Pacific Palisades
Summer 1978
A few days after the incident in the meadow, Jason and his parents, Phillip and Elizabeth, were at June and Donald Walker’s house for their weekly bridge night. Donald was in no mood for bridge that night and he had been drinking. Things were not going well for the Walkers. Their oldest daughter was leaving for college, and that put a financial strain on Donald. But more than that, Donald did not approve of premarital sex and he knew that once his girl was away from home, she would succumb to peer pressure and do “it.” Donald hoped that his wife, June, had educated her on birth control, but he didn’t believe in that either. His middle daughter had just gotten her driver’s license and was begging for a car, which she wasn’t going to get. And now the son of his wife’s best friend was corrupting his son. On top of that, his company was moving him to Orange County. Donald had just told his family that news the other day, and he was worried about selling his Palisades house and finding one as nice down there.
When the St. Johns arrived, Jason and David went into the den and the adults immediately sat down to play cards. Donald Walker insisted on dealing instead of cutting the deck first. Everyone brushed over that without making a fuss. After the bidding, which the Walkers won, Donald became the dummy and went in to the kitchen for another drink. June concentrated on playing her hand and made no comment. Her hope lay in her cards, and if she won the hand perhaps her husband would mellow and it would be a pleasant evening after all.
David hadn’t talked to Jason for a few days and was desperate to know what had happened to him. But, at the same time, David wanted to eavesdrop on their parents. He had a bad feeling about the game that night. It was quiet in the living room; the adults must have been concentrating on their cards, and Jason and David looked at each other rather awkwardly from opposite sides of the room.
“Did the ranger talk to your parents?” David finally asked.
“That friggin freak. Did you see he was covered in tattoos?”
“Yea, probably a marine or something, but what did your dad say?” David wanted to know if Jason had suffered as much humiliation as he had.
“My dad wasn’t home. My mom and I talked about it and she was pretty cool. I explained the whole thing, and she doesn’t think there’s anything weird between us.”
“My dad hit the roof. You’d have thought I’d murdered somebody. What about your dad, didn’t your mom tell him later?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t seem concerned. Said he’d love me no matter what. That was a little weird.”
“My dad was all over my mom and my sisters. He blamed them for making a sissy out of me. God, this is going to get all over town. If we walk down the street together people are going to calls us fagots.”
“So what!” Jason truly didn’t care. “You and I know that we aren’t, so screw them. I don’t care what other people think, and what they think isn’t going to ruin our friendship.”
“Yeah.” David had a hard time keeping his voice from breaking. To David, Jason’s loyalty and friendship was a great relief. They were best friends, so tight, and what happened in the hills just added a profound layer to his already burdensome, adolescent angst. David checked his impulse to run across the room and hug Jason. He was too afraid.
Back in the living room, Jason’s parents deliberately projected normalcy, though the tension at the card table could be cut with a butter knife. June Walker kept giving Elizabeth St. John glances that telegraphed her distress. “Pray for me. Help me. How do I deal with this kind of situation and maintain harmony?” June pleaded silently.
Instead of addressing June’s plea for help, Elizabeth retreated into her detached, Christian Science practitioner mode where she had no sympathy for “mortal mind” behavior—that human perception that there is power in material cause and effect. As with everything Elizabeth did, she went all the way. She went through Christian Science class instruction with the finest teacher she could find and was a member in good standing of the Mother Church, therefore she was eligible to practice spiritual healing. June relied on Elizabeth for spiritual support and secretly went to the Christian Science Church. She liked the peace there; so different from the hellfire of her husband’s Baptist Church.
Elizabeth wasn’t being rude to June, though it might have appeared that way. She was silently working to bring harmony into the situation. Her Christian Science teacher had taught her that one of the strongest tendencies of the so-called mortal or carnal mind was its love for sympathy. She could not be an effective healer and have any sympathy for “error,” or wrong thinking.
Donald Walker came back from the kitchen with another bourbon. “Any religion founded by a woman,” he said, referring to Mary Baker Eddy, “has no balls and should be relegated to spinsters and old maids.” He pointedly looked at Elizabeth. “You’re turning my son into a fairy!”
And raising his voice to June; “David’s going to go to a real church, one with some discipline, some hellfire and punishment!”
“You don’t mean that, Donald,” June said emphatically, as if denying her husband’s outrage would delay the impending embarrassment.
“I mean every word of it. I’m sick and tired of all this pretending. You think you’re fooling me by going to Elizabeth’s “church.” Her religion might be fine for sick people, but I won’t let you brainwash my son.”
“Donald, that’s the alcohol talking and not really you,” June said weakly.
Elizabeth got up from the table and put her hand on June’s shoulder. “Let’s make some coffee.”
“Coffee won’t do any good. It’s not going to change things.” Donald stood up and blocked the doorway to the kitchen. “You haven’t told them?” he shouted to his wife. “Your goddamn best friend and she don’t know shit?”
