Walking Through Walls (35 page)

Once I returned to school, my father and I would talk maybe once every three months on the phone. I wrote frequent letters and received occasional replies. Our conversations and correspondence concerned mostly art or which of the many metaphysical books on color healing, magic, kundalini, or orgone theory I had read. Our connection remained our ongoing discussions of the supernatural. Possibly our emotional distance was due not only to the physical distance but also to the natural process of me growing up and being on my own. Or maybe Ruth monopolized all of my father's emotions, and there was nothing left for me. On the surface, we were no longer so intimately involved in each other's lives. I later learned that Pop's distance was probably due to the difficulties he was experiencing with Ruth.

According to written psychic messages from my father's various spirit guides, things were not going well for the couple. There were frequent disagreements, which were compounded by Ruth's manipulative and erratic behavior. What was extremely odd about these particular messages were the repeated scoldings that my father would receive from the spirits. Yet they always excused Ruth's violent outbursts as a normal reaction to my father's uncaring coldness. Until Ruth appeared, the spirits had always been very gentle and protective of my father. If they chastised him, it was only for not working hard enough or seeing enough patients, but never for not being understanding. I came across these documents after my father's death. In reading them, I realized that something strange had occurred in his relationship with his longtime spirit guides. I couldn't quite understand it, but something had definitely changed.

The following message from Arthur was odd in both its tone and choice of words. It seemed curt and lacking in Arthur's usual literacy:

“Your upsetment is a very strong reaction, knowing as you do that Ruth is hardly responsible for her outburst. It is about time that you were able to realize it. Ruth could absolutely not be capable in her right mind of doing the things she does when negative forces suggest the action. Please stop and think before you get angry, so that both of you don't get upset. It won't be much longer now when everything will be smoothed over. Hold on till then, and all will be well, and our problems will have been resolved.”

Upsetment?
When he was alive, Arthur Ford was an extraordinarily articulate and erudite gentleman. I doubt that death erased any of his verbal skills. Increasingly, messages from Arthur and Chander Sen took on an aggressive and condescending character that I had never seen before.

On another occasion, Arthur castigated my father once again: “Lew, you are being stubborn again. It does not take much to irritate Ruth, so why invite trouble? You are both honed to a sharp edge; just ease back and don't throw darts. Please believe me, I know what I am saying. Your friend, Arthur.” As a result of these spirit messages, my father began to question himself and started searching for various ways to become softer, gentler, and more loving toward Ruth. However, whatever he did was never enough. There was always another unexpected outburst from her that was quickly followed by a stern reprimand from his spirit guides.

Without telling me, my father and the divine Miss Ruth quietly divorced. Also without telling me, he then remarried Ruth three months later. Then, eight months later, the happy couple divorced again. This time Ruth sailed into the sunset with a boat captain she met and a chunk of alimony payments from my father. The first time Ruth married my father was for money. The second time Ruth married my father was for more money. Most of the money that he had carefully saved to continue his healing work and research departed with Ruth to fund her next psychotic adventure.

Ruth was an anomaly, a black hole, a blip in the quantum theory of space-time continuum. For whatever reason, the spirits conjured up this witch and put her directly in my father's focus. I can only imagine that through Ruth he had experienced an entire life cycle of emotions—love, courtship, marriage, divorce, longing, marriage, divorce, and betrayal—in the space of less than twenty-four months. At this stage in my father's life, time was precious. This was his last chance to live the life of an average mortal. He had work to do and not long to do it. Now that this compressed roller-coaster ride was over, it was time to get down to the serious business of making miracles in a way that had never been done before and no one could have ever imagined.

Throughout my adult life, Ruth's relationship with my father remained one of those unsolved mysteries that happen to all of us. None of us can ever really know what generates or extinguishes that special spark between two people. We are all outsiders when it comes to other people's relationships. For me this was one of the only incidents in my father's life where I could not comprehend how both he and his spirit guides had allowed Ruth to enter his life and create the damage that she did. Once my initial dislike of her had subsided, I began to simply accept this aberration in my father as a curious flaw in an otherwise remarkable man.

After I finished the first draft of this book, I was reviewing some of my father's papers, and I came across a stack of pages ripped out of a steno notebook. They had been stuffed in the back of a spiral notebook and were held together by a rusted paper clip that included a small piece of paper marked “Imposters.” I had no idea what this meant and began looking through the messages. Each page had a red line drawn through it as if it were to be deleted. These messages from the spirits detailed the psychic operation that Ruth had gone through, as well as messages about her depression and irrational behavior. Much of the material I was familiar with—the waiting, the pain, the promises of great psychic powers. As before, the messages seemed odd in their hostile tone as they provided questionable explanations for an array of puzzling events.

