Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  My pencil case standing in for a transponder, I called out, “Beam me up, Scotty!” as I dodged imaginary foes. Sadly, the circuitry in my pencil case was just as unreliable as my current cell phone carrier, so at six p.m., when my mother called me in for tuna casserole and Tater Tots, I’d reluctantly head back inside.

  Even at age ten, I suspected it was going to take a few years before we caught up to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision, so I located the next best thing.

  Mrs. Brownstein, my fifth-grade teacher, was a fresh-out-of-college hire at River Road Elementary School in Wilmington. One of those newbies who shows up each day beaming enthusiastically at students, before the light goes out in their eyes, as it did for my son’s seventh-grade science teacher, a thirty-five-year veteran of the overcrowded Los Angeles public school system. Clutching her desk for support, Mrs. Lee looked like she’d been airlifted out of a tsunami. Her clothing was disheveled, her hair unkempt; one shoe was missing. “I have no idea what day it is,” she told us. It was Back to School Night. School had been in session for exactly one week.

  If you were an outstanding student in Mrs. Brownstein’s class, you’d get the privilege of receiving an invitation to have dinner at her home. My mother, who has diligently saved the writing assignments and playbills from my childhood, sent me a report I wrote in Mrs. Brownstein’s class. It was on how I wanted to be a teacher and be pretty, kind, and have good penmanship just like her. I got an A, but Mrs. Brownstein added in her excellent script, Okay, Anne, you don’t have to try so hard! Lady, you have no idea.

  I was included in the first group of students chosen. She and her husband, also an elementary school teacher, served meatloaf and an iceberg lettuce salad. The Brownsteins were sweet but a bit on the boring side. They were exactly the kind of people I wanted to bunk in with. If I were their daughter I wouldn’t have a grandmother who’d call “on the long distance” to remind me of the importance of having a good bosom—I was ten years old. The only thing is, in my memory, Mrs. Brownstein looks a bit too much like the actress and musician Carrie Brownstein, and her husband too closely resembles the comedic actor David Krumholtz. I remember us as seated around a circular white plastic table on white plastic modular chairs, but that’s also a description of the dining room set in my Barbie’s Malibu Dreamhouse. Memory can be a trickster. One thing I am certain of is that I wanted them to adopt me.

  This plan was thwarted because halfway through fifth grade, my dad announced we were moving to Florida, where I found plenty of enviable families that included parents with recognizable jobs, steady incomes, and homes that felt like secure harbors. Many of my new classmates had generations of wealth behind them and traveled through the world with an ease that I would later come to see as entitlement but at the time was something I desperately desired. My initial instinct, probably due to a genetic predisposition to criminal activity, was to kidnap my friends for large ransoms—you know, something on the order of one thousand dollars!

  I enlisted one of my new pals, Noelle, in my plot. Unlike our tanned, sporty classmates, Noelle and I were preternaturally pale-skinned and bookish, took ballet lessons, and had outsider musical tastes. The other kids were boogying to Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World,” while Noelle and I performed overwrought interpretations of Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick” for each other.

  We drew up our kidnapping plots at the local soda shop while mainlining Cherry Cokes and popping candy dots, pure sugar baked onto what looked like cash-register-paper rolls.* No one would get hurt, because the kids would all be in on it; we’d get that one thousand dollars, spend it all on candy, and start our own secret society, a sort of mash-up of Willy Wonka and Lord of the Flies. I don’t really need to note that nothing ever came of these plans, because I’m not writing this book from a prison cell, but my friendship with Noelle faded after we auditioned for the modern dance club with a routine choreographed to “Aquarius” from the musical Hair. Noelle got in, I didn’t, and without a partner in crime, I turned my attention to spending as much time as possible at friends’ homes, hoping that one of their parents would say, “You know that friend of yours? She really seems like one of us.” I’d pack that paisley bag and slam the door shut behind me. See you never, Gurwitches!

