Chapter 1. The Holistic Conference
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover
It was late November 1977. Lee Saveta and Arthur Randall, lovers since March 1973 when she was 15, he 31, awoke before seven. They had to be two miles away at the Tucson Community Center by nine and Lee planned to walk, Arthur to use his slow and clumsy electric wheelchair. They hugged. After being apart all summer they had been with each other three disappointing weeks in Godwin, New Jersey, where they had met and their families still lived all year round; they had been in Tucson now for four nights and three days. In Tucson they had not yet made love, and in neither place had they talked effectively about their love’s malaise.
Lee had left New Jersey two weeks ago to come get ready for Arthur’s return, and soon after getting here she had rented this place, the same house in which in the fall of 1975 they’d first lived together. It was one of six tiny white houses--each a living room, a kitchen, and a bedroom--that faced each other in two rows of three across a small courtyard bisected by a walkway; the six were on the corner of Adams Street and Tyndall Avenue, just three blocks from the main gate to the University of Arizona. Arthur and Lee's friends Rebecca and the Count, though about to move, lived in the house next door; fellow former Godwinite Bess O’Toole lived opposite; and Lucia Gammersley lived next to Bess and across from Rebecca and the Count’s, Lucia another friend and exile from New Jersey. Arthur and Lee’s house was the closest to the Adams-Tyndall corner. The front doors of the facing houses were up two steps and only 12 feet apart, so there was not room for a ramp into the courtyard, nor did any but the southwest corner house have a rampable kitchen door.
The courtyard onto which everyone's front door opened was decently private, hidden on three sides by dense tall oleanders and on the fourth, behind (and west of) Arthur and Lee's, by another flowering shrub that grew almost as profusely. The walkway ran from the Adams curb about fifteen feet to the oleander hedge, passed into and through the courtyard, and ended at the north end of the hedge at a gate leading to and from a dirt parking lot where Lee’s lover Rusty’s truck-home had been parked for several days before Arthur’s arrival. The morning Arthur was to arrive, Rusty had left, but yesterday he had returned.
Lee and Arthur had been apart from each other three to five months of every year they’d been a couple, but again, during the summer just passed, Lee had anticipated their October reunion every day. She had already missed Arthur as Rusty had driven her and Bjorn north in May, but ahead of her lay California, Oregon, and Washington jobs picking cherries, peaches, apricots, nectarines, pears, and apples, and though the work would be exhausting, the flies biting, the sprays poisonous, and some members of her crew alcoholic and burnt out, she was looking forward to her first summer on the fruit trail. She and Bjorn had been lovers for a few weeks earlier in the spring, at the same time that Arthur and a red-head named Jan had been lovers, but as Lee had come to know Bjorn better he had grown careless about shielding her from his bossiness, and she’d tired quickly of being told what to do.
Rusty had a reputation for independence that his deafness, the extent of which most people didn’t know, contributed to by limiting whatever gregarious tendencies he might have had. He was a scrounger, city and country alike, and habitually squirreled all things useful, not just in his home on wheels but in stashes in holes, caves, and storage bins all over the West. Lee had scarcely been acquainted with him when they’d left Tucson but by the time they’d reached the orchards she'd known about his bad eyes and worse hearing and was well over being put off by his manner. She'd felt he always would be likelier to go his own way than not, but he was mild of speech, quick witted, and could fix anything, and she liked his wiriness, his height (about five six), and his long blond hair. He was funny, too.
Bjorn and Detroit Squint, who was Lee’s best-woman-friend Lulu’s boyfriend, had vied all summer for the prize as most-intolerable-to-be-around, a contest in which Lulu herself, among others, had held her own. Rusty and Lee had become friends and taken to leaving the camp-ground battlefield and going off alone for relaxation and relief. Rusty wasn't a cocksman and he was used to being alone. He had fallen in love gradually.
