Walking Through Walls (7 page)

His timing could not have been more serendipitous, or prescient. Haight-Ashbury, Maharishi Mahesh, Timothy Leary were all about to unleash their love seeds of a new consciousness on the world. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was about to become the mantra for a new generation wanting to explore anywhere but here. Somehow Pop sensed that this happening be-in was imminent. He was changing as fast as he could to be in tune with the coming youthquake. For a man in his sixties, he was definitely a hipster ahead of the crowd.

The
Miami Herald
named Pop “the King of Beads.” His office took on the look of a psychedelic candy store. Thousands of bottles containing brightly colored beads lined the shelves, waiting to be artfully assembled into curtains and room dividers for the forward-thinking idle rich. His clients would line up to spend thousands of dollars for a designer version of what would be hanging in every stoned hippie's Haight-Ashbury crash pad.

On weekends we all sat down at the long dining room table, which he had designed of expanded metal mesh, and strung long strands of jeweled combinations that seemed worthy of Harry Winston, all destined for wealthy homes in Palm Beach, Miami, and the Caribbean.

Eventually none of us could string fast enough to supply the needs of his design-starved clients. My father's beaded curtains had become a “must-have” accessory for the competitive rich. To keep up with the demand, Pop discovered a family of dwarves living one block off the poverty-stricken Tamiami Trail, which led to nowhere except the alligator-infested swamps of the Everglades. This family, who desperately needed any kind of work, was more than happy to set out beads on their individual metal TV tables decorated with pictures of grapes and ivy, and string, string, string. Pop was their sole source of income.

There was an unspoken but prevailing social stigma attached to being different in any way, and this included being handicapped. You simply did not see handicapped people out in public. They certainly did not hold regular, visible jobs; instead they stayed home and hid. Pop was always looking for a way to help those who were less fortunate. However, Mom's compassion stopped at the door on this one. She was unable to socialize with the dwarves and covered her eyes when the mother dwarf came to answer the door. If Pop asked her to run into their house and drop off some money or pick up their handiwork, she would refuse.

Each of us was finding ways to adjust to and accommodate Pop's new metaphysical personality. To her credit, Mom tried to creatively incorporate brown rice into her best French recipes and feigned interest in a book on Krishnamurti lectures. After school I was teaching myself yoga asanas from a small pamphlet, printed in India on newsprint, with out-of-register black-and-white photos of men and women in tight bathing suits assuming the poses. One particular set of photographs demonstrated a nose-washing technique that involved pushing string up one nostril and somehow getting it out the other. All we had in the pantry was plain old kite string. I passed on this one. In the mornings, I was meditating (
ommmmm
) and listening to scratchy recordings of consciousness lectures by various yogis. I didn't understand a word they were saying, but just listening to the sound of their thickly accented Indian voices made me feel holy and enlightened.

Early in June, just as we all thought we were finally finding our equilibrium, Pop suddenly disappeared. After several days of not hearing any chanting, I realized that I had not seen him in a while. No good-bye, no explanation, just gone.

Mom seemed perfectly content that Pop was MIA. Her daily routine continued as if nothing had changed. Every morning she got dressed and went to the design studio. I figured that maybe Pop was on another business trip to New York or California or Jamaica (Cuba was out by then), and someone forgot to tell me. Finally I asked. Her response was simply that he was “away.” Weeks turned into months—but no Pop.

As usual, I found ways to entertain myself, which is the nature of being an only child. In addition to painting everything in my room fluorescent orange and green (including myself), I discovered electric bananas. I thought my father would approve of my method of obtaining cosmic consciousness through the fruit of Mother Nature. Perhaps I could convince him to light up with me one day.

I loved the idea that I could get high for free using leftover bananas. The process involved scraping out the inside fiber of the banana peel and then drying this “tobacco” in the oven. After I had dried my Chiquita stash, I then crushed several aspirin, added a bit of tobacco from my mother's Camels, and tossed the ingredients together as if making a psychotropic Caesar salad. I must have read about this recipe for a low-cost legal high in one of the San Francisco or New York alternative publications that I subscribed to, like
Ramparts
or the
East Village Other.
This was the problem of living in a hick town like Miami: I believed everything I read in any newspaper or magazine as long as it was from somewhere other than Miami. Donovan would memorialize this ridiculous ritual in his hit “Mellow Yellow.”

After a few puffs, my skin would begin to tingle in an unpleasant way, as if there were bugs crawling up and down my arms, and the room began to spin. This creepy sensation was followed by a drenching cold sweat, which was the signal that I was to collapse into bed and remain there for the rest of the day—feeling nauseous. I would then switch on my black light and stare at the psychedelic posters that were tacked to the ceiling. Somehow I convinced myself that this “high” was fun and enlightening. I liked the idea that I didn't have to risk arrest by buying marijuana in the Grove. It was safe, it was legal, and it didn't work. I would remain slightly comatose until about five o'clock, at which point I crawled out of bed and started all over again. This was how I spent my summer vacation as a thirteen-year-old—sick to my stomach.

One afternoon late in August, I was just about to emerge from another wasted day in bed when I noticed a shadowy figure standing in the doorway of my room. “Wow,” I thought, “I'm finally hallucinating. Maybe it takes time for the banana chemicals to build up in my system. Far out!” This stuff really worked. A full-fledged hallucination achieved with only natural ingredients available at your corner grocery. This formula could revolutionize the drug trade. No more arrests. No more guns. Just miles of banana plantations making millions of people nauseous while hallucinating. Maybe I could start selling it in nickel bags.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed with my vision. I had hoped to see mind-expanding prismatic colors. But I was still happy that my summer of long, hard work perfecting the natural high had finally paid off. I looked again, and as my eyes slowly focused, the figure looked a bit like my father. But he was much thinner, so it couldn't have been my father. The thought occurred to me that maybe this was not a hallucination but actually my father, teleporting in from his presently unknown location—an occurrence that wouldn't have surprised me in the least. I shakily got out of bed to go and touch the hallucination/teleportation.