One message from Arthur was somewhat defensive, apparently in response to a question posed by my father. “Guardian angels are always sure of what will happen. Spirit doctors and guides are not. We have been working on Ruth all this time with a concept in mind that memory and knowledge can be implanted in the human entity and can be withdrawn at the will of that entity. This makes for an all-knowing human computer. What better means would there be for bringing the ‘word of God' to all who will listen? This, my friend, is no hoax. Ruth has been subjected to that before, and you have a right to be wary, but she knows in her heart that she is being programmed for what she has been destined for. We are being supremely careful and cautious, for this has been our greatest undertaking to date. We too had to experiment and learn and develop skills and knowledge before we started with Ruth. Our beginning goes back many incarnations of the present Ruth with foreknowledge of what was to be. Her soul history or destiny has been as a leader. But leaders must be taught if they are to fulfill their missions. Chander Sen and Dr. Berman were the only ones who worked on Ruth. Be a bit more patient; we are almost through.” I was disturbed by the word
hoax.
Why would Arthur even raise that issue? My father had no reason to ever mistrust Arthur. I also wondered why the spirits would need to experiment on a human when they had access to unlimited knowledge both past and present. This was the first time that any of my father's spirit guides had been stymied by limitation. These questions bothered me as much as his marriages to Ruth did.

Several pages later in this pile of documents, I finally found the explanation I had been looking for all these years. There was a message to my father that solved the mystery. It was unsigned; I'm not sure who it came from. “We have both been fooled—to be kept from helping others and developing ourselves. The messages have been false because I have been gullible. I took the messages as true simply because I did not question properly. I asked, ‘Do you come through Christ?' This left the door open. Negative entities can say they come through Christ but not through Jesus. We both awoke in the morning with a vibration of fifty. We had been pulled down in the astral. Also, the dreams have been bad. Nothing of a spiritual nature. You have been tranquilized to keep you inactive. I doubt if spirit would do this unless absolutely necessary.”

A few pages later, there was a clarifying message from Arthur titled “Regarding the Hoax.” “There are groups of negative entities that, like the White Brotherhood, who work for good, band together to cause conflict and create confusion among those whose lights are bright. This is their method of preventing the spiritual minded from adding to their ranks. The traps are set for those who seek shortcuts. You must be wary of those by listening to your inner voice and learning how to discern the true from the false. These experiences are lessons that you must learn. The truth is within you. Your soul will guide you if you but listen to the voice within.”

After this message the rest of the pages in the notebook are blank. Apparently, for my father, that was the end of the matter. He realized, without ever letting on, that Ruth was not just a fake but a bundle of negative, harmful energy that marshaled up dark forces whose goal was to interfere with his healing work and possibly destroy him. The dark buddies that she hung out with were somehow able to impersonate Arthur Ford and Chander Sen and get through to my father on their particular wavelength while blocking their genuine communications. Throughout the time that he spent with Ruth, he was repeatedly attacked, hindered in his healing, and exposed to false information. Yet he decided to stay with her, knowing her secret. He must have loved her in a way that I'll never understand.

The phone rang. I wiped the paint off my hands onto the front of my trousers and answered it.

“What are you thinking?”

I was taken aback that my father would even ask such a question. We both knew that he didn't need to ask, since he always knew what I was thinking, whether I liked it or not. We hadn't spoken in over a month.

“Nothing, really.” I had been moody the last couple of days. Obviously my father picked up on this and decided to give me a call.

It was now 1980, and I had been living in New York for the past five years. After Bob the photographer tried to shoot me, I half-heartedly skipped from university to university in the Northeast. I honored my mother's wishes and completed my degree. Now I was on my own doing the work I loved.

That week I'd just had a studio visit from Richard Marshall, one of the curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The visit had gone well. Richard liked the work and said that he would like to reproduce one of my drawings in the
Paris Review,
which I knew would please my father. Eventually Richard would select my work to be included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial. Any artist would have been thrilled by such events, but I was currently in between gallery associations, and the lack of a home for my paintings gave me a constant sense of anxiety. Museums were happy to look at my work, but galleries were not quite sure what to do with my ten-foot drawings. As the dealer Holly Solomon said to me at the end of a studio visit, “We just can't afford to frame your work.” Interestingly, after my father died, I found Holly's name on a small piece of paper in his files. It was a note about her mother, who lived on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, needing a psychic healing from my father. I could not figure out how Holly came to contact my father, since I never discussed him with her or vice versa.

Having once had a gun pressed to my head caused me to want to live way below the radar. As a result, I dressed inconspicuously, had an unlisted phone number, and became even more invisible than when I lived in Miami and tried to disappear from being the son of a psychic.

