by Philip Smith
Scrambling for money, he designed some exotic African-esque figurines that he was able to convince a man to cast for him out of plaster. At night he would paint them in empty parking lots illuminated by a few bare bulbs, and by day he went door to door. Eventually he scraped up enough cash to send for my mother. The starstruck lovers had a quick don’t-tell-anyone marriage at city hall. The bride wore black, and it was done—for better or worse.
Just after the “I do’s,” Mom peered into the surrounding sun-bleached, flat, alien landscape and wondered what the hell she had gotten into. When Mom moved down, she was expecting lovers in paradise. The truth was that this was no kosher kitchen. With money and God an issue, the couple looked for shelter around upper Biscayne Boulevard, just past the Eazy Breeze trailer park. There a small white stucco two-story apartment building with rats, snakes, the occasional possum, and a broken stove became home. The eagle-eyed Baptist landlady took their money with no questions asked, no forms to be filled in, and no credit check.
Two days later Miss Baptist casually asked, “Hey, y’all ain’t Jews, are ya?” Affirmative. The local sheriff was sent to free the property from the filthy Hebrew influence. Mom, unaware that being Jewish was a crime, fast-talked/sweet-talked that redneck with the blond peach fuzz on top. After a little back-and-forth, along with a stunning display of her intelligence, he tipped his hat and proclaimed, “Evenin’, ma’am,” calling it a day.
In this small hellhole hothouse of an apartment, Pop managed to look for work, paint portraits of local Haitian women, and began to create magnificent floating mobiles made from pieces of found scrap metal. Despite the economic hardship at the time, the abundant heat and sun were luxurious enough to fuel his creativity. Mom loved the idea of being married to this brilliant bohemian artist and living on the edge, contrary to everything she had ever known. Growing up in the Depression taught her to seek stability and security. But with my father, she was willing to throw all those goals out the window in exchange for a more interesting life.
It was a great love story. Unfortunately, “happily ever after” was not in the cards as it should have been.
Mine was the last question that Sophie answered that day. She looked tired. As she put my scroll back into the Peg-Board holder, she said, “God has spoken.”
“That’s right…Amen.”
six
Meet the Preacher
The police car behind me came to a screeching halt. Maya turned around and said, “Uh-oh, I think they’re after us.”
“Just keep walking,” I said. “We didn’t do anything wrong.” I heard the squad car’s doors slam.
Maya and I were hanging out in the Grove, the overgrown, jungly portion of Miami that had become the secluded outpost for the bohemian rich, poor blacks, fabulous decorators who loved carpets with bold geometric patterns, and free-love hippies. We were on our way to the Head Shop on Oak Avenue.
Run by a visionary hippie—a skinny white boy with a big ’fro named Mike Lang, who would eventually go on to become one of the major driving forces behind the Woodstock music festival—the Head Shop was the gathering place for Miami’s nascent hippie community. Mike had taken over a dilapidated wooden house that bordered on the black section and turned it into hippie headquarters. Inside the store was a small selection of trippy paraphernalia that I’m sure one day will show up at auction at Sotheby’s: Day-Glo posters by Mouse Kelley advertising concerts at the Fillmore by Big Brother and the Holding Company or the Grateful Dead; brass pipes; Indian flutes decorated with pictures of Krishna; kaleidoscopes; and fluorescent colored plastic boxes for storing “stash.” Anything that sparkled or was reflective ended up in the display case for Mike to sell to the local hippies. I would sit for hours on the store’s steps. Throughout the day and night, people would congregate outside in small groups. God knows what critical information they were exchanging with one another. This was going to be Maya’s first trip to hippie HQ.
I had to be careful. Introducing her to my father and Sophie Busch didn’t work too well. Despite the magical otherwordliness of the Head Shop, where life passed in slo-mo, the people I hung out with there were a bunch of runaway underage kids who were nothing more than a pack of wild dogs. They slept on filthy mattresses in abandoned apartments with the windows smashed out and thought nothing of breaking into people’s homes for money to buy food, drugs, and more drugs. We panhandled on Grand Avenue for spare change to buy cigarettes, sold the Bulldog and other underground newspapers that advocated revolution and “killing the pigs,” and generally formed our own unit of antisocial delinquent outcasts. I’m surprised more of us didn’t end up in jail.
Within seconds, another police car came to a screeching halt in front of us. We were pinned between the two cars. Six cops surrounded us.
“Hey, faggot, what’s this, your mother’s dirty rug?” The cop was tugging on my Mexican serape.
“Yeah, hippie shit, what’s that filthy rag?” another cop spoke.
Then a huge cop stepped forward, his hand on his holster, and asked, “Where do you think you’re off to, buying drugs? I’ll bet you both are carrying some joints. Hey, Cecil, give this here girl—I mean guy—a patdown. Check out his woman friend as well.”
Maya started crying. Two cops descended on her. They dumped the contents of her purse on the road and used their feet to kick it around to see if there were any drugs. They picked up a bottle of Midol. One cop yelled, “Rick, got something!”
