Walking Through Walls (25 page)

Jerry looked at me, slightly confused. I could tell he had no idea what Florence was talking about. He temporarily lost his focus until he asked, “Hey Phil, how much money do they owe you?”

“Five hundred fifty dollars.”

Jerry repeated the number to Florence. “Five hundred fifty for my friend here, and we go home. Otherwise, it's not me you're messing with but my dad, who is a big litigator for the city.”

Florence was not impressed. “Excuse me. I have work to do.” She pushed Jerry aside and went upstairs.

Jerry looked at me as if to ask, “Now what?”

I figured the party was over and turned to leave. Toni sat at her desk, looking down at some flower-power doodle that she pretended to be engrossed in.

The next thing I heard was yelling. I turned around and could not see Jerry but heard his voice from upstairs. The staffers looked startled. But no one moved. I ran up the stairs and saw Jerry banging his fist on the wall next to Florence's head. “Gimme the money now!”

Florence screamed back,
“No!”
When she saw me coming up the stairs, she started yelling at me, “You will be excommunicated for this and will never be able to set foot in any Org in the world! We will have to rout you out!”

Jerry, who went to some sort of after-school Christian football meetings, put his face in front of Florence and screamed, “This ain't no fuckin' church, lady! You're full of shit! Only the pope can excommunicate, not you! Now give me that goddamn money!” He picked up a heavy metal stapler off the desk and was about to whack Florence on the head. It was immediately clear to everyone that if Jerry let loose the stapler, Florence would not be auditing anyone again, ever.

“Okay, okay. Toni, come up here immediately!” Florence was bent over and panting. Her eyes were wildly searching for a way out of the room.

I heard the stairs groan as Toni pulled herself up them.

“So cut the shit, let's go, where's the money?” Jerry was still “on purpose,” as they say in Scientologyspeak.

“It's coming.”

I went downstairs. As I walked by Toni, she said without looking up, “You're fucked. Really fucked. This goes all the way to Special Command.”

I heard Jerry upstairs losing his patience. “The money
now,
bitch, or I let loose. You and this place won't be standing by the time I'm done.”

Those were the magic words.

Florence came down the stairs, went into the back, and returned with five one-hundred-dollar bills.

I let Jerry take the money. He counted it and said, “I think we need another fifty.”

Florence went into her purse and handed him two twenties and ten ones. She was silent. As we started to leave, she regained her composure and said, “Philip, this will be communicated directly to Ron. I know he was interested in you. He will be disappointed. We will be forced to do an ethics review.”

I surprised myself by responding, “Don't bother, I'll write Ron myself. He'll be happy to hear from me about how badly you run the Org.”

On the way to the car, Jerry was hootin' and hollerin' like he had just won a major game. Jerry handed me the money. I gave him one of the hundred-dollar bills. “What's this for? My fee is twenty dollars.”

“You earned it.” I was sad. My dream of a lifelong affiliation with Scientology had ended badly. I had really wanted to find a home at the Org, become enlightened in a scientific way, and have a unique understanding of a new kind of truth, just as my father had discovered new kinds of powers. I felt anxious and in a bit of a free fall.

When I got home, I called Maya.

“I know I'm not supposed to laugh,” she said, “but it's very funny. I wish I had been there. I knew Jerry could do it. What are you going to do with the money?”

“I was thinking that you and I should go to Europe for our summer vacation. You know, backpack, sleep on the beach, youth hostels. Just for a month or two. Let's get out of here. I have enough money. We can go on one of those European planes; it's only a couple hundred dollars. Let's go to Greece and Paris. This is a better way to spend the money than on auditing.”

“When?”

“As soon as we can get tickets. I'll call tomorrow.”

“Okay, I'll talk to my mom and dad.”

Maya's parents were dead set against the idea. Her father was convinced that she'd be raped by village peasants while I was roasting on an open-air spit. My mother thought I was little young to be on my own in Europe but knew better than to say no, since it wouldn't do any good. Deep down inside she loved the idea of me running off to Europe to become a sophisticated world traveler. Maya and I quickly planned our dream itinerary: Paris, Italy, Spain, and Greece. The day after school let out for the summer, we were at the airport with backpacks and sleeping bags, boarding some hippie airbus that originated out of Iceland.