  No one ever did offer to adopt me, though I did form lasting bonds with classmates, some of whose parents have served as surrogate mothers and fathers throughout my life.* My mom told me recently that one of these mothers, someone whose favor I curried and cherished, knocked on our front door and offered unsolicited advice not long after we moved to Miami Beach:

  “You need to buy your daughter new clothes. She’s never going to fit in here with those drab wool dresses, long knee socks, and Buster Brown shoes.”

  In my fifth-grade class photo, it looks like an Amish has been Photoshopped into the picture. I’m in a dull maroon smock with a high lacy collar. But in the sixth-grade shot, I’m wearing a bright blue short-sleeved blouse with puffy sleeves and hip-hugger bell-bottoms that laced up the front and back. By virtue of growing up with the children of these families and aided by my new wardrobe, I had much greater entrée into the world of privilege than my mother and father ever would. These bonds also led me into another, more unexpected realm.

  I was at a Chuck Mangione concert with my high school boyfriend when I saw colors streaming through the air. It was easy to see the pattern: the rainbow of electric reds, yellows, and oranges was triggered by the sound of the horn instruments. When the music stopped, the colors disappeared, but for three weeks following the concert, if I heard something on the radio by Chicago, Steely Dan, or Earth, Wind and Fire (you couldn’t get away from horn sections in those days), those hues would appear like a Peter Max flag waving in the air around me.

  This neurological phenomenon of seeing musical notes as colors is a form of synesthesia, a misfiring of synapses in the brain, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was afraid to tell my parents, as that might have involved mentioning exactly how much pot I’d been smoking during this foray into the mystic (which happens to be a song I experienced as waves of undulating amber and crimson). These hallucinogenic colors disappeared just as suddenly as they’d appeared, but I’d glimpsed the invisible magic in the ether. Both the high school boyfriend—let’s call him Daniel, because that was one of the most popular name for males born in the 1960s—and I were sure it was a message from the divine portending a special destiny.

  I’m sure that Daniel’s family breathed a collective sigh of relief when, a year my senior, he went off to college and left me behind, because I’d spent an inordinate amount of time at their home. “Now what?” they must have said when I turned up in New York City the next year. Not only had I followed him into the same drama department at NYU, I’d moved into a dorm a block from the condo they’d purchased for him. I was a constant presence at their place, even after his sister took up residence in the condo’s second bedroom. The summer after my freshman year, we traveled around Europe together, and when my parents’ finances imploded and I dropped out of school, naturally, I moved in with them. The thing is, we’d broken up by that time, so Danny partitioned off part of the living room for me. When I finally moved out, it was to a studio apartment in the building next door. Was their kindness offered solely out of love and compassion? Maybe, but I think I just wore them down. Like an infestation of mold, it was really hard to get rid of me. There was something else at work here as well. Danny and I believed that we’d been reincarnated as siblings over many, many lifetimes.

  When you read these next few pages, it helps to put in perspective what was happening in New York at the time. Many “seekers” were signing up for pop psychology seminars like EST or sampling sects of Buddhism like they were tapas platters; Shirley MacLaine was running around touting her psychic abilities and belief in past lives; and we became avid readers of books on “expanding consciousness.”

  It was Danny who introduced me
to a new age psychic and medium.

  Van Zandt was a classical pianist, a Fulbright scholar, and had won several competitions. Charismatic and strikingly handsome, he was in his mid-thirties when we met. He hailed from west Texas and his slight Southern twang went a long way toward fostering an instant kinship. He’d been a student of Jane Roberts, the author whose series of books is composed of the teachings of Seth, an entity who communicated from a non-physical plane. Under her tutelage, Van Zandt discovered that he too had a gift for channeling disembodied spirits. If you met him on the street, you would never have suspected this interest in mysticism. Outside of his fascination with new age philosophy, he was the organist at a church in Brooklyn, and gave piano recitals. The S & M scene was at the height of its popularity in the West Village but Van Zandt, a khaki-pants-and-penny-loafers guy, was pretty straitlaced for a gay man. Alas, he would never make it as a spiritual leader today: he loved his cheeseburgers.

