After getting off the phone with Brad, I decided to stop by at my neighbor's house for a drink. Dr. Steven Yu is an internal medicine surgeon who specializes in fibroid removal, vaginal rejuvenation and hymen restoration. The Doc did very well for himself and owned a Jeep, an Audi, a Ferrari and had a million-dollar Benetti anchored in Marina Del Rey. The Doc and I used to drink a lot together but since I had given up drinking, I spent a lot less time with him. The Doc had invited me to come by earlier and so I decided to pay him a visit. After a few drinks I told him what Brad had said about my case and he grew quiet.
“You know I love you, my brother.” he said affectionately.
“I love you too man.” I replied.
“Can I tell you something?” the Doc said.
“Yeah, what is it.?”
“Your friend Devon is a piece of shit.”
“Well, that may be but lots of people love him. Woody Harrelson likes him. Bill Mahr likes him. You would probably like him if you knew him.”
“Man fuck Woody Harrelson and Bill Mahr needs to retire. He’s not even funny anymore. Devon makes his money off the business you built. You know that. He can’t take that from you.”
“So what is your point?” I said.
The Doc poured us each a shot of Absolut and quickly downed his. I tilted my head back and swallowed the hot firewater.
“We should have killed him when I told you to do it back in the day. We should have taken him out to the desert, buried him up to his neck and left him there.” The Doc said.
“You know I couldn’t go through with it.” I answered.
“If I grew up with someone and he did that shit to me, I’d put him in the ground. I know you’re a Buddhist and you don’t believe in violence, but I believe in an eye for an eye and that karma is a bitch.” The Doc was hopping mad now.
“I’m not a Buddhist. Buddhists don’t believe in god.” I still do. I just think he’s a sick sense of humor.” I said.
Now The Doc starts to sing the Depeche Mode song. I join and we sing together
“I don’t mean to start any blasphemous rumors,
But I think that god’s got a sick sense of humor”
“And when I die, I expect to find him laughing.”
“We should kill him seriously.” The Doc says brandishing his drink.
“You aren’t the first person who has offered to kill him for me just on general principle, but I always tell them no. Devon’s life is his own punishment. Besides, the Tao say.
“If you wait by the river long enough
you will see the body of your enemy floating down it”
“Ok. Enough of this fortune cookie philosophy. The Doc growled. ”I’m the Asian in this conversation. The problem is you still think of him as family.”
“It’s true. I do, even though I know he’s not. Still his life is his own punishment. I wouldn’t want to trade places with him.
The Doc pours us another drink. I just sip on this one. I’m starting to get buzzed.
“So how is Chad doing?” The Doc asks me. “I saw him on TV playing for the Seahawks against the Rams last year. “Do you ever talk to him?”
“Not really. I reached out to Chad after he got arrested but I never heard back from him.”
“Arrested for what?
“Come on, you watch ESPN all the time. It was national news.” I answered him.
“What happened to him?
“So, you really don’t know.”
“No. Tell me what happened.”“Just google Chad Wheeler.” I told him.
The Doc picked up his phone and typed in the name Chad Wheeler. He read the story out loud.
“It says here. Seattle Seahawks lineman Chad Wheeler is no longer with the team after being arrested on suspicion of felony domestic violence. Kent, Washington Police report that a woman called 911 and informed them that someone was trying to kill her. When police arrived, they found the victim Aliyah Taylor was bleeding from injuries and had a dislocated arm. She reported that Chad Wheeler had shaved his head bald and ordered her to bow down to him. When she refused to bow down Chad strangled her until he thought she was dead. The woman woke up to Chad standing above her and he was surprised to find out she was still alive. “
Steve stopped reading and looked up from his phone.
“What the fuck. I can’t believe this. His football career is over. He’s going to jail.”
“The girl he beat up has been going on talk shows and making a big deal about it. So I think he’s going to jail.”
“Devon must be losing his mind. Can you imagine if that happened to your son? What if Jordan or Max was going to jail for trying to kill some girl?”
“I couldn’t think of a worse thing to happen to someone if I tried. Why did you think I said his life is his own punishment?”
“Didn’t Devon try to strangle you the last time you saw him?”
“Yeah, but I ended up dropping the charges.”
So he strangled you and got away with it and now his son is going to jail for it. That is some biblical shit.”
“Why do you think I said God has a sick sense of humor? It’s like Willie Nelson said, ”Nobody slides my friend.”
“I still don’t understand what happened with you two. You guys grew up together.” The Doc asked.
‘Why did Cain slay Abel?” I answered.
“What does that mean?”
