Song by The Carpenters.
It’s the first pop song I remember and it immediately changed my mood. Jolts of rhythm surged through me and I felt like singing and dancing even though as the son of a Seventh-Day Adventist evangelist and Bible scholar, I knew that singing pop songs and dancing were sins and forbidden in my home. My older brother and sister had many fights over this with my dad. As the youngest child, and the most passive, I had a more mellow upbringing. My step-mother was 18 years younger than my dad, they married when I was four, after my mom died from cancer, and my step-mum didn’t mind some pop music.
In 1972, the Seventh-Day Adventist church issued the following guidelines about music:
The Seventh-day Adventist Church has come into existence in fulfillment of prophecy to be God’s instrument in a worldwide proclamation of the Good News of salvation… The lives of those who accept this responsibility must be as distinctive as their message. This calls for total commitment by each church member to the ideals and objectives of the Church.
Music should:
1. Bring glory to God and assist us in acceptably worshiping Him (1 Cor 10:31).
2. Ennoble, uplift, and purify the Christian’s thoughts (Phil 4:8; Patri¬archs and Prophets, p. 594).
3. Effectively influence the Christian in the development of Christ’s character in his life and in that of others (MS 57, 1906).
4. Have a text (words, lyric, message) which is in harmony with the scriptural teachings of the Church (Review and Herald. June 6, 1912).
5. Reveal a compatibility between the message conveyed by the words and the music, avoiding a mixture of the sacred and the profane.
6. Shun theatricality and prideful display
…Certain musical forms, such as jazz, rock, and their related hybrid forms, are considered by the Church as incompatible with these principles.
Regarding dancing, the Church held: “In the Bible there is no trace of dancing by men or women in the worship services of the Temple, the synagogue, or the early church. This absence can hardly be attributed to negligence, because the Bible gives clear instructions regarding the ministry of music in the Temple. The Levitical choir was to be accompanied only by stringed instruments, the harp and the lyre (2 Chron 5:13; 1 Chron 16:42). Percussion instruments like drums and tambourines, which were commonly used for making dance music, were clearly omitted. What was true for the Temple was later also true for the synagogue and the early church. No dancing or entertainment music was ever allowed in God’s house.”
I don’t think my dad was home when I first heard Sing a Song or I would not have been able to enjoy it. I could never enjoy anything in his presence of which he did not approve. I’m not sure I can to this day.
I had no problem taking a different position on music and sin than my father, I just didn’t want to fight it out in my own home. I knew that one day, I’d be on my own.
So I guess it was just mum and me when I heard this delicious song float along and I felt glorious. Happy. Surprised. And I realized that there were things in the world outside of the church that could bring me instant comfort. I realized that if I could just find my own space, I could listen to songs I loved and feel everything I wanted to feel and that nobody could tell me that I was sinning.
Until this time, I’m not sure there was anything or anyone in my life I could always count on for comfort. Because of this, I loved to escape into books and fantasy and running and writing, but this music was like nothing else, it spoke to my heart, it was instantly appealing, instantly accessible, and instantly healing. It talked about all the things I wanted such as love and love and love.
It would’ve been unfathomable for me at this stage to purchase any music, anything that was not Christian nor classical was not welcome in my home, but I had my own radio and when my parents moved to Washington D.C. in late 1979 and left me behind for six months with friends to complete eighth grade, I started listening to pop music most every night when I went to bed. In my new home, this was no sin.
I put the radio under my pillow and learned there were millions of people out there like me who suffered from loneliness, dislocation and disconnection.
Three years later, I bought my first cassette tapes (through those eight tapes for 1c offers from Columbia House) such as Air Supply’s Greatest Hits, Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits, Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, and the Mommas and the Poppas Greatest hits. Then I no longer depended on the radio to give me what I needed, now I truly had instant comfort, I could just put on the song I needed to hear in the moment and be swept away to a better world.
I could just sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong, sing of good things not bad, sing of happy not sad. I could sing of love there could be, I could sing for you and for me.

1977 EATING BETWEEN MEALS

I grew up a Seventh-Day Adventist, which has more focus on minute behaviors than other Protestants.
One of the big sins I was warned about as a child was eating between meals.
As Gary D. Strunk wrote in the October 1981 issue of Ministry (magazine for Adventist pastors): “…eating between meals can have as dire a consequence to the quality of health and the length of life as smoking. That’s why God in His mercy, His kindness, and His efforts to heal us before we get sick has told us that “never should a morsel of food pass the lips between meals,” “not even an apple, a nut, or any kind of fruit” (Counsels on Diet and Foods, pp. 181, 182). These practices depress the spirits, demoralize the attitude, and contribute to early death.”
Other Adventist sins included:
* Playing cards or chess or checkers
* Movies
* Plays
* Pop music
* Cities
* Caffeine
* Nicoteine
* Meat
* Candy
I was always pretty skeptical of the divinity of these commandments. They seemed extreme to me. Extremely stupid.
I don’t think I had much trouble as a child seeing the world differently from my family (meaning my father, the Seventh-Day Adventist theologian). What I’m still trying to sort out through psycho-therapy are those reflexive unthinking habits I took on as a child that don’t serve me.
When I was a year old, my mother was diagnosed with bone cancer and over the next three years, she withered away and died. During that time, the three kids got farmed out so my dad could properly care for his wife and for his work.
While I was living with different people for those three years, some of them bloody awful, I learned to survive and to see the world my own way.
When the family got back together in 1970, I didn’t just snap back to the Ford way of doing things. I didn’t want to get exiled again, so I learned to conform behaviorally, but from my earliest memories, I always did what I wanted when I could get away with it.
In those earliest years, I wasn’t particularly good at getting away with it.
I remember going to kindergarten when I was about five, and on the ride home, all the kids were given cookies. I ate some.
When it was found out (I had committed two sins — eating between meals and eating cookies), I got a beating I’ve never forgotten.
It wasn’t the last time I got hit for eating between meals.
As a preacher’s kid, people in my Adventist community would often rush to tell on me for my sins. It seemed like I couldn’t do anything publicly without my parents finding out. If I was disruptive in Sabbath School, my parents found out. If I cursed, my parents found out. If I ate between meals, my parents found out.
When I moved with my parents to Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley at age 11 in 1977, I noticed that fewer people told on me. Maybe this was a healthier community than Avondale College, where I grew up? Or maybe I just got better at hiding what I did from those who’d tell on me?
I started reading books at age eight, many of them recommended by my dad. I had no problem telling him about the ones I loved and the ones I didn’t care for. I developed a worldview different my father’s. I cared primarily about this world, not the next. I cared about Western civilization. I thought it was superior to the alternatives. My heroes were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, worldly men, not Christian missionaries.
As Desmond Ford‘s son, I got more religion than I wanted growing up, and so as my life went along and I got more control of my own time, the less religion I practiced. I never got out of the house just so I could be alone with my Maker. Rather, I’d tell my parents I was going to a Bible study on a Friday night and go to a basketball game instead.
I always believed in God and the divine inspiration of the Bible (except for a flirtation with atheism from 19-22) but I didn’t take my own religion of Seventh-Day Adventism too seriously. It seemed withdrawn from the world, quiet.
I didn’t see my dad’s way of life as a happy one and I didn’t want to imitate it.
I remember my dad’s students at Avondale College threw a big going away party in our yard in April 1977. It was at night. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I wanted to join in the festivities, and so I ate a piece of bread to fit in. And I freakin’ got caught and punished for eating between meals.
So we moved to PUC in May 1977 and dad introduced me to the library there where I spent that summer. I didn’t know anyone, so I spent my days reading books, mainly on wars and American history. Eventually, I started leafing through every issue of Time, Newsweek, Life and Sports Illustrated magazines.
I memorized jokes without knowing fully what they meant. One was about the wonders of the knight. He could do all sorts of wonderful things, including scaling the walls of nunneries. I remember the ladies, including my mom, were quite appalled at that one. I don’t think I fully got at age 11 that the primary reason men would scale the walls of nunneries was not to eat between meals but rather to rape women.
At that age, I would’ve rather eaten between meals.
I’ve never had a relationship with God. I’d talk to God about what was on my mind at times, but He never talked back. I sometimes got a ghostly sense of His presence. The further I’d try to run from Him, I remember feeling pulled back.
As I got into all sorts of dangerous reporting assignments for my blogs during my 20s and 30s, I kept feeling a force pulling me back from the edge. I had a sense the force was God. Or perhaps it was just my imprinting.
When I started 12-stepping for sex addiction in 2011, I realized I needed to get serious about seeking a relationship with God. That’s been awkward.
I’ve always wanted to do my own thing. I hated the idea of surrendering my life to God. I was attracted to Judaism in my 20s because it seemed like religious humanism, that people had more of a role than in Christianity.

1977 THE NOTE

“My therapist says I’m driven to marginalize myself wherever I go,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it is Hollywood or Judaism or journalism. I either have to be the leader or in my grasping for leadership, I marginalize myself. I don’t relate to people in a normal way.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I could give you lots of good stories, lots of good reasons,” I said. “I’ve built them up over the years. I’ve accumulated them as self-defense. I could tell you it is because of my devotion to my craft, to writing and to art and to the transcendent. I could tell you it’s because I’m a heroic truth-seeker. And I’ve believed these things. I still do.
“I’ve thrown away my life. I’ve exchanged what was valuable for grandiose delusions.”
“Why do you marginalize yourself?”
“It’s because I’m afraid that if I were to relate to people with an open heart, if I did it without throwing up barriers between us, then people might reject me for who I am. I’ve thrown up so many obstacles to people getting to know the real me because I’m scared to death that I could not handle it if I was rejected for who I really am. So I write a blog and I do outrageous things and when people reject me for these externals, it is not nearly so painful if they chose to reject me after getting to know me.”
I had a shot at a normal life. I had one brief opportunity for happiness. And I let it slip through my fingers because I was afraid to be known for who I really was.
I moved to Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley with my parents in the summer of 1977. I entered sixth grade that September.
Here was my great opportunity to move up in social status. When you move to a new town, people don’t necessarily know that you were regarded as a loser where you came from. They don’t know you weren’t invited to the cool parties. They don’t know you’re not cool. They don’t know you’re insecure and needy. They might just think you’re interesting.
I think that’s what happened. Somehow, I must’ve made a good impression on the hottest girl in the class — Cindy Anderson. Or perhaps it was just a miracle of divine grace.
I’ve never been much interested in faith, hope, love, grace, faith and all that Christian crap, but perhaps this sparkling moment in time I’m about to describe is an argument for divine intervention in our daily lives.
So here I am the new kid at school. I don’t really know anyone in my class. I’m needy and insecure. What I’ve got going for me is a cool accent.
I’m eleven years old and increasingly interested in girls. I was fascinated byLipsmacker. They were these tubes of lip gloss that the girls would rub on their lips and make them shiny and smelling of fruit.
I think Cindy used to diligently apply Strawberry Lipsmacker.
She might’ve been taller than me. She had a symmetrical face and clear skin. She had long shiny brown hair that flowed behind her when she ran. And she could run fast.
She was more subdued than me, more ladylike. I just loved to look at her and to dream about her. I yearned to be close to her.
Doesn’t the Torah talk about Isaac finding comfort in Rebekkah after his mother’s death? That’s what Cindy could’ve been for me — a chance to be normal, to reveal my true self, and to merge with another.
One afternoon, Cindy walked by my desk and dropped me a note. It read, “Will you go with me?”
It was the first note anyone had dropped on my desk at my new school. It might as well have been an atomic bomb. I was blown away. I blushed. My heart pounded. I had what I wanted, who I wanted, in my grasp and yet I was afraid to act. I was afraid to confess to Cindy that I wanted to go with her too.
(There was this time in second grade where I was swimming with a friend on a hot day and we were offered ice cream. I said no even though it was what I wanted most. I don’t know why I keep saying no to what I want most.)
I couldn’t look at her for a couple of days and then I started teasing her awfully. I was really mean. I was merciless. I kept it up day after day.
There was a guy in the grade above us who often walked home with Cindy. I think his name was Mark Friegal.
One day, he got tired of me teasing him about Cindy and he chased me. I ran away and I finally got tired and he caught up to me and explained that there was nothing going on between him and Cindy and I should stop teasing both of them.
I did.
After a few months, I came to my senses, and summoned the courage to drop a note on Cindy’s desk asking her, “Would you like to go with me?”
She quickly dropped a note back, “I don’t!!!!!”
I was devastated. All those exclamation marks. I told my closest friends about what had happened and swore I’d never love a girl again.
Cindy left town after sixth grade. I’ve never seen or heard from her since. I wonder if she’s still hot.
My favorite movie is Cinema Paradiso. It’s about a kid in a small town in Italy who falls in love with a girl and with the cinema. His mentor realizes he will never achieve great things if he settles down with the girl, and so he arranges to send the boy away.
He becomes a great movie director. He sleeps with a lot of hot chicks.
One day, he’s summoned to come home for his mother’s funeral. And there he meets the girl he once loved and has an opportunity to make peace with his past.
I want that opportunity too. I bollixed up so many chances. Cindy Anderson was mine for the taking and I was too scared to reach for her. Surely it’s not too late?
Over the past nine years, I’ve twice put myself back in Seventh-Day Adventist land. I have no belief in the distinctive beliefs of the church, but I have an eternal faith in the beauty of Adventist girls and smelling their Lipsmacker makes me feel young again. I feel like I am sitting in my desk in sixth grade and the most beautiful girl in the class has just dropped me a note asking me to go with her.
This time I’ll say yes.

MY FIRST POP SONG

One day in 1978, I think, when I was about 12, I was in the living room of our apartment at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley and the radio was on and across the airwaves came Sing a Song by The Carpenters.
It’s the first pop song I remember and it immediately changed my mood. Jolts of rhythm surged through me and I felt like singing and dancing even though as the son of a Seventh-Day Adventist evangelist and Bible scholar, I knew that singing pop songs and dancing were sins and forbidden in my home. My older brother and sister had many fights over this with my dad. As the youngest child, and the most passive, I had a more mellow upbringing. My step-mother was 18 years younger than my dad, they married when I was four, after my mom died from cancer, and my step-mum didn’t mind some pop music.
In 1972, the Seventh-Day Adventist church issued the following guidelines about music:
The Seventh-day Adventist Church has come into existence in fulfillment of prophecy to be God’s instrument in a worldwide proclamation of the Good News of salvation… The lives of those who accept this responsibility must be as distinctive as their message. This calls for total commitment by each church member to the ideals and objectives of the Church.
Music should:
1. Bring glory to God and assist us in acceptably worshiping Him (1 Cor 10:31).
2. Ennoble, uplift, and purify the Christian’s thoughts (Phil 4:8; Patri¬archs and Prophets, p. 594).
3. Effectively influence the Christian in the development of Christ’s character in his life and in that of others (MS 57, 1906).
4. Have a text (words, lyric, message) which is in harmony with the scriptural teachings of the Church (Review and Herald. June 6, 1912).
5. Reveal a compatibility between the message conveyed by the words and the music, avoiding a mixture of the sacred and the profane.
6. Shun theatricality and prideful display
…Certain musical forms, such as jazz, rock, and their related hybrid forms, are considered by the Church as incompatible with these principles.
Regarding dancing, the Church held: “In the Bible there is no trace of dancing by men or women in the worship services of the Temple, the synagogue, or the early church. This absence can hardly be attributed to negligence, because the Bible gives clear instructions regarding the ministry of music in the Temple. The Levitical choir was to be accompanied only by stringed instruments, the harp and the lyre (2 Chron 5:13; 1 Chron 16:42). Percussion instruments like drums and tambourines, which were commonly used for making dance music, were clearly omitted. What was true for the Temple was later also true for the synagogue and the early church. No dancing or entertainment music was ever allowed in God’s house.”
I don’t think my dad was home when I first heard Sing a Song or I would not have been able to enjoy it. I could never enjoy anything in his presence of which he did not approve. I’m not sure I can to this day.
I had no problem taking a different position on music and sin than my father, I just didn’t want to fight it out in my own home. I knew that one day, I’d be on my own.
So I guess it was just mum and me when I heard this delicious song float along and I felt glorious. Happy. Surprised. And I realized that there were things in the world outside of the church that could bring me instant comfort. I realized that if I could just find my own space, I could listen to songs I loved and feel everything I wanted to feel and that nobody could tell me that I was sinning.
Until this time, I’m not sure there was anything or anyone in my life I could always count on for comfort. Because of this, I loved to escape into books and fantasy and running and writing, but this music was like nothing else, it spoke to my heart, it was instantly appealing, instantly accessible, and instantly healing. It talked about all the things I wanted such as love and love and love.
It would’ve been unfathomable for me at this stage to purchase any music, anything that was not Christian nor classical was not welcome in my home, but I had my own radio and when my parents moved to Washington D.C. in late 1979 and left me behind for six months with friends to complete eighth grade, I started listening to pop music most every night when I went to bed. In my new home, this was no sin.
I put the radio under my pillow and learned there were millions of people out there like me who suffered from loneliness, dislocation and disconnection.
Three years later, I bought my first cassette tapes (through those eight tapes for 1c offers from Columbia House) such as Air Supply’s Greatest Hits, Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits, Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, and the Mommas and the Poppas Greatest hits. Then I no longer depended on the radio to give me what I needed, now I truly had instant comfort, I could just put on the song I needed to hear in the moment and be swept away to a better world.
I could just sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong, sing of good things not bad, sing of happy not sad. I could sing of love there could be, I could sing for you and for me.

1979 THE LUNCH THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

In May 1977, when I was eleven, we moved to the Seventh-Day Adventist Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley. I liked it there and I didn’t want to leave.
I think it was in December of 1979 that my classmate Andy Muth invited me to his home for Sabbath lunch. It was the first time a classmate had invited me over on the Sabbath. Andy didn’t want to. His mother made him. He was scared of my big mouth. I was a verbally aggressive kid. I enjoyed cutting people down.
I was very excited by the invite. It sucks when you’re not popular and you have to spend most of your life on your own.
Andy’s home had a whole different emotional temperature than mine. You have to understand that my father is a great man. He has two PhDs and he’s a gifted evangelist. He can mesmerize a crowd. Thousands of people believe that he’s changed their life.
So dad’s a double-threat. He can write academic books and he can speak to the common man about the great issues of life.
Dad didn’t just live his principles on the pulpit. He embodied them each day. I never saw him lose his temper and act out of control. He’s very controlled. Dedicated. He feels a mission to show people Christ crucified.
Dad didn’t mess around with his life. He didn’t waste it playing games or pursuing hobbies. He was a good father. He’d play Monopoly with me when I was a kid and kick a ball around for exercise.
My home was often cold. Literally. Dad believed in the virtues of fresh air, even in winter. He’d wrap up in blankets and leave the windows open and encouraged us to follow his example. If I’d shut the windows, he’d later come around and open them. In such a battle, the one who opens windows always wins. It’s easier to let warm air out than to keep it in.
Today I love a warm home. I keep things in my apartment a few degrees warmer than most people like. It’s my over-reaction to my childhood.
I hated being cold. I constantly dreamed I’d be adopted by a warm family, yet, whenever I thought through the specifics, I always concluded that the benefits of my own home outweighed the disadvantages. I loved having a dad who was a big shot and who was accomplishing great things in the world and knew great people and knew how to unlock books and explain important matters to thousands of people.
My father lived by the dicta that great people discuss ideas, not people. Our table talk was about philosophy, history and my father’s theological battles. Ordinary matters, such as girls, were forbidden (not explicitly, just by my father’s stern example, which my stepmother generally fell in with).
My parents did their best by me. They gave me far more than they had growing up. They loved me and they disciplined me and they gave me guidance about how to lead a good life. They connected me with God and with a religious community. I have no complaints. The things they forbade in the home and that I later came to enjoy, well, my enjoyment was all the sweeter for having once been denied.
So there I was in the Muth home after church that Sabbath afternoon. It was my first time there even though I’d known the family since I arrived in America the summer of 1977.
The first thing that struck me was the absence of tension. The two parents and their two kids were constantly kidding each other. These were fundamentally happy people. They weren’t constantly striving to be great. They weren’t weighed down by intellectual disputes. They didn’t regard the outside world as an enemy.
I loved the temperature in the Muth home. It was warm. It was emotionally warm. It was physically warm. It was a warm happy place.
It was probably a cold winter’s day outside but inside was warm and welcoming.
My dad was dedicated to the health message of the Seventh-Day Adventist church. For my own good, I wasn’t allowed to drink with my meals. No water. No juice. And certainly no soda.
Due to its high fat content, peanut butter was severely limited. Just a thin spread was all I was allowed.
On this day, however, that all changed. I could drink all the juice I wanted. I could eat all the peanut butter I wanted. I could eat and drink anything I wanted.
Religion does’t have to deform a family. It doesn’t have to end all pleasure in life. It doesn’t have to cut you off from those around you. It can be an aid to a good life.
You probably don’t understand my upbringing. Religion was a terribly swift sword. My parents basically lost contact with their families when they converted to Seventh-Day Adventism in their teens and took on this weird life.
I grew up not knowing what a niece or a nephew were. I didn’t know what constituted a cousin. I was really shaky about uncle and aunt. I had almost no contact with my relatives and those few times I did, it was very awkward. They were secular and my family was religious and we seemed to have nothing in common.
I didn’t understand home and family as happy places. I was more familiar with them as battle stations. They were instruments for regrouping before renewing one’s righteous assault on the wickedness of the world.
The Muth family, however, was completely different. They made me feel happy, a most unfamiliar feeling.
Until I met the Muth family, I felt like I was on the outside of life looking in. I was lost in fantasies of grandeur. I was terribly lonely and unhappy.
Once I was in with the Muths, I got to live life from the inside. I knew that no matter what happened, there would always be a place for me.
Living life from the inside means you’re connected to other people and that what you do matters. You affect people. You matter. You have a role in the play and a place at the table.
Mrs. Muth said she wanted me to be able to finish eighth grade with my class and that if I needed to, I could stay with their family.
I’ve been the recipient of much kindness in my life but I don’t think anything ever touched me as deeply as this. I was dreading the move to D.C. I didn’t want to leave my classmates before graduation. More than that, I wanted to be part of a normal loving family.
I didn’t get to stay with the Muths through June of 1980 when there was no escaping a trip back east. My family had arranged for me to stay somewhere else. Still, I got to be friends with Andy and spend a lot of time at his home over the next five years.
These were the happiest times of my life. Though my family moved 2.5 hours drive away in the fall of 1980 to Auburn, I kept coming back to PUC whenever I could to stay with the Muths.
I was a completely different person away from my parents. In my dad’s shadow, I was a skeleton of a human being. He was the lead actor and I was just an extra. Away from my parents, I was the lead in my own movie.
I always felt giddy when I was on my way to PUC and I always felt sad when I left. In my teenage perspective, one place was warm and full of community. The other place was remote and lonely. In one place I belonged and in the other place I was just serving time. One place was happy and one place was sad. One home was tense and one home rang laughter. One home constantly had people over and one home didn’t.

March 30, 1981

On the day Reagan was shot, I was walking home from the bus stop in Auburn to my home more than a mile away.
I was just off Interstate 80. The day was hot. I passed by a car parked beside the road. Inside, I saw a man flogging himself.
I’d never seen this before. I’d never done this myself. I was shocked and appalled.
I walked on. A minute later, the guy drives up beside me and asks me if I want a ride.
“No, thanks,” I said and walked on, scared to death.
I had never encountered anything like this. This was not the way Seventh-Day Adventists behaved.
Just then, some Adventist friends drove up and offered me a ride. I gratefully accepted.
A couple of years later, I was walking in to town along a nearby lonely road on a Sunday afternoon when a man drove up beside me and said, “You wouldn’t be interested in a blowjob would you?”
I said, “No thanks!” and walked on.
I told some friends about this and they said, “You should’ve asked him, ‘Where’s your wife?’”
I don’t think there’s much that’s more appalling than a sexually out of control man.

