Walking Through Walls (5 page)

It would often be close to noon before the blackout shades in the bedroom were finally lifted to admit the white-hot glare of the Miami sun. With half the day now gone, she was just about ready for her cameo appearance at my father's design studio as bon vivant, confidante, and personal secretary to Mr. Lew Smith, interior designer to the stars.

One night my father was attending a meeting of the Designers and Decorators Guild, where he was acting president. I was lying in bed with my mother, watching Johnny Carson as he interviewed some starlet about her new celebrity crash diet that consisted only of coffee, cigarettes, and pills. While she looked great, Johnny made it very clear that he did not think this diet was a good idea, and neither did I. But here was a live report from
Valley of the Dolls,
and Mom was all ears. She shushed me to be quiet whenever the starlet spoke. Mom's intense interest made it evident that she was taking the exact same diet medication as someone on TV. I used to fish the slim, clear compartmentalized plastic box out of Mom's enormous pocketbook and stare at the beautiful assortment of green, yellow, and pink pills. They looked identical to those candy dots on long white strips of waxed paper that I devoured by the yard. The starlet's pill diet confirmed for Mom that she was in sync with the Hollywood elite even though she was living in Miami and married to a kooky decorator.

It didn't take a brilliant analyst to realize that the recent arrival of brown rice and coffee enemas was going to present a serious image problem for my mother. At the time, tragic starlets dined on what could kill them—not what was going to lead them toward longevity. There was no way Mom was going to find brown rice even remotely glamorous.

In an effort to convince her that some celebrities were interested in keeping their looks through diet and exercise, Pop bought her a copy of Gayelord Hauser's book
Look Younger, Live Longer.
Hauser was the 1950s health and fitness guru to many of Hollywood's stars from the golden era. Among other things, he advocated steaming one's face daily with boiling water seasoned with an herbal laxative mixture, Swiss Kriss, in order to remove the impurities from the skin and create movie-star radiance. Mom couldn't be bothered. She was too busy reading her stack of assorted trashy detective novels.

As a last resort, Pop tried to appeal to her Hollywood sensibility and informed her that Mae West was a devotee of daily enemas. Wrong role model. He didn't realize that Mom thought Mae West was vulgar. He would have scored more points if he had mentioned Audrey Hepburn. Problem was, now that I think about it, I doubt that Audrey Hepburn would have enjoyed having a coffee enema for breakfast. Despite his relentless efforts at conversion, Mom deftly managed to escape the joys of macrobiotics. However, I wasn't so lucky.

“
Sir,
that is
not
a jacket.”

The sniffy maître d' raised his eyebrows as high as they would go and grandly pointed to the framed sign behind his podium. Executed in elegant cursive script, it read “Gentlemen Must Wear Jackets.”

My father and I were standing before the maître d' of a posh French restaurant in Coral Gables. We were wearing matching Nehru jackets made of a shimmering gold brocade fabric left over from one of his Palm Beach jobs. I had accessorized my outfit with a primitive lead casting of the ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life—purchased by mail from the Psychedelicatessen head shop in New York—as well as a few strands of multicolored peace beads that I strung up myself. Mom was off to the side in her black cocktail dress, sunglasses, and patent leather heels, studying the menu with unusual intensity. Her gold bracelets clanked as she turned the pages.

Pop looked down at his gorgeous creation and couldn't understand what the maître d' was saying about jackets. It was as if he were speaking a foreign language. Unfortunately, I understood what he said perfectly. Now at the age of thirteen, I was a flawless translator of the experiences that transpired between my family and the overwhelmingly hostile outside world. What he was really saying was, “This restaurant does not serve freaks—go away.”

We would have had a better chance of being seated if we had presented ourselves as loud, gregarious performers who had just finished taping
The Jackie Gleason Show,
but instead we were too blissed out to be in showbiz. Our peace-love-om-shanti-shanti routine was new in town and had never been seen by the Miami establishment. By now Pop had a whole closet filled with Nehru jackets. There was no chance that he was going to return to his earlier incarnation of a suit and tie for dinner. In 1966, he was digging the Nehru scene. What he should have said to the maître d' was, “Hey, daddy-o, I'm, like, in the guru groove and looking for some cool cordon bleu, can you dig it?” We would have eaten out more often if he had just gotten the vocabulary down.

“But this
is
a jacket,” my father protested. In his mind, he was better dressed than the maître d' in his crummy black suit. Not to mention that the fabric in that Nehru jacket alone was worth more than what we would have spent eating out for the next month.

“Sir!”
The maître d' leaned forward. The conversation was over. We would just get in the car and go somewhere else where we were not wanted.

