Page 16 of All the Way to the River

I want to pause for a moment to make a disclaimer.

I do not wish to exaggerate Rayya’s virtues or to idealize her in any way.

This is not only because I want my memoir to be as accurate as possible but also because one of the central characteristics of sex and love addicts is that we assign magical qualities to people, and then we become enraged when those people fail to live up to our fantasies, expectations, and projections.

I have often been guilty of the crime of pedestalization—with Rayya and also with many others.

So it is essential to my own emotional sobriety that I describe her with as much clearheadedness as I can muster.

However.

That said, and this disclaimer having been duly disclaimed, I happen to believe that we each do possess certain magical qualities—innate talents and gifts, assigned to us, perhaps, by our Creator.

Nobody has all the gifts, but everybody has some.

And I will stand forever by the truth that the way Rayya Elias dealt with people was pure magic.

And her impact upon me was definitely magic.

Because as we got to know each other better, I began to notice something happening to me whenever she was around.

Or rather, something stopped happening to me whenever Rayya was around.

What stopped happening was that I stopped feeling frightened.

Specifically, I stopped feeling frightened of other people.

If Rayya was in the room, I stopped feeling like I had to work the room in order to survive.

I stopped feeling like I had to cover my ass, or read everyone’s minds, or charm everyone into submission, or ceaselessly monitor the microexpressions on everybody’s faces in order to make sure that all the humans (the most unpredictable and chaotic species on the planet) were kept calm and happy at all times.

This fear of people had been such a constant presence in my life that I’d never fully noticed its magnitude.

“High vigilance” was just the default setting of my nervous system.

It was like the old joke about the two fish who meet one day, swimming about in a lake.

One fish says to the other, “The water’s cold today.

” The second fish, puzzled, replies: “What’s water? ”

Fear of people was the water I’d been swimming in my whole life.

But whenever Rayya was around, my fear went away.

Because she could so effortlessly manage anybody’s chaos and insanity, I didn’t have to do it anymore .

All she had to do was walk into the room with that confident, relaxed sailor’s gait of hers, and every cell in my body would say, “Everything’s okay now. Rayya’s here.”

I cannot communicate strongly enough that this was the first deep and consistent experience I’d ever had in my entire life with the sensation of absolute safety .

Having believed for my entire life that constant low-grade terror was just my destiny and my inherent nature, imagine my amazement when Rayya’s presence simply took it away.

And now I get to tell you a story—my very favorite story—about this unique and compassionate power of hers.

We went to a funeral together once, Rayya and I.

The mother of a dear friend had died, and we wanted to pay our respects.

We knew enough about this family to know that they were riven with dysfunction, addiction, and suffering, so we were expecting more than a touch of drama.

But when we arrived at the gathering, we stepped into a crisis that immediately sent panic down my spine.

It turned out that one of the deceased’s grandchildren—a young man suffering from meth addiction—had recently gotten out of prison.

He had a history of violent behavior, and the family was frightened of him.

Therefore, they had not invited him to the funeral and had tried to prevent him from finding out the date and location.

But he had found out about it and had shown up anyway.

You know who’s really scary?

That guy .

That guy, who—on top of addiction, a history of violence, and grief at the loss of his grandmother—has just found out that his family tried to hide the details of her funeral from him?

That guy is terrifying.

Everyone at the funeral was trying to stay away from his seething rage, praying he didn’t go off. The tension was off the charts, and my internal fear alarms immediately hit nuclear-meltdown level.

But here’s what Rayya did.

She walked right up to him without the slightest fear or hesitation, and she did this beautiful thing that she always used to do with people when she was concerned about them. I must’ve seen her do it a thousand times over the years. I can almost feel her doing it to me right now.

Rayya made a loose fist with her right hand and gently tapped the furious young man on the chest, right over his heart.

“How you doin’ in there, bud?” she asked.

How you doin’ in there?

Because here’s the thing—Rayya knew there was someone in there. The rest of us saw a criminal, a possible killer, a drug addict, a menace. But Rayya knew there was someone who was still inside that damaged human heart. Someone who was sick. Someone who was lost.