The big cop walked over and held up the bottle, looking at it carefully. Holding it between his thumb and forefinger, he shook it in Maya’s face. It sounded like a pair of maracas. “Looky what we got here, young lady. I’d say you’re looking at ten years, easy.” With that, a second cop grabbed her hands and pulled them behind her back as if he was going to handcuff her. He flashed the big cop a huge grin like he had just caught the biggest kingfish out in the bay. “Yep, you sure got a problem here, missy. I knew you were a user just by lookin’ at you. And I bet your little boyfriend’s a dealer. Is he your pimp, too?” Both cops nearly doubled over in laughter.
The three cops that were guarding me found nothing in my pockets except a pair of house keys and nine single dollars. The big cop turned to me and said, “Son, you didn’t answer my question, where are you off to?”
“We’re going for a walk.”
“Where are you walking to, your local stash house?”
“No, we’re just out for a walk.”
“Son, I’m going to ask you one more time, where you walking to?”
“We thought we’d get some ice cream.”
“Ice cream? Now where do you get ice cream at this time of night and in this neighborhood?”
“That’s why we’re out for a walk, to find some ice cream.”
With that, the big cop signaled one of the cops next to me with his chin. The cop kneed my groin and punched me in the stomach.
“Now, you still think you’re out for some ice cream, or maybe something else? We can continue to refresh your memory as long as it’s necessary.”
“Uhhhhhhh,” was the only answer I could utter.
“Huh? What’d you say? I couldn’t hear you.”
“Uhhhhhhh.”
“Son, you just don’t want to answer my question, do you?”
Wham! Another knee, another punch to my stomach.
Maya continued to cry. At that point, the big cop opened her Midol bottle, looked inside, and spilled them on the road. He then crunched them with his feet. “Cecil, you know, I think the best thing would be to just let these folks lead us to their home base. Let ’em go, and we’ll follow them; they’ll take us where we want to go. Oh, Bobby, if you want that fella’s rag that he’s wearin’ to wipe your ass, go right ahead. It’s yours.” With that, the cop behind me named Bobby grabbed my serape, threw it into the backseat of the car, and let out a rodeo whoop. All the cops started yelling as they piled into the two squad cars and squealed off.
“Are you all right?” M
aya came running over to me with tears in her eyes. “Oh my God, I was so scared, I thought they would kill us! Why did they do that to us?”
“For fun. They had nothing else to do.”
“Do you think they’ll follow us?”
“No, they’ll find someone else to bother. I’ll tell you what, instead of the Head Shop, let’s go over to the Feedbag restaurant. They’re having a screening of a Kenneth Anger movie and a Warhol film starting at midnight. I think you’ll like them.”
“What’s a Warhol film?”
Maya and I weren’t the only ones spending time in the Grove. In order to escape the imploding universe at home, Mom on weekends would attend a matinee at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Afterward she and her friends would have lunch at the cozy Taurus Steak House, an old wooden shack nestled among the monster-sized banyan trees particular to the Grove.
One Saturday afternoon, as she sat down for lunch, she noticed Tennessee Williams sitting at the table next to hers. She leaned over and told him that she had seen Summer and Smoke.
“Well,” Tennessee purred, “did you like it?”
“Like it? I was so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed for a week.”
“Oh, good, it’s supposed to be depressing.” Tennessee smiled.
“Who the hell needs you? I can get depressed on my own.” And with that, both parties returned to their lunch.
Pop also began to spend more time in the Grove. In the midst of this hippie heaven, there were a number of people interested in the supernatural. At times he would bring me to meetings held at the rambling pink Spanish Mediterranean bayfront estate of a former Vogue model from the fifties who was recently divorced from her husband, who had been a part of the military-industrial complex. The Vietnam War had been especially good to her and her gorgeous blond children. She was spreading her alimony wealth among freaks, flower children, and gurus.
The group usually consisted of a few stoned-out hippies who thought my father was a narc, a couple of massage therapists looking for a sugar daddy, and two or three librarian types seeking to free themselves from the earthly bonds of their dreary lives. Occasionally a medium would show up and produce astounding mind-reading demonstrations. Other times everyone held hands and tried to “feel each other’s psychic energy.” Or they might play a type of ESP parlor game where someone would write down a word or the name of a country, and they tried to “tune in to their being” and guess the answer. All together now: “ommmmmmmmmm.” After the meeting, “organic food”—the latest fad—was served. Brown rice balls with shredded carrots, pecans, and dates sprinkled with coconut were brought out on a tray by the Dominican butler along with a huge kettle of Mu tea—the drink of choice for committed macrobiotics.
Eventually my father moved on and discovered a more serious study group in South Miami. Each meeting started with a meditation followed by a different psychic experiment or discussion. Routinely, my father fell asleep as soon as the meditation began. He would sleep through the entire class, and then at the exact moment the class ended, he would wake up refreshed. It was a standing joke that before the meeting started, someone would inquire as to whether or not my father had taken his nap.
Marcia Flowers, the woman who ran the group, told me that on one specific occasion, my father woke up from his meditation nap and was suddenly a different person. Everyone in the room commented on his changed appearance. She described my father as now having a highly energized aura. It was her belief that during these naps he traveled to another dimension where higher beings were preparing him for his healing work.
