Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

great, Johnny made it very clear that he did not think this diet was a good idea, and neither did I. But here was a live report from Valley of the Dolls, and Mom was all ears. She shushed me to be quiet whenever the starlet spoke. Mom’s intense interest made it evident that she was taking the exact same diet medication as someone on TV. I used to fish the slim, clear compartmentalized plastic box out of Mom’s enormous pocketbook and stare at the beautiful assortment of green, yellow, and pink pills. They looked identical to those candy dots on long white strips of waxed paper that I devoured by the yard. The starlet’s pill diet confirmed for Mom that she was in sync with the Hollywood elite even though she was living in Miami and married to a kooky decorator.
    It didn’t take a brilliant analyst to realize that the recent arrival of brown rice and coffee enemas was going to present a serious image problem for my mother. At the time, tragic starlets dined on what could kill them—not what was going to lead them toward longevity. There was no way Mom was going to find brown rice even remotely glamorous.
    In an effort to convince her that some celebrities were interested in keeping their looks through diet and exercise, Pop bought her a copy of Gayelord Hauser’s book Look Younger, Live Longer. Hauser was the 1950s health and fitness guru to many of Hollywood’s stars from the golden era. Among other things, he advocated steaming one’s face daily with boiling water seasoned with an herbal laxative mixture, Swiss Kriss, in order to remove the impurities from the skin and create movie-star radiance. Mom couldn’t be bothered. She was too busy reading her stack of assorted trashy detective novels.
    As a last resort, Pop tried to appeal to her Hollywood sensibility and informed her that Mae West was a devotee of daily enemas. Wrong role model. He didn’t realize that Mom thought Mae West was vulgar. He would have scored more points if he had mentioned Audrey Hepburn. Problem was, now that I think about it, I doubt that Audrey Hepburn would have enjoyed having a coffee enema for breakfast. Despite his relentless efforts at conversion, Mom deftly managed to escape the joys of macrobiotics. However, I wasn’t so lucky.

three
The Human Ray Gun
    â€œ Sir, that is not a jacket.”
    The sniffy maître d’ raised his eyebrows as high as they would go and grandly pointed to the framed sign behind his podium. Executed in elegant cursive script, it read “Gentlemen Must Wear Jackets.”
    My father and I were standing before the maître d’ of a posh French restaurant in Coral Gables. We were wearing matching Nehru jackets made of a shimmering gold brocade fabric left over from one of his Palm Beach jobs. I had accessorized my outfit with a primitive lead casting of the ankh, the Egyptian symbol for life—purchased by mail from the Psychedelicatessen head shop in New York—as well as a few strands of multicolored peace beads that I strung up myself. Mom was off to the side in her black cocktail dress, sunglasses, and patent leather heels, studying the menu with unusual intensity. Her gold bracelets clanked as she turned the pages.
    Pop looked down at his gorgeous creation and couldn’t understand what the maître d’ was saying about jackets. It was as if he were speaking a foreign language. Unfortunately, I understood what he said perfectly. Now at the age of thirteen, I was a flawless translator of the experiences that transpired between my family and the overwhelmingly hostile outside world. What he was really saying was, “This restaurant does not serve freaks—go away.”
    We would have had a better chance of being seated if we had presented ourselves as loud, gregarious performers who had just finished taping The Jackie Gleason Show, but instead we were too blissed out to be in showbiz. Our peace-love-om-shanti-shanti routine was new in