Noah Pohl

The truth was, I threw away most of my twenties — shooting up, snorting fast, inhaling hard and coughing up a lung after realizing my aspirations as an actor wouldn't come to fruition. I wasn't going to be the next Bruce. I wasn't even going to be the next Dolph. Not that I had anything against failure; I'd been a failure all my life. Sometimes it was my fault. Sometimes it was less my fault, but still my fault. I'd just hit a point where I needed something to go my way. In the meantime, I repeatedly told myself: Failure's just another brick in my palace. Except now, my palace was turning out to be an igloo parked squarely in the desert.

I'd been trying for six years to act professionally without so much as a paycheck or a booked role, only credit-card debt at an egregious APR, still mailed to me under my God-given name: Jasper Rodolfo Funt. I'd even gotten my ass kicked three times in high school with a name like that — people loved to call me Mother-Funter. To be frank, I don't think anyone was jonesing to see my name in lights.

So at the age of twenty-six, I packed up my belongings, terminated my apartment lease in Canoga Park, and motored my double-salvaged Ford Escort back to the San Bernardino Mountains in shame, retreating to my childhood bedroom in the tiny enclave of Skyforest — a place that never really wanted me. A place where people gave me endless looks that said, "Don't you dare."

Weeks into my retreat, the police found me lying face down on the beach at Lake Gregory, a syringe stuck in my arm, my mouth full of rocks. I have no idea what I was trying to do with the rocks, but I can't imagine it was for my betterment. When I came to, the first vision I had was of the inflatable, neon-orange water-slide in the middle of the lake — a floating bouncy fortress for kids — as though I'd woken up in some kind of deranged fairy tale.

I was a creature of habit, and my habits, it turns out, were slowly trying to murder me. If I stayed around town, I figured I might never break this cycle. What I needed to do was make a meaningful shift, get a grip, start somewhere new. Or in six weeks, I'd probably be dead.

People say: True change often starts with your address. So in a last-ditch effort to turn it all around, I scraped together the dregs of my savings, said goodbye to my father, and set off for the Low Desert. Within a matter of weeks, Jasper Rodolfo Funt would vaporize into a ghost of the mountains, a remnant of a forgotten altitude. In his place would emerge a young man, a reinvention of self — or so I believed — ready to grab the great wide open by all seven chakras and spiritually-cleanse his way to small-time infamy.

A month into my time in Cathedral City — a working-class suburb just east of Palm Springs, dotted with repair garages and price-conscious dental practices — I was deeply lonely, trying not to use, and spending way too much time staring at the blue-gum eucalyptus trees outside my window. They appeared to be involved in some kind of botanical stick-up.

Heading for broke, I needed to do something fast. So I scoured Yelp using my neighbor's WiFi signal and found a dive bar nearby called The Big Red Dog — where the main thoroughfares of Palm Springs joined together like some kind of geographical aorta. My only goal for the week was to make one new friend, and perhaps that friend could lead me to a job.

Arriving at the bar, which looked more like a furniture store having an identity crisis than a cozy hovel of inebriation. I posted up in a shadowy corner by the pool tables, sipping a club soda. I soon spotted a strange character across the room, chalking the tip of his pool cue.

In his midnight-blue suede loafers, body-hugging black V-neck, white skinny jeans, and fake-gold chain clinging to his stubbled, Slim Jim of a neck, the young man, who I would come to know as Seamus, looked very much out of place. He appeared to be roughly my age — perhaps a few years older, approaching thirty — and seemed like he was a person playing a character in some kind of an absurdist television show. Probably why I gravitated so strongly towards him.

After missing his pool shot and flying off the handle, he swung his stick my way, shouting: "You! In the corner! Stop starin' and grab a stick! Let's play a round!"

After some small talk, Seamus mentioned that he was renting a two-bedroom house in Araby Cove, a bohemian neighborhood in Southeast Palm Springs known for its enclave of rock homes, falsely rumored to be built for the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. It was located up on a sandy, snake-infested hill overlooking the city — and he'd occasionally have coyotes taking a dip in his pool. That night, Seamus had ventured downtown for one reason: to get obliterated.

