Gentlemen,
Some time ago, Dr. Gray asked to borrow my laptop as I was cooking dinner and started a riveting thread about hanging out in the kitchen - which was only slightly less interesting than a Twitter message from Ocho Cinco. Slightly annoyed, I wrote a response, but never got around to posting it given that shortly thereafter I somehow ended up riding the skunk on life's merry-go-round and have just come up for oxygen.
Yesterday morning, Anthony let me know he was recovering in the hospital from what sounds like horrific spinal reconstructive surgery. Having been treated to "back rehab" six times, I can certainly sympathize, but that is still no excuse for inflicting an e-mail with self-portrait attachments of our favorite Tennessee dentist standing before a mirror in a hospital gown with his bare ass sticking out.
However, though the post-op pharmaceuticals have him feeling well enough to banter with Barny over the e-mail, recovering from back surgery takes takes some time and it will be a while before he can resume his two favorite activities - although knowing him, I am fairly certain that he will soon figure out a way to enlist a nurse or two into some oral therapy. The golf might take a bit longer.
I hate to waste anything deliberately written for a purpose because time is at an impossible premium these days. Thus, here is my version of our last meeting. Better late than never:
MY DINNER WITH ANTHONY
Had I known that Dr. Gray was planning on inflicting a cloying, nauseating post on the Treehouse gallery, I would never have coughed up the child protection passcode to my laptop – and infused his saute with Ex-Lax instead of Indian cumin and white wine in retribution.
That stated, I would consider writing a movie called “My Dinner with Anthony” except the truth would be so far afield of believability that not even a porno producer desperate for a serviceable screenplay would touch it.
I described our recent meeting at Bandon to Tom Paul as akin to watching an airplane of questionable stability doing barrel rolls in the mountains with a blindfolded pilot. It seems impossible that Anthony has not crashed except for the halo of divine invincibility that seems to surround him.
He had sent me a pair of discs to play on the computer a few weeks back. One was a primer on Anthony's day at Pebble Beach with all the trimmings; but having been lucky enough to grow up playing there, it was only interesting enough to wade through a quick look before putting it aside.
Disc #2 was an entirely different piece of the enigmatic puzzle that is all things Dr. Gray - and must be seen as it stretches the credible firmly into the realm of the incredulous. Imagine a womanizing oral surgeon standing over a writhing peasant, performing an exorcism on a shrieking woman somewhere in the bowels of the Dominican Republic.
Yes, extracting Satan from the body of an impoverished villager who looks to be suffering a seizure, on a makeshift altar in a church full of pilgrims wildly dancing and singing, while Emcee Anthony rocks the house with scripture shouted at full volume into a microphone.
As we waited for my garlic balsamic to reduce, I had to get the full story. Trust me on this, if you ask this man a question, you'll get a full, unfiltered answer with not a macabre detail left out.
In my former life in Southern California, I had once been exposed to a cult that, shall we say, had some interesting and unusual beliefs. Lured more out of curiosity than an aimless quest to find spiritual fulfillment, I was “introduced” by someone close to me into their insular lair.
The sensation of sitting at a table with boys and girls clad in Fraternity Row sun dresses, Lacoste shirts and topsiders grimly holding hands, chanting incomprehensible “prayers” gives me shivers to this day. By the time I fled Los Angeles, I had my fill of new age religions, secret seances and cults, vowing to avoid forever those afflicted with enough arrogance to play Russian Roulette with devils, ghosts and goblins.
Oddly, several years later another close friend (also living in SoCal) invited me to what amounts to an “Eyes Wide Shut” party – having convinced the organizers that I was the perfect scribe to present this form of extreme carnal exploration (cloaked as a faux-religion cult gathering) as a legitimate lifestyle pursuit for those enlightened enough to investigate what still looks to me as secular humping.
For those in the know, Anthony is a complex man. Part child, part parent, part sex addict, part golfer, part dentist/exorcist who while cloaked in the robes of Christianity carries on a half-dozen monogamous relationships simultaneously.
However, he seems harmless enough and I half suspected that his histrionics in the Dominican Republic were the entrails from a class in Method Acting and that Anthony did not actually believe he held the power to extract devils from the great unwashed.
So, given that we were both far afield of the throes of sobriety and my reduction sauce still had a way to go, I needled him about his TV Preacher alter ego, likening his silly Pentecostal Evangelist routine to a minor league Jimmy Swaggert in orange plus fours and a tattered golf shirt.
Without a word, Anthony slowly leaned forward in his chair, gently cradling the pomegranate martini in his hands as one might the papal chalice, and with a crooked smile began to softly speak in tongues.
It was not gibberish, no, but a language of some sort with identifiable phrasing and inflection. He went on for about 30 seconds, stopping only to have another sip of his vodka. Smirking at the shocked look on my face, Anthony put down his drink and blandly asked if he might fetch me another glass of wine . . . . . .
Of course, I demanded to know the meaning of this prayer he had just recited, but in similar fashion to those ensnared in the college cult I left behind, Anthony had no idea. He explained that for those with the gift, it was a simple matter to channel God, Jesus or Space Aliens – simply acting as their conduit into our three dimensional reality.
Nobody with one spike in this transitional netherworld has ever explained to my satisfaction how anybody praying in an ancient tongue can be sure they are not conjuring up an incantation over which they have no control – a APB calling all cars for the very devils he seeks to banish back to perdition.
But Anthony seems to know what he is doing . . . . . there is a palpable force that protects him from harm or real consequence. Whether it is dark or light is impossible for anyone to know for certain - including Anthony I suspect.