NINE

I always aspired to be as hip and cool as possible. In my attempting to 'pass for black' years, I learned to speak as my black friends did. Before ever working at Mays, I had a friend at Wabasse whose family moved there from 'projects', a modern area of apartment buildings located in the mainly black and Puerto Rican Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, close to downtown Brooklyn where I’d worked at Mays. Growing up there, Mark learned to walk the walk and talk the talk, although he was like me, white and Jewish. He hung with some of the greatest doo-wop singers there, Anthony & Imperials, the Chips, Pearl & the Kodaks. I never tired of his stories, for example about how the Kodaks were forced to change the spelling of their name (obvious, right?). He introduced me to peas & rice, and showed me how to walk jitterbug style and how to slip somebody 'five'. Yeah, everyone knows this stuff now, but in the early 60’s Mark & I, and through us our friend Jerry 'Nazz' (short for a hard-to-pronounce Jewish name) were among the privileged few whites I was aware of that bothered to learn this stuff or cared. Oh sure, there were hip white record company executives, etc., but for the most part America was still pretty darned segregated then. The three of us were a sight, standing on the street corner with our dark sunglasses on, hitting each other 'five'. Now, Mark had soul; he grew up in it, but Jerry and I were probably a little on the silly side. I remember Mark always warning me to 'be cool' when I got carried away with my faux black 'accent'.

After moving to the west coast, having passed through my black phase, through my Italian phase, to my hippie phase, while changing buses on a dark block in Oakland, I could detect a tall, young man closely following behind me. Before he made his move, I turned around and started jive talking, “what’s happenin’ muh” and so forth. He admitted that he was about to mug me, but hadn’t realized that I was a ‘brother’. We had a good time waiting for our buses together after that. A few years ago, after I got saved, a ‘black wannabe’ white kid accused me of being a bigot because I quit selling music with profane lyrics. I told him that I believed G-d wanted me to do that, and he replied that I worshipped a white G-d that only enslaved blacks. There are some people who believe that Jesus looked like the typical pale New York rabbi of today. Others picture Him as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan. At some black churches, He’s imagined as a black man. No one knows exactly what Jesus, the man, actually looked like (the jury is still out on the Shroud of Turin), nor does it matter. Middle-eastern skin color varies wildly, though, and it’s not a stretch to picture Him with dark skin. I wonder if any white folks would leave the church if that was somehow discovered to be true. I told him that there’s only one G-d and He loves us all equally. We ought to do likewise.

    But in the days when being hip was paramount to me, oo-wee did I have a potty mouth. One time, up 'in the country', my cousin Bruce’s mom came into our apartment and complained to my mother that her son had picked up a few bad words, and she was concerned. So, I said, you mean like… and rattled off all the cuss words I could think of. I defended myself at times by saying I was into 'theatre', that I was expanding people’s closed minds. Another time I was walking home from school with my friends, who were being especially mean to me that day. When we got to the door of my apartment building, and this one fellow said, in a nice sweet voice, ‘see ya Lenny’, in the safety of the company of all the adults sitting there on their lawn chairs, I gave him both barrels, shocking all these Jewish seniors and embarrassing my mom, who was there. Nowadays, profane language is everywhere from TV to school. It’s become an art form to see how many 'f-words' one can skillfully weave into a sentence. I guess I was in the forefront of that 'movement'; L-rd forgive me.

    Ellen and I moved to Oakland in 1970. I had started to develop asthma in our four-floor walk-up apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, where we lived with our friend Marty and two kittens, Pokey (after Gumby & Pokey) and Jethro (from the Beverly Hillbillies). In those days most of New York’s cats were running around loose in the streets. I had never met anyone with a pet cat, although I’m not so naïve to think that rich folks didn’t own pedigree animals; I just never met any. New York’s cats were mainly large and fierce, survival of the fittest and all. One night while I was coming home from a date and still lived in Borough Park, I remember it was late and the only sound was two animals, dogs I assumed judging by their size were having a 'conversation' around a fire hydrant on my block. I slowed down to avoid chasing them away, fascinated by the way they were communicating with each other. But they were two large, smart cats with no fear, not even glancing at me as I passed by.

    After we were married and moved to Ocean Parkway, we did meet a woman with pet cats, obtained at the ASPCA, and decided to do the same. We had those two for a number of years, until our trip back to New York when my mother died. When we returned we discovered that the person who was supposed to feed the cats didn’t, and the cats had moved in with a neighbor down the block. After we broke up, Ellen continued to name her cats Jethro, while I began to tend to a series of cats named Zeus.

Unaware of this, she coincidentally has a cat named Zeus today.

    Our sweet kitties were not the only 'wild life' dwelling at the Ocean Parkway walk-up. Prior to moving there, I’d seen cockroaches outdoors and only occasionally inside a building, usually a restaurant. I recall one Chinese Restaurant that you could expect to see four or five roaches during your meal, but the food was so great we kept going back until the Health Department closed them down. But our apartment was another story altogether. There were dozens at any given time. Seeking to outsmart them, I snuck into the kitchen late one night brandishing a rolled-up newspaper and flipped on the light. They were there all right, and scattered quickly, not a dozen but hundreds of them. Chasing them under the sink I saw empty egg sacks, and while to my credit I destroyed twenty or more bugs; I could see that I was under prepared for the task. I called the 'super' and complained; an exterminator was very shortly dispatched. Success!

