by Philip Smith
Pop looked down at his gorgeous creation and couldn’t understand what the maître d’ was saying about jackets. It was as if he were speaking a foreign language. Unfortunately, I understood what he said perfectly. Now at the age of thirteen, I was a flawless translator of the experiences that transpired between my family and the overwhelmingly hostile outside world. What he was really saying was, “This restaurant does not serve freaks—go away.”
We would have had a better chance of being seated if we had presented ourselves as loud, gregarious performers who had just finished taping The Jackie Gleason Show, but instead we were too blissed out to be in showbiz. Our peace-love-om-shanti-shanti routine was new in town and had never been seen by the Miami establishment. By now Pop had a whole closet filled with Nehru jackets. There was no chance that he was going to return to his earlier incarnation of a suit and tie for dinner. In 1966, he was digging the Nehru scene. What he should have said to the maître d’ was, “Hey, daddy-o, I’m, like, in the guru groove and looking for some cool cordon bleu, can you dig it?” We would have eaten out more often if he had just gotten the vocabulary down.
“But this is a jacket,” my father protested. In his mind, he was better dressed than the maître d’ in his crummy black suit. Not to mention that the fabric in that Nehru jacket alone was worth more than what we would have spent eating out for the next month.
“Sir!” The maître d’ leaned forward. The conversation was over. We would just get in the car and go somewhere else where we were not wanted.
When we did manage to break through the security detail at the front door, it never failed that the entire restaurant fell silent as we walked to our table. People stopped eating and eyed us with concern. Miami had never seen a live impersonation of the Addams Family up close. I seemed to be the only one who noticed that we were the center of attention. Pop was perfectly content being transcendental, and Mom was happy to finally be out of the house. The maître d’ always scrambled to find us a table as far away as possible from the other diners. I’m surprised that they didn’t hold tablecloths in front of us while we ate or stick us in the kitchen next to the dishwasher.
Ever since Pop had begun his macrobiotic transformation, we rarely ate out. It was difficult, actually impossible, to find a restaurant that served hijiki seaweed as the main course and umeboshi plums for dessert. As a result, we ate at home—where I ate what Pop ate, and Mom ate whatever she wanted. Mom didn’t care if she went straight to macrobiotic hell.
For my mother, dining out was a pleasure; it was elegant and an adventure. She loved knowing the chefs at the various restaurants and asking for the secret recipe for the salad dressing or the key lime pie. For example, at the restaurant on top of the Miami airport, Mom felt like she was eating at Chasen’s when the chef came over with a wooden salad bowl the size of a satellite dish and prepared his special Caesar salad with fresh eggs just for her. As he narrated each step and ingredient, she pulled out her huge black Parker fountain pen and took notes.
There were exceptions. No matter how many times we went to Joe’s Stone Crab and she wandered back into the kitchen to beg the chef for his key lime pie recipe, she could never duplicate it at home. Turns out he intentionally left out just one ingredient, which he would never tell my mother, and the secret died with him.
As I had anticipated at the start of our evening’s adventure, we ended up back at the house, where Pop and I had leftover brown rice from breakfast, and Mom boiled up two kosher hot dogs. This was typical not only of our attempts to eat in restaurants but to interact with the outside world. Because we were on our own planet, we were treated like unwelcome aliens wherever we went.
Over the next few months, the contents and the atmosphere of our house began to change. Just as my father’s thinking had become more transcendental, so too did his interiors. Our once modernist house began to look like an opium den as seen through the lens of a Technicolor Hollywood movie. Heavily perfumed smoke from burning pots of incense in thick bronze antique Chinese censers now mingled in the hot, humid air with Mom’s ever-present pale blue cigarette smoke. Brown rice in heavy cast-iron pots was constantly cooking on the stove. Ceiling fans slowly mixed this eclectic potpourri into an intoxicating, strange ether. All of this scented haze gave the house a languid, dreamlike feeling, as if time had stopped in our own private universe. Low-hanging Japanese rice-paper lanterns softly lit the living room, while casually tinkling wind chimes stirred by the slow-moving tropical breeze added to the esoteric sound track. Strange surrealist sculptures, such as a pair of fractured hands holding a bleeding heart, were carefully placed in front of cryptic Balinese calendars—illustrated with mythical sea monsters devouring cowering humans. Calder-esque mobiles made of assorted metals by my father hung from the ceiling and moved slowly in random, hypnotic rhythms.
Every morning as my clock radio alarm went off, I would slowly open my eyes to the sounds of the Beach Boys and the weather report, which rarely varied from “seventy-four degrees and sunny.” I would lie in bed for another few minutes, dreading the idea of getting up and going to school. As I finally got out of bed, I could hear the distant strains of Japanese shakuhachi flute music or Ravi Shankar’s sitar coming from the living room. This was the new background music for my father’s morning ritual. He now awoke early to practice his yoga asanas, pelvic “fire” breathing, meditation, and Buddhist chants. Somehow he had discovered the one and only yoga teacher in all of Miami, who taught him at age sixty-two to stand on his head and sit in full lotus position. This was the first I had ever heard of yoga or seen it practiced. When I mentioned to a teacher at school that my father started his morning with an hour of yoga, she didn’t know what the word meant.
With his exercises completed, he fired up the blender for one of his special health drinks, which included wheat germ, liquid lecithin, raw eggs, brewer’s yeast, honey, apple cider vinegar, juice, and yogurt. Occasionally he would be inspired and throw in something green: a cucumber, a stalk of celery, or an entire aloe leaf from the backyard, for “good digestion.” The result was unpalatable, as I was often forced to attest. If Mom stumbled into the kitchen while he was mixing up his “mess,” as she called it, she dramatically rolled her eyes, grabbed a can of Metracal, and fled before she could be offered a glassful of vital green froth. She then retreated to more important matters, like putting on her makeup.