Our first stop was to be Paris, but at the last minute, and for no particular reason, we changed our minds and jumped a train to Spain. Maya spoke the language, and it seemed as good a place as any to start our adventure. In Madrid we found a small pension and took a wonderful turn-of-the-century room. Tall ceilings, faded green velvet curtains almost in shreds, blue and white tile work in the bathroom. The neighbors' wash was hanging in the courtyard, and the heavy smell of olive oil infused the air. Neither of us had seen anything like it, and we were overcome by the romance of the place. The owner had the maid bring us a morning coffee.

As I started to unpack, I suddenly felt as if all the blood had completely drained from my body, leaving nothing but a hollow core. This was immediately followed by a pervasive tingling, crawling sensation all over my skin. I started sweating and shivering, and collapsed onto the bed. After about twenty minutes of being completely immobile, I became delirious with fever. Maya later told me that I began to speak some nonsense language and was thrashing violently about in bed. Panicked, she ran to get the lady of the house, who took one look at me, cried,
“Dios mio!”
and ran off in search of the local doctor.

Maya went downstairs and asked the woman in the kitchen to prepare some manzanilla tea for me, which was her mother's favorite herbal cure-all. When the housekeeper brought the tea, I was completely frozen in a fetal position and shaking violently. I was unable to even raise my head or open my mouth to drink the tea.

When the owner of the house finally returned with the doctor, I was lost in a haze of fever, chills, aches, and sweat. He looked me over quickly and told Maya there was nothing he could do until the next morning, when he would be able to get someone to draw my blood. He thought it might be malaria or typhoid, and told Maya, “Put cold compresses on his head—and pray.” He crossed himself as he left the room. Maya was terrified that if I died, she wouldn't know what to do with the body or what to say to my parents. After all, we were only seventeen and very far away from home for the first time.

For the next half hour, Maya washed me down with cold towels, when suddenly my fever completely broke. I opened my eyes and asked calmly, “Why am I all wet?”

Maya started to cry. “Oh my God, I thought you were going to die! I never saw anybody so sick. I just didn't know what to do. I can't believe the fever is gone. It just suddenly vanished. Thank God you're okay.”

The next morning, with this incident behind us, we resumed our travels. After our first stop in Madrid, we completely abandoned our original itinerary and traveled to cities and countries based on spontaneous decisions. Never before had we felt so free. We slept on the beaches in Greece, ate grilled octopus, and visited the great works of Italian art that I had seen only in books as a kid. Late-night Paris cafés and long train rides through the Spanish countryside filled with miles of sunflowers.

Two months later, when I returned home, I called my father from the airport to let him know I had returned. “Hi, Pop, I just got back. We had a great time.”

“I'm so relieved you're home safely. I'm really sorry about what happened in Spain. I just couldn't get to you quickly enough.”

“Huh? What are you talking about? What happened in Spain?”

“Don't you remember? You were really sick with a serious infection.”

I must have blocked the incident, because I had no idea what he was talking about. “Pop, I honestly don't remember anything like that. Anyway, I've got to tell you about Florence. You would love Florence, especially the churches. The architecture is amazing; to think that they created these buildings so long ago. You know, now that you mention it, I do remember something happening in Spain. Maya told me that I had a fever or something. And then it was gone. So what were you saying about how you couldn't get to me?”

“I had been tracking you based on the itinerary that you left for me. You were supposed to be in Paris, but when I looked, you weren't there. My connection with you had been severed. At the time, I felt that everything was okay and that I would look for you in the morning. So I went to bed. In the middle of the night, I heard an alarm clock ringing. You know that I don't have an alarm clock, so I knew that it was spirit waking me for a reason. That's when I realized that something was wrong with you, but I wasn't sure where you were. So I got out a map, and with my pendulum, I started to look for you. I kept checking Paris, but the pendulum indicated that you weren't there. I looked in England and Italy and still couldn't find you. Spain was the last place I looked because that was going to be the end of your trip. But I found you in Madrid. I can't remember the street name, but I have it written down somewhere. Once I found you, I instantly began checking out your vital signs.”

