The Visitation: “To become square, square yourself”

The next eviction notice came after Brad turned 14, which was right before the Christmas holidays.  Mo was between jobs, working hustles with his partner Shue. Plays he called them. They would come in all excited in the middle of the night, get drunk, and pass out. Natalie would get some cash for food, beer, cigarettes, and her Astrology magazine.  But lately there hadn’t been many good plays and they were 3 months behind on the rent. The Sheriff posted notice and they had to get out. The parent’s options were living in the car, or giving the kids up to foster homes. In desperation, she called her mother Mary and begged for a place to stay.

Grandma Mary came over in an old pickup truck with her second husband Randy. She bossed the kids, telling them anybody who didn’t behave in her nice house was going to get whipped and have to stand in the corner all day. Worried her crusty mother would change her mind, Natalie was buttering her all up, and she gave Randy a kiss and some hugs. The old man almost swooned when the pretty young mom put her arms around him. After everybody said “yes Grandma Mary,” they began to load up  the truck, the boys  carrying stuff out while their smiling mother gathered things in plastic bags and boxes. It took 4 trips across town to get all their stuff moved. They had to leave some furniture but they took the TV.  Mo never showed up to help. Grandma Mary cursed him for that, which only stopped because Natalie gave her a wad of cash.

They settled into Grandma’s house in a quiet neighborhood near the San Gabriel mountains. The younger boys crowded into a small back bedroom, and Natalie and the baby got a tiny side room by the porch. Because she liked Brad, Grandma Mary gave him a special deal. If he could clean out the basement, he could sleep in it.

“Ahh, hell no!” said Natalie when she saw the cluttered space.  They peered into the shadows cast by the dim light of a bulb which hung from a beam in the ceiling. There were piles of dirty junk and old car parts. Cobwebs hung, and it smelled moldy. Brad saw it as a sanctuary, and got Grandma to override Natalie. It took him several days after school to clear everything out. There was an old mattress he could put on a concrete rise in a corner, and a rickety chest of drawers. Finding a beat up folding chair, he improvised a desk with a spare door and some crates. School let out for Christmas break, and having had to give up his paper route there was lots of free time. He remembered a book of Natalie’s and asked her to borrow it.

“Really? What do you want to read that for?” It was The Tarot, by Mouni Sadhu. “That is some far out shit in that book. I couldn’t read it past the part on the Tarot cards!”  She laughed in that way when she was mocking somebody.

“I’m just curious, I’ll give it back in a few days, Mom.”  Sneaking into her books one time, he had read the introduction which promised that reading it, universal knowledge could be achieved in 5 years. Bored, he wanted that. He wanted universal knowledge like a thirsty man wanting water in the desert.

She gave it to him. The book was a mind-bender, and full of concepts that he couldn’t grasp. But there were techniques for meditation, which was a requirement to get universal knowledge. He was soon sitting cross-legged on the mattress every day, breathing as instructed, forming a mental concept of the third space in front of his forehead.  The daily practice brought inner calm and made the chaos upstairs just part of the daily routine. Back at school he was making straight A’s without much difficulty, focusing on his homework under the light bulb over his basement desk. Months went by,  and sometimes he could sit perfectly still and calm for a whole hour.  Then one Saturday morning, he was visited.

It was just like any other meditation, until he felt a warm tingling in the back of his head that seemed to expand into his face and chest. There was a presence. He ignored the urge to look around, and waited, maintaining unfocused gaze down his nose as was the custom.  In the third space the heads of three beings appeared in front of him, forming an inverted triangle. They had simple features, were larger than human and gave off a bluish glow. Then a resonant, masculine voice said “to become square, square yourself,” so clearly it startled him, forcing him to look around, which caused the heads to vanish. The encounter took only seconds, but the words and the image stayed in his mind.  His first impulse was to share the vision with Natalie, but the memory of her abuse when he told her about the Fairies stopped him. He had to figure out what the words meant. Reading through Mouni Sadhu’s book wasn’t helpful, so he researched books at the library, coming across Journeys Out of the Body, by Robert Monroe, which described techniques for Astral Projection starting with meditation like he was already doing. That would be his next challenge! Maybe the  visitation was to encourage him to develop psychic powers, which could help with his goal to be like Superman.

Brad would succeed at Astral Projection, just like Monroe taught. But he would find out many years later, that was not the reason for the visitation.