Donald’s language nearly knocked over the St. Johns. Elizabeth grabbed June’s shoulder to steady herself. Phillip jumped from the game table, ready to defend his wife if the scene grew more ugly.
Jason and David came in from the den. They couldn’t help hearing what was said. Jason looked at David, his best friend, surprised he hadn’t been told. David shrugged, embarrassed. All of it was terribly depressing; moving away from his best friend, being forced to go to a fundamentalist church—what was next, military school?
“We better go and let the Walkers work this out in private,” Phillip said as he put an arm around Elizabeth. Elizabeth stepped back from June and beckoned for her son to join them. Jason silently walked over and stood between his parents. Phillip had always dubbed them the three musketeers; it was how he thought of his family.
Standing together like that, David suddenly saw it. Nothing could ever come between them. They were invincible, too strong for bumpy emotional detours; Christian Scientists to the core, standing “porter at the door of thought.”
Their circling of the wagons turned David off. In the volatility of his family there was a lot of affection along with the fighting. It seemed more honest, somehow. How smug Jason and his parents appeared to David. How perfect. Then Jason gave David a subtle wave, and David knew that they would always be buddies. Not even Mrs. St. John’s steel-trap mind could alter their destiny. As David watched his best friend walk away, clad in the armor of metaphysics and right thinking, he felt surprisingly free. They weren’t done with each other; they were just entering a new phase of their brotherhood.
“I’ll call you, Elizabeth,” June said.
“Fine.”
The Walkers moved to Costa Mesa the next week, and Donald had all of his kids at the Baptist Church that Sunday. David never knew if his mom had called Elizabeth to explain things. He felt sure that she did, and knowing Elizabeth, knew that she listened politely to June, careful not to give in to sympathetic mesmerism.
David caught his first wave as the sun came up over the Ko‘olau Mountains. A couple of teenagers tried to drop in on him, but his style of surfing dissuaded them. Riding a long-board was like sailing a classic yacht; it’s graceful, elegant
, and smooth in a world of quick, frantic action. The kids surfing with him started to respect his style and soon they were mixing ballet with hip-hop on the same wave. After a dozen or so waves the kids said their good-byes and paddled in to go to school. David spent the rest of the morning sitting on his board, away from the surf line and the ever-changing crowd, thinking about Jason’s call. By the time it became too hot to sit out in the sun any longer David was close to his answer and paddled in.
Chapter 11
Stanford House
Wednesday Morning, November 2004
Jason sat at the large country table in the family room of their apartment in Stanford House staring at Lillian’s computer. He read the MySpace chats from the night before that ranged from speculation that Lillian was having an affair to Lillian’s bizarre activities with Alex and their drive to Chester. He loved how Lillian had outthought and outmaneuvered Gary and the ISD.
Melanie’s mobile phone rang and slid across the table, almost falling off before Jason could grab it. He checked the caller ID—it was Lillian. He was glad to hear her voice,. “Everything alright?”
“Much calmer this morning. There’s a car that’s been parked across the street a couple of houses down with two men in it. I think they followed me and are still watching us.”
“Don’t go out unless you have to. Perhaps you could sic your dad on them.”
“You have Sir William waiting. Do you need help opening Skype?”
“No. Thanks for reminding me.”
Jason ended his call and opened up the Skype program on Lillian’s computer. As soon as he did he got the message that Sir William was online waiting to speak with him. The camera was kind to Sir William; he was a tanned, athletic man in his early seventies with short white hair and a gold earring in his left ear. He sat in a paneled office with flattering light, surrounded by bookcases filled with important looking law books. The image Sir William presented was one of wealth, wisdom, and the assurance of a professional who knew what they were doing.
“Sir William, thank you for meeting me like this.” Jason spoke into the computer screen.
Sir William Boyd, a senior partner at the law firm of Norton, Boyd & Gladstone, saw Jason, a harassed-looking man, anxious and worried. Sir William and Lloyd Harvey, Lillian’s father, had grown up together in the countryside between Chester and Liverpool. Sir William became Lillian’s godfather when she was born in 1961.
“Jason, what’s going on?” Sir William was concerned.
“I’ve been doing some things that the board doesn’t understand and they want to stop me.”
“Like appearing in a cancer ward out of thin air?”
“That’s being distorted and I plan to give the world a complete explanation. But first I have to deal with my board. They’re isolating me and want to silence me. Frankly, I think some of them would like to throw me in a dungeon.”
Sir William thought about that for a moment. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m afraid of what it’s doing to Alex and Lillian. They had to escape yesterday. This is ridiculous.”
“Can’t we meet in my office?”
“No. This is the best I can do. Lillian made sure our internet is separate from the Ministry’s.”
Sir William opened a thick folder.
“Have I screwed myself completely?” Jason asked. “Can we redo the trust?”
“It will be difficult.”
“Is it even possible?”
“Not so fast. Remember, you were off setting up healing centers in the far corners of the earth, and didn’t want to be bothered with, as you said, the ‘organization.’”
“I know. I know. Don’t you have any secret clause hidden away somewhere…?”