“It means there’s nothing new under the sun? What do you think happened to the guy who invented the wheel? Someone hit him on the head with a club and stole the idea from him. That’s like asking why wolves hunt. What really sucks is that I don’t get to be happy about any of this. I feel terrible for the girl, and I feel terrible for Chad.”
“Dude, he almost killed that girl. He’s a psycho.” The Doc continued reading.
“The kid never had a chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Chad grew up getting everything he wanted. No one ever said no to him. There were a few incidents at USC that got covered up before he made it to the NFL. A lot of people thought it was racist because the girl was black but I don’t think it was. Chad was a gladiator and people treated him like a god. He probably thought that his girlfriend should bow down to him and worship him. He just ran into the wrong black girl and she wasn’t having any of that yes massa shit.”
“I still say both of them belong in a shallow ditch.” The Doc took another drink of his Absolut.
“My friend David is a dentist and says the same thing. You doctors are so bloodthirsty. Don’t ya’ll have to take some kind of oath to practice medicine?” I countered.
“I’m a surgeon bro and he’s a tumor as far as I’m concerned.” The Doc lit a Marlboro Light cigarette and took a long drag.
“That is cold, Doc and I agree with you but that’s not going to happen. I just don’t have it in me.” I protested.
“Let me tell you something. You think about this stuff way too much. Karma, the afterlife, they’re all myths that we created to explain things we don’t understand. We evolved and evolution works like this. For long periods of time, we are in stasis. Stasis means things stay pretty much the same. We eat, we reproduce then we die. Then some violent event like a volcano, a fire, an earthquake, a tidal wave or even an ice age comes along and wipes out most of the species. Only the species that adapt survive. That is called punctuated equilibrium. But even during stasis the natural order is kill or be killed.” he stated absolutely.
“That’s what I’ve been saying. Some of us are predators, and some of us are prey?” I agreed.
“I’m saying unless something drastic happens things don’t change and if you don’t adapt you don’t survive.”
He poured us another drink and downed it right away.
“Well, I’ve got surgery in the morning so I’m going to crash. Here, take the bottle.”
The Doc handed me the bottle of Absolut.
“That’s ok.” I said pushing it back into his hands.
“No, take it. I’ll see you later. Luv you baby.”
The Doc shoved the bottle back into my hands and staggered out the door. This was par for the course. On his days off the Doc drank like a sailor but he had a switch and in the middle of a conversation he’d say he was tired and go right to bed. At times I suspected that he just got tired of our conversations and that was probably the case. He was a brilliant surgeon, one of only a handful of people in the United States who could operate a DiVinci robot which was designed for non-invasive surgery. He knew absolutely nothing about history, literature, philosophy or any of the subjects I had spent 5 years pursuing a degree in American History. I had studied what I loved but The Doc had taken the hard way and clawed his way to the top. I had to admit to myself that my story had ended in abysmal failure, but his tale of adaptation and accumulation had been a resounding success. He was a useful part of the machine, and I was an obsolete part.
When I got home the lights were all off and everyone was asleep. I walked around the side of the house up to the front porch. The city was quiet now and the thick fog made the shimmering lights look like tiny suns in a far-off galaxy. I had a T-shirt with a picture of the Milky Way Galaxy filled with stars with a red map pin dropped on one of the dots that read. “You are here.” I loved that shirt. Now it made me think of how insignificant I was. Just another grain of sand on the beach or a speck of dust in a tornado. I took a long pull from the bottle and the clear molten liquid slid down my throat. It had been 5 years since Grace had been raided and closed. During that time our former landlord Suresh Jain had collected $50,000 a month in rent earning him over $3,000,000 for destroying my family’s life’s work. We had taken out two second mortgages on our house to pay for our new store which had been closed and down to cover our legal bills. Now I had no idea if we were going to be able to keep our house which was all we had at this point.
Did the man who invented the wheel profit from his invention or did some bigger stronger cavemen hit him on the head and claim the idea for himself? Everything that I had learned about human beings told me that the inventor of the wheel had ended up with his skull bashed in and with his invention stolen by some stronger predator. I had been functioning under the mistaken assumption that I was living in a civilized society in which the rights of citizens were protected under the law, but deep down I knew my lawyer was telling me the truth and he was right. Judge Epstein would not award us a penny of the money that we had lost.
I had been in stasis for five years waiting for punctuated equilibrium but without some drastic event or adaptation, I was going to end up as prey, just another wildebeest taken out by a hyena on the Serengeti. So, I formulated a final plan. I had failed at everything that I had attempted. I failed as an actor, failed as a writer, failed a ganjawalla and now I was failing to provide for my family. I had lost everything that I had worked my entire life to build, and my reputation had been destroyed but I still had an ace in the hole. I had a 1-million-dollar life insurance policy.