As I was lining up my corner shot, he proceeded to — in what I thought was an effective tactic to throw off my concentration — casually inform me that he was only attracted to women over the age of sixty-five. He proudly admitted that he subscribed to AARP Magazine in order to have things to talk about with all the widowed septuagenarians he bedded down across the retirement-friendly Coachella Valley, causing me to falter in my aim.

"Trust me," he announced, a little too loudly, "you ain't lived until you've fucked someone with a double hip-replacement."

The more I listened to Seamus, the more I became convinced that something was seriously wrong with him. Still, he had a deranged charm that grew on you like a foot fungus or a chain of plantar warts. He also claimed to be his unashamed, authentic self at all times — judgments be damned. "I'm not for everyone," he stated. "But for some, I'm everything."

I'm not sure how he made his money — vague allusions were made to crypto "shit-coins," and various rental properties he may have flipped — but he was somehow able to survive sans gainful employment. Seamus only indulged himself one night a week out at The Big Red Dog, his self-described "night on the town," drinking himself into oblivion and eating three plates of greasy street tacos, before throwing up in a dumpster and returning to his normal nightly routine of checking fantasy sports scores and flirting with elderly women over text — who didn't understand the emojis he used but were highly curious for an in-person tutorial.

"You grew up here?" I asked him.

"Palm Desert. Bored outta my mind. You?"

"Up in the mountains—the San Bernardinos."

With that, Seamus lit up light a dashboard warning light, raising one severely-waxed eyebrow and twirling his pool cue around his body. "The mountains, eh?" he said, pointing at me repeatedly, like I'd just won a prize.

"What?" I blurted out.

"I know those mountains. You got a charisma, Mountain Man. A weird charisma to you." Seamus jammed his pool cue back into the wall holder. "It's under wraps, but it's there. Maybe you oughta find a way to use it."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He scoffed, like I'd missed the punchline to an obvious joke. "Look — there's a whole lotta suckers out here. People who think they know something 'cause they bought a house that looks like a piece of museum art. But guess what? They're just as lost, lonely, and broken as anyone." He pulled on his crusty leather jacket. "That's why it pays to be in the 'solutions' business."

"The 'solutions business'?" I asked. "What's that?"

"I'll give you my number," Seamus said. "Get in touch if you wanna jam out an idea or two. You know — find solutions."

That week, I motored my double-salvaged Ford Escort around the Coachella Valley, making a loop down Route 111 toward La Quinta, and returning via Interstate 10 every night, watching the sky turn a shade of almost-embarrassed pink. On the way back, I always got drive-thru machaca tacos with extra-spicy habanero, plus three milk gelatinas — my only real meal of the day. Some might call that intermittent fasting; I called it laziness and poverty. I still hadn't called Seamus, though. I'd only looked at his number half a dozen times, scribbled in blue ink on the stained bar napkin he'd given me — which now read: "The Big Red og."

During the day, I drove by churches and temples and a couple Buddhist centers. I motored alongside golf courses with sweeping lawns — their chlorophyll-choked expanse encroached upon by the desert's scruffy chokehold. I sped past towering walls of burgundy rock so sheer they looked like they belonged on a movie set. It almost didn't feel real. I almost didn't feel real — but thought it could be the withdrawal from the drugs.

Sometimes I got a little scared when I felt this way, like something in my brain chemistry was off. But I tried to look at it another way: like my soul was opening a parking space for something brand new to pull right in. And I was about to let it.

A few nights later, I dreamed of the San Andreas fault line.

It was a bizarre dream. Somehow, a staircase had been constructed, leading down into a landing area — maybe thirty or forty feet down into the fault line — and this gentle healing celebration was in progress. A large crowd of people were waiting at the bottom of the stairs, like they'd been specifically chosen, allowing me access to this forbidden place. In the dream, I joined the party; I wanted to talk to everyone there. But as I joined the celebration, the crowd just went quiet, as though I were trespassing.

When I awoke, I sat with the idea for about an hour, then called up Seamus.

"You want to go down into the San Andreas fault line?" Seamus repeated back to me. "Are you high, Jasper?"

"No... But can you? Like, can you go down into it?"

"Why would you want to do that?"

"I don't know," I said. "Just humor me here."

He inhaled sharply. "There's these Jeep tours out of La Quinta. They take you to it. There's also that place up in Thousand Palms where you can see the fault. It's kinda touristy, though. And boring."

