Rami’s Workshop

Rami’s running one of his workshops in the Loft room this evening. He arrived two and a half hours early at 3.30pm laden with bags of crystals, biscuits, sandwiches, water…it’s going to be a long night.

He’s planned everything meticulously down to the minute but of course these plans didn’t account for reality. He’s parked on a double yellow line so after dropping his bags off he has to go and find a parking spot to leave his tank-like SUV for the rest of the evening. I do him a favour and lug his bags up to the room for him while he’s gone.

At 3.50pm Rami returns sweating and anxious, twenty minutes behind schedule. He heads straight upstairs to begin setting up. He puts out a dozen chairs even though only four people have signed up for the workshop, then decides he also needs extra tables because eight isn’t enough. I don’t even ask what he needs so many tables for. I’ve seen his crystal collection. I’ve also seen him getting hopelessly confused trying to remember which crystal goes in which velvet bag, when it’s time to put them away again. But that was after one of his workshops, right now we’re still in the before. But I get it. He’s creating a setting. He needs a setting. He’s planning on taking people through the Portal of Eridanus tonight. You don’t just do something like that on the fly. It takes planning. It takes thought.

“So if you had to wear a badge,” I asked him the other day, “that warned people of something they needed to be wary of about you, what would it say?”

I’d been reading Jasper Fforde’s comic dystopia Shades of Grey and this was something required of certain characters in the novel. It struck me as a brilliant conceit. Rami eventually decided that he was a planner, which he then reframed in more negative terms but only because I made him.

“I’m a ponderer,” he said and I laughed out loud.

“That’s perfect,” I told him. “You are. You are definitely a ponderer.”

“But I don’t see that as a negative,” he protested.

“No. Neither do I. But someone who’s spontaneous would.”

“I don’t trust spontaneous people,” he said earnestly, “these people who act without thinking…”

At 4pm Rami’s new helper Emily arrives. Rami needs a helper. He can’t do what he does alone. He completely relies on the aid of someone attentive to his audience’s physical needs while he focusses in on the spiritual. He has the foresight to provide refreshments but he couldn’t open a packet of biscuits once he gets going. Emily is the cheerful wife of Tom who runs a support group at the centre for people who experience crippling, untreatable pain. Tom is very down to earth so I was surprised to discover Emily was into Rami’s sort of thing, but she is, in a breezy, light-hearted sort of way. They’ve still got a couple of hours before anyone is due to arrive so after showing them how to work the urn and the air-conditioning I leave them to it.

I’m downstairs in the office at 6pm when the first of the participants appears; an apprehensive young woman in her late twenties, wondering if she’s in the right place.

“Is this where…”

“Rami’s workshop?” I suggest.

“My friend told me about it. This woman doing some kind of reading or meditation kind of thing?”

“Rami’s workshop?”

She checks the message on her phone.

“Yeah. Rami.”

“Rami’s not a woman.”

“Oh.”

“But there’s a woman with him.”

That didn’t come out right. I was trying to be reassuring. That just sounded creepy.

“Has anyone else turned up?”

“Not yet.”

“Right. I’m just going to wait for my friend…”

She starts anxiously texting her friend who soon arrives, another woman, a little older, fizzing with enthusiasm and wanting to get in to the workshop as soon as possible. She whisks her worried friend upstairs.

I don’t see anyone else arrive and don’t go to check on them for another three and half hours by which time all the other groups have left the building and it’s time to close the centre. By prior arrangement I’m going to leave a spare set of keys with Rami and he will lock up after himself when he’s done. Or more likely Emily will. Rami’s pretty spaced out at the end of his workshops. He gave me a lift home after one once and he was on another planet. He really shouldn’t have been in command of a vehicle. He gave me a rose as a memento.

I take a peek through the window to the Loft room to see where he’s at. The last time I did this I discovered Rami sitting in the centre of the room, surrounded by all his crystals, looking stoned out of his mind as a couple slow danced to dinner jazz, some of the other participants were sat talking to each other, and a woman in the corner of the room was perched on the edge of her chair looking terrified, way out of her depth and far removed from her comfort zone. This was the night he gave me a lift home afterwards. Never again. Tonight when I take a look into the room not a lot seems to be happening. Rami is sat in his crystal wonderland as usual, fiddling with a CD player, casually perusing his notes, taking a leisurely look around the room. I change my angle so I can see the participants and all five of them, including Emily, are sitting in chairs, facing Rami, with their eyes closed. One or two look like they might be asleep. I quietly open the door a crack and hear Rami say – the first thing he’s said in thirty seconds of me watching him –

“And you can feel your body…”

Then another long pause. He finally glances over in my direction, sees me and raises his eyebrows. I indicate to him that I’m leaving now and locking him in. He smiles beneficently. The master at work.

Whatever he’s doing in there, people seem to like it. At least he’s not running a racket like the Californian guy he follows who runs weekend seminars in four-star hotels for thousands of dollars. This is one man in a room with five other lost souls who, for a time, are maybe not feeling quite so lost. Or at least are feeling more at peace with their lostness. Or sleeping. Or slow dancing to dinner jazz. And if it takes an inordinate amount of time and planning to get people through the Portal of Eridanus to find that place, well then I guess that’s how the cosmos works. Rami genuinely believes that what he’s sharing with people is a gift. He gives most of the money he makes back to us for the cost of hiring the room. He’s walking away with nothing really, apart from feeling like he’s helped a few people further along the path to…I don’t know…wherever that path goes. I have sat and listened to him explain to me the interdimensional origins of fairies. I couldn’t relate it back to you. I did my best to follow along but it was quite complicated.

Rami has a sing-song phrase that he often uses instead of simply saying goodbye. Initially I found it a bit New Age and cheesy. Now I rather like it.

“Happy days.”

I assume that’s the right spelling.