I get up from the hotel couch and walk over to my ninth-floor window, staring out at nothing and everything at the same time. The blurry space I see might as well be my soul. But I’ve had enough with all this black and white. It’s time to fill in the drab canvas with the color of spirit. At forty-six, I am finally going to get serious about finding God. I vow to dedicate the better part of the next year to stop using the Celebrity Industrial Complex as my excuse for why I am not focused on spiritual matters and, instead, use Hollywood as a laboratory to figure out what I believe, to define exactly what my relationship with God is…and to determine whether I even believe He/She/It exists.
The list of things not missing in my life—a supportive family, decent health, some financial security—is long, yet the void I was feeling stemmed from not having the one thing I had lost touch with over my years in Hollywood: God.
And I don’t just mean the biblical, paternalistic God—that fire-and-brimstone, Ten Commandments–declaring omniscience of my Catholic childhood who demanded that you accept Jesus Christ as your savior and commit no sins or else…you go to hell! What I miss is having a faith in any Higher Power. I mean, I have friends who are addicts who, as part of their twelve-step program, believe in one. Yet, apparently, I don’t have what even recovering crackheads do: Faith. I want to believe in something that might elevate me above the spiritual superficiality of work and drive-by parenting that fills me with a near-constant guilt that I am failing my family by traveling so much and being occupied by yesterday, tomorrow—and not the moment.
I come home night in, night out to be with my family, but I am too often not “there” with them. Instead, I am distracted by my emails or lost in outlining my next book or so consumed with anxiety over anything stressful that I, more often than not, come home and camp out in the bedroom, lose myself in my laptop, or veg out on the couch watching NHL game highlights. I feel so damn lost. And if I continue to float on my raft down this isolation river, I fear—actually, no, I am convinced—that all of this is not going to end well. I too could become a Hollywood cliché. I don’t think I am being melodramatic when I say that I could be Lamar.
But that’s getting ahead of myself—something I am very good at, by the way. Projecting myself into the future and all its uncertainty, and in so doing making my present as uncomfortable as a priest watching a Seth Rogen sex comedy in front of his congregation.
I don’t have spiritual peace, a calming center that might come from having a firmer sense of what will happen when I meet my maker. I don’t need all the answers; I just want to dive into something far deeper than the spiritual kiddie pool in which I find myself splashing.
After twenty years in Hollywood interviewing the rich and famous (and by becoming a TV personality blurring the lines between me and them), I have in far too many ways, if not entirely, become the kind of materialistic, spiritually superficial person I never set out to be.
OK, fine. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I have a history of being my own worst critic, a holdover of my competitive hockey-playing days where I was trained to believe that no matter what you achieve, “you’re only as good as your last game.” As a result, I critique nearly everything—my on-air performance, my book prose, my parenting, my gym workout. There’s virtually no activity that I engage in that isn’t followed by some sort of I-could’ve-done-that-better analysis. At various points in my career I’ve tried to lay off the critical gas and mute this negative inner monologue, only to return to it, as it’s the only driving style that has kept my career barreling down the Hollywood highway. But what good is such a security blanket if it ends up suffocating you?
To be fair to myself, I haven’t totally “gone Hollywood” and descended into self-loathing, self-obsessed, narcissistic madness. My primary focus in my life for the last ten years has been on providing and caring for my family, trying to be a decent person at work and at home, in general just trying to follow the Golden Rule. I want to be a good role model to my kids and do so by working hard, rushing home from the TV studio after work whenever possible for the kids’ ice-hockey practice and giving them, from the perspective of someone who himself played college and pro hockey back in the day, words of wisdom on a regular basis. Six years ago, I even helped a friend, Olympic skater and born-again Christian Scott Hamilton, write a self-improvement book on how to be happy in the face of adversity and everyday obstacles. But somewhere along the way I have failed to practice what we preached in that book. I wonder, Am I a fraud?
I’ve come to spend far more time doing things like getting makeup smeared on my face every day for the lights and cameras, listening to Howard Stern on the car radio during hour-long freeway commutes, watching NHL games on the tube and scheduling regular teeth-whitening appointments instead of meditating, praying, or engaging in any activities aimed at deepening my spiritual self.
I haven’t been nourishing my soul like I did before I became consumed with things that used to matter to me but now seem so vapid: Being a familiar face to millions on TV in over 150 countries, amassing several hundred thousand social media followers and fans. Maybe it is mid-career burnout. It messes with your mind knowing on a daily basis your face and voice and body is being zapped in the form of electrons into the eyes of total strangers, and you don’t know them or see them or have any way to interact with them. Perhaps to some this seems like a healthy energy transfer, and it is a karmic blessing that I can connect with so many people. But I feel as though this media-enabled energy transfer is predominantly one-sided, leaving me with some sort of a deficit. This, of course, is a very wonky way to describe a very simple dynamic: I am giving away a lot, but not getting a lot back in return. The math doesn’t compute well for my concept of what makes a nourished soul.