"What if we threw a party there? Like, the world's craziest party?"

Seamus didn't answer for a moment.

"And made it seem exclusive?" I added. "Ultra-exclusive?"

I could tell he was mulling it over, giving the idea a quick test drive in his mind.

"And maybe," I continued, "maybe we give it a spiritual bent? Like — that's what was happening in my dream. A ceremony, almost. Perhaps I could give a sermon or something ?"

"A sermon?"

"You know I was trying to be an actor? Before I moved out here?"

"No."

"I didn't tell you that the other night?"

"You might've — but I was beyond wasted, Jasper."

"I mean, you talked about 'solutions' at the bar. You said everyone feels really lost. So why not give them something...?"

He snorted.

"If we cap the numbers," I said, "and keep it exclusive — make people feel like they need to be a part of something — we might actually have a cool thing on our hands."

Seamus took a deep, labored breath, then started laughing.

"Christ," he said. "You sure you're not high?"

Here's the thing: From my time as an aspiring actor, preparing for roles, doing character research — I can be a true craftsman. Poring over countless self-help books during rehab, burying myself in the literature of twelve-step programs, studying exposés on fake spiritual leaders on Vice, I thought about how easy it was, almost how sad it was, to truly fool people. How these pseudo-messiahs managed to rip off almost every major tenet from the same pool of a dozen or so big ideas, synthesizing them in such a way that sounded both fresh and unique. Some of these fake gurus could even fashion everything into a big, sexy, wildly appealing package — making it seem like they were speaking truth to power when all they were really doing was bread-crumbing a growing flock of desperate sheep, hanging onto their every word and deed. And then charging a monthly subscription fee for it.

It wasn't that I was outright trying to scam people. It was more like I wanted to half-scam people — and maybe give them a little something to think about in the process. Besides, I thought I could help people with what I knew and maybe make a few bucks doing it. Was that so bad? Why should the predatory, phony gurus be the only ones allowed to make a profit doing this?

More than that, I wanted something to finally go right in my life.

I wanted a win.

A big win.

Two days later, Seamus called me to say that he'd had a dream about the San Andreas Fault the night after I pitched him my idea, and since then, couldn't get the party scenario out of his mind. He'd become just as obsessed with the idea as I was, and wanted to talk.

I sped into the Araby Hills with a bag of machaca tacos to meet him. We agreed to put our heads together to concoct the world's greatest, most exclusive celebration — based entirely on an unnamed spiritual movement that we'd invent, which worshipped not a god or a deity, but one of the most dangerous physical elements in nature: a massive break in the Earth's surface. With Seamus's feedback, I would take the creative reins, inventing a mythology that would serve as an elaborate tribute to this aberration in the ground — one of broken lives, cracks in the psyche, and how a physical break could symbolize a peek into the so-called "basement" of one's humanity. I'd string together a complex yarn about accessing our inner darkness via our physical surroundings — justifying the need to descend into the Earth itself. To get close to our wounds, we'd need to release what was trapped below, set off little disturbances — "minor quakes" — to relieve the pressure of the ever-hovering Big One, which continually threatened to take a bat to the knees of our lives. Major upheaval always remained a vague threat, a haunting specter, floating over each and every one of us.

Followers would confront, sequentially (never all at once; you never wanted to deliver a complete cure!) what stymied their progress in life, like a giant coordinated juice cleanse for the soul. To top it off, the movement would center around a legendary, once-a-year ceremony with food, drink, dance and song — and due to the intense emotional release and dangerous stakes of the ceremonial setting — likely a tidal wave of hedonism to follow.

We'd have to construct layers to this heart-centered grift — make it a multi-step plan: create bonuses, define ways to build hierarchy, provide opportunities for tangible growth amongst followers. I could even build a special chamber that allowed a person to go deeper down into the fault line, like a mini-sweat lodge, where one could have "hypo-spiritual" release. That could be a perk reserved for the movement's chosen few. For the "turbo healers."

With Seamus's advice — which frequently boiled down to "be more vague and more mysterious" — I would weave together a so-called doctrine of the seismic, a gospel of the geological, in which people could upgrade their mind, body and soul through a proximity to physical danger.

