Jay's Journal

by Dr. Beatrice Sparks

  June 9

  I tried to talk to Pete at the Pine Boys’ School but whoever answered the phone was very curt to me when he found out what I wanted; he wouldn’t give me any information at all, just said Pete had left and that they didn’t have any forwarding address, then Bang—he hung up.

  I was so curious I waited a couple of hours then called back and asked for Dave. Everybody knew he’d be there for a long time because he was a ward of the court and considered violent and dangerous, but he was into the supernatural and knew Pete well. Sure enough Dave finally came to the horn. After the initial shit I asked him about Pete and his voice lowered. He said he couldn’t talk. I gave him my address and he promised to write right then. I can’t wait for the mail tomorrow, or will it take till the next day?

  June 11

  Dave’s letter has about done me in. I’m not surprised that Pete was a fruit, but raping a little ten-year-old boy in the broom closet? Man, what kind of a weirdo is that? And hurting him enough so they had to take him to the infirmary? Dave said he’d have killed Pete if he hadn’t cut out before the kid was found.

  I wonder how long it would have been before Pete put the move on me? Dave said he got to no telling how many kids with promises or bribes or just gentle offers of friendship and acceptance. Lots of kids need that so badly they would do almost anything to get it from almost anyone. Judas, just thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach, and I thought Pete was soooooo neat! I wonder if he was using PCP or something?

  June 12

  I think I’ll ask the folks if I can visit Dell in Las Vegas if Mr. Thomas will give me time off at the store.

  June 14

  Wow! Leaving in two days. Everything went so smooth I can’t believe it. In a way I’m sorry to go because both Brad and Barry will be home right after I leave. But it will be superneat to see old Dell again. We haven’t written but he was so excited when I got him on the phone he about broke my eardrum with his scream.

  I feel rotten that I can’t take Toad down but it’s going to be some months before I get the bread to repair his wounds. Man, Dell would have loved him so much and we would have had such fun, but at least Dell says his dad lets him drive an old Apache truck at night after work. He also said maybe his dad would let me work on one of the jobs. They really make money! Maybe if I stayed the whole summer I could have Toad all repaired when school started. Wouldn’t that be a splash in the sky?

  Later—I’m glad I ate my dinner before I got Kurt’s phone call ’cause now I’m sick again. He said he’d heard I needed Koodo and that he couldn’t talk on the phone but that I’d get his letter tomorrow. Judas, I didn’t want to hear from him. I don’t want any more to do with that mess of mixed ups. I’m sick of the whole thing! I just want to get to Las Vegas with Dell.

  June 15

  Got this crazy letter from Kurt, the young nutso whose dad was the electrician at the Pine Boys’ School. Man, am I happy I’m leaving tomorrow! That whole bunch of weirds are short a few bricks of a full load, short a few cards of a full deck, short a few ounces of a full pound, short an inch or two of a full foot, in short—shorted out a little in the brain . . .

  June 16

  I can’t get over Kurt’s crazy letter. How did he know Barry had been trying to get me to become a Presbyterian, and that a couple of times I’d thought about it. Nobody knew about that! I didn’t even write that thought down, it just came into my mind. And how did he know about my wishing someone would move to Apple Hill with a Karma similar to mine? AND THAT I’d been thinking about Deb again? Was it ESP? Was it Cosmic Consciousness? I don’t understand, but neither can I deny that there are powers existent here on this planet that science hasn’t yet investigated. Maybe that is my calling, maybe it’s up to me, without bias or malice, to explore these concepts, catalogue them, seriously consider them, and present them to some group at some university that can take on from there. I know certain departments are experimenting with ESP and parapsychology. I might be able to give them much helpful information. Well, I don’t have to worry about any of that far-out stuff now since I’m leaving for Las Vegas on the afternoon bus. I’m excited! Man, I’m excited! It’s been such a dull nothing summer so far. I need you, Dell. You’ll never know how much I need you to get my act together. Maybe I’ll just forget the whole scene. When school starts again I’ll be so busy with Toad, and scholastically, and in the theater and forensics there won’t be any time left for that kind of crap anyway.

