One day we went into town to buy supplies and run errands. Outside of the post office, I climbed up onto a bench.
“Bob, catch me!” I said.
“OK,” Bob reluctantly agreed. I leapt into his arms again and again. “OK, one more time,” said Bob.
I jumped the last time, but Bob stepped away from me. Time slowed as I clawed at the empty air, watching his impassive face recede into the distance. I crashed to the ground in a tangle of bruised extremities and tears.
“What’s wrong with you!?” Claudia rushed to my aid.
Bob looked at the ground: “I don’t know.”
That night, at dinner, Claudia brought out pencil and paper and began doing math. “Bob, you haven’t been paying your half of the rent. You now owe me a thousand dollars. What’s your plan?”
“I knew you were going to do this.” He began yelling: “You’re so damn greedy! And materialistic! All you care about is money!”
My mother’s jaw was set like her mother’s before her. “Bob, this has been going on for months, and it’s just not working out. You need to leave.”
“With pleasure! I’m having dinner with Stan and Maureen, my friends. They invited me over.”
Bob turned the ignition switch of the bus and, after three or four false starts, the engine fired up. The bus coughed and sputtered into the distance, and the house was quiet. Claudia locked the front door and slid a chair under the doorknob. Late that night, the bus coughed its way back up the driveway and then fell silent. Bob tried the door to no avail, and then started banging on it.
“Claudia! Open the door!” he yelled. “This is bullshit! Bullshit! I don’t care. You think I care!?”
Claudia sat at the edge of my bed. She placed one hand on my chest to keep me down and the other across her lips, indicating silence.
Bob kept yelling. His speech was slurred like he was speaking through a wall of water. “I’m goin’ onna trip anyways! I’m goin’ down to Berkeley for a few. To visit my buddies in the Frog House. To see my real friends! This is bullshit!”
The bus coughed back into the night.
The next day, Claudia and I sat down at the table and wrote a letter to Bob, care of the Frog House. We composed the letter together, honing in on the right message and carefully selecting the right words. Claudia demanded repayment of her $3,000 for the bus and the back rent. On the envelope, she helped me spell out Don’t come back. We hitchhiked into town, and Claudia held me up to the mailbox so I could take credit for mailing the letter.
“We’re done with living with Bob,” I said.
The next morning, Sky ambushed me on the front porch and stole my toast. I yelled after him: “We’re done living with you too, Sky!”
The next day, Sky glared at me from behind the bars of his cage as we sold him to the toothless old man in town. “Why ya’ll wanna sell ’im?” the old man wanted to know.
“We wanted him to impregnate our hens,” Claudia explained. “But he won’t go near them.”
“And he’s mean to me,” I added.
“But why don’t ya’ll jus’ eat ’im?” he asked.
“We’re vegetarians,” said my mother.
The old man shook his head in disbelief and said: “Well, jus’ so’in ya’ll know. I’m gonna eat ’im.”
We left the old man to his dinner without so much as waving good-bye.
A few days later, Moon, Sky’s gay rooster partner, disappeared and was presumed dead. Whether from a broken heart—as Claudia suspected—or from the neighbors’ dog—as I suspected—I was glad to see him gone too.
A month or so later, the green bus wheezed up the driveway one last time. Bob traipsed into the house and began digging through the pantry. My mother burst out of the bathtub naked, screaming: “Get out of here!”
Bob was hunched over and apologetic. “Jeez. I was just lookin’ for something I left behind.”
“Get out,” said Claudia, her naked arm dripping with water as it pointed out the door.
The bus rambled down the driveway for the last time, and Claudia called after it sarcastically: “Be sure to mail me the money so I can pay my mother back.”
We never saw Bob again. At least not in the flesh. Many years later, Claudia threw the Seattle Times down in front of me.
“Look at that,” she said.
The paper was folded open to a holiday solicitation from a men’s homeless shelter. It said: HELP US. Beneath the lettering were two scruffy homeless men with their hands out for alms. One of them was an older, chubbier, even balder image of Bob DiNardo, a slight smile on his face.