As soon as I heard the toot-toot of the yellow school bus, I was ready for my Academy Award–worthy performance of a normal, average kid. When the school bus door swung open, I greeted my fellow classmates with a beaming smile intended to say, “I have just woken up in a household where Mom served bacon and eggs, and my father finished the morning paper before he left for the office to sell life insurance policies.” What that smile and the rest of the day actually required was that I would have to radically rein in every one of my natural eccentricities, seal my lips about my wacky parents, and with great strain appear to be just a normal kid.
Of course, having a lesbian golf pro and an aristocratic Cuban pedophile as teachers did not exactly help to reorient my compass toward normality. My homeroom teacher, Miss Davis, better known as Bobbi, started class every Monday by showing off her weekend tournament wins. One week it was a diamond ring that she would flash in our faces; the following week it was a new car, and so on. Bobbi was aggressive and proud of her overt athleticism. Every single day she dressed in her signature color—turquoise—complemented by her closely cropped brassy blond hair with dark roots. Her tops were always tight and stretchy, which fully displayed her large, tapered, and very pointy breasts. They were so sharp that some of the boys worried that if they accidentally bumped into Miss Davis’s chest, they could have their eyes poked out, while others had trouble concealing their boners as she walked by.
Bobbi decided immediately that she didn’t like me and classified me as a “discipline problem.” In order to demonstrate who was in charge, she would dig her nails in my arms until I began to bleed,
pull me out of my chair by my hair, and, on several occasions, “accidentally” throw me down the stairs. During phys ed, which consisted of volleyball, she insisted on always playing opposite me. The result was that all her returns were spike balls that bonked me on the head every time. Eventually my mother grew concerned about my patches of missing hair and constant black-and-blue marks. When she called the principal, he told her that I had a balance problem that needed to be reviewed by a medical professional. My story of a sadistic teacher seemed too fantastic to be believed by anyone.
Concerned that I was fabricating this persecution complex, they herded me through a vast array of medical evaluations, including sessions with a child psychiatrist who showed me Rorschach tests that all looked like caricatures of gyrating African dancers. After endless weeks of assessments, all the psychiatrist ended up with was a diagnosis that I had an acute sensitivity for color that he had never seen before. His prescription: get Philip a dog; he needs a friend.
Mr. Rodriguez was part of the first wave of upper-class Cubans who fled Castro’s revolution and found a job teaching us classical penmanship. Before we began the day’s adventure of exploring the more cursive aspects of the alphabet, Mr. Rodriguez would peer at me through his thick black glasses and, after several minutes of this silent visual interrogation, publicly declare my budding Beatle haircut a disaster. I was then ordered to the bathroom, where we would have a little hairstyling session with his big black comb. Gently, he would part my hair to the side and slowly comb it into a more traditional style. He would step back and admire his salon skills and then pat my head and say, in his heavily accented English, “Now, isn’t that better?” Only then would he notice that I looked a little rumpled. Over the next several minutes he would tug on my shirt and carefully tuck it in until I looked like a little cadet. We would then return to class to resume the day’s lesson. No one ever seemed to notice that the two of us would disappear from class every day for a good half hour and that upon return I looked remarkably different.
During recess, while the other kids roughhoused in the play yard, I would wander out into the back alley behind the school, where there was a body shop. The walls were filled with blond pinups from Playboy. I would stare at them while the guys fixed cars. The mechanics would jab one another and point at me. They loved this idea of a little kid gawking at their nudie shots. Thus was the cycle of my day: watching Pop stand on his head, lesbian male-o-phobia, pedophilia, macho mechanics, and then home to a nice hot dish of macrobiotic adzuki beans and organic brown rice.
Macrobiotics sparked Pop’s appetite for physical and spiritual transformation that could be achieved through dietary extremes. This was a strange concept in the time of TV dinners and where the only fresh vegetable sold in supermarkets was iceberg lettuce. Every few days Pop embarked on yet another obscure-sounding fast that was meant to purify a specific organ or internal system. For example, his beet fast was intended to cleanse the liver, the organ dedicated to filtering all of the toxins in the body. The grape fast would rebalance his acidity-alkalinity. It was not unusual for him to follow a ten-day rice fast with a fifteen-day juice fast. Once this phase of fasting was complete, he would then slowly prepare himself for solid food by drinking cups of hot water with the juice of half a lemon squeezed into them. It might then be another three or four days before the first morsel of brown rice entered his mouth. Once he began eating again, each mouthful of solid food had to be chewed one hundred times before swallowing. This was an idea that he found in one of his ancient books on yoga philosophy: “All digestion begins in the mouth. The enzymes in your saliva must thoroughly mix with your food so that you can extract optimal nutrition from everything you eat.” Each meal became a major project in the reconstruction of the body and mind.
I alternated between being curious and being totally uninterested in Pop’s evolving diet fanaticism. At times I wanted to be a supreme thirteen-year-old yogi, and at other times I wanted to be a typical kid and eat as many Snickers bars as I could. Every so often I joined Pop on a ten-day fast, which pushed my already skinny body toward emaciation. He had convinced me that I needed to purge myself of all toxins, which, left untreated, would eventually induce disease and death. During the first three days of any fast, I felt dizzy, unable to concentrate, and horribly hungry. Mom usually ignored any dietary extremism on our parts and continued to eat as she always had. She categorized these dietary adventures as a type of father and son outing.
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.