“Sounds like you were up all night looking for me.”

“No, not really. I think it took about twelve to fifteen minutes to locate you once I started the search. My real concern was that your vibrations had dropped dramatically, and I felt that you were in danger of dying.”

“This is when I had the fever?”

“Yes, so I did a quick scan on you and started raising your vibrations and tried to stabilize you. Once you were stabilized, I could track down the problem and get your systems working. There were a lot of other problems going on. If they hadn't woken me up, I don't know if you'd still be alive.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said with some irritation. I was not aware that I had been at death's door. I thought to myself, “So what if I had a fever? I would have gotten over it anyway. Just let me have my fever without always watching over me. I'm old enough to take care of myself.” At that point, I would have gladly traded a week of fevers to have a father who didn't know where I was and wasn't in the room with me and my girlfriend while we were in Spain—or any other country, for that matter. If he was in Spain with me, did that mean he was with me in Paris, Rome, and Athens? Yes, it did.

“Next time I'll know that I should check on your whereabouts several times a day and not rely on your itinerary.”

Despite my annoyance with my father's psychic snooping, I was impressed with his ability to locate and heal me while I was somewhere in Europe. For the first time, I began to think that just maybe I should actually start paying attention to this weirdo father of mine.

It was a brilliant Saturday morning in December. Clear, cloudless skies, seventy degrees, no humidity, and the birds were busy singing the weather report to the world. I was expecting a call from my friend Mark. Since I was no longer spending all my time at the Org, I started to hang out on Saturdays with a few of the more eccentric kids from school. Maya hated surfing, so Mark and I had planned to go with Cindy and Davida. He was waiting for his father to come home so that he could use the car. Mark's family had recently moved down from New York so that his father, a painter, could teach art at the University of Miami. On his first day in school, Mark looked a bit like Chad Stuart, the lead singer in the British folk-pop group Chad and Jeremy, with his wavy chestnut hair, square tortoiseshell glasses, and denim work shirt. He was sitting alone in the cafeteria emanating Bob Dylan cool, dressed in clothes from the Army-Navy store. We took one look at each other and immediately bonded. It was clear that we were both young members of the avant-garde.

Davida and I both loved the singer Laura Nyro and spent hours discussing who in our pop-cultural pantheon was shooting heroin. With her long hippie hair and gauzy blouses with subtle embroidery, Davida had a kind of haunted angelic quality that appeared in her endless obsessive self-portraits that she drew in her black leather-bound sketchbooks with her scratchy Rapidograph pen. Davida thought and acted like a full-fledged drug addict without actually being one. Cindy, on the other hand, was just a sweet, goofy girl who loved to take acid and listen to the same Grateful Dead song over and over and over and over again.

Unlike California or Hawaii, Florida surf never amounted to much. The water was too tranquil, except during a hurricane, when surfers risked their lives to catch good waves. The best we could manage was to paddle out and slowly ride a sleepy wave in to shore. While neither Mark nor the girls were paragons of normalcy (how could they be if they were hanging out with me?), their company helped me forget that I was the son of
My Favorite Martian.

Several months earlier, I had found a little surf shop in Miami Beach, down on Ocean and Second. It was a storefront next to a bagel shop, where we would rent boards along with a cake of wax for five dollars and eat fresh, warm bagels. We were the surf shop's only customers that day if not the entire weekend. At the time, this part of Miami Beach was exceedingly uncool. The area was largely shuttered and abandoned except for the kosher butcher and bakery on Washington Avenue. It was the large population of elderly Jews that encouraged people to disparage the area as “God's waiting room.” Davida and Cindy would pack a picnic lunch, which we would eat in the shadows of the abandoned, rusting dog track that was once part of Miami Beach's high-roller circuit. Eventually the track would be torn down and become the epicenter of the glamorous high-rise Miami Beach known as South of Fifth.

