o much dead wood and garbage in our lives, phoniness, grandstanding, humbuggery: how to rid ourselves of it and move on to richer, deeper things? how to shuck these lures and snares and give the beauty within us space in which to grow and bloom? how to be more the good person we set out to be when we were nineteen instead of this dull greedy old weasel snarfing all the food on the plate who we turned into instead?
These questions began to bear down on me a few years ago, when I was in San Francisco to participate in a conference on Birthing Our Self-Affirmation of Wellness and I enjoyed a beautiful massage from a holist named Sha-tsi that completely emptied my being of all havingness (just as she said it would) and afterward my billfold was gone. It wasn’t in my briefcase or in my overcoat.
And there was no name tag on my garment bag or my carry-on.
A great massage, but I could not recall my home telephone number or even remember where I lived.
Suddenly I recalled Thoreau’s advice, “Simplify, simplify.” So I called my agent, Larry. “Where am I from?” I asked. He wasn’t sure either. Ohio, he thought. I looked at a map of Ohio. Nothing rang a bell. I had been on the road for three years since I wrote Being the Person You Are, and gradually Mona and I had lost touch.
“How many children do I have, Larry?” I asked. He thought three. Three sounded right. Mona had been the primary care-giver in the family, so I wasn’t sure. Three daughters, he thought, but I thought I remembered a boy.
Arnie?
I never thought this would ever happen to me. Being the Person You Are was short, thirty thousand words, and nobody at Chester White Publishing thought the book would cut much lumber in the self-esteem field up against giants like Wayne Dyer and Leo Buscaglia, but it went out and it sold five million copies or so in more than eleven languages and seventeen dialects.
Not bad for a Methodist minister who, in fifteen years of Sunday sermons, never had anyone come up to afterward and requested a copy.
So many people have told me that Being the Person You Are completely changed their lives, and others have had their lives changed partially.
Well, it changed mine too. The book was about taking charge of your life and tapping into your deep inner power sources, but the success of the book was like a flash flood, and I floated away like a loose canoe. I ballooned from 180 to 238 pounds and chewed my fingernails and my hair got thin and three months later there I was, a big lumbering galoot with bleeding cuticles climbing in and out of limos and adjusting his toupee, and though I could afford a good one, not nylon, still I felt stressed, jumpy, owly, and the baldness affected my balance so I was liable at any time to topple over into a heap.
I fell on a woman in the lobby of the Four Seasons Clift hotel in San Francisco. She was small and delicate, Japanese, visiting our country perhaps for the first time, garnering impressions, and suddenly a big load of blubber lands in her lap.
I fell across the head table on the dais at the Bobist Institute in Santa Fe, tumbled into the tofu salad. People applauded, thinking that I had made a bold point that would be clearer to them later.
Doctors puzzled over my dizziness. An acupuncturist put needles in my knuckles, an herbalist made a saffron sachet to hang around my neck. One morning, I woke up in Dayton, Ohio, fully dressed, sprawled across a hotel bed, my pants moist from creamy desserts stuffed in my pockets. I was registered there under the name Dr. Santana Mens, and a pink name tag with the Mens name on it was gummed to my breast pocket. It was a name tag from a large bookstore in a nearby mall, and I assumed I was supposed to go and autograph books, but when I called, they said that I had been there a week ago.
Was Dayton, Ohio, my home? Had some homing instinct brought me there, some unconscious imprint of flight schedules? There was no Al Denny in the phone book. Had Mona gone back to being a Thompson?
“You’ve got to get your life on track, Al,” I thought, and Larry had provided a week’s break on the lecture tour, so I hunkered down in the Mayfair Hotel in Chicago and wrote Rebirthing the Me You Used to Be, and that sucker sold fourteen million copies—in fact, it’s still selling—in thirty languages, including a New Guinea tribal dialect in which my book was the first written literature. Through an interpreter, the chief, a man named Wallace Boogada, invited me to come and be their deity. They had been Christianized by Army chaplains during World War II, but God had disappointed them and they wanted to try me.
Evidently, Rebirthing rang the wind chimes of a lot of folks, and it certainly dinged my doorbell too. I thought, “Al, you have got to simplify your life now.”
One day, I met Larry for lunch and noticed his tie, deep blue with a majestic stag elk standing on high rocks as ducks wing across an autumn sky and an Indian paddles a canoe across a broad pine-rimmed lake—“Larry,” I said, “I’m taking the loot and buying a mountain and building a log lodge on top of it and moving up there with nothing but dry clothes and a notepad and some coffee beans and warm bedding and a Scout knife. Doggone it. And I want an elk. And a canoe.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll take care of that, while you finish up the lecture tour.”