1982 – MY FIRST LOVE

Love first hit me in third grade. Debbie Hick was a girl in my class. She had red hair and freckles and was solidly built. She was smart and tough and funny. I loved her.
I never told her that. I never made much time with Debbie. I just admired her from across the room.
Love was Debbie and then Cindy in sixth grade, Denise in seventh and eighth, and then, just before 11th grade, the first girl to love me back was Rainy.
Growing up Seventh-Day Adventist, about the only way I could touch girls was with violence. We’d play keepaway games in the pool. Each guy would pair up with his girl. And then it would be guys against the girls. And we’d toss the ball back and forth. But it was all an excuse for us to feel each other up in the Pacific Union College (PUC) pool.
But I was pretty awkward. I got pretty violent and pretty competitive with the girls. I remember the guys would tell me to calm down and to just use the opportunities to feel her up.
I was about 17 before I could make-out with a girl. Prior to this, I only got to touch them while rough-housing.
Around age 11, I decided that I would dedicate my life to getting laid. This did not happen for another 11 years but at least I had a goal.
I was about nine when I started daydreaming about girls. For three years at the Avondale College Primary School, I thought about this redheaded freckled girl in my class named Debbie Hick. I don’t normally go for redheads but she just seemed so capable, so smart and tough and funny. I loved her.
I never told her that. I never made much time with Debbie. I just admired her from across the room.
I like capable people period. I have fantasies that they will rescue me. I like to surround myself with capable people because I often feel so incapable of looking after myself.
Love was Debbie and then Cindy in sixth grade, Denise, and then Kris in high school…
During those years, I thought that touching girls was the greatest thing on earth (now I know that it is studying Torah). I was so desperate for affection but so mixed up when it came. I was awkward. I was rough. I was frightened. I often felt like a social outcast, that I’d have to totally transform myself to get a foxy chick. I was always going on these kicks to transform myself so I could land a foxy chick.
Come to think of it, I’m still doing this. I’m a teacher of Alexander Technique. That should really impress the ladies. The money and applause just flows in.
There was a girl in fifth grade who liked me. In response, I teased her unmercifully, I put tacks on her chair, and at times I kicked her. After I had once been particularly horrid, she said to me through her tears, “One day you’ll learn what it is like to love someone who kicks you.”
Come to think of it, there were various girls who liked me in elementary school. Some of them I even liked back. But all of them? I drove them away with my deliberate cruelty. I was afraid of connection.
The first time I fellin love was the summer before 11th grade. My girl was Lorraine aka “Rainy” (she was a year below me in school, we both loved Barry Manilow). She was soft and cute and feminine. She made my heart thump. She made me want to be a better man.
When I was with Rainy, I felt connected. I felt like I was living from the inside. I felt alive. She was my missing half. So much of life I missed out on without her guidance and wisdom. Life with Rainy was twice as good as regular life and my pain was halved.
Rainy was very round. She wasn’t fat. She was just round with chubby cheeks. I was very angular. I felt absorbed in her (in a chaste way). She’d duck underwater at the PUC college pool and make these chipmunk faces. I adored her.
We’d gone to school together for three years at PUC Elementary School but we’d barely spoken because she was a grade below me.
I spent the summer of 1982 (between my sophomore and junior years at Placer High School) at PUC and got a job with the camp for kids. Rainy worked in custodial. I saw her every day when her rounds brought her to the gym. We started talking and flirting and I became obsessed with her.
It took too much courage for me to call Rainy on the phone, though once I called her number and when her dad answered, I blasted Barry Manilow.
“Who’s this?” he said. “Disco Jerry?”
Then I hung up. They didn’t have caller ID in those days.
Rainy and I never talked about theology. My dad was a controversial theologian but Rainy didn’t care. We never got intellectual. Instead, we kidded around. Rainy would pull these adorable chipmunk faces. I liked the way she smelled. I liked her simple approach to life. There was no artifice with Rainy. She was just a nice girl. Not terribly complicated. Not terribly beautiful. But a kind girl with all her fingers and toes.
She was my first girlfriend though we never used that language. We never spoke about our relationship. Girls were terra incognita to me. Rainy was my way in to this secret world.
Having her in my life made me feel whole. I obsessed about her. I thought about her constantly. I talked about her. I worried about the state of things between us. By having her in my life, I felt like I had crossed the Rubicon into the winner’s circle. Many of my peers had girlfriends. Now I finally did. I felt cool. With it. That I had become somebody to gossip about.
We used to go to the PUC pool on many afternoons and were quite affectionate (though I was frightened to kiss her that first summer), rubbing in liberal quantities of suntan lotion on the other’s soft skin (one of the first time I’d done that on a regular basis), much to the amusement of the older folks around. I got quite a reputation. I was a fast Adventist! My friends called her “Action Jackson” because of our innocent antics. I was known as “Hans Ford” because I tried to look like a guy who knew how to touch a girl.
Sometimes our touching was too much for me and I had to lie on my stomach on the cement so my excitement wouldn’t show.
Our first summer together, we never kissed. I was too afraid. I only knew how to dunk her in the pool and to twist her nipples and other violent displays of affection.
I remember there was this younger girl in our circle who was very forward. She liked to grab our privates and twist them. “She’s gonna get raped one day,” my friend said.
I got the idea from her twistings to twist Rainy’s nipples. I only did this once or twice. It was frightening to be so transgressive.
So how did I know she loved me? Because of the way her eyes shone when she saw me. Because of the way she laughed at my jokes. Because of her smile. Because she didn’t run away. Because she talked to me day in and day out. Because our conversation was never forced. Because she let me rub suntan lotion on her back at the college pool. Because she answered my letters. And the next summer? Because she made out with me. Rainy was not the type of girl to make out with someone she didn’t love.
Once in the PUC pool that first summer, I was frolicking with Rainy, when this little black boy wearing a face mask popped up from under the water and said to me, “Why is your penis sticking out like a lance?”
I’ve never been so embarrassed.
Rainy let out a yelp and swam away.
I dunked the little black boy and swam after her, trying to talk my way out of my embarrassment. “Stupid kid,” I said. Then I jumped out of the pool to show that I wasn’t hard, that I hadn’t been stalking her through the water with a loaded gun in my pants, pointing at her, ready to go off.
We grew quiet and never discussed what had happened. It took a while for her to meet my eye.
I never did discuss erections with Rainy. We frolicked like puppies with their balls removed. At age 16, I was obsessed with sex. I loved the porn. But I kept those urges separate from my urge to love a real live girl. These disparate feelings only came together for me for the first time at age 22 at UCLA when I took on my first lover.
In high school, we all knew that guys got erections, but it was mortifying, particularly in the stiff upper-lip Seventh-Day Adventist context, to have it pointed out publicly in front of the girl you loved.
Here’s the closest analogy I can think of — imagine someone had pointed out to her in front of me, “You’re bleeding all over the pool.” How would she feel? Everyone knew that teenage girls menstruated, but when your blood flow was pointed out publicly, it was embarrassing.
Was I afraid that she wouldn’t like me after that? No. I realized the event had no great objective meaning. I just found it mortifying, the most mortifying thing that ever happened to me. It was like I had lost control and peed my pants publicly.
Did I get mad at my body? No. I understood that my erection was normal. It was no sin to have an erection. What was unacceptable in my culture was to talk about such things. You didn’t point out someone’s boner. It was uncool. We were Seventh-Day Adventists. Sister White didn’t talk about erections and neither should we.
We weren’t Jews who could talk about everything without shame, including killing the Son of God.
If this exact same incident had happened in a different context, in a more context where we had joked around about such things, it would not have been as embarrassing.
I have no sense of self. Everything I feel is conditioned by the people around me. The exact same things around different people evoke very different emotional reactions in me.
If I’m talking to you and you find the erection incident hilarious, I’ll likely find it hilarious too. If you find it cute, I’ll find it cute. If you find it embarrassing, I’ll find it embarrassing. I’m always looking for mirroring, for other people to tell me who I am, which inevitably exhausts them, causing them to put limits on me, which I take badly.
In late August 1982, my mother arrived to take me home to Auburn (almost three hours drive away).
Rainy worked as a janitor. I went to her little office in the gym to say goodbye. I was emotional but abrupt. Just before leaving, I grabbed her and kissed her on the cheek.
We began exchanging letters. Every couple of months, I made it back to PUC to see her and my other friends. One weekend, Rainy told me she was going to a concert that Saturday night with some college guy. I made no reaction but I was mad. I was jealous. I didn’t know what to do with my fears so I stopped writing to her.
Months went by. Rainy broke down and wrote me about how hurt she was by my silence. I felt good and strong that she loved me this much but I didn’t reply.
That Junior year of high school, I finally learned how to kiss.
I went back to PUC the summer before 12th grade. I kept running into Rainy. I slowly let down my guard. One day, I walked her home. After we crossed a log over a stream, I grabbed her and kissed her on the lips for the first time. We made out for about five minutes and then took a break to breathe.
“We could’ve done this last summer,” she said.
I didn’t explain that I had been too scared, too inexperienced, too awkward. We kept french-kissing. Long, slow kisses, just the perfect kisses for a summer’s day. She had soft full cheeks and I loved to pinch them. I felt like a grown-up. We’d walk through the woods around PUC and hold hands.
We never discussed why I had stopped writing to her.
I kept making out with her for a few weeks. I once got her back to the home where I was staying. I got her into my room. I got her on to my bed. I began violently making out with her while trying to take off her clothes. I felt like she owed me since she’d gone to concerts with the college guy, but she wouldn’t let me go anywhere with her. She kept saying, “I’m not that kind of girl.”
For some reason, I decided to take it as a personal slam. Frankly, I was still hurt about the college guy, and now that I’d gone as far as I could with her, I let her go.
I felt like I could do better, that I could get with someone smarter and finer.
The spell had been broken. I didn’t want to be hurt again. I was a coward. A lifelong pattern.
At age 17, I thought that love and the skills I learned with it would give me a permanent feeling of connection and confidence, that I had taken the great leap forward and moved irretrievably into the winner’s circle of life. Winners had girlfriends. I’d had a girlfriend. Ergo, I was a winner!
I was wrong. I had no success to speak of with women for the next six years. All I had were my memories of Rainy and my unrequited fantasies about other girls.
What does love feel like for me? A flutter in the heart, an empty feeling in the stomach like when you’re reaching out with your foot and the stair isn’t where you thought it was and you start falling through space. Love is that time falling through space until you crash into reality. Love is a fantasy. It is a projection on to people of magical qualities and then blaming them when they disappoint you.
Love does not disappear for me when I obtain the object of my desire. It changes. It deepens. It becomes more complicated and shot-through with hate and ambivalence.
Love expands my world. I’ll try more things. I’ll meet new people. I’ll get new ideas. I’ll discard old ideas and old habits that were holding me back.
Love improves the quality of everything in my life.
Love is dangerous because it sheds my defenses.
Love makes my life more intense.
The intensity of love has not diminished as I have aged.
With love, I always think I’ve permanently kicked things up to a higher level. And it’s always a delusion. When the love ends, so do my delusions and my normality is even more painful because I’ve tasted what it is like to be abnormally fine. I’ve had some borrowed functioning for a few months and mistaken it for personal growth.
I always felt stronger after attaining love, more psychically able to deal with life. I was secure now that I had the mirroring I needed. And it was always a delusion.
I learn from each relationship but I’m still essentially the same.
What is love? That which enables you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t (for good and for bad).
Love is the elixir that gets one out of an unwanted self. Love is the balm that heals all wounds. Love is a drug that takes away pain.
Love is cool. The cool successful popular people have love and when you have love, you are cool. You have been validated by somebody else. She has tied her fate with yours.
Love is when you devote yourself to another and she to you (though love is much deeper and more lasting when you are both devoted to causes greater than yourselves). Love is when you can tell the other person everything and she won’t use it against you. Love is trust and generosity.
I feel more comfortable talking about how I’ve exploited women than how I’ve loved women. I find it easier talking about my bad self than my good self. I have these delusions about myself as a ruthless exploiter of women. I find that status easier to claim than that of a needy boy insatiably seeking nurture. Would you rather be thought cruel or pathetic? I’d rather be thought cruel.
If I call myself bad, then you can’t hurt me. You can’t shame me. I’m protected! I love having my walls up.
My mindset might have something to do with being a preacher’s kid, or just being the typical addict with the conviction that he is irretrievably bad, that his needs will never get met through ordinary life, but that there’s a substance or a process that removes his pain.
I’m a nurturing attentive boyfriend. I give what I want to receive. That’s how I know how to nurture. And from my dogs. I liked how they would bound up to me and lick me.
I call every day, even a couple of times a day, just to check in. I can listen to her for hours without judgment and without giving advice. I like to stroke my girlfriends. I like to stroke them physically. I like to stroke them emotionally. I like to stroke them spiritually.

THE BLIND SIDE

I love this movie. I identify with its big black protagonist.
Like him, I’ve often felt lost.
I often walk through the cold without a coat.
I remember running up to Young Israel of Century City one Shabbos afternoon. It was cold and I didn’t have a coat.
“We’ll have to get you a coat,” said my friend.
I could’ve gotten myself a coat but I’m not practical in that way.
I tend to have a disparaging view of myself and of everyone else. I’m not the type to drape myself in a warm coat on a cold day.
I’ll never forget something Neil Strauss once said about rock stars: “They have a wild glint in their eye and can mesmerize a crowd. They’re also incapable of doing anything for themselves.”
That’s me. I’ve certainly got that wild glint.
The coach in this movie says, “Most kids from bad situations can’t wait to be violent and that comes out on the field.”
My violence comes out on my blog. I can’t wait to tear someone’s head off, particularly when it is a religious leader abusing his authority.
I was a pretty lost kid but I liked living at Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley. Then my dad got called to Washington D.C. in late 1979 to defend his controversial theological views.
I thought I was about to get snatched from eighth grade halfway through.
One Sabbath morning, this kid in my class became friendly for the first time. His mother had asked him to ask me if I wanted to stay with their family to finish eighth grade.
“No way,” said the kid. “You ask him.”
He was afraid of my cutting remarks.
So I was brought back to this family for Sabbath lunch and the mom asked if I’d like to stay with them and I got very excited. I said yes.
This family kinda adopted me.
My older siblings are eight to ten years older than me. I’ve basically grown up as an only child. But this family had kids my own age. I got to feel what it was like to be part of a normal family.
I’m not normal. I’m not good at taking care of myself. I remember driving down to UCLA a month early in 1988. I had no place to stay. I didn’t want to spend money on a hotel. So I lived out of my car for a month and slept in the bushes behind a softball field at UCLA.
A normal person would’ve made arrangements for a place to sleep.
When I moved back to Los Angeles in 1994, I lived out of my car for several months. I had a friend at UCLA who was going to invite me to live with him but he found me sloppy and irresponsible.
I could’ve gotten a job and an apartment, but I preferred to live out of my car and to go to acting classes and auditions.
I’ve always been convinced that I’ll be a big success one day and would be able to find people who could do a better job of taking care of me than I can do for myself so I can concentrate on what I do best.
The way people look at the Michael Oher character in this movie, that’s how they’ve looked at me.
I love that scene early in the movie where Sandra Bullock asks Michael Oher why he’s headed for the school gym late at night.
Michael says, “Because it’s warm.”
That’s why I like attention — because it’s warm.
Like Big Mike, I was a lousy student in school. But I was blessed with some teachers who turned me on.
I was a lousy Jew. But I was blessed with some rabbis who turned me on.
“Do you have any place to stay tonight?” Sandra asks Mike.
He nods his head.
She says, “Don’t you dare lie to me!”
He shakes his head.
Then she takes him home and makes him all warm and comfy.
I loved that.
Like Michael Oher, I’ve always had the good sense to surround myself with good people, even when I didn’t know how to interact with them.
I don’t enjoy therapy any more. It used to be my favorite time of the week, but that’s changed.
I used to charge into therapy eager to regale my therapist with my adventures. I’d say things like, “You wouldn’t believe the blowjob I got last night!”
I don’t tell so many stories any more. I just find myself spending most of therapy swimming in icky emotional waters. Sticky, oily water, filled with bugs.
I remember once watching these hot chicks wrestling in jello. That’s what my therapy feels like these days, like I’m wrestling in jello.

MY NICKNAME IN HIGH SCHOOL WAS THE RAPIST

After Torah Talk, I was lying in bed listening to Libera.
I started thinking about Rochelle, a cute brunette I rode the bus with for part of my senior year at Placer High School in Auburn, CA. She was a sophomore and on the gymnastics team. We did a little verbal jousting most mornings.
One Friday night, I told my Seventh-Day Adventist parents that I was going to a Bible study, and instead snuck the video camera out of my school against the explicit instructions of my teacher and joined the girl’s gymnastic’s team for a competition in Sacramento — all because I wanted to be close to Rochelle.
I videotaped the meet for later broadcast on our school’s community access channel on the local cable TV.
The thing went late. I found myself lying on a pillow. In it, I found three quarters. I started to pocket them and then stopped. Holy cow, I was almost a thief. That’s what going to public school had done to my morals.
On the ride home, I got things rowdy on the bus. Cool controlled rowdy so the adults, the coaches, wouldn’t shut things down. When I noticed them laughing, I started tickling people, and keeping an eye on their reactions and making sure I stayed within their good graces, I eventually moved my hands to Rochelle, the object of my affection. I started subtly, just three fingers rubbing her ribs over her uniform, and I watched for her reaction. She squealed, laughed, gasped for air, and pushed me away. I thought this was all good fun so I put both my hands on her and increased my intensity. She yelped and ran away. If I had stopped there, I might’ve remained ahead of the game, but I chased her down the bus and tickled her repeatedly. I put my arms around her, picked her up and jostled her up and down on my lap.
For me, this was foreplay. A promise of great things to come!
The coaches laughed. Our classmates laughed. Rochelle laughed. I laughed.
I loved touching the girl I loved, and I was grateful to do it without having to first ask her out, take her to dinner, make a move, and risk all that rejection and humiliation. I was strong now and I had created an atmosphere where she couldn’t object too strongly without looking like a spoil sport.
“You’re a lot stronger than you look,” said Rochelle midway through our battle and I figured what I was doing was OK. That it would be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
I’d only had one relationship in my life (in the summers before 11th and 12th grade at Pacific Union College) and it had also started with awkward groping, tickling and tittie twisting a full year before we began kissing.
That Friday night on the bus back from Sacramento, I kept checking with the coaches and noticed they were laughing. They found me charming. I had that Australian accent.
As long as Rochelle wasn’t punching me or appealing for help from the adults, I assumed my behavior was OK.
Yet I knew that I didn’t like to be tickled by somebody stronger than me, I only liked getting flirt tickled by a girl. So, after five minutes, I quit my assault.
Rochelle looked relieved.
I wasn’t sure if she liked me more or less. I wasn’t sure what the future held for us. I felt like I had declared my intentions. It was up to her now.
I was the mighty editor of my school newspaper, the Hillmen Messenger. I did the weekly school news report on the local radio station KAHI AM 950. I was the face of our school’s cable TV channel. I was a good catch.
I got on the bus that Monday morning with trepidation. I looked at Rochelle with hope but she turned. Our friend Rob Stutzman shook his head at me and told me privately, “She doesn’t like you anymore.”
And she didn’t.
Another mutual friend — I guess he liked Rochelle as much as I did — later told me that she was going to the Senior Prom with Markey, the center on the basketball team. I skipped the damn thing and went camping with my buddy Shannon Anderson.
After the prom, my friend reported that Rochelle and Markey had “massive sex.” I believed the news and felt horrible. I couldn’t believe that that Southern California import had despoiled my ideal girl. To deal with my grief, I spread the news around school because I needed to talk about her and my deepest fears.
When the Placer High yearbook came out, my friend scribbled in green pen over the crotch area of Rochelle doing the splits on the beam.
She later wrote in my book: “Luke (Alias The Rapist): I sure hope you had a fun year spreading rumors about me! So sorry I didn’t sink low enough to be Hillgal of the Week. I guess I sort of ruined all you and Greg’s fun… I guess your right, you didn’t spread lies about me. Sure I had massive sex with Mark, you’re right, I was definitely the one that ATTACKED you on the bus back from championships! And I’ll never forget how you made me the star on cable TV! All those great tapes you took and most likely edited yourself. I am really glad had a fun time with that collection of yours (of tapes). Love your good, good friend, Rochelle.”
I was relieved that she hadn’t gotten it on with Markey. To an ordinary person, Rochelle’s remarks would’ve stung. For me, they felt good. They were a return to our verbal play. All was forgiven.
A few years later, I got religion, and in the summer of 1992, I sought out Rochelle. I found out she was teaching English in Japan. So I did these vocal exercises and then lay down on the floor so that my voice would get really deep and I talked to her on my dad’s tape recorder:
“Hi Rochelle, it’s Luke, your old bus buddy. I wanted to apologize for my behavior in high school. I was out of control. Yes, I did attack you on the bus back from the gymnastics championships. I thought it was just playful tickling but I realize now I went too far. I’m sorry.
“Also, I’m sorry for spreading rumors about you. There was no excuse for that. I feel bad about my behavior and that’s why I’m making this tape. I hope it finds you well. I got sick about 15 months ago. I’ve had to drop out of UCLA. The doctors call it Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Nobody knows what it really is. So I’m back in Newcastle and living with my parents and trying to figure things out. And I’m making amends to various people I’ve harmed. I’ve been humbled by life.”
I included in the tape a recording of a KAHI radio interview I’d done about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
A couple of weeks later, Rochelle replied on tape. She forgave me. She said she wasn’t any worse than a lot of other guys she knew at Placer High.
“Your voice is extremely deep. It took me a long time to adjust… From the tape of your KAHI interview, I learned much about CFS but even more about how CFS has changed your life. You’ve been given the opportunity to consider the true reasons for man’s existence and to adjust your perception of what is important in life.
“I’m glad that you went on the radio to explain your illness to people. I admit that when I first heard about CFS, I didn’t think that it was legitimate.”
She told me to call her when she got home in a few months. I did. The conversation was brief.
I had all these fantasies that she would rescue me but Rochelle had a life and it did not include me.
I have no idea what she’s doing now. I can’t get Google to tell me a damn thing, except that perhaps she lives in Chico.

1988 THE I-5 TO FREEDOM

There are few things I love more than hitting the open road. The prospect of a long drive without any obligation fills me with joy. This is change I can believe in!
Soon after I arrived in California in 1977, my family drove south on the I-5 from the Napa Valley to Anaheim where we visited Disneyland for a day. I had high expectation, high excitement, and high frustration.
My memories of that trip are sparse, mainly of heat and claustrophobia, but when I made a similar drive a decade later, it was the beginning of my present self.
Despite a relapse of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I left for UCLA on Monday afternoon, August 22, 1988 from parents’ home at 7955 Bullard Drive in Newcastle, CA, 95658. Due to my more than six months of mystery illness, my parents did not want me to go, but I was 22 years old and could do what I wanted.
I packed my 1968 purple VW Bug. Then I came back to the house and said goodbye to my dad. He walked me out to my car. He told me to drive safely. We hugged awkwardly.
The Ford men are not easy at giving and receiving affection.
“I love you dad,” I said.
“The feeling is mutual,” he said.
It’s the only time I remember telling my dad I loved him. I certainly did and do but in my home, the men did not talk directly about their emotions. We were Protestants from stiff-upper-lip Australia. We were supposed to have hearts transformed by Christ’s love, and so we weren’t supposed to have the messy emotions of hurt, jealousy, anger, lust and the like. To do so would be to indicate that one was not truly saved. One had not truly accepted God’s love.
So we spoke about our emotions in code. We were silent or just alluded to them. We might preface our rare outbursts with, “If I wasn’t a Christian…” And then we’d really let our enemies have it.
I’d become an atheist at age 18 but was still Australian WASP in my mannerisms.
After the awkward hug, I drove to Lincoln to have my teeth cleaned by family friend Dr. Daniel Badzik. Then I drove to Rocklin to fix a sprinkler problem at the home of my late boss Doug Hanzlick. By 4 p.m., I was driving south on I-80, and then connecting to the I-5 for Los Angeles.
This would be my first trip to UCLA. I believed the university would be the place where my life would finally take flight. The four years since graduating from high school had been awkward. I’d done a lot of running around in circles. In fact, all of my life had been running in circles without blasting off to the stratosphere of the smooth, popular and successful.
Before I decided to take a year off after high school to live with my brother Paul in Tannum Sands, Australia, I had planned to major in Journalism at Cal-State Fullerton.
In June 1985, I came back to live with my parents in Newcastle, still a virgin, and decided to go to Sierra Community College and figure out where to go from there. My best friend Shannon Anderson was going (after his schooling in San Diego was interrupted by the need for brain surgery for a benign tumor). He persuaded me.
In my first semester, I took an Economics class in addition to a Journalism one. Since Reagan became president in 1980 and enacted deregulation and tax cuts, the American economy had boomed and I had become fascinated by political economy.
Many journalists I knew recommended against majoring in Journalism so I decided in my first year of college to instead major in Economics.
I figured I’d go to Sac State, but one day I told my friend’s father, Bob McKee, a mentor to me, and he’d said, “You know what they say about Sac State?”
I didn’t.
So he said, “Somebody has to go there.”
I felt so small that I decided to study hard and go to UC Davis instead.
During my Spring semester of 1986, I got sick with mono. I struggled to keep up with work at KAHI/KHYL radio and school but my life was miserable. When the semester ended, I determined to get strong.
I took a job in construction and after the first few exhausting days, I started feeling strong. I loved that feeling. I could swing a pick and drive a shovel all day in the hot sun. Quickly I became a supervisor and had teams of a dozen men working under me.
That fall semester of 1986, I dropped all my classes but two so I could keep my supervisory role, keep working outside and keep feeling strong.
I quickly realized that I had made a big mistake. Working in landscaping was not as much fun in the winter. In the Spring semester of 1987, I took 18 units in addition to working part-time.
I had been accepted into UC Davis but I decided to get serious, to drop my job at the radio station, to stay an extra year at Sierra College and to take Trigonometry and Calculus classes before transferring to UCLA.
I had grown disenchanted with journalism. I found I didn’t have enough time in radio to do anything in depth. I decided an academic career would be more rewarding. I’d follow in my dad’s footsteps.
Most economists were lousy writers. I knew I was a good writer. I just had to master math and then my career would take off.
In my fall semester of 1987 at Sierra, I took 21 units and got straight As for the first time in my life. In early 1988, I was accepted into UCLA for the Fall quarter as a pre-Econ student.
Then disaster struck in February 1988 as I struggled with 24 units (many of them were unnecessary, I just took them for fun). I kept telling myself, “I’ll break through or I’ll break down. Either way, I’ll get love. I just have to keep pushing.”
I got sick. It felt like the flu but it didn’t go away in a few days. As it stretched on, it felt like a relapse of mono, except it didn’t go away in weeks or months. Finally, in March 1989, a doctor gave me the waste paper basket diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
So I was 22 years old and I knew what I wanted to do with my life. The trouble was that I too sick to do much. So I decided that I’d just keep trying and on August 22, I kept driving south on the I-5.
Along the way, I heard a familiar voice on the radio — Jack Thomas.
We’d worked together for years at KAHI/KHYL. Then one morning I came in early to help him with the news and found him drunk. He looked at me and said, “Do you know what alcoholism is?”
I’d nodded but I had never known an alcoholic before.
He was fired from his job, but the station kept him on the payroll for a few weeks so he could go to rehab.
Now as I drove south on I-5, I heard Jack giving the news on a college radio station affiliated with NPR and I thought about the different directions our lives had taken.
The grass through central California was dead and it made me feel sad. Life as I had known it was dead. My health was dead. I wasn’t that far from dead and I hadn’t even had sex yet.
Because I felt weak, I took breaks every couple of hours. As the night came on, I tried to wrap myself in a blanket and sleep, but the sprinklers came on. So I got into a conversation with some hispanic guys my age. We were outside of Bakersfield and they lived in South-Central Los Angeles. They said I should come to visit them. They had videos, pornografia. I said I would, but had no intention of straying into that part of town.
After midnight, my VW strained up the grapevine and when I got to the top and saw the big city spread out before me, I told myself, “This is where you will make it big.”
Little did I know it would take me another decade to become the Matt Drudge of porn.
I had a great deal of body tension that night. I was tired and excited and trying to find my way over unfamiliar roads. I finally took the Sunset Blvd exit and drove slowly east for a couple of miles. As I prepared to turn right on to Bellagio, a car sped by me into the university. It was probably a student who already had the lay of the land. I felt like there was nobody for miles who was as scared as I was.
When I’m scared, I slow down and consider every step.
I knew the Playboy mansion was nearby. That you could see it from certain UCLA dormitories. My friend Cheryl Hanzlick had worked there with the animals.
I turned right on De Neve Drive and right again into the first parking lot. I was a quarter mile from my future dorm Rieber Hall, but it would not open for a month. I had come to UCLA early to see a doctor in Santa Ana my mother recommended — Norman Beals, endocrinologist.
It was about 4 a.m.. With my slow driving and frequent rest stops, I had turned a journey of six hours at high speed to a 12 hour ordeal.
I sat in my car scared. Was I allowed to park here? I had no sticker. I was in the big university in the big city and I had no place to sleep for a month and no intention of paying for a hotel. I had hopes that Dr. Beals would cure me and that my time at UCLA would begin my life of sex and success.
The emotions that dominated me that trip south were fear, exhaustion, hope and confusion. Over the next ten months, these feelings wouldn’t leave as my illness held me in its iron grip until I had to finally give up and return home a beaten man in June 1989.
My ten months at UCLA were not a total failure. They set the stage for my future choices, only I didn’t know it then.
So what had I learned at university? For one thing, I lost my virginity at Rieber Hall and had my first sustained intimate relationship.
UCLA was my first time living in the city and I loved it. Ever since then, when I’ve had the choice, I’ve gone urban (Los Angeles since 1994).
I impressed several of my professors that year. I knew I could be great.
I bonded with the faculty in residence at my dorm, Jules Zentner, and he’d be my best friend through the confusing five years of illness that followed my departure from university.
Most important, I met Jews for the first time at UCLA, including Orthodox Jews, and decided later in 1989 that I would join the tribe.
I came to UCLA in 1988 with great expectations and they were all dashed. I had planned to become an economist, that never happened. I had planned to become an academic, that never happened. I had planned to get a BA, MA and PhD and I never finished my undergraduate degree. I had planned to conquer Calculus and Linear Algebra and Econometrics and that never happened. I had planned a life of conventional success and that never happened.
If I had known then what I know now, how destroyed I would’ve felt. If I had known that chronic illness would keep me in bed for the next five years and hamper my life after that, I would’ve been devastated. If I had realized then that I would no longer be able to overcome my obstacles through will, I would’ve been stunned.
I knew I was a religious seeker in 1988 but this thirst wasn’t often conscious for me. I had to be destroyed before I sought God.
Sex was every bit as wonderful as I anticipated in 1988. I knew then from my experiences with porn that even after experiencing wonderful sex, it wouldn’t fix me. It wouldn’t transform me. It would just lay a temporary balm on my misery. I knew I had an insatiable desire for a variety of partners. I knew I had many such drives that would destroy me if I followed them, so I planned to keep losing myself in hard work and hoped that I’d find ways to get healthy and to connect normally with others.
If I had recovered my health that year at UCLA, I believe I would be an academic economist today, something like that Freakanomics guy. I doubt I’d be a Jew. I suspect that I’d be married with kids. One day I’d meet a woman I couldn’t live without and because I had my life together and she had her life together, we’d get married and build something.
So what exactly were my dreams that August 22-23, 1988 as I drove south to UCLA? And which ones came true?
* I yearned for transcendent meaning for my life and thought I might find it in political economy. Instead, I eventually found it in Judaism and 12-step work.
* I yearned to lose my virginity. I did and it was wonderful. I experimented most wonderfully in this department for many years, experiencing heights of pleasure and intimacy and satisfaction and healing but no relationship would last beyond a year, so I believe that my best sex is yet to come.
* I yearned to mix with people at my level of intellectual engagement with life. I found that in Los Angeles. Anything you want, you can find in this city.
* I yearned to recover my health. I never did fully, but I did partially in early 1994, and 2012 has been my healthiest since I first fell sick in early 1988.
* I yearned to become a star. I yearned for recognition. I yearned for honor. I yearned for thousands of people to read my work. I yearned for public speaking opportunities like my dad’s. I’ve had a taste of this.
* I yearned to make the world a better place. I thought I could do this by promoting Marxism or some other economic system. Within 1989, I’d replaced Marxism with Judaism. I’ve had a taste of making a difference for the good. Once you publish stories that have saved lives, it fills you with a rock-solid sense of your ability to read the world clearly, to report on what you see, and to see the world change for the good as a result. You never again worry about people taking you seriously.
* I yearned to create my own life separate from my father’s. I wanted to go out on my own. I wanted to be free from my upbringing.
* I yearned to be warm. I hated the cold winters of Northern California and Sydney, Australia. Mission accomplished.
* I yearned to be at the center of what was going on in the world. I hated living on the fringe. Mission accomplished.
* I wanted to create my own loving home. Mission accomplished (not in the sense that I’ve married and had kids, but in the sense that I’ve found a home in my various shuls).
* I yearned to escape my feeling of running in circles, my feeling of alienation from others, my feeling of being rinky dink and second-rate. I wanted to go big-time like my father but bigger. I wanted to see my photo on the cover of newspapers and magazines. I wanted to see myself interviewed on TV. I wanted people from around the world to beat a path to my door to hear what I had to say. Mission accomplished.
* I yearned for people to treat me with respect. I felt like I had been treated trivially most of my life because I was rarely part of the cool crowd. Mission accomplished. Once I took up blogging and the world took notice, people stopped treating me trivially for fear I’d blog them.
* I wanted to be a god and to have worshipers.
* I wanted to be able to return in triumph to all of my old haunts and feel at ease, and thereby heal the trauma of the past.
* I wanted to fulfill my mom’s prophecy when I was still in her womb. “This one will do something special for God.”
* I wanted a piece of Hollywood. I wanted pretty girls with loose morals. Mission accomplished.
I finally met Dennis Prager in person in Tampa Bay Super Bowl weekend 1994. He said that if I came to Los Angeles, he might have work for me. I decided to move to LA.
I flew home to Sacramento from Orlando March 24, spent a week at home in 95658, bought a yellow 1977 Datsun station wagon for $600 and just after 1 p.m., on Thursday, March 31, 1994, I drove south, avoiding rush hour in Sacramento and LA.
This would be my second move to LA and this one would stick.
Compared to August 22, 1988, I was much happier. I’d recovered much of my health. I’d gone through six years of hell and now I was strong enough to pull off most of a normal life. I planned to work for Dennis Prager and to finish my Economics degree at UCLA. I had been accepted back to start the Fall Quarter.
Spring is a more hopeful season than late Summer. When I first drove to UCLA, the center of California was filled with hot dead grass. Now the fields were green. My life was ready to resume.
My friend Jules Zenter said I could stay with him for a few weeks while I got on my feet. He was still a faculty in residence at a UCLA dorm.
My mother had given me a couple hundred dollars and told me to get a cell phone. She wanted me to be safe.
Driving down the I-5, I hit a big sandstorm before Bakersfield, which would necessitate expensive car repairs over the next couple of months.
My feelings now about my car were utilitarian. I didn’t love it like my first one.
On January 17, Los Angeles had been devastated by a 6.7 Richter scale earthquake centered in Northridge. I was aware that many roads were closed. I wasn’t able to go straight from the I-5 to I-405 to Sunset Blvd. Instead, I got diverted from the I-5 shortly after the Grapevine and inched along surface streets for miles.
By the time I got to UCLA shortly before 10 p.m., it was a dark and stormy night.
While my first trip five-and-a-half years before had been dominated by fear, this one was filled with hope. I now had God, Torah, Judaism and Dennis Prager.
I was calm. Hopeful. Expectant. Focused. Excited.
The previous time I’d been to UCLA, I’d been sick. Now I was OK. I felt like Douglas McArthur returning to the Philippines. “I shall return!”
On my drive south, I looked forward to:
* Reconnecting with Dennis Prager, working for him, and joining his temple and community.
* Exploring Judaism
* Sleeping with lots of women
* Getting together with my fantasy girl from UCLA in 1988/1989
* Returning to UCLA and getting my professional life back on track
* Exploring work as a model and actor
* Finding further help for my health
Deep inside, I had a sick feeling about losing six of the best years of my life to illness and that it had all been my fault because I had driven myself too hard at school with 24 crazy units.
Life was less lonely now that I had God and an organized religious/national/cultural community in Judaism.
Unlike my first trip, I knew where I was going to sleep for the next few weeks. Life didn’t loom up before me as dangerous and frightening. I’d taken this trip before. I’d spent a year at UCLA. I knew where it was and how it worked. This time I had a community and a specific identity. I had a mentor in Dennis Prager. I had a job. I had wisdom from six years in hell. Every day I could walk around like a normal person was a bonus, was something beyond my expectation. For much of my illness, I feared I would never get well. Now every day was a gift. I was filled with gratitude.
I’d gone through various stages in my conversion. At one point, I sold all my rock music CDs, gave up masturbation and turned my back on popular culture. Then in mid 1993, I met a girl with E-cup breasts and started compromising.
So I was a mellow believer when I drove to UCLA in 1994. I was ready to enjoy as much of life as possible while staying within the generous boundaries outlined by Dennis Prager. I took the 1994 drive with a smile on my face and a song in my heart (perhaps “Adon Olam”).
This drive was not nearly as hard as the first one. I was in better shape. I took fewer rest stops. I’d done it many times now, so I wasn’t afraid. I knew where to go.
I had my earthly possessions in the back. I traveled light. My heart was light.
The downside of my joy was that this journey was not as vivid as my first one. I was more sure of myself. I felt like I had been born again. Now I was Jewish.
Looking back from 2012, it is easy for me to relate to this guy in 1994. By contrast, the guy making the 1988 trip is a stranger. He’s so frightened and sick. It’s painful for me to put myself back in his skin.
On the other hand, the bloke making the 1988 trip had more than $25,000 in the bank while the 1994 guy had next to nothing. But the 1994 guy had an open heart. He plunged into Jewish life, going to every synagogue and speech and social event he could. He embraced it all, from Reconstructionist to Orthodox.
Once in LA, I was so eager to get into the mix with Judaism and discovered to my consternation that you had to make choices that closed off other choices. The big one was whether or not to be Orthodox. If you were Orthodox, you were part of a close knit community, but if you chose to not be Orthodox, you were outside of Judaism’s fiery core. You were compromising with the tradition and it’s hard to get excited about a compromise, to quote Rabbi Harold Kushner.
1988 UCLA FOOTBALL GETS ITS FIRST WIN OVER NEBRASKA SINCE SEPTEMBER 10, 1988