“I’m afraid not. You let Tony Bass dictate what he thought would be an efficient board. That’s what you wanted—someone to take the burden off of you so you could write, teach, and heal. I counseled you to be more engaged in the process and tried to put articles in the deed that would protect you, but you let Tony modify them so that the board has total control over you.”
Jason groaned.
“As the settler, Jason, you were the only person endowing the trust. At that time no one else put anything into the trust. You were calling the shots. The original endowment was for the purpose of promoting universal healing. All your assets at that time were transferred from you to the Ministry, or the trust. They’re the same thing. It’s all very standard and Tony organized the trust into the various departments so that the Ministry could efficiently fulfill its purpose. You wanted the trust to exist in perpetuity and, against my advice, inserted that only a unanimous vote by the board could dissolved it. Upon your death the trust will support Lillian and Alex for the remainder their lives but not Alex’s offspring. There is nothing we can do about that part of the trust.”
“Are you saying that there is something else we can do?”
“I did my best to protect you, but you were not the easiest client to work with,” Sir William said.
“I was thinking how close we all were. How we all had the same vision.”
“Tony and I had our biggest differences about your future material,” Sir William continued. “I argued that you should keep the rights to whatever writings, videos, and unknown breakthroughs you might discover in your future experimentations. In other words, anything you created or developed from that moment on, and all the revenues generated, would remain with you and not the trust. But you trusted Tony back then. So right now, you, and all that you create—your image, name, new discoveries—belong to the trust. Since it owns all of that, a majority vote by the board can forbid you from any and all public activity that has any connection to St. John Ministries.”
“What if I simply quit? Retire. I could take the family and move to the States, back to Hawaii and live on the beach.”
“How would you live?”
“I’d get a job of some sort.”
“You couldn’t teach, write, or heal without the board’s permission.”
“What if people were healed just by being in my presence?”
“Now you’re splitting hairs. But I would imagine the board could demand that you stop and if that meant that you could not go out in public, they could demand that you remain cloistered. If they went that far we could fight that last demand in court.”
“I’d buy a boat and take the family to the South Pacific.”
“With what? You’ve got no money outside what the trust gives you.”
Jason got up and paced back and forth before Lillian’s computer.
“Jason, sit down,” Sir William demanded. “I can’t talk to you when you float in and out of the picture.”
Jason laughed at the irony. “You have no idea … So is there any way out?”
“I was able to add a few clauses in your favor. One—you, Lillian, Melanie, Dorothy, and David, as founding trustees, can never be kicked off the board.”
“But David resigned, remember?”
“Doesn’t matter. His seat is always there for him if he ever decides to return.”
“Secondly, though members serve a life term, a director can be removed by a two-thirds vote if their actions are shown to undermine the purpose of the foundation, and/or if they abuse their fiduciary duty. And thirdly, your vote on the board counts as two votes. So unless Tony and his supporters can stack the board, you have a powerful say in what takes place.”
“That’s golden!” Jason says. “How did Tony miss that?”
“He didn’t. He was going to walk and I told him to go ahead. I told him you really didn’t need a trust, so he took control of what he could. Given what he’s doing now, Tony may assume that you don’t realize the control you have, given the lack of interest you’ve shown in the past.”
“Do the other trustees know about that two-vote provision?”
“Yes, it’s all in the trust deed. Do you know how the board is split regarding your current activities?”
“Four,
maybe five would vote with Tony. If Dave comes back, the three of us, Lillian, David and I would be four votes. Deedee, I’d have to assume would be with us, and Melanie could be toss-up. I don’t know. We could be deadlocked. What happens then?”
“I, or someone from our firm, would cast the deciding vote, following as close as we can the articles of the trust deed and the mission statement of the Ministry.”
“What if I die?”
“The current board would control all the assets and Alex and Lillian would be taken care of according to the trust provisions.” Sir William then leaned into the camera on his computer and said, “If you die, and there is a body—or if you’re killed, the provisions of the trust are very clear and it would be extremely difficult for Mr. Bass or any other board chairman to deny support for Lillian and Alex or force them to do or say anything they wouldn’t want to.”
“What if I disappear?”
“If you disappear, and nobody can find your body, Alex and Lillian would be at the mercy of the chairman. He could determine that you were still alive and run the Ministry according to his agenda, as it appears he wants to do now. He could force Lillian and Alex to go along with his program and they would have limited legal recourse.”
“So until Dave gets here I don’t have the votes to go against the board. And until I have the board’s support my family is at risk.”
“May I make a suggestion,” Sir William says.
“By all means.”
“I don’t agree with all that you teach, and I absolutely recognize the incredible scope of your healing Ministry, but I would advise you to follow one of the principles you teach—the one about non-resistance. Don’t resist Tony. He’s a fighter.”
“I’m not going to roll over and play dead.”
“Then, I wish you the best of luck.”
Sir William signed off leaving Jason staring at his own picture in Lillian’s computer.
For the first time in his life, he felt trapped.
PART II
The Atua Man Page 8
