by Philip Smith
As my father’s curiosity and explorations expanded, he would eventually follow a trail that led him to the theosophical teachings of Krishnamurti and Madame Blavatsky. Over time his affiliation with the Theosophical Society would grow, and he would become one of its frequent lecturers on healing. Each of these philosophical stopping points was critical in his evolution as a psychic. It seemed as if Pop was enrolled in some sort of supernatural PhD correspondence program.
I was extremely hesitant to talk to any of the kids at school about ectoplasm, the akashic records, the mystical sect the Hunza people, or any of the other arcane topics that Pop discussed with me based on his readings. Out of necessity I developed a dual personality. During school hours I needed to appear as normal as possible, in order to avoid being beaten up or laughed out of class. However, as soon as I came home and opened the front door, it was like walking onto the set of I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched. For me these TV shows were like documentaries rather than fantasy sitcoms. At last there were other people who, like me, lived in a parallel, paranormal universe. Major Tony came home from his day job at NASA to find his genie ready, willing, and able to put spells on people, read minds, and alter reality.
After school, along with my homework, my father provided informal lessons in metaphysics. He would casually discuss subjects like Atlantis, astrology, kundalini, and Buddhism the way that other dads talked about baseball players or politics. These subjects had a captivating quality, as if I were listening to the latest installment of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Soon I knew more about chakras and reincarnation than I did about Tom Sawyer or American history. Our conversations about multiple incarnations and life in other dimensions made it somewhat difficult to actually focus on my algebra homework. When at home, I lived in my own imagination as I daydreamed about mystical beings and supernatural feats of power.
In an effort to mimic my father’s new interests in religious spirituality, I signed up for an evening one-on-one Bible study class. I really did it for the free illustrated Bible, which had great pictures and was the reward for finishing the course. My parents watched in horror as a former Fuller Brush man with a limp would come to our house twice a week at seven o’clock at night and make me memorize psalms from the New Testament. Since I only wanted the free Bible and wasn’t doing really well with the apostles, I quit after five weeks. I just wasn’t that interested in the door-to-door salesman’s version of Jesus’s Good News.
As my father continued to teach me about the ins and outs of reincarnation, it made me feel as if this life didn’t matter that much. After all, it was just a preview for the next one. Because everything was predetermined by God, spirits, and karma, I assumed that it made no difference whether I studied or not or whether I excelled or not, because God had a plan for me. The problem was, I didn’t know what the plan was and felt powerless to change it. As a result, my school performance began to plummet. I figured if my destiny was to be an honor student, then God and His spirit cohorts would make it happen for me. Learning to read cues and affirmations from my environment as omens, my beliefs were often reinforced when my mother would spontaneously break out in her favorite song: “Que Sera, Sera”—whatever will be, will be…
Mom continued to work hard at being a supportive wife, as if her husband had merely taken up golf or tennis. While she rejected most of his “wacky ideas,” she did her best to go along with his new interests. On nights when he disappeared for yoga lessons, she expressed her delight that whatever this thing called yoga was, it was helping him relax from the tensions of the office. Ever practical, she focused on the end result of his metaphysical curiosity.
She endured the first wave of “kooky friends,” which included the yoga teacher, astrologers, and other seekers, with a good-natured hostess smile and a feigned interest in the conversation. Over time the smile disappeared, and her conversation turned to logical and incisive questioning of their belief systems. Typical of one of her stop-the-conversation-cold questions would be, “So, if I understand you correctly, what you are saying is that the reason someone gets cancer is because they did something terrible in their past life such as raping their daughter or killing their next-door neighbor? Therefore the cancer in this lifetime did not occur because of the current medical explanation of mutant cells rapidly multiplying but instead is due to a karmic payment for past sins? Am I on the right track here?” She quickly entered the no-win zone of these metaphysical, meandering conversations. In no time at all, she realized that she was better off playing the silent cook rather than the happy hostess.
The ever-widening gulf between my parents was especially apparent in the bedroom. Secondhand books on Buddhism, levitation, hypnosis, Rosicrucianism, magnetic healing, UFOs, and reincarnation continued to pile up on the table next to Pop’s side of the bed, while Mom stuck to her lurid novels and biographies of screen stars and Rat Pack comedians. The separate piles of reading material beside the bed were indicative not just of different interests but of two lives that were diverging.
But now time had passed, and their differences had hardened. As if in one final attempt to acknowledge and accommodate their growing estrangement, Pop created a special mattress that catered to their individual tastes: firm and ascetic on his side, and soft and cushy on hers. There was something very Hollywood about this his-and-hers mattress invention. In a nod to Eastern sleeping habits, the bed, a gold-leafed extravaganza, was just a foot off the floor, whereas standard American beds seemed to be getting higher and higher until you needed a ladder to climb into them. The gold metal headboard of swirls and curlicues designed by my father anticipated the free-form psychedelic aesthetic that was about to sweep the country.
