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I was walking through a crowd, West on 50^th Street in New York City, when I saw a sign for a strip club. I assumed “Bare Elegance” was a strip club because there’s one near LAX with the same name. It had been a favorite destination of a friend of mine, who, on that afternoon, had been dead two years of a heroin overdose.

I’m not a guy who enjoys strip clubs. Spectator sports frustrate me. Joe would take me just to watch me squirm. When I met him I’d recently given up drinking and Joe was helping me through that devastation, but sometimes he had to torture me too. Torturing me was often how he helped me through.

Thinking about Joe, I felt a little better. A real wise-ass, he would have kidded me into a good mood by suggesting that we immediately go upstairs. He took me to places like Bare Elegance, I think, to explode my painful self-importance. He taught me that what I thought was sacred was usually corrupt and what I thought was corrupt was usually fun. I never acquired a taste for strip clubs, but I no longer tell myself that I’m a good man just because I stay out of them.

Before I tell you what happened to me on 50^th Street, I have to tell you more about Joe. A tax accountant with an armed robbery conviction in his past, Joe was a weird combination of Republican and gangster. If you can imagine James Cagney with a Masters degree in Taxation, you get the idea. He had the kind of inflection that can only be obtained at a Catholic High School in New York City. His hair was bright red and his face was unmistakably Irish. Hanging around him, you could feel the criminal bad guy junkie, but you could also feel the solid citizen who hadn’t taken drugs in a long time. Joe used to tell me that he went to bed one night a dangerous criminal and he woke up Ward Cleaver.

I first started praying because Joe suggested it. Something good had happened to him, and I wanted some of that action. He insisted that my approach to God didn’t have to be fancy, that I didn’t even have to believe in God for it to work. My first prayers were the most powerful prayers of my life because, in some weird way, they were the most faithful. I had faith in Joe. I said something like “God, I don’t believe in you, but I’m in a lot of pain, and Joe said this would help.”

It did help. I didn’t feel so awfully alone. It helped so much that I kept doing it. I talked to God the way I would talk to a friend. For years, my best prayer was, “Look, I’ve fucked this up. Can you help me?” Another one that always did the job was, “Listen, I think you want me to do this, and if you do, I need your help. If you don’t want me to do this, I need to know what you want me to do.” Not exactly John Donne, but it worked.

Joe used to say that my solutions were worse than my problems. He said that life was “an inside job.” I sat in Joe’s office telling sad stories about what a mess I’d made of my life, and he would say, “Well, maybe this is as good as it will ever get.” When this didn’t send me screaming from the room, it reminded me to start from where I was. If I left town – a thought I had about every twenty seconds – I’d be waiting for myself at the next location.

Maybe my life was better than it had ever been, right now, and I was just too big a knucklehead to notice?

Maybe the most unlikely thing that could happen had already happened: that I was just okay, sitting in a chair in Joe’s office on a pleasant Fall day in the middle of my life.

When Joe died of a heroin overdose, eight years after I met him, the light went out of my life. I lost weight, I couldn’t sleep – I rehearsed what I liked about life, and I couldn’t find much. I still prayed, but I wasn’t taking any comfort in it. I missed my friend, and I couldn’t avoid the worst question: how could the man who taught me so much have died this way? He hadn’t had a drink or a drug for a decade when he picked up again.

Fortunately, I remembered something else that Joe had taught me – that helping people was a kind of prayer, that putting someone else’s needs ahead of my own was a way to empty my mind so that God could fill it. “When all else fails,” Joe used to say, “find someone who’s in worse shape than you are.”

I did this. And one day, while I listened to a man tell me his own sad story – I remember where I was standing, but not who was speaking – I realized that Joe was in a good place, that I was in a good place, that everyone I knew was in a good place. I understood this as certainly as I understood that wood was solid and water was wet. I had what William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, called “a passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration.” In a moment, I went from being the most depressed person I knew to the happiest. The world was luminous with love.

I experienced a fearlessness and joy that others could see. Once, in a line for Mexican takeout, I was smiling with such intensity that a pretty woman asked me why I was so happy. “Because God loves me,” I said. An atheist herself, she still gave me her phone number.

But it didn’t last forever. Eventually I forgot. And even when I did remember, it wasn’t with the clarity of the experience itself.

That’s how it is with me and spiritual insight. It starts like the best movie you’ve ever seen – THX sound system, plush seats, unflawed screen, thrilling special effects – and then it becomes pretty good television and then eventually, inexorably, heartbreakingly, it becomes “Yeah, I watched that show once.”

I think that’s what happened to Joe. I think he forgot. And he wasn’t able to remind himself. Heroin had been waiting a long time to fill the vacuum. What Joe himself used to call “that God-sized hole.”

And so, when I was walking West on Fiftieth Street, hoping that I could catch a movie on the Westside and stop my head for a while, I was having a conversation with myself about whether I was “good enough” to get the things I wanted from my life. A conversation that wouldn’t have happened in that line for Mexican takeout. I’d done something stupid the night before with someone I didn’t care about – you can imagine – and I’d started to tell myself a story about what that meant. I was thinking maybe God was reconsidering our relationship.

Joe had been one of the people who helped me to understand that God had to be bigger than that. A God who cared so much about my sins was too much like me to be of any real use. Still, some sick part of me loves that place where I am sinful and small and don’t merit His attention. I think that’s because to be apart from God is a step closer to pretending to be God myself.

Looking up at the sign for the strip club, relaxing a bit into the memory of my good friend, a voice began to fill my head. I recognized it as the voice of God because … well, I just knew. The Voice said, “The question is not whether you’re going to get what you want. You will get what you want. The question is whether you’re going to serve me or serve yourself.”

I knew exactly what He was talking about. I’d been selfish the night before, and that’s why I was suffering. God was promising me that I would continue to feel bad so long as I lived for myself. And it wasn’t Him that would be doing the punishing – it would be me. The laws of the universe – another way of describing God – were set up so the punishment was built-in. Even answered prayers would become a curse so long as my motive was to take rather than give.

Wow.

I wish I could tell you this was the end of the story, how I walked from that moment, like Paul picking himself up from the road to Damascus, into a life of faith. Instead, I cheered up and went to the movies and didn’t think about God again until I was halfway home. When I did remember, I felt like I was hearing news from another life.

Since that day, I have forgotten and remembered and forgotten and remembered so many times. I think there’s something useful in the struggle to remind myself. It’s the reason we’re not alone on this planet. “The hardest part is not admitting that you need God,” Joe used to say. “The hardest part is admitting that you need bozos like me.”

The Catholics have a concept called “The Communion of The Saints.” They believe – more or less – that all souls, living and dead, are bound to each other in God. That’s why, they say, it’s possible to pray for the dead and the dead to pray for us. I like that. I believe that my message from God was a gift from my friend Joe, that he’s in some kind of heaven right now, putting in a good word for bozos like me.