That morning I had been dressed and ready to go since eight-thirty, but by ten o'clock Mark still hadn't called. He told me under no circumstances to call his house, because his sister was sick, and he didn't want me waking her. I told him that I was going to spend the morning hanging out with my father and to call me over at his house. Waiting for Mark's call, I sat on the back porch, where I could hear the phone ring, and leafed through my latest copy of
Eye,
a short-lived, glossy counterculture magazine that featured fashion spreads of long-haired kids in bell-bottoms and multihued striped shirts. Every month the magazine ran interviews with underground heroes such as Rudi Gernreich, Timothy Leary, Twiggy, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, and Peter Max.
Eye
was my window onto another world that seemed even more exotic than the supernatural one at home.

Finally the phone rang. I jumped up and ran to the kitchen to get it before my father did. I knew it was Mark calling. “Hello?” There was a slight hiss and crackle on the other end. It sounded like long distance.

“Hello. This is Mrs. Stanley Moore. May I speak with Mr. Lew Smith?”

“Just a minute, please.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and yelled out, “Pop, it's for you!” so he could pick up the phone on the other line. “Stupid woman,” I thought to myself. “Why did she have to call? Now my father will be on the phone forever, and Mark will never be able to reach me.” This was decades before call-waiting. Mark would probably call, get a busy signal, pick up the girls, and go surfing without me. Just my luck. I was furious. Rather than hang up the phone, I decided to listen in, so I would know when he was finished with his conversation.

“Hello?” my father answered.

“Mr. Smith, my name is Nancy Moore. I'm calling from California. I was given your name and number by a woman named Linda Davis.”

When she announced herself, I heard the
click
of my father turning on the tape recorder. This meant it was going to be a long call. He had started taping all of his conversations as records of his healing activity. “Oh yes, how is Linda?”

Linda Davis was a well-known writer who specialized in popular books on nutrition, an esoteric subject at the time that interested only little old ladies from Pasadena. Linda lived in L.A. and had been friends with my father for some time. Over the past several months, despite all her nutritional knowledge, she had found herself increasingly ill with some mysterious disease that no doctor could diagnose or treat. She began to bleed spontaneously not only from her nose, but also her eyes and at times from the palms of her hands. She had seen oncologists, cardiologists, internists, and endocrinologists, with no success. Finally she called my father. In the space of a few minutes, Pop diagnosed her illness as a case of possession.

It seems that Linda had a lady friend who had recently moved in with her. This woman, according to the information my father received from his spirit guides, was generating a lot of negative energy. From the minute the bad-vibe lady arrived, she had begun to take over Linda's life: controlling her finances, her social calendar, and her professional life. Linda was exhausted and frightened. In a few minutes over the phone, Pop removed the possessing entity using a series of antipossession prayers along with his pendulum. He restored Linda's vibrations and her equilibrium. When he told Linda that she had to get this woman out of the house immediately, Linda responded that she was afraid and didn't know how. My father said, “Well, then I will.” With a few more rounds of the pendulum, he told Linda to leave the house for the day. When she returned in the evening, the woman would be gone. She did, and she was. Linda's bleeding stopped immediately.

“She's quite well,” reported Mrs. Moore. “Her health has improved dramatically. She had such a strange condition; I had never seen anything like it. However, I'm afraid that my mother isn't doing too well, which is the reason I'm calling. It seems that she has a blood clot on her brain. She's in the hospital. The doctors do not want to operate because she has a heart condition and she's diabetic. They're afraid that if they operate, she'll end up a vegetable because of her weak heart. There's nothing they can do. So Linda suggested I call you and that you could help my mother.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighty-three.”

“Well, let's see what we can do.”

I thought to myself, “Why couldn't her mother just have a cold or a bad back? That wouldn't take so long. But a blood clot on the brain—this will take at least an hour.”

“Mrs. Moore, I'm going to ask you to help me here. I need to use you as an intercessory to send healing energy to your mother.”

“You mean we don't need to fly out and see you?”

My father laughed. “No. I can do it all over the phone. It doesn't matter where in the world your mother is. I can still read every organ in her body and send her whatever medication she needs, all through thought. There is no time or distance limitation on how I work. We are all just energy. The idea of doctors and medicine is antithetical to the true nature of the body, which is pure spirit manifested in a physical form.”