  June 17

  I’m so glad I brought you to L.V. with me, Journal. I almost didn’t until I saw that built-in lock on the little foot locker. Can you believe that Dell is into the occult here? Man, that was the biggest blow to my head in the world. Judas, I didn’t know O was underground in most schools. It’s scary. I want to get Dell the hell out! HE can’t go into it like I can, undetached and scientifically.

  Dell’s dad says he has a job for me for the rest of the summer and Hallelujah, I’ll be making twice what I made at home. Little Toad will love that. It will assure him that he can come out of retirement when school starts, or maybe I’ll just mail my paychecks home to Dad and let him start having the work done on old Toad. Judas, that makes me happy, but the other, Dell into all the kinky business. I don’t know if I can handle that, but I guess I can. I have to! As long as I can stay detached I’m all right. I must keep reinforcing that thought. But it sure knocks the hell out of what I thought it would be down here. All the laughs and pranks and fun. Dell can be so serious and morbid when he talks about O. Crap, maybe tomorrow will be different, and besides Dell’s brother, Kim, is yelling at me to turn out the light. All three of us have to sleep in one room.

  June 18

  I feel like a man! Working on a big construction job just like all the other men. Of course I’m just a gopher but that’s cool. I can dig everything about this business, hauling the nails and lumber, picking up, cleaning up . . . GETTING MY PAYCHECK AT THE END OF THE WEEK! It’s exciting!

  Some of the guys have got mouths like toilets, but I guess that’s how it is in the construction business.

  This is a big house but with Dell and me and his mom and dad and his five brothers and sisters and his old aunt, man, it’s a mess, a noisy, do without, messy mess.

  Tomorrow Dell’s dad is going to pile us all into his van and take us to Hoover Dam; that’s going to be exciting. I remember studying about the dam in geography and I just read about it again in a brochure they’ve got here.

  Imagine, 726 feet high, one of the highest dams in the world, and we get to go down inside it in an elevator. Lake Mead is one of the largest man-made bodies of water in the world. I don’t know what Los Angeles and the rest of that area would do without it. It certainly couldn’t have expanded like it has.

  June 19, 1:30 A.M.—Just past June 18!

  The trip to Lake Mead was a disaster! Fighting, quarreling, snot-nosed kids whining for everything in sight and if one kid wanted something or to do something, the others didn’t and vice versa. Judas, what a madhouse, and Dell’s mother is a bitch, she yells all the time. But then I guess I’d yell too with all those brats acting like animals in a zoo, and living temporarily in someone else’s house and in such a crummy district. I’m glad tomorrow, or today, is Sunday. I never thought I’d be glad to go to Sunday school. It’s always been an I-had-to-do-it thing, at least the last year or two. Last September I remember I told my dad he was taking away my free agency by making me go and he said, “Oh no, I’m not taking away your free agency, you still have a right to choose. You can go either willingly or unwillingly.” Isn’t it strange that now, sitting at the kitchen table away from all the confusion and rabble, I feel a need to go. Maybe I just miss my parents, and little Chaddy and Kendall. I’ve never been away from home much except with the scouts and the nightmare at the Pine Boys’ school. I really do miss my family. I wonder if I’ll feel this way when I’m grown up and married or away at college. Actually I don’t care if I do because it’s a nice warm belongin
g feeling even if it hurts.

  I miss you now that I am here

  And you are there.

  I miss the way you look

  The way you care

  I wanted oh so very much

  To get away

  Now every single day I stay

  I miss you more

  And love you more

  And need you more.

  3:45 P.M.

