Luke Ford

* When I was a child, I had these bouts of conscience where I confessed my sins to my step-mom. This began my life-long habit of confessing, which has repaired many a relationship. For the last 16 years, I’ve done much of this confessing with my blogging. No matter how awful I’ve behaved since childhood, my redeeming quality of coming clean has served me well. If you’re open and honest with people, they’ll put up with a lot.

* In the fall of 1986, a year into Sierra College, I dropped all of my classes but two to work full-time in landscaping. I didn’t mind working in the heat but found I hated working in the cold. When I returned to school full-time in the Spring semester of 1987, I was a serious student. In my first year of college, I got just better than a B average. From here on, I got nearly straight As and took my education with great seriousness. It didn’t happen until I was 20 but from here on I was dedicated.

* In my Senior year of high school, I decided to go to college at Cal-State Fullerton and major in Journalism. Later in that school year, I decided to take a year off after high school, return to Australia, live with my brother and work. I decided that when I returned I would go to Sierra Community College and then transfer to a four-year school for my BA, which, by 1985, I decided would be in Economics. I planned to go to Sac State until one day in 1986, I think, I mentioned my plan to my friend Kevin McKee’s dad, Bob, and he said, “You know what they say about Sac State, don’t you?” “No,” I said. “Somebody’s got to go there,” he said. I was so stung, I decided I would transfer to UC Davis instead. I still planned to major in Economics.

Then, in the fall of 1987, as I was dead-serious in my studies, I was deciding between UC Berkeley and UCLA. My advisor recommended UCLA to me, a little less serious and mathematical. I decided to go to UCLA. That changed my life because in Los Angeles, I encountered Dennis Prager and Russell Roberts and they turned me on to Judaism.

* In the summer of 1987, I decided to quit working at the radio station and devote myself completely to my studies (and to landscaping in my spare hours). That fall, I got straight As for the only time in my life.

* In the summer of 1988, a few months into a confusing disease later diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), I decided I would transfer anyway to UCLA and hope for help in the south. If I had not transferred, despite my illness, I would not have encountered Dennis Prager and Judaism. I only finished three classes that school year at UCLA (1988-1989), but those nine months changed my life through my exposure to Jews (for the first time in my life).

* In the summer of 1986, I started working construction for $3.50 an hour, a fourth of what I made in Australia 1984-1985. Despite the low wage, later raised to $4.50 and eventually $5.50 an hour, I fell in love with the work and often put in 90-hour weeks. On the one hand, the hours I put at this low-paying drudgery over the course of more than two years was absurd. On the other hand, the wages I got allowed me to pick up a decent disability check for about seven years when Chronic Fatigue Syndrome kicked my butt (1988-1995).

* Living in a secular environment in Tannum Sands in December of 1989, I decided to convert to Judaism.

* In 1992, I was living with my parents in lonely Newcastle, 95658. After many years of CFS, I became convinced that if I stayed where I was, I would never get well. I had to get away. I had to connect and that the best way for me to do this was by placing and answering singles ads. I believed that about 1% of women in my demographic would find me mesmerizing and through connecting with one of them, she’d find a way for me to get out of my illness. This is what happened. Sleeping around is not blessed by any religion, and certainly not by my family and my religious friends, but using women to get well enabled me to find the woman who’d connect me with a great psychiatrist, get me out of my parent’s home, force me to stand on my own two feet, though sick, and get me the medication (nardil) that would turn my life around, even though I quickly left behind all the women who made my recovery possible (one of them, nine years older, said she’d have to hit the lottery to get me to stay with her).

* I returned to Los Angeles in March of 1994 at about two-thirds of normal health. I feared returning to UCLA in my weakened condition and instead pursued acting and modeling work for 15 months until I realized I was not cut-out for collaborative endeavors and tried to make a documentary (What Women Want). My technical skills doomed that and so I got to work on a book. Writing became my main work, source of income and prestige after the fall of 1995.

* In December, against the wishes of my friends, I began work on an unauthorized biography of Dennis Prager. Though the price was heavy in lost friends, I became free of things holding me back. In Freudian terms, I slew my adopted father.

Every time I’ve made a major change in my life, I’ve had to leave behind friends (of whom I’ve never had a surplus).

* For my 40th birthday, I got Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Two years later, for my 42nd birthday, I used an Amazon gift certificate to purchase Neil’s sequel, Rules of the Game. This book had one sentence on the Alexander Technique. It said that women prefer guys with good posture. I was intrigued, read up on the Technique, took 30 lessons in the fall, and began three years of teacher training in January of 2009.

