Linoleum and red vinyl

S. and I are at this diner in downtown Tucson, a kitschy place popular with the hip college crowd. It’s one of those places with lots of linoleum, and worn red vinyl in the booths. Shiny metal counters and napkin dispensers glint in the fluorescent lights. This is no Johnny Rocket’s or 5 And Diner, corporate 50s chic to cater to the family nostalgia demographic. The fading is a bit too real, the small tears in the seats too genuine, for that. It’s genuine fake, the Real Faux Deal. It’s been faking since before your time, been faking so long it has become a real thing. The main attraction, aside from the delightful “dive” ambiance, is that it is open 24 hours, and offers the chance to eat huge bowls of cereal at 3 A.M.

It’s the mid-90s, S. and I are coworkers, and we have come here to have a Conversation. At this point in my life, I’m more than a little lost. I’ve face-planted on the whole life thing. I’m in the Dark Wood, a poor wretch, yada yada yada. I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in God — but I really, really want to at this moment, remembering how I almost had myself convinced, back in high school, that I had found an answer and some peace — though I had found no such thing. I’ve convinced myself that my doubts now are a sign of weakness. Recently, I had read a couple of books that made me very angry — an essay collection by Harlan Ellison (how his famous anti-Christmas article pissed me off!) and Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Both are reminding me of skepticism and asking questions, and damn all if I’m having any of that.

(Later, I will realize that reading The Demon-Haunted World was a turning point for me — from that point forward, I will always have Sagan in my head, whispering questions, and worse, suggesting that it’s okay. It will be years before I fully get that.)

So here is S., my coworker. She’s beautiful, she’s hip, she’s smart, she’s funny. A blond tomboy, careless in her appearance, a haunter of thrift stores. One of her favorite shirts is a UPS shirt she found at Value Village. She’s kind and sweet and listens with an almost scary intensity. You don’t talk with S. — you converse with her, long rambling conversations that cover all the bases, in depth, with lots of laughter throughout. She’s one of those people who seems to almost genetically have her shit together. It’s an illusion, of course. I’ll find, with time, that she has the same problems with that as any of us do. But right now, in this diner, she seems to be a Totally Together Person.

And this Gregory of the mid-90s is all about the gurus. My whole conscious life has been a search for a guru, a person with the answers. A person to save me, to fix the problems of my life, make it all better, iodine, band-aid and a kiss. My romantic life has been a shambles, since I’m always searching for the Magical Woman who will heal me (except for that one time, when I searched for, and found, a bit of poison in female form…). In high school it was B., and the brush with Evangelical Christianity. There was P., and the way I pushed her away with my desperate, needy clinging. There were others, too, the non-romantic relationships, almost always women, often ones I was attracted to. It’s part hormones, part the guru thing, and part my inability to have decent relationships with other men. Because there is always that — I get along better with women, and most of my closest friends have been women.

Anyway. S. I’m a little keen on her, and a lot lost, and searching for that guru. And here she is, in her favorite joint, ready and willing to talk. A Christian. Deeply so. Campus Crusade so. Mission to that heathen land, New Zealand, so. Fact is, that part is bugging me. I have a huge problem with that. I hate Campus Crusade and their ties to right wing extremists. I hate the whole missionary thing. Rational Gregory is already being birthed at this point, and he cringes at all that. And yet. She’s got it all together. She’s happy, she’s relaxed, she seems to know what she wants from life. She’s grounded. She must know Something. Teach me, Guru, teach me! Heck, I think, drowning out the skeptical questions in my head, maybe it’s even that Christianity thing. Maybe I’m missing something, my smarty-pants intellect getting in the way and keeping me from seeing the Truth.

So I’m telling S. about this book I found, an old, faded paperback of Asian religious literature — one of those very Eurocentric affairs, the ones that point to the whole continent of Asia like it’s one cultural group, so that you have Buddhist hymns along with Sufi poets and everything else in between. One of the poems is by Rumi, about Judgment Day, and it has me thinking. It’s long lost to my memory, but I remember it talking about being called to give an accounting of one’s life. I’m being just plain honest when I say that, at this point near the end of the millennium, the accounting on my life is a bit worrisome. I pour my heart out, in a breezy, vague sort of way, and admit that I find myself wondering if that whole Jesus thing might have something to it.

Funny thing is, I don’t remember what she said. I remember that she was sweet and kind, and that we laughed a lot. I remember that she didn’t really push the evangelism, just spoke simply about what she felt and believed. The specifics are lost to me. I mostly remember the scene, in that trashy dive that was real faux. I was really searching for truth, but also not really doing so. I was trying to get answers from someone else, trying to recapture something from my past that had never really been All That to begin with. Chasing a bit of nostalgia for what had never really been, and knowing it deep down. And yet, at the end of day, I was still really, honestly searching. I was being fake and real at the same time. It would be years before the real stuff became more earnest, before I could start to put aside the quest for Truth, the endless search for my magic guru, and begin to really look, myself, for truths. Looking back, though, I know that she never could have convinced me, no matter how hard she tried. Questioning was already part of me, something I couldn’t turn off, no matter how hard I tried.