“I almost feel sorry for him,” Claudia said.
I didn’t. He probably thought he was pulling off the biggest scam in history.
FIVE
Two Eyes Are Better Than Three
With Bob DiNardo finally gone, Claudia and I had Mount Lassen all to ourselves. One evening in late summer, my mother ended our walk through the woods with a story about the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
I didn’t quite grasp all the nuances of the Tibetan Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth, so I asked: “Claudia, how did the monks know the new baby had the same spirit as the old man who died?”
“Because his first word was the old man’s name.”
This made good sense to me, and I asked hopefully: “What was my first word?” Maybe I had spoken words of prophecy. Maybe I too was the reincarnation of some great spirit.
“Your first spoken word was juice.”
Bummer.
“But you first spoke to me telepathically when you were just a tiny fetus in my womb.”
“I did?”
“Yes. I could hear you twinkling at me.”
“What did I say?”
Claudia kept walking in silence as though she hadn’t heard me.
“What did I say, Claudia?”
She stopped and looked down at me with glistening eyes. Her lips twisted around, wrestling with what not to say. She smiled suddenly and then sniffled, and we resumed our silent march up the driveway of volcanic gravel. It was a secret. I could see that, and something about the crunching of delicate lava rocks beneath our feet and the cool twilight unfolding around us convinced me not to disturb the perfection of that secret. Maybe what I had told her as a fetus was too powerful to repeat. Or maybe she wanted me to figure it out telepathically.
We’d had a lot of time to practice our telepathy since Bob left. Maybe too much time. That night I sat cross-legged on the shag carpet in our little half-built cabin at the edge of the magical pine forest. Claudia sat across from me, holding a card in her lap. Our eyes were closed.
“Is it the crescent?” I asked.
“Good, Joshey! Good!” Her eyes opened, smiling. “That’s three in a row. We’re really connecting now. OK, here’s the next one.”
The back of the new card was the same as the rest. Opaque. A dark blue with a tan border. My mother was leaning forward, her eyes closed. She raised the card up to the level of her forehead, to her third eye.
“Close your eyes and concentrate,” she coached me.
I closed my eyes and tried to push all the distractions out of my mind. A flurry of images stubbornly flitted though my head, like old photos tumbling out of a shoebox: Ms.Ms. curled up on the corner of the bed; raindrops sliding down the darkened window; the bowl of currants on the peeling linoleum countertop.
I tried envisioning the spinning sword of fire clearing my mind of images, wiping my third eye clean. But I didn’t have the patience for it. Nor the discipline. It was too boring. I made a calculation and guessed.
“Is it the river?” I asked hopefully. We called the two parallel squiggly lines the river because they looked like the cartographic symbol for rivers in our 1956 world atlas.
It wasn’t the river. Her slowness in answering said as much.
“No. Try again. Try to concentrate just a little harder. You can push through it.”
“Is it the circle?” I asked again, less hope
fully.
Claudia opened her eyes. She shook her head no, her lips clamping together. She turned the card around for me to see. It was the upside-down Y. I’d gotten it wrong.
But then her face lit up: “Oh! Did you just see a flash of blue light?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping to please.
Claudia beamed. “We are really connecting tonight.” But she didn’t want to wear me out. “Should we take a break, Joshey?”
“I think we should,” I said thoughtfully, not wanting to seem too eager.
This was my school. Other kids had kindergarten teachers teaching them how to pledge allegiance to a flag and recite the alphabet. I had my mother, and she was teaching me about my chakras, the I Ching, and Kundalini yoga. But most importantly, she was teaching me about extrasensory perception. My psychic powers. How to harness my sixth sense. How to clear the film away from my third eye, the one that Society didn’t want me to use (or know about).