Posted on Sep 8, 2012 in Personal, ucla
The UCLA Bruins football team shocked Nebraska tonight 36-30. It was their first victory over the Cornhuskers since September 10, 1988.
I was at that 1988 game. It was my first big UCLA event, and it came just a couple of weeks before I started university in Westwood.
I drove down to UCLA from Northern California on August 23, 1988, a month before the dorms opened. I wanted to consult a doctor in Santa Ana for my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For the next few weeks, I slept in the bushes beside the Easton Softball Stadium at the intersection of DeNeve and Bellagio Drives at UCLA, half a mile from my future residence of Rieber Hall. Even though I had $25,000 in the bank from construction work, I didn’t want to pay for a hotel.
I lived out of my 1968 VW Bug and paid $5 a day for parking. I ate a lot of raw oats and granola because they did not go bad without refrigeration.
I came from small rural communities (Avondale College in Australia, Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley, and outside of Auburn, 45-minutes drive north of Sacramento). Now I was in the big city and planned to be a city boy for the rest of my life. I was part of a big university. I was filled with ambition. The only problem was that the motor of my body didn’t work. I gutted through every day feeling like I had a flu that never went away.
I had grown up a Seventh-Day Adventist, a religion that regards cities as dens of iniquity and encourages its members to settle in the quiet country. I rejected all of that. I wanted the big city lights.
My parents were worried about my living out of my car. My mom wanted to drive down to rescue me. My dad told her, let him make his own life.
So they turned to a Los Angeles lawyer named Andre, a fan of my dad’s gospel preaching, and asked him to look after me. He in turn took me to two football games, one Raider game at the LA Coliseum and one UCLA game on Saturday, September 10, 1988.
I no longer observed the Seventh-Day Sabbath and was free to go to games on Saturdays. I was an atheist. I could do what I liked.
When I grew up, we celebrated the Sabbath in Adventist churches. Now I was going to the cathedral of secularism — the sports stadium. I was tired of living on the edge of life. Now I had a primo seat at a nationally televised game.
I used to get my meaning in life from religion. Now I got it from porn and sports and TV and fantasies of greatness.
I used to get inculcated with the values of faith, humility, and serenity. Now I was reaching for excitement.
So when I had an appointment at the Rose Bowl that Sabbath, September 10, I consulted a map and saw that Sunset Blvd would slowly and twistingly get me to the Rose Bowl. It would be a longer trip than taking the freeways, but it would be much simpler. Besides, I heard there were hookers on Sunset Blvd and I wanted to see them for myself. I’d never seen a Hollywood hooker before in real life.
I wanted to get some. I was not sure that I would actually buy a hooker, but I wanted to get some of life that had been denied to me and life then, the purpose of life then for me primarily meant taut young female flesh, something always denied me (by my religion, my upbringing and my awkwardness).
I was in the grips of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was weak and tired and scared but terribly curious about the world around me, the world I’d never experienced, the world I wanted to make my own if only I could get well.
When I feel such anxiety, I like to slow down, to make my choices deliberately and to get early starts.
So about noon, September 10, I start moseying along Sunset Blvd from UCLA with all my worldly belongings in the back seat of my Bug. I’m looking for Hollywood hookers but don’t see any.
A few miles east of the university, I pass a porn theater. I stop, park, and study the poster for Veronica Hart’s movie, Wanda Whips Wall Street.
A pre-econ major, I figure this movie’s a mitzvah, and so I buy a ticket from a guy with long painted black fingernails.
The theater is dirty and gross. There’s no big screen for a movie, the film is just a video and it plays on a large TV and features the fat hairy beast Ron Jeremy. The audience is all guys, all losers, and the movies doesn’t teach me anything about Wall Street.
After 90 minutes, I go out on the street and stop by a public phone.
My parents had given me the phone number of a female classmate of mine from Pacific Union College Elementary School (we were there together from sixth to eighth grade). She now lives near Pasadena. We had spoken previously about meeting up that day, but now I learn it’s not going to work out.
I tell her about my illness.
“If I only had 90 days to live,” I say, “I’d go to Mexico and hire a different hooker every day.”
She says, “Why wouldn’t you just choose one person and get really good with that one person?”
“That’s not as exciting to me as 90 different women,” I say.
I go to the stadium and meet up with Andre and his friend Bob and the place is filled with hot co-eds and I’m filled with hope that life is going to get good.
I’m 22 years old and I’m still a virgin. If I can just get an even break, I’ll change that status pronto.
The game starts around 5pm and finishes after sundown. I don’t talk with any girls. Previously when I had been in a big stadium it was as a journalist in the press box. Now I am just a fan who can’t connect with girls.
I’m in the mix now. I’m in the big time. I’m in the big city. I’m in the big university. Is this my future or this just a sample of a product I can never afford? Is this my tomorrow or is this just delusion? Is there where I belong or is this a bridge too far? Has all of my life been building to this point or will everything from here be a falling away?
Looking back from 2012, I see that game was and was not a taste of my future. I’d never again attend a college football game. I’d never make it through university. I’d never join the cool crowd. But I would make it in the big city. I would taste the big time. I would date hot women. I would find recovery from addictions I was not then conscious of and I would find a good world with a place for me. Overall, that game was more of a start of something rather than an end of my dreams. I would go on to join the wider society and to have a voice in the national conversation while simultaneously finding my true self in the oldest ongoing culture (Judaism).
Going into the game, the Huskers were ranked number two in the nation and the Bruins were ranked number five. Troy Aikman was the UCLA quarterback. I looked a bit like Troy Aikman.
The Bruins won easily that evening, 41-28, and it was awesome to be in the stadium with my future schoolmates.
Playing before an ABC national television audience and the fourth-largest crowd ever to see the Huskers play (84,086), second-ranked Nebraska was subjected to the worst first-quarter blitz it had ever seen.
Fifth-ranked UCLA scored on its first three possessions, then tacked on the first punt-return touchdown against NU in 24 years as the Bruins built a 28-0 lead.
After the game September 10, 1988, I have to find my way home in the dark. I’m convinced to brave the freeways. I get instructions from Andre and set off. After 10-15 minutes of driving on the 10 Freeway, I realize I am going in the wrong direction. I get off, turn around, and head west to my bushes by the softball field.
I am happy to have experienced more of life. I had gotten to Pasadena and back on my own merits, navigating a strange city in a fragile car, and on and off through the day, I had sucked in the faintest whiffs of human connection.
Porn, sports, religion-based connection, and trips down memory lane had characterized my day, my previous decade and the next 20 years of my life.
What did I learn on September 10, 1988?
All the great philosophies have been encapsulated in pop songs, says Rabbi Mordecai Finley.
I identify with these lyrics from Duran Duran:
But I won’t cry for yesterday
There’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way
To the ordinary world
I will learn to survive
If I could now crawl up to that frightened shivering boy in the bushes that night of September 10, 1988, what would I tell him?
“Hey, it’s a friend. I’m coming up to see you. You’re not in trouble. I too don’t like paying hotel bills. I understand your desire to save money. Your secret is safe with me. This is a fine place to sleep. It’s perfectly safe.
“I know you want more of life. I know you’re not satisfied with the taste you’ve had up to now. I dig.
“I’ve got some bad news for you. This illness afflicting you the past six months? It’s not going away for many many years.
“The good news? You can do it. You can survive this. You’ll be at UCLA for the next nine months. You won’t accomplish half of what you intended, but you’ll set the foundation for your future. You’ll find an amazing tradition and you’ll join an ancient people.
“I understand your desire for comfort. You feel like if you can just get up inside some hot girl, if you can just get some fame and fortune, it will fill the hole in your heart. It won’t.
“Please know there are reliable sources of comfort and you can access them at will and they won’t make you feel dirty afterward. I won’t spill them out now. You’re not ready.
“I know you hate your upbringing. I know that’s easier for you than hating yourself. You’d rather be angry than depressed, but neither option is a happy one.
“You can’t will yourself out of this agony. You need help. You need to open yourself up to realizing that doing things your own way won’t work. You need a good therapist. You need a 12-step program for your emotional addictions.
“You can’t just achieve your way out of your dislocation. You’re going to find this out quickly because with your poor health, you’re not going to be able to achieve much for many years. So you’ll be on your own. You won’t be able to distract yourself with work or study or girls. You’re going to have to find meaning outside of achievement.
“Your task ahead is to connect with good people, and to the degree that you’ve had trouble doing this, it’s not the fault of the good people you’ve known and it’s not the fault of your family. It’s not your fault either. Given who you are and where you’ve been, you could not have acted differently.
“I’ve been where you are today. I’ve lived for years with addictions to romantic intrigue and the need to rescue and be rescued in my relationships. When you’re ready to get help, I want you to know it’s out there. It’s a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope to help people like you to recover from things such as emotional anorexia and sexual compulsion. You don’t have to keep living like this. There’s a better way.
“I’m going. Feel free to sleep. Just remember one thing in the midst of your pain and confusion, you’re not alone. The things that ail you? They ail millions of people. And many of them have found help like I did and gone on to lead happy productive lives.”
So how did my failed year at UCLA set the foundation for the rest of my life?
* It exposed me to Los Angeles. I loved the city. I loved the weather, the light, the touch of the tropics. I loved its dream factory. I loved its opportunities. It didn’t matter where you went to school. What mattered in LA was what do you have to offer?
After my year at UCLA, I was determined to get back to LA and I have lived here since 1994.
* I met Jews that UCLA year and eventually I converted to Judaism.
* I love the West Side of Los Angeles and have lived here since 1994.
* I love the big city, the big media, the big university. I love the opportunities that come from living in a concentration of people.
* I learned you could live without resentment. I love how Southern California has no enmity against Northern California nor anyone. We don’t hate other cities here. We’re not jealous. We’re too busy enjoying ourselves. I love that attitude.
* I love freedom and constructing my life to do what I want. This year at UCLA was my first time as an adult living on my own.
* I love movies and TV and love hanging out with people who make them.
* I had my first intimate relationship at UCLA.
* I learned you didn’t have to be cold much of the year.
* Coming from a landscaping background, I rejoiced that you can grow anything in LA.
* LA is the place to reinvent yourself. It’s a city in recovery, filled with 12-step programs and yoga and alternative paths to health.

I SUCK THE LIFE OUT OF WOMEN

Something got seriously warped in my relationship with the opposite sex very early in my life.

On the night of my first birthday, my mother got very sick. She was soon diagnosed with cancer and over the next three years, she wasted away.

On April 24, 1970, two days after her 40th birthday and a month before my fourth birthday, she squeezed my dad’s hand and said, “Thank you for a lovely life.” Then she drifted into a coma and died.

The normal way that kids learn to relate to their parents, particularly their opposite sex parent, I don’t think that happened for me and I’ve been pretty twisted ever since.

As a kid, I liked to poke girls with sticks and announce to the world the color of their knickers.

I’d lie on the ground beside the stairs and as the girls would walk up and down, I’d shout out the details of their undies.

If only I’d done this with adult women and gotten them to sign release forms, I could’ve pioneered the up-skirt phenomenon.

The first dirty joke I remember hearing (around age eight) and then retelling enthusiastically was: “What did the father say to his son? Take your little Tonka toy out of mommy so I can park my big truck.”

In fifth grade, the first girl seriously made a move on me. I responded by teasing her. I left tacks pointy side up on her seat. When she got too close to me, I kicked her.

“One day you will love someone who kicks you,” she said with tears in her eyes.

I moved to the Napa Valley with my parents halfway through fifth grade. I started sixth grade in September 1977. For a brief few weeks, my classmates didn’t realize I wasn’t cool and the most beautiful girl in the class dropped a note on my desk asking me to go with her.

I was so frightened at the prospect of getting what I wanted most that I teased her unmercifully for months until she hated me.

When I finally repented and asked her to be my girlfriend, she blew me off.

I didn’t get my first real girlfriend until February 1989. I was 22.

A couple of times over the next few years of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, she visited me at my parent’s home in Newcastle, 95658.

Afterwards, my mother said to me, “You squeezed her like a lemon and threw her away.”

In 1993, I met Diana through a singles ad in the weekly San Francisco Jewish newspaper. She was 5’2″ and had natural E-cup breasts.

I told her how religious I was and that I didn’t believe in pre-marital sex. I thought it was better that we way to get to know each other before messing around.

The first weekend she visited, I proclaimed I was “shomer negiyah” aka the Hebrew phrase for not touching the opposite sex, but on the final day, I lay on the bed with her and she rested her chest on my hands. I justified that they were just passively on the bed and I wasn’t actively touching her. She was touching me, but on the drive to the bus stop, I couldn’t help myself and my hands started actively touching her.

The next visit, I picked her up at the bus station on Friday night and pushed her to tell me in excruciating detail about the various times she’d been raped. There was that time at age 12 when she watched her dad’s copy of Debbie Does Dallas with the boy next door and he forced her to give him oral. Then there was the time in high school when a classmate talked her into making out with him in his car in the school parking lot and then forced her to give him oral. And then there was the party where she’d gone to bed and then this guy she’d been making out with climbed into bed, pulled off her clothes and started having sex with her until her protests roused other partygoers and they dragged him off of her.

I was terribly excited by these tales of woes and started aggressively hitting on her while driving home. She fought back and turned out to be stronger than I was.

“Do you want me to turn around and go home,” she asked?

“No,” I said.

“If you come into my room tonight, I’ll scream,” she said.

So I waited until the morning. My parents were preparing for church. I snuck into her room carrying a paper towel and slid into bed with her. We cuddled for a while and then my hands started playing around with her and then she said, “I wish it was your ****,” and away we went.

I had to be careful not to slam into so hard that the head board banged against the wall and alerted my conservative Christian parents.

By the time we emerged, they were gone.

As I prepared breakfast, Diana said to me, looking away, “What color are my eyes?”

“Brown,” I said.

“No,” she said. “They’re green.”

I was house-sitting for the neighbors. I brought Diana over with me and I overcame her objections and we did it in their bed.

The next morning, Diana was tired of fighting, and when I snuck into her room, she was naked. The lack of resistance non-plussed me and I was unable to complete the deed.

Sex for me isn’t a particularly loving act. It’s usually a violent act. And yet without it, I don’t feel loved. I don’t feel alive. I don’t feel nurtured and accepted and desired.

After we’ve done the deed, then for me it is time to be tender and loving and to share feelings and to drop pretense. I feel far closer to someone after sleeping with her once than if I had dated her for three months without sex.

Sex nurtures my soul far more than food or words or gifts. Only once I’ve had it do I feel fully human. Without it I feel starved, like a beast raised by wolves.

So while I carried on a passionate daily telephone relationship with a woman 11 years my senior in Florida, Diana would pop up from San Jose to visit me about every third weekend.

One day she told me on the phone, “Every Sunday I leave you, I’m exhausted. You suck the life out of me. You can’t get enough attention. I don’t know why. Perhaps you didn’t get enough as a kid? You just want more and more. You just lap it up. You just take and take and take and you give nothing back.”

She gave me the book, The Givers and the Takers.

Soon after, the woman from Florida visited me for three weeks and at the end of her stay, I flew back to Orlando with her and moved in.

My new girlfriend was concerned about community property laws and when it quickly became apparent that I was not a keeper, she stayed overnight with an ex, knowing that I’d get so mad, I’d leave.

Women still do this to me. They tell me about hooking up with an ex just to get me out of their lives.

I’m terribly jealous. I know how much I want to sleep with every hot chick I can that I can’t help but fear that my partners are as faithless as I am (in my inclinations more than my behavior for I’ve never cheated).

You know how people will pop off and say things casually that you never forget?

For me it is comments like, “Why are you so needy for attention?”

Or, “Didn’t your parents love you?”

Or, “Why are you so insecure?”

Or, “Pity is the Trojan horse Luke uses to get inside women.”

Everybody has a favorite phrase. Mine is, “Let’s talk about me!”

I fear I’m condemned to live off women for the rest of my life. Sure, in good times, I hold down good jobs and make my own way in life, but then there are the inevitable collapses and dependencies and I always end up lying in bed wanting to suck on her breasts and have her rock me to sleep.

I’m a sucker. I suck women dry. I can’t get enough sex. I can’t get enough nurturing. I can’t get enough attention.

“I get this image of you,” said my therapist one day. “You’re sucking insatiably on a breast because every breast you’ve known has run dry.”

Another time, my therapist said, “At times I felt like bringing you home and taking care of you, but I knew I’d only grow to resent you.”

I spent most of my work time from 1995 to 2007 blogging about the **** industry. A normal person doesn’t do this. I think something got screwed up in the way I relate to women. I like having sex with the attractive ones but their endless neediness frightens me.

Women frighten me. They’re too intuitive. I resent that 99% of the chicks I’ve hit on have knocked me back. That’s why I loved ****. It’s revenge on all the women who rejected me. Now I can see them subverted.

I could go on and on about how I exploit women. For instance, Holly paid for every movie and meal we shared over several months. “It bothers most men when I pay,” she told an interviewer, “but somehow it never bothered Luke.” Other women let me move in with them for weeks and months (never longer than three months). One flew me to New York for three weeks and gave me spending money.

But presenting myself as an exploiter of women is just bravado. Overall, the women I’ve been with have gotten as much back from me (mainly in the form of entertainment) as they have given to me. When the ratio got too out of whack, they left me. Mainly, I’ve just been alone. That’s why I write so many stories about the ones who got away. Somebody with a life doesn’t take up as much residence in the past as I do.

A few years ago, a childhood friend sent me a copy of the one book my mom published. It’s called Fireside Stories (by Gwen M. Ford) and it is a collection of children’s stories. I read the book hungrily one Shabbat, looking to see if it contained any messages for my life. The only one that was clear to me was that I should be a good Christian.

