Walking Through Walls (8 page)

“Who's Dr. Mishra? I thought you didn't like doctors.”

“It's not that I don't like doctors; I wish they were more open-minded and didn't just want to give people pills that create other diseases. Dr. Mishra is a different kind of doctor; he's not a medical doctor but a doctor of philosophy.”

I had never heard of a doctor of philosophy before. To me all doctors were
doctors.
Dr. Mishra was the first true metaphysician that my father had met. The few assorted people with esoteric interests that my father had encountered in Miami were all amateurs, but Dr. Mishra was a living, breathing guru from deep in the Punjab. How they met was a mystery, but it was apparent that my father's life was beginning to illustrate the Buddhist saying “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

My father's time at the ashram with Dr. Mishra was a revelation for him. It was like consciousness boot camp. At dawn they arose for meditation. The day continued with yoga, vegetarian meals, horoscope readings, and philosophical lectures. Now the stuff of CEO retreats, but back in 1966 this type of activity would invite and warrant a raid from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It was during this retreat that my father realized that his goal of greater mental powers and insight was indeed possible. Dr. Mishra had reset my father's compass and sent him off full speed in a new direction.

I looked back up at the cloud. It remained stationary even though the surrounding clouds had now floated away. The perfectly round hole he had created was still there. Unlike the neighboring clouds, which had fuzzy edges and mountains of rough volumes, this cloud was crisp, neat, and looked somewhat artificial. Within minutes the twilight sky was empty except for this one cloud, which hovered like a strange white inflated inner tube. “So, Dr. Mishra taught you to do this just by changing your thinking? How does that work?”

“If you control your thinking, you control your reality. Change your thinking, and you change your reality. It's that simple. Our physical world is nothing more than a manifestation of our thought energy.” At thirteen years old, I never gave changing reality much thought. It just seemed to be there—or not there, as in my father's case. But from my father's point of view, reality was something completely pliable that could be shaped like a handful of clay. “Nothing is as solid as it appears,” he said. “Most of the obstacles we face in life are only illusions and can be dissipated just like I punched that hole in the cloud. That's why it is important to learn how to use your mind. Once you know how to do this, nothing will ever stop you. When you're ready, I'll teach you to control your mental powers. Life is very different when you fully use your mind's unlimited potential.”

The truth was that at that moment I had no interest in learning to punch holes in clouds. What I really wanted to do was lose my mind in some more banana smoke.

“The world is your oyster…”

Mom was starting one of her “you have your whole life ahead of you and, oh, the adventures you will have” talks. She expected great things from me. Since I had no desire to fulfill her dream of becoming the first Jewish president of the United States—which she had bragged about to anyone who would listen since I was a baby—or a rich doctor, it seemed that she was now grooming me for show business. We were sitting on the couch in the living room after dinner.

“You know, when Sammy Davis Jr. comes back to his dressing room after a performance, and he looks in the mirror, he is all alone. At that point, all the lights and the glamour, the applause and the photographers mean nothing. When he looks in that mirror, that is the moment of truth. What kind of person are you? Are you a mensch who can stand up and be counted or just an emotional cripple who lives for other people and needs drugs and alcohol to face the world? So, yes, all the fame and worldly success are wonderful, but it's who you really are when you're off stage that really counts. Let me tell you a story about Burt Lancaster. You know, Burt is Jewish, and he…” Mom was always on a first-name basis with all the stars.

At that moment, my father rushed by us, lost in thought, carrying a two-foot-tall wooden crucifix. Without moving her head or stopping her story, my mother's eyes quickly shifted to the side, fully taking in this man with a mission bearing a cross. I had not perfected her advanced technique of peripheral vision and simply turned my head and looked at my father, wondering where he had picked up this latest accoutrement. I doubted that this was just an accessory for one of the houses he was decorating. He carried that cross as if it were a magic wand.

Mom shot her eyes back to me and continued her story, pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. However, when her eyes met mine, they seemed to say, “Did you see what I just saw? What the hell is your father doing with that cross?” Given the last few years of his rapidly evolving religious curiosity, neither of us would have been surprised if he had suddenly become a Pentecostal or Baptist when we weren't looking.

That cross was the least of her worries. Now, witches, astrologers, psychics, yogis, and trance mediums were streaming through the house at all hours of the day and night. One woman, Connie, with a beehive hairdo, who only wore purple and smoked Virginia Slims, claimed to be able to speak a variety of languages used by extraterrestrials throughout the galaxy. She was like a multilingual interpreter at the UN and was available for translations for those who had unexpected alien encounters.

