Killing Buddha _ Chapter 1

What happens when the least spiritual person on the planet gets hired to make a move about spirituality?

I hope you enjoy Chapter 1 of my book Killing Buddha! You can order it on Amazon or though your favorite bookseller!

CHAPTER 1

beep beep beep beep ...

Is it my phone alarm or the oven timer ringing in another batch of my now famous, all- organic, gluten-free and even in vegan flavors, gourmet dog treats—Zak’s Super Snacks— available worldwide at all of the finest retailers?

Either way, I’m standing in my kitchen, my sweet baby girl balanced on my hip, giggling happily, wearing Hannah Andersen from head to toe. My three St. Bernards, Manny, Moe and Jack, are crowding around me as I lovingly scoop freshly baked dog treats from the cookie sheet into my vintage McCoy Owl Cookie Jar—the one I bought at auction after my company went global.

beep beep beep ...

Wait a minute. If I’ve got the cookie sheet in my hand, it can’t be the oven.

I scan my kitchen searching for my phone, taking in my beautiful California Craftsman

home—a real one, not one of those new-builds with the fake laminate wood floors. Mine is situated on a private cliffside road with a view of the San Francisco Bay, all shabby chic, white and soft pastels filling each room, a touch of modern with a smidgen of kitsch. My kitchen is stunningly white with stainless steel, of course, because that’s how I roll.

I relish the perfection my life has turned out to be. A beautiful home surrounded by other millionaire entrepreneurs. (I may not be in tech, but all rich tech people love their dogs, and my dog treats are now a national must-have status symbol.) A ridiculously handsome, equally successful husband, a gorgeous angel of a child, my three St. Bernards (all from the same mother with impeccable pedigrees), and a Maine Coon cat, the fluffiest and biggest cat of them all, round out my picture-perfect life. A soulful Norah Jones plays as I dance around the kitchen.

Beep beep beep beep beep ...

Jesus Christ! Alright already, let me just get a look at my shoes before I wake up ...

My eyes pop open. That is not the oven or my phone alarm, it’s my car. Someone is stealing

my car! In a flash, I am transported back to reality and leap from my bed in Los Angeles, CA— Fairfax and 3rd to be exact—no stunning view, no stainless steel and pastels, no Saint Bernards, just my duplex in an apparently now crime-ridden neighborhood. As I tear towards my bedroom door, sans glasses, which makes me almost blind, I miss the door and my small toe connects with the door jam. Crack! OMG! How is it that something so useless can cause so much pain?

But that’s something to ponder after too much wine as I sit alone on a Saturday night. Right now, I’ve got to keep moving. “Piggy Toes, Piggy Toes, Piggy Toes,” I curse-mutter—a useless something my mother taught me to say when I was six to take away pain that doesn’t really work but hey, when knives are piercing the arteries in your leg and running is paramount to your car’s survival, it’ll do. It’s also better than the alternative F-bomb I usually drop because I’ve been trying to sound less like a drunken sailor and more like my vision of what a successful Female Entrepreneur of The Year would sound like. I don’t want to find myself screaming, “Get The fuck out of the way Karen” at school drop-off one day when I’m late for a board meeting and Chloe (my yet-to-be-born angel of a daughter) needs to be first in line at preschool so she can get yet another gold star and once again beat out all the other kids for Star Student of the Month, getting a leg up on acceptance into Harvard. You’ve got to start kids on the success train early.

As they say: fake it till you make it ... right?

I hear my car engine roar to life and the sound pierces my heart. Do not rev her that hard! I think, panicked. She’s a woman who needs time to purr. Typical asshole man, hops in and gets pounding. Men don’t realize it takes the average woman 40 minutes to even get close to an orgasm. I read this somewhere and I’m sure it’s true. I imagine my ex, screaming, “Are you going to cum?” No asshat, not even close. But you go ahead. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?

“Fuck!!”

Sometimes it’s the only word that heals. Someone is stealing my car, I can’t find my fucking glasses or my fucking shoes, and my dog Zak is howling like a rabies-infected hyena. I try to steady myself on the wall of my hallway as I hobble-run, managing to hit and shatter one of the last remaining pictures hanging on my once love-filled walls—a daily reminder that I am now single and on the other side of 35. Even Norah Jones couldn’t get a woman’s engine purring coming from the cheap-ass portable speaker I was left in the break-up. Who am I kidding? Norah hasn’t been around this place in a long time. Norah is my go-to “I’m blissfully having orgasms” soundtrack, not my “I hate all men and the world sucks” soundtrack.

I sometimes regret my emotional, wine-fueled, blasting Icona Pop’s “I Love It” outburst where I decided not to keep anything we bought together and, channeling my inner voodoo priestess, cursed it all as I, all by myself at two a.m., piled all his junk and our once jointly owned stuff out on the curb and then left about seven drunken messages letting my ex know about it. My original plan was to leave pieces of our stuff at all of our favorite spots around LA. But I soon realized that would take too much time and energy and, while I’m an excellent rager (Look out when I’m mad! I really do need to work on that), my anger that night had its limits. So, I only got our stuff to the curb.

