It's All In the Playing (37 page)

One thing was certain. Everyone was beginning to view life and its working conditions through the eyes of perception rather than evaluating it all as objective fact and reality. As a result, they were coming to the understanding that they were responsible for how they experienced the location. We were not victims of the location we saw; we were victims of the way we saw the location.

I was in for a learning process of my own on that score. It had to do with the abuse of power. As the production department brought our business to a close, the question of bonuses came up. I heard that ABC would not give Esther a bonus, because “she had not been a good influence on me.” Irately I demanded to see the Brass and Brass Number One showed up. We happened to meet in the bar, with surrounding crew members well within earshot, when I asked, in no uncertain terms, what the hell this was all about.
Why
wasn’t Esther getting a bonus?

“Because she brought that voodoo expert to your trailer and you got so interested you held up production because you wouldn’t come out.”

This was news to me. I remembered being so careful to report as soon as they called me for each setup.

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know where you got that. I was out of that trailer so fast just
because
I didn’t want to be accused of this.”

“That’s not what the production sheet says, and my job is to go by
it,”
he answered.

“Then fuck the production sheet—it’s
wrong!”
I shouted. “And besides, even if I
had
held up production—which I didn’t—I was having a ceremony that I believe ultimately helped us alter the weather in Machu Picchu.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And that ceremony made you sick.”

“So
what?”
I said. “What the hell difference does it make to
you?
We got the sun and we got the shot, didn’t we? What do you care how we made it happen or how I was feeling?”

He looked at me with a baffled expression. Maybe he really did care. I realized then that we weren’t talking about production problems. We were talking about spiritualism, and he was using my sickness and supposed tardiness to attack something that looked as though it might have been a metaphysical “miracle” that he found difficult to accept.

I hated the subterfuge. Why couldn’t he come right out and say that it was voodoo black magic bullshit to him? Angry all over again I rushed on to attack further, berating his intelligence, his honesty with himself, dragging up the mess about not feeding the Peruvian crew, accusing him of abusing his power—and finally stopping dead in my tracks, appalled that I was acting out what I felt he was doing. Shaken both by my anger and by the unpleasant discovery about myself, but still unwilling to admit to it, I stood up, said something like, “I can’t deal with this,” and stalked out. I didn’t have the guts to apologize.

Once again I had failed myself, had reacted with strongly expressed negativism to a situation which might have been remedied if handled with reason and understanding. If I had had the sense to step back and gain some perspective on the role I was playing in the conflict
of interests I might have been able to take the sting out of my own anger.

   When I realized what was really going on, I found myself attracting people to me during the last days of filming who hadn’t connected to me before because I wasn’t ready for them. I was so busy playing out the drama of emotional conflict that I hadn’t taken the time.

Gerry never left me. He seemed to be hovering over me, watching and curiously listening to what was transpiring in my life. On an earth plane level he would have pooh-poohed what was happening. “Aberrations of imagination,” he would have said. But now—who knew?—perhaps he could not only afford to be open-minded, but found it necessary if he was to go on to complete his own higher understanding.

Meantime, there were aspects of higher understanding that
I
intended to explore.

Chapter 23

   M
r. Anton Ponce de Leon is a cultural anthropologist in charge of investigating UFO sightings in Cuzco. He is a gentle, unassuming man of kind patience yet rigorous curiosity. Since so many sightings had been reported, he was a busy man.

“I never really understood any of the reports I received,” he said, “until I had an experience myself.”

Anton then described a sighting he’d had near a lagoon in the mountains outside of Cuzco.

He said he was driving home late one night, through the mountain pass, when he noticed a string of lights hovering above the usually quiet lagoon. He got out of the car to observe more closely. All he could hear were the frogs in the water. Otherwise, silence. Then suddenly the string of lights began to move, without sound, until the two ends linked up with each other, forming a circle. He said he couldn’t see whether the lights were from craft or not. Then from the opposite direction he saw another light hanging over the city of Cuzco. It began to move toward the circle of lights above the lagoon, becoming larger and larger until it hovered above them.
Now, lit from underneath, he could see it was a giant craft. He watched as it linked up with the lights over the lagoon.

“It looked as though the lights were supplying energy to the craft,” said Anton. “I watched for three and a half hours, until I was too cold.”

“What was it?” I asked.

He looked at me, not certain whether to go on.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That was my experience. After that, I no longer called anyone else crazy for what they reported. And those who call me crazy now will stop after they have their own experience.”

Anton had not read
Out on a Limb
and was not aware of the story we were filming. He had simply been told that I was interested in extraterrestrial activity. We took a long walk together after shooting one day and I attempted to make him feel comfortable in sharing more of his experiences.

He told me he had met a woman who had changed his life with her philosophy and spiritual knowledge. I didn’t think much of it at first, but then I realized he might be describing someone I had very likely heard of before.

“What did she talk about?” I asked.

Anton was reluctant to be very specific except to say that she discussed the state of the world with him, how negative thinking was ruining human relationships, and how a deep internal spiritual belief in the God within each of us was what would be the salvation of mankind, particularly in the face of nuclear disaster. She discussed something he described as “spiritual technology,” outlining energy patterns and electromagnetic vibrational frequencies emanating from a person who is peaceful as opposed to the kind of energy coming from a conflicted and tortured individual. She said inner peace was the most valued state of being in the cosmos.

“Well, who was she?” I asked.

He shrugged. “She only had one name.”

He said nothing more.

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“She was small, with dark hair and dark almond-shaped eyes, not really Oriental. I’ve never seen eyes like hers. She was so beautiful. She seemed to look through to my soul, and when she moved she was floating almost.”

“Where was she from?” I asked.

Anton brushed lint from his coat and shrugged again.

“Let me tell you something,” I said.