Ultimately, I believed that the San Andreas fault line wouldn't just be a portal into the Earth's depths, it could also be a gateway — for those willing to embrace its true powers — into an entirely new existence.

“You want to do what?" the professor barked into the phone.

The geology expert from UC Riverside had taken three days to call me back, and once he did, immediately seemed to regret it.

"Go inside the fault line," I relayed, as calmly as possible. "I just wanted to get your thoughts on how safe that might be."

"Why in God's name would you..." he began.

"It's just something I was curious about, sir."

He put the phone down and I could hear muffled noises in the background. A moment later, he was back on the line. "Young man, that's the literal definition of insane."

"I understand. But I'm not saying this is something I would actually do."

He cleared his throat. "I've never had anyone ask this. It's very peculiar."

"Since I have you on the phone — and thank you for getting back to me — could I also ask: What are the chances of the Big One happening soon? Say, in the next few weeks?"

"We're overdue," he said.

"Are we talking weeks? Months?"

"I can't tell you exact dates, but just know this: It's happening in our lifetime. And whatever makes you want to spend a single second inside a fault line, or even entertain the idea of it? I'd recommend you spend that energy elsewhere. Adopt a pet. Make a new friend. And please, call your mother. She's probably very worried about you."

"My mother's dead."

A long pause. "I'm sorry."

"Thanks for your time," I said, and immediately hung up.

After negotiating with several contractors, and finding one willing to skirt the edges of the law, the fault line party floor had been constructed — very swiftly and very illegally — in a matter of weeks. The location was fifteen miles outside of town where the fault line zigged and zagged, deep in a remote desert canyon; a spot suggested to us by asking around under the guise of "real estate research." A sturdy stairwell had also been constructed — as though ripped from my dream — leading down into a larger, open-air deck space. Seamus suggested that the floor be decorated in psychedelic colors for "heightened spiritual effect," and I agreed.

As soon as the floor contractor wrapped his duties, I reached out to a local artist willing to swear secrecy around our location, booking him for the first week of July. When I scrolled through his Instagram page, I knew immediately he was the person for the job.

"There's this artist, Agnes Pelton, she's very 'desert spiritual,'" the artist explained. "Kind of like the Georgia O'Keeffe of the Coachella Valley. Anyway, I know exactly what you guys are going for — and I'll do it for cheap — but under one condition."

After consulting with Seamus, we agreed to allow him to post photos of his work to Instagram, as long as he kept the party's location completely undisclosed until further notice.

The price of a ticket for this? Four hundred and fifty dollars. Unapologetically expensive, but just expensive enough to be taken seriously. The price included "organic small plates," an open bar with "spiritually-blessed" cocktails, CBD- and THC-infused edibles baked into the shapes of merkabas, and a comped bus ride out to the ceremony from a "sacred set" of coordinates — which would be posted online for a maximum of fifteen minutes on the morning of the party, then promptly deleted. If you missed the bus because you missed the coordinates, you were out to sea. We were upfront about that, for those who signed up and agreed to the purchase.

Turns out, one of Seamus's cousins from Bermuda Dunes came through with the fifteen G's we needed to finance the entire endeavor upfront — building the floor plan, painting the podium and stairwell, funding partygoer transportation, and catering the party, top-to-bottom. Seamus claimed it was always smarter to invest other people's money if you could get it. So we got it.

Luckily for us, the posters I'd hung up around Palm Springs — featuring a single QR Code on a stark, cream-colored piece of paper, leading to a ticket purchase link — were having a major effect. I'd taped them to bulletin boards outside swanky hotels catering specifically to the L.A. crowd, like the Ace, the Saguaro, Arrive, and Colony Palms. Within a week, we had a hundred and twenty-seven tickets sold, netting Seamus and I a hefty little boon.

Due to our collective hustle, we soon found ourselves flush with nearly sixty grand in cash, easily reimbursing Seamus's cousin within two weeks of his loan.

Seamus cracked two beers, handing one my way. We were high up in the Araby Hills, sitting in his backyard, celebrating the moment.

"Ad-Astra," he said, clinking my bottle with his.

"Ad-Astra," I repeated, then asked, "What does that mean?"

"To the stars."

I smiled and raised my bottle, then we both took long, languid sips.

Clearing my throat, I said, "Honestly, the houses up here in this neighborhood? They're like nothing I've ever seen."