  Everyone is taking their Sunday afternoon nap except the little kids who are buzzing around somewhere. I’m embarrassed I enjoyed our Sunday school class so much. The teacher was talking about the miracle of forgiveness and it was like he was talking to me alone. Man, I really do need to consider that concept. Every rotten thing I’ve ever done in my life, and that’s a pile, keeps cropping up in my mind to make me feel guilty, unworthy, less-than-everybody-else in existence. I pretend I’ve got lots of confidence and I’m a big jock and like that but deep inside I’m a frightened, insecure, can’t-make-it-failure.

  I must forgive myself for all the rotten things I’ve done. I know . . . I REALLY KNOW that God has forgiven me. He is so kind and loving and considerate and ever-supportive. If I loved myself as much as I love Him, I could forgive myself completely too, couldn’t I? Jesus said the first and greatest commandment was to love the Lord with all my heart and strength, and that the second was “like unto it,” I should love my neighbor as myself. I really have got to start working at loving myself . . . reverencing myself . . . I am God’s child, in God’s image! And there is no way I can be a good neighbor, or even completely love God until first I’ve learned to love myself. O.K. neat old great self, let’s get this book locked back in the foot locker so we can take a nap too and then get up and help Dell’s mom fix a bite before we go to church. That will be being a good neighbor to her and she really needs it with all this mob to control as well as feed and clothe and clean up after. She’s a special, special lady to even let me stay here with them when they’re in such a hassle. I am going to be more appreciative and more helpful. She’s neat . . . but I sure miss Mom’s bread! I wonder if I can send her an ESP message to send some.

  June 20

  I worked just part of a week but I still got the old check home to Dad to start fixing up Toad. I only kept out ten dollars which is really going to keep me on a string, since Dell and me have to pay for gas and stuff as well as an occasional hamburger. I’m glad Dell isn’t involved with chicks. They’re too expensive! Even when they go dutch.

  We’re going to another O meeting tonight. I wish we weren’t, but . . .

  Working is fun but it is sooooo hot. Man, sometimes I pick up a hammer or something by the metal end and it about takes the skin off my hand. Everybody just works in their pants and I’m so sunburned I look like a tomato but Dell said he did the same thing when he first started, then he peeled and now he’s brown, brown, brown, and looks great. He’s also growing a pretty good mustache; I’m trying but it looks like the moths have been in it. Like a dirty, fuzzy, little, barely visible caterpillar on my lip. I’ll give it another week, maybe by then I’ll get over looking like I’ve got the mange. Once our cat Hamlet got the mange and looked in spots just exactly like my lip does. Oh crap, I want so much to be macho . . . macho with three hairs on my chest and thirteen under my arms? Girls seem to think I’m pretty neat-looking though, but then most of them have got the hots for anything that’s male.

  Oh hell, I’m upset about tonight, and in a way, scared. Why? Maybe it’s possible that, like they say in O, sacred secrets have been passed down from the ancients to the chosen few! Am I being a hypocrite and unworthy to go into their research? I’m so cynical, so hypocritical. Just like I accuse everybody else of being. I must try to be fair, open-minded and unbiased, a seeker of wisdom and truth.

  I know the crystal ball works. Is it like the seer stone the Bible mentions? I’ve seen shadows in it myself. Nothing real yet but that’s not necessarily the ball’s fault. It’s most probably because I haven’t yet attuned myself . . . like the auras and the auwa. I had to put forth the effort. I had to learn the principles and use them. I must go into this research like a professional! I can and I will! Another depth, another principle, another form of power long held from men because of their disbelief and unwillingness to open up their minds. Maybe I . . . I . . . I will be the instrument through which these great sources, new to us yet well known to the ancients, are channeled to the learned and the caring who want to use them, along with electricity and atomic power and the other wonders found in the last century or so.

  Or am I just trying to give myself a snow job?