  A group met regularly in his tiny West Village apartment. We crowded around his waterbed, sitting crisscross applesauce, knees touching, surrounded by the artifacts he’d gathered on his frequent travels to the Far East. There was a perfumer, a clothing designer, a graphic artist, and a photographer, among other creative types. For many of the years of our association, I was the youngest, and the group was supportive of me outside our sessions, coming to see me perform and treating me to meals, as you would if your younger cousin had just moved to town. Thank goodness. I was so ill prepared to be on my own, I reverted back to the picky eating habits of my childhood. I lived on a “Southern comfort food with a New York deli twist” diet, eating a bagel for breakfast, a piece of fried chicken for lunch, and a mini cheesecake for dinner, for almost a year, until I developed symptoms of scurvy.

  We were engaged in a dialogue about raising the consciousness of the planet so we could usher in what is often referred to in such circles as the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. I was being offered a second chance to dance my way in.

  At the center of the teachings was a communal belief in God as the shared universal soul. I was on my own in the big city, without a school program to anchor me, and I was desperate for this divinely consecrated connection. I never spoke to anyone I knew professionally about the group, but it was the secret sauce that boosted my confidence.

  One of the great things about new-agey stuff is that it doesn’t require a lot of study; you don’t have to do much except have a mind so open it might be a blank slate, or in the case of the EST training seminars, be able to sit through long lectures without taking bathroom breaks. But magical thinking takes a lot of work. We subscribed to the ideas in Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, in which the author wrote that illnesses are created by errant thoughts. For example, diabetes, Hay posited, is created by “longing for what might have been.”* Since everything happens based on your ability to create your own reality through positive thoughts—much like the premise of The Secret, which claims that you can manifest wealth through the “universal law of attraction”—it requires constant upkeep. If our thoughts create our prosperity, then if you don’t envision it, vision-board it, or affirm it strongly enough, it’s your fault if you aren’t successful, develop multiple sclerosis, or get offed in a genocide.

  Our talks with “David,” the enlightened being that was channeled by Van Zandt, were peppered with concepts like the multidimensional vibrational levels of the earth plane, energetic manifestations, and illumination of the most sacred. It was fairly typical new age vocabulary. We adopted seven Principles of Oneness. We parsed their meaning as if they were liturgical texts, just like Bible study. Principle number 7 gives you a good idea of the other principles:

  The dance of life becomes the ecstasy of oneness as the light of God floods the entire being of all consciousness and the new age begins.

  Having contemplated the writings and messages of many teachers, I believe I can distill the sentiment of most new age philosophies into four words:

  Don’t worry. Be happy.

  David gave us a series of magical symbols with corresponding hand movements, mimicking the opening of lotus flower petals. I believe these may have manifested on this earthly plane when Van Zandt and Danny ascended the Great Pyramid of Giza and an illumination was vibrationally experienced on a multidimensional level, connecting to the most sacred transcendent energy. They were named Yorukai, Samtor, Nnehd, Rhenefe, Lahktum, Kirak, Obrhahahn, Libaan, and Nasareh.

  As I write the symbols and puzzle over why we spelled Nnehd with two N’s, I marvel at how I never questioned this entire enterprise and how I can still feel the loss of being swaddled in a spiritual security blanket like a stone in my heart.* Ours was a God whose grace was dispensed like a cosmic Klonopin drip.

  Much of David’s message to me was a reminder of the fourth principle, which stated that everything had to have a beginning—kinda like Genesis—so I needed to study and have patience. It’s the same advice the acting teacher whose class I’d joined gave to me on a weekly basis. David also prophesized that I would win an Academy Award one day; that admittedly kept my spirits up as well. It was reassuring to know that I was guaranteed success, or in the parlance of my dad’s poker wisdom, the deck was stacked in my favor. But most important, to borrow from Sister Sledge: we are family. Or rather, we were family.

  We were told our group was the reincarnation of a family. Reincarnation is widely accepted by practitioners of a number of faiths, but we were lucky enough to get the inside scoop on it. The soul, David explained, is like a tree with many branches. Some souls are so powerful that their essence is shared by many people, so if you believe that you were Charlemagne in another life, like Napoléon, or Napoléon in another life, like John Lennon, it’s possible.