CRACKING UP
When have I cracked up and gotten down to my deepest motivations? I remember returning to Los Angeles in 1994 — at age 27 — after six years largely spent in bed (because of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). I had made a partial recovery from CFS and was thinking about returning to UCLA to finish my Economics degree.
Instead, I cracked up and pursued acting for 18 months. I had no success. It was a reckless thing to do. But I was strongly attracted to the sexually charged world of Hollywood. I liked going to acting classes and hooking up with girls even if I had to live out of my car for six months to afford this quest (I eventually moved in with a bloke I met at the Westwood Chabad in March of 1995 and I have not been homeless since).
So where did I hook up with girls? Sometimes in the back of my 1979 Datsun stationwagon.
It didn’t matter to me that the odds were astronomically against me making a living from acting. I felt like I had a new lease on life and I was ready to do some risky things.
I kinda liked the adventure of living out of my car (except for when I was sick, then it was just miserable). Just so long as I had a place to shower every day. I was down and out in Beverly Hills and I thought I’d get some great writing out of it one day.
Well, that’s partially bravado. I felt scared and weak much of the time, even desperate. I’m not good at navigating real life. I live in my head.
I had once read the advice that someone who recovers from CFS should do the opposite of what he was doing when he got sick.
Just before I got sick, I was studying hard at Sierra Community College in Rocklin, preparing to transfer to UCLA and to major in Economics.
Acting seemed to me like the opposite of Calculus.
I remembered a story I’d heard on NPR circa 1987. It was told by poet Andrei Codrescu. In his late teens, he apprenticed himself to a demanding stone mason. At the end of his arduous term, he said to his mentor, “So am I going to become a stone mason?”
“No,” said the man. “You’re going to become a writer.”
“But if you knew I was going to be a writer, why did you take me on as your apprentice?”
And the mentor said: “I thought the work would be good for your writing.”
Why is that wherever I go, whatever I choose to do, I am in the same socio-economic position. I have the same degree of popularity with girls. The same loneliness and uncoolness. I’ve always been the least cool of the cool crowd and the most cool of the uncool crowd. The only exceptions have been when someone in the cool crowd would shlep me along for months and years and on that borrowed functioning, I felt like I had stepped up in life. But then they died or moved or dropped me and I crashed down to earth.
I remember three women I slept with in the back of that Datsun station wagon.
One I met on a set. I broke Shabbos one afternoon in the fall of 1994 to work as an extra on a non-union production in Pasadena.
I hit on every attractive young woman on set that afternoon and got knocked back by everyone. (I later got a stern talking to on this score by the man — John* — who sent me out on the job.)
Near the end of the show, I turned my attention to the 46-year old woman extra, Paula*.
“You’ve got nice shoulders,” I said when she turned around to me at the crafts service table.
She smiled.
We started talking. She worked at a respectable charity. She lived with her boyfriend in Santa Monica. She was average-looking.
The show was over. I said goodbye. I got in my car and drove back to the West side, which is where I parked my car most nights.
I noticed this woman driving behind me. As the miles went by and she stayed close to my car, I figured she must like me.
On Mulholland Drive, I waved my hand out my window to her and pulled over. She parked behind me.
“Would you like to go for a walk on the beach?” I asked. I had no money to take her on a proper date.
“Sure,” she said.
So we went for a walk on the Venice beach. After a while, I reached out and took her hand. She didn’t resist. It was dark. The beach was almost deserted. The temperature must’ve been in the fifties.
We sat on a bench. I kissed her. She didn’t resist, so I pushed her down and clambered on top of her and made out with her.
“I feel like I’m in high school,” she said.
And it was good.
She was almost 20 years older than me but it was very good. It was comfortable and easy and she knew just what to do, unlike the virgin I’d been with a few months previous.
Over the next few days, I called her a couple of times and left a message on her voice mail. She never got back to me. I was surprised. I felt sure I was her little stud muffin.
Yikes, today she’d be 63.
Why did I hook up with so many 40-something women from 1994-1996? Because I could. They were the ones who responded to me. They were easy to deal with because we didn’t expect much from each other beyond the sex. I loved their enthusiasm and willingness to experiment in bed aka do what I wanted.
They didn’t push me to spend money on them. They were willing to mix it up with me in the back of my wagon. They weren’t as proud and as demanding as the young hotties I wanted to marry.
Every religion including my own (Judaism) holds that the place for sex is within marriage. I had no marriage prospects thanks to my poverty and ill health and various character flaws. Because I had no prospects, I felt like it was OK to play around to get me through the night.
I liked John and hung out a couple of times at his office. He told me he was staying out of SAG so he could do non-union work. He told me about a lead role he had in a recent movie that was shot in several versions including X-rated. He was a real actor and didn’t do any hardcore.
He told me about one girl he signed up to his casting service. She brought him videos of her various p*** movies. He rolled his eyes that such whores could think they could make it in Hollywood.
Another girl I made it with was an aspiring actress. I’ll call her Jane. Plain Jane. A Christian.
We started talking at a Christmas party at the home of Don Glut, the director of Dinosaur Valley Girls.
It was the end of 1994.
I hit on a lot of girls at the party. None successfully. Then I started talking with Jane.
We left the party together. We stood talking beside my Datsun. I tried to kiss her but she stopped me.
Frustrated, I invited her into my place.
My place at the time was a 1979 Toyota stationwagon. I’d been living it out of it for a few months. I figured a job would only hold me back from achieving my dreams.
We were standing beside my wagon and I was trying to hold her hand and she was pushing me away. So I invited her inside so that we could be on our own and not let bourgeois morality impinge upon our feelings.
I had the back seat down and all my possessions piled up in cardboard boxes along the sides. In the middle was my comfy duve and two pillows.
How could she resist?
We slid in.
I put up towels around all the windows so we could have privacy. Then we got under my duve and got cozy.
We were both religious in a traditional sense, so we didn’t just stampede to the clitoris like secular humanists do. Nor did we do oral.
(“Oral is moral” claims the dad in Big Love, but my religion teaches me otherwise.)
No, we just held each other like Christians United For Israel. Then we stroked each other. Then we clinched. Then we made out. Finally, I took her hand in mine and placed it in my pants.
Thank God the gasoline fumes weren’t too strong that night.
She said she was really good at handjobs, but before she’d give me one, she had to say a prayer to Jesus. She was worried about me. I said fine.
She prayed, “Dear Jesus, I’m here with Luke who’s very troubled. He’s been sick for a long time. He’s homeless. He’s left you behind. He’s in a new town where he doesn’t know anybody. He’s in pretty desperate shape. It’s in these tough times that we turn to you oh Lord. We know that a penitent and upright heart you will never despise. I want to invite you into Luke’s heart. I know you can do miracles. We acknowledge you and we love you and we commit ourselves to you, amen.”
Then she reached down and let her fingers work their magic.
Why are some women awesome at this and other women just suck?
The third woman on my hit list I met at Stephen S. Wise temple on a Friday night in August 1994. I’ll call her Carla. She was from Venezuela and she didn’t speak English (beyond a few words) and I didn’t speak Spanish (beyond a few phrases).
I’d just been dumped by the woman (Darla*) I’d been living with (on and off) for a few weeks. Every day for the next three months after this break-up, I broke into tears at least once (no other relationship has compelled me to cry more than a few times).
So, Friday night, I meet Carla and give her a ride home.
Saturday morning, I pick her up and take her to temple.
I see Darla at services. During the misheberach where they ask for names of people in need of healing, I ask Darla to say my name. She suggests that I ask someone who cares.
I cling to Carla inappropriately. Outside in the sun, I try to touch her big breasts.
“Es muy necessario,” I say.
Carla pushes my hands away. “No es necessario,” she says.
An old-fashioned gentleman, I obey her commands.
For the next few Shabbats, I pick up Carla and take her to temple. Then maybe we go off for a walk on the beach and then I park near the home she’s staying at in Bel Air and we make out and I take her home like a Victorian gentleman.
On our last night together as we’re making out in the back of my station wagon and I’m rubbing against her hard, she says, “Condom?”
Yes, indeed, I have one and away we go.
Very happy times. They’re a solace to me in my old age.
Carla had us exchange addresses so we could write but as she didn’t know much English, I didn’t see the point. And that was that.
In May of 1995, while I was driving Kanan Dunan road in Malibu in the rain on bald tires on my way to a one-on-one scene study with a gorgeous young actress, my car spun out and I went head first into a light pole and that was the end of my promiscuity.
Even though my next vehicle was a van, I gradually came to regard the mattress I kept in there as tacky and I discarded it soon after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
My last attempt at seduction on it was ended by the van’s intense gasoline fumes.

In the final weeks of the longest live-in relationship of my life (three months in Orlando during the summer of 1993), my partner pushed me to try the drug recommendation of her psychiatrist Daniel Golwyn — nardil aka phenelzine — to help me out of my bedridden Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
According to Wikipedia: “Phenelzine is used primarily in the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). Patients with depressive symptomology characterized as “atypical”, “nonendogenous”, and/or “neurotic”, have been reported to respond particularly well to phenelzine.[1] The medication has also been found to be useful in patients who do not respond favorably to first and second-line treatments for depression, or are said to be “treatment-resistant”.[2] In addition to being a recognized treatment for major depressive disorder, phenelzine has been found in studies to be effective in treatingdysthymia,[3] bipolar depression (BD),[4] panic disorder (PD),[5] social anxiety disorder (SAD),[6]bulimia,[7] and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[8]”
I did go on Nardil and within hours I started feeling better. During the last three months of 1993, I moved out from my dissolving relationship and gained 30 pounds, moving to 160 on my 6′ frame.
On Super Bowl weekend 1994, I met my hero Dennis Prager in person for the first time. He said that if I ever lived in LA, he might have work for me.
I moved to LA in March. The job fell through when Dennis and his assistants quickly saw there was something wrong with me, something off, something broken, something discordant with ethical monotheism.
I started leafing through the classified ads in the LA Weekly looking for work. There were all these pitches for actors and models (most of them were scams I found out later). I was titillated and answered many of them.
I got an agent (Debbie Durkin) and she sent me out on modeling and acting auditions, none of which amounted to anything. But I had Hollywood fever.
Debbie required her actors to take her astronomically expensive acting workshops (about $1500 for two days). On one, I started pushing this guy around in a scene until the teacher told me to stop. “I don’t want to see your pretty face get smashed in,” she said. “Never touch anyone in a scene without getting permission first.”
I knew the odds were astronomically against me making a living as an actor or a model, but I loved going to classes and meeting hot chicks. There was sex in the air.
Hollywood seemed full of hunters and prey. What made it different from the outside world was that the prey — the hot chicks — didn’t mind being prey and even seemed to enjoy getting plundered, particularly if it offered an opportunity to get ahead.
In my classes, the hot women used their bodies and charms to get the attention of the teachers, casting directors, agents, managers and producers who came our way and in turn, these men in power bestowed their time and interest most generously on those who turned them on.
This was the way of the Hollywood jungle and I was turned on.
My lack of power and my commitment to Judaism prevented me from being too predatory, but I was fascinated by the naked pursuit of sex.
Acting is physical work and I found it was not uncommon to go to bed with your scene partner. When people all around you are doing it, it becomes easier for even the most awkward and uncool — me! — to get in on the action. All you had to do was to show up.
I slept with more women (about two dozen) during the year I pursued acting than the rest of my life put together. And most of that time, I was sick and homeless and broke.
I’m profoundly affected by my environment. When I’m around Orthodox Jews, I act like an Orthodox Jew. Around Hollywood types, I go Hollywood.
Even the religious people I knew in Hollywood didn’t mind sampling the booty. It was just taken for granted that creativity required and supplied new sex partners.
By this time, heterosexual AIDS had proven to be a myth.
I was fascinated by the interplay between porn and Hollywood. Many porny types came to acting classes to try to go legit. They dressed provocatively and complained about sexual harassment and engaged in crazy sex with men who might help them get ahead.
I never packed enough voltage to show up on their radar. I was just a sympathetic ear.
I worked as an extra on one music video. During a break, I saw this attractive girl I knew, a married stripper, sitting in a miniskirt on a ledge in front of this black guy she’d just met, and her legs were so spread I can never forget the image. I was going to give them both a ride home and who knows what hijinks would’ve occurred but something came up and I went home alone.
On the shoot, I met this Japanese woman. She called me afterwards. She said she wanted to come by and just lie down with me. Not sex. Just lie down.
So she came over and she just lay down with me. Afflicted with CFS, I lay with my arms around her and tried nothing. After about an hour, she got up and gave me a ride to Westwood where I was to meet a first date at a restaurant.
We get a table and order drinks and I tell my date I have no money and can she pick up the tab? She does. And then she gives me a ride home.
I was 27. I was broke, sick, frightened, striving to make my way in a new city, and bedazzled by all the sex going on all around me.
I took my first acting class in June 1994 (I had taken one theater class in college in 1987). The class cracked up when I tried to act. No matter what role I got, they said I always played it like a serial killer. I just came across as crazy intense and I had this frightening way of staring at people.
The percentage of women in acting who responded passionately to me was no higher than about 2%, the same as my percentage in the wider world. The difference was that in the acting world I was constantly meeting hot chicks while in the wider world, after college, that takes special circumstances.
One of the smartest things I did was to try to make a documentary on what women want. I placed casting notices in Dramalogue and received hundreds of resumes. Then I held interviews at my apartment in Beverly Hills during the summer of 1995. I bought video cameras, used them for just under a month, and then returned them for full refunds.
I knew this was unethical but I was desperate to get ahead.
I scored with two of the sixty plus women I interviewed (one was hot, Francesca!).
I remember she invited me — a producer! — to her showcase.
Afterward, we stood and talked in the parking lot. I probably went on and on about my conversion to Judaism and then I slipped my hand into her shirt.
“Isn’t that against the rules?” she asked.
I said it was but I was overcome by passion. We made out. I wanted to go home with her but she said no. So we went our separate ways and then talked on the phone into the early morning. She said she was having all these sexual thoughts about me but she didn’t want me to come over.
The next night, she invited me over to help her hang some curtains. It seemed like a total pretext to me but then it took a lot of talking and maneuvering — exhausting! I have CFS — before we finally lay on the couch and made out and finally one thing led to another and I didn’t go home until morning.
After attending the Synagogue of the Performing Arts on Friday night, I went back to her apartment but she had friends over and I felt miffed by the lack of exclusive access to her.
I never got lucky with her again.
In March 1995, I moved in with a guy I met at the Westwood Chabad and he gave me free rent in exchange for helping him with a movie script. Whenever this guy went out, he scored. He often brought women home and once or twice, I got the leftovers.
I became friends with one woman he dated and when we finally hooked up, she told me my roommate had tried to rape her.
A largely secular Jew, he started going to the Kabbalah Centre, stopped screwing around, and moved to Jerusalem and became Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jew).
We parted ways May 31, 1996. I didn’t realize it then but my promiscuous days, my acting days, were behind me. From now on, my primary work would be writing, and that would be largely solitary labor with few hot chicks around to soothe my furrowed brow.
During difficult economic times in the last half of 1996, first half of 1997, I worked temp jobs where I found the office atmosphere was not nearly as welcoming of sexual play as Hollywood.
I remember I went to one job wearing my black velvet yarmulke. I reviewed and signed the pages of job etiquette they gave me.
Then I get in this room with a woman to help with dictation. When she crawls under my desk to plug in my machine, I look at her ass and say, “It’s a good thing I’m a man of holiness or I’d take advantage of this situation.”
The boss happened to walk by at the time and I got fired on the spot.
I lost another job at an insurance company in Century City for using the fax and photocopier for personal business (for this book I was writing on the history of sex in film).
I get reprimanded on another job (at a hospital on Vermont and Sunset) for working on my book on their computers. I also handed out a copy of the one porn movie I directed in January 1996 and got into trouble for that. Needless to say, I wore a yarmulke every day into work and wouldn’t labor on the Sabbath and on Jewish holidays.
Doing bad things while wearing a yarmulke and making Jews look bad is about the worst thing you can do according to Judaism. And I was doing it in spades and knowing I was doing it the whole time and hating myself the whole time and trying to make it better.
At a printing company on Santa Monica Blvd, I showed around a copy of this same movie I directed and the fat Christian lady working next to me got me fired.
At temple I had my eye on this ravishing but wholesome Persian woman who attended the University of Judaism. Her whole family came to the synagogue. During a conversation with her dad, I mentioned I was writing a book on sex in film. He said he wanted to see it. So I gave him a hundred pages. Needless to say, that didn’t go over well, and whenever I see this woman, this woman I dreamed about for years would one day be my wife, she always asks me about the porn film I directed — that classic What Women Want.
It’s not the worst thing I’ve done, but it is definitely the most embarrassing. I hate it when people bring it up to me when women are around. Then I wish the ground to open up and swallow me.
I bought my first real computer July 3, 1997 and within an hour of bringing it home, I had my first website up on AOL (under the email address of luzdedos@aol.com, it means two together create light, and I got it from the woman who told me my roommate had tried to rape her). Over the next few months, I lost the account for violating AOL’s terms of service by posting sexually explicit ads for porn sites.
So I signed up with the account luzdedos1@aol.com, an account I hold to this day, but when I emailed my family under this address, they for some reason always replied to luzdedos@aol.com and I never got these emails. Because of this I thought for a couple of years (until May 1999) that my family had disowned me. I obviously thought I deserved to be disowned.
I’m frightened by the way the world can read my thoughts. I’ve thought for years that because of the sundry yucky things I’ve done, many of which are elaborated here, I deserved to be shunned. Then I was shocked and hurt when people picked up on this and treated me accordingly.
I guess I don’t see the world as it is. I see the world as I am. And that’s the most frightening thing of all. The knowledge that other people are as flawed as I am, but in different ways, makes me want to stay home alone.

1994 THE HAPPIEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE

I knew this girl at school. She was super cute. Busty. Asian. Sweet. Shy. Christian!
Just how I love ‘em!
I thought I’d never have her. That’s how my life had been — that which I wanted most — a mother, health, community, stability, friends — was always out of reach.
Surely this fine Christian girl would be no different.
We parted ways when illness forced me to drop out of school.
Somehow, I got her mailing address. Though I was feeling low, I didn’t want to come across to my dream girl as needy. So I limited myself to writing her once or twice a year.
And half the time, she wrote me back.
I had so much that I wanted to share with her. I wanted to tell her about my desperation and my fear and my loss of hope, but to the best of my ability, I kept an upbeat tone with my letters.
In the darkness of my life, however, I fantasized about her and the field of dreams that was her body.
I’d never had a busty girlfriend, you see. God hadn’t blessed me that way.
The years rolled by. I feared I’d never get well.
And then I did. Sorta. All thanks to a skinny girl 11 years my senior with A-cup breasts.
I came back to Westwood in March 1994. Staying alone in a friend’s apartment, I called my dream girl and a couple of days later, she came over.
We sat on the porch on the fourth floor and looked out at the city.
She’d aged — she was about 24 now and a recent university graduate — and she wasn’t as hot as six years previous, but she was still my fantasy.

I was 27 years old. I had two-thirds of my health back. I was at UCLA. I had my (Reform) conversion to Judaism. And in my arms, I held my naked dream girl.
I was like the victor in World War II standing in a French wheat field in the May sun with my arms spread wide proclaiming, “Soon there will be plenty!”
That Spring of 1994, I was cock sure there’d always be plenty of love in my life.

JULIA ROBERTS

April 24, 1970. Two days after her 40th birthday, my mother pressed my father’s hand and said, “Thank you for a lovely life.” Then she slipped into a coma and died from bone cancer.
I was not yet four.
May, 1977. I moved to the Napa Valley from Australia with my father and step-mother. I spent 16 of my next 17 years about an hour’s drive from Sacramento.
February of 1982. On a trip to Australia for my sister’s wedding, I began my habit of browsing men’s magazines like Playboy and Penthouse at the news stand.
Fall of 1982. In tenth grade, I went to public school for the first time and encounter MTV. Most of the videos seem to be shot in Southern California and the girls appeared gorgeous. I wanted them more badly than Jesus.
Spring, 1988. Sierra Community College in Rocklin, California. I stood in the parking lot talking with a friend of mine from Calculus class.
He said that girls in Southern California were really loose.
I was a virgin at the time and the prospect of loose girls seemed heavenly.
March 30, 1994. I drove for seven hours south from my parents home above Sacramento to UCLA. It was a couple of months after the big Northridge earthquake and traffic on the Five South was diverted on to side streets at one point.
It was raining. It was about 10 p.m. when I pulled into a UCLA dorm where I’d stay for the next couple of months with a friend of mine on the faculty.
The next week, I’d place a singles ad in the Los Angeles Times. I only remember one response. It was from a spunky woman who was all giggly and excited to meet me. She said, “I look like Julia Roberts, only I have bigger breasts.”
She picked me up that next evening in Westwood. She had a Julia Roberts smile and facial structure and her bust was plentiful.
She worked as a movie editor in Hollywood and lived in Studio City.
I was so happy to be back in LA after five bedridden years of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Her big breasts symbolized the bounty of Southern California. I couldn’t wait to get stuck in.
She wasn’t Jewish, but I didn’t mind. She took me to a sushi bar in Santa Monica where she ate dinner as we talked about my conversion to Judaism.
Then she drove me north on the Pacific Coast Highway, pulling off to the side in Malibu.
It was about 10 p.m. We walked out to some rocks beside the ocean and I put my arms around her and we started making out.

A few evenings later, she picked me up again.
“I want to show you something,” she said, and drove me to the Holocaust memorial at Pan Pacific Park.

I don’t think I ever talked to her again.
I got busy with two women I knew from Rieber Hall at UCLA (1988-89).
Then this woman I knew flew in from New York for the Memorial Day weekend.
I let Julia go.
A few days later, I got a long letter from her. When I read it, I felt like she was holding me close once again and looking into my eyes while the ocean surged around us.
She talked about how much she treasured our time together. She thanked me for being gentle and considerate with her. She asked to reconnect.
I don’t know why I didn’t call her. She had everything I wanted in a woman (aside from Judaism).
I guess I was spoiled. I’d been in LA for a few weeks, and I’d already nailed various women who’d previously been out of my league.
I lived in the city of angels and felt that Julia wasn’t such a big deal.
I was wrong. I was very wrong.
Many nights when I go to bed alone, I think about Julia.
I don’t reread her letter in my mind and wonder what might have been.
I don’t picture what she looks like now.
I don’t replay us wrestling beside the Holocaust memorial. Nor do I dwell upon my inadequate performance of the ultimate deed.
Instead, I see us standing on the rocks beside the ocean on our first radiant night together.

1994 Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

The scene is a Stu and Lew Jewish singles dance in the mid-90s. Hundreds of young Jews at the Century Club in Century City are eager to connect, to make Jewish babies, to never forget the Holocaust. Every generation the goyim rise up to annihilate us but we’re still here, thanks be to God. From the destruction of the two temples to the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Chelmitzki pogroms and the Shoah, oy, how we’ve suffered, but the Chosen Ones are eternal. We will never be destroyed.
So I spot this woman standing by herself and she seems available.
I just get a feeling about certain girls, that they’re in my league, that I can sleep with them. I’m rarely wrong. As for girls out of my league, I lose all hope at the outset. If they’re too pretty, too popular, too successful, I figure they won’t want me and I don’t really try. When I have tried, it’s never worked out. And as for girls below my league, they don’t interest me unless I’m horny.
Sara is a 6.5. I’m an 8. Just telling the truth. I cannot lie. That would be a sin.
Don’t give me crap that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is objective and scientific. It’s symmetry and hip to waist ratio and perceived fertility.
My scale is generous, folks. Women I think of as sixes, other guys call fours.
I’ve slept with a lot of homely women and my friends make fun of me for it. Even ex-Gfs get mad at me when I date someone homely because it reflects badly on them.
I do have a heart. I find that a woman’s attractiveness changes when I get to know her. Someone who’s a five objectively, she can become a ten in my heart, but I don’t fool myself that objectively she’s a supermodel simply because I love her.
I’ve got a big heart. I can fall in love with fours. Most of my male friends can’t.
It’s important to be honest about these things. You need to know how you stack up. If you’re constantly getting dumped, it means you’re dating out of your league. If you’re the one who’s consistently doing the dumping, that means you’re dating beneath you.
So know where you stand with your looks, your personality, and your life position. Read the book, The Rating Game. It’s written by a woman, Reba Toney.
What’s my confidence level? Generally speaking, it’s low. At my core, I have all the fundamental beliefs of the addict (that’s why I never touch drugs or alcohol or gambling, I know they would destroy me). I know that I’m a rotten person, that regular life is rarely satisfying, but I also know that there are ways to escape from my misery through sex and success and love and God and religion. And I know that there are people out there who can rescue me because I’ve experienced wholeness before through human connection, romantic and platonic, and life became rich and colorful and vibrant. Eventually, however, with everyone I’ve known, the unconditional positive regard has fallen away and my sense of self has dissolved with it.
Do I feel ashamed about living out of my car? Well, frankly, I have so much shame, what’s a bit more? My sense of self, my sense of shame, they’re all situational. In certain contexts, I feel strong. In other contexts, I feel ashamed. It all depends on the outlook of the people around me. If they feel I’m pathetic, I feel pathetic. If they think I’m an adventurer, I feel like an adventurer. I have no core. I rely on other people to tell me who I am. A psychiatrist would say that I’m constantly seeking mirroring and that this exhausts people. I’m so needy for attention that others have to set limits with me and I never take this well.
Do I feel like I’m a catch? Well, I know there are women out there who will go crazy for me. I just have to talk to a hundred girls to find that one. My Australian accent doesn’t hurt me in the search. Once I make a girl laugh, the odds are good she’ll sleep with me.
Clubs and bars don’t work for me because it’s usually too loud to talk much. Shuls, Shabbat dinners, those are my happy hunting grounds.
So what’s my confidence level? It’s strong in the sense that I know that there are people out there who will find me fascinating if we can just have a conversation and that they will want to help me to achieve a good life. I’ve met thousands of people in my life and at least one percent of them have adored me. I’ve known human connection. I’ve known success. I’ve known friends. I’ve known community.
The Jewish theologian Dennis Prager once wrote a friend of mine in 1993, “Anyone who’s a friend of Luke’s is a friend of mine.” I’ve been stamped kosher by Dennis Prager!
So what’s my confidence level? It’s strong in the sense that I know there are certain things I can do well. I love to talk and to listen to people who read books. I know I’m a good writer and a good speaker. I know I can achieve anything if I can just have normal health, which I don’t. I know I can still achieve substantial things, even as weak as I am, if I can just be nudged into the right niche. I just need a helping hand. I just need guidance. I just need adopting. I just need regular sex and baths and home-cooked meals and a few extra dollars a month.
So in the mid-90s, I am about 27. I have a model’s looks. I have personality. And I am living free with a friend, a UCLA professor who soon kicks me out for my messy inconsiderate ways and I have to make do with living out of my car. After six years of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I’ve made a two-thirds recovery and moved to Los Angeles and am trying to pick up the pieces of my life. I don’t have a college degree. I don’t have a job. I could work something prosaic and get an apartment, but I prefer to live free, to embrace the adventure, it will be great for my writing one day, down and out in Beverly Hills, and to spend my time away from drudgery reaching for greatness. Everyone has told me that I will be great one day. I believe them.
I spent my 20s sick. You probably spent your 20s getting laid. Now I want to catch up. I am new in the big city, I’m a legend in my own mind, and I want to get some. I want to connect. I want to launch myself. I don’t want to work an ordinary job. I want an extraordinary job as an actor or writer or model or escort.
So I go up to this girl at this secular dance and I come in under the radar with the spiritual approach. The first thing I say is, “Hi there, where do you go to temple?”
She smiles. She says she has no regular temple but is going to a beginner’s course in Judaism one night a week at the University of Judaism.
“I’m a convert to Judaism,” I say. “I go to a lot of different synagogues from Stephen S. Wise to Aish HaTorah, usually both each Shabbos. I love being in a city with so many Jews and Torah classes.”
Sara: “What got you interested in Judaism?”
Luke: “Listening to Dennis Prager on the radio. I’ve gotten to know him a little bit. He said that if I moved to LA, he might have work for me.”
I tell her I have an agent (Debbie Durkin) who sends me out for auditions for modeling and acting work and I might return to UCLA in the fall to finish my Economics degree.
She gives me her phone number and I call her the next day and she swings by to take me to the beach.
Sara* is about 35 and never married.
We lie on our towels in the Santa Monica sand and rub each other with sunblock. Then she gratuitously lets her long fingernails glide over my back.
It’s heaven. I’ve never had a girl do this to me before. She just grazes up and down my back and I daren’t turn over or my excitement will show. She’s in no rush. Up and down. I bet she could really work my digit.
I think she really likes me.
I’m lying in the sun on the beach in the company of an attractive woman who shares my values, shares my religion, and shares my love of pleasure.
A few days later, I tell her about this reality show I am thinking of going out for, but it is for couples. Is she interested in coming with me?
She is not.
I am a fool for asking her. I’m not living in reality. I’m oblivious. I’m just thinking about myself. I have delusions about others. Typical! Sara is a private person. She has no need to perform. She has a responsible job in healthcare. This is never going to be her thing. I’ve taken a bridge too far.
Our conversation turns serious. You can’t joke about marriage and children and relationships with girls, those topics are sacred. Once civilizations started joking about adultery, it meant that adultery wasn’t so bad. When I joke about marriage and kids, it just shows I don’t take such responsibilities seriously.
Sara says she can’t see us having a relationship.
I feel like a dick. I thought she was really into me. I have been way too flip in asking her to be my girl on TV before she is my girl in real life and now she’s knocked me down.
Something inside me dies when a girl does that. If she’s not going to take me seriously, if she’s not going to consider me for the long-term, well, I’m not going to take her seriously either. She’s no longer precious to me. She’s no treasure. She’s not somebody I will invest in. She’s not somebody I will commit to. She might be useful, she might be fun, she might be smart and interesting, but she’s never going to be mine. We’re just ships passing in the night.
Have I ever been in love? Yes, of course, but it takes two to tango. I’ve never been in love with girls who’ve declared to me that we have no future. That we’re not having a relationship. That we’re not going anywhere. There’s nothing like such declarations to turn off my feelings. There’s nothing like such declarations to turn off my honorable side. Such girls are no longer precious. When I can already see the end of us, my blood runs cold.
And you know what? All the women I’ve known who I told I could not see us building a future together, they changed immediately from warm to cold towards me. If women can’t see a future together, they get no joy from the present. They’re not like men who are happy to get some today without thought for the morrow. At least I’m open to the present! Carpe diem!
A few days later, Sara invites me over to her place Beverly Hills adjacent for dinner.
Afterward, we sit on the couch. I rub her back. One hundred percent of the girls I’ve known for the past six months who’ve let me rub their backs have also let me have sex with them.
I’ve been with about ten girls at this point in my life, nine in the last year.
Sara starts sighing. Then she says, “Let’s go into the bedroom.”
We make out for the first time and then we keep going. I’ve got my hooks into her now. I’m gonna trap her with the great sex and then just let this thing play out. I’ll have someone on my side. I’ll have a place to stay. I’ll have rescue.
I stay the night and then drive her to the airport in the morning. She’s going away for the weekend and she says I can stay at her pad.
I pick her up Sunday night. I bring her home. We make out. And then she asks me, “What do you want to do?”
“Can we go to Disneyland*?” I ask.
“OK,” she says.
I’ve never done this before but I’ve seen it in movies. It looks so cool.
I only tried it with one previous girlfriend. When she told her mom that Luke wanted to go to Disneyland but she was scared, her mom said she was a wimp. And when we tried it, she was really tense and it didn’t work.
Now I have someone who says yes as easily as if I had asked her to pass the peas.
So my first trip to Disneyland. I have some trouble with the route. I don’t feel comfortable asking directions so we go around a bit, take a few false turns until I finally bear down and get us there. It isn’t pretty but it works and its worth the wait for me. It’s wonderful. It’s one great ride. I feel like a million bucks. I’m ready to fuck my way to freedom.
I’m not just a good little Australian schoolboy anymore. I’m not just Dr. Ford’s son. I’m not just an ethical monotheist. I’m a bloke who walks the mean streets and knows how to ride a girl. I can drive a stick, I can become a Jew, and I can find Disneyland. I know what to do with my tools. I can be a manual laborer. I’m not just an effete writer. Give me a hammer, give me a nail. Let me create something magnificent.
Here I am with a girl who does not consider me worthy to be her boyfriend, who does not want a relationship with me, and now she’s doing everything I want. This is better than Space Mountain, this is better than Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. This is freakin’ Pirates of the Caribbean action. I’m getting the booty. I’m going where no man has gone before and I’m making her scream my name.
Why was this such a big deal to me? Because it was fun, exciting, pleasurable, taboo. I couldn’t do this with an ordinary girl. I couldn’t do this in a sweet loving relationship. I needed rage and a desire to inflict pain to pull this off. It’s easy to tap into rage when a girl lets you know you’re not good enough for her.
Sara didn’t want a relationship with me. She’d cut me off at the knees. Now I’d cut her off at the knees. It was justice. I was God’s servant, delivering divine karma.
With some girls, I only love her with my good side. With Sara, I could love her with my desire to do good and with my desire to do bad. She was the first girl to accept all of me. I hid nothing from her and she withheld nothing from me. I had a willing adventurous partner. I had a sport, a good sport, a champ. She took it like a champ.
She offered up on the altar the most precious part of her and let me do with it what I would. She didn’t do that for just anyone. I was special. I was privileged. I was chosen. She held nothing back. When we got together, she wasn’t coasting on her laurels. She wasn’t lying on her back allowing me to feed her grapes. Now she’s changed positions. When she met me, she was a tight end. Now she’s a wide receiver.
During July, we end up getting together twice a week.
Some mornings I get up early and go to prayers and Talmud class. I’m hitting for the cycle — God, Torah, Israel, Disneyland.
LA is a great place. Anything is possible. You can recreate yourself. I ask Sara if she’s ever considered upgrading her B-cups. “No,” she says, “I’m happy with them. They’re proportionate to my body.”
I agree. I was just kidding.
Sara is a health professional and sometimes when we go to Disneyland, she makes me wear protection.

