Three
So New York. The moment came that I didn’t believe anymore in walking
around in a three piece suit. I didn’t believe anymore in the daily routine of
going to the office, the six complete floors of a heavy stone building in
downtown Denver that the Divine Light Mission rented from arms manufacturer Joe
Gould. I didn’t believe anymore in the meetings on ‘international communication
systems’, ‘financial planning and control’ and the hidden question: how the
enormous stack of bills was going to be paid. I didn’t believe anymore in
sleeping on the ground in a room with at least five other people. I didn’t
believe anymore in food that shouldn’t be delicious because that would distract
you from the straight path, not to mention women. And I didn’t believe anymore
in a guru that refused to lower his daily allowance of five hundred dollars
even by a dime to help relieve the financial burden of his organization. But
then again, that was just what triggered it. The life that I led didn’t bring
me the tiniest bit closer to what I was looking for: being at peace with life.
I wanted a normal home and a wife and a kid. I wanted my own life back.
So I thought, more or less from one day to the other: I quit. I’m going
back. See if I can get a scholarship, a place of my own, a nice university
course. If I was flying home, ‘K’ and Jody said (two housemates from Denver who
recently took a similar step), “you must drop by New York.” See something of
the United States after all. “Actually”, said K (from Kendric III, I think, but
nobody used all that), “you’ve gotta travel right through it. Straight across
America. Then you’ll see how life here really is. And then New York. The
reward.” He wouldn’t mind driving. His father was one of the major beer brewers
of the United States. Because K had joined the guru, his father didn’t want to
know him anymore, but within his family he could always get his hands on
‘wheels’. I had nothing at all. After my unfaithful move I was happy I was
allowed to take a suitcase with some clothes and was offered a ticket home to
Amsterdam. “You can stopover in New York without any extra costs”, K
immediately figured out. With all the mileage that I had flown on my trips for
the Divine Light Mission, Pan Am would happily arrange that for me. K knew the
world. And I could stay at her parents house in Brooklyn (‘Bwwoeklin’), Jody
said, so as far as sleeping was concerned my lack of cash shouldn’t be a
problem either. How I was going to manage in Amsterdam, I had no idea. But
okay, New York it is, I decided while sneaking a bottle of Coors Light with K and
Jody in the ashram garden to celebrate our good bye to ascetic life.
Daring to eat meat again, took a lot longer. By that time I lived in a
small student apartment at the Rode Kruislaan in Diemen and studied sociology
at the University of Amsterdam. No idea how to prepare anything from meat,
because when I moved to a room at the Vrijheidslaan in Amsterdam at the age of
eighteen, my head was already full of thoughts about yogis, the third eye and
lift off from Earth. Each night I chewed my brown rice with seaweed fifty times
to reach the yin-yang balance of Zen Buddhism. Each morning I stood on my head
to get rid of earthly weights. And then made my first water pipe of the day.
Cook a meatball or grill a chicken? I never learned it. So half a year after I
left the Divine Light Mission and mustered up enough courage, I rode my bike to
the only snackbar Diemen had back then and ordered a chicken. Not a drumstick?
Not a leg? Not a half if need be? No, might as well get right down to it, I
figured, so a whole chicken gurgled in the deep fryer and then hung with a nice
brown crust on my bike’s handlebars, swinging in its plastic bag. Back home the
numb thud the chicken in its bag made when I put it on the linoleum floor of my
student apartment, caught me off guard. Like the first shovel of sand on a
coffin. But I bravely ate it. All of it, including the dripping frying fat.
Delicious.