When we
did
manage to break through the security detail at the front door, it never failed that the entire restaurant fell silent as we walked to our table. People stopped eating and eyed us with concern. Miami had never seen a live impersonation of the Addams Family up close. I seemed to be the only one who noticed that we were the center of attention. Pop was perfectly content being transcendental, and Mom was happy to finally be out of the house. The maître d' always scrambled to find us a table as far away as possible from the other diners. I'm surprised that they didn't hold tablecloths in front of us while we ate or stick us in the kitchen next to the dishwasher.

Ever since Pop had begun his macrobiotic transformation, we rarely ate out. It was difficult, actually impossible, to find a restaurant that served
hijiki
seaweed as the main course and
umeboshi
plums for dessert. As a result, we ate at home—where I ate what Pop ate, and Mom ate whatever she wanted. Mom didn't care if she went straight to macrobiotic hell.

For my mother, dining out was a pleasure; it was elegant and an adventure. She loved knowing the chefs at the various restaurants and asking for the secret recipe for the salad dressing or the key lime pie. For example, at the restaurant on top of the Miami airport, Mom felt like she was eating at Chasen's when the chef came over with a wooden salad bowl the size of a satellite dish and prepared his special Caesar salad with fresh eggs just for her. As he narrated each step and ingredient, she pulled out her huge black Parker fountain pen and took notes.

There were exceptions. No matter how many times we went to Joe's Stone Crab and she wandered back into the kitchen to beg the chef for his key lime pie recipe, she could never duplicate it at home. Turns out he intentionally left out just one ingredient, which he would never tell my mother, and the secret died with him.

As I had anticipated at the start of our evening's adventure, we ended up back at the house, where Pop and I had leftover brown rice from breakfast, and Mom boiled up two kosher hot dogs. This was typical not only of our attempts to eat in restaurants but to interact with the outside world. Because we were on our own planet, we were treated like unwelcome aliens wherever we went.

Over the next few months, the contents and the atmosphere of our house began to change. Just as my father's thinking had become more transcendental, so too did his interiors. Our once modernist house began to look like an opium den as seen through the lens of a Technicolor Hollywood movie. Heavily perfumed smoke from burning pots of incense in thick bronze antique Chinese censers now mingled in the hot, humid air with Mom's ever-present pale blue cigarette smoke. Brown rice in heavy cast-iron pots was constantly cooking on the stove. Ceiling fans slowly mixed this eclectic potpourri into an intoxicating, strange ether. All of this scented haze gave the house a languid, dreamlike feeling, as if time had stopped in our own private universe. Low-hanging Japanese rice-paper lanterns softly lit the living room, while casually tinkling wind chimes stirred by the slow-moving tropical breeze added to the esoteric sound track. Strange surrealist sculptures, such as a pair of fractured hands holding a bleeding heart, were carefully placed in front of cryptic Balinese calendars—illustrated with mythical sea monsters devouring cowering humans. Calder-esque mobiles made of assorted metals by my father hung from the ceiling and moved slowly in random, hypnotic rhythms.

Every morning as my clock radio alarm went off, I would slowly open my eyes to the sounds of the Beach Boys and the weather report, which rarely varied from “seventy-four degrees and sunny.” I would lie in bed for another few minutes, dreading the idea of getting up and going to school. As I finally got out of bed, I could hear the distant strains of Japanese
shakuhachi
flute music or Ravi Shankar's sitar coming from the living room. This was the new background music for my father's morning ritual. He now awoke early to practice his yoga asanas, pelvic “fire” breathing, meditation, and Buddhist chants. Somehow he had discovered the one and only yoga teacher in all of Miami, who taught him at age sixty-two to stand on his head and sit in full lotus position. This was the first I had ever heard of yoga or seen it practiced. When I mentioned to a teacher at school that my father started his morning with an hour of yoga, she didn't know what the word meant.

With his exercises completed, he fired up the blender for one of his special health drinks, which included wheat germ, liquid lecithin, raw eggs, brewer's yeast, honey, apple cider vinegar, juice, and yogurt. Occasionally he would be inspired and throw in something green: a cucumber, a stalk of celery, or an entire aloe leaf from the backyard, for “good digestion.” The result was unpalatable, as I was often forced to attest. If Mom stumbled into the kitchen while he was mixing up his “mess,” as she called it, she dramatically rolled her eyes, grabbed a can of Metracal, and fled before she could be offered a glassful of vital green froth. She then retreated to more important matters, like putting on her makeup.

As soon as I heard the
toot-toot
of the yellow school bus, I was ready for my Academy Award–worthy performance of a normal, average kid. When the school bus door swung open, I greeted my fellow classmates with a beaming smile intended to say, “I have just woken up in a household where Mom served bacon and eggs, and my father finished the morning paper before he left for the office to sell life insurance policies.” What that smile and the rest of the day actually required was that I would have to radically rein in every one of my natural eccentricities, seal my lips about my wacky parents, and with great strain appear to be just a normal kid.