I adore Sara. She salves the pain of my neglected childhood, the pain of growing up a socially awkward preacher’s kid who never got any, the pain of all those girls who rejected me, wouldn’t experiment with me, wouldn’t open themselves up to me… I adore Sara as much as you can adore someone who doesn’t want you in her life for long.
I’m a boy-toy. I get it. It hurts.
As we lie in bed one night, I say, “I’m going to New York for three weeks.”
“Who will you stay with?” she says.
“A friend.”
“Is your friend female?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re going to be having sex with her.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re going to be having sex with her,” she says, and starts crying softly.
She lets me leave a suitcase with my clothes under her bed.
On the day of my trip, she’s particularly tender. She takes me to breakfast on Beverly Blvd.
I fly to New York. Rachel* picks me up.
About nine months previous, Rachel placed a singles ad for a friend in this Jewish newspaper. She gives all of the responses to her friend but mine.
I start talking to Rachel (about 35) on the phone (she pays!). I send her cassette tapes with my musings.
It’s all very polite and spiritual until one evening, she talks about her difficulty falling asleep. “I’ve found that sex has a marvelously soporific effect,” I say.
She agrees and our connection takes a more intense turn.
I finally meet her when she flies to Los Angeles for Memorial Day weekend. We have a lot of sex. We go to Shabbat dinner. We go to shul. We take baths together.
She wanted to know what I was doing about work. I said Dennis Prager might hire me. I was just waiting for the word. For two months now.
So, unbeknownst to me, Rachel gets on the phone with Dennis Prager’s office and the next day, I get a letter saying they regret they don’t have work for me.
I guess I’ll have to make it as a model.
Rachel and I talk regularly on the phone during that summer. We love Judaism and sex. She knows I’m broke so she pays for my plane ticket to New York. I don’t think things will work out between us, but I’ll give it a try.
Rachel’s an heiress. She can afford it. She was born Jewish. She was born in the money. She has multiple graduate degrees from Yeshiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. She’s a five.
It makes me feel good when she gives me money. It makes me feel nurtured, cared for. Throughout my life, I’ve always paid for dates. Now due to circumstances out of my control, things have turned. I don’t have money. It makes sense to me that people who do have money and care about me, will help me out.
When I’ve had, I’ve given away. I come from a tight-knit religious community where we were generous with each other. Now I’ve joined a new religious community and it makes sense to me that we help each other out. With the little I have, I give.
I’m a youngest child. I don’t mind living off people. I’m used to getting things just by being grateful and adorable.
I remember in the mid’80s, I heard this story on All Things Considered about a guy who’s told he’ll spend his life living off women. That struck me hard. That’s me.
My ex-girlfriend Holly Randall was interviewed on the radio a few years ago. She said that she usually dated broke guys but most of them were bothered when she paid for stuff. “For some reason,” she said, “that never bothered Luke.”
It doesn’t bother me when other people pay my way. I’m Luke Ford. It just seems natural to me. I have so many gifts that I give to the world freely, abundantly, generously, through my witty conversation, my writing, my personality, my smile, that it only makes sense that the world would want to repay me with free trips to Disneyland.
I stay with Rachel for three weeks at her apartment on 78th and Broadway on the Upper West Side.
Just before I arrive, she has her maid do a thorough clean. Each day after that, however, her place progressively falls apart. She’s not the domestic type.
On my first full day in New York, Rachel starts telling me a little too strongly what to do with my life. I retreat inside. I realize she is not for me. Boom, that’s it. That possibility has closed. I will no longer invest in this woman. We’re just ships passing in the night.
Her bossiness causes me to shut her out for the rest of my visit but I try to make the best of things. We have a vanilla milkshake every night but there are no trips to Disneyland. She gives me $15 a day spending money and shows me around the Big Apple. We visit the Lincoln Square Synagogue, the Jewish Center, Stern College (an Orthodox school for girls), Crown Heights, the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Bnai Jeshurun, and several Broadway plays.
I place a singles ad in the Village Voice and say I’m a bicoastal actor-model. I feel no obligations to Rachel. I tried and she’s just not somebody I can live with. I don’t say this aloud because I’m dependent on her for a place to stay for three weeks.
With two days left on my trip, Rachel reads my ad and calls in to hear my voice. Things get a bit tense between us after that.
I borrow $500 from Rachel to buy two hours of the time of an acting manager. I need guidance with my new career. I tell him about my conversion to Judaism. I tell him about my role in a new movie whose details are listed in the Hollywood Reporter. I tell him I’m thinking about escorting for women! He says that’s probably a good idea.
He places some calls and tells me this new movie in which I have a lead role is a scam. It will never shoot.
He’s right.
Then I fly back to LA, forgetting my wallet at Rachel’s. She goes through it and finds the address of a woman I met at the Conservative synagogue Bnai Jeshurun.
She finally sends my wallet back but in our final phone call, she says her therapist thinks I’m using her and that’s it.
I still refer at times to the tiny siddur (Jewish prayer book) she gave me in happier times where she writes in the front in Hebrew and in English: “Wishing you peace of mind and joy to your heart, Love always…”
So I’m back in LA and Sara reluctantly agrees to meet up with me.
We go to a Shabbat dinner hosted by this weird woman. It’s awkward. Then we go back to Sara’s place.

“I have nothing to lose,” I tell myself. “This is healing. This is therapeutic. This is reparations for her contempt, for all I’ve missed out on in life. This is good times. This is an education. This is preparation. This is practice. This is knowledge. With every woman, I get wiser. I make new connections. It’s good for my career. It’s good for my writing.”
“I’m in LA. This is where they make music videos, movies, TV, porn. This is the sex capitol of the world. Everything I’m doing is consensual. In LA, life is sweet and easy. Sex is easy. This is what I deserve. I’m hot stuff. I’ve got a great story. I’m gonna be great.
“All of my life, I’ve had older women bossing me around. Teachers, substitute mothers, caretakers, the works. They’ve been telling me what to do, running my life, squashing me, beating me, harassing me. Now I’m getting some. I’m out on my own at last. Life has restarted at age 27. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to make my way in this world. When will my disease return and turn out the lights? I’m going to stuff as much as I can into each day. What I want more than anything in the world right now, aside from God, is sex. Rough sex. Deviant sex. Dirty sex.
“Yeah, I like to inflict a little pain. A little discomfort. No blood! No injury! No bruises! Just minor discomfort to a consenting adult partner. You’re going to judge me for that? What I do is nothing compared to what women have done to me. It’s nothing compared to being knocked around the house as a little boy by a rageaholic. Multiple women did that to me. This time the bitch is getting hers.”
I wanted someone to rescue me. To show me the way. To give me a place to sleep. It ain’t easy picking yourself off the sickbed after six years and trying to make your way in a big city at two-thirds strength, no money, and a car-home that keeps breaking down. In exchange, I will give you the ultimate ride. There’s no one like me. I’m destiny’s child. My mother used to say when she was carrying me in her womb, “This one will do something special for God.” I’ve always known I was going to be great. I’m the greatest writer of my generation. My insights into life are so keen that other people resent me for it. No matter, that’s the price of being an artist. I don’t complain and I don’t explain. All geniuses are misunderstood.
Life is good. I move in with Sara for a couple of weeks. One evening, she takes me to her parent’s home. I’m dying to see this videotape of my work at a recent acting workshop, and so that’s how I spent most of the visit.
I don’t make a good impression.
A week later, Sara asks me to move out. She says her parents don’t think much of me. She says her friends don’t think much of me. She says her therapist doesn’t think much of me.
I’m in a bind because I’m broke and my home, my 1977 Datsun station wagon, is in the shop.
I borrow $500 from Sara to get it repaired.
In my last scheduled night at her place, she comes home late and finds a tiny drop of my seed on the toilet seat. Sheesh, I thought I’d caught it all! She marches into the bedroom and demands I clean it up.
Then we go to sleep like brother and sister.
While my Datsun is in the shop, I’m supposed to stay with a friend from acting class.
It’s Saturday night. I know Sara has a date. I sit on my friend’s porch and wait.
His name is Alexander Denk and he will hit the news more than a decade later as the putative father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.
When Alex doesn’t come home by 11 pm, I try to sleep in the bushes beside the Beverly Hills High School. After a few minutes, I give up.
I walk over to Sara’s place. I wait until the lights go out in her apartment. Then I ring the buzzer, hoping her date has gone.
She answers. I explain my situation. She’s not happy but she lets me stay the night on the couch.
And that’s it.
Over the next three months, I cry every day over my loss of Sara. I’ve never done anything like this before or since. The intensity of what we shared shakes me up and losing her is like losing an addiction. I am now walking the tightrope of my life without a net. Nobody will catch me if I fall. I have no one to distract me from the hole in my soul. I have no one to distract me from my lack of normal human connection. I have no one to distract me from my lack of friends, my lack of work, my lack of home.
Fear of abandonment is my deepest fear.
To find such rescue again will take a lot of luck and a lot of work. I am back to zero. I am in withdrawal. I have no distractions.
To have tasted connection, to have tasted living from the inside, and then to be thrust back out in to the cold, it makes the pain worse. It reminds me of everything I’ve missed out on in life. For a little while, I had connection and now it’s gone.
I am a scared, frightened, sick, homeless boy trying to make his way in the big city. Again and again I turn to sex to get by — for solace, for affirmation, for comfort, for connection, for the sheer joy of doing what I do best. The only reason I never formally sell my services? I get no takers for the two months of escorting for women ads I place in Los Angeles magazine at $90 a pop.
I feel bereft without Sara. Lost. With her, I have solace and satiety. I have someone in my corner. I have everything I need. I have my basics taken care of — sex, shelter, connection — and with those bases covered, I can look around to do better. And now my security blanket has been ripped away. It would’ve been one thing if I had done the breaking up, if I had someone better to move on to, but I don’t. I’ve been fired from one job without having another one ready to go. That’s not like me. Normally, I’ve scouted out for where to land when the current relationship crashes.
All those thrill rides came to a crashing halt and I am back at the starting line. My life isn’t the unfolding upward progression I’d dreamed.
One Saturday morning at temple, I sit next to Sara. When it comes time to call out the name of somebody who needs healing, I ask Sara — as a joke — to call out my name.
“I think it would be better if you asked someone else,” she said.
My laughter dies. I feel small. I feel insignificant. I feel rejected. I feel like my mommy has died.
That’s about our last conversation. I avoid her after that.
A few weeks later, I sit in the YULA beit midrash and write Sara a valedictory letter telling her about how much our time together meant to me. I send her a $500 check and I send Rachel a $500 check. I’m a bloke who always pays his debts.
Sara replies with equal warmth. She says that while I was in New York, she met a guy she fell for hard. One night he came to her place. He asked her about the suitcase under her bed. When she told him the truth, he left her and never came back.
One Friday night a few weeks later, I meet a new friend, Bobby*. He listens to my tale of woe about Sara. He confides that he’s really well endowed. And that he did Sara on their first date a couple of years previous.
But she never took him to Disneyland!
About five years later, I run into Sara at temple. She is married and living in the Valley.
Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can’t shoot them anymore.
That long black cloud is comin’ down
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.

1999 MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

I met Sony exec Jane* at Adat Shalom on a Friday night in the Spring of 1999.
Afterward, our Traveling Shabbat singles group arrived at some apartment where I got to talk to her more.
She was a smart brunette, like Rochelle and like my mom.
On our first date, I took her to A Walk on the Moon.
I laughed. I almost cried. I had a ball. Afterward, in the parking lot of the Beverly Center, we talked about work. I wrote on the other Hollywood. She confessed that she also worked for the dark side — something to do with gambling.
I said the National Film Board of Canada was flying me to Montreal for five days in June. She said she had a relation there. He might tell me where I could go for Shabbos. I must promise not to pervert him.
On our second date, a Sunday night, we went to dinner. Coming back to her place, I kissed her on the lips good night and said by accident, “Gut Shabbos.”
I’m not sure where that came from. She laughed. I was embarrassed.
On her birthday, I gave her a copy of the Nicholas Sparks novel, Message in a Bottle. I didn’t know what an execrable writer Sparks was nor had I read any reviews of the book. Just the notion of a message in a bottle spoke to me, I wasn’t sure why.
Profiles of me were published in Salon and the Los Angeles Times. I forwarded them to Jane. On our third date, she took me to a screening on the lot. It was a dark thriller (Arlington Road) and I hated it and I felt sad that Jane and I seemed disconnected that evening.
When I called her next, she didn’t call me back for a few days.
Early one Shabbos afternoon, she left me a phone message inviting me to go with her to the Hollywood Bowl that evening.
I was gone all day and didn’t get the message until it was too late. The next day, I went out and bought my first cell phone so I’d never again miss such a call.
Frustrated by our misconnections, I didn’t call her back for two weeks. I wanted to show how strong I was.
When we finally talked, the conversation was limp and we never went out again.
Tonight I Google Jane. She married a surgeon. She took her husband’s last name. She has children.
When I look at at her on Facebook, I can still hear her laugh.
This morning’s assignment in writing class is to describe the first story you ever heard.
I can’t think of anything. As I go back in my head, back through the mists of time, I remember my mother. She was frail, sick, dying, shielding me from my sister’s blows (I had broken into her perfume collection and mixed it with toothpaste and shoe polish and smeared it all over the bathroom). Mom was the archetype for women I’d love. The major themes for my writing were formed out of my brief fractured attachment to her.
I suck women dry. I never get enough attention. I don’t connect normally with people. Something went awry early on in my life. I’ve grown up to take all I can get in the moment knowing that the breast will soon run dry, that death was just around the corner.
A few year’s ago, I read my mother’s book, a collection of children’s stories on Christian themes. I sought in vain for a message for my life.
Many years ago, I asked my father, or was it my step-mother, no, I don’t think I asked anyone, just thought, why did mom not leave me a letter? A message in a bottle?

Luke: “All of my life, I’ve been into self-help. I’m always trying to improve myself and to change my position in society upward. It’s done no good. People can still see and they immediately know I belong with the least popular of the popular crowd or the most popular of the unpopular crowd.”
Rabbi Rabbs: “When we went for a walk on Shabbos? When I normally walk around Pico-Robertson, people pay no attention to me. I got a lot of stares when I was walking with you, more than I ever get. I got stared down. It wasn’t a happy stare-down. It was like, why are you with that loser?”

THE RATING GAME

Today I was telling my shrink, Dr. Spielvogel, about this new book by Reba Toney— The Rating Game.
If you find yourself getting dumped a lot, it’s probably because you’re dating out of your league. If you do the dumping most of the time, it’s probably because you’re dating beneath you.
Reba urges people to rate themselves honestly on face, body, personality and life position and to then seek out partners in their ball park. A fat ugly smelly loser, for instance, should not try to date a socially successful ten.
The women I fall in love with tend to be out of my league.
They don’t mind getting together with me at the hovel for Torah talk, but they don’t want to be seen in public with me.
Ouch! It’s like I’m some chick who’s 50 pounds overweight but gives great blowjobs. You’re happy for the highs I give you in private but you don’t want to introduce me to your friends.
Well, I don’t like that.
I don’t want you sneaking me into your apartment any more and hiding me from your roommate. I’m tired of being told to pipe down with my expressions of joy. I want to share my feelings for you publicly.
Dr. Spielvogel, I don’t know what I’m going to talk about today. The biggest highlight in my life right now is listening to Dennis Prager’s classes on the Torah.
Why do I get so excited about Dennis Prager? Well, 50% of the answer is that I made a commitment in December of 1997 to chronicle his life. If I hadn’t made that commitment, I would not spend as much time with him, perhaps.
Dennis keeps giving me important things to think about almost every time I hear him. He doesn’t let his emotions run away with him. He doesn’t overstate. Most public figures, most rabbis, I’m not that excited about them. I see their flaws too clearly. They’re prostitutes for publicity, for taking bold left-wing stands, and the like. Dennis does not overstate, even when he’s upset. I’m sure I’ve nettled him many times but he’s never lost his cool.
As soon as a person overstates, I become suspicious of everything they say.
I’ve always had good taste in friends. I can spot meanness from a mile away. Dennis isn’t my real friend. He’s my imaginary friend, but I spend more time listening to him each day than I do to the real people in my life.
Oy, doc, I can’t believe I just spent ten minutes comparing and contrasting Dennis Prager’s three wives. Oy, I need to get a life. No, I don’t want to be one of Dennis Prager’s wives. He is a father figure to me. A virtual father. I spent about two hours a day listening to him on the radio (without commercials via DennisPrager.com).
I look athletic? Well, I’m lying out in the sun for about 20 minutes every day. I do yoga and Alexander Technique and daf yomi.
I tend to date women who are above me in social status. They make more money. They have more friends. They’re more socially astute. For some reason, they like the tortured blogger.
The sex is great. Not a holy thing to say, I know. I should wait for marriage. I just have so much to give to the opposite sex, I can’t wait. I must give concrete physical expression to my feelings.
It was so painful to hear that **** didn’t want to be seen with me in public. She was ashamed. She said it was the Orthodox get-up, the beard and the tzitzit out, and how it was incongruent with who I really was. That I was a poser. That if she ever introduced me to her Orthodox family, they’d want to kill me. They’d hire a hit man.
Both Peppys had more friends than I did. Their lives were a social whirlwind. They were so connected to others. By contrast, I feel disconnected much of the time, holed up in my hovel and blogging my heart out, too exhausted to do anything else.
I was excited to be in their world and connecting with cool people. They lifted me up to a higher plane, and I thought, I like it up here. I want to live here. Yay! Finally I run with the cool crowd.
I was gaining in status. I had an attractive articulate girlfriend. I had worth. I had prestige.
When I was close with Cathy Seipp, I was also connected to a lot of cool people, but after she died, my connections fell away. Then I took my life in a new direction and I lost touch with most of my old friends. I pursued yoga and Alexander Technique and dropped out of the writer gatherings that were the center of my social life.
These girlfriends I loved, they weren’t as socially destructive as I am. There’s something rotten in my soul. In almost every social gathering, I start thinking, “What is the single most inappropriate thing I can say in this context?”
If I had stayed at Aish HaTorah, I’d have more friends today. If I had stayed atYICC, I’d have more friends today. If I had stayed at Beth Jacob, I’d have more friends today. If I had stayed at Bnai David, I’d have more friends today.
Well, maybe not. I didn’t develop friends at Bnai David. I was so shell-shocked from my expulsions, I was afraid to talk to people with an open heart. I was open-hearted at Aish and YICC and Beth Jacob and connected with people, but not at Bnai David. I curled in on myself like an infant.
I was on this weird probation program for a while where I could only daven and not go to anything, not kiddush and not Torah study. Then after that, I always felt in danger of getting kicked out, so whenever I interacted with people, it was from a frightened broken place. I kept people at arm’s length.
There’s all the difference in the world between stepping into a room where nobody wants to talk to you and a room where one person wants to talk to you. I’m grateful for my friends David and Monica.
There was this woman from yoga who told a friend of mine, “There’s just something off about Luke.”
There’s a brokeness in me that strangers can sniff out before I say a word. And worst of all, I know it, and I think about it when I’m socializing and it makes me seem all the more messed up.
I saw myself on the big screen a couple of weeks ago and I was appalled. That big ugly beard. I looked so disturbed. I wouldn’t want to get close to that person.
But it’s not the beard. I’ve always had something wrong with me. I remember when I was about four years old, people thought I looked like a Holocaust survivor. I had these big sunken eyes.
Throughout my life, I’ve felt ugly and awkward. I remember I was at a posh cocktail party at age 21 and my sister across the room was pointing me out and there I stood holding bits of lemon rind. You know how they give you lemon slices with your drinks at cocktail parties? Well, I was so nervous that I had torn mine apart and was holding it like a dead possum.
I remember one Sabbath afternoon at Ohr HaTorah in 1999 with Jana. We’d been having sex on and off for a year but we weren’t boyfriend-girlfriend. She didn’t want a relationship with me.
She stood up after kiddush and said, “I’m going.”
“I’ll walk you out,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want people to think we’re together.”
She apologized for it a few days later, but I understood her instincts.
This was before the beard. I was a good looking chap then.
Was it my reputation? No, it was the whole me. She knew me. She knew my reputation and my reality. She knew my good points and my bad points.
She knew all of me. We’d spent countless hours talking. She’d heard me interviewed on the radio. She’d seen me on TV. She knew who I was and she just didn’t feel strong enough that Sabbath afternoon to be seen in public walking out with me. She wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t evil. There’s a price to be paid for befriending a social outlaw and she just didn’t feel like paying that price that day.
Without even saying a word, I give off the vibe that there’s something not quite right with me. And the more I think about that, the more wrong I get.
I don’t think this can be solved by affirmations or even psycho-therapy. I have to pile successful social interactions upon successful social interactions, accumulate social prestige, and through concrete accomplishment, convince myself that I am a good guy.
This consciousness of my brokenness can be paralyzing. I go into countless social situations and I’m as limp as a noodle. Other times, I’m manic and I forget my flaws and I can mesmerize an entire room.
Most of the time when I walk into a gathering, I can predict how things will go. If I’m feeling confident and smooth, I will act accordingly. If I feel like a loser, I will act accordingly.
I’m not that thrilled with who I am, no matter how much I try to talk myself up and say meditations and affirmations and read self-help book. I don’t think that I am a particularly good person. I want glory but I’m not willing to work for it. I want attention without merit. I want sex without commitment.
Oy vey! I’m mad, bad and dangerous to know.
I cheated through math and science classes in high school. Though I eventually stopped cheating in community college, that same character flaw haunts me. I like to take the easy way out. If I’m pushed to the wall, if I’m caught, my tendency is to want to lie, cheat and steal my way out of trouble. I can fool some of the people some of the time, but I can’t fool myself. I know who I am. I know that my liabilities equal my gifts. I’m trying to nudge the needle towards gift but I can’t pretend that I don’t carry big liabilities.
I’m trying to do more things that I am proud of so this aching sense of badness diminishes. Judaism helps. When I do a lot of mitzvot, I feel better about myself.

I WAS THE KING OF KINGDOM COME

Posted on Apr 25, 2012 in Personal
I was a spiritual being. I lived in a world of light. All day long, I wrote my blog without a care in the world. I studied the sacred text and I communed with angels. I was like Peter Pan.
Then one day, father came to me and said, “Son, I want you to go down to earth and live among men. Get a job for a Jew lawyer. Personal injury. Chase ambulances. Pay off credit cards. Do without health insurance. See how the other half lives. And take my message to them.”
And so I went down to earth and worked 9-5 as a secretary. Every day my boss would say to me, “Man, what are you doing here?” And I’d say, “I’m living the dream. I’ve never been happier.”
I worked among lawyers and I passed out my Alexander Technique business cards and did my best to embody observation, inhibition and direction.
One evening I was working late. There was a big party. We weren’t invited. A beautiful woman came by looking for the bathroom. I showed her. The boss had me revise documents multiple times. He said I looked tired.
The woman came back out and walked by.
“Nothing could make me happier,” I said to the boss as I did my final revision. “Well, maybe one thing.”

