A Little Bit of Heaven in Hollywood

In the beginning, I felt frightened to meet God. My heart actually pounded and I had sweat on my forehead. I told myself the reaction was ridiculous. But still, I could understand.

God lives in Hollywood, three miles from my Los Feliz flat, so it’s an easy drive. I have no trouble spotting the sprawling apartment complex--the bunker sort with gutters sticking out from concrete balconies like stunted gargoyles. I find God’s name on the black directory board, between “Glover” and “Gomez.” I ring, but Lil, one of God’s friends, goes through the gate just then and lets me in. A few men wearing black Speedos and tattoos lounge around the pool, reading scripts, headphones clapped to their ears.

God approaches, a tall man with a bad toupee, which I later conclude is an unfortunate haircut. His beery eyes remind me of my Uncle Vince’s--all lids and swollen orbs. His skin is the texture of marzipan. God, 57, takes me through a labyrinth of corridors separated by weighty fire doors.

“Welcome to heaven!” he cackles as he lets me in his apartment. The place is done in ‘70s thrift shop, but not as if it was something hip to do. We sit on velour couches that have chunks of orange foam poking through. God begins chain-smoking his way through his early life, how he left the Mormon church, his 18 years as a deejay and a stint working for a mail-order ministry headed by a “Rev. Al” in Fresno, who tricked his congregation into supporting faux orphanages in Haiti. I stop God when his sentences begin to blur.

“Tell me the story about how God became God,” I say.

This is what I learn. On the night of June 17, 1976, Terril Clark Williams hit his head on the windshield of his 1969 Mustang after plowing into a light pole at Highland and Franklin avenues. He went home, none the worse, and about 3 a.m., “Wham! It was like I was hit with a bolt of lightning!” God tells me. The room burst with light, and for three hours his head was filled with thoughts and instructions. He learned that everything and everyone is God and that the universe is one living, conscious being.

I tell God that I’ve always liked the Hindu notion that God is playing hide-and-seek with himself--through us and as us--and will eventually wake up from the delusion of separation. “But what’s with the name?”

God leans back, lights up a Marlboro and fixes me with his cinder eyes. I know he’s about to deliver the clincher.

“I was told that I should play God until everyone knows they’re God,” he says quickly, without blinking. He was told he would get the impulse to change his name to God, “which just horrified me, just horrified me,” God tells me, shaking his head.

So, in 1981 Williams quit the Fresno mail-order ministry and told the Rev. Al he was going to legally change his name to God, and the Rev. Al said, “You can’t upstage me, you SOB.”

On Oct. 6, 1981, Terril Clark Williams walked into the Fresno County Superior Court and handed over a name-change petition. Judge C.F. Hamlin looked it over, raised his head and said, “I hereby change your name to God. But I must warn you that this could be counterproductive to your life.”

“I’ll take my chances, your honor,” God responded.

God scripted a press release and sent it to the Associated Press, United Press International and the Fresno Bee. Then he said, “What the hell have I done?” He spent the next two weeks giving phone interviews--London, Guam, Sydney, to Radio Ireland, and most of the 50 states--detailing that we are all God and that “the same being looks out through everyone’s eyes.” He ran out of money and now lives on a monthly $620 disability check, cleans apartments and appears on fringe radio and TV shows. He’s listed. That’s how I found him, while thumbing through the phone book one day.

God finishes his story and turns to me. “God is becoming aware of himself in the world,” he says. “God is busting out all over.”

This is the sum of what I learn from God during our first meeting. I leave, shake his hand and say that I’ll return the following week.

*

Two years have passed since that first meeting, and i’ve come to know God intimately. We’ve had lunch often, and I’ve met God’s neighbors and his mother, Ramona, who lives one floor below him. (He calls her Holy Ramona, Mother of God). His neighbors mostly call him Terry, in deference to Ramona, and they say he helps them with groceries and pets, vacuums, takes them to the doctor and gathers their used clothes for the homeless.

God has shown me documents that prove his existence: A driver’s license; a Social Security card (which requires three names, so he’s down as G.O.D.); a jury summons to God, who declined, saying that he relinquished his ability to judge others years ago.

During one visit I ask him if the human race needs identification papers to believe in God.

“No,” he says, dipping his chubby hand back and forth into an ashtray. “To believe in themselves.”

God always tells me to strive to see God in everyone but, damn it, I can’t even see God in God. His intensity disturbs me. I have an easier time seeing God in the homeless man who meanders into traffic at Los Feliz Boulevard and Commonwealth Avenue.

God often shares his dreams with me. Many of them center on an aching desire to be known. Recognized. His need is sweeping, universal. God once dreamed he was a sideshow act in this “crummy carnival.”

“I do my thing,” God tells me, “standing in a booth with a curtain that someone pulls. And there I am, God. I talk to people about me, and about them. The crowds are good and I get a lot of bookings.” God says I stroll by, catch his act and then call CNN. “The story of God being here is flashed around the world. It’s like no one knew they were really here, and now they get it. Something unprecedented is born in the world. And it all happens because of that crummy little carnival act.”

God has another dream, a recurring one. He’s an announcer sitting in front of a mike. “There are no records to play and no one to hear me,” God says. “I can’t find any news to read. The boss, he’s also the station owner, is listening. I know my job is on the line. It’s complete dead air. I wake up in a total cold sweat.”

I ask God what the dream means. “It means that I’m not being recognized as God,” he says, his eyes large and moist. “It means that I can’t do my job.”

I know that I can’t solve God’s problem, and sitting beside him on his ragged couch, that’s what I want to do. I look hard into God’s eyes. I want veils to part, to at least feel some angelic presence. I want to glimpse, recognize Allah, Brahma, Shekinah. I see only scared black eyes.

The last time I see God, I sit with him and his neighbor Lil at Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard near the 101 Freeway. God has gained weight, his stomach a perfect half basketball, his chin a round knob. With a cigarette-loaded finger, Lil adjusts leopard print horn-rimmed glasses. The two hack away as they sip on Bloody Marys.

I wonder why I’ve kept tabs on God for so long, and what I’m trying to get. The certain knowledge that we’re all trying to wake up, know we’re God the dreamer thrashing through our wild dream lives? I look at God; the thin skin on his temples shows an atlas of veins. I want someone else to have the job, someone who works out and maybe runs 15 miles a week. Life never has a way of turning out how you expect. You finally meet God and this is what you get. I want to lay into God, grab him by the collar and make him teach me how to see God everywhere, even in the eccentric sitting before me. Even behind those scared black eyes. Even in myself.

I start to think that maybe God, the Perfect One who lives in the state known as heaven, is not the goal, the prize to be won at the end of all of this. He is the odd, divine treasure to be known in the midst of all this. He is as loving and frightened as we are. He is a middle-aged man on disability sitting in a Naugahyde banquette in a Denny’s lounge, chain-smoking his way through a patchwork philosophy, doing the best he can. That is as far as I get. When I look at God and Lil again, they tilt their heads and smile at me as if I’ve been away for a very long time.