I'm Afraid Of Water

Not when I see it like this, out the window of my friend's condo in Santa Monica,

but when I see it like this, out the window of hell.

My fear is so irrational that once in Ocean City, Maryland, a "friend" threatened to throw me in the water and I bit his arm so hard it surely had to be amputated. At least I hope it did because that's how much I hated him, especially while I screamed, "Please don't, I'm afraid of water, pleeeeeaaase don't!"

"Jean, did I kill a little boy on a water ride of motorized boats when I was 4 years old?" Jean stuttered a little. (AHA!)
"Uh, no honey, you didn't."
"Are you SURE?"

Jean, a friend of my parents, has known me since I was born. This memory of my murderous past had haunted me for years and I finally got enough courage to ask her about it. Surely there's a statute of limitations on killing someone on a motorized boat when you were a child, isn't there?

Jean was more than sure because she'd taken me to that particular street fair and no one had died. I thought she might have been lying. She probably thought I was insane.

When I was 13, my mother, sister and I took the Queen Elizabeth to Cherbourg, France, on our way to Paris to visit our grandparents, which we did every summer. On this particular voyage we met a man who took us down below, to the loading bay. It was wide open and there was a metal chain stretched across the opening. The Atlantic Ocean rushed past in a blue fury, whitecaps dotting the landscape as far as the eye could travel. The man told us to step back and be very careful.

When, many years later, I asked my mother why she let this stranger take us so close to danger she replied that IT NEVER HAPPENED. I'm pretty sure you can't get Alzheimer's at 13 but maybe I was singled out because of my bad perm and braces. Not to mention because I hated my parents.

The only time I went to sleep away camp I was in a pool that had no shallow end. It was a pool specifically designed to teach kids to swim. Terrified, I clung to the edges. Every time this one counselor walked by she'd step on my hands and make me shove off into the middle of the pool where I sputtered and took in water like the Titanic. I hope she's dead now because if I ever find her I'll make her wish she was.

A lifetime of strange water memories. It didn't appear that some of them were real. Then how did I remember them so vividly and what did they have to do with my fear of water? Like the chicken and the egg, which came first, my fear or those incidents?

I meditate and have for over 25 years. I've studied metaphysics longer. I read Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualizations in the 1980's and got in touch with my Higher Self, sometimes known as a spirit guide. It's the voice in your head that tells you what to do, or what not to do. Mine turned out to be a 7 foot tall man with a flowing white beard. His name was Raji and he WALKED TOWARDS ME ON A BEACH during my first meditation about contacting the Higher Self. A beach is next to water in case the cap locked letters weren't enough of a clue.

I depended on Raji for advice until I moved to California and he disappeared. How does a non-human form disappear? One day while I was out hiking I realized he no longer "talked" to me. The next year I had new guides, 4 or 5, depending on the day. They were very loving and encouraging, like Raji, and there was one in particular, a Scotsman, who kept calling me Laddie. And I would reply that I was a Lassie (not the dog) but he didn't seem to care and continued to call me Laddie. He spoke in a Scottish accent and in my entire acting career the Scottish accent is the one accent I could never replicate.

Everyone has a Higher Self. Everyone. You hear the voice but you may discount it as your own. It's not you. It's the voice that tells you to turn right at the stoplight but you turn left and then realize you were wrong. It's the same power that kept showing me a vision of my new apartment in June of last year. The apartment that I eventually moved into.

I worked a lot as a comic the first 10 years I lived here in L.A. I traveled to clubs all over the U.S., Canada and overseas and went to Hawaii once a year. On one trip I was on the island of Maui,  lying on a towel on the beach in front of my hotel. I went into one of my meditations and silently asked why I was so drawn to Hawaii that I cried whenever I left.

And one of my guides answered: "Because this is where you drowned."

The Mystery Of The Two Windows

While I was looking for apartments, I kept getting a picture in my head of a window at the end of a kitchen. And a picture window in the living room next to it. I had no idea why or what it meant. I would see apartments all day long and come home and have that vision pop into my head at random times. I wondered if it was going to be in a house I would own. (Even though I've never in my life wanted to own a house.)