Back in San Francisco, Claudia had trained as a psychic at HeartSong, the expanded perception center where she learned telepathic communication and astral projection. At HeartSong, they would hold healing sessions where seriously ill patients would come to be treated. The psychics would sit in a circle around the afflicted and project deep healing energy into their bodies, sometimes for hours at a time, and the patients would be cured. At least for a day or so.
Claudia would place herself into trances at bus stops, in the park, and in restaurants, reading everyone’s energy around her. She once saw two men approach each other in a café. They were friends. They leapt at each other, embracing. They were two gay men passionately in love. But when she opened her eyes she saw that the two men were just standing at arm’s length talking. It had been their spirits embracing.
There was nothing mystical about any of this. Claudia believed it was pure science. It just hadn’t been recognized by mainstream society yet.
“Joshey, the mind is like a radio receiver. The broadcasts are already out there. You just have to know how to tune in. Someday scientists will discover auras and chakras and ESP and all the things we already know about, and they’ll say: ‘Oh, my God! Here is a new way of looking at the world!’ But we’ll be one step ahead of them.”
One day I was surprised to learn that psychic power could cure not only the human body, but cars as well. Claudia believed that with enough concentration you could do absolutely anything with your mind. You could bend spoons, lift objects, and even jump-start our rusty Plymouth Valiant stalled out in the middle of the intersection.
The green light turned to red again. “Move your ass!” someone yelled. The honking was growing more incessant. I couldn’t let these distractions pull me from my trance as I attempted to meditate in the passenger seat.
Claudia coached me: “Sit still, channel your mind, focus your energy. Start!” Nothing.
The pressure was on. We lived ten winding, mountainous miles from town, and that car was our lifeline for food and supplies. With the pittance that the government gave us for Welfare we could never afford a car that worked for long. The guy who’d sold us the rusty Plymouth Valiant for a hundred dollars had told us: “She looks like she’s been through hell, but if you pull out the choke and rev her up for twenty minutes, she’ll get you there. Also, the brakes don’t work too well, but if you just keep pumping ’em, they’ll come through for you.” This was an improvement from the seventy-five-dollar Chevy Nova that came without a back window or bumpers and only occasionally started if we popped it into gear on a downward slope.
The line of traffic honking behind us was growing, and the pressure was immense.
“Come on, Joshey! Concentrate! Let’s focus. Come on! We’ve got to concentrate harder.” Rrrr, rrrr, rrrr, the engine sounded like it could go either way. It just needed that extra psychic push from us. But our telepathic jumper cables didn’t cut it, and we had to bail out into traffic and flag down strangers to help us push the car off the road.
It was a familiar experience. We often found ourselves stalled out on the side of the road after dark in some remote mountain pass. But Claudia never lost confidence in her mental powers.
“OK, Joshey, focus your mind. Envision blue light filling up the engine with starter energy. OK, concentrate. Now on three, let’s make that engine turn over.”
Sometimes our powers worked, and we whooped and revved the engine in celebration. Other times we had an off night, and we shivered by the side of the road, waiting to hitch a ride to the nearest pay phone, so we could spend the last of our savings on a tow to the mechanic’s shop. Sometimes the tow truck drivers would take pity on us and give us a ride up the mountain for free. Other times we spent the night hustling for a ride outside of the twenty-four-hour diner. Standing on the shoulder of the road with our thumbs out, Claudia would say: “Next time, we have to try to focus our minds even harder.”
“Yeah, we will,” I agreed wearily. But I wasn’t sure it would matter. I was beginning to believe that cars didn’t respond to psychic energy.
If Claudia’s ability to conduct clairvoyant car repair work was in doubt, her other psychic skills were unimpeachable. She treated Uncle Tony’s bouts of depression with chakra healings over the telephone and was particularly good at energy readings. She could hold an object in her left hand while measuring its emanations with her right. Bric-a-brac in the thrift store, a rusty key I found on the winding gravel road, an old fountain pen. She could read the spiritual auras for all of them.