I told him I desperately needed to get out into nature and put my priorities in order, but he had put together a great package, “An Evening with Dr. Al Denny,” thirty lectures in twelve cities, at ninety thousand dollars per crack, and it was too late to back out, so I went—BIG SUCCESS, standing room only, hockey arenas packed with quiet people in meaningful T-shirts, people with interesting hair, there were press conferences and blizzards of questions about polarity and rebirthing and chrysalis-awareness and re-aging and the ancient Inca secrets channeled through a Cleveland man now known as El Hugo, and three-hour autographing sessions and people fawning over my every word—I’d say, “Hi, how are you?” and they would say, “Yes! Of course! How are you! It’s not the whereness or the whyness or the whoness of the You, it’s how! How!”
A month later, the tour ended in Tallahassee, and Larry sent a Learjet to take me to the mountain. Except it wasn’t a mountain, it was more like a plateau, and it was in Iowa. A vast complex of buildings he had bought from the Maharishi for two hundred million dollars. He drove me around fast in the dark on a golf cart, pointing out a dormitory here and a dormitory there, a gymnasium that would be our TV studio, a barn where the llamas would be housed.
“Llamas?”
“A very peaceful creature. You’ll love them. They’ll be in the petting park, with the deer,” he said. “People will come, live here at the resort, go to the spa, take your courses at the study center, be rebirthed, pet the llamas, visit you in your home, and have a tremendous two weeks. We have more than two thousand reservations for June already. You’re hot, Al. People want to be near you.”
All the buildings looked the same to me, three-story light-brown brick things with narrow windows and flat roofs, like nursing homes or an office park. The gymnasium had a thirty-foot satellite dish in back of it.
“For your cable show,” he explained, parking the cart, and we opened the big steel doors and there was the studio, three hundred feet long, bleachers for two thousand, six cameras on dollies, a set with a long white couch and fake windows and plants. “State of the art,” he said, proudly.
So I had to write another book to pay the overhead.
Coexisting with Your Other Self did not do as well as Rebirthing but it sold five million and had a blue cover with primitive masks on it. It was about using your inner potential to create an outer protective self to guard the secret beautiful you.
Meanwhile, I moved into my home on the grounds of the Dr. Al Denny Study Center, fully furnished, toothpaste and night-light and wine carafe, throw rugs, accent pieces, all there and ready. Larry took care of it. I seldom left the home due to the disciples lurking in the trees and because I was a little down since losing track of Mona and the children. Mona and I had been married for twenty-four years, and I loved her, but I was never clear on exactly what she did—some sort of teaching, I believe, or investment services—so it was hard to trace her through professional associations. I believed she used to attend meetings now and then in Chicago, but forgot why. I laid low for awhile. I watched old movies and slept, and every day Larry drove a van into the garage (attached) and closed the door, I climbed in and lay on the floor, he zoomed out past the disciples and took me to the studio.
On The Circle of Life with Dr. Al Denny, a half-hour program carried everywhere in America, I sat on the couch in front of the audience and chatted with persons of wisdom such as quilt-makers, for example, and wood-carvers and southern people and farmers and old blues singers and old ballplayers and old shepherds and Iowans and people over eighty and country doctors and guys named Walt, people you seldom see on TV. Their simple philosophies were deeply moving to me though also confusing.
They all said that the best things in life are spiritual, and I myself was in a very acquisitive stage of life at that point.
I owned four Bentleys. I owned paintings. I owned two fine horses, who terrified me. I owned 164 cases of a 1952 Bordeaux that I loved to drink with a particular kind of lobster that was flown in live from the Mindanao archipelago. I kept buying sweaters and loafers and those baggy pants with the fronts that pooch out. I purchased expensive dogs, one after the other, because I kept losing track of them. I’d leave them in stores and places. One was a Dalmatian, and another was a Weimaraner, I think. Somebody said it was, and then it was gone too.
Once on my show there was a heavyset gal from Mobile named Vernelle Tomahasset who devoted her life to creating art from bread bags and said the most important thing in life is to keep busy—she gave me a little horse made out of nine hundred bread bags—and a one-armed accordion man said he felt lucky because he had his health, and the very same day I paid seven thousand dollars for a German-made CD player. Only a hundred like it in the world, and I have one, and Prince Charles has another. It was like that a lot of the time.
A shepherd came on and said, “Waste not, want not, that’s my motto. Also: there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.”
Meanwhile, I owned three separate houses within ten miles of each other, two on the Study Center grounds, and one in Mason City that I never saw, the remodeling went on and on.
An old rug-hooker from Omaha said, “Dr. Al, you know it’s true: there’s no summer without winter.”
I had just purchased a $3.5-million home on a private island off Antigua where I planned to spend December, January, February, March, and the first part of April.
But before I got to fly down there, a child Autoharp-player named Little Ginny came on the show. She was terminally ill, and Larry had read somewhere that dying children possess preternatural wisdom. She died a few days afterward of a mysterious raging fever. She was an assertive little tyke and she spoke right up in her sickly voice and told you what she thought. She wasn’t whiny or grumpy. When I asked her what her name was, she said, “God gives us new names in heaven, and I want to be a Theresa but right now I’m Ginny.”
