by Ronnie Pontiac.
Some experiences with ghosts happen in broad daylight. Such communication can be so subtle a single word can carry great meaning. Or was it all a most improbable coincidence?
In sixth grade I was a runt. Raised by paranoid immigrants, beat up by classroom bullies, I found my only refuge in drawing and writing. Unfortunately my poetry attracted my teacher’s attention. On Parents Night the school covered an entire wall in the auditorium with my poems, guaranteeing my future victimization in middle school.
My father never smiled at the wall of poems. He listened to the teacher’s compliments with a grim expression. In the hospital down the boulevard my mother’s life hung in the balance after a difficult surgery. As we walked across the dark playground where I had been bruised so often he took me by the hand, a rare occurrence.
I thought he looked handsome in his gray delivery driver shirt. They allowed him to bring his truck home sometimes. He smoked a cigarette I wasn’t supposed to tell mom about.
He explained that writing is a poor vocation, or a hard piece of bread, as he put it. I’d never be able to make any money at it. So I shouldn’t make a habit of it. What I had done was wrong. He had that squint of a man who would climb until he owned half the company whose logo he wore on his shirt.
I tried to stop writing but it had become an addiction now shameful and irresistible as masturbation. I soon discovered that if I wrote my parents trite poems for birthdays, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I could write the rest of the year unmolested. I thought of it as tribute extracted by tyrants, but I paid the price to have the freedom of my imagination.
As that tradition continued into my first driver’s license I wrote those poems because if I didn’t it meant war. I had tried before to substitute a simple card or a thoughtful gift for this outgrown childhood ritual, but lack of a poem outranked even my numerous acts of delinquency when it came to enraging the old man.
To rein me in he’d remind me. He’d show me the handful of various pills he had to take to stay alive. He’d tell me his stories again.
At the beginning of the war, still a child, he almost died, dragged onto a train where anyone who lost consciousness smothered underfoot in human excrement.
A slave laborer he knew what it was like to be inside the factory when an allied bomb hit. Knocked unconscious he woke to a soldier poking at him with a gun.
He knew the death march from personal experience. He saw the open ditch. He joined the line. He heard the machine gun begin firing. Before the bullets reached his end of the line he fainted.
He woke among the bloody bodies and crawled out to find no one around but a murder of crows watching from a nearby tree.
How did he survive in those death camps, one after the other? He tried to stay clean, to comb his hair, hoping they would understand his dignity. He said some guards took pity on him so they snuck him moldy bread. He was referred to by number not name
His family of almost twenty they reduced to three. He knew he was lucky to have survived, but he had to live the rest of his life with memories of babies thrown in the air for target practice.
His amputated toes bore unavoidable witness whenever he took off his left sock. He understood why some had the numbers removed from their arms, but he wanted the proof of what he had been through. His survival had defied the entire engine behind that tattoo needle all the way up to the Fuehrer himself.
My father told a story about the day he was liberated from the camps. An American soldier named Irving gave him the Tissot watch off his wrist, trying to help him in any way that he could.
In a starved stupor my father joined others taking a train east back to a country that wasn’t to be found anymore in the cities of rubble. The train never made it. The engineer abandoned the locomotive in a wilderness of snow covered evergreens.
Trying to stay alive my father limped down the tracks. At last he came upon a Russian patrol. He showed a Russian soldier the numbers tattooed on his arm, hoping for a sympathetic reaction, like Irving’s. But the soldier scoffed at my father’s tattoo. He opened up his jacket and shirt to reveal his intricate tattoo of a ship at sea. “Now this is a tattoo,” he boasted in Russian.
Decades later, retired in beautiful southern California, my father would chase crows away from his swimming pool because he remembered them eating the eyes of human corpses. He could understand neither the American fascination with gruesome horror movies nor the Christian obsession with the torture of Jesus, having seen worse. Halloween made no sense to him.
The war made him an atheist. He told me he didn’t care if the whole world died as long as he wasn’t singled out again. He refused any therapy for the horrific events he experienced and witnessed. He insisted on carrying them without help every day of his life.
Fear kept my mother and father from having their only child until late in life. Not long before he died my father confided that he and my mother had talked about it and they decided that they regretted the decision.
At first I rooted for the good guys. Influenced by a William Blake book in an otherwise dismal school library in Van Nuys, California, everything that I wanted to do with my life could be summed up in the word “imagination.” Art, writing, music, theater were a chorus of sirens I could not resist.
My father and I had bitter arguments about how hard my life would be. He believed I was throwing away my intelligence, and my responsibility to my family and to society. I tried to explain that for me there was no more pressing duty than serving the almighty imagination, the engine of human evolution.
Eventually our arguments degenerated to catch phrases delivered with bitter sarcasm. My father would dismiss my optimism with the curt remark: “I don’t have such imagination.” To him imagination implied delusion, effeminacy, laziness, self infatuation, the weakness of dreamers, the border of madness.
Soured by my own comparatively meager suffering I found myself agreeing with the old man about a godless universe. This is what it means to be a man, I thought, to understand how hopeless and meaningless life is. But unlike dad, who added the necessary corollary that you work hard and live decently anyway, I preferred the role of spoiler, which proved popular at first.
When love, and then friendship, brought hope back to my life I began to study the history of religions again. I eagerly reported back to my father my favorite gems of wisdom, including various perspectives on life after death. All such nonsense he dismissed as wishful thinking.
Once he died in the hospital and was revived. I shared my own near death experience with him but it only made him angry. He insisted he had experienced nothing. Embracing nonexistence, he proudly proclaimed himself a hardheaded realist and dismissed my experience and any other like it as childish fantasy.
He had been sickly all his days, burdened with numerous afflictions caused by starvation and exposure in the war, exasperated by his stressful relationship with my mother. After her attempted suicide and her incarceration in a mental ward, he decided to risk a procedure.
After hours of conversation in his hospital room I understood he did not expect to survive, and he wanted it that way. Even there taking his last few conscious breaths he refused the comfort offered by spirituality. The sweetest thing he could imagine was an end to suffering.
Afterwards, trapped in a coma, he showed consciousness only by moving one eye. Thinking of Poe, I tried to prepare him for the bardo. I wiped his sweating brow with an iced towel talking about what he would see, and what he should look for. I promised reunions and horizons. His eye followed me, until they turned up the morphine.
Saddled with unexpected responsibilities involving lawyers and accountants, trying to do the best for my now mentally impaired mother, missing my father despite our lifelong battle, I suffered a slight but painful back injury symbolic of the camel and the straw. The chiropractor suggested I visit a therapist she knew who specialized in releasing trauma.
Feeling miserable I drove deep into Laurel Canyon where I met the healer in the closest thing to a cottage in the woods Hollywood can provide. In his living room I browsed the shelves of art books. The therapy room had a window on a lush green backyard that looked more like sunlit English countryside than arid southern California.
I told him only that my back hurt and my father had recently died. Without further conversation he began working on my back, but then, he stopped the session, and looked at me with a peculiar expression.
“I am not a medium,” he said, “I don’t channel. I never have. Yet I feel his presence so strongly. He’s repeating an important message for you. Your father wants you to know he’s learning to enjoy his imagination.”