Walking Through Walls

by Philip Smith

  As Pop looked at me, he commented that I now had a very strong chin. This is not something I had ever noticed, but it was his way of acknowledging that I had successfully grown from my travels.

  It was good to be home, but I felt that my travels and my experience with Bob had cut the umbilical cord between my father and me. I was becoming my own person.

  “I want to hear all about the trip,” Pop said, “but I have a little problem I need to attend to first.” He pointed to a stack of boxes that almost reached to the ceiling. The sides were marked “Japan.” “I don’t know why I ordered these beads. They’re too heavy to use in draperies. They’ll pull the rod out of the ceiling. I’ve never done anything stupid like this before.”

  I tried to lift one open carton on the floor. They were heavy. Each carton must have weighed at least one hundred pounds and contained sixteen boxes of white beads strung necklace style. They were innocuous, plain-Jane beads that at best could be sold at a five-and-dime for fifty cents a strand. I couldn’t figure out why he’d bought these beads either. Probably some closeout deal.

  Trying to be helpful, I said, “Well, maybe you can send them back.”

  “No, they won’t take them back. I’ll just have to figure out some way to use them. Maybe I’ll give them away. You must be hungry; why don’t we get going?”

  I put my knapsack in the car and was looking forward to getting home. I also had not seen my mother for a long time and missed her. I knew she’d be unhappy that I had disappeared without letting her know, but she would be thrilled to hear about my journey. She’d want to know every detail.

  For some reason, Pop took the long way home, driving down Biscayne Boulevard, which was lined with shuttered office buildings like ghosts from another era. We passed the long-defunct stark white Art Deco Sears Tower. Its roof was collapsing from termite damage and the summer monsoon rains. The last time I had been in that store was fifteen years earlier with my mother, looking for “necessities.” That was the first and last Sears she ever visited. Mom didn’t believe in shopping with the masses. Even though she was now leading a different life than she had envisioned, she maintained her dignity, her character, and her moral compass, and still dressed like a million bucks. I can’t imagine how hard it was to have her ex-husband continue to live next door to her. Why neither of them picked up and moved on was beyond me. I guess they both felt they had a right to be there. Perhaps they were secretly hoping that this emotional freeze would eventually thaw, and they would pick up where they had left off.

  The car windows were open, and the twilight breeze was coming up off the bay, kissing our faces as we headed down the boulevard. Thanks to Miami’s never-ending stream of corrupt politicos, who gave away the city-owned bayfront for bags and bags of sweet, crisp, unmarked bills, this simple pleasure of life is now long gone. Miami’s Bayfront Park once featured the odd combination of the pristinely white, marble-clad main library and a notorious cruising ground for pedophiles who lurked behind the lush tropical vegetation for underage bait. It seemed that Miami pedophiles preferred smart underage children who actually could read rather than the dumb-hick kids who hung out at the rifle range. Or maybe kids who read were less dangerous than kids toting guns. Eventually the library and the pedophiles gave way to sports arenas and tourist malls with daiquiri bars. Progress.

  Just across the street from the Freedom Torch, the eternal flame in memory of JFK, which was unlit due to the continuing local Cuban resentment toward John F. Kennedy for failing to provide air cover during the botched Bay of Pigs invasion nearly ten years earlier, my father pulled up to the curb of an anonymous office building with a white marble lobby that looked like an oversized airport men’s room. A woman standing on the sidewalk smiled in an aggressive and almost painful manner at my father. She was smoking one of those long liberated-lady cigarettes. I disliked her instantly.

  She opened the door and climbed into the front seat. I noticed immediately that she was wearing navy blue stockings. This was something new to me. What little I remembered of the stockings that my mother wore was that they were sheer or coffee colored. But blue? Even in the swinging sixties, no one wore blue stockings. Pink, yes. Yellow and fluorescent green were okay. But never, ever blue. This must be something that was sold at the grocery store in those egg-shaped plastic containers cleverly called L’eggs. Stockings are not an item that should be sold at grocery stores to begin with, much less blue stockings. In a million years, my mother would never buy stockings in the grocery store. In fact, my mother didn’t believe in grocery stores, except for staples such as detergent or milk. She would drive miles out of her way to find a butcher or a small fruit stand. But stockings? I think she would have rather faced electrocution or deportation than buy a personal item such as stockings at the supermarket. These blue stockings told me all I needed to know about this woman sitting in the front seat of my father’s car.