She knew this because she had once been that person.

She used to tell me how bewildering it had been for her, all those years earlier, whenever she got lost inside her own addiction and madness.

She used to say, “I always knew I was a good person, but I couldn’t find myself in there.

I was so sick, and I just couldn’t find myself underneath all the sickness. ”

Back then, she would watch herself stealing from people, hustling and lying, even threatening them with violence—and all the while, she knew she was good.

She knew this wasn’t her true nature. This couldn’t possibly be who she was!

She couldn’t possibly be this dirty junkie whom people looked upon with such disgust and fear.

Yet her interactions with the world constantly affirmed that she was this dirty junkie.

And every single cop and prison guard and psychiatric nurse who was paid by society to deal with people like her drove home the shame even further: You are the problem, you are the worst, you are our burden and our collective nightmare.

Once Rayya got clean and sober, she never judged people, no matter how badly they were acting out.

She never condemned them—not even when she was angry or frustrated with them, not even when she was setting boundaries with them—because she knew what it was like to be at the very bottom.

She knew what it was like to be feared and despised.

She knew what it was like to live completely outside of your own integrity, a million miles away from your heart.

As she said to me once, “Until you’ve stolen money from your father’s wallet to buy heroin while he was sick in a hospital bed, you don’t know what it feels like to need to be forgiven. ”

She also used to say, “Mercy is what I owe, because mercy is what I always needed—and mercy is what I have been given.”

So that was the face the young meth addict saw at the funeral when he looked down and saw Rayya Elias tapping lightly on his heart, asking, “How you doin’ in there, bud?”

He saw the face of mercy.

And for a moment, he crumpled.

His rage collapsed and he looked like he was about six years old—just an overwhelmed child grieving his grandmother.

Grieving, perhaps, his entire lost life.

I thought for an instant that he was going to fall into Rayya’s arms and weep, as I’d seen so many other troubled people do.

And I wish he had done that—for there was never a more comforting feeling than Rayya Elias taking you in her arms and saying, “I’ve got you. ”

I wish he could have felt that feeling.

But then something prideful or wrathful took hold of him again, and all his crazy came back. He muttered an obscenity, pushed her away, and strode off in some random direction, careening off a wall or two in the process.

When Rayya returned to me, she was thoughtful.

“Are you okay?” I asked, shaken.

“Yeah, I’m good,” she said. “But listen, babe. I want you to gather up all our valuables and lock them in the car, and then bring me the key. Then we need to walk around this place and let everyone know to do the same thing. Don’t make a big scene about it.

Just tell all the people not to leave their purses or wallets or phones lying around unattended today.

Everything goes in their cars, everything gets locked up. You got it?”

So that’s what we did, and everyone complied, and the day proceeded without further incident.

That night at dinner, I thanked Rayya for taking care of everybody at the funeral, and for protecting us from the dangerous young man. She looked surprised, then her face softened.

“Oh, honey,” she said, and suddenly tears stood in her eyes.

“Did you think I was protecting us ? No, baby, no. I was protecting him . Because here’s the reality, babe: We’re fine, and we’ll always be fine—even if he stole our car!

Nobody needs to worry about us . But the odds are that kid doesn’t have much longer to live.

He’s really far gone, and he doesn’t have any support system.

But there’s always a chance he might get clean someday, with a miracle.

And if he ever cleans up his life, as part of his recovery he’ll have to make amends to every single person he’s ever harmed.

And I don’t want that poor kid, in addition to everything else he’ll have to face someday, to be forced to deal with the fact that he stole money from people at his grandmother’s funeral.

I wouldn’t want that for anybody . So that’s what we were doing today, honey.

We were keeping him safe from that—from the worst thing he could do to himself. ”

That was my Rayya.

Someone who could, at her best, understand and protect the humanity of everyone in the room.

Someone who could keep both predators and their potential victims safe.

That was the woman I fell in love with, and that is the woman I still love and miss to this day.

This was the person I believed I had always needed.

And once I saw who she was, I couldn’t let her go.