During this period of change, my parents continued to work together at the design studio. While much of the day-to-day work remained business as usual, Pop’s decorating sensibility took a turn toward the mystical as well. Maybe it was his daily meditations or the early tremors of the mid-sixties shaking all around us, but suddenly he found the staples of traditional decorating—such as fabric and wallpaper—terribly old-fashioned and conventional. Without ever dropping a tab of acid, he was inexplicably drawn to things bright and shiny, especially iridescent jewel-toned colors.
One day Mom was wearing some vividly colored Mardi Gras pop beads (so unlike her) that her sister had given to her. They caught my father’s eye. Suddenly he had a decorating epiphany that these beads could become a new way to make modern draperies. Perhaps this inspiration was brought on by one of his many previous incarnations, specifically the one where he was a Persian talisman maker, as revealed to him many years later in a message from one of his spirit guides. Thanks to the magic of reincarnation, a new decorating trend—beaded curtains—was born that would sweep the country and keep me in bell-bottoms for years to come. From this moment forth, fabric was banished from his decorating vocabulary, to be replaced by plastic and glass beads from around the world. The beaded draperies, created with his brilliant sense of color, design, and texture, combined the best of hippie regalia and cheap made-in-Japan bamboo curtains with a majestic sense of antiquity. Pop was high-low decades before this would become a cultural idiom.
His timing could not have been more serendipitous, or prescient. Haight-Ashbury, Maharishi Mahesh, Timothy Leary were all about to unleash their love seeds of a new consciousness on the world. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was about to become the mantra for a new generation wanting to explore anywhere but here. Somehow Pop sensed that this happening be-in was imminent. He was changing as fast as he could to be in tune with the coming youthquake. For a man in his sixties, he was definitely a hipster ahead of the crowd.
The Miami Herald named Pop “the King of Beads.” His office took on the look of a psychedelic candy store. Thousands of bottles containing brightly colored beads lined the shelves, waiting to be artfully assembled into curtains and room dividers for the forward-thinking idle rich. His clients would line up to spend thousands of dollars for a designer v
ersion of what would be hanging in every stoned hippie’s Haight-Ashbury crash pad.
On weekends we all sat down at the long dining room table, which he had designed of expanded metal mesh, and strung long strands of jeweled combinations that seemed worthy of Harry Winston, all destined for wealthy homes in Palm Beach, Miami, and the Caribbean.
Eventually none of us could string fast enough to supply the needs of his design-starved clients. My father’s beaded curtains had become a “must-have” accessory for the competitive rich. To keep up with the demand, Pop discovered a family of dwarves living one block off the poverty-stricken Tamiami Trail, which led to nowhere except the alligator-infested swamps of the Everglades. This family, who desperately needed any kind of work, was more than happy to set out beads on their individual metal TV tables decorated with pictures of grapes and ivy, and string, string, string. Pop was their sole source of income.
There was an unspoken but prevailing social stigma attached to being different in any way, and this included being handicapped. You simply did not see handicapped people out in public. They certainly did not hold regular, visible jobs; instead they stayed home and hid. Pop was always looking for a way to help those who were less fortunate. However, Mom’s compassion stopped at the door on this one. She was unable to socialize with the dwarves and covered her eyes when the mother dwarf came to answer the door. If Pop asked her to run into their house and drop off some money or pick up their handiwork, she would refuse.
Each of us was finding ways to adjust to and accommodate Pop’s new metaphysical personality. To her credit, Mom tried to creatively incorporate brown rice into her best French recipes and feigned interest in a book on Krishnamurti lectures. After school I was teaching myself yoga asanas from a small pamphlet, printed in India on newsprint, with out-of-register black-and-white photos of men and women in tight bathing suits assuming the poses. One particular set of photographs demonstrated a nose-washing technique that involved pushing string up one nostril and somehow getting it out the other. All we had in the pantry was plain old kite string. I passed on this one. In the mornings, I was meditating (ommmmm) and listening to scratchy recordings of consciousness lectures by various yogis. I didn’t understand a word they were saying, but just listening to the sound of their thickly accented Indian voices made me feel holy and enlightened.
Early in June, just as we all thought we were finally finding our equilibrium, Pop suddenly disappeared. After several days of not hearing any chanting, I realized that I had not seen him in a while. No good-bye, no explanation, just gone.
Mom seemed perfectly content that Pop was MIA. Her daily routine continued as if nothing had changed. Every morning she got dressed and went to the design studio. I figured that maybe Pop was on another business trip to New York or California or Jamaica (Cuba was out by then), and someone forgot to tell me. Finally I asked. Her response was simply that he was “away.” Weeks turned into months—but no Pop.
As usual, I found ways to entertain myself, which is the nature of being an only child. In addition to painting everything in my room fluorescent orange and green (including myself), I discovered electric bananas. I thought my father would approve of my method of obtaining cosmic consciousness through the fruit of Mother Nature. Perhaps I could convince him to light up with me one day.
I loved the idea that I could get high for free using leftover bananas. The process involved scraping out the inside fiber of the banana peel and then drying this “tobacco” in the oven. After I had dried my Chiquita stash, I then crushed several aspirin, added a bit of tobacco from my mother’s Camels, and tossed the ingredients together as if making a psychotropic Caesar salad. I must have read about this recipe for a low-cost legal high in one of the San Francisco or New York alternative publications that I subscribed to, like Ramparts or the East Village Other. This was the problem of living in a hick town like Miami: I believed everything I read in any newspaper or magazine as long as it was from somewhere other than Miami. Donovan would memorialize this ridiculous ritual in his hit “Mellow Yellow.”