  At the time, I was dating someone in medical school who was doing his internship in the psych ward at Bellevue.

  “Sometimes,” he told me, “we have a run on messiah complexes. We have to separate the patients because it’s too upsetting for one Jesus to encounter another Jesus. They fight over what channel the TV should be tuned to.”

  Christ, it’s a good thing I never mentioned our interpretation of why this was happening, or I might have ended up on his ward.

  We were advised that we could draw energy from these other lives and they from us, and this idea helped me to feel empathy for people from different backgrounds.* It’s a shame that I couldn’t feel connected to the family of man simply because I was a part of the family of man, not to mention all species on the planet. We are all distant cousins, but cousins nonetheless, of the “last universal common ancestor,” also known as LUCA, the very first, single-celled organism off the biological assembly line some four billion years ago that gave rise to everything that ever followed. LUCA thrived in hot vents at the bottom of the ocean. Reincarnation or not, it’s obviously a straight line from LUCA to my love of steam saunas.*

  Our group shared one particularly spectacular lifetime. Much more exciting than being the great-granddaughter of a peddler and a bootlegger, we were the family of the pharaoh who introduced monotheism to Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty. Van Zandt had been the pharaoh, Akhenaten; Danny was one of his daughters; and I was his eldest, his favorite daughter, I might add, while others were extended family members or high priests. As such, we were an elite soul cluster: members of the Council. Our reunion was thousands of years in the making. Our eternal bond could not be broken, which conveniently absolved me from feeling guilty that I’d mooched off Danny’s family. There were also other lives. I’d been a cobbler, a beggar, and a farmer—nothing glamorous—and that added to the verisimilitude, because you couldn’t be royalty in every life, right?

  I wouldn’t know what kind of father the pharaoh Akhenaten was, but VZ was the best gay dad a girl could ever have. He couldn’t have been more different from my own father. He didn’t give a hoot about money, a fact that was helped by the smallest of inheritances, which allowed him to live e
xtremely modestly, and happily so. He was one of the least neurotic people I’ve ever met. He was a disciplined musician, knew all the best thrift shops in Greenwich Village, was effusive with praise and generous with his time, and had complete and total confidence in me, both in and out of his trances. He was an inveterate world traveler who had fabulous taste in textiles, and like any good dad, he brought souvenirs home from around the globe, many of which still hang in my home.

  My relationship with my parents and even my sister was strained. The illusion of my father’s infallibility finally shattered. I was crushed to see him revealed as someone who’d put his needs before our family’s well-being, and though I had boundless compassion for my past-life personas, I couldn’t see beyond my own self-interest to have compassion for my mother’s inability to fix things. I didn’t come home for holidays and we spoke infrequently. On the two occasions I went to Miami for work, I stayed in hotels.

  Everyone in our group seemed to believe in our glorious lineage. Recently, I was visited by one of the members of the Council. I hadn’t seen her in over thirty years. Thanks, Facebook! We went out for lunch and I ordered a cheeseburger in Van Zandt’s honor.

  “I was always a bit dubious about having been Queen Elizabeth,” she confided.

  “Not me,” I chirped, stuffing a fry into my mouth. “I had no trouble believing I was a princess.”

  Akhenaten is depicted on reliefs preserved from the eighteenth dynasty as receiving rays from the sun god, the Aten. Or was he in communication with aliens? This idea wasn’t exactly original to our group. Extraterrestrial enthusiasts have long associated the pharaoh with an alien intervention, speculating that his elongated skull and curved spine were indications of his alien DNA. More likely is that he suffered from Marfan syndrome, which also explains his brief reign and early death.*

  All of our spiritual development was leading up to an intergalactic date with destiny. At four p.m., on October 25, 1995, our family was going to take part in the first recorded contact with aliens. The landing would take place on the coast of Italy, in Sardinia. We, the Council, were being called home as representatives of our planet.