From arcade to shrine room

by Walter Logue

Walter Logue, circa 1977

I was raised from the age of six (1966) in Boulder, Colorado in a mostly Southern Baptist family environment. My father had actually been a minister for a short while, mostly standing in when the main minister was not present. Around the house there was quite a bit of angst in discussing religion, which helped to stifle me into silence regarding religious topics at a pretty young age. By the time I was eighteen, I had been a ward of the State for five years. I had been in every jail and detention home in Boulder County, and had a certain notoriety amongst the local police department.

In early 1978, I had just finished serving a three-month jail sentence in the new Boulder County Jail at the mouth of the Boulder Canyon. During this time I had a job way out on the east side of town where I worked from 4 PM to 2 AM, four days a week on work release. Getting out of work at 2 AM meant there were no buses, no hitchhiking, and no other way to present myself back at the jail other than to walk the several miles to turn myself in, again and again.

This marked a very dark period in my life. I had never felt so worthless and miserable. During this time I remember walking home one morning, along Arapahoe Avenue, and feeling extremely suicidal. Another one of my dear friends had committed suicide at the end of November and I was walking miles and miles every morning just to look forward to another strip search, and another day in my own private hell realm.

Having all of that time to walk alone with this crazy mind, left me to contemplate my life for the first time. That same morning, there was a beautiful Colorado snowstorm. The fresh new snow, this raw broken heart, and the futility of my life to that point, led me to a heart wrenching breakdown where I knew that my life was a dead end, and that I desperately needed a teacher. I needed someone to talk WITH. I had plenty of people talking AT me and around me, but it seemed to me that I had never been actually included in the conversations.

I remember writing in the snow, with the tears streaming down my face:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son...

I did not feel that I was actually communicating with some creator being. It felt more like I was merely confessing my despair so that the heavens and the earth could know that I was at the end of my rope. I also remember crying out to everything. I was crying for someone who could see my heart inside all this anger, someone who could still find the time and space to communicate with this mortally confused being.

For all of the struggles of life to that point, I feel now that I was probably the luckiest teenager on the planet. I had been homeless, I was a drug dealer, and I had lost several friends to suicide. I could easily have been locked up in any one of the available scenarios of the day, or even dead. Instead I had the supreme good fortune that the Buddha was working right next door to my haunts!! Out of the hundreds of arcades in hundreds of small towns all over America, I hung out in the one across the street from Trungpa Rinpoche's main center in the US. Of course that hundred feet from arcade to shrine room might as well have been a thousand miles. This shy teenager would never have wandered in to any such place without someone's help. It was the dharma brats—my friends (and angels) from the arcade—who introduced me to the fact that there was a buddhist place right over there. My first pointing out instructions?

One day, not long after that time in jail, I walked across the street and asked the woman at the desk for meditation instruction. She introduced me to Pat Bandak. Pat showed me how to meditate and told me there would be a talk that evening, and I could come if I wanted. So I did.

That evening I cut short my nightly vigil at the arcade and poked my head inside the door at 1111 Pearl. The stairs were almost full of people sitting and listening to a scratchy sounding microphoned speaker, whom I later learned was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I went to the top of the stairs to see if I could catch a glimpse of the speaker but there were too many people crowded into that hall and thus I surrendered to listening in the hallway. I cannot recall the topic. I remember none of the details other than the fact that there were several pretty women and some obvious hippy types amongst the crowd. I do remember feeling like it was okay that I was there, it was also okay that I was a confused person, and equally okay that I was so sad in life. For whatever it is worth, it was the first time I can ever remember feeling that way. It was like someone had lifted all of the guilt and shame from my shoulders. This was new and delightful. I cried myself to sleep that night with tears of wonder and joy—the first time in my life I had ever experienced tears of joy.

Shortly thereafter, a wild and seemingly carefree German gentleman named Berndt Ladendorff opened the Milky Way Arcade down the street, one block from the current Shambhala Center. I applied and got the job as co-manager. Berndt furthered my introduction to dharma by making it mandatory that I do a weekthun every year for as long as I worked at the arcade. I do not recall whether I actually recognized ANY breathing going on during my first weekthun. I do remember crying and laughing interchangeably. I also remember being hook, line and sinker in love with the practice and the kindness of a man who could bring such a space of freedom into my life.