I decided that I was ready to cash out of this casino. I had failed at life but I could die with a purpose and at least my family would be taken care of. I thought about my father Shyamakunda Das and how he had sacrificed everything only to be cast aside by Kirtananda Swami after Prabhupada’s Palace had been built. My father had passed away a few years ago and now Kirtananda Swami’s son Devon Wheeler had done the same thing to me, cheating two generations of our family out of our life’s work.
I took my father’s axe out of the tool shed and hid it in the left arm of my jacket. I had decided that I would die with my father’s axe in my hand.
“If you are a big tree, I’ll be a small axe”.
Ready to cut you down, sharpened to cut you down.”
Bob Marley.”
It was a cold night and so I made sure to add extra layers as I prepared for my last mission. I pulled my jacket closed and zipped it up. I put on my black leather gloves. I pushed my bike quietly towards the gate and slipped out into the alley. It was only about a mile ride from my house to the Erba Markets store on Pico and Centinela Ave. I got to the store and saw that all the lights were on. I drove past and parked the bike around the corner in the alley. I unzipped my jacket and held my father’s axe in my hand.
When I was a kid, and my dad was drinking a lot, me and my sister imagined ourselves as superheros who smashed up liquor stores. Now I would get my chance. Like some dark avenging angel, I slipped through the alley towards the store and came to the Adult Book Store, the sleazy porn shop that Suresh Jain rented. I smashed every single window in the porn shop. Then I came to Jan’s Liquor, the liquor store that Suresh operated. I smashed every single window in Jan’s Liquor. Now the alarm from the liquor store was going off. I expected the police to arrive any minute.
I made my way to Erba and looked inside. The shelves were filled with colorful packages, drinks and candies. An oversized rendering of Leonard Khamhout's pedo-jewelry, a giant metal chain with a bell hung in the middle of the Erba store defiling the sacred place that had once once been Grace. I thought of my father who had dedicated his life to serving Kirtananda Swami and building New Vrindavan only to be excommunicated from the community that he had built with his own hands for drinking alcohol by a “guru” who turned out to be a homosexual predator pretending to be a celilabate monk. I had helped Devon at every turn because I felt sorry for him. His father had abandoned him and he had barely known his mother. I thought he was my friend. I had served a year in federal prison for him. I had helped him steal his father in law Leonard Khamhout’s business from him after we found out he was a pedophile. Now he had taken the one sacred thing I had built in Grace, My Valley of Peace and turned it into a den of thieves.
I gripped my dead father’s axe in my right hand. I raised the axe above my head. The giant picture window shattered into a thousand pieces scattering glass all over the floor and the sidewalk. I struck again and another window collapsed. I went to strike again, but this time it felt different. I suddenly felt sick inside. I had installed these windows; I had put in the Himalayan Slate floor. I knew where there were fossils on the floor that were over 250 million years old. A lot of my old friends that were patients for years still shopped here. I could hear sirens now. The police were on the way, but I couldn’t bring myself to break another window. Grace had been my baby and destroying any part of it just felt like hitting my own child. So I ran.
The police were closing in on all sides now. I ducked into the alley and jumped on my bike. As I came out of the alley and headed east on Pico towards Bundy an LAPD Ford Explorer sped by me but then quickly turned around. I crossed over Bundy and parked the bike at a Tiny Hi Dive Bar and walked inside. I saw LAPD pull up outside. I thought of ordering a drink and trying to play cool but I didn’t have my phone or identification on me. I walked through the bar and out the back door and into the alley. In the alley I saw another LAPD unit heading north on Bundy. I pushed my way inside the gate of the apartment complex on the corner of Bundy and Pico and slipped inside. I hid behind the bushes next to the wall.
There were cops everywhere now and I could hear them searching for me on foot outside the fence. I laid very still and kept completely quiet. If I made a sound they would hear me. As I laid there trying not to move, I heard a sound in the garden. Something was crawling through the bushes toward me. I hoped and prayed that it wasn’t a possum or a racoon. The creature moved closer and closer towards me, but I dared not make a sound to scare it away for fear of alerting the police on the other side of the fence.
‘Meow?” I heard the beast cry out pitifully. I looked over my shoulder and saw an Orange tabby cat staring at me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God it wasn’t a possum. They freak me out more than clowns.
