Epilogue
Hidden between UCSD and the Pacific Ocean were burial grounds, Rama said, that were sacred to Native Americans. Surfers on their way to Black's Beach passed through this land of cliffs and ravines. They pointed to a graceful, white mansion and said, "Heyyy, duuuude, that's Atkinson's place, duuuuuuuuude." Several properties south of the UCSD Chancellor's mansion lay a burned-out car abandoned on a charred foundation. The address seemed to be 951, but in my mind the missing tile was in place: 9514 La Jolla Farms Road, where Rama became "enlightened" and where I moved into darkness.
It was 1988. I parked my Volkswagon Bus at a mall one-and-a-half miles east of campus and walked with Nunatak toward the sea. I had cut through the not-yet-bulldozed chaparral just east of Interstate-5 many times since returning to UCSD—a twenty-seven year old undergraduate—but now the sun was setting and the air seemed heavy. Suddenly, I had a sense of where I was going. During the past two years I had dealt with my Rama experiences intellectually. But you can only sit cooly, unmoved and protected on the cap-of-things-that-were for so long before the cap blows and sends you tumbling. There are many ways to grapple with the enormity of what lies beneath the surface world of reason. I approached 9514 La Jolla Farms Road.
The last time I got near the place had been the year before, with a friend. "I lived there once with some radical people," I had told her. "One of them became... enlightened."
"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.
"That's where Atkinson lives," I said, pointing away.
Now, as the sun sank in the Pacific, I stood with Nuna on the edge of the property. I took a few steps forward but quickly stopped cold. I could almost hear Rama saying in his Kermit-the-Frog voice, "Make millions of people happy." I stepped to where my room used to be when suddenly, superimposed over blackened concrete slabs, images appeared. Rama was in the kitchen cooking for a hundred spiritual seekers. Rama was in the meditation room giving a talk beside a larger-than-life photo of an Indian guru. Rama was at the same spot giving a talk beside himself. Rama was in the garage surveying stacks of WOOF! Rama was offering me cookies to cheer me up because I doubted his enlightenment—my *friend's* enlightenment. Rama was hopping around the house like a kangaroo, and I was right beside him, and we were laughing like children, and at that moment, in the fading light, the cap blew and tears streamed down my face.
* * *
Over the next few years, I grappled with conflicting images of Rama. Sometimes I saw him as a friend. Other times I saw him as a semi-enlightened seeker or as a powerful sorcerer. But the more I researched his past, the more I discovered he was human.
He was born Frederick P. Lenz III on February ninth, 1950, in Mercy Hospital, San Diego. He was raised Catholic in Connecticut where he lived, alternately, with his grandparents, aunt and uncle, and father. His parents divorced when he was a child. His father remarried, joined a yacht club, and, in 1974, was elected mayor of Stamford.