At this particular meeting, my father rubbed his eyes after he woke up, got up without saying a word, and walked over to someone who was quite ill. He stood behind her and slowly placed his hands on her shoulders. As he stood there, he closed his eyes for about two minutes. When he opened his eyes, he removed his hands, and the woman commented that for the first time in days she felt a complete absence of symptoms. Without any explanation, my father had performed his first healing.
About a week after this incident, my father walked into a lecture by Arthur Ford, who headed the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship (SFF), an organization of people interested in expanding the possibilities of human consciousness. This was in 1968. Arthur Ford was a world-famous medium who had spent much of the early twentieth century contacting the dead before large audiences throughout both Europe and the United States, including sold-out performances at Carnegie Hall. His messages from the other side were relayed to his clients by an entity known as “Fletcher,” a spirit who took over Arthur’s body as soon as he went into trance. Ford’s clients and friends included Aldous Huxley, Upton Sinclair, Gloria Swanson, King George of Greece, astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, and Mrs. Harry Houdini.
Ford’s encounter with Mrs. Houdini sealed his worldwide reputation as a first-rate psychic with extraordinary powers. Harry Houdini spent much of his professional life exposing fraudulent psychics and mediums. However, in 1926 just before he died, he left a complicated ten-word secret coded message with his wife, Bess. No one but Houdini and his wife knew the exact words and their meaning contained in this code. Their understanding was that if a medium was able to deliver this message to Bess after Houdini died, then this was firm evidence that there is life after death. For many years Mrs. Houdini received thousands of letters from various psychics claiming that they had received the code. There was even a $10,000 reward offered to the person who could reveal the code. Unfortunately, none of them was correct.
During one of his trance sessions, Ford commented that Houdini’s mother had come to him in a vision and appeared with the word forgive. This had been the exact word agreed upon between Houdini and his mother as a signal of communication from the great beyond. Once Ford was in psychic communication with Houdini’s mother, it then opened the door for Houdini himself to begin communicating through Ford.
Over a period of weeks, Houdini would appear to Ford and give him a word here and there of his code. Then in one evening session, the entire code came through as “Rosabelle—Answer—Tell—Pray—Answer—Look—Tell—Answer—Answer—Tell.”
As Ford reported in his autobiography, Nothing So Strange, this session was witnessed by a Mr. John W. Stafford, who was then the associate editor of Scientific American magazine, and his friend Francis Fast. These two then took the written code and delivered it to Mrs. Houdini, who proclaimed that the code was correct. Houdini had broken through the silence of death and delivered the code as agreed. However, this was just the first step in the cryptic communication between the dead Houdini and his living wife.
Mrs. Houdini then requested a session with Ford, which was witnessed by a number of observers, including a member of the United Press. During this trance, Houdini came through and delivered the same ten words. Only Houdini’s wife knew that each word was a part of a carefully constructed code that once deciphered spelled out “Rosabelle Believe.” This was Houdini’s message from the afterlife. The press was notified in a written statement by Mrs. Houdini that, in fact, the great Houdini had come back from the dead. This astounding demonstration brought Ford global attention and solidified his reputation as one of the world’s great psychics.
Arthur worked the celebrity circuit on both sides of the Atlantic with impressive results. He was shuttled from yachts to first-class hotels, ever ready to dispense precious psychic advice to heads of state and the needy rich.
Ford was a curious character. While gifted with extraordinary supernatural talents and a direct line to those who had passed on, he was reportedly plagued by obsessions that included fastidious skin care and the need to drink. His personal life was usually solitary, but occasionally it would be peopled by devoted companions of both sexes.
The topic of that Sunday’s lecture by Ford was on mediumship and the afterlife. There were maybe fifteen people sitting on wooden folding chairs in a small church off North Miami Avenue. The audience was composed largely of single women, mainly in their fifties. At f
irst glance, they could have been widowed or never quite got to the altar and were leading small, unnoticed lives. They were here for a last chance at hope and redemption.
Ford used his sonorous voice and profound intelligence to captivate his small audience, as he had done his whole life. Having briefly attended the Transylvania College for seminary studies, he learned his Bible and became a charismatic preacher. Unlike Pentecostal preachers who just scared the hell out of you, Arthur masterfully combined the Bible and religious history with a live feed from the hereafter. He was convincing to all present. As usual, my father taped this and many more of Ford’s lectures. They are nothing short of captivating. At this lecture, Ford spoke about reincarnation, mixing strong biblical references with his own work as a clairvoyant.
Ford opened the lecture with the single most provocative question for humanity: “Where does the spirit go after physical death? You don’t immediately go to heaven and play a harp. First you have to iron out your character when you are free of the body. You go where you choose to go; God doesn’t send you there. You are the same person in the spirit world as you are here.
“Christianity started as a healing cult. It was taken over by the Roman emperor Constantine. Read in the New Testament from First Corinthians 12:15, where Saint Paul lists all the spiritual and psychic gifts. He says you all have them, and you should use them for a purpose. In chapter thirteen he talks about love and says that before we can plunge into another dimension, we must get straightened out in this dimension, get rid of jealousy, greed, all those negative things that are often part of our lives. Develop positive love; make love your aim.
