Walking Through Walls (3 page)

At the Playhouse, I was surrounded by boys and girls whose Baptist and Methodist parents, unlike our neighbors, spent their Saturdays doing something else besides shooting coons. I met church mothers who ran bake sales and fathers who owned gas stations or sold insurance. Since my parents were both self-employed in the style industry, I had no idea that such exotic people existed. These kids had fathers who looked like the ones I saw on TV. Their mothers were demure and acted like good wives—preparing pitchers of Kool-Aid and getting the Slip 'n Slide or the Water Wiggle working in the backyard. Ignoring such standard maternal duties, my mother could often be found cha-cha-cha-ing with the best of them till 3:00 a.m. in some dive off Collins Avenue.

Mom also loved anything calypso. We had a stack of steel drum and Harry Belafonte albums. Often, I would come home from school and put on my all-time favorite song, “Mama Look A Boo Boo,” from
Belafonte at Carnegie Hall.
I would sing and play rhythm on one of the brightly painted voodoo drums that several years earlier Pop had brought back from Haiti.

The story of Pop's trip to Haiti was one of Mom's favorites. During her dinner parties, after the plates had been cleared, she would open a fresh pack of Camels, screw a smoke into her cigarette holder, flip open her Dunhill lighter, and take a long drag. She was now ready to entertain her guests with this epic.

One afternoon, as she often recounted, she came running into my bedroom, threw some clothes on me, and scooped me up in her arms. I was around three years old at the time. Mom put the top down on the convertible as we drove Pop to the airport for yet another “client meeting” in some sun-parched, impoverished country surrounded by water the color of glass. This time, the country was Haiti, land of forbidden voodoo and Barbancourt rum.

Just a week before, Pop received several phone calls at the office from the Haitian ambassador to the United States and from the commercial attaché. The president of Haiti, Paul Magloire, needed the public rooms of the palace freshened up ASAP, since he was expecting a visit from U.S. vice president Richard Nixon to review the troops. What that really meant was that Dick was going to drop a pot of foreign-aid money on Magloire, which would never see the light of day after it landed silently in his Swiss bank account. What they didn't tell my father was that the Haitians had already gone through one decorator, an Italian. Seems the poor guy was unable to get the job done in time and, as a result, had disappeared without a trace. His body was never found. Rumors circulated that he was either killed by the president's secret police or was the victim of some pretty powerful voodoo. Most likely it was a combination of the two—voodoo first and murder later. It would have been helpful if my father had been informed of this minor detail before he agreed to take the job.

Given the fact that the palace redo was a top government priority, the Haitian ambassador sent an old Pan Am prop plane with the interior ripped out to pick up my father in Miami and fly him to a barely paved landing strip known officially as Port-au-Prince International Airport. My father's presence at the palace was a matter of utmost urgency. Met by a solid-black Cadillac and whisked through customs without even opening his suitcase, Pop was personally greeted by the smiling president back at the palace. President Magloire spoke to him in heavily accented English, a gesture reserved only for those foreign guests of great importance. My father took a look around and realized he needed a few basic things, like a tape measure, pins, electric sewing machines, and a few hundred yards of the best French silk. Pop sent a telegram to my mother with a laundry list of items needed to get the job done. With barely any phone service, a telephone call was out of the question.

Back in Miami, Mom headed over to their office on fashionable Lincoln Road and began throwing bolts of fabric and boxes of tools out the window to the waiting Haitian army officer downstairs. The ambassador called Pan Am and had them bump everybody off the next flight back to Haiti and fill the plane with the necessary materials for the palace makeover. Like a pro, Pop worked around the clock and completed the job in less than a week despite the country's erratic delivery of electric power, which made sewing somewhat difficult.

With the job finished and the palace sparkling, the president held a celebratory dinner in honor of my father. After the guests had finished their first glass of wine, Mrs. President announced her vision that with a proper palace she could become the reigning Queen Mother of the Caribbean basin. She invited Pop to stay on and redo the place, top to bottom. No thanks, he said, got to get home to my wife and kid back in the States. Smiling in a way that only madam dictators can, she said, “Oh, but you must.” At that moment the president's elite team of thugs and murderers swarmed the dinner table, and my father found himself looking at twelve American-made machine guns. Backup arrived with machetes drawn. He was taken hostage, bound, gagged, and pistol-whipped until he agreed to make the palace the shining star of the Caribbean. Threats against my mother and me were also uttered with “We have people back in Miami that can do great harm to your family.” Until that moment, he had no idea of the serious occupational hazards and risks of being a decorator. I seriously doubt that anyone in the high pantheon of interior decorating, from Billy Baldwin to Sister Parish, was ever pistol-whipped over a job—that is, unless they wanted to be.