  June 21

  Dell’s Dayan is unbelievable. At first I thought he was weird and fakey. Then he looked in the ball and told me things about myself that even Dell couldn’t have told him. I felt cold chills ripple up and down my back. He told me he would start the mark of Christ in the palms of my hands and the heat that generated only there became unbearable. I tried to convince myself that he had just put that thought in my mind and I was doing it myself, but then he told me I must also hang on my own cross. Absolutely, thoroughly and completely against my will I walked over to a huge neon flickering cross on one wall and stood before it. The pain was excruciating. The tears streamed down my face, tasted salty in my mouth, and wet the front of my shirt. I could only moan for them to set me free.

  No one was touching me! No thing was touching me! And yet I could feel pain in my hands and feet that I could not endure. Was it an electric current from the neon cross? After what seemed forever I felt a torturous thrust in my side that made me scream then took my breath away. The force was invisible and I wondered if they were using some kind of laser beam. As I was trying to rationalize myself out of the maze the pain became so great that I felt myself go limp, my head fall to my shoulder. It was over.

  When I awoke Dell and eleven others were anointing my body with oil and chanting together over me. I felt a kind of peace and relaxation that I had never felt before. The only thing that even compares with it was one time in a dentist’s chair when he had been giving me nitrous gas and was called to the phone. I wonder if somehow they had given me nitrous. Did they have a hidden tank somewhere? Was it somehow piped into the whole room?

  The Dayan was leaning over me, “We have another doubting Thomas, yes?”

  I closed my eyes. The feeling was too great not to enjoy. It’s 4 A.M. and I still can’t comprehend or understand what happened. We are sworn to secrecy on a blood and death oath, but I think of myself sort of as a spy among the enemy or a seeker of truth that is above restrictions. Am I right? Oh God, I wish I had never gotten into this. Pete said, and now the new Dayan confirms, that what I’m learning is just an extension of Christianity, just the secrets that were known by the ancients at the time of the first peopling of his world. All the secrets and powers that were given from Adam on down as man was able to receive them.

  I better get to bed or I’ll never be able to do my work tomorrow, I feel so tired—not tired, exhausted, drained, pooped, consumed. Maybe I’ll wake up and find it all hasn’t happened. Who am I to try to be the bridge between two worlds? Me, the weak one that can’t even control my own destiny.

  Oh Judas, I’m confused.

  June 22

  It’s hard to put into words what’s happening. I feel so stupid and as I read the words back they sound like I’m some kind of a psycho or something. I must constantly remind myself:

  Great concepts

  Start small

  Grow tall.

  The tiny acorn

  Grows into a tree.

  I like the acorn

  Shiiiiiiiiit.

  Am a nut.

  Dell and I talked to our Dayan till 2:30 tonight or today or whatever. He really convinced me they’re not like the crazy Moonies who are trying to say he’s the Messiah. They’re just an extension of what good we already believe. They don’t want to take that away from us, indeed they just want us to build on what we already have, enlarge and enli
ghten our own souls, develop and estimate our own spiritual growth from where we are! He says Pete’s deplorable actions put a restriction on my aura and auwa, rather I put it on myself, because of him. So I cannot expand beyond a certain point until I lift that restriction and let my good vibrations flow out to encircle the world. He really makes that seem both possible and plausible. He used the simile that if the world were covered with calm water and I threw in one little stone those ripples would go out and out until they encompassed the whole body. I believe that in a sense, also, that people can feel my anger or my love, that my vibrations do touch them, do warm them or cool them, do give them happiness or detract from that happiness. I also believe like he says that life is made up of negative and positive currents like electricity, positive thoughts and actions triggering off positive power for good. Negative thoughts and actions doing the opposite. They are true principles. But I don’t know . . .

  Maybe I’m not in enough or out enough.

  Dell says he’s happy and he religiously goes through his rituals in the bathroom every night, even though sometimes he’s interrupted a hundred times or more before he’s through. Man, this is really a madhouse. It would be hard to have any kind of personal discipline here, and yet both the girls take piano lessons and Mike practices trombone and Kim practices saxophone. I’m glad I didn’t bring my guitar. We couldn’t stand any more music! That’s music?