My studio loft on the Bowery was housed in a condemned building with no heat. The building was owned and neglected by the city. Several artists had taken over the loft as a place to live and work. The windowpanes were broken. I had glued cardboard over the windows to keep out the wind. For warmth I hung from the ceiling large sheets of plastic that I bought on Canal Street; those “walls” would trap the small amount of heat emanating from my tiny electric space heater. The transparent plastic tarps allowed me to partition out a studio and a bedroom area. A makeshift kitchen had been installed. There were no walls separating the bathroom from the rest of the space. At night I ate dinner under an electric blanket.

Without even a hint from me as to what was going on, my father started right in as if we had discussed my current situation many, many times. “Well, I wouldn't worry about your art. Just because some gallery hasn't said yes doesn't mean you can't paint. Keep painting and keep writing. Doing the work is what's important; you will be guided. If you want, the spirits can help you with inspiration for the painting. Meditate, and I will send them to you. Your paintings will be unlike anyone else's.”

“Thanks, but I'll just do it on my own. Maybe I should have listened to mom and become a lawyer.”

“I really don't think you had a choice. I knew very early on that this was your destiny. Remember when I went to the ashram with Dr. Mishra? Well, I had your chart done. I can't even remember how old you were at the time. In fact, I had your chart done by several astrologers who were there. They all said the same thing. Your destiny is in art. It is how your soul speaks.”

In my paintings, I was attempting to map out a kind of dreamlike state of consciousness populated by a flood of pictographs not unlike the types of images one might receive during a séance. When I was a kid, my father would drag me to every psychic in town for a reading. They would take one look at me and start describing the images that were appearing before their eyes. In the trance state, most mediums get their information from flashes of mental symbolic pictures, which they interpret for the sitter. For example, a psychic might see a picture of a woman with lots of blue jewelry talking, and he would interpret that as a wealthy woman from the island of St. Bart's coming to give you a lot of money.

Each of the pictures in my image-dense work could operate on multiple levels of meaning and interpretation not unlike a tarot card reading. In some ways, I was trying to emulate aspects of my father's work—he could implant energy or thought-forms into objects or people. What I did was try to implant energy, multiple meanings, and codes into ordinary-looking images. Over time the images in my paintings began to reveal multiple scenarios for the viewer. As a kid, my fascination with archaeology and ancient Egypt seemed to have some impact on the formal construction of my paintings as well.

An astrologer that I saw every year on my birthday as a kind of spiritual tune-up told me that my work was an active form of meditation. He said that during the painting process I entered a metaphysical space. I don't think he was wrong. I usually slept most of the day and painted all night until the morning. My mind was quieter in the middle of the night, and I felt better able to access the more arcane aspects of my mind as I worked until morning. On rare occasions, if I took a break in the middle of the night, I would go around the corner to visit artist Bob Rauschenberg on Lafayette Street.

In the few years that I had been in New York, my work was exhibited at Artists Space, the Drawing Center, and occasionally an uptown gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. I was extremely fortunate in being included in a seminal 1977 exhibition of new artists titled “Pictures.” The critic and art historian Douglas Crimp had uncovered a vein of artists who were all working with found media images and were producing a new kind of work that was the polar opposite of the reigning vogue of conceptualism and minimalism. This unique moment produced a new crop of artists that included Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntauch, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and David Salle. The “Pictures” exhibition was well attended, widely discussed, and traveled to several museums and universities around the country.

Simultaneously, I was earning a bit of money by writing for magazines such as
ARTS, GQ,
and Andy Warhol's
Interview
. For some reason, writing came to me naturally, as it was not such a different process from the pictographic storytelling in my paintings. My published interviews included artists such as Keith Sonnier, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne, as well as Run Run Shaw, the great producer of martial arts films in Hong Kong, and Morris Lapidus, the long-forgotten, audacious architect who would live to see his brilliant career reassessed by a new generation. Writing gave me an opportunity to have extraordinary conversations with people I might not otherwise have met.

Whenever I turned in an article for
Interview,
I would head up to Warhol's Factory to personally deliver my double-spaced interview that had been banged out on an old portable typewriter. While I'd be talking with Bob Colacello,
Interview
's editor at the time, Andy would eventually drift over and speak with me in this open-ended, cryptic way that I understood perfectly given my background of listening to disembodied spirits deliver messages. Almost every other Saturday, when the Factory was quiet, Warhol would call me in my studio to chat and catch up. Often I was invited to Factory lunches with food brought in from Brownies health food restaurant, as Andy's tape recorder captured the roundtable conversation for the next issue of
Interview
. Years later, after editor Robert Hayes passed away, Andy would offer me his job. I couldn't paint and edit a magazine at the same time, so, regrettably, I declined the most fun job on the planet.