Never one to let a few machine guns or guards keep him down, Pop waited until his personal guard was asleep, and, just like in the movies, climbed out the bathroom window. He hailed the first local donkey to come along and paid the owner to get him to the airport pronto, where he boarded the next flight to Miami. While the plane's three propellers (one wasn't working) spun furiously in preparation for takeoff, my father's gun-toting friends from dinner suddenly stormed the plane and once again pointed their weapons at his head. He was handcuffed, blindfolded, and pushed into the backseat of a waiting army jeep. It was back to the palace for several more months of sewing, measuring, and making French fantasia.

Back home, Mom was preparing for widowhood as weeks turned into months with no word from her hostage husband. There was not the usual phone call asking us to pack our bags and join Pop that afternoon by the pool. Nor was there the sudden knock at the door from some rich person's representative telling us to be ready in ten minutes for our ride to the airport. There was nothing but silence from the great republic of Haiti.

Mom spent the next six months pleading with the U.S. State Department, the FBI, and the U.S. embassy to launch a search-and-rescue mission for her husband. For some reason, hunting down a missing decorator was just not one of the government's top priorities. Every U.S. agency slammed its door in her face. I was constantly asking annoying and unanswerable questions such as “Where's Poppa?” Mom did her best, inventing countless explanations as to why my father wasn't around. I was beginning to get used to the idea that I was now a fatherless child.

Under the watchful eyes of armed guards, Pop made Mrs. Magloire the most splendid palace imaginable. Marble and mahogany, silk and brocade were flown in from all over the world, thanks to an unlimited budget that magically appeared in the poorest country of the Western hemisphere. The palace renovation was a testament to the critical importance of American foreign aid. Rest assured that our tax dollars purchased the finest-quality draperies and silk ottomans that money can buy.

Finally, when every inch of that palace had the divine Lew Smith touch, the president shook my father's hand, gave him a glass paperweight containing his official portrait as full and final payment for services rendered, and sent him back home.

Having secured his freedom from decorator detention, Pop returned to his daily routine of satisfying the needs and fantasies of the mega-rich. I was content growing up in my own private jungle, chasing wild rabbits in the backyard. Life, for the very last time, was completely normal.

Fast-forward to October 1962—the height of the Cuban missile crisis. I was ten, listening to the air-raid sirens screaming war from the roof of the Loews Riviera movie theater, which was over two miles away. Mom was in the kitchen making meat loaf for what she imagined might be our last supper. She had rushed home from work at my father's design studio to the terrifying accompaniment of piercing air-raid sirens that filled the city. Talks between the superpowers and Fidel had not gone well that day. With all the sirens going off, I was convinced that the world was about to end, and we were all going to die.

My favorite radio station, WFUN-AM, was broadcasting nothing but a single piercing tone followed by a recorded message: “This is an alert from your emergency broadcast station. Stay tuned for further instructions.” Of course, there were no further instructions, because there was nowhere else to go. Unlike most of the country, Miami did not have real bomb shelters. The water table was too high. If you dug down a couple feet, you hit brackish green-gray water, despite the fact that
Miami
was the Seminole word for “sweet water.” Because of this elevated ground water, there are no cemeteries on Miami Beach. The bodies would quickly contaminate the water, and what would all the tourists drink? As a result of our unfortunate proximity to ground water, we had no place to hide in an underground bomb shelter and enjoy canned peas and powdered milk like the rest of the country.

Usually Mom liked me to talk to her while she made dinner. As soon as she came home, she would find me in my bedroom looking at picture books of archaeology or modern art and say, “Come talk to me in the kitchen.” That night was different. Instead of seeking me out, Mom just opened the front door, threw her pocketbook on the black-and-white zebra-patterned lounge, and went right into the kitchen. After a while I wandered in, a bit perturbed that she had not issued her usual invitation.

The big pink Philco refrigerator was humming noisily as she squished meat, eggs, and crumbled Saltine crackers in a large Pyrex bowl. Just as I was about to announce my presence, the sirens wailed again. They seemed to be either louder or coming closer. I was now officially scared. Having spent several years in school perfecting my “duck-and-cover” routine that would protect me in the event of nuclear war, I quickly climbed into the cabinet under the sink, huddled next to the Ajax, and waited for the war to start while Mom chopped onions.

Soon Pop arrived, looking sharp in his gray suit. He wore his usual Rooster tie with its horizontal stripes in muted tones, held in place by his free-form gold tie tack. All of my father's clothes seemed to come from another era. Thinking back, I now realize that he dressed as if it were still 1930. He wore dark, elegant, pleated pants, and if you looked close enough, you could see the small, subtle patterns floating throughout the weave. On several occasions I had asked why his pants were so baggy. I was trying to understand the purpose of those strange folds of fabric on the front of his pants. All of my school pants were Perma Press and pleat free, giving me that sleek sixties look. The pleats seemed to precede him as he entered a room and made him appear bigger than he actually was.