I put out my gloved hand toward the tabby who I will call Orange, and he slowly made his way towards me. I started to stroke Oranges back and he started to purr. I felt a sneeze coming on and I tried to hold it in. I cupped my gloved hand over my mouth and let out a muffled sneeze. Then Orange bolted, jumped up on a shelf and knocked over a plastic flowerpot. The pot crashed to the ground and Orange scurried away and disappeared into the night.
“What was that?” I heard someone shout.
“It came from over there.” I heard one of the cops say.
“You, in there. This is the Los Angeles Police Department. Come out with your hands up!”
I stayed completely still. After all it was the cat who made the noise, not me.
“You, in there. This is the Los Angeles Police Department. Come out with your hands up.” Again, the order came.
I am a firm believer in making the police work for a living and I know better than to ask the police for help. I don’t cooperate with the police. I don’t admit anything to the police, and I don’t turn myself into the police. But it was late, and I was getting tired, and I really had changed my mind about wanting to get shot.
I had sobered up and the adrenaline from my bike ride had worn off. I was starting to get cold and the whole plan was starting to seem like a terrible idea to me. Besides, I hadn't been able to go through with it. No one had even fired a shot and yet somehow here I was lying in the dirt with some random alley cat who then gave away my position. I guess that’s why you never try to wrestle with a snake. I wasn’t sure that this was rock bottom, but I did know that I didn’t want to be there anymore.
Again the cops outside repeated their order.
“This is the Los Angeles Police Department. Come out with your hands up. You are completely surrounded.”
I picked myself up off the ground, dusted myself off and got to my feet. I put my hands in the air and pushed on the gate.
“I’m coming out. “I said. “Don’t shoot me please.” I shouted.
The LAPD guys turned out to be pretty cool. A few of them knew me from when Grace had been broken into a few years earlier and they had shown up to take the call. They couldn’t figure out why I was smashing my own store up. After I told them all that had happened and that I had a civil case against Jain they decided not to arrest me. They were about to write me a citation for destruction of property and release me with a court date to appear. Then they ran my name for warrants and found out I had a pending case against me for operating an illegal cannabis business within the city of Los Angeles. I was arrested and booked. My bail was set at $100,000.
Fortunately for me cash bail had just been outlawed for non-violent crimes in the City of Los Angeles. After 24 hours, I was released without bail. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. I pled guilty to operating an illegal cannabis business and in exchange the State of California agreed to drop all other charges against me. As part of the plea agreement I was ordered to complete 300 hours of community service and a 52 week Anger Management Program. I did my community service work building sets for the Odyssey Theater on Sepulveda Blvd. The director Beth Hogan is a wonderful lady and it was a genuine pleasure to work there. It was a great experience and I actually learned quite a bit about set design.
After I had completed my sentence and my community service Lisa and I were arrested and charged with tax evasion by the State of California. I had filed a claim against the State of California for over $300,000 for the illegal raid against Grace in 2019 that had resulted in the closure of the business. I had contacted Jason Nakano who headed the investigation for the State of California and informed him that the 2019 raid was illegal because Grace had a pending application with the Department of Cannabis Regulation. The illegal raid had taken place after we had refused to pay a $100,000 bribe to Senator Palanco to guarantee that our application would be accepted and the tax evasion case was filed in retaliation to us seeking the return of the property that was seized in the 2019 raid. I already signed the first plea agreement with the State of California in exchange for all charges being dropped against me, but now after being led to believe that the matter was settled, Lisa and I are facing 3-5 years in prison.
We had already lost Grace, the business that we had spent a lifetime building and had mortgaged our house to pay our lawyers. We had borrowed the money and expected to repay the loan after our case was settled but Judge Rosenberg and Judge Epstein seemed perfectly willing to let Wheeler, Jain and Handal steal our business and we got absolutely nothing. Not a penny. We were trying to sell the house which we had lived in for 20 years and had raised our family in but it needed some repairs and had fallen out of escrow. Now I had only one mission. To keep our home from going into foreclosure long enough to be able to fix it up and sell it.
I was barely surviving by operating Grace as an illegal weed delivery business during the week and selling American flag hats on “the pick” on the weekends. Lisa had gotten her real-estate licence and she managed to sell a few condos. So we were scraping by and I was hoping to not get caught selling weed again and arrested and to keep our house from going into foreclosure. We put our house up for sale, but the house had fallen out of escrow. Now we were behind on our mortgage and I didn’t know if we would be able to stay in our house long enough to see our son Brady graduate from Santa Monica High School. This was the desperate situation I found myself in when Oliver Bane came to live in our home.
The White Castle (top level) and Oliver and Bandit’s Quarters downstairs.