At the same time Arthur had been in northern New York State at Wurts Farm, a commune of which he had been a cofounder in 1970. Lee had joined him there the week in August 1975 that she had been graduated from Godwin High, but her first morning at the farm it had been raided by forty-two New York State Bureau of Criminal Intelligence men, three of whom, out of uniform and carrying shotguns, had waked her and Arthur at gunpoint at 5 A.M. She was not amused and had only returned once, to pick up her things after her night in jail. She’d not particularly wanted to live at Wurts Farm before the bust; she didn’t at all want to live there, and wouldn’t, after it, and however much she had wished to be with Arthur, his letters this summer had done nothing to make her wish she were there.
Arthur had missed her and looked forward to autumn. She had missed him with a clear heart-rent obsessedness. His experience of romantic love, all, till her, from before his paralysis, had been of obsession followed by doubt and painful change. Lee had had no doubt-filled past. In their first few years together, she had known her passion for Arthur was unfading and that it would only deepen and elaborate upon itself, never forget itself. The first year or two as a couple each had assumed the other would eventually move on; after that neither had given it much thought. They had a relationship they liked and were absolutely true to each other in a way many in the United States in the 1970s theoretically approved but very few achieved. Each tried to allow the other to be free and neither tried to change the other. As Rusty had been falling in love, Lee’s desire for him had not consumed her desire for Arthur. Arthur, meanwhile, had craved a woman to whom to give and from whom to receive physical and emotional love. There had been no such person at the farm and he had taken solace knowing in the fall there would be Lee.
He had been in his tenth year paralyzed, his tenth year without a lover, when Lee, for more than a year a frequent visitor to his rooms in his parents' house, had asked on the night of her fifteenth birthday if she could lie down beside him. They had made love that night and most nights after that. She would come the mile across town in the middle of the night to be with him for a few hours, then before dawn get dressed and sneak home through the empty village, crawl in a cellar window, creep upstairs to her bedroom to snatch a few hours sleep, and go to school. Before he and Lee had become lovers, Arthur had begun to imagine that his legs were turning cold; he had also been having dreams of comeless sex he felt as work. Then she had found him and broken the spell by which he’d seemed bound. He’d known he needed her; she’d needed him, too. But she seemed to him too young to commit herself to a single other, to him, and from the beginning they were intimate with others. She accepted this as natural, he as necessary and desirable though sometimes emotionally difficult. They were attached immediately, attach is what we do, and the attachment grew with time even as they took chances less daring, maybe wiser, lovers avoided.
In Washington in 1977 Lulu took to teasing Lee about Rusty, her new friend, as Lee mooned over Arthur, thousands of miles to the east.
"Things change. Arthur could fall in love you know," said Lulu. “Rusty’s here."
Even after the clear warm moon-filled night when Lee and Rusty took each other by the hand and got up from the campfire and went into the orchard alone and made love all night for the first time, Lee had no idea she was destined to feel about Rusty as she felt about Arthur. She didn't know it when she and Rusty separated in Washington; she didn't know it when she rejoined Arthur in New Jersey; and she didn't realize it even as she was realizing that the magic between her and Arthur seemed to be missing. And now, though she had made love to Rusty last night in his truck--which was again parked in the parking lot that served their compound--and then after midnight rejoined Arthur in their bed, she still didn't realize it. Arthur was her best friend. She talked of Rusty to him. Rusty, they both thought, was not what was wrong between them. Arthur loved Lee, Lee Arthur, and both believed that time would heal this brief and puzzling breach through which they suffered.
Now Lee climbed out the foot of their queen-sized waterbed, stood, and stretched luxuriously. She was an inch above five feet, about 100 pounds, had dark hair, brown eyes, and skin several shades darker than Arthur’s. Her legs and armpits were unshaved. Arthur’s reddish unkempt beard was streaked with gray. His hair, which hung several inches down his back when he wore it down, was gray at the ears. Lee’s breasts were small and full, and her nipples stood out as she stretched. Arthur loved her body and smiled watching her, then pushed his covers off and reached with both hands for his left leg to begin his morning range-of-motion exercises. He held his left foot from the outside with his left-hand's fingers reaching almost to the ball and straightened it so the toes didn’t hang to the right, placed his right hand against the inside of his knee, and lifted his leg, pushing his unbent knee left with his right hand and continuing to hold his foot straight with his left. There had been three years in the 1960s during which his range of motion hadn't been done—he wasn’t then doing it by himself--, and his joints had changed, tightened. He’d realized his error and now did the exercises daily.