After a few puffs, my skin would begin to tingle in an unpleasant way, as if there were bugs crawling up and down my arms, and the room began to spin. This creepy sensation was followed by a drenching cold sweat, which was the signal that I was to collapse into bed and remain there for the rest of the day—feeling nauseous. I would then switch on my black light and stare at the psychedelic posters that were tacked to the ceiling. Somehow I convinced myself that this “high” was fun and enlightening. I liked the idea that I didn’t have to risk arrest by buying marijuana in the Grove. It was safe, it was legal, and it didn’t work. I would remain slightly comatose until about five o’clock, at which point I crawled out of bed and started all over again. This was how I spent my summer vacation as a thirteen-year-old—sick to my stomach.
One afternoon late in August, I was just about to emerge from another wasted day in bed when I noticed a shadowy figure standing in the doorway of my room. “Wow,” I thought, “I’m finally hallucinating. Maybe it takes time for the banana chemicals to build up in my system. Far out!” This stuff really worked. A full-fledged hallucination achieved with only natural ingredients available at your corner grocery. This formula could revolutionize the drug trade. No more arrests. No more guns. Just miles of banana plantations making millions of people nauseous while hallucinating. Maybe I could start selling it in nickel bags.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed with my vision. I had hoped to see mind-expanding prismatic colors. But I was still happy that my summer of long, hard work perfecting the natural high had finally paid off. I looked again, and as my eyes slowly focused, the figure looked a bit like my father. But he was much thinner, so it couldn’t have been my father. The thought occurred to me that maybe this was not a hallucination but actually my father, teleporting in from his presently unknown location—an occurrence that wouldn’t have surprised me in the least. I shakily got out of bed to go and touch the hallucination/teleportation.
I was sweating and so weak from months of not eating properly and smoking my aspirin-banana combo that I collapsed. My hallucination caught me. It was my father standing there. He held me for a minute while I recovered, then said, “Get some food and meet me in the backyard. I want to show you something. Hurry before it gets dark.”
I went into the kitchen, which had gone to hell in Pop’s absence. Mom and I had been happily eating sirloin steaks, canned Le Sueur peas, and instant mashed potatoes from a box. In the freezer I found a carton of Sealtest ice cream, the kind that contained three neatly divided sections of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. I quickly forced a couple of spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream down my throat. The sugar stabilized me, and I wandered out back looking for my father. I had a pounding headache.
My father was standing at the side of the house, looking up at the sky. His hand was shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun’s glare. “Look at those clouds. They are especially beautiful today.”
I looked around. The landscape wobbled and spun. I was much more interested in throwing up than looking at the clouds. Once I regained my balance, I saw that they were, in fact, especially cottony and full. Miami specializes in extraordinary cumulus cloud formations, possibly due to its unique location in the Gulf Stream. Finally, as my cognitive functions began to fire up from the sugar rushing through my body, I realized that I had not seen my father all summer and asked, “Where were you?”
“I met someone. A very special man, and we went away together.”
“What, like on a vacation or something?”
“To his ashram.”
“His what?”
“A place where you study. He showed me some new things, some new ideas about how to think about life. Let me show you one of the things he taught me. You’ll like this. Pick a cloud, any cloud, and watch me do something to it. Just point to one.”
I scanned the sky and found the biggest, puffiest cumulus hanging low on the horizon. “That on
e,” I said, pointing. “Do something to that one.” I had no idea what Pop was planning but imagined that maybe he could make the cloud change colors or even talk. The banana residue was affecting my thinking.
“The one with the little gray spots at the end?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Okay. I’m going to punch a big hole right in the middle of the cloud and make it look just like a doughnut.” Who needed to smoke bananas and aspirin when they had a father who talked about punching holes in clouds? This was very trippy stuff. He cautioned me, “It takes a few minutes for my thought beam to reach the cloud, so just be patient.” A deep silence fell over my father. About a minute later, he took several deep breaths and let them out. In slow motion he carefully placed his fingertips on his temples and began to stare at the cloud. He looked like one of those ads in the back of comic books for X-ray glasses that let you see ladies’ underwear through their dresses.
I looked up at the cloud. Nothing much was happening, and I began to lose interest. At that moment, I had no patience for my father’s attempts to defy the laws of physics and wanted to get back in the house. I was eager for my next dose of bananas. It was also getting to be four o’clock—time for Gilligan’s Island.
Minutes passed. Pop looked like a statue, just staring at the cloud. I glanced around the yard for a distraction, slapped a couple of mosquitoes, and waited impatiently for us to go back inside. The lychees were just coming into season, and the seaside mahoe tree had blanketed the yard with yellow-and-russet-colored flowers. The mockingbirds and the mourning doves were chattering loudly to announce the end of the day. My father just stood there staring at the cloud. His eyes were squinted, his jaw tight. I looked back up at the cloud, and it was completely intact. Nothing had changed.