* After getting asked to leave a shul in September of 2008 (or shutting down my blog and submitting to the elders my new blog entries), I sought out two sessions a week of psycho-therapy, which I’ve been in since then. This therapeutic work led me in 2011 to start 12-stepping for love and fantasy addiction.

* I have a hard time submitting myself to authority, but I swallowed my pride and successfully enrolled in conversion to Judaism programs in 1993 (Reform) and 2008 (Orthodox), and in Alexander Technique teacher training in 2009-2011. To pay for my training, I swallowed my pride and kept asking my family for financial help (for the first time in my life) and they got me through.

* In 2008 and 2009, various Orthodox rabbis in a position to hurt me almost cowed me into shutting down my blogging and placing my future writing under the supervision of the rabbis. In the end, I did not cave, and nobody tries to intimidate me in this way any more. When you fight back hard enough against bullies, you eventually become free.

* In September of 2012, I began a five-month class to create a one-man play. Mine was on eroticized rage.

* In June of 2013, after more than four years off all medication (previously I was on lithium, clonidine and clonazepam for about eight years), I read about modafinil, became intrigued, saw a psychiatrist and got a prescription that dramatically improved the quality of my life.

* In 2012, I adopted the phrases, “I have no opinion” and “I try to stay out of fights.”

I just watched this movie for the third time. I love it. It’s about growing up an Adventist in Australia.

It made me think, what was the last day of my youth?

Here’s my answer — the morning I woke up with a bad flu in February of 1988. That led to almost six years in bed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I was never the same afterward in either my physical or mental strength.

Here are other possible dates for the end of my youth:

* The morning in May of 1984, the end of my Senior year of high school, when I cut Media class (I think with the permission of the teacher) and went to Alice’s home and played in her pool with other Seniors. Alice was a brunette beauty. I admired her from afar. I ran into her a few times at Sierra Community College. She transferred to UC Berkeley and got her degree in English.

I had never cut class before. It seemed so rebellious and transgressive. I loved playing in the pool and I felt almost normal.

* Later in May 1984, when I was 18, I finally got my driver’s license. Once that happened, I had a ticket to drive and could take on an adult life.

* Perhaps it was the afternoon I drove away from home on August 22 of 1988 and took the I-5 to freedom at UCLA. It would be the first time I would live apart from family and friends. This would be the year I would cease to see my father as my hero — he didn’t change, I did — and begin my first steps towards Judaism.

* Perhaps it was August 28, 1988, when I heard Dennis Prager’s voice for the first time (on KABC radio) and became a big fan and ended up converting to Judaism and dedicating myself to writing an unauthorized biography of my hero.

* Perhaps it was the evening that week of Valentine’s Day, 1989, (Thursday, February 16, I believe) when I would lose my virginity.

* Perhaps it was the day in July 1993 when I fled my parent’s home and despite crippling Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and a relationship in the toilet, I flew to Orlando and moved in with my girlfriend. I knew almost no one but her in the city. I started going regularly to my first synagogue, Ohev Shalom. I started going regularly to her psychiatrist, Daniel Golwyn, and he got me on nardil, which began the turnaround of my health. I was 27 and about to re-enter the world. This would not have happened if I hadn’t left home to move into a terrible heart-breaking relationship punctuated by her infidelity (done to get me out of the house). I picked up the pieces of my heart on my first evening away and slept with an old alcoholic black woman and soon I was on my feet again, slicing through the ladies back to health.

* Perhaps it was August 14, 1980. I was 14. The setting was the high altitude (about 7500 feet above sea level) Glacier View Ranch in Colorado. On Thursday, the General Conference President of the Seventh-Day Adventist church (aka the leader), Neal Wilson, went after my father from his seat high above the gathering of the Church elite. He got angry. He said to dad, “Why won’t you listen to your peers?” My dad didn’t get much of a chance to reply. He just had to take it. I was sitting in the audience with my step-mom Gill. I got upset watching my dad torn apart by the church administrators. I really didn’t care about dad’s theological positions but I felt defensive about my father like never before. I became upset on his behalf like never before. I felt like he was being bullied and humiliated by Neal Wilson. I was familiar with dad’s constant controversies but nothing like this had happened before. Gill told me to calm down because the emotional way I was acting argued for Neal Wilson’s position that I should not have been come to the conference.

I would never again consider myself a Seventh-Day Adventist (though I lived around that milieu for another four years). I would never again find a home. Perhaps this was the last day of my youth?