With her eyes closed, and her third eye open, she would fall into a kind of trance: “This key opened a padlock on an old wooden shed. Gray shed. The door, partly off its hinges. An old man with a full white head of hair and blue-jean overalls. He would come with this key every day to the shed to work on something. A project—a train set maybe, or something with little pieces on a big table. I see the key waiting patiently for the old man, on a hook by the door of the house. And then, after a time, the old man doesn’t return. The key is thrown into a box one day and loaded into a truck. At a curve in the road, the box topples over, the key bounces out of the back of the truck. And then one day you come along and pick the key up out of the dust.”
“What happened to the old man?” I asked. “Is he dead?”
“Yes,” she said, “but now the key has you as a friend. A gift from the old man to you.”
This was my favorite of my mother’s psychic powers. I never tired of bringing her found objects, of hearing their stories and mysteries revealed. I would carefully select rocks down by Narnia Creek, the little ribbon of water that slid past our cabin. I would run back with my finds rolled up in my T-shirt.
“What about this one, Claudia, what does this one say?” The fresh shiny river rock had a very low energy reading. Her right hand came down to within an inch of its surface. It didn’t have much of a story to tell. It liked the water and was young.
“What about this one?” The porous red igneous rock displayed an energy reading of six inches or so. She was born out of eruption and fire from the volcano that had once been Mount Lassen. She was an ancient rock, tired and fading.
The hunk of obsidian generated a startling amount of energy for such a little guy. My mother’s right hand hovered dramatically two feet above it in the air. This had been a sacred rock, used by Native Americans. It was kept in a little leather bag by a woman shaman, a crone, who used it for healing. A great fire had burned her village and consumed the bag. The various magical stones had become scattered, leaving this little piece of obsidian all alone until I stumbled upon it.
Any rock that had been used by Native Americans was sure to generate a heightened valence of energy. And I didn’t have to go far to find the shiny black rocks that set Claudia’s hands tingling. My mother identified so many stone talismans and tools within a short radius of our front porch that I couldn’t help but conclude that we were living on the very site of an extinct Indian village.
While my mother’s skills were undeniable, I suffered from g
rave self-doubt. I didn’t think I could live up to being the warlock she wanted me to be. “Are you sure I’m psychic, Claudia?”
“You are very psychic, Joshey. Don’t you remember when you were sick?”
I did remember. A couple of months back I had been laid out for nearly two weeks with a wicked fever that ravaged my mind and transformed the tiniest noises into explosions and the slightest glimmers into violent lightning storms. I lay motionless for hours on end, barely able to accept the drizzle of miso soup my mother slid down my throat. Somewhere in the darkness I’d heard her booming whisper on the phone:
“He’s really sick. He’s burning up with fever. No, I’m not going to give him drugs. I’m giving him garlic and sponging him down with cold water. No. Where? I don’t even know if there is a doctor in town. And how would we get there? No, I don’t think so, Tony. What would a doctor do? Give him penicillin? Penicillin might make him get better a little faster, but in the long run he’ll grow to be stronger without it.”
One morning I lifted my sweaty head out of feverish oblivion and called for tangerines. As I caught up on two weeks’ worth of food, Claudia told me: “You were super psychic while you were in your trance.” She told me that at one point I’d sat straight up in the midst of a vision and announced: “I just saw a man in the water, wearing a blue shirt.” A couple of days later, she turned on the radio and heard a news report about a local man who had drowned in a waterway. I had foretold his death.
I had to admit that my feverish pronouncement sounded paranormally prescient. But I didn’t remember uttering it.
“Well you did, Joshey. Don’t worry. I’m telling you, you have a special gift.”
But I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t feel it within me.
One afternoon, I wrapped myself up into the deepest meditative trance I could muster and reached into the depths of my soul to project one solitary message into Claudia’s mind like a thunderbolt: I wanted pizza toast. Minutes later, my mother slid a bowl of blanched beans and boiled bok choy in front of me. She was smiling down at me: “You looked hungry.”
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