Page 5 of All the Way to the River

I was thirty-one years old at the time, and married—in my first marriage, to be clear.

I was on a certain path back then. It was the path I had been taught; it was the path I had sought.

Husband, nice house, good job, about to start a family.

But my life was about to blow all the way up, because—as anybody who has read Eat Pray Love already knows—I was on the verge of being swept up into the heavy drama of falling in love with a man outside my marriage.

He was presenting himself to me as a dashing and heroic rescuer, but his actual role in my destiny was to crush my heart so completely that I would never be able to put myself back together in the old way, and I would need to spend several years searching the entire planet for healing.

But none of that had happened yet, and, for the moment, my life still looked pretty good.

Except there was a problem with my hair, which was a frizzy mess.

(Betraying, perhaps, that I was not quite as put together as I wished to appear.) One day a friend looked at my tattered bird’s nest of a hairdo, told me I resembled a young Art Garfunkel, and said I needed to do something about it.

She suggested I go see this person named Rayya Elias, who was cutting hair out of a walk-up apartment on Avenue C.

Rayya was—I was promised—“really fucking cool” and gave haircuts only to people she liked.

So I went to see Rayya, to find out if she would like me.

I was dressed that day like a salesclerk at Banana Republic, which is how I always dressed back then.

All khakis and cardigans. And I had a copy of The Atlantic Monthly tucked under my arm.

I remember my outfit clearly, because I looked and felt so different from Rayya, who was wearing black leather pants, a white tank top, and motorcycle boots.

She had striking tattoos (this was back before everyone had tattoos—remember that long-ago time?) and her apartment was filled with graffiti-inspired art.

Guitars and keyboards were piled in a corner.

Two scar-faced pit bulls were rolling happily at her feet.

Rayya sat me down in her chair, put her hands in my hair, and started laughing.

That laugh! That giant, marvelous, gravelly laugh!

She said, “Don’t worry, babe—I know exactly what to do with your little duck fluff! I just started dating a chick who’s got the same hair as you. I know how to handle it.”

I instantly relaxed under her hands, never for a moment doubting her competency.

I don’t think I even gave her any instructions; I just fell backward into her field of unwavering self-confidence, trusting that she would take care of me.

(This instantaneous act of trust says just as much about me, by the way, as it does about her: I have always loved handing myself over to perfect strangers.) And Rayya did take care of me.

With no apparent effort, talking and laughing the whole time, she gave me a terrific haircut.

The first of almost twenty years of terrific haircuts.

I have fallen in love with many people at first sight, but I did not fall in love with Rayya Elias that day.

In fact, I didn’t fall in love with her for another eight or nine years—until long after we had become dear friends.

But I did like her. She was funny and interesting and exotic.

And I definitely agreed with my friend’s assessment of her: really fucking cool.

I remember asking Rayya about the strange coins that were piled up on her windowsill.

She said they were her sobriety chips. I’d never seen one before, and she let me handle them.

She had a coin for every milestone of her recovery—one day clean, ninety days clean, six months, one year, two years, three years …

“If you knew how many ninety-day chips I’ve collected in my life!” she said, roaring with laughter again.

She told me that she’d been addicted to cocaine and heroin for most of her adult life, but that she’d been clean for three years now.

She showed me the scars on her arms from where she used to shoot speedballs.

She had more scars on her left arm than on the right one, she explained, since she was right-handed and had better aim with that hand.

I remember how comfortable Rayya seemed when talking about her former drug use, and how she used the word junkie with a relaxed pride I’d never before encountered.

How at home she appeared in her own battered survivor’s body!

“It’s a fucking miracle I’m alive,” she said.

She was ablaze with the exuberant gratitude that I now recognize as being common in early recovery.

This is the phase some people call “the pink cloud”—when the newly sober addict is high on the joy of simply being free at last from the grime and slavery of their dependency.

They don’t need anything more than what they’ve got in the present moment, because they can’t believe they get to even have a present moment.

Life feels simple, bright, limitlessly possible.

I remember, too, that we talked a lot about creativity that day.

I told Rayya I was a journalist and a novelist. She told me she was just starting to make music again and was struggling to find the courage to perform sober.

She said it was difficult for her to handle the vulnerability of living a creative life without a shield of drugs to hide behind.

But here’s what stands out for me most from that first encounter.

Rayya told me she’d recently purchased a little house in Asbury Park, on the Jersey Shore.

She’d figured out a way to work four days a week cutting hair so she could spend three days a week at the beach.

She would ride out there on her motorcycle and hang out at the beach alone—writing music, cooking on the grill, watching the sun come up.

Sounds like heaven, I said, and she agreed that it was.

But she said there were a bunch of people in her life who were furious at her for working only four days a week.

They were personally offended by it—as if she were breaking some kind of sacred capitalist rule.

They were angry that she was spending so much time at the beach—as if people were allowed to go to the beach only when they were on vacation, and just for a few days a year.

“I told them to fuck right off!” she said. “I’m not stopping you from going to the fucking beach, dude—why are you pissed off at me? This is my life, man! Get your own life!”

I was impressed by the casual ferocity of her words—by her absolute confidence.

I had never once told anyone to fuck off.

I had never once said to anyone, “This is my life, man!”

I don’t think I quite understood yet that it was my life I was living.

I was trying so hard to be everything to everybody.

I was both the breadwinner and the homemaker in my marriage, as well as trying to be an artist. And now it was expected that I must soon become a mother.

It was too much, and I was starting to crack.

I couldn’t imagine the freedom of a little house of one’s own, a motorcycle, and three days alone at the beach each week.

Rayya didn’t fall in love with me that day, either.

But she did like me. (She wouldn’t have cut my hair if she didn’t!) Years later, though, she admitted that she wasn’t exactly sure why she liked me.

I was nothing like her other friends. I wasn’t punk, cool, tough, edgy.

There was nothing street about me. Still, she was impressed that I was making a living as a writer.

That was interesting to her. She had a lot of questions about my relatively untormented relationship with creativity.

Why wasn’t I more tormented? she wanted to know.

How did I keep the fear and insecurity at bay, she asked, as I shared my most vulnerable work with the world?

In this regard, my life seemed like a curiosity to Rayya—just as curious as her life was to me.

There was one more thing about that day, though.

Rayya told me years later that when I walked into her apartment that afternoon, she saw a big circle of golden light around my head.

She was intrigued and puzzled by it. She claimed she could see it the entire time she was cutting my hair.

Having been attracted all her life to the darker side of things, she found herself curious about all that brightness.

Who has that much freaking sunshine? she remembered thinking. What’s that all about?