  As best as I could understand, this woman was aiming for a kind of Flash Gordon–a-go-go look. Instead she achieved one of chilling morbidity. There was something about the blue that gave her legs the appearance of a cadaver—dead flesh without circulation. Her legs told me that this woman was all about the wrong place at the wrong time. As she nestled into her bucket seat, she mechanically rotated her head like a ventriloquist’s dummy and turned to face me, saying, “Hiiieeeeeee.” Her lips did not move from her frozen smile as this greeting jumped out of her mouth. What her smile really said was, “I wish you were dead.” I was not my father’s son for nothing. What little psychic genetic material had been passed on allowed me to read people instantly. I could see right through her.

  Not knowing where to look first—at her Rosalind Russell–inspired Auntie Mame bottle-black hairdo with a spit curl lacquered into place on her forehead, or her blue eye shadow and harsh red lips, or her cat’s-eye rhinestone-encrusted waitress eyeglasses—I focused on her hand holding that long, thin cigarette. My mom smoked Camels, without filters, like a real man. This mystery woman smoked Virginia Slims, probably because she thought it made her appear ultrafeminine and au courant. Instead she looked stupid and common.

  Without taking his eyes off the road, my father made a formal introduction. “Philip, this is Ruth. She is a great psychic and is going to be a powerful healer. I thought it would be nice if she joined us for dinner. I knew you’d like to meet her.”

  I was a little upset. Here I had been back in the country for just a few hours, and I needed to meet a new friend of my father’s? What I really wanted was some private time to catch up with him. I guess my stories about life at the equator would just have to wait.

  “Oh, hi, Ruth.” That was about all the enthusiasm I could muster.

  Somehow my father was not sharing my incisive observations about Ruth and instead was smiling; his face was slightly flushed. Whatever he was thinking, he was clearly ignoring the lack of reality sitting next to him. Everyone in the car, except me, assumed that I already knew this was my father’s new girlfriend. The long drive down Biscayne Boulevard had been a prearranged get-to-know-you kind of thing. It was not working.

  We eventually pulled up to Fox’s, a lounge/liquor store that had been around since the 1940s. It was known for its martinis and prime ribs even though Miami was turning into a mojito and picadillo type of town. Fox’s was now an anachronism that had not yet acquired the patina of charm or irony. The entrance was from the alleyway, giving the whole place a speakeasy kind of feel. Empty liquor boxes that probably had been gathering for weeks surrounded the door. Painted on the side of the olive green building was a big, slightly naughty fox with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, leering at incoming patrons.

  In keeping with its lounge heritage, Fox’s was dark inside and smelled of old beer and stale cigarettes. Ruth lit up again, adding to the sour smell. She quickly ordered a baked potato with a salad and, exhaling a lungful of smoke, informed me that she was a vegetarian. She patiently explained to me that she did not eat any red meat, any flesh, or an
ything that had had consciousness. I smiled and nodded.

  I felt like saying, “I know what a fucking vegetarian is, you asshole. I’ve been one practically my entire life.” Something told me that she became a vegetarian about five minutes after meeting my father. Usually when I ate out with my father, we dined at one of the few health restaurants in Miami, ordering brown rice and steamed vegetables. Now, with Ruth in the picture, we are having dinner at a lounge? Certainly an odd choice.

  “I’ll have the prime rib, extra rare,” I said, knowing that I was being extremely obnoxious. My father shot me a look. Actually, I was hurting myself more than Ruth. I had not eaten meat in many, many years. I knew that the meal was going to make me feel slightly ill. My father was already calculating how many high colonics I would need to remove the decaying flesh from my colon. Ruth flashed her big fake smile at me again, as if to say, “I know what you’re doing, and I’m going to be the winner of this game.” Pop ordered scrambled eggs and a salad.

