Teenage Wasteland

When we first came to Los Angeles we lived in a monastery. It was the perfect place for me. I would go for long walks in the desert, collect cactus, and study the rocks. My brothers were three and four years younger than I. We have different interests. I made friends with the monks: there was Brother Basil, a Greek born American. His brother was a film director in Hollywood. There was brother Dominic, the cook. He was so fat the other monks used to call him sausage fingers. There was father Xavier, A tall black man from the Belgian Congo. 

Everyone called him father Congo. Father Werner was German. Somehow he knew karate and would teach us self-defense. My father was born Alain Gilles Gaspard-Michel D’Aubignosc, but his show business name was Michael Allan. 

Michael Allan

As part of the arrangement for staying there, my father organized the theater production for the summer festival. As luck would have it, that year we were doing an existential play called “Waiting for Godot,” by Samuel Beckett. My brothers and I spent long hours watching the actors rehearse. To this day, my brother Jean-Pierre can recite entire sections from the play. 

Actors in a production of "Waiting for Godot."

The brothers had marked out the stations of the cross with crucifixes made of driftwood by Father Yang. A rustic path wended its way through the rock and cactus and up the mountain to the last station. 

The acolytes of St. Benedict at the monastery in Valyermo included Chinese, African, East Indian, European, and American. They lived in the Mohave Desert in peace and harmony, and did their best to follow the teachings of Christ by word and example.

Driftwood sculpture by Thaddeus Yang, Valyermo, California

Stations of the Cross, Valyermo California

Later we moved to the Pacific Palisades, the wealthy suburb of West Los Angeles, so that my father could be closer to NBC studios in Burbank where he worked. 

NBC Studios in 1967

During this time the Vietnam War was heating up, and I was now in high school. I had enrolled late that year. They told me I had to take a language course. I said, “fine, I'll study Spanish.” But the Spanish language course was filled, so I said, “fine let me study French.” Fresh was also filled up. I said, “what can I study?" They said German was available. My father was French. He hated the Germans. I asked," what else do you?" They said," well you can study Russian." 

Palisades High School

My Russian teacher was the coolest teacher at school. I learned the Cyrillic alphabet and can still read Russian today. But the best thing that came from my Russian class was Tasha. Tasha Vanderburg was my first great love. We met in the Russian class and I would help her with her homework. She was delicate, blonde, with blue eyes and long hair. She wore the kind of white cotton Mexican blouse embroidered with flowers that were popular with hippies back in those days. We practiced speaking Russian together, and one day I invited her to the movies to see Russian language version of War and Peace. 

We became fascinated with Tolstoy and spent the summer vacation at the beach reading War and Peace. As the Vietnam War escalated, we went to demonstrations together,  went to Pete Seeger concerts, listened to Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. Ever the philosopher, I began digging deeper into the writings of Tolstoy. It seems that later in life,Tolstoy renounced the name and fame that came from being Russia's great novelist. He became a vegetarian and studied the Bhagavad-gita. He even started a kind of commune. 

Tolstoy had some correspondence with Gandhi, and his writings influenced Gandhi's nonviolent movement. Tolstoy felt that the essence of Christianity would be found in the Gospel, in the words of Christ himself. He especially liked the sermon on the Mount, where Christ says, “Blessed are the poor…” 

The more I read Tolstoy, the more I appreciated his teachings. I also read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. I could see that Gandhi had taken some of his important ideas from Tolstoy. 

Beyond Gandhi  and Tolstoy, another writer who had become popular with my generation was Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau wrote about simple living and high thinking as exemplified in his life at Walden Pond. There he spent the summer and winter living in a quiet cabin and writing:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” 
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

One of his books is called “Civil Disobedience," where he argues that citizens must follow their conscience; and that one must not follow unjust laws.  

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” 
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

The war in Vietnam was fought in the shadow of World War II. Hitler's unjust laws were fresh in the memory of everyone. Thoreau's arguments made a lot of sense. Many young people of my generation were charmed by Thoreau. As postindustrial civilization was beginning it's massive destruction of our environment the idea of getting back to the land appealed to us. As I read further into Thoureau, I found that he was a great reader of the Upanishads and Bhagavad-gita. At one point in his summer at Walden he is overjoyed when a trunk of books arrive. After reading Bhagavad-gita, he remarks, "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of Bhagavad-gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."

Here I found a crossroads between these great thinkers. Gandhi had said, 

"When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to Bhagavad-Gita and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh joy and new meanings from it every day".

The Bhagavad-Gita. This was the book that they all had in common. “Where can I get a copy?” I wondered. 

I was a naïve teenager, unsure of myself. The prophet changed all that. I've always been a nerd, introverted, involved in my own little world. But my trip to Mexico changed me forever.