When I read the stories I wrote in the 1980s, the ones I didn’t burn during my religious phase, and I listen to my favorite music at the same time, I’m able to drum up compassion for the man I was.

If I read the stories without the music, I don’t feel a thing.

I’m glad I can develop some compassion for my younger self, even when it is induced through artificial means. I’m sure this is important for my recovery.

I’m keenly aware in these stories of the writer’s yearning for at least normal levels of human connection. He plainly has an attachment disorder but has yet to go to therapy. On the outside, his life looks like a success with money in the bank, good grades at college, and boundless ambition. Below the surface, however, he’s about to hit the iceberg of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and collapse and from that wreckage he will remake his life, though the themes he’s hitting in these stories apply just as strongly to my life now.

Early on in my first story, written in 1988 about events in 1984, I write: “Then one Friday, knowing that my brother Paul would be away all weekend and that I’d have the car, I resolved to invite Rachel to dinner and dancing that evening.”

This gets me to thinking, when did I first ask a girl out to dinner?

The first time I successfully asked a girl out full stop was August 9, 1981. The object of my affection was Denise. I’d met her in September of 1977. I was eleven and new to America. We were in sixth, seventh and eighth grade together. Then in 1980 my family left Pacific Union College (PUC) for Auburn and life outside the Seventh-Day Adventist church, but I made it back to PUC whenever I could and I was spending the summer before tenth grade with my friends the Muth family.

I was fifteen years old. I’d asked out Denise twice that summer already but she always had something else going on, like a horse shoe. This evening, however, she says yes to the baseball game the next day. The Muths happen to have tickets to the resumption of the baseball season after the strike.

Two college students drive four of us kids to Candlestick Park where the Houston Astros beat the San Francisco Giants 6-5.

On the drive, my best friend Andy’s little sister, Jenny, remarks that I’m wearing mismatched socks. Once we get to the stadium, Andy, Denise and I go looking for our seats. I lead the way, nervous and frenetic. Throughout the contest, I’m leaning over to Andy placing bets on various aspects of the game. Denise is not impressed and we never go out again.

The next summer, I have my first love with a girl a year younger, Rainy. I never ask her out, however, except to the PUC pool, where we spend many an afternoon. I hate asking girls out. It’s frightening. I dread the awkwardness and rejection.

I don’t get my driver’s license until right before graduating from 12th grade in May of 1984. The next month, I fly to Australia and live with my brother Paul for a year. I hope to get a real girlfriend and lose my virginity but I’m scared by women and I come across as just as weird and needy as I did in the States. I don’t think I ever formally asked a girl out that year, not for a date by ourselves. I did ask this girl, LeeAnne, to come to a dinner and party organized by some charity and we ended up driving to the beach and hanging out till sunrise but it was all very chaste and we never went out again.

The one girl I made out with that year was brought along on a camping trip. We went to a pub around Christmas and she got drunk and we outside and made out in the bushes before she needed to vomit and that was the last time I saw her.

I came back to California in 1985 and bought a 1966 VW Bug and slowly awkwardly asked girls out to movies and the like. There might have been a few dinners as well. There were definitely lunches. But I didn’t get my first girlfriend until I transferred to UCLA and got together with this Chinese girl in February of 1989, the week of Valentine’s Day. We spent the night and that launched us. I never had to go through the agony of asking her out.

I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at the time and that limited my going out. I had several relationships over the next few years, but because of my illness, I couldn’t exactly ask girls out. I could only ask them to come up to visit me at my parent’s home.

In September of 1993 while living in Orlando, I get on the medication Nardil and begin to recover my health. The next month, I meet Paula through a singles sit run by a Messianic rabbi. We hit it off over the phone and I ask her to dinner.

In my memory, this is the first time I’ve asked a girl out to dinner and she accepts.

Paula drives her mother’s station wagon and picks me up and we go to the Olive Garden and I talk a lot about sex. I’m 27, Paula is 36 and thrice divorced (twice to the same man). She has three kids. She is not Jewish.

The night ends with a chaste hug.

I ask her to dinner at my Conservative synagogue Ohev Shalom on Friday night. She accepts. I pay for two tickets.

She comes over that Friday afternoon and she’s weirded by the family I’m living with across the street from my shul. She flees. I’m mad. After the evening is over, I call her and say I’m not going to chase her.

She comes to shul the next morning and she gets along with everyone and that night we go back to her place. She’s staying with her mom. And we’re launched. From here on, I’m as comfortable as a bloke can be asking a girl out for dinner.