I then proceeded to describe Mayan, the extraterrestrial character in
Out on a Limb,
with whom David claimed to have had contact.

“She was just as you described and her name was Mayan,” I finished.

Anton’s eyes lit up like diamonds.

“That was the name of the woman I met. And she had a ‘commander’ who worked with her. I met him, too.”

I remembered David describing the commander of the craft he had claimed to go on. He said the individual looked human except that he was small, with ears very close to his head, and had no eyelashes or eyelids.

“What did her ‘commander’ look like?” I asked Anton.

“He was very small, maybe five feet tall. He looked very human as we do, except that his eyes had no lids on the top. His ears were round and flush to his head and his eyes had no lashes either.”

It was rich material for a cosmic comic strip, no doubt about that. But it wasn’t a cartoon. It was really happening. I had not included David’s space ride in my book because my editors had said no one would believe it. Therefore I hadn’t included any of the descriptions that Anton had just duplicated. So he couldn’t have gotten any of it from my book.

“So, Anton,” I said. “Are we saying that both you
and David have had contact with an extraterrestrial female who imparted knowledge to you that is not part of our education here on Earth?”

Anton nodded. “I believe that is what we are saying, yes. There is a gentleman in Lima, a Yugoslav—he has also had contact and has written several books on the subject. He has been aboard the crafts. I will give you his address and number and when you finish here you can contact him in Lima.”

Anton Ponce de Leon and I walked for many hours together, discussing the implications of potential extraterrestrial presence on our Earth.

He told me of the legend in Cuzco handed down through generations. An extraterrestrial was supposed to have landed outside the ancient city thousands of years ago. He stayed to teach the people of Cuzco art, science, government, and self-expression. An ageless stone monument to his being still stands.

When Anton and I said goodbye I knew it was only the beginning of our separate investigations.

That night Esther took me to Benito’s house. I wanted to tell him about our manifested weather in Peru. I found him in a corrugated tin hut with dirt floors, one electric light bulb, and dogs, cats, chickens, and fleas everywhere. It was nighttime and he was so congested with phlegm and pleurisy he couldn’t sleep. As I walked to his bed with my autographed picture and a new wool sweater for him wrapped around a bunch of money, I saw that he was interested only in the bouquet of wild-flowers I was holding. With painful difficulty he sat up in bed, hardly able to draw a breath, and one by one he touched and said a prayer over each flower.

He lay back down in his bed, covered with dirty blankets, wearing a shirt and a maroon vest-sweater with a pattern of white llamas knitted into it.

I had brought the company doctor with me. He sat beside Benito on the bed, no doubt wondering if he, like
the rest of us, would pick up the fleas that abounded freely in the hut. The doctor listened to Benito’s heart and lungs, felt his abdomen, and so on.

“Emphysema, possible TB, enlarged heart, possible pneumonia, edema,” said the doctor. “He’s over eighty and is in need of help. I’ll arrange for a vehicle to pick him up and take him to the hospital for X-rays and treatment.”

I looked around the hut. Old cooking pots hung from nails embedded in the mud walls, and there on an orange crate was Benito’s suit and vest with the brown slouch hat. I looked back at Benito.

What did this mean? The man who gave me the secrets to changing the weather was not able to nourish his own body because of his poverty? Or was it poverty? Could it not also have been lack of education? Benito didn’t understand about the body’s need for protein, the issue of cleanliness was not part of his education, and as he lay sick he still continued to devote himself to prayers.

Oh, Gerry, I thought. Couldn’t it have been his spiritual faith that sustained him through the comfortless pain of his life? Couldn’t it have lessened the burden? Wouldn’t he have been dead long ago had he not been such a master of unseen powers? I could feel Gerry there with me. Contradictions tumbled in my head.

I leaned down and touched Benito’s shoulder. “Thank you for all you’ve done for us,” I said. “You made it possible for us to get the shots at Machu Picchu.”

He looked up at me, regarding my thanks as irrelevant and unnecessary. He handed me the bouquet of wildflowers.

“Give these to my wife,” he said. “And tell her to make an offering to God.”

I left his bedside, feeling Gerry accompany me. I wanted to touch him over my shoulder and allude to the fact that the polarity dance between spirituality and materialism was continuing.

*   *   *

   Feeling Gerry with me every moment, I headed into the scene where John (David) tells me (Shirley) about Mayan. We had gotten the master shot of the scene a week earlier. The weather had prevented us from going further. To come in for coverage now, after establishing the emotional mood seven days before, would not be easy.

So once more the two of us stood by the jeep, memorized our marks, and rehearsed so that we would match both the moves and the emotion we had established a week earlier. Even the weather was identical to the master shot: windy, misty, ethereal—a joyous painting.

The cameras rolled—three of them to save time. John began his long monologue—not easy under any circumstances. Everything went fine, for a while. Then the script girl fell down and wrenched her knee, two camera batteries went dead, and a squall sprang up. It seemed as though some direct authority was letting us know we were not to shoot the scene the way it was going. John kicked the mud. I patted him on the shoulder, muttering something like “Everything happens for the purposeful good,” and went to my trailer so I wouldn’t get the wardrobe wet. I sat down in front of my mirror, the rain beating on the roof, to check my makeup. Something didn’t look right. I leaned forward. As I looked at myself closely, I realized I had forgotten to put my earrings back in my ears after lunch and we would have had a colossal mismatch when we came in for the close-ups. Only we wouldn’t have noticed until we were back in America!

I went to my purse, extracted the earrings, and put them on. Immediately the squall stopped. The rain lifted, and as I peered out the window the ethereal mist returned. Within moments one of the assistants knocked on my door and said they were ready for me.

I wanted to say: “Are you ready for ‘why’?”

As I walked back to the set, I looked up and said to an invisible Gerry: “Are you watching all of this?”