Chapter 3, The Beach House Lessons
In the late 70s I went through another divorce that left me emotionally drained. Like many of us, I had wanted to have the two children we were all supposed to have in those days and to live happily ever after, but for many reasons this marriage didn't work. When I was served with the divorce papers, I went to see a prominent divorce attorney that I knew from my years with Dictaphone. Tom, who I first met in '67, early in his law career, was himself divorced. Despite his wealth and popularity, Tom always was an unpretentious person and we hit it off the first time we met.
While talking with Tom about the papers I had been served, I told him I intended to take my share of the money from my house about to be sold and buy "toys". I told him that I was going to buy a brand new sports car and a catamaran sailboat. He told me that he had just bought a beach house on one of the local beaches to "kick around at on the weekends," and he asked if I'd like to keep my sailboat at his beach house. I immediately said, “Yes,” and he had his chauffeur/handyman get a key for his beach house made for me.
The house was a classic bachelor's pad; it had several bedrooms and all the conveniences, including a hot tub that adjoined a big back deck overlooking the beach. I taught Tom what I knew about sailing, and he and some of his friends taught me the finer points of losing one's self in wine, women and song, as the saying goes. I was driving a new expensive sports car, had a new sailboat, plenty of women to date, and could come and go and entertain dates at the beach house whenever I wanted to.
Over the Christmas holidays, I went in Tom's limo with his entire office staff to a local airport where a chartered Lear jet flew us to Freeport in the Bahamas. When we got there, limos took us to several adjoining suites at the Bahama Princess Towers, where we stayed for a long weekend.
Initially, I enjoyed this new lifestyle presented to me, but I kept feeling like something was missing. I tried to convince myself that I was happy, or surely should be happy. The fact of the matter was this new lifestyle wasn't bringing me any happiness or peace of mind. As I spent more time around Tom and his friends, I discovered that they weren't particularly happy, either.
Like a lot of people, we thought that buying and having new "toys" would bring happiness, but it never does. One adopts the erroneous philosophy that I will be happy when I buy the new car, make "X" amount of dollars, and the list goes on forever. One of the examples of being ego driven instead of spiritually seeking occurred just after I bought my new sports car. Tom had a Cadillac convertible and a limo, but he didn't have a sports car, so he promptly went out and bought a new Corvette. His 'Vette was only a few days old when he invited me to drive it from his home in the city out to his beach house. We were only a few blocks from his house when I bottomed out his brand new car on a bumpy stretch of road close to where he lived. I remember apologizing to him for driving the 'Vette over the bump in the road hard enough that it bottomed out. He said, "Don't worry about it." What struck me at the moment though, was the look on his face of embarrassment, as if he, not his car, had bottomed out. The following week I went with him and witnessed him buy a new Mercedes 450 convertible that wouldn't bottom out at that spot in the road.
After a year and a half of keeping my sailboat at Tom's beach house, I needed to get away from him and the negativity of his lifestyle, so I moved my sailboat to another friend's place several beaches distance from Tom’s place. Giving Tom the key back to his beach house was one of the hardest things I have ever done in life. How do you tell a friend you care about that just being around him, and most of his friends, was bumming you out? I never looked back or regretted my decision to leave that environment because as soon as I did, I became a happier person.
I didn't truly understood Tom and his personality until many years later. In early '92, about six months before Tom died of a heart attack at 56 years old, a local newspaper wrote a several-page profile on this highly successful attorney. The writer spent several days with him and really captured most of what he was about. Tom was a man who basically lived for the enjoyment of doing his job. He really enjoyed being the most successful and well-known divorce attorney in the area, and he confessed in the article that he didn't have a "life" outside of his law practice. Sadly, it was the truth.
In my opinion, the reason that Tom didn't have a life outside of work was because of his lack of belief in any higher power. He had zero interest in anything spiritual. I tried on many occasions to talk with him about the subject but never got anywhere with him. The furthest I got was giving him a gift of a little plaque with the Desiderata on it. He read it once and then hung it in a bathroom. Later in this book I will be talking about spiritual systems of service-to-self or service-to-others. Most people choose one or the other, and once in a while a man like Tom comes along who tries to live his life by sitting on the fence.
I knew this friend and acquaintance, who left behind an estate worth millions, for about 25 years of my life. I will remember him as a man who sometimes acted happy on the outside, but was truly sad, lonely and hollow on the inside.
I learned invaluable lessons about life, and my own self, at that beach house. I learned firsthand, that money and status can't begin to buy happiness or peace of mind. I saw that when one ties one's self-worth and happiness into things and possessions, the lifestyle always requires bigger and better to achieve an artificial form of happiness. I learned that lives without Spirit in them are lives with something painfully missing.