Page 14 of All the Way to the River

H ere’s the thing I didn’t know about Rayya Elias when I moved her into my church: She was great.

I’d always known that Rayya was funny and interesting and cool—but I’d never realized she was great .

For many years, after all, our interactions had been sporadic and limited.

We saw each other only when I needed a haircut, and never for more than an hour or so at a time.

She would cut my hair, we would catch up on each other’s lives, she would make me laugh—and then we would go our separate ways.

Consumed as I was by my own dramas and projects, I never thought much about Rayya when I wasn’t sitting in her chair, and I doubt she thought about me.

We never saw each other in the outside world or in social settings.

But as soon as she moved out to New Jersey and became part of my daily life, I got to see her interacting with others—and that’s when her greatness became evident.

It turned out that Rayya had a talent for human interaction the likes of which I had never seen before, nor encountered since.

I discovered that I could add her to any social gathering and she would not only roll with the vibe but would become the vivacious heart at the center of the event.

I never needed to worry about where to seat Rayya at the table or who else was going to be at the party; everyone loved her.

And it’s not like she was trying to earn anyone’s love through pandering or people-pleasing, either.

In fact, she was incapable of that sort of thing.

No, Rayya always showed up exactly as herself—a boisterous, candid, hilarious, affectionate rock ’n’ roll badass who spoke to everyone with the same fantastically disarming candor, and who drew forth beautiful authenticity from everyone she met.

The first time I saw this candor in action was soon after Rayya had moved into my church.

Some overseas visitors were staying at my house, and I wanted to take them to an American Major League Baseball game.

I invited some neighbors and friends to join us, as well—and I invited Rayya.

Since there was such a big group of us, I ended up renting a stretch limo so we could all go to the game together and not have to worry about parking.

But as we began the long drive to Shea Stadium that day, the fun I’d anticipated wasn’t quite happening.

The conversation in the back of the limo was stilted and forced.

Most of my guests didn’t know one another, so there were a lot of polite inquiries about where everybody was from and what they all did for a living.

I was doing most of the social heavy lifting, trying to entertain my guests and find subjects that we all could relate to.

But the conversation wasn’t flowing all that smoothly.

I also had to admit that it was a little strange to be sitting in the back of a stretch limo in the afternoon with a bunch of grown-ass adults—as if we were on our way to some weird later-in-life prom.

But then one of my guests suddenly flew into a copious and uncontrollable sneezing fit. She was deeply embarrassed, but she couldn’t seem to stop sneezing. She explained that her allergies were unmanageable this time of year. It was springtime in New Jersey; everything was in bloom.

Rayya handed the woman a tissue and said, “Man, I’ve got allergies, too!

It’s the worst! Does yours come with postnasal drip?

Yeah? Mine, too! I hate that shit! Doesn’t it remind you of when you used to smoke crack, and you would always get that nasty acidic cocaine-drainage thing happening down the back of your throat? ”

The limo fell silent.

I looked around at the startled faces, taking in the impact of Rayya’s words upon these deeply respectable people—a civil engineer, a stay-at-home mom, an art teacher, a school nurse. Not one of them, by any stretch of the imagination, looked like they ever could’ve been a crack aficionado.

Rayya also looked startled: “Wait, you guys know what I’m talking about, right? Don’t you remember that horrible crack cocaine taste?”

More silence.

Now Rayya was genuinely astonished, glancing around the crowd, trying to find a taker: “Nobody? Seriously? Are you telling me that none of you ever smoked crack? Never? Not even in the eighties? Not even you, Liz?”

Trying to break the awkwardness, I said, “ Me? Are you kidding, Rayya? While you were out there on the streets smoking crack, I was at the library writing term papers!”

Rayya burst out laughing, gave me a high five, and exclaimed, “Well, I guess that explains why you’re paying for the limo, and I’m just riding in it!”

Everybody roared with laughter, and that was it —from that moment on, all formality was cast aside and we had a blast together.