It was not unusual for me to walk into the living room and find a group of my father's new friends deeply engrossed in some sort of bizarre psychic activity such as psychometry (the analysis of someone's personality and future by simply holding one of his possessions, such as a set of keys or a ring), aura balancing, or past-life regression. I couldn't even make it to the kitchen without hearing someone talking in an unknown language as he or she revisited a past life.

At the time, my father was fascinated with reports about Filipino psychic surgeons who could supposedly push their hands into someone's body without making an incision, feel around, grab the diseased organ or tumor, and yank it right out. He would show me pictures of their surgeries. In the photographs, there was blood everywhere and a detached hand holding an organic mass of disease. I was terrified that sometime when I wasn't looking, one of his friends would suddenly reach inside my body and pull out my heart or my appendix before I had a chance to scream for help.

Mom had no interest in this ever-changing psychic circus. During these invasions, she would retreat to the bedroom, turn on the television, and begin her marathon of smoking, hoping they would all just go away. Unfortunately, it didn't work. It seemed that the more she smoked, the more these seekers multiplied and took over our house and my father's attention. Most of the time, I ignored the crowd, and they ignored me. It was as if we were on opposite sides of a two-way mirror.

In addition to his interests in meditation, psychic phenomena, and aliens, Pop developed a curiosity about possession—which explained why he was walking around the house carrying that cross. Long before
The Exorcist
popularized the concept of evil possession for the masses, he understood that a lot of strange antisocial behavior was produced by unhappy spirits trapped in the wrong body. In theory, people who die from suicide or murder don't realize that they are actually dead and as a result refuse to naturally progress to the next level of consciousness. They actively look for vulnerable bodies to inhabit so that they can continue to live an earthly existence. Ideal candidates to host their disembodied spirits are people who have been ill, use drugs, or are overwhelmed by anger, grief, or any other negative emotion. Such problems create a weak energy field, as well as an entry point for the spirit to jump into the body and take possession. Bars are a prime example of a low-energy environment where negative entities hang out looking for a host body. As people drink, their inhibitions decline, their guard goes down, and after that fifth shot of tequila, some dead person takes over and starts driving the bus.

Another method of access into someone's body and mind by a dark spirit is a broken aura. Surrounding our physical body is an energy body composed of light, known as an aura. The aura reflects our general state of physical and mental well-being. One's aura can become broken in any number of ways, which results not only in a leakage of our vital energy but also provides an entrance for these negative entities. Once inside our bodies, these dispossessed spirits can make us ill, infect our thinking, and direct us to take actions contrary to our true character. According to my father, many crimes are committed by people possessed by a lost spirit. All of a sudden, a loving mother decides to cook and eat all her children in a stew, or a husband drives his prized Coupe de Ville over the edge of a cliff, killing innocent beachgoers sunning themselves on the sands of Acapulco. Later on in life, Pop would find that many of his patients were chronically ill due to possession.

One Sunday morning, shortly after this first crucifix spotting, I found Pop in his study waving his wooden cross in the air and saying some sort of prayer. He looked like he was swatting flies as he jabbed the cross at various invisible targets. Without any formal training or placing ads in the yellow pages, Pop suddenly developed a nice little sideline of performing exorcisms free of charge. I don't know what self-help manual he read on removing Satan, but he was becoming quite the exorcist.

Within months of acquiring the cross, Pop began to receive calls from nice God-fearing ladies saying that they were suddenly experiencing strange homicidal thoughts, or spontaneous nosebleeds, or hearing eerie noises in the middle of the night. Or they would come home from work and find their sweet, loving husband swearing a blue streak, hitting the kids, and creating a tornado of destruction, breaking everything in sight. Other bizarre stories included their sons' cutting up dead dogs and eating their hearts while laughing, or their daughters' having sex in the cemetery on top of the tombstones or drinking blood.

Like a good doctor, Pop would respond at any hour, day or night, to those in distress. He would grab his big wooden cross, toss it in the backseat of his convertible with the lipstick-red interior and speed off to some cracker-box tract home in the southwest section of Goulds or Homestead, adjacent to the trailer parks just before the okra farms began. What he really needed to complete the picture was one of those portable revolving red lights that undercover cops slap on their roofs when rushing to a crime scene. Or perhaps just a small official-looking sign that he could leave on the dashboard:
EXORCIST ON CALL
.

Occasionally he would suggest that we “go for a ride” because he needed “to see a friend,” without ever telling me where we were headed. If it was anyone else, I would have assumed that he wanted company while going out to score drugs. Instead of taking a look at plastic bags filled with marijuana, I often found myself in homes filled with plastic statues of Jesus or heavy plastic slipcovers on the living room furniture. It was in these homes, within the souls of these good people, that the devil had decided to reside. How else could one explain the spontaneous, irrational behavior that took over these law-abiding citizens?

