Walking Through Walls (6 page)

I begged Pop to let me stay at home during a fast. Nope. I had to go to school, as fasting was supposed to be part of one's everyday life and nothing out of the ordinary. By the fifth or sixth day, I emerged from the clouds with a sense of mental clarity and a renewed stream of physical energy. On Saturdays we visited Nancy, the colonic specialist in a crisp white uniform, who irrigated my young colon with a big smile.

My normal appetite was always being curtailed, either through fasts or the dictum that the stomach should never be completely full. While other kids stuffed themselves with sweets and hamburgers, I had to carefully calibrate my eating according to strict yogic principles so that at the end of any meal my stomach would be filled with one-third food, one-third liquid, and one-third air.

During this time of various fasts, my father frequently mentioned his goal of eventually becoming a breatharian, a practitioner of an esoteric form of yoga. This was one of the few goals that, fortunately, he never achieved. Breatharians are those who have refined their body's mental and metabolic processes to the point where they are able to live solely off rarefied magnetic particles in the air known as
prana.
They breathe, but they do not eat. I could just see us at dinner parties as the hostess passed along her favorite dish: “No thanks, we'll just have some air” or “We're already full from breathing.”

These ongoing fasts seemed to be the official launching pad for my father's grand philosophical search. Possibly the lack of food altered his brain chemistry and encouraged him to begin asking larger, deeper questions about his own life. He began an aggressive reading program on every aspect of esoteric spirituality. In order to keep up, he enrolled both of us in the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Dynamics made popular by the late President Kennedy. So many books, so little time. At night we would sit in class moving our fingers across and down pages while supposedly retaining everything we read at a thousand words a minute.

In 1966 he began reading everything he could about the philosophy of yoga, which led to an interest in reincarnation. One metaphysical topic led to another. Over time his exploration of the arcane began to unfold as if he were following a well-defined syllabus. His esoteric books were not easily purchased. To obtain these long-out-of-print titles, Pop patiently wrote letters of inquiry to small, dusty bookstores in New York or London that specialized in wacky, hard-to-find books. Most of these were published in the early 1920s during the last great wave of interest in spiritualist matters. Weeks and often months passed between when he mailed his request and the time he found a package wrapped in brown paper and string waiting in our mailbox.

Through his readings, Pop became fascinated with the idea that he had been here before and would be back again. Mom wasn't buying any of it. She believed that we have only one life to live, and we'd better make the best of it. When she tried to have civilized discussions with him about her views on these topics, they went nowhere. At this point in his path, his views were so far out that he was looking for agreement, not logic, and certainly not dissension.

One evening, just at twilight, my father and I were sitting in near darkness. As we continued to talk, we must have looked like talking-head silhouettes shrouded in black. We could barely make each other out. He began explaining the concept of reincarnation, which I had never heard before. Suddenly my life seemed a little less solid. I began to feel completely transparent as I imagined the ghosts from my past lives surrounding me. The idea that this was not my only life really scared me. I didn't want to have another life either as an Egyptian prince or as a high priest in Atlantis; I wanted this one. He laughed when I told him that I didn't like this subject. The laugh made me uncomfortable. It was the kind of Vincent Price all-knowing laugh that implied, “You foolish young thing, you can fight this strange idea all you want, but one day you will succumb…”

His curiosity about reincarnation naturally led him to the provocative mythology that surrounds the pyramids. Pop was especially fond of an out-of-print book from England on the secret science of the pyramids. This was not your average pyramid power book positing that the pyramids acted as landing cones on the runway for errant flying saucers but instead a scientific treatise the size of a large city's yellow pages.
The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message,
printed in 1925, featured complex fold-out tables with such dense titles as “Pyramid Noon Reflexions During the Winter Half of the Year,” providing the reader with numerous calculations of the sun's altitude along with azimuth of apex ridge of “reflexion.” Another chart offered information on the “Precession of the Equinoxes—The Solar Year in 4699 BC.” “The Sed Hebs of Dynasties XVIII and XIX” detailed the genealogy of specific Egyptian dynasties.

Pop read this book as seriously as if he were in Bible study class trying to gain enlightenment from the book of Revelation. He must have felt that this book contained some missing key that would illuminate his life. Over time he filled several notebooks with quotes and observations from the book. I would flip through the book and carefully pull out the diagrams of the secret chambers within the Great Pyramid and imagine becoming an archaeologist. In my father's growing library, this book was like a magic carpet that transported me to other worlds.

The prophetic messages supposedly contained in the Great Pyramid led my father to read about Edgar Cayce, the famous sleeping prophet. During the 1920s Cayce, a simple churchgoing man, was able to diagnose and provide remedies for various illnesses while asleep in a deep trance. Once he went into a trance, associates would bring by “patients” with difficult-to-treat ailments. While in this state, Cayce was able to contact some other form of intelligence that allowed him to prescribe numerous effective treatments. Clearly this was an ability that Pop wanted to acquire. Cayce became an early role model for my father, who was fascinated with the idea that you could obtain from invisible sources information that could heal people. Years later Pop became close friends with Edgar's son, Hugh Lynn, who would visit and stay with us during the winter.

As my father's curiosity and explorations expanded, he would eventually follow a trail that led him to the theosophical teachings of Krishnamurti and Madame Blavatsky. Over time his affiliation with the Theosophical Society would grow, and he would become one of its frequent lecturers on healing. Each of these philosophical stopping points was critical in his evolution as a psychic. It seemed as if Pop was enrolled in some sort of supernatural PhD correspondence program.