“Well, okay,” Mrs. Moore responded somewhat weakly. Her patrician voice led me to believe that she was not a fan of anything alternative, and I could tell by her tone that she was a little sorry she had made this call. I'm sure that she, like so many others, had called my father because everything else had failed, and he was her last resort. “Now, what is it that I have to do to help you?” she asked.

“Not much. Just think of your mother. Keep a picture of her in your mind. See her in perfect health, surrounded by a white light. Feel as much love for her as you can.”

“Well, we've never been that close and—”

“I know that. That's why I want you to really feel that love for her. She needs to feel it, and so do you.”

“Okay. I'll do the best I can.”

“Do you want your mother to be healed?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then you'll have to do better than that. I want you to really love her. It will make my job a lot easier.”

“Okay.”

My father cradled the phone on his shoulder as he used two hands to begin dowsing the mother's health status. “Level of acceptance?”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm just checking your mother's level of acceptance—her willingness to be healed.” My father was now holding his pendulum over one of his charts as he scanned the mother's various energy bodies and determined their vibrational status. “I have now been given permission to heal her. Fortunately, she is very open to this.”

“How do you know that?”

“I'm scanning your mother's emotional and soul characteristics as we speak. I need to find out whether the cause of her clot is physical, emotional, or karmic. That will tell me where to work. But first I need to raise your vibrations so I can send the energy through you. Visualize her.”

“I see my mother in my mind now.”

“Good. Okay, I've raised your vibrations to the cosmic level. Here we go…First I'll check out her heart. I see I need to normalize her heartbeat. Good. Now, I'm sending through you a particular healing energy. What did you just feel?”

“I felt something in my head, as if my brain were made of feathers. It feels so light.”

“I just sent you something that dissolves blood clots. It went to the head right away to dissolve that clot in her brain.”

“Well, that's what I felt. Something in my head just opened up.”

“Now let's work on the diabetes. Wait just a minute. Okay. I've stabilized her blood sugar. I don't think she'll need her insulin shots anymore. That will go a long way toward her feeling better and having more energy. Let me do one more thing. I've just developed a new medicine made from the thought-form of venom.”

“You mean like venom from snakes?”

“Yes. I call it Pro-Ven, and it repairs the immune system. It's very dangerous to work with. Doctors are now using cobra venom in a new medicine, but it has a lot of side effects. I've distilled the healing essence of the venom and placed it into a thought-form.”

“Ohhhh…”

“Just a minute, I need to do something else. Good. Hold on. I just selected four bottles of cell salts that I put on my sender board that will direct the specific healing energy that your mother needs. I'm also sending her Pro-Ven through you. What did you feel?”

“I felt something in my stomach, something like a change in my stomach. Strange. I can't quite explain it.”

“Okay. I also want to send her some color energy that will help repair the functioning of her brain.” I heard my father let out a deep exhalation. “By the way, I just checked your mother, and I see no signs of cancer, so we don't have to worry about that. She's clear. Okay, now I'm going to send more cell salts to her so the body can rejuvenate. I'm sending her enough surplus cells so the body can pick and choose what it needs. I think we've covered everything. She looks to be in good shape. Now, when are you going to speak to your mother again?”

“Probably sometime tonight.”

“Well, then, give me a call tomorrow and let me know what happened. I'm sure you're going to have a good report.”

“Thank you so much for your time. I can't believe what has just happened. I will definitely call you tomorrow. What do I owe you?”

My father laughed. “Nothing. I don't accept payment for doing God's work.”

“This is incredible. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Good-bye.”

“Don't forget to call me; I want to hear how she's doing. Good-bye.”

I was relieved that she had finally hung up. The call didn't take as long as I thought it would. Pop wrapped it up in less than fifteen minutes. It was now almost ten-thirty, and I hadn't heard from Mark. Either he tried to reach me and couldn't get through, or his father didn't come home from work. Now it was getting too late to get over to the beach.

My father called from his study, “Philip, would you come in here for a minute?” Probably I was going to get stuck with some chore. I found him still at his desk with all his healing charts and diagrams laid out. They looked like celestial navigation charts for travel to distant planets.