He was a compact man with a dark mustache, at a time when few, if any, American men wore mustaches. It gave him a distinguished European air that women found attractive. His salt-and-pepper hair was turning grayer by the day on a head that seemed round and free of sharp angles. When he smiled, his face flushed with happiness. His voice was melodious, and he spoke with a precise and kind intonation, as if he had read endless amounts of poetry during his youth. This camouflage carefully hid his lack of any real formal education.

As the sirens continued to wail, the atmosphere became claustrophobic. All my senses had been short-circuited by the noise, which seemed to be closing in on me. I decided to stay under the sink. Peeking through the doors of my makeshift bomb shelter, I watched my parents talking in very serious tones. It seemed almost as if they were going to have a fight. I cracked the door a little farther to hear what my father was saying but without jeopardizing my safety. “There's something I've been meaning to tell you. I have some bad news we need to discuss before this war starts.”

All chopping stopped. There was an immediate and strained silence in the kitchen. Pop just stood there while my mother stared at the iceberg lettuce on the counter waiting to be washed. Dinner was on hold.

“I have
sanpaku
.”

“You what?” my mother asked, still staring at the lettuce. Her face had a look as if she had stepped barefoot on a piece of glass. “What is this
sanpaku,
like cancer?” She began to slowly pull the outer leaves off the lettuce. In that split second, she must have imagined herself as a young widow with a child to take care of and no real income to speak of. Perhaps being vaporized by Castro's nuclear weapons was not such a bad option after all. I could tell that Mom was not in the mood for this conversation. The threat of the bombs was upsetting her, and I think she was already overwhelmed preparing for her last night on earth.

My father attempted to explain this mysterious disease. “There's too much yang in my body. My system is being poisoned with an acidic pH. If I don't correct this, my body will succumb to disease, most likely cancer. And it's not just me. You're toxic. Philip is toxic. We're all toxic.” My father's voice began to rise in intensity, which it rarely did. He was clearly upset. Something very serious was going on.

This toxic stuff worried me; whatever toxic was, it did not sound good. I decided that bombs or no bombs, I needed to join the family predinner conversation. Jumping out from under the sink, I pleaded with my father, “Poppa, what's toxic? Am I going to die too?” I started crying and hugging his legs.

“See what you're doing? You're scaring the kid. Now he's going to have nightmares and will have to come sleep with us. Thanks a lot.” Mom got tough and angry when she was upset. Pop was the opposite: the angrier he was, the calmer he became. To her credit, my mother was seeking some clarification about this mysterious disease that was killing her husband. “Can you please start at the beginning and explain to me exactly what it is you're talking about? Don't we have more important things to worry about right now instead of this toxic nonsense? What did the doctor say about this? You have about another five minutes until Castro wipes us off the face of the earth, so start talking.” The air-raid sirens had revved up again, and the noise was getting on everybody's nerves.

Pop was shouting to make himself heard over the piercing wail. “You know I don't believe in doctors. What do they know? You think a doctor is smart enough to know that I'm sanpaku? You know what your wonderful doctors do? They give you some pills that make you sicker than when you walked in the door. Then they give you more pills to counteract the first pills, and when those don't work, they start shooting you full of things like cortisone that rot your insides, and then you die. Look what happened to my brother Ruby. He's dead now, thanks to the brilliant doctors and their goddamn medicine. And while the doctors make money, and the drug companies make money, and the insurance people make money, you have the privilege of dying as they take your last dime.”

Doctors were always a big source of contention between my parents. Mom thought they were gods who had created germ-free modern living, and Pop thought they were nothing but ignorant devils. Ever since I could remember, Pop kept his medicine cabinet filled with thick brown bottles of homeopathic medicine, which he imported from England, with strange-sounding names like Allium cepa and Rhus tox. The moment anyone got sick, Pop pulled out his enormous
Materia Medica,
the diagnostic bible of homeopathy, and began prescribing tiny, sweet white pills. I don't know where or when he learned to diagnose and prescribe homeopathy, but as far back as I can remember, this was his preferred method of treatment.

At the time, it was nearly impossible to get homeopathic medicine in this country. Usually when his shipment of pills arrived by freighter months after he'd ordered it, it was immediately impounded by customs. Pop would then receive a call from some customs agent requesting that he come down to talk to them. I remember our frequent trips to the Miami docks to try to claim his packages. After a lengthy interrogation by officials from customs and often the Food and Drug Administration, the bottles were usually destroyed, and my father was warned that he could serve jail time for importing unregulated pharmaceuticals into this country. But he would just order them again and again until some sleepy customs agent handed him the package and waved him through.

