When I told Jane about Joan’s comments on the boar-faced man in the mirror, that he symbolized my rebirth, she looked at me as if I had just accepted two nickels for a quarter. “It’s not a re-birth,” she said. “It’s an honoring, a reconnection.
Wake up.”
“But aren’t they the same thing?” I asked.
“Not where I come from,” she snapped. “Where I come from you squat to give birth.”
To make matters worse, Jane kept repeating she didn’t really know if she could do a third oral version—that she and Joan were too different in terms of sound and approach—that it didn’t make any sense. I kept telling her I was aware of that, but she could do the responding in any manner that felt right to her and she finally, reluctantly, said OK, she would do it. Then she told me she was going to speak it, not sing it, and that she didn’t want me to use her name on the CD. “Use some other name,” she said. “I don’t care what it is; make it up.”
We had to try several times before a new version of the myth finally formed itself.
ALICE HICKEY 23
As I had expected, it had a completely new sound and dramatic approach. Jane’s version illustrated perfectly how ancient oral myths were created. Preliterate myths weren’t remembered verbatim, as many scholars would have us believe, but were recreated virtually from the ground up out of story-telling memory.
What’s more, certain elements were deemed sacred and remained constant, while others changed with the poet and time. This is exactly what happened with the third version created with Jane. In many respects, Jane’s version was similar to the first two, but it had substantial differences in tone and approach. The totality of all the versions was the real myth, which was what I wanted to create and others to feel: how mysteriously alive myths are in their native, oral form. I was happy. I had somehow produced the three oral versions and one written version I instinctively felt were the final, correct way for the myth to be experienced by others. Don’t ask me why or how I knew this. I just did. I was very happy.
Jane, on the other hand, was happy and unhappy. I was prepared for a bit of heavy going. I asked her what she thought of the myth now that she had actually created one. She was again standoffish, mumbling I was going in the wrong direction. But I persisted and she struggled with something and then scribbled out on a nearby pad: “like a snake / like a bone beneath flesh / bare bones / cold poem.”
When I asked her to be more precise about what she had written, she became impatient, as if she were irked with me about something. Finally she blurted out,
“I keep seeing a skeleton whose bones are perfectly articulated,” she said.
“What kind of skeleton?” I asked.
“It’s human but not human.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“The bones seem alive, wet, glittery. I can’t explain it any other way,” she said.
“What did you mean when you said the myth is like a snake?”
“That’s the part of the bones that’s not human.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means the bones are special.”
“How?”
“Flesh swims on them, becomes alive.”
“What flesh? “ I asked.
“The flesh of the other myths,” she said. “You know the ones: the myths where the hero walks through fire and survives, or talks to God and dies, those myths.
The Wrath of Achilles, Black Sambo.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think I understand what you’re saying. You’re telling me this is the mother of all myths.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you meant it.”
“No I didn’t.”
“What did you mean then?”
24 ALICE HICKEY
“What I meant was what I said. The bones of this myth are special: the flesh of other myths swims on them. That’s all I know.”
She was right about the bones being special. They didn’t look like the bones of any myth I’ve ever seen. I told her how strange the myth seemed to me, that it was unlike anything else I had ever done, that it didn’t seem to have any roots in me. “I know,” she said. “I’ve been watching you. Think about this: maybe the poem isn’t yours. Maybe it belongs to somebody else; that’s why you can’t understand it.”
ALICE HICKEY 25
Chapter 6: Pinga Dentista
April 2001, Tavernier Key
I needed a change of scene. I called Pinga Dentista, an old friend in the Keys, told him I’d like to go snorkeling for a few days. “Sounds good,” he replied, “I haven’t been out of the house for a week.”
Pinga was an unlikely friend. His only real interest was diving for treasure, which consumed him. Like his 17th century counterparts, he was sure that somewhere just off the Keys, Spanish galleons laden with treasure were sailing along, waiting to be boarded—except, in Pinga’s case, the galleons were sailing very, very slowly far beneath the shifting sands.
Everything about him reflected his obsession with piracy and treasure, even his house. It was on the bay side of Tavernier and consisted of four old aluminum Airstream trailers arranged in a large X. Just above the X was a very large bed of flowers shaped like a skull. Unless you were in a plane, however, you couldn’t see the flowers nor make out the grand design of it all, because from the front driveway, it just looked like a graveyard of old Airstreams nosing each other.
It was only when you climbed up on the watchtower he had built that you saw the complete Skull and Crossbones. It was a beauty. Pinga may have been born 400
years too late, but he wasn’t budging an inch. “Estoy El Pirata” (I am The Pirate) was painted above his front door. Every morning and evening he would roll a joint, climb the watchtower, and scan the horizon for God knows what. It was quite an act. I loved it.