I continued to look for apartments and then one day saw one I really liked. The manager left to get me an application and while he was gone I looked out the kitchen window. Then rocked to the side and saw this:


It was the EXACT picture that had appeared in my head, the kitchen window on the right, the living room picture window on the left.

Sidebar: The first dog my sister and I owned was an AKC dog named Fago Marigold's Mental Image. We had picked out a puppy but the breeder said, "You're not puppy people." Our dog, eventually named Kiko, was 9 months when we got him and we nearly cut off his balls by accident so we were probably not "9 month old dog people" either.

I had another apartment to see that day and it was also terrific. The manager gave me an application and said he would need to see my bank statements or a tax return. I didn't carry those around with me - obviously - so said I would return in a few hours. But I had a feeling the universe was trying to save me another application fee by putting this snag in the transaction. I knew in my heart I was supposed to have the first apartment. That's what the vision of the Two Windows was all about.

When I got home, the first apartment manager had already called and told me I got it. (He said when he saw my credit score he had to get me into the building) (It must have been high) (Or maybe he was?)

Remember the story of the Nic Cage movie and the angel played by Don Cheadle and how he told Nic the answer would come to him, and then my phone rang and it was from the town my Dad died in? I knew that was a message. The answer would come to me. And I knew it was my Dad "calling" to let me know it was a message. He and I believed in the metaphysical much more than the reality most people hang onto. Our way is more comforting but requires more faith. Although sometimes I run a quart low on that.

This is the view from my living room window.

This is the view from my 3rd floor balcony. In back of the pink house, those pale ash colored buildings, Paramount Pictures, are three blocks from my apartment.

I had so much extra stuff I was able to furnish my balcony.

Which is really ridiculous. I'm only showing one half of it because if I show you the other end, also furnished and decorated, you're going to call Hoarders on me.

Sometimes My Brain Is On Pause

Saturday I was lying on my couch waiting to die, waiting for the Velocirapture to swallow me whole. And watching a movie called The Family Man starring Nicolas Cage and Tea Leoni. I spent most of the movie trying to keep track of Nicolas Cage's hairpieces. He had more styles and colors than a 25 year fast-forwarded clip show of Oprah's hair.

There's a moment in the movie when Cage and Don Cheadle, who plays an angel, are in a car and Cage is confused about what's happening to him. Cheadle tells him he has to figure it out. Cage asks him why he just can't tell him what's going on but Cheadle persists. "Let it come to you. It will come to you."

This is how my life has run its course. The Answer always comes to me. It pops into my head and I instantly "Know" it's the right thing to do.

Sidebar: This offer not valid with boyfriends.

It happened in Paris, it happened in New York. Both times I was miserable but then I heard The Answer and off I went. But as unhappy as I've been living at my present address here in LA, I haven't heard The Answer. That calm inner voice of The Higher Self. The voice telling me what to do, where to go. It once told me the password of someone's email account. It often gives me the result of someone else's problem. I depend on it so much that it writes the majority of my punchlines. It's never been wrong.

Sidebar Again: This offer still not valid with boyfriends. I repeat this for my own benefit.

But lately I've been obsessing about The Answer. Where is it? WHERE IS IT? And then I take a breath or seven and remember that all the other times it came to me, I didn't expect it. It just showed up.

So I'm watching Don Cheadle, one of my top 5 favorite actors ever, tell Nic Cage that the answer WILL COME. It will come, he repeats. And as much as I've been fixated over this very issue, I knew it was a message I was meant to hear as messages appear in many forms. Movies, a chance encounter, a phone call. We've all read The Celestine Prophecy, correct?

Then my phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID.

Area code from St. Petersburg, Florida. The town my father died in. The caller hung up immediately, didn't leave a message. But they didn't need to.

I heard it loud and clear.

I spent Sunday with my sister. I told her the story and at the end of it she burst into tears. "That was Dad helping you out."

Yes, I know. So, thanks Dad.