Because Rayya had been so immediately authentic, everyone else got to be authentic, too, shedding their carefully arranged public personas and becoming loose and free.

And I got to sit back for the rest of the afternoon and take a rare break from trying to keep everyone happy, because Rayya was doing it for me—and she was doing it without even trying.

Over time, I would learn that this moment had not been an anomaly. Rayya was indeed a social magician who could make anyone feel at ease, who was funny and direct and warm, and who always cut right to the center of human realness.

“Hey, you little fucker” is how she used to affectionately greet my god son, who was about six years old at the time—and who kind of was a little fucker back then, albeit in an awesome Tom Sawyer sort of way.

Rayya’s salutation always made him laugh because it was so clear she had his number.

He loved it. His parents loved it, too. They explained to Sloan that there was such a thing as “regular language,” which normal people spoke, and then there was “Rayya language”—which only Rayya was allowed to speak.

And Sloan totally got it. Even a first grader could see that Rayya was different from other people and that the normal rules didn’t apply to her.

“You guys know I hate kids, right?” she casually mentioned one night at dinner with this same family—who happened to have two other children as well as Sloan, all of them present.

Then she added, looking at the dumbstruck children: “No offense, you guys. It’s nothing personal.

It’s just that kids suck. You’ll see for yourselves someday. ”

The kids burst out laughing, and loved her forever as a result. (And when I say forever, I mean forever : One of those children, Callie, now nineteen years old, recently got a Rayya-inspired tattoo so she could honor her hero for the rest of time.)

But this is how Rayya was —the straightest of straight shooters.

If she found herself seated with a bunch of intellectuals and was unable to follow the drift of their conversation, she’d be like, “Guys, nobody has any idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” and everyone would feel instant relief at not having to pretend to be smart anymore.

One night when she was seated at a restaurant next to someone who was acting particularly arrogant and entitled, she just laughed at his antics and finally said, “Wow, man! I never knew what a little bitch you could be!”

And the wildest thing was that this “little bitch” started laughing, too—amazed and disarmed at having been called out with such blunt but affectionate honesty.

Somehow Rayya had managed to cut him down to size at the same time as tucking him under her wing—and in the end, he only loved and trusted her more for her honesty.

You could say that Rayya had no filter, and some people did say that about her, but I don’t think that’s fair.

To say that someone has no filter is to imply that they are not in control of their words—that truths slip out of their mouth unbidden and land upon their targets in a sloppy or chaotic manner.

That is not how I experienced Rayya.

I believe she knew exactly what she was saying, and she said it with intention.

She shot the truth straight out of her heart with the precision of a master archer.

And it was beautiful to behold because Rayya loved the truth.

Truth was her religion, her passion. When I asked her why she loved the truth so much, she explained that after so many years of having to hustle and lie as an active drug addict, the truth felt like heaven to her.

Truth was her place of safety, a badge of honor, and proof of her recovery.

What’s more, she believed that being honest was just the simplest path through life and the surest means of eliminating confusion and drama.

“The truth has legs,” she used to say. “It always stands. When everything else in the room has blown up or dissolved away, the only thing left standing will be the truth. Since that’s where you’re gonna end up anyway, I figure you might as well just start there.”

Maybe this notion sounds obvious to you, dear reader, but to me it felt like divine revelation. I had never before encountered such directness in a person, nor had I ever witnessed someone who placed such trust in the power of simple and unblinking honesty.

I had not grown up feeling that the truth was a place of safety—and for reasons that I will not go into here, it wasn’t .

From earliest childhood, my survival strategy was to always give the pleasing answer, never the truthful answer, because it felt safer to be pleasing than to be truthful.

So I learned how to read other people’s faces and discern what they needed to be told in any given moment in order to keep them calm and happy.

This vigilance turned me into a nervous child, constantly monitoring the room to stay ten steps ahead of everyone else and—when I sensed tension coming— misdirecting everyone’s attention, or creating some sort of spontaneous and distracting entertainment, or simply running for the hills.