It didn’t stop there. Inside the house, treasure maps were all over the walls, along with NOAA charts of the Caribbean, side-band sonar strips, pictures of Mel Fisher, you name it. I told him once that we were in the same business, we were both dreamers, and he looked at me like I was nuts and then he disappeared somewhere behind his eyes and then he reappeared and said, “You could be right, Whitey, you could be right.”
That isn’t to say Pinga didn’t have substantial side interests, like cheap strip bars and smoking good dope. But his real side interest was doing deals. It never stopped. It didn’t make any difference what the deal was as long as it made money with a minimum amount of effort. Pinga called it “low-hanging fruit.” He was addicted to it. One piece of low-hanging fruit he particularly liked was buying old, non-working cars from widows and reselling them to junkyards.
You wouldn’t think there would be any money in that, but there is if you don’t pay anything for the car, and there was no one better than Pinga in convincing a 26 ALICE HICKEY
grieving widow that letting him get rid of her late husband’s old, junky Buick was almost as good as going to heaven. The rest involved finding some high-school dropout who viewed twenty bucks as big money for towing the car a few miles.
Needless to say, the promise of some good smoke helped Pinga locate those particular gems.
What was really amazing about it was that Pinga never left his house. It was all done on the phone while he watched the soaps or NASCAR, take your pick. On any day there would be three or four old cars on his front lawn waiting to be towed away to the highest bidding junkyard. And believe it or not, the junkyards loved him. He knew cars, and he always delivered what he promised, and with the correct papers, even if he had to make the corrections himself. Never any hassle with Pinga. Yet for all his wheeling and dealing, he always left everyone feeling like a winner, a rare thing today. You couldn’t beat it. People just liked doing business with him. It was the best hall of mirrors I’d ever seen.
He also had an uncanny way of disappearing in photographs. I took some pictures of him one day when we were out diving with some of his buddies and they came out fine, except for his face, which was either blurred, or slipped, or unrecognizable. At first I thought it was just an accident—maybe he moved, or I did, or the camera screwed up—but after looking at maybe twenty or thirty pictures I had taken of him over the years, I realized I didn’t have any clear pictures of his face.
I have several of him posing as a pirate with my little grandson Kelby at the Gasparilla Festival in Tampa in which everything is crystal clear except for Pinga’s face. Either he looks like someone else or his face is turned or blurred or distorted. When I mentioned it to him one day all he would say was, “I don’t like pictures of me.”
“Why is that?” I asked, somewhat bewildered.
“I just don’t like pictures of me, that’s all.”
Very polite but that was the end of the conversation.
Ever since I had known him, Pinga had lived with his mother, Kiki. She was small, dark, like a crow, and looked just like him. She adored him. It didn’t bother her that most days he was stretched out on the couch watching the great, humming wheel of NASCAR on a TV screen that took up half the trailer. She didn’t even find it odd. I asked her once if Pinga watched anything else, ever.
“Why should he?” she answered, “It’s on twenty-four hours a day and he likes the goddamn crashes.” But then again, she had some strange habits herself. In all my years visiting Pinga, I never saw her lying down or resting. Her bedroom looked new, almost unused, like a furniture showroom. I remember getting up once in the middle of the night for a drink and seeing her sitting in the kitchen with a cigarette hanging from her lip, talking a blue streak to the microwave. I think it was Portuguese but I never asked.
ALICE HICKEY 27
Kiki had died suddenly in February. It was completely unexpected. Pinga seldom talked about her death; he was closed that way. But for some reason I could still feel her sharp, quick eyes. It was as if she were still with us in the living room, watching the great wheel of NASCAR, telling me what Pinga should do, something she often did when she was alive. “You think he’d listen to me, but he won’t; he’s too goddamn stubborn,” she used to say.
For sure she was with us the day Pinga began telling me about a long, complex treasure deal he was working on. “It’s a kind of barter deal,” he said, “but everything’s going to work out fine. It may take three or four years, but the guy’s OK; you can trust him.”
“You jerk,” I suddenly snapped, “he’s a goddamn crook. Wake up.” But it was so quick and dismissive I knew it wasn’t me talking. Pinga did too. At least I think he did. But just to make sure I said, “Hey, that wasn’t me. I don’t even know the guy you’re talking about. To tell you the truth, I think it was your mother. Or maybe it was my mother,” I added, knowing he was sensitive about me bringing up his mother. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He knew who it was.
