I was 18 years old when things started to change for RJ. I’m not sure when RJ found More University, nor do I remember who introduced him to the teaching there. I think it was some client at Larry’s salon. Those years are pretty blurry, I don’t know if I was ever sober.
Deb and RJ broke up and he found his way to the VA. RJ started to go to a veterans support group and talk about some of his war horrors. When he finally asked for help, he was in such a bad way, they told him to stop with the cocaine but maybe wait on kicking the alcohol. He was getting clean and finding space around some of the PTSD he had brought back with him from Vietnam. I believe he was actually traumatized before he ever left, but I will write about his first wife later.
RJ and I were still working at Larry’s salon at this time, but I had moved from Russian Hill to a studio on Bush Street by Jones. We were not very close at this time. We still worked together, but I was completely obliterated, doing what I had done most of my life: living somewhere between functional addiction and death-defying feats of total abandon. Sometimes with guys from RJ’s vet group. They came around and as is necessary, damage finds its own reflection.
You what?
At some point, RJ came into the salon after taking a course at More University and said, “I want to get you off.” I don’t believe I answered, I was shocked. Not only had he never seemed to care about that before but very few of my partners so far had. He didn’t try to sell me the Basic Sensuality Course, he just asked me to take it and paid for it.
A friend drove me back and forth all weekend on his motorcycle to and from a purple house in Oakland. Brian and Kassy Shekeloff taught the Basic Sensuality course (word for word where RJ got the Common Sense course he “teaches”) that weekend. I remember crossing the bridge from SF to Oakland in the mornings. This was before the helmet law but my friend Jim made me wear one anyway. I remember laying down in the course and feeling sleepy. I was super stoned the whole time but Brian and Kassy made me feel comfortable. I spent the weekend listening to Brian’s funny stories while he smiled at me through his thick bottle bottom glasses.
I could tell RJ was hoping some change was going to come over me when I took this course. There wasn’t. He hadn’t taken to scolding me yet but as he pulled his head out of his own reckless behavior he saw clearly where I was headed. He was worried in a way I hadn’t seen before. Worried and frustrated, the two main emotions I stirred in many people, it felt different coming from him, but that didn’t slow my roll. This is what finally did.