I was sweating and so weak from months of not eating properly and smoking my aspirin-banana combo that I collapsed. My hallucination caught me. It
was
my father standing there. He held me for a minute while I recovered, then said, “Get some food and meet me in the backyard. I want to show you something. Hurry before it gets dark.”

I went into the kitchen, which had gone to hell in Pop's absence. Mom and I had been happily eating sirloin steaks, canned Le Sueur peas, and instant mashed potatoes from a box. In the freezer I found a carton of Sealtest ice cream, the kind that contained three neatly divided sections of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. I quickly forced a couple of spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream down my throat. The sugar stabilized me, and I wandered out back looking for my father. I had a pounding headache.

My father was standing at the side of the house, looking up at the sky. His hand was shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun's glare. “Look at those clouds. They are especially beautiful today.”

I looked around. The landscape wobbled and spun. I was much more interested in throwing up than looking at the clouds. Once I regained my balance, I saw that they were, in fact, especially cottony and full. Miami specializes in extraordinary cumulus cloud formations, possibly due to its unique location in the Gulf Stream. Finally, as my cognitive functions began to fire up from the sugar rushing through my body, I realized that I had not seen my father all summer and asked, “Where were you?”

“I met someone. A very special man, and we went away together.”

“What, like on a vacation or something?”

“To his ashram.”

“His what?”

“A place where you study. He showed me some new things, some new ideas about how to think about life. Let me show you one of the things he taught me. You'll like this. Pick a cloud, any cloud, and watch me do something to it. Just point to one.”

I scanned the sky and found the biggest, puffiest cumulus hanging low on the horizon. “That one,” I said, pointing. “Do something to that one.” I had no idea what Pop was planning but imagined that maybe he could make the cloud change colors or even talk. The banana residue was affecting my thinking.

“The one with the little gray spots at the end?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Okay. I'm going to punch a big hole right in the middle of the cloud and make it look just like a doughnut.” Who needed to smoke bananas and aspirin when they had a father who talked about punching holes in clouds? This was very trippy stuff. He cautioned me, “It takes a few minutes for my thought beam to reach the cloud, so just be patient.” A deep silence fell over my father. About a minute later, he took several deep breaths and let them out. In slow motion he carefully placed his fingertips on his temples and began to stare at the cloud. He looked like one of those ads in the back of comic books for X-ray glasses that let you see ladies' underwear through their dresses.

I looked up at the cloud. Nothing much was happening, and I began to lose interest. At that moment, I had no patience for my father's attempts to defy the laws of physics and wanted to get back in the house. I was eager for my next dose of bananas. It was also getting to be four o'clock—time for
Gilligan's Island
.

Minutes passed. Pop looked like a statue, just staring at the cloud. I glanced around the yard for a distraction, slapped a couple of mosquitoes, and waited impatiently for us to go back inside. The lychees were just coming into season, and the seaside mahoe tree had blanketed the yard with yellow-and-russet-colored flowers. The mockingbirds and the mourning doves were chattering loudly to announce the end of the day. My father just stood there staring at the cloud. His eyes were squinted, his jaw tight. I looked back up at the cloud, and it was completely intact. Nothing had changed.

I started to feel my dizziness return. I turned to walk back in the house, but when I took a second glance at the sky, I noticed a small indentation—a soft, shadowy gray area—in the middle of the cloud. It definitely had not been there before. Wispy strands of cloud started to emerge from the center like a trail of smoke. After these first few strands floated away, the center of the cloud began to open wide as if it were yawning. Slowly the entire central core of the cloud disappeared, revealing a round window onto pure blue sky. A large perfectly formed doughnut hole appeared exactly in the place where I had pointed.

Maybe those bananas were stronger than I thought. I couldn't quite tell if I was still high or if this was really happening. The truth was that nothing my father did these days surprised me. If my father grew another head or began to fly, I would have simply shrugged and lit up another banana cigarette. From everything he taught me, I knew that anything was possible. However, in that moment, I did sense what I can only now describe as a perceptual shift. It was as if someone had, for a split second, shut off the fuse box and then clicked it back on. The world went from color to black-and-white and back to color again in a millisecond. It almost felt as if nothing had happened, but I knew that something very strange and powerful had occurred.

My father dropped his hands from his temples and looked down at me. He was smiling with serene satisfaction. Pointing to the cloud, he said, “There's the hole. Just where you wanted it. What do you think?”

“
Wow,
it's a really big hole. How'd you do that?”

“Mind control. It's a kind of meditation. Once you organize and control your thinking and your mind's energy, then anything is possible. You don't need drugs or anything else to be able to do this kind of work.” This was an obvious reference to my chronic banana habit. “You can change reality whenever you want to. What I did just now was to gather up all the power in my mind and project it onto that cloud. I used my mind like a ray gun, cutting a hole in the cloud. Your thought is the most powerful thing in the world, more powerful than a bomb or any other weapon. Thought travels around the world and through the universe instantaneously. Everything in our experience in this lifetime originates in our mind. In the future we will be able to do everything just by thinking. One day we'll be able to drive cars and fly planes just by our thought. This cloud-busting meditation is something I learned from Dr. Mishra.”