The one good thing about the frequent moves of my childhood was that they kept giving me a chance to get it right. I’d move to a new country and before the internet, nobody there knew I was a loser. For a few weeks, I could even be a curiosity. I had an accent after all.
Then the ugly truth about me would inevitably reveal itself and I’d be back in the unpopular crowd (or, at best, I’d be the least popular of the popular crowd).
Occasionally good people would adopt me and shlep me along for weeks or months or even years (the Muths at Pacific Union College, the late Lane Van Howd in ninth grade, Shannon Anderson in twelfth grade, Cathy Seipp 2001-2007, rabbis), I had the illusion that I had changed for the good and could now live on a higher plane. But this borrowed functioning always ran its course, leaving me in that familiar slough of isolation and despair.
At age 12, I thought that running marathons would get me lots of attention and transform my social status. I envisioned myself setting world records. I’d be the next Derek Clayton (the Australian world record holder for the marathon).
I finished five marathons in seventh grade, but my fastest time was four hours and fifteen minutes.
Discouraged, I started training twice a day, averaging more than 60 miles a week.
At a race in San Francisco, I met Derek Clayton. “I’m going to break your world record,” I told him. “I’m training twice a day. Ten miles a day.”
“At your age,” he said, “you should be running track. Run the mile. Don’t run long distances yet. Your body can’t handle it.”
In my next race, I was on track for a 3:30 marathon at the 18 mile mark but felt wretched. I dropped out. Knee trouble over the next few years (Osgood-Schlatters disease) ended my running career.
I took away from my 18-months of running long distances an unshakable belief in my ability to discipline myself to achieve anything I wanted.
Running hadn’t led me to prestige or to records or to fame, but I’d gained some friends (one is still my Facebook friend, David Nieman), some focus, and some taste of achieving goals through hard work.
In high school, I thought that by displaying my journalistic talent, I could get lots of attention and transform my social status. It did not work.
I envisioned myself becoming the next Dan Rather but vocal trouble limited my radio career (from 16-21) and I never made the next step to TV.
The more I worked on my voice during these years, the worse it got. I quit in utter humiliation and felt a quiet burn over the next two decades until I started studying the Alexander Technique in 2008. By 2011, my voice troubles were gone and I’d love to get back into radio and give it another shot.
A few years ago, I sent a Facebook friend request to my former news director atKAHI/KHYL radio, Pete DuFour. He’s yet to respond. I find it frustrating that I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone from these years.
Working in radio news between 1985-1987, I got to interview U.S. Senator Alan Cranston, Los Angeles County supervisor Mike Antonovich, Boston Celtic Larry Bird, San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry,Randy White, and Vanna White.
I never earned more than minimum wage at KAHI/KHYL. I didn’t get any dates from radio and little fame, but I always had the sense I could be huge if I just conquered my vocal trouble. I was unshaken in my belief about my potential greatness as a journalist and as a scholar.
In college, I thought that by achieving straight As and preaching Marxism, I could get lots of attention and transform my social status. It did not work.
I envisioned that being a Marxist would make me chic on campus and get me laid. It did not happen. Not even a little bit.
Marxism was the greatest acting exercise of my life. For about two years, I acted as though the opposite of what I truly believed was true. I read dozens of books on Marxism and learned to talk the talk (OK, at times I really believed there was something to Marxism).
I was terribly amused when I told people from 1987-1989 that I was an “atheistic communist.”
This ability to enter the thinking of those inimical to me served me well as a blogger when I ventured into hostile territory and spoke to people I hated in their own language and allowed them to feel I was on their side.
After discovering Dennis Prager, I thought that by converting to Judaism, I could jettison an unwanted self and recreate myself as a righteous man who received lots of attention and transformed his social status. It did not work.
I envisioned that converting to Judaism would allow me to let go of my lifelong habit of using people, that I would become righteous and normal and that I would marry and have kids and be a respectable part of a holy community and a blessing to those around me.
I thought that by moving to Los Angeles in 1994 and getting close to Dennis Prager, I could transform my life. It did not work. I just perpetuated my lifelong habit of first idealizing and then devaluing.
Dennis Prager is the most significant of all the substitute father figures I’ve adopted. I’m not quite sure why I do this. My relationship with my own father is perfectly fine. Still, in high school, I noticed myself at times wanting to spend more time with the fathers of my friends (such as Robert McKee, Joe Hamelin) than with my friends (Kevin and Scott).
Dennis was just the ultimate father figure. He was wise and good. A great role model. I wanted to be close to him. I wanted to work for him. I wanted to take his values to the world.
My break with Dennis was the most significant rupture of my life. I lost all the friends we had in common. Distraught, I entered psycho-therapy (and have been in it ever since). I wanted to understand why I was destroying my most important relationships.
One day my therapist explained that I had learned so much from Dennis, that I wanted to show him what I could do. From that day on, I stopped wasting my therapy time talking about Dennis and the friends we’d had in common.
By leaving Dennis, I was able to do my own thing, and, at times, to do it brilliantly. I wrote what I wanted without worrying about how my work reflected on Prager.
From now on, my writing would come first for me. That had become clear. I’d sacrificed all my friends to write on Dennis. From now on, I would sacrifice everything to write what I wanted. I would not let anyone or anything hold me back from pursuing my life purpose. All loss would be bearable if I could just craft a true sentence.
I envisioned that working for Dennis Prager would be my path to meaning, to excellence, and to normality.
When that part of me died, other parts of me came alive.
From 1994-1998, I thought that by attending Aish HaTorah, I could remake myself like many of its baalei teshuva (penitents), and transform myself. It did not work.
I envisioned that I might marry and have kids and be a part of the warm, loving Aish community. I dreamed that I would leave my compulsions behind and be 613 all the way.
I didn’t quite make it, but the sweetness of what I tasted was not forgotten, and even though Reform Judaism was easier, I soon made my way back permanently to Orthodoxy because that was where I knew the best people.
And in the various Orthodox shuls of Pico-Robertson, I met many people who like myself had been m’kareved (brought closer) by Aish but had since moved on.
In 1995, I thought that by writing on the porn industry, I could get lots of attention and transform my social status. It did not work.
I envisioned that I would become a best-selling author and quickly move on to other more socially acceptable topics. Instead, I got stuck in the salt mines of porn for most of 1995-2007.
While it was not the topic I wished for myself, and while it was the only way I found to make a living writing, I found many compelling stories during my time in XXX. There was rarely a dull day. Porners may not be polite but they are hilarious.
In 1998, I began years of psycho-therapy. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
For years, my therapy was largely crisis management. It helped to stop me from completely destroying myself by holding me accountable. Every week I had to check in and share what I was doing and we would talk about how that compared to what I wanted for my life. How did my deeds compare to my stated ideals? I had converted to Judaism. What did that mean for my choices?
For years, I used therapy as another forum for showing off. Eventually, however, I reduced the acting out in my sessions, reduced the boasting about the details of my sex life, and began to talk about my true feelings of shame and loneliness.
In 1999, I began homeopathy. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
For the first couple of months, I felt like I was leaving Chronic Fatigue Syndrome behind but then it returned with a vengeance. I kept consulting my homeopathic doctor until about 2003, when I gave up.
In 2000, I began attending Young Israel of Century City and was befriended by a prestigious man. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
I envisioned myself becoming like those around me at YICC — successful in Torah and successful in the world. But I had taken the easy route to infamy and confused it with lasting success. I was not in the same league as these guys.
Booted from Young Israel of Century City in June of 2001, I began attending Beth Jacob. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
In August of 2001, I began attending Chabad Bais Bezalel. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
In August of 2001, I quit writing on the porn industry. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
I envisioned myself making the same impact on Hollywood with my writing as I had made on the porn industry with my blogging. That didn’t happen.
In October of 2001, I began attending Bnai David-Judea. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
By this point, I was so shell-shocked by this point by my multiple shul ejections and from feeling like a pariah around my community of Pico-Robertson, that I retreated from most of those around me and became increasingly isolated in the shul.
In September of 2002, I quietly began writing on the porn industry again. This time I had no illusions and only wanted to get out.
I did not use my full name of “Luke Ford”. I was just “Luke” or “Deep Under Cover” or some other such name.
In October of 2007, I stopped writing on the porn industry. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
In July of 2008, I took up the Alexander Technique. I thought I could transform myself. I thought I could become more successful with women. It did not work.
In January of 2009, I took up Kundalini Yoga. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
In May of 2011, I began 12-stepping for sex addiction. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
In December of 2011, I began teaching Alexander Technique. I thought I could transform myself. It did not work.
How come complete strangers can read my thoughts and know that I am no good?

1997-2000

I found my niche in 1997 blogging about the porn industry. In June 1999, I published my first book — A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film. For my intrepid reporting, Hustler magazine in its Christmas issue 1999, named me its Asshole of the Month.
It was an honor just to be nominated.
In 2000, my family is so worried about me that they give me a free trip back to Australia to see the doctors of their choice. One of them is a psychiatrist. I spent three hours with her.
Afterward, Dr. Redden gives this evaluation to my sister: Applying the DSMIV, Luke has a personality disorder of the histrionic/narcissistic type.
Luke is very dependent upon other people for his identity as a person.
He has poor identity integration and poor self esteem. Accordingly, Luke is always looking for mirroring – it’s called “narcissistic supply.” That is to say that Luke is always looking for external validation of himself as a person (i.e., he needs other people to tell him who he is). However, because it is not possible for people to mirror him all the time, he gets disappointed and this can turn to envy. Luke may not be conscious of the fact that he is very envious of his family as they seem to have things he would like to have but does not have. This leads to him fluctuating between, on the one hand, devaluing people such as the family (putting them down) and on the other, idealisation of people – such as Dennis Prager.
Luke tends to make unreasonable demands of people who are eventually driven to setting limits on him. Luke takes this very badly.
Luke needs five to ten years of insight orientation psychotherapy. It was the falling out with Dennis Prager which caused him to go to therapy. While Luke has a lot of therapy ‘speak’, he may not really understand the concepts involved.
Luke will continue to do what he is doing to satisfy his needs until such times as the rewards (reinforcement) are outweighed by the negative effects of same (punishment). Then he may do something about getting his life on track and getting therapy or going back to finish his degree (which would give him some self-esteem).
The negative effects of his current behavior are that no one will have a long term relationship with him as no matter how sane they are, people cannot live without getting something back – and Luke is always taking in without giving anything back. Second, any decent woman who looked at his website would be immediately repulsed.
Luke has a complicated personality. He has mood instability – perhaps mild cyclothymia.
Luke become very focused on one thing then, when he is not getting the desired rewards, he drops it and moves on.
Luke may have had some post viral illness but then the illness took on a life of its own. It is common for people to retreat into the sick role because it is a way of failing in a face-saving way. Luke was failing because of the lack of significant relationships in his life.
Luke in his current state would not be successful in employment.
He wants immediate results and if he does not get them, then he does not want a bar of it.
As with most adolescent boys, Luke was obsessed with sex.
As with most super egos – it is not well integrated. His rules are situational and he justifies things.
Luke is capable of being exploitive.
Luke is reacting to the values of his family unit.
We [Luke’s family] have to have a firm boundary of where we go in his life. We should stay off his website – what we don’t know won’t hurt us. We should set limits on his unreasonable behavior. We must treat him as an adult that he is and stop babying him.
Luke has tunnel vision and difficulty seeing things as others see it. He is only looking for mirroring.
Luke has a poor sense of identity – he is not well integrated – he has no sense of self – therefore he is very changeable in different circumstances.

I wonder how many hours I could go without seeking mirroring? Am I capable of a mirroring fast? Please let me know what you think.
I’m a bit attention whore. I don’t have a solid sense of self. I keep looking to other people to tell me who I am. They inevitably get tired of doing this and I get disappointed.
So I wonder if I could experiment with deliberately doing nothing to seek attention? I wonder if I could get in touch with my highest self and just live that an hour at a time.
As much as possible, I’d like to let go of my attention-seeking ways. It inevitably gets me into trouble. When I have true connection with people, I feel much less desirous of cheap internet attention. When I’m disconnected, I like to log on to Facebook to get a virtual connection. It’s a crutch to help me through lonely times.

2000

More than a decade ago, I met this girl Jana*, a former cheerleader, who was out of my league. She worked for a major studio while I was an independent blogger. She had degrees from Harvard and Stanford while I failed to graduate from UCLA. She paid $2,500 a month for her Beverly Hills apartment while I paid about $600 a month for my Pico-Robertson hovel. She had a nice car while I had a bomb.
We met at Friday Night Live at Sinai Temple and immediately felt an attraction. Soon after, however, when she mentioned my name, her friends warned her against me.
Jana and I were friends for months and then one Friday night after dinner, we wandered into a bar. She ordered a cocktail. I ordered nothing. It was Shabbos.
When it came time to pay for her cocktail, she asked me if I had money. I didn’t. I didn’t carry money on Shabbos. Luckily, the bar took her credit card.
We wandered on to the beach and held hands as we strolled along the water. Finally, I pulled her on to a deck chair and we made out.
I asked her to come back to my room. She said no.
The next morning, we met at breakfast. There were a group of us. I was asked for my plans. “I’m going with her,” I said, pointing at Jana.
We went to the beach and slathered the sunscreen on each other.
I was concerned. I was already one-down in this relationship. I was following Jana around. I knew she moved on a higher plane than I did and I felt insecure. Could I pull this off?
I had a big problem. I earned my living blogging about the porn industry while Jana worked for Disney. She probably already knew this about me, but I had to tell her what I did for a living without using the word porn. So I told her I wrote about the entertainment industry and the sex industry and I’d published a book on sex in film.
I never learned whether or not she ever read my website. On there, I wrote deliriously about being in love without mentioning any details about her.
I think she took the attitude, “the less I know the better.”
I never said the word “porn” to her.
She liked that I was religious and we went to temple together. Once she even came to Beth Jacob with me. It was her first time in an Orthodox shul. She couldn’t stand to pray with a mechitza so she came late for the Shabbat dinner.
Afterward, we went back to my place for the first time. She was appalled at how small it was but she tried not to show her disapproval.
I attempted to make out with her but she stopped that, using the excuse, “It feels sacrilegious.” That was a new excuse. Women often had them for not getting close to me.
Jana beat a hasty retreat from my hovel that night. She wasn’t the first or the last girl to do that, though most of the women I dated made peace with its weird comforts. If they couldn’t, it would’ve been hard for us to spend time together. One girlfriend lived a few miles away and we spent most of our time at her place and virtually no time at my place. She absolutely refused to have sex there.
I didn’t have a bed. I slept on the floor, on top of a sheet and under a duve.
I regularly emailed my Advisory Committee (four male friends around the country) every detail of our ups and downs. I was besotted. All I talked about in therapy for weeks was my relationship with Jana.
I was always one down. I always felt like a shmuck but never wanted to blame Jana for this. In truth, the problem wasn’t so much things I was doing but who I was and where I was in life. I didn’t match up. I knew this and it made the pain worse.
We never did the ultimate deed, which exacerbated my insecurity. I’d hoped that I could hook her with the hot sex and that would enable us to coast for months.
Driving back from a party Saturday night, our first trip in my rusting old van, she said, “Next time we’ll take my car.”
We stopped by Jerry’s Deli. At the end of the meal, she opened up, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but after I met you at synagogue, I told two other women about you. They were happy until I said your name. They thought you were a loose cannon.”
“Yeah, it’s true,” I sighed. “I’m in therapy. I’m working on it.”
“This is something that concerns me,” she said. I’d like to bring you to my uncle’s barbeque this afternoon, but I’m concerned about your sense of propriety. You have a tendency to say really inappropriate things.”
I nodded and paid the bill. As we walked, I heard a familiar voice calling my name. I turned around and saw porn star Ron Jeremy at a booth with four sluts. I paused and then stepped forward to my Uncle Ron, leaving Jana behind. She waited for me to introduce her, but when I didn’t, she skipped off to the bathroom.
Ron regaled me for a few minutes with his latest accomplishments, including a public introduction at a Chris Rock performance.
After a few minutes, I said goobye and found Jana outside.
“Who was your friend?” she asked.
“A B actor,” I said.
“Why didn’t you introduce me?”
“He’s kinda sleazy.”
I tried to keep my life neatly separated. There was a compartment for work, a compartment for love, a compartment for religion. When I hit a bump in the road the contents of my life spilled together, I felt uneasy.
I never did get an invite to her uncle’s barbeque.
One Sunday evening a week or two later, we bought dinner at the market and then ate it at her place. Afterward, she said we should talk about the relationship. “We just want different things,” she said.
I nodded. I knew I wasn’t in her league. I couldn’t keep up with her. She spoke so fast, lived so fast, spent so much.
We kept seeing each other intermittently. Jana moved to San Francisco.
One day about a month later, I called her and when she didn’t get back to me within 48 hours, I sent her an email breaking up.
An hour later, she called me. She hadn’t seen my email. She invited me to come to a wedding with her the next weekend. “This will be the first time we’ll spend the night together,” she noted.
I was dying on the other end of the phone. What I wanted had arrived but it was too late. “Umm, I sent you an email,” I said. “I think you should read it first.”
“Oh, OK,” she said.
I hoped she’d read my email and then ask if that was really what I wanted to do and we’d just talk everything out and go on better than ever.
However, she read my email and agreed it was best that we broke up.
So I never did get to spend the night with her.
I often date women out of my league. I can’t afford to keep up with them. I don’t have the energy and I don’t have the money.
While we go out, however, I love the borrowed functioning. I love moving on a higher plane. I meet great people and imagine I can leverage the connections into a better life.
The end always comes quickly and it’s usually in the form of “We just want different things.” Women are nice. They rarely tell me directly, “You can’t keep up.” I appreciate their kindness.
So do we really want different things? I want money and prestige as much as they do. So I don’t think our differences are so much a result of wanting different things but of rather attaining different things at this point in life.
Am I not capable of keeping up? I’m not sure. I have a lifelong habit of only doing what I want and that has never made for monetary success (I’ve never earned over $50,000 in a year). I’ve always chosen time and space to write over more lucrative endeavors, hoping that my dedication to my craft will one day pay off financially.
And how have things turned out for these high-powered women I’ve loved? None of them have married. I sometimes think that with their guidance, I could’ve kicked things up a notch and everything could’ve worked out.
A few years ago, Sandra Tsing Lo had a garden party for some fabulous women around 40 years of age. These ladies appeared to have it all. They were well put together. They were successful in their careers. They had gorgeous lives. And they learned over the course of the afternoon that they had something else in common — they had all dated Luke Ford. He had seemed like such a catch. A good looking erudite man with a charming accent. And then they Googled him. Oy!

2009 THE OPEN ROAD

There was that Sunday morning one November. I woke her at 4 a.m.. She protested. “You’ve got to be kidding!” I didn’t listen. I picked her up and put her in the shower. “You can sleep in the car,” I said.
I had a rental car for a week because of an obligation (I had crashed a friend’s car and while it was in the shop, I drove him around). It had to be returned the next day. I wanted to see how far we could drive. I had dreams of reaching Big Sur.
We were in Moro Bay by 9 a.m.. She wanted to stop and walk around. We had breakfast. We poked around. By 10 a.m., I was eager to hit the road. She thought three hours of driving was far enough knowing we had to go back the same day.
We asked a guy how far away was Big Sur. “About an hour,” he said.
“That’s too far,” said my girlfriend.
“But how far away does Big Sur actually start? You mean the town is an hour away. But Big Sur starts in 20 minutes drive.”
He agreed. And my girlfriend reluctantly acquiesced to my wishes.
“If we’re going to argue like this, we can’t go on vacations together,” she said.
We stopped on a bluff in Big Sur and carrying a blanket, walked to a secluded spot overlooking the ocean where no one could see us. The cliff face was just a few feet from where we grappled, falling away 200 yards to the surf below.
The sun shone. The sky was blue. The temperature was about 75 degrees. It was perfect.
We made it to Monterey by 4 p.m. and had an hour to walk around before the sun set. My girlfriend had never been to Monterrey. I felt great that I was taking her to places she’d never been before and making her scream my name.
When we got out of the car, she started making suggestions but I said no. We had to find a coffee shop before anything. I needed a bathroom.
She was surprised at how assertive I was. She liked that. Normally I was passive and supportive and she walked all over me.
Beginning the drive home, I put the Cowboys game on the radio. She felt the loss of my attention. Turning to her phone, she read me a text that she’d gotten from Vicki*, a woman she’d twice left me for.
The text said simply, “Do you want to play?”
The first time my girl left me for this other girl was after we’d gone out for a week in January and had plans to get together that Monday night when she went off the radar and did not pop up for six days to leave me a message that she’d gotten back together with someone.
The second time was in July when she went on a vacation and called me to ask how did I feel about her playing around with Vicki* on her last night in LA.
I was speechless, got off the phone quickly, and cut her out of my life two months.
Now Vicki was popping up again. Driving meant freedom to me, but now I was stuck in a car for at least four hours with somebody taunting me about her lesbian hook-ups.
She’d said that her previous boyfriend would never put up with such behavior but obviously I did. I was a doormat.
I went into shock as I drove the car at about 70 mph along the narrow, twisted and bumpy 101 Freeway South. I needed all of my attention to keep us safe but I felt like I had just been punched in the gut.
“Well, do you?” I kept asking her.
She said no. She apologized for bringing it up. “I just wanted your attention,” she said.
When we stopped for gas, my girlfriend paid for the second time that day. She knew the desperation of my finances.
At the end of the trip, I announced how great it had been. My girl said that she now knew how much I needed reining in. Upon reflection, she should’ve stopped me in Moro Bay. I had no common sense. We’d taken a bridge too far.

BOTTOMLESS FEMALE NEED FRIGHTENS ME

I have my needs too but they’re specific. Female need seems so diffuse. You can’t get your hands on it. When you think she just wants a Slurpee, you find out she really needs all sorts of things you can’t provide.
Normally, I like it when my girlfriend natters on and on. Every girl I’ve had has talked more than I have when we’re alone. That’s great until she demands that I respond.
What do I say when I can’t validate her? Her girlfriends do that. “Oh, sister, you’re so brave. You’re a hero for going to HR about your boss.”
And I’m thinking, your story of persecution doesn’t ring true. If you put up with it for years as you said, then you’re partially responsible. We train people on how to treat us. If you let your boss abuse you, then that’s your fault that you didn’t have the dignity to stand up for yourself when the abuse first happened.
I don’t want to say this but she forces it out of me and then she gets mad and there are no more good times.

I write frequently about social status — I feel keenly that I don’t have enough — and people keep asking me what I mean by “social status”. America is supposedly a classless society. What do I mean by terms like “loser”?
Let me tell you from experience:
A loser shows up to Shabbat meals at shul that he can’t pay for.
A loser latches on to people who don’t want to be latched on to.
A loser sends out more friend requests than he receives.
A loser targets high status people for friend requests hoping that a Facebook connection will somehow lift his own status.
A loser gropes women without their permission.
A loser gets thrown out of places.
A loser tries to get close to rabbis knowing that as soon they find out who he is, they will boot him.
A loser can’t find friends his own age because they’re all married with children and mortgages.
A loser joins cults because he longs for acceptance.
A loser gets taken in by pyramid schemes.
A loser watches an hour of pornography a day.
A loser consults a psychic when he loses his acquaintanceship with Dennis Prager.
A loser walks into a crowded room and no one wants to talk to him.
A loser flunks out two days prior to his scheduled graduation because of an inappropriate blog post.
A loser says “Gut Shabbos” to people who say nothing in return and avoid his gaze.
A loser gets a girlfriend and then finds for years that he can think about little else. His life is that empty of human connection. “You don’t have any friends, do you?” she says.
A loser develops a best friend for a few months who then says upon his expulsion from the shul, “Let me tell you about the feeling in this house — I don’t trust you, my wife hates you, my kids fear you.”

I’VE BEEN HUMBLED BY LIFE

I’m humbled by how often my tendencies to bridle at authority interfere with my career success. I just don’t like being told what to do. It’s like I live my life in perpetual rebellion against anyone who reminds me of certain figures from my childhood.
I’m 45 and I’m still lashing out to my own detriment.
I get very humble at times and even grateful to the generosity of certain rabbis, certain teachers, certain authority figures who’ve guided me to a better life. Then my rebellious ways force them to set limits with me and I don’t deal well with these limits and I lash out and endanger these relationships.
“Nobody will tell me what to do!” That’s probably the most frequent thing I say to myself.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve hated student-teacher, parent-teacher conferences. I see again and again how my teachers only want to help me but I buck against their bridle. I hate that bit in my teeth. I want to race off and do my own thing, only I know that that direction leads to failure and humiliation.
So I’m going to take some deep breaths, try to let go a little bit of my instinctive rebellion, and listen more deeply to what my teachers tell me.
Despite the best of intentions, I’m right back at them the next day, pushing away their guidance, challenging their advice, pushing against their direction.
I am humbled by the way my rebellious attitudes keep costing me normal advancement and personal connection. I am humbled by how my rage keeps costing me relationships. I am humbled by how much my teachers want me to succeed. I am humbled by the faith they’ve placed in me.
I need my teachers’ approval to succeed in my chosen profession. I need their good will. I need their guidance. I am going to become the good student. I’m no longer gonna be the bad boy at school. I’m gonna be the rule-follower, not the rule-breaker.

ALONE WITH THE BRIDE

I noticed this woman at Jewish events. She came every few weeks and she was highly defended. She showed no interest in talking to guys. Not to me, not to anyone.
She caught my eye because she looked just like my last girlfriend, Lori*, the love of my life. Lori was a writer like me. We could sit around and write and then we’d read to each other and there’d go the evening. It was grand.
Lori was the ultimate girl for me. The problem was that she came from a broken home. Her father screwed around. “Hell is listening to your father fucking other women in the next room,” she told me.
As a result, Lori was filled with contempt for men. No relationship was possible.
Our other major problem was that though raised in Orthodox Jewish day schools, Lori hated Orthodox Judaism. I, by contrast, was raised a Seventh-Day Advent schools and converted to Orthodox Judaism. I had the convert’s enthusiasm.
Despite our differences and the 32 months since our break-up, Lori still clung to my heart.
So this mystery girl? Eventually I learned that her name was Rivkah*. She was from Los Angeles.
And then a month ago, I learned that she was about to marry.
I went to friends for the second* night of Succot. They’d purposefully invited another girl I liked, but she didn’t show. Among the guests who did show, however, was Rivkah, and we ended up sitting next to each other in the cramped succah.
She talked about her wedding dress and how hard it was to find the right closed-toe shoes. She talked about her honeymoon. She talked about her rabbi and how she needed limits and how she asked him questions and how she abided by his answers.
I’m not so frum.
Eventually, the host asked Rivkah to keep an eye out for a shidduch for me.
So Sarah asked me what age range I was seeking. “Thirty to 46,” I said. “I’m 46.”
Of course, I’m really looking for someone younger than 40, but I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want the grief.
“Are you closer to 46 or 47?” she asked.
“Forty six,” I said.
“Are you open to a divorcee?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Even if her ex is living in the community?”
“Yes.”
“A widow?”
“Yes.”
“Someone with kids?”
“Yes.”
“What qualities are you seeking?”
“Someone with a sense of humor.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, if someone is funny, they’re also smart. Not all smart people are funny, but all funny people are smart. The rest, I’ll know within a few minutes of talking to her. It can’t be defined. It’s just attraction and attraction is not a choice.”
I felt increasingly uncomfortable during the questioning. Not only because it came from a woman who looked like my beshert, but because it was pointless without first explaining that I had a horrible reputation, just Google me, and that I made just enough money to support myself.
She asked me if I knew Rabbi So-and-So and I did, but I knew that this rabbi worked with this other rabbi who was not a big fan of mine. She asked me if I knew this matchmaker and I did, but we never talked about shiduchim for me because this matchmaker knows that no decent woman would put up with my baggage.
Eventually everyone else left the table and it was just me and Rivkah, the Orthodox version of Lori in my mind. And she was due to marry in two weeks. And I wondered what could’ve been.
The dessert came out, including a fruit salad prepared by Rivkah. It had cinnamon, and this simple spice evoked for me all the joys of domesticity that this 46-year old bachelor has never tasted.
I took some home with me and ate it the next morning. I smelled the cinnamon and wondered what I was missing out on in life. I’ve always been a writer and as a consequence I’ve always been poor. Perhaps if I put my nose to the grindstone like everyone else, I could marry and support a family?
And what happened to the woman in the succah? I believe she got married and lived happily ever after.
And what did I get from the experience? All I got was this lousy blog post.