***

Another thing that strikes me as I read these stories — the difference in wages between Australia and America. In Australia, I had a cleaning and gardening contract for the Boyne Island Shopping Center that was worth about $40,000 a year. I came back to California, and the only job I could find was in construction for $3.50 an hour. (The Australian dollar during this time varied between rough equivalence in value to the American and two-thirds the value.)

***

I’m struck that when I see the woman I love in this story, I cross the street and try to get away unseen. Getting close to what I want frightens me to this day. Why? Because my heart gets so full and I’m emotionally flooded and like a car that floods, I don’t run. I have to get distance to soothe myself. What’s my anxiety? What was I scared of that Friday night in 1984 on Gondoon Street in Gladstone?

I think my primary fear is of connection to someone I want so badly that I won’t have the inner resources to handle rejection. Love feels to me like stepping off the edge into a free fall. OK, so I’m scared of how much I could get hurt and embarrassed if I approach Rachel. I’m trying to relate to her from a safe place, from humor and sarcasm, to ward off the vulnerability. And these fears plague me to this day.

These fears must go back to earliest childhood when I lived in foster care and home and attachment was not safe because it would get torn up again and again, so I learned to disconnect from my emotions and to avoid being vulnerable. Eventually, I learned to express myself through writing. With enough distance, with a keyboard, I could be honest.

When Rachel wrote her phone number on a Spearmint gum wrapper, I could safely attach to that wrapper. That didn’t cause me anxiety. I could get all emotional about that wrapper. It represented human connection. It couldn’t hurt me.

My fear of getting what I wanted has not affected me nearly as much in my professional life as it has in my love life. I guess I need to conduct my personal life more in line with the way I go about my work life.

***

I’m struck that there are details in the story, such as the name of Gondoon Street, that I have forgotten.

I’m still crazy about quiet, shy, proper brunettes like Rachel. She liked me but I couldn’t put us together and she got snatched up by another bloke.

***

The stories are composed of the themes I return to again and again — loss, thirst for connection, ambition, loneliness, the seeking of love and lust to stop the ache.

Why do feelings of loss, longing and nostalgia create a literal ache in the throat?

During my years in the construction business (1986-1988), I mixed with high-school dropouts, Vietnam veterans, alcoholics, drug addicts and men with big tattoos. Jesse had all these qualities. That man with the screaming eagle tattoo played a prominent part in my writing while I was at Sierra Community College from 1985-1988. I wrote the following for an English Composition class in the fall of 1986. I got an A- grade from a teacher who proudly proclaimed how tough he was on grading our first stories for the class. I think I got the only A grade in the class for that initial composition.