By the time I woke up filled with rager’s remorse, it was gone. I have no idea if my ex came and got it or the guy who trolls my neighborhood for recyclables thought he’d won the lottery. Either way, my house currently looks like an estate sale is in progress, or a drug addict lives here and is slowly pawning all his/her stuff for continued fixes.

It’s probably true that having a good sound system would make my break-up soundtrack sting a whole lot more. There is something almost comforting in listening to Adele sing “Send my love to your next lover” all tinny and muffled, as if it’s not really happening to me but somewhere far, far away in a distant universe and I just happen to be able to catch the sound as it blows by. Unfortunately, it never blows on by. The distant wails of heartbreak and betrayal linger in the air like the smell of rank weed. The portable speaker is waterproof though, which helps since I spend most of my time crying and singing depressing songs about unrequited love, cowardly men, and “I’m a fucking unicorn and you’ll regret it when I’m gone” in the shower. I think my rendition of “Roar” rivals Katy Perry’s version, although I’m pretty sure my dog doesn’t.

My car has a great sound system. Oh wait. Shit. Yes, the car which is currently being stolen. Death and emergencies. They both happen in slow motion with way too much time to think.

I finally make it to the front door in time to see my beautiful baby blue BMW convertible peel out of the driveway. I stand, still reeling from the pain in my piggy toe, looking out into my now empty driveway. Everything is blurry, almost like one of those bad Instagram filters you use when you don’t like how you look in the picture and you’re hoping blurry will make you look younger and happier. It never does. It just tells anyone who sees it you’re probably looking like crap or you’re hiding something. For me, it’s usually my soul. I’m hiding my soul—or what’s left of it—behind a fuzzy Instagram filter.

As I stand there in a tank top and thong, I notice my elderly neighbor waving to me from his yard. I swear that guy is single-handedly the cause of California’s drought. I tried once to explain to him that watering his lawn and the sidewalk for two hours twice a day was excessive. I mean, we’ve been having a drought in California. And he proceeded to lecture me on his time in the war and how he’d survived D-Day and he damn well was going to water whatever the hell he wanted, whenever he wanted. Anyway, he keeps waving and so I just smile and wave back, figuring he probably hasn’t seen a woman in her underwear in a good 20 years and hey, he’s a veteran after all. It’s my civic duty to honor those men. He damn well earned the right to ogle my butt cheeks. Then I notice he is pointing towards my driveway.

“Yes, I know! Someone just stole my car,” I shout.

He shouts back, “They left something in your driveway.”

I squint my eyes. Why do people with bad eyesight think this will help? But in this case, it

does. I notice a small rock sitting in the center of my now carless driveway with what looks like a piece of paper underneath it. I hobble over, knowing full well that at this point the entire neighborhood is getting a TMI view of my ass. Well, screw it. After my two a.m. I-am-a- woman-scorned-dragging-my-lover’s-shit-to-the-curb, one woman, off-off-off-Broadway performance art piece, I should just start selling tickets to my shit show of a life.

Sure enough, my car thieves left me a note. How thoughtful of them. But of course, I live in LA. We only have conscientious car thieves.

I retrieve my love note left by the Robin Hood of LA and, since I don’t have my glasses, I can’t read it. I make my way back into the house, trying to convince my dog that, no, this is not walk time or play time. It is, however, apparently pee time, and I wait impatiently as he does his thing on the magnolia tree in my front yard. Finally, I head back down the hall with the broken glass and empty nails where my cinematic past once hung with pride. The only pictures left are my old movie posters. The one that took the hit is Zombie Strippers, the crowning achievement in my 15-year career as a Hollywood movie producer. What had started out as a promising career as an award-winning producer of artful, profound film festival favorite indie films ended as the go-to producer of anything blood, gore and boobs . . . lots and lots of boobs.

Producing horror is akin to becoming a crack addict. Indie film is great and, of course, important and fulfilling. But it doesn’t pay well, and being a proper Valley girl princess, I have expensive tastes—like my BMW and normally crime-free, hip, two-bedroom duplex in the Melrose district. So, a few years back, I swallowed my pride and decided to take on a shlocky gore film with a solid paycheck and a back-end deal that might actually be worth something. I figured I’d make some money and then work to find the perfect film to take the indie film festival circuit by storm, thus launching me toward Hollywood blockbusters à la Kathleen Kennedy. Well, flash forward ten years. Zombies. Alien monsters. Zombie alien monsters. (All of them with ginormous boobs, by the way.) And my pièce de résistance, Zombie Strippers.

Yes, I had money. But I lost my soul, hence the fuzzy Instagram photos.

I manage to make it back to my bedroom without further injury, find my glasses on my one remaining nightstand (it’s fine, they didn’t match anyway), put them on and read the big bold letters “YOU HAVE BEEN VISITED BY REPO DUDE.” Seriously? Repo Dude? I swear to God, I should start a business charging dipshits like this tons of money to brand themselves as something that doesn’t sound like they spent the last few days high and lost in the Malibu canyons.

I shrink down onto my bed, overwhelmed, wondering if this is what Meghan Markle went through before she married her prince, and suddenly hear my real alarm—I mean my phone alarm—ringing. Still in fight or flight mode, I grab it. It’s 7:00 a.m. and flashing across my screen is a calendar reminder

 “Super Snacks sales pitch 9 a.m.”

Fuck.

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