WHY AM I NOT MARRIED?

I believe that the primary reason I’m not married is because of flaws in my character.
* My lack of regard for others. I’m so intent on doing my own thing and on imposing my will on the world that I think too little about the feelings and welfare of others. I’m not married for this same reason that I was not invited to my classmate Gavin Brown’s birthday party in second grade and I was not invited to the Sabbath home of any of my classmates at Pacific Union College until a mother forced her son Andy to invite me midway through eighth grade.
* My 12 years writing on the porn industry combined with my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Both choices severely restrict the pool of available wives.
* My Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
* My poverty (primarily a reflection of my lack of character rather than a reflection of circumstance).
* My tendencies to isolate myself from whatever community I join.
* My narcissism and my fantasies of grandiosity. “I’d hate to see you lose your life in delusion,” said my therapist. My constant attention seeking. My need for mirroring. My history of exhausting people and pushing their boundaries.
* My fears of abandonment and of commitment. My inability to hold on to myself when in relationship with those I value aka my lack of differentiation.
* My low-grade chronic depression.
* My sex and love addictions. My overwhelming shame. The hole in my soul that I’ve tried to fill with excitement rather than intimacy, intensity rather than connection. It’s hard to stay on the Torah farm when you’ve seen Paris.
* My lack of emotional maturity.
* My synagogue reviews.
* My betrayals.

Sometimes a girl will not return my call and I’ll not sleep soundly for days. My fear of abandonment kicks in and I’m not capable of thinking about anything but this girl, who may not be that hot. For many guys, however, they’d lose no sleep over the matter. They figure she’ll call when she wants to. Meanwhile, there are lots of fish in the sea.
What are my most common thought patterns? What are the most frequent ways I respond to stimuli?
That’s easy! “Nobody will tell me what to do! I’ll go my own way and I’ll pay the price for my choices.”
That’s my instinct when people try to correct me or to set limits on me.
Another thought pattern I have is — “It’s useless. No matter how hard I try, I can’t succeed here. I’m f***ed.”
And, “There’s no alternative. There’s no way out.”
Here are some of my other common responses to stimuli:
* I’m just going to isolate.
* I’m going to shut up and emotionally withdraw.
* I’m going to retreat.
* I’m going to mumble.
* I need to start again.
* I just need to get off.
* If I could only have her, my problems would be solved.
* What can I do to get the maximum amount of attention?
* What can I say or do to appear most fascinating?
* I’m going to ignore everything until I complete this task.
* What is God’s will?
* Other people’s feelings shouldn’t squelch my expression because I’m a genius.
I have all sorts of things like this rattling around in my head and when my life is going at least halfway decently, I have the conviction that I can impose my will on the world around me, no matter the cost.
The most devastating comeback to my plans is the question, “So how’s that working for you?”
Not so well is usually the most honest response.
So what is the primary reason I am in this position today? The small regard I have for other people’s feelings. This has served me well in many instances because it has allowed me to write with brutal honesty. Still, its overall effect has been isolating.
Hmm. I want to go deeper. Why do I have such little regard for other people? Because I have so little regard for myself. Why do I have such little regard for myself? I think a deep sense of shame got implanted in me very early on in my life and as a result I walk around with dysthmia (chronic low-grade depression).
Rabbs: How’s it going with the 12-step program?
Luke: “It’s like a crash course in reality. You get out of your fantasies and into reality. I’m noticing that I am slowly rewiring my brain. Without this, I look at any attractive woman in a predatory fashion. Like she’s raw meat and I’m a tiger who hasn’t eaten in 18 months. That’s how I go around life. I obsess about anything remotely sexual. By going to 12-step meetings, I learn how destructive that is for people.”
“We sexualize our anxiety. Those of us who are sex addicts try to deal with the hole in our soul through sex. If I can just get some, I’ll feel better and this underlying emptiness will go away.”
“If sex is accomplished in a way that violates your values, you’ll have a huge crash afterwards… To get away from this shame, you isolate. You figure you can’t tell anyone about what is going on with you and you figure that people will reject you if they know what you’re really like.
“With a 12-step meeting, you can go into a room where people accept you and you can reveal what’s really going on with you.”
“You’re addicted to sex, as opposed to just being an average lustful guy, if you obsess over thinking that banging women will cure the hole in your soul. You’re likely an addict if you are going around doing things that are self-destructive in your pursuit of sex.”
“If you are spending four hours a night masturbating to internet pornography, you are self-destructive.”
Rabbs: “Who are you to judge me?”
Luke: “When I had my health, when I had these anxieties, I could just run five miles and it would go away. When I had my health, I could accomplish anything. I could study for six hours straight. I could get up at 4 a.m. to do my math homework and learn calculus. I could get straight As. I could work 14 hour days. I could make a lot of money. Now I’m struggling and sometimes I want some solace, something to make the pain go away. All these frustrations I have from poverty, ill health, rejection, ostracism, failure after failure.”
“I remember having all these problems. And I had a hot girlfriend who was above me in social status. I was afraid she’d leave me at any moment. What held us together was the sex. So I would take levitra to make sure that I could really do it good. I’d take testosterone to make sure that I could really do it good.”
Rabbs: “Thirty three minutes [into the show] before he tells us about one of his sexual exploits.”
Luke: “I thought that if I could keep plooking her really good, I could keep her in my life and I could prove I was a man. All the other ways of being a man, such as earning money and protecting her and providing for her, I couldn’t do. But I can bang the bejesus out of her if I just take my levitra. And of course she was just getting really sore. And she’s like, ‘This is hurting me. Stop taking that levitra.’”

I hate women

I’m just starting to realize this from my psycho-therapy and from my attendance at 12-step meetings for sex addiction and those little bits of bother I had yay many years ago in Pico-Robertson’s finest Orthodox shuls, perhaps it wasn’t all their fault?
I never saw my hatred so clearly before.
I’ve long known that many wise people found me toxic. I’ve long tried to dismiss their opinion because sitting with it was way too painful. I couldn’t even face the possibility that they were right. No, I just had to dismiss them.
I remember I had this rabbi-friend four years ago who said he’d take me to a sex addiction meeting. I blew him off. I thought his suggestion was ridiculous. Every healthy man’s a sex addict, right? I’m no different than any other red-blooded all-American male. That was my thinking.
But now I see that I really do hate women.
Now don’t be a simpleton. I don’t only hate women. I also adore women. I love women. I respect women. I fear women. I have the full spectrum of emotions towards women. Many of them are even appropriate!
I have female friends going back more than 30 years. For the last 27 years, for instance, I’ve been far closer with the mother of my best mate in high school than I’ve been with any of my friends from that time.
I’ve always had an approximately equal share of male and female friends. I’ve had many romantic relationships with women, some lasting a year or longer. Heck, I’ve seduced more than 40 women!
It’d be hard to get more loving than that, right, without playing in a rock band or the NBA?
So, hatred is not the only emotion I feel towards women, nor even the strongest. I also feel love and respect and affection, but there is a definite strand of unnecessary hatred towards women that perverts my psyche.
When it comes to my fantasies, they’re all eroticized rage. I don’t fantasize about candlelight dinners, marital relations and long walks on the beach. I fantasize about doing the nasty with some bitch who thinks she’s too good for me.
By confessing my loathsome tendencies, I am not saying that all women as individuals should be exempt from hatred. When a person acts hatefully, it is a good thing to hate what they do, and even at times to appropriately hate them as unnecessarily hateful individuals.
So I see nothing wrong with hating individual women, individual men, individual Jews, individual blacks, individual whites, etc so long as these hateful individuals deserve the hatred because of their hateful behavior.
Hating the wicked can be a mitzva!
My problem is that I’ve been living in reaction to some over-controlling mother figures from my earliest years.
My mom was diagnosed with cancer when I was one and over the next three years, I lived with many different families and had many different mommies.
It’s hard to go back in time and to see these things clearly, but I think I often felt squashed by some of these women and in reaction I’ve harbored a hatred for women, particularly haughty ones.
I must have my revenge even if it is just through viewing some degrading pictures of the fairer sex.
My favorite fantasy is that of the controlling bitch getting her just deserts. I particularly love it when I read about female teachers getting busted for sex with their underage students. That these women jeopardized their careers and their families and their reputations for something so self-destructive, well, that’s just hot to me.
I fear that when I read about actresses in Hollywood who regret all the risque stuff they did early in their careers and then forever complained that nobody would take them seriously, well, that’s self-delusion and self-destruction is just hot to me.
Or, it was. I’m finding through hours of psycho-therapy, 12-step meetings and readings on eroticized rage, that I am starting to reprogram my psyche so that the cruel exploitative fantasies that drove me (I haven’t screwed around for 15 years) are slowly starting to weaken.
At times, I even look at women as human beings.
PS. Here are the traits about women that I hate the most.
Number one and most important, I hate that the really hot women won’t let me attain them. I hate that they turn me down for dates. I hate that they don’t return my calls or my emails. I hate that they don’t accept my Facebook friend requests. I hate it that they don’t like me staring at them. I hate it that they object when I try to chase them around the room and paw them. I hate it that they would find it creepy if I looked in their windows. I hate it that I can’t stalk them.
I just want to hang around hot women all the time and smell them and look at them and read their email and see what they wear and how they choose it. I want to go through diaries. I want to go through their closets. I want to check out their lingerie. I want to read their bank statements and their credit card reports. There’s nothing as fascinating and intoxicating to me as a beautiful woman and I hate how much sway they have over me.
I hate the addictive high I get from female beauty. I hate it how easily affected I am by an attractive woman giving me the time of day.
I hate it that hot women drive nice cars. I sometimes sputter down the road in my old bomb and I look out my window and there are all these hot chicks out there, chicks I’ll never get to touch, and they’re smoking hot and they’re driving nice cars and some of them are probably doctors and lawyers and professors, so they’re probably haughty and yet they may never taste the humiliation I swallow every day with my oatmeal from just wanting so badly what I can’t have.
I feel like if I could just get to talk to some of these chicks, I could heal the pain that spears me. If I could just get to talk to them, if it would only be OK for me to look at them for longer than five seconds at a time, if I could only smell their perfume and skin lotion and conditioner for five minutes, if I could only have seven minutes in heaven with them in the closet, if they’d only let me put the tip in, well, then I’d be the happiest guy in the world and all my anger would melt away, praise be to Jesus!
I had a regard for the opposite sex and a veneration and an awe that was eaten away by sleeping with multiple women. If I would’ve married a high school sweetheart and she was the only woman I had known in that respect, I think it would be easier to be faithful.
I remember the first woman I was with, she bitterly regretted that I wasn’t the first man she was with.
There was a sweetness and an innocence to what we had. And when I moved on to other women, something was lost.

I haven’t even Googled “fear of abandonment” yet but I’m ready to write on this. Waiting for a girl I like to return my call or email for more than a day is agony, but that’s not the embarrassing part. What’s shameful is what my agony says about my life — empty — and my connections — few, inadequate, paltry.
Where’s the rich life of family and communal honor I envisioned? Who’s going to make a documentary about me now? For this I’ll be on the front page of the New York Times?

THE PAIN OF JEWISH HOLIDAYS

I find Sabbaths and holidays painful. They remind me of what’s missing from my life — connection.
During the week, I can distract myself with many endeavors so that I never have to look in the mirror and see my life for what it is — a lonely slog. But on Sabbaths and holidays, life slows down. There’s not much to do. There are no electronic distractions.
When I am feeling good about myself, it is easy for me to put myself out there and to meet people and to connect. When I feel like a loser, I withdraw.
All around me, people are celebrating Passover with their families. But I have created no family. I’m alone. So I latch on to other families but that can bring its own awkwardness. I’m a hanger-on. Or I can go to a community seder at shul with other people who don’t have families, but many of the people there are really weird. As weird as I am. It’s so painful to see them and to realize that they are reflecting back to me my place in the social pecking order.
I don’t want to believe that I am less than, that I have failed at the fundamental task of life — creating a family.
Without holy days, I don’t have to look in the mirror. Without holy days, I can pretty much think that my life is OK. Shabbats happen every week and I have a routine down and I can usually get through them without too much pain, but holidays, taking off a couple of days in the middle of the week to celebrate something, that’s potentially painful.
I look in the mirror and I see a great big crack in it. It’s like I’m missing a limb. The mirror says back to me — loser!
In second grade, the time I started school, I felt like a loser. So holy days don’t create this feeling. I’ve had it all my life. When cool people have adopted me, the feeling has disappeared because of the borrowed functioning.
When I am left on my own, I can no longer distract myself from my failure to connect with people who know me.
Strangers I can get along with just fine. If I have a girlfriend or am connected with friends or a particular shul or a family, I don’t have to confront this feeling so much. If I’m booming with my career, I’m not so vulnerable. If I am struggling financially, professionally and personally, then it is easy for me to isolate myself and to hate myself. If I’m appearing on TV all the time and getting in the papers and I can walk down the street and sense people looking at me, then I think that I’m not a loser and that the hole in my soul has healed, when of course it has just been papered over with a grandiose and false sense of self.
Since about 1992, I’ve had the conviction that there are answers to most of my problems and that if I can only connect with the right people, I can dramatically improve my health, my wealth, my career and my relationships. I’ve had enough experiences of the right people over the past two decades to sustain me in this belief.
There are people out there who can guide me. Every area of my life can be 100% better if I only connect.
When I’m absorbed in some interest or relationship, I’m not cognizant of mychronic low-grade depression. I’m distracted. That’s why all of my life, I’ve been looking for interests and distractions and causes.
I’m an enthusiast. I discover things. Think they answer life’s most pressing questions and then after a few weeks or months, I realize they’re just another false hope. They don’t take away my dysthmia. Then I may or may not continue with the interest.
About two years ago, my therapist said to me, “Do you think your Alexander Technique, yoga, and Orthodox Judaism are ways for you to distract yourself from your chronic depression?”
“Hmm,” I said, and I knew she was on to something.
All distractions wear off. All triumphs are temporary. All highs are followed by lows. All romantic relationships die within a year. All friendships wax and wane. And then I’m left at the same state I was in at four years old (alternating between depression and anger).
It makes no sense to try to live in Orthodox Judaism if you’re not married and have no prospects of marriage. You’re a fraud. You’re an actor. You’re playing dress-up.
“I’m a writer.” That’s what I keep telling myself. “I’m a writer. It makes no difference to me if I am looking up at life from the gutter or down at it from the stage. Both are equally valid perspectives to write from.”
So what if my writing alienates me? I’m dedicated to my craft, right?
Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying dirty words and I got ejected from shuls for writing them. We’re pretty similar, right? Our insights into life are just so keen that the great unwashed can’t handle them.
The incantation “I’m a writer” protects me from facing my failures head on. It’s my defense from admitting that what I am doing is not working. It’s an excuse.
“I’m just so dedicated to my craft” is cold comfort when you observe another Jewish holiday on your own.
I’m going to experiment with occasionally dropping the “I’m a writer” defense. I’m going to try to encounter people, at times, as just a human being who yearns to connect with like minds.
That’s scary because if I get rejected, then it is not for my writing, it is for who I am. I have dropped my shield.
I’ll try it anyway. Who knows? It might even improve my writing.
I find myself blogging less the past three years, since I’ve been in therapy and training to become a teacher of Alexander Technique. I used to work out a lot of my anxiety by blogging. Now I work some of it out in therapy. I’m not as anxious and compulsive and feel less need to blog.
I tend to run away from my emotions. I don’t want to locate them in my body and I don’t want to name them and I don’t want to accept the message they’re sending me. I prefer to distract myself from them and to imagine that I’m great and that one day the world will recognize this.
When I was a little boy, people said I looked like a Holocaust survivor. My eyes were sunk in my skull. I was withdrawn and sullen and reluctant to engage.
When I was about five, my dad came across me flinging manure at other kids and screaming, “I hate you. I hate you.”
I guess I was pretty in touch with my emotions that rare time.
My father had reason to be concerned. This was no behavior for a Christian. Where did such hate come from? The Devil?
I was raised a Seventh-Day Adventist. That’s a form of Protestantism.
Protestants tend to be controlled people. Their religion springs from the heart. Jesus comes into your heart and transforms you so that you want to do what is right. You get right with God by accepting the atoning death of Jesus on the cross and then you get right with your fellow. If you don’t get right with God, you’ll never be at peace with yourself and with others.
There are few rituals in Protestantism. Instead, you get a lot of hymns and well-argued sermons on the need for faith in God, love for your fellow and hope for the ultimate redemption.
Because the emphasis of Protestantism is on transforming the heart, Protestants tend to be very nice people.
In a 1990 lecture series on how to be a good person, talk radio host and Jewish theologian Dennis Prager said: “For eight years I’ve had two hours a week with a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister and a rabbi. After your 400th show, you’re entitled to some generalizations. One is — the Jew is usually the most talkative and the Protestant is usually the most quiet. The Jew is usually the most passionately involved in something, volatile, gets angry, verbalizes, lets out. The Protestant is usually the nicest. In eight years I heard one offensive word from a Protestant [the late Walter Martin] and he was a bona fide nut. These Protestants are the sweetest, nicest, most self-controlled people you will ever meet.
“The religions produced these differences. Protestantism emphasizes the heart. Catholics are in the middle. Judaism emphasizes works. Therefore, the Jew has been the freest to make peace with his miserable thoughts. Protestants are the least free because they are sinful.
“That’s why when it came out that Jimmy Carter lusted for women other than his wife, Jews yawned and Protestants were horrified. A born again Christian and he lusts? Oh my God.”
I picked up the message very early on that I should not express my emotions unless they were kind, loving, reasoned and Christlike.
My father is a self-made man. He got two PhDs and transformed thousands of lives by sheer will power. I’ve never seen my father lying around getting in touch with his feelings. I’ve never heard him say, “That hurts my feelings” or, “I just don’t feel like it” or, “That doesn’t feel right.”
Instead, his life is a triumph of the will.
I don’t remember seeing my father do anything bad. I don’t remember him losing his temper. I don’t remember him yelling at me. I don’t remember him out of control.
I was strongly influenced by my dad’s controlled approach, though I did not have nearly as much success with it as he did.
I grew up an unhappy kid but I don’t think I showed this much around the home. I don’t think I acted out either around my family. I never could handle much conflict in my personal life.
Instead, I learned to channel my pain into cutting other people down verbally at school and church and wherever I had the good fortune of running into them.
Upon coming to California in 1977, I picked up the word “fag” and it became my favorite term of opprobrium.
My dad’s a great debater. He did a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Michigan State University. I wanted to be like him. I organized debates in sixth and seventh grade and tried awfully hard to be terribly clever and to cut my opponents to shreds.
Surprisingly, I’ve never been terribly popular. All of my life, I’ve been mid-level in this regard, the most popular of the uncool and the least popular of the cool crowd.
I never liked to simply sit around with my downward spiral of hateful emotion. Starting at age 10, I began running away from my feelings as I took up jogging. Moderation has never been a Ford virtue and at age 12, I finished five marathons (26 miles 385 yards). By 1980, my knees hurt and I had to quit.
I was depressed for years as I could no longer run away from my negative emotions. I failed two classes in my first semester of ninth grade (Algebra and Spanish). Then I transferred to public school in tenth grade and dedicated myself to the practice of journalism, hoping to become a big shot. For the next five years, I pushed away my emotions in my drive to be great.
Then I crashed into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in February 1988 and since then I’ve been unable to consistently distract myself from what I’m feeling by achievement.
So I’ve had to use other distractions such as entertainment, sports, sex, food and the like to avoid confronting myself.
I began going to therapy in May 1998 and started to identify my emotions. This was not easy. I preferred to talk about conquests and horribly inappropriate things I’ve said and done to shock people.
I love these lectures I’m listening to by Igor Ledochowski. I’m learning to locate my emotions in my body, to describe them, and to receive their message.
This afternoon, I felt so lethargic and tired. I lay down on my bed to listen to Dennis Prager’s radio show, hoping to fall asleep and to recharge before the Passover seder tonight.
I often feel disconsolate about my finances. I hate that sinking feeling. I feel my fear of bankruptcy in my stomach. I feel like I’ve stepped off a cliff and I’m falling.
I know what it is like to pump with adrenalin and excitement and purpose and passion. I wonder what I can do to recapture this? The solution has to be in action. If the particular action I take does not work, I’ll find out quickly and I can then try something else.
My blogging, Dennis Prager’s teachings, Torah, shul, my therapy and Alexander Technique and weekly writing workshop, these are all occasional sources of inspiration for me.
Despite them, I’m not as enthused these days as I was when my blog was big and the news media were calling and I was on TV a lot and Cathy Seipp was in my life and I had love and lust and influence.
Cold showers are a jolt to the system. I never feel lethargic stepping out of a cold shower. I need more. They’re an excellent habit. I need community. I need to engage with people. The solution is action, engagement, connection. Passion. Purpose.

LUKE THE JACKAL

I remember when I was booted from Young Israel of Century City in June 2001, some members of the shul called me an “internet terrorist” for my bloggingabout Dennis Prager.
I’ve never been able to forget that. I always thought I was the good guy. Imperfect, sure, but I was fighting on the side of God. I fought to get important stories out to people. I fought to tell the side of the little guy who was getting squashed and abused.
I spoke truth to power!
When I got called an “internet terrorist”, I felt like that Michael Douglas character in the movie Falling Down who’s stunned to learn that he’s the bad guy.
Like Carlos the Jackal, I’m from the Southern Hemisphere. Early on in my life, I am seized by a vision of myself as a great man. In early adulthood, we both embrace marxism. Perceptive observers soon see that we are more bent on our own glory than any cause.
Through audacious strikes, we become famous. We love fame and attention and we tell ourselves it is recognition and our just due.
We particularly love the attention of pretty young women. We can’t get enough of them.
We’re constantly on the move. When we start to feel at home, we get booted.
We imagine ourselves the equal of the great men we terrorize. Because we have the massive ability to inflict harm, we feel we are big men. We love it when the powerful bid for our services.
We uneasily experience our decline from the pinnacle of success. It is a sick feeling when we realize that the price of our notoriety increasily outstrips its benefits and because of our past choices, we can do little to change the inevitable grinding of the mills of social retribution.
We’re kicked out of home after home and nobody bids for our services anymore. We have to humiliate ourselves to make a living.
We’re seized with the conviction that this won’t end well. We see that we bring misery to those around us. We feel ourselves becoming irrelevant. It is hard on our vanity. We rage when others fail to defer to our grandiose vision of ourselves. We become nostalgic for the days when we were big shots.
We grow fat and our testicles hurt.

STUPID THINGS I TELL MYSELF

I talk to myself constantly and much of it is bloody stupid.
I was just lying down and thinking about my life and the dumb things I’ve told myself over the past forty years.
They include:
* You can get away with it!
* They’ll never know!
* You’re special!
* The rules don’t apply to you!
* I’m a writer and I can go anywhere and do anything because it is all for my art!
* There’s a new sheriff in town!
* This isn’t really cheating!
* I’ve changed!
* Why don’t they like me?
* It’s hopeless!
* I’m sunk!
* I’m invincible!
* More attention for me!
* Wouldn’t I look interesting if I went in this direction?

I’ve realized through therapy that I have all these mantras that I tell myself to hold things together after loss.
My favorite are:
* Writing is number one for me
* Loneliness is the price I pay for courageous writing
* Keep your eye on the prize (of success)
* They’ll regret it when I’m a great man
* When I become rich and famous, I’ll have all the women I want, even when I get old and ugly
* I could wake up tomorrow and be a success but you’ll never wake up tomorrow and be young and hot

I’ll confess in therapy to the shameful things I’ve done. I’ll confess to how I view myself. I’ll berate myself all session about my dirty deeds done dirt cheap. I’m a big sinner! I’ve spurned G-d’s love! And then at the end, they’ll say, “I see you as a lost little boy looking for love. There’s just an aura of sadness and brokenness about you.”

I went through feelings of frustration, anger and despair today/this week/year/decade as I struggle to belatedly take care of things I should’ve tackled decades ago. Much of this work (psycho-therapy, Alexander Technique, addressing my sleep problems, financial issues) is not immediately rewarding.
Most of the things I’ve been battling of late are not getting solved. The turbinate reduction surgery I had a few months ago? Well, the problem I had breathing through my nose while lying down has returned full force.
I’ve ordered a CPAP but my doctor won’t give me a prescription until I undergo more testing.
I was just so frustrated, angry and helpless this afternoon as I ran into these technical recording problems and I knew it wasn’t the technical problems that enraged me but rather my life position. I feel like I am running in circles and getting no closer to leaving my hole. I would’ve wailed and cried if that had done any good, but instead I did ten minutes of active rest and labored on.
Then I took a break after a few hours and wrote in my journal. I find it calming to write out my thoughts and fears. I get to see my self-talk and how silly much of it is. Then I write out things I am grateful for and this makes me happy.