I was extremely hesitant to talk to any of the kids at school about ectoplasm, the akashic records, the mystical sect the Hunza people, or any of the other arcane topics that Pop discussed with me based on his readings. Out of necessity I developed a dual personality. During school hours I needed to appear as normal as possible, in order to avoid being beaten up or laughed out of class. However, as soon as I came home and opened the front door, it was like walking onto the set of
I Dream of Jeannie
or
Bewitched.
For me these TV shows were like documentaries rather than fantasy sitcoms. At last there were other people who, like me, lived in a parallel, paranormal universe. Major Tony came home from his day job at NASA to find his genie ready, willing, and able to put spells on people, read minds, and alter reality.

After school, along with my homework, my father provided informal lessons in metaphysics. He would casually discuss subjects like Atlantis, astrology, kundalini, and Buddhism the way that other dads talked about baseball players or politics. These subjects had a captivating quality, as if I were listening to the latest installment of
One Thousand and One Arabian Nights
. Soon I knew more about chakras and reincarnation than I did about Tom Sawyer or American history. Our conversations about multiple incarnations and life in other dimensions made it somewhat difficult to actually focus on my algebra homework. When at home, I lived in my own imagination as I daydreamed about mystical beings and supernatural feats of power.

In an effort to mimic my father's new interests in religious spirituality, I signed up for an evening one-on-one Bible study class. I really did it for the free illustrated Bible, which had great pictures and was the reward for finishing the course. My parents watched in horror as a former Fuller Brush man with a limp would come to our house twice a week at seven o'clock at night and make me memorize psalms from the New Testament. Since I only wanted the free Bible and wasn't doing really well with the apostles, I quit after five weeks. I just wasn't that interested in the door-to-door salesman's version of Jesus's Good News.

As my father continued to teach me about the ins and outs of reincarnation, it made me feel as if this life didn't matter that much. After all, it was just a preview for the next one. Because everything was predetermined by God, spirits, and karma, I assumed that it made no difference whether I studied or not or whether I excelled or not, because God had a plan for me. The problem was, I didn't know what the plan was and felt powerless to change it. As a result, my school performance began to plummet. I figured if my destiny was to be an honor student, then God and His spirit cohorts would make it happen for me. Learning to read cues and affirmations from my environment as omens, my beliefs were often reinforced when my mother would spontaneously break out in her favorite song: “Que Sera, Sera”—whatever will be, will be…

Mom continued to work hard at being a supportive wife, as if her husband had merely taken up golf or tennis. While she rejected most of his “wacky ideas,” she did her best to go along with his new interests. On nights when he disappeared for yoga lessons, she expressed her delight that whatever this thing called yoga was, it was helping him relax from the tensions of the office. Ever practical, she focused on the end result of his metaphysical curiosity.

She endured the first wave of “kooky friends,” which included the yoga teacher, astrologers, and other seekers, with a good-natured hostess smile and a feigned interest in the conversation. Over time the smile disappeared, and her conversation turned to logical and incisive questioning of their belief systems. Typical of one of her stop-the-conversation-cold questions would be, “So, if I understand you correctly, what you are saying is that the reason someone gets cancer is because they did something terrible in their past life such as raping their daughter or killing their next-door neighbor? Therefore the cancer in this lifetime did not occur because of the current medical explanation of mutant cells rapidly multiplying but instead is due to a karmic payment for past sins? Am I on the right track here?” She quickly entered the no-win zone of these metaphysical, meandering conversations. In no time at all, she realized that she was better off playing the silent cook rather than the happy hostess.

The ever-widening gulf between my parents was especially apparent in the bedroom. Secondhand books on Buddhism, levitation, hypnosis, Rosicrucianism, magnetic healing, UFOs, and reincarnation continued to pile up on the table next to Pop's side of the bed, while Mom stuck to her lurid novels and biographies of screen stars and Rat Pack comedians. The separate piles of reading material beside the bed were indicative not just of different interests but of two lives that were diverging.

But now time had passed, and their differences had hardened. As if in one final attempt to acknowledge and accommodate their growing estrangement, Pop created a special mattress that catered to their individual tastes: firm and ascetic on his side, and soft and cushy on hers. There was something very Hollywood about this his-and-hers mattress invention. In a nod to Eastern sleeping habits, the bed, a gold-leafed extravaganza, was just a foot off the floor, whereas standard American beds seemed to be getting higher and higher until you needed a ladder to climb into them. The gold metal headboard of swirls and curlicues designed by my father anticipated the free-form psychedelic aesthetic that was about to sweep the country.

During this period of change, my parents continued to work together at the design studio. While much of the day-to-day work remained business as usual, Pop's decorating sensibility took a turn toward the mystical as well. Maybe it was his daily meditations or the early tremors of the mid-sixties shaking all around us, but suddenly he found the staples of traditional decorating—such as fabric and wallpaper—terribly old-fashioned and conventional. Without ever dropping a tab of acid, he was inexplicably drawn to things bright and shiny, especially iridescent jewel-toned colors.

One day Mom was wearing some vividly colored Mardi Gras pop beads (so unlike her) that her sister had given to her. They caught my father's eye. Suddenly he had a decorating epiphany that these beads could become a new way to make modern draperies. Perhaps this inspiration was brought on by one of his many previous incarnations, specifically the one where he was a Persian talisman maker, as revealed to him many years later in a message from one of his spirit guides. Thanks to the magic of reincarnation, a new decorating trend—beaded curtains—was born that would sweep the country and keep me in bell-bottoms for years to come. From this moment forth, fabric was banished from his decorating vocabulary, to be replaced by plastic and glass beads from around the world. The beaded draperies, created with his brilliant sense of color, design, and texture, combined the best of hippie regalia and cheap made-in-Japan bamboo curtains with a majestic sense of antiquity. Pop was high-low decades before this would become a cultural idiom.