"That's why I chose it — the neighborhood's an outlier."

"So all of those stories about the Munchkins in this neighborhood are false? The Wizard of Oz rumors?"

"Correct."

After a few minutes of working on our beers, I reached down for another, handing Seamus a second. "Aside from your cousin, where's the rest of your family? I never heard you speak about them."

He popped the cap off his Dos Equis. "I never get too comfortable with the idea of family," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Family's just a concept."

"That's what you think?"

"That's what I've learned," he said. "Because most people in life won't be there for you, when the chips are down." I waited for him to continue, keeping one eye peeled for any pool-hopping coyotes in the darkness. "Especially the ones you're closest to," he added. "But here's the thing: You can lose everything. Friends. Family. All your money. But it turns out, if you keep one thing in mind, you'll still have everything you need."

"What's that?"

He windshield-wiped the condensation off the front of his sweating beer bottle. "The only true abandonment is when you abandon yourself."

After a moment, Seamus just grinned and raised his bottle, as if adding a punctuation mark to the silence.

Over the next two days, I blew through Youtube videos like they were rails of cocaine, watching hundreds of people speaking in tongues, or what sounded like otherworldly languages. I studied these examples, took notes, and spent hours re-recording my own voice and playing it back to tweak my performance. My plan was to launch into something akin to this before the crowd — but with my own spontaneous, invented language — before delving into the meat of my sermon, which was, ironically enough, about people not being there for one another. Seamus's words from the previous night had inspired me.

When I ran my sermon past him the day before the party, Seamus approved it with minimal notes. "Good work," he assessed. "Remember to keep a little mystery."

On the day of the party, I motored us out to the "sacred coordinates" meeting spot, which was, by then, packed with Teslas and Priuses, owned primarily by L.A. people, waiting for the bus to pick them up. No one knew who Seamus and I were — and that was the point; there were no photos of us on the ticket-buying website. We wanted to remain anonymous until the ceremony began.

While on the bus ride, Seamus asked if I was ready.

"Yeah," I admitted. "But my armpits are soaked."

"Good. It means you give a damn about what you're about to say."

After everyone made their way down the staircase into the psychedelically-painted fault line party space, we gave people about half an hour to get buzzed on their spiritually-blessed cocktails before starting up the ceremony.

When I stepped up to my place at the podium — a mosh pit of glee, sweat and New Age optimism spread out before me — my hands were abuzz, fingers numb from nerves.

"Welcome, party people!" I shouted, earning cheers from the crowd. Then I immediately lowered my voice a few octaves, implying seriousness. "Before we begin, let's all take a moment to recenter ourselves, and embrace the healing codes of light embedded in my upcoming verbal transmission — they will upgrade your personal operating software, and usher in an alignment to your truest path."

The crowd cheered again, lifting their drinks and shouting approval.

"Today is a special day," I began. "Today is the day we usher in the biggest shaking the world has ever known. But it's not an external shaking, it's an internal one. A ten-point-oh on the Richter scale of your psyche. And with the collective power of everyone before me, I do believe we can trigger earthquakes so great — for all of us — that it might just reset the planet. It's time for the world to cleanse itself, for our souls to 'prison break' from our own imposition, to feel our worst selves cracking apart, and shuttling us into our new 5D reality. And that's where we can be there for one another, for all of time."

More optimistic cheers emerged from the crowd.

Then, as I opened my mouth to continue, it was as though I'd suddenly bumped into some kind of invisible energetic wall. I felt a gentle "no" coming from somewhere deep and untouchable in the universe.

My chest fluttered. I cleared my throat and coughed twice, again trying to speak.

"I..." was all I got out.

Seeing this, Seamus made a supportive "you got this" double-thumbs-up from the front of the crowd, followed by a "let's move it along" hand twirl.

I opened my mouth to speak, but again: nothing.

The crowd started to look a little concerned for me.

I swallowed hard, twice. And then I left my body entirely.

Somehow, I found myself back on the shores of Lake Gregory — a syringe in my arm, my mouth stuffed with rocks — staring at the neon-orange bouncy castle in the middle of the lake. It was blowing gently in the wind, like one of those inflatable dancing tube men, fluttering outside a car dealership.