He finished with his left leg and reached to begin on his right, with which, as usual, he intended to be careful. His right hip had been broken in 1971 and could easily be dislocated. He stopped. His right thigh was hugely swollen; his knee was swollen too, so much so that it looked relatively normal.
Arthur was an astonishingly skinny man, was more than six feet long (not to say tall) and weighed 115 pounds. Usually his knees looked notably knobby. When weight-bearing bones bear no weight over a long period of time the bones become porous, enlarged, and brittle, and Arthur’s had. He had borne no weight on his legs in almost fifteen years, since having his neck broken in a car accident when he was twenty-one, and he had no idea to what extent his skeleton had deteriorated, just assumed it more or less had. He had not discussed his condition with a knowledgeable doctor since 1970, coincidentally the year he had last worn shoes. He shouldn't have stopped wearing shoes. His feet were very fragile, the skin like tissue paper, and shoes would have protected them, but the longer-term problem caused by being always barefoot was foot drop; without shoes’ splinting effect his Achilles tendons, unstretched, had shortened, so that his feet, instead of making right angles where they met his legs, were more or less like those of a ballet dancer dancing on his or her toes. Too, when Arthur was sitting his knees tended right, his butt left, and he habitually leaned on his right arm. It was his twist. Without shoes, his twist continued so that his feet were to the left of his knees. He tried to support them and keep his legs in line by having foot-shaped slits cut in the 4-inch foam rubber on which his feet rested, but the slits didn't work as well as shoes on footrests had.
"Lee," he said.
She came into the bedroom from the kitchen and Arthur drew her attention to his thigh with a wave of his arm in its direction. Her eyes widened.
"Honey, what is it?"
"I dunno," he said. "It ain't normal." They looked at his leg together. "I don’t see how it could be broken," he said.
Six years ago his right hip had snapped while he had been being held over the side of his bed, head down, being helped to cough. Actually, he now thought it had only broken a little worse that day, the initial break having happened three weeks earlier as his friend Shell, who had accompanied Arthur on his recent flight from New Jersey, was doing the range-of-motion exercises. They’d been listening to Tommy by The Who, and the passive exercises had turned into a dance. The snap had been on the fourth jerk (instead of careful stretch) of Arthur's right leg and had shocked them. They had done another bowl of hash right away, not because they didn't care what had happened or to facilitate ignoring it but because they had had nothing better to do while waiting to see if his leg swelled. It hadn’t, and Arthur, relieved, had done nothing but accept the loud crack as a warning to go easier doing exercises.
Arthur's body potentially provided unceasing stimulus to the hypochondriac who lurks in almost all of us. Symptoms forever abounded. Sweats, low fevers, irritability, and muscle aches all, for instance, could indicate a urinary tract infection (UTI), to which his indwelling catheter made him susceptible. A change in the weather might produce the same symptoms. Odd cracking noises, though never before so loud as the one he and Shell had heard, and odd swellings, too, occurred. Arthur felt fortunate not to be incessantly worried about himself. He had learned to wait, as a doctor often has to wait, for symptoms to develop. Had he not learned, he would have been that much more handicapped than he was. He was his own physician’s assistant, diagnosing and treating eighty percent and more of his real and imagined ills by himself, but his swollen thigh was the sort of symptom that required more learned attention, and probably tests. His tendency was to wait too long, be a degree too cool, about his medical needs, and this coolness and his lack of a regular doctor added to Lee’s burdens. The Who crack had been discounted when no swelling had developed, but when his hip had again audibly cracked three weeks later it had looked as it did now within an hour.
But how could it be broken this time? What might he have done?
"I suppose I could’ve hurt it the day I flew, but I don’t remember anything dramatic happening. Or it could be an infection; or a clot inhibiting blood flow, if clots do that."
It occurred to him that at least they knew that they hadn't damaged him while making love but--fortunately, he thought almost immediately--he didn't mention it. He and Lee were well-meaning people, to an unusual degree.
"So what do we do?" Lee asked.
