The Guru and The Great Escape

Jim, a tall, handsome Irish-American scriptwriter from Boston, and myself had been plotting our escape from the film business for several weeks. For the last three months we had trotted down to the local Shiatsu school to learn the art of pressing one’s thumbs into people’s backs for a living. Anything has to be better than writing we had decided. And so giving our index fingers, the only one either of us could type with, a rest we practiced poking around on innocent bodies, taking breaks only to venture to Reena’s Raw Food Café next door, which was filled with hippie-types that may not have moved from the spot since 1962. We found sustenance in the form of the odd spinach leaf served up on a silver plate.

“I just blew off a major party in Hollywood to be sitting here with you tonight on this deserted street outside one of the most bizarre cafes I have ever been to,” I confessed last night. “Do you think I have gone mad?” “No,” said Jim. “You have finally got your priorities straight.”

Dear Reader, this is the plight facing journalists today: “To Write or Not To Write?” Or maybe both suggested our guru, a diminutive and wise man from Tokyo who perched like a delicate flower on the edge of a stool in his Sense –I get-up, consisting of one of those suave black warrior-jackets and cute white trousers, looking somehow more seductive than Prince could ever hope to writhing around on stage. So I spent the morning planning my reinvention as a writer of anything other than Hollywood stories, sending out wild pitches to far-flung corners of the globe. In-between I tried to convince the gardener, who had spotted us practicing on the terrace, that really I was not qualified to mess around with his back. Yikes. Give a massage, I thought? I was in a clear mid-life crisis mode. I headed next door to sit in the Jacuzzi of my neighborhood hotel where a buggy had flown into the water. Real weather, wind, rain, fog, had finally made it to Los Angeles. And its inhabitants were in a panic. The buggy had almost bopped a bald-headed man on the head. He hadn’t noticed. But I thought Tibetan Yoga in the studio sounded more promising. After pumping our hearts like soldiers with our fists, and making strange cycling movements with our arms, in a sequence that would have made Indiana Jones seem far scarier than his riffle, I realized that this effort to conjure forth some all-powerful Tibetan deity was in vain, when the teacher declared that she had to leave early to get home in case it rained.