However, when I was sick, I wanted to be treated by a real doctor in a white coat with a cold silver stethoscope around his neck—not by my father, in a pair of madras shorts, opening a brown bottle, shaking out some small white tablets, and saying, “Here, put these under your tongue.” All the kids at school went to doctors to get shots, pills, and lollipops. What I really wanted was a penicillin injection like everyone else.

When the oral polio vaccine was first being tested, Pop was convinced that it was part of a government-sponsored medical experiment on unsuspecting American children. “They are putting the polio virus into your body. Anything can go wrong,” he said. “You could become paralyzed or even die. Don't go near that stuff. You cannot put that virus in the human body and expect everything to be okay.” He was not entirely crazy. When the Salk vaccine was first being administered, portions of the virus were still live and actually created several hundred new cases of polio. But Mom was not about to risk me losing the use of my legs or becoming a poster child for the iron lung.

In protest over whether or not I got the vaccine, she threatened to leave him, then actually moved out, into a pink motel romantically perched on a small waterway just a few minutes away, near the University of Miami. Every day Pop drove me over to see her sitting alone in this small room, and we begged her to come home. My mother had brought nearly a dozen suitcases, several hatboxes, and an assorted collection of wigs in order to camp out in style. The small room was filled with her luggage, which contained about eight months' worth of wardrobe changes. It was considered wildly chic and very a-go-go in the sixties to have numerous wigs in various styles and colors to change your mood, your look, and your mind at a moment's notice. No matter what her wig of the day looked like, Mom always remained a blonde. Her combined annual wig and hat bills must have been equal to the gross national product of Bimini. During our time in the cramped hotel room, my parents engaged in high-level talks about vaccine theory and their marriage. On several occasions my mother would just collapse into a flood of tears. Three days later her walkout achieved its goal. I was back at school, drinking cherry-flavored vaccine out of a tiny paper cup, the kind normally used for urine samples. It was delicious. Immunization against a deadly virus never tasted so good.

“Are you going to die from sanpaku?” I asked as the tears streamed down my face.

My father bent down to look at me and pointed to the bottom of his eye. “You see this little bit of white under my eye?”

I looked cautiously because I was afraid that if I peered too closely, I would see thousands of sanpaku germs floating around that might jump out and bite me. Just below his dark brown iris, I noticed a bit of white. That didn't strike me as unusual. Everybody had white in their eyes. “Uh-huh,” I responded slowly.

Excited that I had seen the white, he explained, “Whenever you see white at the bottom of your eyes, that's how you know you're sanpaku. Normally, when you look straight ahead, your lower eyelid should just touch the bottom of the iris. If it doesn't, and any white is showing, this indicates a high level of toxicity created by the Western diet. It needs to be corrected immediately by balancing your pH levels to reduce your acidity, which causes all this cancer. You don't need a
doctor
to tell you that you are sanpaku. The body tells you what you need to know, if you only know how to listen to it.” The word
doctor
was emphasized for the benefit of my mother, who was measuring out the oil and vinegar for the Good Seasons salad dressing with her back to us. She pretended not to be listening to our conversation, which she didn't want to hear anyway.

I wasn't about to rush into the bathroom and self-administer my own sanpaku test. Pop had already told me I was toxic, and I didn't need any additional information on this subject. “So will the doctor give you some medicine that will make the sanpaku go away?” I asked. This disease seemed so serious, I figured that just this once, he would have to see a doctor.

“I'm going to use macrobiotics to cure my sanpaku.”

Macrobiotics sounded like some sort of new and advanced form of antibiotics. Whenever other kids at school were sick, they got to stay home and take big pills. Not me. I had to stay in bed shivering with a high fever because my father believed that the fever was nature's way of heating the body to cook the germs and render them harmless. In the process, he claimed, the immune system was enhanced.

As part of his new anti-sanpaku campaign, Pop announced, “In the morning we all start our ten-day macrobiotic brown-rice purification fast to get rid of the sanpaku. This will equalize the acid-alkaline balance in our bodies. Next we'll have three days of coffee enemas prepared with spring water to remove the poisonous residue from our bodies.” This did not sound like something I was going to enjoy. Suddenly my fear of nuclear weapons was replaced with an even stronger fear of coffee enemas. I looked over at my mother, who did not seem very excited either. My father was not winning any converts to his new purification program. She had not made any more progress on the dinner preparations. It looked like we would not be eating before midnight, if at all. I knew that it would be easier to get those missiles moved out of Cuba than it would be to get my mother to remove poisonous residue from her body. To her there was nothing more pleasurable than a cigarette and a dry martini—any time of day or night. Smoking was almost a religious rite. Any comments about her tobacco use were considered heresy and punishable by death. There was not a chance in hell or in heaven that she would suddenly become macrobiotic in the interest of cleansing her body of toxic sanpaku.