Arthur Randall, still sleepy, did not know what to do and wasn’t in pain. Had he had sensation where he was swollen, had he hurt, he would likely have responded differently, less casually.
"Bouncing to the Community Center'd be radical," he said. "It'd probably be the best place to go, though, with all those healers there."
He was less than half serious, since tests of the sort he thought prudent would require orders from an M.D., and few or no M.D.s were likely to be at the holistic convention to which they were going. Holists treat the whole person--body, mind, and soul--, whereas allopaths, which almost all M.D.s then seemed to be, tend to treat specific pathologies. To prescribe antibiotics without counseling seemed futile or worse to many holists, Lucia Gammersley included. Arthur trusted antibiotics with or without theory and he had had excellent luck with allopaths. He thought a sore throat might indeed indicate an inability to speak one’s mind, but he thought treating the infection, if one were present, preferable to depending on finding what to say, and doubted that in most cases merely finding what to say would do.
But about much that he felt and that his common sense told him he knew Arthur Randall was severely agnostic. He was ignorant and knew he did not know to what extent. Jesus' disciple Thomas never accepted the master's Godness on faith alone; neither did Ramakrishna's Vivekananda know satori, though when his body was found his expression was blissful. Arthur identified with them, the unknowers, the doubters, and besides doubting the existence of the God with whom as far as he knew he had not conversed, he doubted the materialistic world picture that he inferred from his experience. Arthur believed post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore on account of this) a fallacy, but he liked it that he could not disprove a wizard’s knowledge it was not. He knew some of us will be well after being sick and prayed for, and some sicker. What is the effect of prayer? Some prayers are answered, or at least as though answered, and some aren't or seem not to be. Mortals know limitation and we know ambiguity. Our experience is limited to our time, the space we occupy, what we do and feel and the ideas we come across and have. There would be diverse views represented at the conference, and Arthur's embraced more coincidence than would most. He strove for non-denial to a degree that amused him--and at the moment what he would not deny was that his swollen thigh should probably be X-rayed and diagnosed by an M.D.
"But it'd be stupid going far in the chair like this," said Arthur.
He coughed feebly and was reminded how weak he was. He suspected that the cold he had had and the pneumonia that had begun shortly after Lee’s return to Godwin were the chief causes of both his recent moodiness and of his and Lee’s present difficulties. He hoped and guessed both mood and difficulties would pass as his recovery progressed. Now, though, he had to make a decision.
"So damn," he said. "Dr. Gammersley's truck splitting was what woke me, so we have no transportation unless Rusty’s still out back. You'd better try to get hold of that doctor I saw last year and tell him what my leg looks like, and ask him about sending an ambulance to pick me up or if he thinks I should just drive myself over to the ER." (The University Hospital emergency room was less than six blocks away.) “His name and number is on his card, in my black address book: Felix Wolfson, I think."
“The Hindu shit guy?”
“The very dude."
Dr. Wolfson, who wore very thick very strong glasses, had made a house call to Arthur in 1974 and, stalking about the house with a cigar in one hand and the other hand on the back of his hip like Groucho Marx, had noticed a baggie of marijuana on top of a book on Hinduism. His parting advice had been to drink plenty of fluids and rub a little of that Hindu shit on the affected area. He’d been rather a hit with the household.
The nearest telephone was across Adams Street and Lee left to call for help. She was tired of Arthur's ailments in spite of herself. She blamed herself for it, but his needs did sometimes wear on her. Ten minutes later she was back. She had called Dr. Wolfson but not reached him. She had also called friends with a car, but it had been out of commission; she had checked the parking lot to see if Rusty were still there and found he wasn’t.
Arthur decided to get up and head for the conference. He had used only a push chair for years, had left the hospital using it in 1964 on his rehab doctor’s theory that pushing it would be good exercise. Since, he had sat in one place a lot.
This was the first year he had brought only his power chair with him to Tucson. It had been a lemon when he got it, five years ago. Then, after leaving Tucson last spring, he had had it converted from two batteries to one; he'd hardly used it except around the house at Wurts Farm because it was still painfully slow and impossible to drive far in a straight line, but at the end of summer he had driven it six miles one day, four the next, the second day on dirt roads. Its not having let him down had made him decide to depend on it here this year.
