A Walk on the Mild Side
If you should happen to see a short, dark-skinned guy walking through a residential area in Beverly Hills talking to palm trees, don’t panic. That’s just Ba Ba.
He is telling the trees that very soon now all the nails and screws sticking in their bark to hold addresses, reflectors and side-view mirrors will be removed and they’ll be happy again.
Ba Ba might be a little premature about that, but I’m sure it’s making the trees feel better to know that someone cares. Their fronds must be swaying with delight.
A native of India, Ba Ba was raised in a Buddhist temple from age 9 to 19 and knows all about karmas, energy connections and the pain felt by palm trees.
He has been in L.A. for a year and teaches meditation and yoga to some very important people, which is what he was doing in Beverly Hills in the first place, where a lot of those important people live.
What he knows for sure, he told me one day as we strolled along North Canon Drive, is that the wide boulevard of million-dollar homes hosts some very bad karma because of cruelty to the willowy palms that line its golden sidewalks.
“You think trees don’t feel pain?” he demanded. I shrugged. “Well they do. Nails pounded into Jesus eventually killed him, and they would do the same to the trees.”
Ba Ba was thinking very seriously of ripping out the addresses, reflectors and mirrors stuck into the trees, but I cautioned him against ripping out anything in Beverly Hills. He promised he would meditate on it.
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I met Ba Ba through actor Randy Quaid. Quaid spent a day with me to study for his role as a columnist in the movie “The Paper.” I was the prototype for the tall, slick, wise-cracking, gun-toting guy that Quaid eventually portrayed. We’re all like that. He learned how to be a columnist in that one day, which is probably about half a day more than necessary.
Ba Ba had moved from India to Italy where he worked as a waiter and taught meditation to Quaid on the set of “Godfather III.” That’s where he became spiritually connected to show biz. Quaid introduced him to George Hamilton and Hamilton introduced him to Al Pacino.
He still works for Hamilton, who has his own daytime television talk show. If you wait long enough, you’ll eventually have your own talk show, too.
Ba Ba doesn’t charge for teaching meditation, by the way, but does accept pay for working as a personal assistant to people like Quaid and Hamilton. In Pacino’s case, he was paid for beating him at chess, which, apparently, was not that difficult.
“I beat him 18 times and could feel his energy was not happy so I let him win twice,” Ba Ba confided. “He won’t play with me anymore.”
In the United States, he taught meditation to the icon of Western culture, Roseanne, for whom he worked as an assistant for a week. She paid him for three weeks. He likes that kind of karma.
“Roseanne has wonderful energy, very balanced,” Ba Ba said. When I expressed surprise, he explained that while the ocean may be rough on top, it is always calm below the waves. OK.
“You have balanced energy too,” he said, touching my wrist. “But sometimes you are tense and have air balls in your stomach.”
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The more he studied and touched the palm trees with nails and screws in them, the angrier Ba Ba got.
“Trees are like us,” he said. “They breathe like us, they sleep like us . . . and they’re purer than we are.”
Americans talk a big karma but don’t really care that much about nature, Ba Ba said. “Your earthquake was nature trying to tell you something. Make your environment clean or nature will clean it for you and there will be nothing here.”
That seemed a high price to pay for putting a nail in a tree, so I called the Beverly Hills City Hall to see what could be done about it. I was referred to Article 3, Section 10-4.302, of the Municipal Code:
“It shall be unlawful for any person to post, suspend, print, stick, stamp, tack or otherwise affix or cause the same to be done, any notice, placard, bill, card, poster, sticker, banner, sign, advertising or other device calculated to attract the attention of the public to, over, or upon any street right-of-way, PUBLIC SIDEWALK, curb, curbstone, lamp post, hydrant, TREE, railroad right-of-way, electric light pole . . . “
You get the idea. You can be fined $1,000 or jailed for six months in Beverly Hills for abusing a tree. If that doesn’t rattle their karma along North Canon Drive, I don’t know what will.
Ba Ba was delighted at the news, and my wife has noticed that the air balls in my stomach seem exceptionally pleased too.