During my conversation with my father, he kept trying to put a positive spin on my bad mood. “The ‘Pictures' exhibition you were in traveled all over the country. It is a very important show and will have a great influence on art for many years into the future. You should be very pleased. It got a lot of attention. People respond to your paintings in a profound way. While they are not for everyone, there is an energy and power in your paintings. If you meditate before you begin work, you can actually put healing energy into your paintings just like Zen monks before they begin their calligraphy. I always wanted you to work with me, but I think you do your best metaphysical work through your paintings. I know you're depressed. Do you want me to remove it? It'll take just a second.”

“Naw, don't bother, it'll go away.” I was in no mood to be tinkered with. “Besides, isn't depression good for creating? Aren't artists supposed to be tortured and depressed?”

My father laughed. “That is a really stupid idea. I hope you will quickly let go of that thought. Art should come from a serene, wise place that is not disturbed by negative ideas. You know, I've told you this before, you create your own reality through your thoughts. I've taught you so many exercises to improve your thinking so that you are always on an elevated level. You need to be at that high vibration, and only then will you make art that will speak to people over time.”

Even though my father was 1,500 miles away, I was sure he could see me rolling my eyes in annoyance at what I thought was a pointless, patronizing lecture. I felt that he just didn't understand the creative process even though his entire life had been one large creative endeavor.

“You need to keep your thinking on the divine level,” he continued. “Then true inspiration will come. All the hardships you are experiencing are your own creation.”

Oh, man, I didn't need to hear this right now. Happy thoughts were not going to help me complete the painting I was working on. They certainly weren't going to get the Whitney Museum to consider my work for its permanent collection.

“Keep your thoughts pure and elevated. You know how to filter your thoughts. If not, all this negative thinking will only create a negative reality.”

“Okay, okay, I got it.” I was irritated by his sunshiny attitude when I was involved in the stark and dangerous
life-and-death
struggle of making a painting.

My father believed that every aspect of our reality was first created in our thoughts before it physically manifested. We were the directors of our own movies—not chance, not the guy across the street, not our boss. If you wanted to be covered in white mink, become president of Mali, or invent a flying car, you just needed to visualize it. He had always taught me that by aligning my thoughts with the magnetic properties of the universe, they would attract good or bad events, depending on the content of my thinking. The choice was mine. At the moment, I was being a passive, negative thinker and not in control of my mind.

“You sure?” he persisted. “I could run a quick scan and psychically send you some Bach Flower Remedies to correct your current imbalance.” My father's intentions were good. He hated to see me suffer.

In addition to being able to heal the physical body, my father was able to heal and remove mental blocks, emotional traumas, insecurity, phobias, neuroses, and obsessions almost instantaneously. He could collapse ten years of psychiatric care into about three minutes. As his healing talents evolved, he would now begin every healing with diagnosing and treating the mental state, as he believed that all disease originated in the mind—be it the superconscious, conscious, or subconscious mind. Once the mind had been healed, the body would more readily follow.

This breakthrough in his technique came when he discovered the work of Dr. Edward Bach, an English surgeon from the 1930s who felt that there had to be a more intelligent way of treating illness than cutting and sawing our precious bodies. Bach, who eventually became one of my father's spirit guides and communicated with him on a regular basis, left his lucrative practice and followed his intuition into the fields to pick specific flowers that had mental healing properties.

When Dr. Bach held a particular flower in his hand, he would intuitively sense and then physically experience the very condition that the flower could cure. For example, certain flowers would make him feel anxious or fearful or depressed. When he experienced these mental states, he then knew that this flower could heal that emotion. Once he had discovered a specific remedy, Dr. Bach would then distill the flower's essence and use it medically. Based on his research, he developed the Bach Flower Remedies, a therapeutic system composed of thirty-seven remedies used to correct an almost unlimited range of mental disorders and imbalances. As Bach states in his book
Heal Thyself,
“Disease will never be cured…by present materialistic methods for the simple reason that disease in its origin is not material…Disease is in essence the result of conflict between the Soul and Mind and will never be eradicated except by spiritual and mental effort.”

Over the years, Pop had created detailed charts of the entire range of human emotions and corresponding methods of balancing and correcting them. Not only did he believe that negative emotions were often the basis for most disease but he also needed to be able to check out if there was emotional resistance when one of his healings didn't take. Like many of his other healing methods, these techniques had come from Arthur, who told my father, “It's time you got busy and work on the charting of attitudes and emotions. You will need that information to determine what your patient is thinking and his attitude of acceptance regarding the healing you are giving him.” With one of these charts and a minute or two with the pendulum, Pop was able to know every detail of a person's past, present, and future emotional makeup. By going down this chart with his pendulum, he was able to develop a detailed diagnosis of his patient's mental condition as well as determine the correct remedy.