I began to float a little bit closer to it.

And finally, I was right inside the bouncy house. That's where I saw my mother's body, strung up by a belt. Somehow held up by a structure that could barely hold itself up.

She'd used one of my old karate belts to do it. Green with two purple stripes. Track marks dotted insides of her arms, little punctures she'd put in her body. Places where she'd tried to let things in, or maybe let things out. Aberrations across her surface.

I couldn't stop thinking about all the holes in her arms. I wanted to put holes in my arms too. I wanted to put holes everywhere, and then fill them up. Maybe that's why I tried to eat rocks, because I felt like if I ate enough, it would put holes in my stomach — or at least cause me to sink right to the bottom of the lake.

I blinked and saw my father drinking by himself at a dive bar, and then sleeping in the back of his truck. Eventually, he would return home to help clean up the mess. Not that he cleaned it up, he just made it his own.

I saw myself sleeping in my mom's sweatshirt for the next two months.

I saw the house in Skyforest become a dusty secret kept from the world.

When I arrived back in my body, standing at the podium before the fault line crowd, tears flooded my eyes. By now, Seamus looked thoroughly confused.

I swallowed hard, twice.

And then I simply bawled by eyes out in front of the crowd.

After a moment, I raised my head and opened my mouth. "The thing I have to say is this: It's time to stop abandoning yourself. This is a con."

It was then that the ground rumbled.

Our feet began to shake.

And a beam of white-hot light flashed down from above — almost celestial in its intensity.

For a moment, I thought: Holy fucking shit, did I just summon an earthquake?

"YOU'RE ALL UNDER ARREST," boomed a voice on a loudspeaker. "YOU'RE TRESPASSING. DO NOT TRY TO RUN."

It turned out that the rumble was a troop of SWAT team members, thundering down the stairwell into the fault line, their weapons fully drawn.

This, predictably, sent everyone flying into a drug-fueled panic.

As the authorities descended into the party pit like a river of dark blue, rounding up the crowd and slapping plastic handcuffs on all of us, a chopper circled overhead, vibrating our eardrums. I did not run away. Instead, I chose to surrender — as all good spiritual paths teach.

A tall woman standing near me wearing a flower-patterned sundress bawled loudly into her merkaba edible, before chucking it across the dance floor in an outburst of rage.

"It'll be okay," I reassured her. "I don't know how, but it will."

"Fuck you!" she shouted. "And your bullshit."

As the cops took me by the wrists and perp-walked me up the stairs, I passed by Seamus, who appeared to be shell-shocked. Our eyes met briefly, and they signaled a deep worry, as if warning — keep your damn trap shut.

The cops immediately yanked me away before I could say anything to him, as more officers flooded down into the fault line — into our now-doomed, soon-to-be-retired, fluorescent pocket of raging hormones and drugged-out bliss.

Three weeks later, to the day, the Big One hit.

The epicenter was located ninety miles southeast of Palm Springs, deep in the Medjool date fields of Westmoreland, emerging from a system of multiple faults warming up like angry oven coils, coming online to wreck the peace party.

The area where we threw the fault line ceremony collapsed twenty feet down into the Earth, I heard — obliterated and entombed in rock, sand, dirt and leftover neon party favors.

In the weeks following the disaster, Seamus and I were both charged with trespassing, managing to plea our punishments down by each completing a hundred hours of community service. Ironically, I was assigned to clean up a damaged part of Thousand Palms that served as a tourist exhibition for the San Andreas fault line. We also had to individually pay a ten-thousand-dollar fine to a local tribal council, which left me close to broke. Essentially, right back to where I'd started.

How Seamus made out, I'll never truly know. We drifted apart soon after that. I don't think he ever really forgave me for outing our spiritual co-hustle with my spontaneous truth-puke. But he was also right about something — you could lose everything without abandoning yourself.

A few weeks after finishing up my community service, I got a call from an old friend who ran a cherry farm outside Leavenworth, Washington, offering me seasonal cherry-picking work. But the deal was: I needed to start in a week. Then I remembered: True change often starts with your address.

So I packed up my belongings, turned in my apartment keys, and said goodbye to the blue-gum eucalyptus trees playing botanical stick-up outside my window. I was ready to go — or ready to arrive — depending on how you looked at it.