Throughout my life, I’ve had my narcissism interrupted by tides of empathy. I would suddenly see things as they really were for those around me and I would see how I was doing things that were unnecessarily hurting others and myself, I would see how in some ways I had been heading down a wrong path for days or weeks or months or years. I would get these lightning flashes of clarity. They were a combination of feelings and thoughts and they left me quite ashamed.
When I would feel things as others felt them when they experienced my behavior and my words, I’d feel horrible. I’d feel ashamed. I’d determine to change my ways and sometimes I did change and did the hard work to make myself a better person. But I hated those bouts of shame. I hated them so much that I held myself away from empathizing too much and just told myself to keep my eye on the prize of accomplishment and to hunker down and to keep pushing myself forward.
Empathy and shame. They’ve run together for me much of my life.
A new Brigham Young University study adds our social relationships to the “short list” of factors that predict a person’s odds of living or dying.
In the journal PLoS Medicine, BYU professors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith report that social connections – friends, family, neighbors or colleagues – improve our odds of survival by 50 percent. Here is how low social interaction compares to more well-known risk factors:
– Equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day
– Equivalent to being an alcoholic
– More harmful than not exercising
– Twice as harmful as obesity

I have no trouble understanding the suicide bomber.
Hmm, maybe I am one, a suicide bomber of the soul?
People who blow themselves up don’t do it out of hatred for their enemy so much as to achieve status within their group.
If I felt like a loser in the Gaza Strip, as I often do in Pico-Robertson, and I felt like I could become cool if I blew myself up, then, well, sitting here in plush America, I totally understand the motivation to blow myself up.
My strongest drive is to feel important. I want sex and love and luxury and success, but most of all, I want to feel important. I want to feel at the center of things. I want to feel like a big shot.
I feel important when thousands of people read my blog and take to the streets and chant my name. I feel important when hot chicks talk to me at parties. I feel important when I walk down Pico Blvd and people yell out of their cars, “Luke Ford!”
There are many things I’ve striven for in life, such as God and goodness and Dennis Prager’s approval and money and fame and sex and friends and fast cars, but most of all, most of the time, I’ve wanted to feel important.
Throughout school, I hung out much of the time, perhaps most of the time, with the losers. I was rarely in the cool circle. I was rarely popular. I was a freak.
I still am a freak. I’m like the Elephant Man. I remember hanging out on the set of Taboo 22 from Metro. It was directed by DCypher and starred Ava Rose. And most of the people on set weren’t particularly thrilled to have me on set, but they respected the reach of my blog and so I got an invite.
And throughout the day, Ava kept telling me, “Luke, you are not an animal.”
The only time she stopped saying this to me was when she was tied up and had a big red gag stuffed in her sweet mouth.
What **** is all about is revenge on all the hot chicks who’ve rejected you over the course of your life, all the unattainable girls, the cheerleaders and the haughty high-powered executive chicks, oh, how they laughed at you, you pathetic little worm, you tiny tiny boy, you could never do a man’s job, get away from me with that thing.
At least, that’s what I’ve heard.
I know how much I yearn to be loved and to be admired and to hang out with the cool kids, with the Monicas and Davids of the world. That’s where I want to live. I want to breathe their rarified air. I want their good graces. I want their social ease.
I want to be cool. I desperately want to be cool. I want to live from the inside, as Rabbi Dr. Marc Gafni would put it.
Luckily for me and for the world, Jews don’t tell converts that they can become cool by blowing themselves up. If they did, I’d probably be up in smoke.
Well, now that I think about it, I blow myself up regularly when I start blogging. This blog post is my suicide bomb.
I’m now thinking about female sex columnists. They dynamite their chances for future happiness by writing about their intimate life. This is a form of suicide bombing just to achieve some fleeting fame.
From DennisPrager.com today: “Prager H2: Dennis talks to Ariel Glucklich, professor of theology at Georgetown University. His new book is Dying for Heaven: Holy Pleasure and Suicide Bombers. Why the Best Qualities of Religion Are Also Its Most Dangerous�”
Ariel says: “We tend to assume that the kind of aggression that religious people do are motivated by outside concerns. My book says it is motivated by internal social concerns. People will commit suicide for other people because of how they want to fit in their group, not for how they feel about their enemy.”
“His willingness to die while committing the atrocity is about the honor or wanting to belonging or wanting to fit at the heart of things.”
I understand why little people want to do big things so they can feel better about themselves. I too have this yearning.
I understand people who make computer viruses and light forest fires (even though I don’t have this yearning). I understand the thrill of standing there and watching the vast destruction you have created. I can see the flames for miles and the sirens going off and thousands of people evacuating their homes and I can think, wow, all these people’s lives are shifting because of me. I am like God. I can create worlds. I am woman, hear me roar. Gay pride. Crips forever. Let’s roll.

FLASHES OF INSIGHT

Most of the time, I am content to live in my delusions. I see myself as the hero of my story. I think of myself as a great writer. I’m convinced that I am an artist, that I have keen insights into life, and that I should just keep on my path. That I’m going the right way.
Then, on occasion, I get these lightning flashes of insight and they frighten me.
You know how in movies, you’ll get lightning flashes through the darkness and you’ll suddenly see scary things — a dead body or men with guns or Democrats passing Obamacare.
The other day, I woke up with this frightening insight that I was taking the easy way out with my life by settling for slovenly.
Most of the time, I think I have been right in my conflicts, but on occasion, I think that the rabbis were right, that Dennis Prager was right, that my critics were right, and that I have been acting very badly.

THE LOSS COMES ROLLING IN

Most of the time, I’m the happy-go-lucky moral leader you all love and enjoy.
A moral leader for the whole family!
I strike dramatic poses. I say dramatic things. I get into dramatic conflicts. I write out my dramatic feelings.
Oh, it is all such fun. So grand! So childish.
And then the loss comes rolling in. I’ll be silly on my blog, I’ll be clowning on my live cam, and then I realize that I am 46, never married, no children, tenuated ties to others, little community. And that feeling of loss keeps expanding until it weighs down my heart and I just feel hollow inside.

END FROM THE BEGINNING

“You see the end of things right from the beginning,” says his therapist.
He’s jolted. “My previous therapist said that,” he says. “Not the one before you, but the one before the one before you. She said I was always prepared for loss. That I always expected the teat to go dry. That I’d just suck away for all I could get because I felt sure it would go dry.”
“Your writing comes first for you,” says his therapist.
“Yes,” he says. “It’s number one. That makes decision-making easy. Everything else in my life, everyone else in my life, is subordinate to my writing. It doesn’t matter if I am lying in the gutter or davening at shul or standing on a porn set. They are all opportunities to write. Each perspective is but raw material in my artistic hand.
“I’m all about the work. I’m ready to sacrifice everything for my art.”
“That sounds very lonely,” says his therapist.
“Yeah, it can be,” he says. “It’s good to have your priorities.
“I’ve been jazzed about Dennis Prager since I started listening to him in the fall of 1988. I was so thrilled to finally meet him in Tampa Bay in January 1994. He said he might have work for me if I were in Los Angeles.
“I said I might be moving to LA. His office asked for my resume. I polished it up and sent it off. I moved to LA. I interviewed for two hours with Prager’s right hand man, Mark Wilcox.
“I didn’t get the job.
“I started going to Stephen S. Wise temple on Shabbos morning. Because Dennis Prager went there. He spoke at least once a month.
“I developed this whole social circle around Dennis. It was this whole group of people I knew in common with Dennis.
“I’d always had this relationship with Dennis where I argued with him. I heard him on the radio and then I started calling his show and arguing with him.
“Then I started writing my autobiography and I had several chapters in it about his effect on my life. Dennis’s wife Fran and some of the friends we had in common read this.
“So I’ve always liked being in dialogue with Dennis.
“When I started coming around Stephen S. Wise, I realized I’d have to adjust. The price of being in Dennis Prager’s social circle was that you could cause no waves for the great man. He was carrying big enough burdens. He didn’t need any of us adding to them.
“So I started keeping quiet. I was very respectful with my disagreements. It was important to me to belong.
“Then I got a real computer in July 1997 and I started writing about the porn industry. I noted how much Dennis Prager had affected my views on porn and related moral issues. So people started questioning me, how does Dennis feel about what you’re doing?
“It was constant. I felt bad. I didn’t want Dennis to get contaminated by my choice to write on the porn industry but it was inevitably happening. I felt him distance himself from me. I felt various of the friends we had in common distance themselves from me. I realized that we were all headed for a break.
“I had a choice. I could keep writing freely or I could preserve my place in Dennis Prager’s social circle. I had to choose. Even if I stopped writing on porn, whatever I wrote, people would press me if I departed too severely from Dennis Prager’s guidelines. So I had to choose between my membership in Prager’s social circle and my desire to write freely.
“I was told very clearly by Prager’s personal assistant that she would not talk to me again, Dennis would not talk to me again, that the friends I had in common with Dennis would not talk to me again, if I proceeded with my idea of writing about him.
“I heard the warning and I proceeded with the writing anyway. And everything she said came true. I was intellectually prepared for this loss, but emotionally, I was not prepared. I was devastated. I felt like my world had cracked apart. I had alienated the man I admired most in the world, and I had alienated myself from all the people we had in common. My whole group of friends in Los Angeles disappeared.
“So I entered therapy.
“Over the years, I’ve gotten to make the choice again and again — between writing what I wanted and belonging to the group. I always chose my writing.”
“Do you think that is serving some need?” asks his therapist.
“Wow,” he says. “Wow. It could be that my devotion to my craft is in part an excuse to distance myself from others, to always be prepared to lose all relationships and community. My writing might be a sword with which I keep others at bay. Wow. Wow. Wow. I think there’s something to that. Writing is not just a heroic quest for me, it’s an excuse to have sub-standard relationships.
“I’m always preparing myself for the loss of some beloved relationship. I tend to devalue my relationships. Because they are flawed in various ways, I tell myself they don’t matter so much, because I don’t want to face up to the pain of desperately wanting to be in a relationship with someone who may not want me as much. There’s only so much disparity I can handle before I get anxious and want to run.”

THE MERCY FUCK

Have you ever heard of the term “Mercy f—”? It is usually the woman, who has the lower desire and thus enjoys the power in the sexual relationship, who says to the man, you can do me but I won’t enjoy it. You can use my body if it will get you off my back.
I only had this happen to me once. We got home from shul. I was all stirred up. She was not. She said I could do her but she wouldn’t be into it.
I did her. And afterward, I felt horrible.
Our relationship started as passionate for the first week, but over the next three months it turned increasingly sadistic until it ended with her hooking up with her ex and me running away crying.

GETTING INTO TROUBLE

There’s a specific mood I get into when I want to make trouble.
What are the signs I’m going to make trouble?
* An absence of a feeling of connection
* A desire to break through and find freedom
* I don’t value the connections I’m about to shatter
* I think my life will be better when I break out and find freedom
Sometimes, I want to pick a fight. When I have the opportunity to bully, I bully. I had this sweet girlfriend who’d let me bully her. So I’d bully her.
When I’m feeling like a victim, under-valued, under-appreciated, under-cared for, disrespected. Oy, that’s a big one. Diss me and I want to fight back.
Sometimes I get these delusions of grandeur. I see myself as a hero. I feel drunk on my own power.
I often feel contemptuous of others. That’s a sure sign I’m going to cause trouble.
The more secure I am with myself, the less likely I am to pick fights and to shatter relationships.
When I’m ready to fight, I start marshaling arguments in my head about why I am right and the other person is wrong, bad.
I often develop an agenda for an important conversation and then ride roughshod over the person in the pursuit of my agenda. I do much better when I honor the conversation I am in and only bring up my agenda when I see there’s an opening.
I wonder if I can let go of my hurt more quickly and be more vulnerable more quickly so the other person can open up and we can start healing instead of hurting.
I am prone to jealousy. It is underlain by this insecurity, this fear of loss. When I can stabilize my sense of worth, I’m less vulnerable to my rages.

WHY DO I WANT A GIRL?

I want a girl to save my life. Remember when we were driving north on the Pacific Coast Highway Nov. 8? I passed a car and was steaming ahead, not realizing I was in the lane for the southbound traffic. A car was approaching and I did not think about it. You tapped the dashboard on the right and said, “Move over right now.”
And I did. And then I realized what had happened. You had saved my life.
I’m blind in a lot of ways. I say and do a lot of risky and self-defeating and dangerous things. I need help.
Imagine you’re in Commanche country and dozens of Commanches have surrounded you and they want to take your scalp and rape you and leave you dead. If you are one person, you’re always going to have your back turned on some Commanches. But if there are two of you, each one of you can cover 180 degrees of Commanches.
That’s what a relationship is about. You each take 180 degrees of Commanches and protect each other from getting scalped and raped.
Also, once you’re a twosome, it’s easier to bond with others and with a community. Once you have a girl, people assume you have higher value, that you’ve proven your worth to someone, and so they take you more seriously. You bond with others and they can help you with blind spots that neither of you can see.

IMAGINING MY DAD’S PERSPECTIVE

I gave my life to Jesus Christ as a teenager. That’s a great comfort for me. In the final analysis, it’s all in God’s hands.
I did the best I could. I fought the great fight. I ran the race. It’s not in my hands anymore.
You bring a son up. You try to teach him right and wrong. You give him love and books. And when he grows up, you have to let him go.
Luke was my third. My wife Gwen had breast cancer. She had a mastectomy in 1964. We didn’t expect to have another child. Luke was an accident.
While she was carrying Luke, Gwen became convinced he’d do something special for God.
We’re still waiting!
Luke had a blessed first year of life. We all loved him very much. Then life threw us all a bouncer. My wife was diagnosed with bone cancer.
I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t do my work — run the Religion department atAvondale College and conduct evangelical tours — and look after my sick wife and my children. We didn’t have medical insurance.
We found various people to care for Luke. Some weren’t ideal. None of them could love him like we could. The other kids went to other families.
After a separation of more than 20 years, my brother looked me up. He’s an atheistic communist. He had a hard time with me converting to the Seventh-Day Adventist church.
The church was a great boon to me during Gwen’s illness. They eventually picked up her medical expenses. Then they insisted I get medical insurance to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Hundreds of people prayed for Gwen to get well. It didn’t happen. She just steadily sickened. Before she went, she told me to marry my secretary Gill so that Luke would have someone to look after him.
A few months after Gwen died, I married Gill. Luke clung to her. “I’ve had many mothers,” he’d tell her, “but I don’t want anymore.”
We all left for England at the end of 1970. I was 40 years old. I wanted to get a second PhD. In those days, English degrees were more respected than American ones. I wanted to study the New Testament’s teachings about the end of time (not to be confused with that “Left Behind” twaddle).
I never lacked for self-confidence. “I’m here for a holiday,” I told my advisor, Dr.F.F. Bruce at Manchester University.
It took me 18-months to get this second Ph.D. and then I took the family around Europe for a three-month holiday.
Luke was a bit of a worry. He had these sunken eyes that haunted me. He was a sensitive child, sickly, lost in his own world. He didn’t play nicely with others.
I came across him once in England throwing manure at these kids and screaming, “I hate you, I hate you.”
I worried that he wasn’t a good Christian.
Sister White taught that it was a bad idea to start kids in school too early. From age six to eight, Luke wandered around the bush outside our home at Avondale College. We then entered him into second grade at the local Adventist primary school located at the college.
He was happy to get into school with the rest of kids but he still hadn’t learned to play nicely with others. There was always a lot to worry about with Luke. He was very competitive particularly with his best friend Wayne Cherry. He never learned that our value comes from our relationship with Jesus Christ, not from finishing first in silly games.
I used to hear about Luke swearing and poking girls with sticks and smoking cigarettes and stealing money from us to buy sweets. When we busted him in third grade for telling lies, I knew it was time. Spankings were not sufficient to rein him in. He needed The Word.
I started assigning him 40 pages of dense Christian apologetics to read every day and I made him type a one-page summary. He hated it but he learned to type and he learned all the key arguments for the truth of Christianity.
Did it change his behavior? I think he became more careful — more careful at getting away with stuff!
He was a worry. He loved to play with fire. He played with matches and burned our plastic tablecloth. I gave him a good hiding for that. He could’ve burned down the whole house.
We made him bike home at lunch. All his mates could play. We’d keep him out of trouble biking back and forth.
I used to get complaints that he was disruptive in Sabbath School. He’d come squealing in, racing fast, and then sliding down the floor. It was all a big show to make sure that everyone noticed him.
He didn’t realize that our worth comes from our relationship with the Savior. That Jesus loves us just as we are, but he doesn’t leave us just as we are.
Luke got into reading in a big way at age eight. He’d sit out on the porch hour after hour reading adventure books by Robert Louis Stevenson and G.A. Henty. I’d recommend to him books I loved as a child and he’d devour them.
I warned him that all these hours hunched over books were ruining his posture. I said, “Other people won’t bother to point this out, only those who really know you and care about you, but you need to sit up straight.”
It didn’t do much good.
He rarely listened to his dear old dad.
We had some good times together. When I’d take Luke with me on an evangelical swing, we’d always bring the Monopoly game and we’d get in a few contests. He always enjoyed kicking soccer balls around. I did it just for the exercise. In the end, I don’t give a cracker for this fallen world. The only point of sport is to get a bit of exercise so you can more efficiently accomplish God’s will.

Luke was a bit of a worry during his early years. It was hard on him losing his mom and living with different people. When I remarried and got him back during his fifth year, he was withdrawn, sullen and angry.
He rarely misbehaved around the home. He was too afraid he’d get shipped off again. He didn’t understand that he could feel secure in our love. My second wife, Gill, and I loved him very much, but he was like a child who’d been raised by wolves.
He’d had the best first year of life, surrounded by love. The next three years were a disaster. They warped him.
Around the house, Luke was very easy. Very obedient. He never caused trouble. He didn’t confront us over anything. He didn’t fight back. He just adjusted to our changing surroundings the best he could.
He was very partial to Gill and clung to her. She had pre-menstrual syndrome a couple of weeks a month and was a bit of a horror. Luke didn’t know what to do, so he did what he’s always done when insecure, he retreated. He retreated deeply into himself and he tried to stay out of the way of the flying crockery and all the emotional drama.
I retreated too into my work, into my study, into my evangelism. This wasn’t the home I’d known in my first marriage. Gwen was a saint. She didn’t have PMS. Gill and I made the rounds looking for help but that didn’t come until about 1984, when she started hormone replacement therapy.
I wonder if Luke got his tendency to withdraw from me? When I’m confronted with emotional drama, I too want to withdraw. I seek safety in books and work. I wasn’t always the most loving and comforting husband. I think that Gill often found that more from Luke than from me. He was a loving child much of the time, desperate to love and be loved. He loved to listen. He was always a better listener than me. I have to fight my tendency to pour my wisdom down people’s throats. It’s hard for me to let people finish their sentences, because 90% of the time, I know better than they do what they are trying to say.
In the Biblical view, the man is the head of the household. Somebody has to be in charge. Men are more ruled by reason than by emotion and they are better suited to taking the lead. The buck stopped with me. I provided for my family. I saw my that wife and children got everything they needed. They never wanted for anything. In exchange, they knew that I had the final vote. They treated me with respect.
While Luke was very easy to have around the home, he was quick to get into trouble when he left the home. He liked to eat sweets, even between meals. In the Seventh-Day Adventist view, eating between meals is a bad idea. Eating candy is bad. So we punished Luke for this.
Luke was docile around the home, but away from it, he’d get into fights. Not fisticuffs, he’d just use his brain to taunt people and to wound them. They responded by hating him, which just made him taunt them all the more.
During Luke’s first two years at school, second and third grades, he was a worry. He didn’t have many friends, usually just one close one (Wayne Cherry was his best friend, perhaps only friend, from 1972-1977).
I worried about Luke’s character development. I worried about his lack of discipline and toughness. I tried to build him up. I gave him rewards for accomplishments and I punished him for messing up.
I spanked him about a dozen times, mostly from age eight to nine. There were two main things he did that worried me — he’d lie to avoid punishment, and he’d eat sweets.
On a third-grade camp-out, his teacher Mrs. Patrick caught him with an enormous cache of cookies and candies. She told us. We confronted Luke. He confessed to stealing money from us to buy his loot.
Before I hit him, I sat him down and explained why I was going to spank him. That it would hurt me more than it would hurt him. That it was for his own good. He had to learn that certain things are wrong and there are consequences.
Gill and I used to keep telling him the Bible verse, “Be sure your sins will find you out.”
It’s his strongest memory of all instruction.
I’d tell him that if he cried while I hit him, I’d only hit him harder and longer.
I wanted to toughen him up. He was a bit of a girly boy, very sensitive (at least to his own feelings).
Then I’d have him pull his pants down, bend over, and I’d spank him 10-20 times with my bare hand.
Gill whacked him a few times, but that was spur of the moment when she was angry and he was egging her on. He was always good at getting people’s goat. He loved to goad and to mock.
It was not very Christian of him and it worried me.
I tried to beat the Devil out of him.
I remember working in my study one morning and heard a rattle in the kitchen. I looked over and Luke was swallowing something and picking up a spoon.
It turned out he’d been attacking the brown sugar bag over the past few weeks. I made sure he never did this again.
Luke learned very quickly that when he was caught in his sins, it was best to make a full confession. I believe this has become a lifelong habit for him — first he’ll try to lie his way out of a mess, and when this doesn’t work, he’ll make a full confession.
After Luke moved into fourth grade, I don’t think I ever had to spank him again. He hated that we made him bike home for lunch every school day. He wanted to hang out with his mates, but we made him come home so he’d stay out of trouble.
By the time he’d biked the mile back home, there was rarely time for him to play.
The next ten years in his life were deceptively quiet. He’d learned to be as good as church mice around the home. Outside of it, he learned what he could get away with without us ever finding out.
We got very few complaints about Luke during this time. He learned not to make waves. He learned who he could trust and I guess it wasn’t his dear old dad.
I was very busy. I ran Avondale’s Religion department and then in 1977, I transferred to Pacific Union College in the Napa Valley. A couple of weekends a month, I’d go out on evangelical swings around the world. I admit that my focus was on saving souls for Christ. I didn’t neglect my home life, but I was very focused on my work. Luke and Gill seemed to be able to make their own way while I saved the world.
Home was a refuge for me. I liked it quiet and contemplative. On occasion, I had a few friends over, but most of the time it was just the three of us. We all loved books and we’d sit around in our separate rooms reading.
Luke got his hands on a radio in sixth or seventh grade and that was the beginning of his fall. Before this, he was an innocent kid. Once he got the radio, he became a sport fanatic. We tried to limit his radio time but he’d sneak it under his pillow at night and what could we do?
He got his first job in seventh grade. He hit up friends of ours for a gardening job. He got fired after a few weeks. He was not a good worker. He got fired from almost every job he ever held through high school.
He was quick to use the advantages of being Desmond Ford’s son. He’d hit up our friends for work. How could they say no? It was very embarrassing to me when he didn’t do good work.
Luke has never been good at doing anything he wasn’t passionate about. He got poor grades at school unless he was enthusiastic about the subject and the teacher.
Luke has always liked to take the easy way out. He tried to use my connections. He tried to use his status as my son to get preferential treatment. Early on in his life, he got into the habit of cheating and stealing when he could get away with it. We punished him for it. And what did that do? He just took greater care not to get caught. And he was largely successful, if you count success as avoiding punishment from his dear old dad, who was frightfully busy and looking to avoid domestic drama.
Americans are frightfully generous people and Luke took full advantage. He was always looking to suck up as much love as possible, frightened that the teat would soon run dry so he might as well get all he could in the moment.
I’d say that his years 1977-1980 at Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, were the happiest years of his childhood. It was an idyllic place. Luke got a lot of love from the people who loved me and from the people who hated me (because they wanted to prove their goodness).
I remember in our first few months in California, we were playing a game of softball. Luke didn’t really know the rules (neither did I, not that I cared), but that didn’t stop him from screaming at Dr. Staples, a member of the religion department, that he was cheating. It was horrifying.
Luke has always been quick to accuse. He has not always been as quick to check his facts.
I saw Luke looking longingly at other homes, dreaming about them adopting him. He thought that other moms didn’t suffer from PMS and other dads liked to play sport with their kids. In the end, however, he realized that the advantages of being Desmond Ford’s son far outweighed the disadvantages.
Luke loved having a famous dad. Fame was always very important to Luke. Something got warped in Luke in his early years, and he thirsted for attention. It was his substitute for love.
He didn’t act towards others in ways that would gain love. Instead, he’d use shock and awe with his vocabulary to demand attention.
It was not a recipe for smooth relationships with others, and he almost got kicked out of the Pacific Union College Elementary School in seventh grade.
Luke loved his elementary school and he reacted to this threat by straightening up his ways and staying in school.
Luke loved to people’s buttons. He was driven to establish where your limits were, but once he found out, he was usually careful, if he valued you, not to push you past your limits so that you would punish him.
In January 1980, Gill and I moved to Washington D.C. so I could prepare a defense of my controversial views on the church’s Heavenly Sanctuary doctrine.
Luke was distraught at the prospect of leaving his friends behind, so we let him stay at PUC with a friend of the family.
When he came back to us in June, he was changed. He was chewing gum, not something I approve of. It was like he’d assimilated American values and was acting more like other kids.
We’d bought a television for the first time and he loved to watch TV, particularly sport. We had to limit him.
It was a pretty miserable summer for him. He didn’t have friends in D.C. He spent his days at the local library. God knows what he was reading. I suspect that much of it was not wholesome.
When I lost my job with the church, Luke was sad. He loved PUC. He wanted us to go back. It was not to be.
It looked for a while like we were moving to England, but then we set up camp in Auburn, 45 minutes drive north of Sacramento. We were only two hours drive from PUC and Luke was able to nip over several times a year.
Luke loved the attention my controversy attracted. I was written up in Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times and other media. Sometime in eighth grade, Luke decided he wanted to be a journalist.
It was not work I’d have chosen for him. I used to work as a journalist in Sydney during the 1940s. Most of its practicioners were secular. There favorite method for getting a good story was taking sources to the bar and getting them drunk. The journalists I knew tended to curse a lot and chase women.
I never pushed Luke to enter any particular career. I did suggest law. I thought he’d be a good lawyer because he liked to argue. His big sister eventually became a barrister.
Luke did poorly at school. No matter what we said or did, he wouldn’t study hard for any class that he didn’t enjoy. He wouldn’t work hard at any job he didn’t like. We couldn’t seem to correct this character flaw.
“Life is a hard taskmaster,” I’d tell him. “You’ll have to learn at the University of Hard Knocks. I want to try to spare you that pain, but I’m not getting through.”
In 1978, Luke set his heart on jogging and soon he was running marathons (26 miles 385 yards). Gill and I were opposed to this extreme exertion. We didn’t think it was healthy, but Luke has always had a strong will. We couldn’t stop him.
His knees cracked up after a year and that stopped him.
For our first year in Auburn, Luke was miserable. He failed classes at school. He got sick a lot. He only got that light back in his eyes when we reluctantly allowed him to go to public school (starting in tenth grade) so he could take journalism classes.
During the next three years, Luke excelled at keeping his life away from us. We didn’t really know much about what he was doing. He’d tell us a lot of stories about going to Bible studies and the like, but I had a vague suspicion he was sneaking off doing things he shouldn’t.
During his teenage years, his connection to Christ dropped steadily away. I think religion was mainly a social thing for him, an opportunity to be around girls, and when I was isolated by the church, Luke got isolated too and gave up on religion.
After high school, he went to live with his brother Paul in Australia and completely abandoned God. He started working on the Sabbath. He came home a year later and announced he was an atheist.
For the next three years, for the first time in his life, Luke worked hard. He extended himself to the limit. As is usual with the Fords, he overdid things. We tried to restrain him. We wanted him home at a decent hour, but he was determined to work late into the night.
We finally gave up fighting him on it. He would’ve left the house otherwise.
We warned him that his health would crack if he kept work so hard, but he didn’t listen to us. Then in early 1986, his health did break, and he struggled with mononucleosis for three months. Gill and I were away for most of that time. When we got home, we were very worried.
He recovered his health in the summer of 1986 by working construction. Luke began to look at hard work as his salvation, as his solution to troubled relationships with others.
There are some people who move ahead with grace in life. They bless others with their presence. Luke was not like that. He was dogged and stubborn. He exerted great effort. He bulldozed people when he could get away with it.
Finally, life laid him out. The great collapse I’d been warning him about happened in early 1988. He came down with what was later diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He’s had to limp through life eversince.
I never told him, I told you so. I just tried to help him every way I could.
Gill and I were terribly worried. We reached out to everyone we knew who might be able to help. We sent him to all sorts of doctors. We got tons of medical tests. I used my research skills to try to get to the bottom of this baffling disease.
He drove off to UCLA in August 1988 and lived out of his car for a month before the dorm opened. Gill was frantic and wanted to drive down to get him but I told her we’d have to let him go his own way.
We sent him to a doctor in Southern California, endocrinologist Norman Beals, who was able to help him a little bit.
After nine months of school, he gave up and came home. He felt thoroughly whipped by life.
Luke had a new hero. He was always seeking out these substitute father figures. Luke wanted to go his own way. He didn’t want to follow in my shoes. He went through all these phases where he wanted to be a politician or a journalist or a sports anchor. Now he was following this Jewish theologian Dennis Prager.
During the summer of 1989, somebody asked Gill where Luke was spiritually. She said, “He’s between Marxism and Judaism.”
Of the two choices, I much preferred Judaism. I even read to him (at his request) Prager’s book, The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism.
Luke was so sick, he couldn’t read to himself.
I’d never seen him this helpless, not since he was a little boy anyway. He seemed to relapse into the pathetic state of his earliest years.