Of course, having a lesbian golf pro and an aristocratic Cuban pedophile as teachers did not exactly help to reorient my compass toward normality. My homeroom teacher, Miss Davis, better known as Bobbi, started class every Monday by showing off her weekend tournament wins. One week it was a diamond ring that she would flash in our faces; the following week it was a new car, and so on. Bobbi was aggressive and proud of her overt athleticism. Every single day she dressed in her signature color—turquoise—complemented by her closely cropped brassy blond hair with dark roots. Her tops were always tight and stretchy, which fully displayed her large, tapered, and very pointy breasts. They were so sharp that some of the boys worried that if they accidentally bumped into Miss Davis's chest, they could have their eyes poked out, while others had trouble concealing their boners as she walked by.

Bobbi decided immediately that she didn't like me and classified me as a “discipline problem.” In order to demonstrate who was in charge, she would dig her nails in my arms until I began to bleed, pull me out of my chair by my hair, and, on several occasions, “accidentally” throw me down the stairs. During phys ed, which consisted of volleyball, she insisted on always playing opposite me. The result was that all her returns were spike balls that bonked me on the head every time. Eventually my mother grew concerned about my patches of missing hair and constant black-and-blue marks. When she called the principal, he told her that I had a balance problem that needed to be reviewed by a medical professional. My story of a sadistic teacher seemed too fantastic to be believed by anyone.

Concerned that I was fabricating this persecution complex, they herded me through a vast array of medical evaluations, including sessions with a child psychiatrist who showed me Rorschach tests that all looked like caricatures of gyrating African dancers. After endless weeks of assessments, all the psychiatrist ended up with was a diagnosis that I had an acute sensitivity for color that he had never seen before. His prescription: get Philip a dog; he needs a friend.

Mr. Rodriguez was part of the first wave of upper-class Cubans who fled Castro's revolution and found a job teaching us classical penmanship. Before we began the day's adventure of exploring the more cursive aspects of the alphabet, Mr. Rodriguez would peer at me through his thick black glasses and, after several minutes of this silent visual interrogation, publicly declare my budding Beatle haircut a disaster. I was then ordered to the bathroom, where we would have a little hairstyling session with his big black comb. Gently, he would part my hair to the side and slowly comb it into a more traditional style. He would step back and admire his salon skills and then pat my head and say, in his heavily accented English, “Now, isn't that better?” Only then would he notice that I looked a little rumpled. Over the next several minutes he would tug on my shirt and carefully tuck it in until I looked like a little cadet. We would then return to class to resume the day's lesson. No one ever seemed to notice that the two of us would disappear from class every day for a good half hour and that upon return I looked remarkably different.

During recess, while the other kids roughhoused in the play yard, I would wander out into the back alley behind the school, where there was a body shop. The walls were filled with blond pinups from
Playboy.
I would stare at them while the guys fixed cars. The mechanics would jab one another and point at me. They loved this idea of a little kid gawking at their nudie shots. Thus was the cycle of my day: watching Pop stand on his head, lesbian male-o-phobia, pedophilia, macho mechanics, and then home to a nice hot dish of macrobiotic adzuki beans and organic brown rice.

Macrobiotics sparked Pop's appetite for physical and spiritual transformation that could be achieved through dietary extremes. This was a strange concept in the time of TV dinners and where the only fresh vegetable sold in supermarkets was iceberg lettuce. Every few days Pop embarked on yet another obscure-sounding fast that was meant to purify a specific organ or internal system. For example, his beet fast was intended to cleanse the liver, the organ dedicated to filtering all of the toxins in the body. The grape fast would rebalance his acidity-alkalinity. It was not unusual for him to follow a ten-day rice fast with a fifteen-day juice fast. Once this phase of fasting was complete, he would then slowly prepare himself for solid food by drinking cups of hot water with the juice of half a lemon squeezed into them. It might then be another three or four days before the first morsel of brown rice entered his mouth. Once he began eating again, each mouthful of solid food had to be chewed one hundred times before swallowing. This was an idea that he found in one of his ancient books on yoga philosophy: “All digestion begins in the mouth. The enzymes in your saliva must thoroughly mix with your food so that you can extract optimal nutrition from everything you eat.” Each meal became a major project in the reconstruction of the body and mind.

I alternated between being curious and being totally uninterested in Pop's evolving diet fanaticism. At times I wanted to be a supreme thirteen-year-old yogi, and at other times I wanted to be a typical kid and eat as many Snickers bars as I could. Every so often I joined Pop on a ten-day fast, which pushed my already skinny body toward emaciation. He had convinced me that I needed to purge myself of all toxins, which, left untreated, would eventually induce disease and death. During the first three days of any fast, I felt dizzy, unable to concentrate, and horribly hungry. Mom usually ignored any dietary extremism on our parts and continued to eat as she always had. She categorized these dietary adventures as a type of father and son outing.