The teacher droned on. Would he ever quit? I shifted my attention from the blob at the front of the room and stared out a side window. My eyes lost focus in the spring sunshine and I imagined I could see Jesse.
Curly blond hair matted with sweat sat on top of his block head. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. Shirt off, his bronzed skin glowed in the sun. The outstretched talons of a screaming eagle tattoo reached across his back and dug into his broad shoulders. I laughed when I first saw the eagle, thinking I could hear it scream.
Jesse joined our landscaping crew at the bottom of his luck. He had earned eight dollars an hour with the paint crew but with us he’d make four.
I was Jesse’s foreman. Initially confused and uncomfortable with telling a man twenty years my senior what to do, I soon learned that when it came to digging a 20-foot ditch for PVC pipe, well, better he than I.
Jesse worked hard. Hunger does that to a man, and Jesse was very hungry. Our boss wouldn’t give him an advance to buy food. The boss had been ripped off too many times before. I, however, was young and naive. I lent Jesse $80.
I worked with Jesse for about a month and we had a lot of time to talk. Jesse said that he dropped out of high school to serve in ‘Nam. He didn’t like the war. The tight leathery skin on his face grew even more constricted when he talked about seeing his friends die.
Jesse had been a sniper and an excellent shot. He didn’t die. He wasn’t even physically hurt. War means kill or be killed, and Jesse killed.
“Several people,” Jesse said.
Jesse began drinking heavily in Vietnam and he took drugs. “Everyone did,” he said.
After the war he returned home to Pennsylvania. He bought a small farm, married, fathered two daughters, and worked as a pastry chef.
During the recession in the early 80s Jesse lost his job, then his farm and finally his wife in a divorce. Jesse moved to California – the land of opportunity.
Jesse worked construction and saved several hundred dollars which he sent to one of his daughters. “I thought I’d be OK,” said Jesse. “I had a good job.” Not for long, though. He moved on to another job as a painter. After several months, he lost that job also. He moved on to another one. Lost it and moved on.
In his latest job Jesse built fences around the Springview Apartments in Rocklin. Now he dug with us and lived in the woods.
“Woodstream?” I asked, referring to a moderately priced apartment complex in Rocklin.
“No,” said Jesse. “In the woods… In a tent across the railroad tracks from Pacific Street and just behind the Springview apartments.”
Ants had been a problem, said Jesse. They had gotten into his last loaf of bread. He’d eaten some of it but had had to throw most of it away. He had no money. Could I help him? I could.
For a man struggling to eat, Jesse smoked a lot. I never saw him when he wasn’t dragging on a cigarette. Often in the morning he looked bleary eyed and smelled of beer. At those times his shoulders hunched, and the eagle seemed to dig its claws deeper into his back. I learned later he was an alcoholic.
Despite his problems, Jesse worked hard. Looking out from his shiny blue Mercedes, a real estate titan was impressed. He asked me for an evaluation.
“Jesse is a top guy,” I said. “Salt of the earth. I recommend him highly.”
The rich man nodded and said he was going to hire Jesse.
“We’ll miss him,” I said.
We did miss Jesse, but not because he quit to take another job. He just didn’t show up for two days. The third day he did show up, reeking of alcohol. He wanted his check. He said his mother had died and he wanted to go back to Pennsylvania for the funeral.
“Not so fast,” I said. I took his check from the boss and drove Jesse to the bank. I cashed Jesse’s check for him and took out all he owed me. I then gave him the small amount left and he walked off.
The last I remember of Jesse was seeing the outlines of that eagle on his back. Its talons seemed to dig even more deeply than ever into his shoulders. I thought I could hear the eagle scream.
“You remember Jesse?” my boss asked me a couple of days later. “Yes,” I replied. “He’s in jail. Police got him for stealing a car. He tried to get back to Pennsylvania on the cheap.”
A commotion roused me from my reverie. Students leaving their desks headed out the door. Class over. I walked outside. The sun hit me in the eyes. I squinted and kept walking. My head filled with a picture of an eagle alighting on a man’s back and digging in its claws. I saw blood and I knew the eagle would never let go. I could hear it scream.

POSTSCRIPT: I talked about Jesse in my persuasion presentation for Speech class in the fall of 1987. I think most of the quotes in the following are accurate to my speech but the sex stuff was all made up in this 1988 write-up.

“Shit.”
I jarred them out of their suburban complacency. Confused, edged forward on their seats, they listened to me berate them.
“That’s how you think of the homeless. As shit, as the excrement of society. If the homeless were human, we’d have obligations to them, wouldn’t we?
“I think that you’re more disturbed by my use of the S-word than by homelessness in America.
“I can still see Jesse walking into the hot afternoon, that screaming eagle digging into his back. So disfigured that he hardly looked human.
“He returned from fighting communism to get spat on. Talk about vicarious atonement. Talk about suffering for sins.
“Jesse suffered so that Americans could feel good about imposing their morality on ‘Nam. Talk about a suffering servant.
“I quote again from Isaiah. ‘He endured suffering and pain. No one would even look at him – we ignored him as if he were nothing. But he endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that his suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins he was wounded.’
“Jesse was despised and rejected. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
“There are many Jesses out there. Many homeless men are Vietnam veterans. What have we done to help them?”
The blonde in the front row leaned forward. Her lips opened and she breathed rapidly. Her breasts trembled. I paused, stood on my tiptoes to look down her shirt, and then continued.
“Jesus said the poor would be with us always. I say that’s an excuse. Jesus was wrong. The poor do not have to be with us always. For the price of 20 Stealth bombers we could eliminate hunger in America. Let us build low-income housing, instead of MX missiles. Make homes not wars.
“But if you must make war, make war on poverty.
“What’s in it for you? How will it help you to reduce the number of homeless? What’s so wrong with a sink-or-swim society?
“This is what’s wrong. People who drown like Jesse, first thrash about in the water. They may take you down with them.
“It’s in our self-interest to love our homeless neighbors as ourselves.
“I close with a specific request.
“Tonight and every night, St. Vincents homeless shelter in downtown Sacramento needs volunteers. People to cook, to serve food, to arrange bedding, and perhaps most important of all, to listen. I know it’s in the downtown and I know it’s Catholic, but there are people out there tonight who need our help. I’m heading there right now. Will you join me?”
They would. They clapped loudly, took down the address I wrote on the board, shook my hand, climbed into their cars and drove away to do good. The blond lingered and I lingered with her. We decided against going to St. Vincents that night. Instead we went back to her place.