As he waited in the kitchen for Lee to do a few last-second things, Arthur drove a foot forward, a foot back, forward, back. He was struck by how unusual yet characteristic of him this movement was. He was more restless than he knew.
Lee wore a short-sleeved ankle-length lavender print dress with nothing under it and Birkenstocks, Arthur a short kitchen apron, mismatched socks, and a t-shirt. He’d given up pants and gone to aprons that amounted to loin cloths two years ago, and his legs were bare. His extended legrests were elevated so that back-to-front his chair was five feet long, and the 2-liter drainage bag that was attached by a long tube to his catheter hung off the right side of his right legrest.
Less than a block from their house friends on their way to the conference passed them, stopped, and lifted Arthur in his chair into the back of their pick-up, but by eleven Arthur was in the emergency room of University Hospital.
When he had arrived at the conference he had imagined (not expected or hoped) Lucia might introduce him to a healer who would help him. He had thought imagining it fun. He had soon been approached by a clean-shaven long-haired man about twenty who had introduced himself as Morton, and when Arthur had mentioned his leg Morton had asked whether he thought the swelling connected in some way to the conference. The phenomena seemed unrelated, but Arthur had in fact mused about a possible connection.
Having asked for and received Arthur’s permission, Morton put his hands on the older man's thigh. He closed his eyes and talked softly.
"As I touch you," Morton said, "identify with your astral body, where you are whole."
Arthur also closed his eyes. He was by no means certain of the existence of any such body as he was imagining, one that was healthy and whole and from which his physical body emanated, but he let that question be. Conference attendees swirled about them, chatting, registering.
Arthur and Morton opened their eyes at the same time and Morton stood back. He reached into his pocket and drew out a stone the size of a half dollar with a butterfly painted on it.
"Keep this with you," he said.
For four or five minutes after Morton had zapped him, Arthur felt he was seeing everything from an unusual height. He liked the perspective. It was as though he were standing where he sat and looking through his astral eyes.
Arthur stayed at the conference through the first speaker, a healer named Olga Worral whose workshop he had been scheduled to attend, but only a few minutes into the second presentation--by a delegation of Hopi--he began
to cough, and rather than be disruptive he left the auditorium.
Outside, Shell, alarmed by Arthur's post-pneumonia cough no less than by his swollen leg, had no trouble convincing his friend to hie himself to hospital, and after six hours in the emergency room he was admitted. He had the stone Morton had given him put in a drawer next to his hospital bed. The next night he received distance healing from Mrs. Worral, who was across town
with Lucia Gammersley and the other conference organizers, and the day after that he was released and advised to return to the hospital should his condition worsen. There had been no change in the appearance of his leg but X-rays had shown it was not fractured and tests revealed that his blood was flowing normally through his femoral artery.
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover
Hi Steve,
This is a superb first chapter, you give so much detail and explanation I feel as if I am right there.
If the rest of the book is as good as this, I can't wait!!!
Just another test Steve to see whether these notifications are working OK.
My Girlfriend is printing the Healing out today and she is going to read it at the weekend and as soon as she has she will be adding her comments so you can expect some of those in your inbox.
I will be putting a link to the download on my front page soon so hopefully that will lead to some more feedback.
Spinalman,
I hope the book continues to hold your interest and am delighted you decided to comment. Your comment is the first I've had here on Matt's site, which is still fairly new.
Steve
________-
Matt,
It works fine! Are you a Guest?
Hi Steve,
I am reading The Healing at the moment so I will be adding some comments once I have got a bit further with the book.
Lou
Hi Lou,
Matt's worked it out so I'll know whenever anyone comments. I wonder if you'll know now that I've answered. I hope so and figure Matt, who's off to Sweden, will tell me when he returns if you haven't.
Hi Steve,
We got back from Sweden last week but this is the first chance I've had to read the Healing. I've only read the first chapter but it is great, I've been wanting to read something in English. The Healing is brillantly written, it so descriptive and the story is captivating, so I am going to stop writing and start reading! Lou
Lou,
I'm honored you're refreshing your English with THE HEALING. I wonder how it would go in Dutch?
Steve