    After a few days, however, the exterminator was called to my neighbor’s apartment and the roaches all returned, along with their friends. They won the war and we would have to move. We traveled to the west coast at our friend’s admonitions, and a close friend of ours, Karla Fong (get it? After ‘Carl LaFong’ from the great W.C. Fields movie “It’s A Gift”) agreed to house sit. We did warn her that she’d see a few roaches and she did. But when she saw one crawling up her cigarette as she pushed it to her lips, she poured a pile of kibble for her wards and ran out of the building in her nightgown screaming.

    I was always afraid to die. I remember telling this to my mother back in the cold war days of ducking under the desk at school. During the day I’d search the skies for enemy bombs; at night I’d dream about either World War 3 or attacks by Martians. My mother assured me that I was going to live until 100 and not to worry. Only 100? What about after that? She said we’d all be in heaven together. One night in Oakland, I awoke in a cold sweat, shaking Ellen awake, and announcing that I was going to die someday. How do you feel now, she asked. I’m fine but someday I’m going to die. I will no longer exist. What was the point of being born in the first place? There was nothing she could say to comfort me. It was true; I would die someday. 

    In the days following, I began to feel a vibration in my chest just before waking up in the morning. Was I having a heart attack? I checked my pulse just like the old days; it was fine. Once I was completely awake, I could no longer feel the vibrations. Some time later, I discovered a book called Journeys Out Of The Body by Robert Monroe. In it, I learned that there is a part of us that exists apart from the physical body, that this ethereal body separates from the physical body while we’re asleep, always attached by a silver cord (this isn’t totally implausible, see Ecclesiastes 12:6). The cord is broken at death, but the ethereal body continues to live and even has sex, according to Monroe. While I was still reading the book, I began to have these out-of-the-body experiences, or OOBE’s, attempting to recreate those of Monroe. This book is still in print and I imagine there are plenty of folks by now that are ‘astral projecting’ up a storm. On the positive side, I was relieved to learn that there is life beyond the physical body. What I didn’t realize was that I was on the threshold of a spiritual experience that would lead to places I could not have imagined. For me, drugs had already been a gateway to the unknown, a place I’d wanted to examine ever since the One Step Beyond TV show a decade or so earlier. Now, another gate was open.

    I certainly don’t recommend that you try this yourself. I’ll describe it you from the best of my memory, but I in no way endorse leaving the safety of sitting at the L-rd’s feet to indulge in any metaphysical hi-jinks. At the sound of the vibrations in my chest, I could wiggle around in my body, then pop out and float at the ceiling looking down at the bodies of my wife and my own. Then I could travel just by thinking about a place and I’d be there. After a while Monroe could no longer control his OOBE’s. He’d 'pop out' while at work, and lost his job. In my case, I needed to work at it, and never progressed to a place where it was out of control. On the other hand, I never had out-of-the-body sex, although I certainly tried. On one occasion, music was the catalyst that popped me out. I’d fallen asleep listening to the radio, when Terry Riley’s hypnotic piece “In C” began to play. I felt myself sloshing around as if in water, then flew upwards. I awoke while “In C” was still playing.

    The weirdest thing I tried was flipping over backwards while leaving my body and shooting out through my head. Monroe was supposedly able to travel to another populated dimension in this way, and inhabit another person’s body! This never worked for me (I think Someone was looking out for me even then); but one time when I tried this technique, with my 'astral' head sticking out through the brick wall, I heard a man’s voice say, “Look at that, what do you think we should do”, and a woman’s voice replied, “Let’s kill him”!

    The most amazing related experience I had took place while I was married to my second wife. We were not getting along well and were close to breaking up at the time. Unknown to me was that she was pregnant with another man’s child. What happened was, I 'woke up' in my astral body and could hear a quiet voice. I moved my 'astral' arm to touch her and could then clearly hear her speaking in an unknown tongue. When I completely woke up, she was actually speaking and her lips moving! I could tell it was a real language and not gibberish. I remember thinking it was a 'sing-song' type of language, and it seemed like the recitation of poetry. In the morning I asked her if she knew any languages other than English; she didn’t. It happened again the next night as well, and I asked her for permission to tape it. She said no, and it happened again for the third and last time. All three times it was the same language. Then I heard a bit on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In concerning someone speaking a Native-American dialect in their sleep. The man my wife had been having an affair with turned out to be a Native-American. “Do-do-do-do etc. (insert Twilight Zone theme here)! These days if anyone ever asks me if I believe that 'speaking in tongues' is possible, I know it is. But any examples I’ve heard in the church sound like gobbeldy-gook, not like a real language, as in the book of Acts. But whatever my wife was speaking, it sure sounded real, but not necessarily of G-d. I’m not trying to paint my ex-wife as a wicked adulterer; after all we lived a free-wheeling lifestyle, and I had cheated on her first. I mention these things only to point out the weirdest things I can remember. Debbie certainly had more character strengths than flaws, and I’ve never been in a position to throw stones. Thank G-d she chose to have her child, a beautiful daughter named Liberty, a grown woman today with children of her own.

Years later, in another book by Monroe, an other-worldly entity is contacted and begins to recite a passage from a book I owned by another author. To me, this cast serious doubt on Monroe’s integrity. I don’t believe that he was knowingly plagiarizing the other author although that’s what I suspected at the time. I believe now that the source of all so-called 'new age' knowledge is a very powerful but evil spiritual person, whose acquaintance I would soon make. Yes, it’s Satan.

    I saw my heart doctor one last time before moving to California, taking my yearly EKG, electro-cardiac exam. At one point, a wrong button was pushed, causing the machine to flat-line, to which the doctor’s young assistant joked, “the patient has expired, doctor”. Never joke about that, he sternly advised, but I thought it was funny.