I’ll never forget the hush in the studio when that tiny pale child staggered to the couch in her pure-white dress, lugging the harp, and climbed up, and sat there with an oxygen tube in her nose, her chin on her chest, listing to one side, and strummed “O Dem Golden Slippers” and faintly sang, “I’se goin up de ribbah wheah de golden rainbow shine,” as her relatives collapsed sobbing in the wings. She was white and had learned the song from an old book of spirituals.
The audience clapped and clapped until our production people had to tell them to hush.
At this point, she was supposed to tell me a folktale about a mother hen and her chicks, but instead she climbed up on my lap and draped her skinny arm around my neck and put her little cheek next to mine.
My gosh, she was hot, burning up with fever, and sweat poured off her. An extremely hot damp child. A bead of her sweat fell on the back of my hand and—this sounds insensitive, I know, but nobody had informed me if her fatal illness was contagious or not—I thought to myself: “Al, you need a fatal disease right now like you need a hole in the head.”
I tried to pry her loose but her bony fingers were clamped onto my wrist and my lapel, and when I tried to bend her fingers back, she flopped around like a dying fish and her eyes rolled back up in her head.
I tried to signal the staff with my eyebrows to come and take this hot potato off my hands, but they were overcome with emotion, I guess. When I tried to stand up, she clung to me like a bat and tore the rug off my head, and then Little Ginny pressed her burning face to mine and whispered in her hoarse little voice, “God says to cut out this shit. He says, stop it and shape up.”
I knew right then that my career had peaked and that the long grim slide had begun, but of course I couldn’t know how far it was to the bottom.
I smiled and said, “Friends and neighbors, I know this show is one I’ll remember as long as I live. What do you say we invite Little Ginny to come back next week?” Everybody clapped again, but Little Ginny looked at me with pure disgust. She said, “Don’t be stupid. You know I’ll be in my grave next week.”
And she turned to the camera and whispered, “Every word he says is a big fat lie.”
She died a few days later.
I sat at home and thought, “What shit am I supposed to cut out?”
Am I supposed to give away money? Fine. But where do you draw the line? There’s the heart fund and the bladder fund and the Save the Snakes foundation and the Center for the Dull and there’s a cabdriver whose mom is waiting to come over from Zagreb and a waitress with a slight limp and who do you say no to? Once you start giving away dough, if you say no they’ll write long accusatory letters and lurk around your home and attack you with coat hangers. No, a rich man can’t buy peace of mind.
I began to discuss these issues in Empowering Others by Enabling Yourself, and the next thing I knew, there was a knock on the door and it was the FBI.
An unfriendly agent in a shiny gray suit talked to me for four hours. He asked me about some Life Savings Certificates that had been sold across the country by mail, certificates issued by the Al Denny Savings Institute—I hadn’t heard about that at all!
Evidently, fifteen thousand people had mailed in sixty thousand dollars apiece on the promise that they could live at the Study Center through their declining years and be rebirthed.
Some of them now wished to obtain their money back.
“Talk to Larry,” I told the FBI, but they said that Larry was gone. He had flown to the private island off Antigua, and he was not answering the phone.
The FBI drove me to Mason City and led me through a gauntlet of TV cameras and flashbulbs and put me in a small, cinder-block cell.
Then they located Mona. She was in Akron, Ohio, not Dayton. Akron. And we had two daughters and a son named Aaron.
“Al, you big wombat, how the heck are you?” she cried, throwing her arms around me. “I always said you oughta be locked up. Gosh, I love you, you big lug.”
She wasn’t a teacher or an investment person, it turned out—she was a lawyer, and a darned good one. She got me out of the clinker and back to Akron in a jiffy.
The kids all have her red hair and big beak and melting brown eyes. My son looked up as I walked in and said, “Did you remember the butter brickle?”
“No, I forgot,” I said.
“Oh.” He wasn’t surprised. Evidently, forgetting had been a habit with me.
It’s good to be a regular daddy again instead of a big cheese, and I have promised the kiddoes not to write a book again. I started one called Starting Over, which was about men finding new roles as daddies and homemakers, but then I got too busy to write. You make breakfast for Mona, pack her a healthy bag lunch, send her off, wake up the kids, and shepherd them through the cleansing-dressing process, answer all their questions, feed them, get the kids out the door with their lunches and homework in hand, wash the breakfast dishes, and go from room to room with a vacuum and a feather duster, and change the beds and scrub the bathrooms, and after five hours your urge to sit and write and regale the reader with insights has mostly dissipated, you would rather go dig in the garden and put in the crocus bulbs. Life is good. More than good. You have a clean house and feel like a clean man! You have not told a single lie and it is almost lunchtime! Praise God for His goodness! Now you must plan the supper.