One day my father answered the phone to hear a woman screaming and crying that her daughter had bitten her face and was running around cursing and spitting. She was talking so loudly that I could hear her panicked voice, though not the specifics, all the way across the room. As he hung up, Pop said, “I need to go help someone right now. I'd like you to come with me.” It was a Saturday, and I was just sitting home reading about a light show at the Fillmore West in
Ramparts.
Exorcisms were not high on my list as a weekend activity. I would have much rather helped my father mow the lawn or rake leaves than watch him save another soul. However, duty called, and off we went.

We pulled up to a nondescript little white house way out, just off of South Dixie Highway, with brown grass starved for water, no trees in the yard, and a dented chain-link fence that looked like a couple of cars had backed into it. As we knocked on the door, a mangy German shepherd, the kind you see at the pound or guarding scrap yards, was inside the fence, roaming around and barking.

A plain-looking woman in her mid-thirties, with mousy brown hair and tears running down her cheeks, answered the door. Her face was swollen from the bite, as if she had just happened into a mess of wasps. She did not greet us; instead she stared at us blankly, nodded her head, and glanced to the right, indicating that we should enter. As we walked through the door, we could hear snarling curses coming from one of the rooms and echoing throughout the tiny house.

“You eat dirty pussy, you fuckin' bastard piece of shit! I'll tear your eyes out and swallow them one by one! You'll burn in hell while you drink my piss!” I had never heard anything like this, even from the guys who hung around the 7-Eleven drinking from beer cans wrapped in paper bags. Upon hearing this deep, possessed voice, my father immediately raised his cross and waved it in front of the woman's face and over her head as we entered the living room. Her husband, who looked like the kind of guy who drove a tractor, just sat planted in his La-Z-Boy, staring in shock through his thick glasses.

The house felt dirty, as if there was goo everywhere. I didn't want to touch anything. This was one of those tiny, blank houses that crammed whole families into a living space the size of the garage in a normal-sized house. Divorce or suicide seemed to be the only avenues of escape from this claustrophobic environment. The minute you entered, navigational decisions were thrust upon you. There was no opportunity to wander from room to room. Instead, you either took one step to the right for the living room, two steps forward for the small kitchen—with its white metal cabinets that held dinnerware one got for free in boxes of detergent—or two steps to the left to a cramped hallway containing three bedrooms and the one bathroom that afforded little to no privacy.

We went to the left and found a girl who looked to be about a year older than I was, lying on a filthy baby-blue carpet in one of the bedrooms. Her eyes seemed to have rolled to the back of her head, and all I could see were the whites, which gave her the appearance of being either dead or blind. She didn't seem to notice that we were in the room staring down at her as she thrashed about in violent contortions, completely naked except for her panties. Her alarmingly white body was almost translucent and covered with sores and black-and-blue marks that could have been anything from snakebites to self-inflicted wounds. Her shoulder-length brown hair looked sticky and matted, as if it had never been washed. Pouring out of her mouth was the kind of foam you get from squirting too much detergent into a sinkful of dirty dishes.

She looked like those blubbery manatees that silently patrolled the inner canals of Miami and every so often got caught in a boat's propeller. Brutally gashed all over, they eventually floated to the surface, stinking up the whole canal until some game warden fished them out. I had never seen a naked girl before, especially one with her left hand jammed into her underwear. I just wanted the game warden to come and scoop this one up in a big net and haul her away.

I almost laughed at how ugly she was, but I was too scared and just wanted to go home as soon as possible. The best I could do was to hide behind my father and hope that this would all be over soon. I knew I couldn't cry and distract him, because he was up to some serious business. When I looked at the possessed girl, all I could think of were dangerous snakes—water moccasin, rattlesnake, and python. It seemed like she was going to slither right up, bite me on the ankle, and fill me with her poison. I was hoping my father still had his red rubber snakebite kit that he kept in the glove compartment of the car, in case he had to siphon her venom out of me.

My father was taking this whole scene in his stride. He paused for a moment to assess the situation before getting down to work. With incredible precision, my father planted his feet on the ground about two feet apart as if bracing himself against someone pushing him over. He then lifted the cross and held it firmly in front of him with both hands like a shield that would protect him from a sniper's bullet. He began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd…He maketh me…all the days of my life…forever and ever…” Before he got to the “amen,” the girl had stopped cursing and was slowly whimpering as she rocked back and forth. Her eyes were now closed. Behind me, her dad watched in dumb astonishment while my father performed his rites.