This at least partially explains the persistent anxiety, the occasional panic attacks, and the overall existential emptiness of the kind that grips me in my Vegas hotel room.
And now, after years of soul neglect, I am ready to make a conscious choice to press Pause on this movie that is my life.
The stakes are high. My mind is frazzled, my body aches, my stomach refuses to digest much of anything without rejecting it with moans and groans. My innards can’t handle dairy, spices, fried foods, red meat—basically anything that requires a strong, healthy body to metabolize it. Worse, except for when the cameras are on, I am not smiling very often anymore. Something is rotting from the inside out. Maybe a preacher would call it Satan. A shrink would call it anxiety. I call it no way to live.
If I don’t embark on a soul-searching mission to find my spiritual truth, if I don’t answer this call from what I can only decipher as the Voice of God, I’m afraid I won’t make it much longer. I fear I am not even living; I am dying.
If I walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting right now, they might wonder why I showed up. For starters, I don’t drink alcohol. Other than popping the occasional panic-attack-combating Xanax, I also don’t abuse drugs. Yet there is no doubt that I would fit right in at a support-group meeting.
As unhealthy as it is for my overall health, I crave tension, uneasiness, pressure, insecurity; it is my good luck charm that I have learned to carry in order to achieve my goals. Never get too comfortable. You’re only as good as your last game.
For so many of my years, I have been fueled by a high that comes from walking life’s tightrope without a net—in secular pursuits with little sign of mindfulness, clarity, peace, or grace, which are the very qualities that I want to possess. Instead, I ride a wave of adrenaline and egoistic performance thrill that by the end of each day leaves my nerves so frayed I am afraid to close my eyes because the person I meet in that quiet silence is really not one with whom I want to spend time alone. How ironic that worshiping my ego so much has left me being completely not at peace with myself.
So what would happen if (despite my not remembering the last time I got tipsy, let alone drunk) I walked into an AA meeting? I know exactly what I would do: I would sit down in the circle and announce, “My name is Ken and I am a Self-Aholic.” Then I would take my cue from page one of the AA playbook and declare, “I am powerless over my addiction—and as a result my life has become spiritually unmanageable.”
But I have worked for twenty years in Hollywood—the capital of Secular Self-Worship—yet I have never heard of Self-Aholics Anonymous. Why? Because it doesn’t exist! When it comes to submitting to and bowing before a force greater, wiser, more insightful than yourself, there is no one place where people like me who are suffering can go and get fixed in any step-by-step way. While there isn’t one go-to God place, there is no shortage of places to go within the “Thirty Mile Zone” of Hollywood, as TMZ terms it. Each day, as I hustle about my business of attending events, interviewing celebrities, hosting shows, I pass by churches, mosques, synagogues, Scientology centers, meditation studios, Buddhist temples, and various nondenominational spiritual places of worship. Inside these places, I am told, are gifted pastors, gurus, yogis, masters, and teachers, all of whom are helping suffering souls to get in touch with a spiritual realm, connect with a Higher Power, worship an entity other than the Self.
Now that I have prayed for Lamar, I remember how easy it is to pray. You just close your eyes and talk (silently, unless you want people to think you are a loony toon). Back when I was a competitive hockey player, I would pray often. Don’t worry. I wasn’t one of those annoying jocks who thinks God gives two craps about whether they win a silly game. It’s so off-putting when some jughead scores a touchdown and immediately points to heaven. Seriously, c’mon! If you’re going to praise Him for a touchdown, you should also point to heaven when you blow the game with a stupid mistake. After all, I was taught in Sunday school that God gives us lessons through positive and negative experiences. So, no, I wasn’t one of those self-glorifying jocks. Instead, I would pray for protection and thank God for allowing me to play the sport I love. I found that it settled me, made me feel like there was less pressure on myself knowing I had a relationship with a greater power who didn’t care about the outcome of my match. Therefore, it only makes logical sense that if prayer helped me be better on the ice, then it should help me better off the ice in “real” life. Sure, there’s as much sports psychology involved in this as spiritual psychology, but, hey, if it centers you it centers you.
When I played hockey back in college at Colgate University, I kept the Serenity Prayer taped to my locker-room stall:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the Serenity Prayer, written by the late American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is a staple at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
Which brings me back to me being the charter member of “Self-Aholics Anonymous,” which of course doesn’t exist. And since there is no one place for one to go discover God as one goes to AA to attain sobriety, I will embark on a self-directed journey.
But for now, I will go back to fantasizing about what would happen if I joined AA. After I embraced the first of the recovery program’s twelve steps, I would vow to take Step Two: That I have come to believe a Power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.
Or so I hope. But the only way to know if I can find “God” will be to go and try to climb my personal stairway to heaven. Step by step. And in either a cheesy coincidence or a sign from God, as I am somewhere between Barstow and the Nevada state line driving back to L.A. from Lamar’s near-death coma in Vegas, I spin through the satellite radio channels, and Whitney Houston is singing…
I’m gonna take it slowly ’cause I’m making it mine
Step by step…