In the car on the way to dropping Laura off, I revealed the dream to her and what I had tried to do to keep it from becoming a reality, and she just smiled and said, “God is wonderful.” I kissed Laura in her driveway and watched her go in, and then drove off.
During my drive home my thoughts were only about the dream and the events that followed it. A couple of weeks later Laura and I went to a Bible study at a pastor’s house and I brought David along with me. Once at the Bible study the pastor began to give divine messages concerning our lives in the future, and she looked at Laura and said something to the effect that she would be someone of influence, and then she looked at me and said that I would be likened unto Moses. Everyone almost stopped breathing for a moment and looked at me; Laura nudged me in my side with her elbow and said, “Wow.”
The pastor told David he would be an evangelist, and David said there was no way that would happen because he had other plans for his life, and being an evangelist one not one of them.
A few weeks later Laura got an invitation to try out for the Women’s Olympic basketball team. She began to practice hard at the gym, and she and I would play some pickup games a couple times a week. When the tryouts came, Laura flew to Colorado very excited. Her heart was set on making that team and we were all behind her, but she fell short and returned home to Los Angeles very sad.
A few months later Laura and I had a minor disagreement inside the USC basketball gym, after which I walked away and told her the relationship was over. She never called me and I never called her. To my surprise, it really was over. I then made plans to move out of Reverend Jones’ place, I really needed privacy and found a little place over in East LA above a church. I still couldn’t shake the dream and the Long Beach Arena event; all I knew was that there was a change inside of me and it felt good. My major goal was to immerse myself fully into my acting and hopefully get a break. It was time to move on, time to knock down the doors of Hollywood. After all, this was the reason I came west and I had to focus. Now I had to become a star.
The little room above the church was infested with roaches. The pastor of the church made it a point with me that it was important that I attend church downstairs because after all, this was one of the reasons she let me have the room. It seemed to me back then that she was running some kind of cult church because the people who stayed there in the rooms above the church were almost worshiping her in a way. I knew how we were supposed look up to pastors and all that, but sometimes I would go downstairs with my friend Larry who also lived in one of the rooms and when we visited her in her little house, some of her church members would be washing her feet, combing her hair, dressing her, cooking for her, and so on.
I just found it kind of strange that all of this was going on. There were a lot of broken families living in some of those rooms. It was right about the same time that Jim Jones killed all those people from his church in Guyana. Some of the people in this church had lost family members, and I would see these people sitting around at the pastor’s feet in her house, never smiling, never really looking anyone in the face. Most of the time they kept their heads down to the floor as they sat around the pastor. I asked my friend Larry one night when we were downstairs visiting the pastor what was wrong with these people who always sit at the pastor’s feet and never smile. I figured in my mind that if they were Christians and they knew the Lord then they should smile a little sometimes. Larry finally pulled me to the side one evening and told me that these were relatives of some of the people who got killed with Jim Jones down in Guyana. It became very clear to me then; these people were in mourning for their loved ones. At that point, I did feel a little guilty for questioning the church, the pastor, and the people who hung out around there. This was the first time in my life that I was finding God and the church on my own without my mother, so all the things that were going on around me, as far as the church was concerned, were new territory. But I had just had my own in counter with God, and I needed to be sure this place really had God in it. Although I was a young Christian, I still knew the stories of how people in the church took their eyes off of God and began to focus on the pastor and got lost. It can happen before you know it.
A few days later Larry and I got into a big fight over his ex-girlfriend Rachel; they had broken up at the church and she asked me to give her and her kids a ride home. This didn’t sit well with Larry, and Rachel asked me to stay over for a while and have some dinner. It had already gotten dark outside, and as we were sitting at the table talking, she heard a noise outside of the window near the dining room.
She jumped up and said, “Oh my God, it’s Larry spying on me!” She was afraid of him and felt he would do something to hurt her. I started to get concerned myself because I knew he was really in love with her and I didn’t want him to think I was trying to make a move on her. I really liked her kids, and I thought we were all friends, but after hearing him outside the window and seeing the fear on her face, I started to feel a little out of place.
The next thing we heard was a knock on the door. Rachel was afraid to open it, so I went to the door and slowly looked out, and sure enough it was Larry looking me dead cold in the eyes like I had committed a cardinal sin by being in the house without him. He pushed me out of the way and charged directly towards Rachel. Her kids got scared as he argued with her, asking her why she had me sitting at her table. He then turned to me and told me that I was trying to take his woman. I simply turned towards the door and walked out and got into my sky-blue 1968 Chrysler New Yorker and drove off into the East LA night.
Later that night, Larry knocked on my door. I asked who it was and nobody answered. I got my pistol from under my bed and asked again who it was. This time I heard Larry’s voice saying, “Me, Larry.”
I put the pistol to my side and opened the door ever so slightly with the door chain still attached.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He just told me that I was in the wrong for hanging around his girl and that he knows I was trying to get her. He was in no mood to hear what I had to say. And just as quick as he knocked on my door, he walked away.
The next morning I got up and went down stairs and one of the church girls outside told me that Larry was moving out that day. I saw Larry hop into a strange car with his clothing and drive off. He looked back at me from the rear window as I came down the sidewalk in front of the church. He didn’t wave or anything, just turned back around, and that was it.
I felt sorry for Larry; he had known my big brother Willie Jr. back in Florida and had become a friend of mine when I met him in drama school. It just seemed shallow that he would let this thing with Rachel come between us, but what could I do? Back in Florida, I knew his mom, his sisters, his brother, and his stepfather, but he let a girl come between us. I guess stranger things happen, don’t they?
At that moment I decided to start writing a script that I always wanted to write. It would be a script that I would direct and star in, and over the next twenty days, I only knocked out some ten pages. I titled it Young Star, a story about a young kid who has dreams about going to Hollywood and becoming a big star.
The writer’s block didn’t go away, so I put the script down until I could get my flow going again. In the meantime, I hooked back up with my first girl in California: Betty. She would come over and hang out and sometimes stay the night, and during a conversation one night Betty asked me if I would like to go back to Florida with her.I told her that Florida was my second home and that I was starting to miss it, and yes, I was thinking just today that I would like to go back and see my friends and family. Betty said, “Well, let’s go!”
I was having a hard time finding a good job and getting acting work in Los Angeles, and she wasn’t getting along with her family, so going back to Florida seemed like the right idea at the right time. The next day, I made arrangements to sell my New Yorker at bottom price, the dealer