  Like a bad Hollywood movie, Pop asked Ruth, “How was your day?” He placed his hand on top of her nonsmoking hand in a sign of affection. She recounted details from her day as a reservation clerk for Eastern Airlines.

  Ruth exhaled another cloud of smoke that I pretended made me cough. I gave her my best judgmental look that said, “How can you, the fairy princess of Eastern Airlines, smoke in front of my distinguished father?” She smiled what I can only imagine was her perfected would-you-like-a-window-or-aisle-seat? smile. Holding it for the Kodak moment that she was living in her mind, she ratcheted her head toward my father, keeping her eyes locked on mine. She turned to me for her opening play and said, “You know, you’re lowering your vibrations by eating the dead carcass of that cow.”

  “Yeah, I know, but my father taught me how to neutralize the toxins, send them to the sun for purification, and then return my vibrations to the divine and healing level. So, in the long run, it really doesn’t matter what I eat, as I can still maintain my spiritual purity without being debased by the gross matter that I put in my body.” I surprised myself with how much of my father’s thought processes I had really absorbed.

  Pop had now perfected the ability to change his reality just by thought. I remember that after my parents divorced, Pop decided he no longer needed fancy clothes, and his custom-made suits and Nehru jackets gave way to off-the-rack polyester wash-and-wear. To me this was an ominous sign of spiritual bad taste as well as our dramatically altered economic conditions. As Pop’s spirituality increased, his interest in the finer things offered by the material plane decreased. Personally, I stuck with pure cotton, which was more difficult to find, as polyester had become the miracle fiber of the moment. Pop repeatedly told me that “polyester is poison and puts carcinogenic chemicals in your blood. The skin can’t breathe when you wear that stuff. This is why there is so much cancer around.”

  Polyester? When I reminded him of the carcinogenic properties of polyester, he explained his change of fabrics this way: “I’m able to psychically neutralize the negative effects of polyester and make the body believe that I’m wearing cotton.” Thanks to his elite spiritual connections, he could enjoy the benefits of wash-and-wear without any of its potential dangers. While this appeared to be just a bit frivolous or completely psychotic, it was really an indicator that my father had moved into a realm where he believed that he could control every aspect of life on a molecular level. With his psychic powers, he could reprogram his body to repel the negative effects of the petroleum-based polyester and wear it with impunity. This was no different from the way he approached changing the body’s energy systems in order to repel and dissolve metastasized tumors. Eventually he would be able to apply this ability to channel thought and alter physical reality on a much larger scale. In the meantime, I was hoping that I could make my body believe that this thirty-two-ounce prime rib was nothing more than a head of lettuce.

  At the time, I rarely practiced what my father had taught me about marshaling my mental powers. If I did, maybe I wouldn’t have had so many problems. According to my father, by creating the proper thought-form and surrounding our body with this invisible shield, we could theoretically repel everything from radiation to speeding bullets and life-threatening insidious germs. With the correct mental attitude, you could smoke a carton of cigarettes a day with no repercussions as long as you surrounded your lungs with the white light of protection and sent any carcinogens to the sun for purification. While I had been well schooled in the art of repelling toxic substances from my body, what I was really signaling to Ruth was, “Don’t fuck with me or my father, you low-vibration fraud.”

  Just then the lights blinked three times. We all noticed. Ruth perked up and announced loudly, “Ohhhhh, Arthur’s here!”

  I was stunned. How did she know about Arthur? Obviously my father had been sharing more than a baked potato with Ruth. Now she was privy to our top-secret relationship with Arthur. No one except my father was supposed to have access to Arthur. All of a sudden, this interloper with the blue stockings was talking to Arthur? A line had been crossed. This was treason. I felt angry and betrayed. Arthur had practically raised me, and now here he was showing up while Ruth was around. Arthur should have known better than to be talking to this horrible woman. If Arthur had a message for Ruth, I was going to get up and leave. If necessary, I’d walk home. Ruth flashed me a giggly smile that said, “Isn’t this fun? A message from Arthur, wheeee!”

  Pop reached for a pen and began writing on his napkin. “The white beads were sent to you for a healing purpose. They are not a mistake. In the next several days, we will instruct you on how to properly energize them with healing energies. Give them away to people. They will continue to emit healing energies that those with disease will find helpful.” I was relieved that Arthur’s message had nothing to do with Ruth. If it had, I would have personally crossed over to the next dimension and strangled him. I thought to myself, “Nice work, Arthur.” This was a message that I could discuss with my father, since I was the one unpacking the beads. Thank goodness Arthur kept it general and didn’t reveal anything personal in front of Ruth.

  Pop leaned back in his chair and, with a smile, said, “Well, that’s a surprise. Here I thought that I had made a huge mistake in buying those beads, and all along it was the work of spirit. I should have known better.” He was clearly relieved that he now had a reason for having bought several tons of white glass beads from Japan.

  Just as Arthur had stated, my father soon began to psychically energize the beads with healing power. For years he gave them to his patients to hold and absorb the energy whenever needed. I still keep mine next to my bed. It was not unusual to walk into one of my father’s lectures and see everyone wearing the same strand of white glass beads.

  “Oh, Lew, that’s wonderful. See, you need to have more confidence in yourself. Doubt is a negative emotion. You need to be positive at all times. We’re going to have to work on that.” Boy, was she digging in fast. Ruth loved the fact that Arthur had shown up while she was present. Apparently my father was now willing to have someone share his friendship with the spirits. For the rest of the meal, Ruth was like a little bird, chirping “Oh, Arthur this and Arthur that.”

  Ever since I’d known Arthur, I was told to keep my mouth shut because the outside world could not know that my father was talking to invisible people. Now Ruth was blabbing to the entire world about Arthur while having a baked potato at Fox’s. I was having enough trouble digesting the slab of meat on my plate without having to watch her performance. I kept thinking, “Where did he find this one?”

  After dinner we drove Ruth home. She lived a few blocks south of her office, in a 1950s apartment building huddled next to the bridge on the Miami River. There was a constant nerve-grating buzz as cars crossed the iron grate drawbridge. It was a place inhabited largely by forgotten souls who, for whatever reason, never managed to do better in life. While my father escorted Ruth to her apartment, I sat in the car and read the psychic
predictions page by Jeane Dixon in the National Enquirer.

  On the way home, Pop told me that he had met Ruth at one of his lectures just a few weeks ago. She had been having severe back problems and asked my father for a healing through laying on of hands. In front of a room full of witnesses, she got the full treatment and was instantly healed. From then on, they were an item. Shortly after this first meeting, Ruth somehow convinced my father that she had divine powers and they should work as a tag team. Soon ads began to appear in the Miami Herald for lectures on healing by Lew Smith and Ruth at the Theosophical Society, and the psychic fair at the Holiday Inn on South Dixie Highway. Ruth spoke of the importance of love and forgiveness, while my father performed actual healings.

  After our initial get-together at Fox’s, my father began to see Ruth every day. He would bring her back to his guesthouse, often in full view of my mother as she was picking up the mail. If my parents had business to transact, it was done on the front lawn while Ruth sat in the car, glaring at my mother. In my opinion, my father was guilty of conduct unbecoming. There was something so unspiritual about the unfinished business of their marriage. Wisdom and enlightenment did not prevail.

  After about two months of serious spiritual dating, my father told me that Ruth had just confided in him that she was about to undergo a very dangerous and potentially life-threatening operation. Personally, I was not concerned. If the surgeon’s knife accidentally slipped and severed an artery or two, what was the harm? Ruth pleaded with my father that she would need his full cooperation to ensure a successful outcome. Based on this request, my father assumed that he and his psychic deputies would be on call twenty-four hours a day during the ordeal. However, what Ruth really meant was that she would need the full cooperation of his checkbook as she walked out of her job to prepare for the surgery.