It amused Pinga that I was a babe in the woods on almost everything that mattered: engines, cars, construction. Every once in while, I’d catch him smiling to himself, like he couldn’t believe something I’d just done. If it really amused him, he’d start hopping up and down on one leg like a four year old needing to take a leak. It was a sight because he couldn’t control it. Jane Washington didn’t know what to make of his hopping up and down when she first met him. One time, after he’d left, she blurted, “That man, you know what he is? He’s a little Eshu, that’s what we call them in Nigeria. He’d be an elf in your world, but a very tricky elf. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but that one is full of the devil.”
She was right. Pinga was always up to something. Always.
I remember being introduced to the devil in him right after I had met him. It was on a long sailing trip to Key West with several mutual friends, including a lifelong, treasure-diving friend of his, Angelo de Marza. Over the years they had become a sort of comedy team, with Angelo being the overweight, anxious bear and Pinga the small, cocky terrier. When one of them couldn’t come up with a punch line, they resorted to a lot of rapid, back and forth face slapping, which they found hilarious.
The act never stopped. On our trip down to the Keys from Sarasota, they had drawn the bleary midnight to dawn watch, and the idea of them alone on the deck yukking it up wasn’t exactly reassuring. The waters approaching the Keys were very tricky. Yet we somehow arrived at the correct channel marker just as the sun rose. God knows how they did it, because all I could hear from down below was a nightlong stream of laughing and face slapping.
28 ALICE HICKEY
After we docked, Angelo began jabbering at the Dockmaster for a better rate, while Pinga and I raced ahead to a nearby hotel to shower before heading out to Duval Street. Just as we were leaving the hotel, Angelo raced in, begging us to wait, that he didn’t want to miss anything. Pinga told him not to worry; he’d call to let him know where we were. Which he did, because as soon as we got to Captain Tony’s, he called Angelo to tell him we were waiting for him at the southern tip marker.
I couldn’t believe it. If you know Key West, you know Captain Tony’s and the marker are at opposite ends of the town. When he hung up the phone, Pinga began hopping up and down laughing. I told him Angelo would never find us. I remember Pinga’s words, “Oh he’ll find us, it’ll just take him a little longer,” and he started hopping up and down laughing again. We were back at the hotel hours later when Angelo burst into the room laughing and screaming at Pinga. The face slapping went on for hours.
So when Pinga suggested I go to Panama with him, it would be fun, I hesitated. I could see myself wandering around the dark barrios looking for him, so I put him off. But he kept building the trip up, telling me that there was a shallow wreck just off the enlisted men’s beach he wanted to scout—that it was only a few miles from Panama City.
It sounded interesting, but I was also aware he knew I had family in Panama City, family with connections in case things got tight, as they always did in the treasure business. The soup was getting a little too thick for me, so I told him, “OK, but not now, I’m all traveled out; we’ll go later this year. I have to get there eventually; there are some things I have to talk about with my aunt Mercedes.”
Indeed I did. Mercedes and I had been visiting each other regularly since the death of my mother. She and Mercedes had been very close as young women.
After my mother’s death, I kept getting intimations I should visit Mercedes—that there was something she was supposed to tell me. So I flew down to Panama. On that first visit, I didn’t know what to expect.
I hadn’t seen her since I was a young boy. Yet, despite the years, she was pretty much the same: funny, stylish, and shrewd as ever— maybe too shrewd, as my mother was fond of saying.
The other thing that struck me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have, was Mercedes’
house, which I had never seen. It was right out of Dickens: very elaborate outside, in the old Latin tradition, with a courtyard and gardens, but inside it was dark and cramped and cold, like a cave. Here is a poem from that first visit:
ALICE HICKEY 29
PANAMA JOURNAL
August 13, Lunch, The Courtyard
By noon, the din in the courtyard
has become unbearable, like an opera
composed entirely of arias. Today,
there is Mercedes' repeated,
whimsical complaint that the parrot
no longer knows Spanish: No more
Amor y Sangre, she claims,
only the melodies
the Indian maid coos through the bars.
By now, that aria has become permanently engraved
on my cortex. As soon as lunch is finished,
I make my excuses: I must write, go to my room, I say.
But it is nice in the garden, you could write here, no?
No, I say, I need my papers, my books.
But it's the dark I need,
the dark, curio-filled room
where I go every day to lie down
and listen to the sound of my own breathing,
as if each exhalation were keeping the room
from crawling across the floor with its
hundreds of silver-framed pictures and dishes
and crosses of palm and the pink elephant soaps
and the six broken telephones, because
I am living in a midden
bristling with someone else's life.
But
the
walls
are slowly making room for me. Little
by little, I have carved niches
for my things. There is space now
for my books, for Dubie, and Stern.
And my journal. And the small radio
that bleeds love songs all night.
That will give you some idea of what it was like living within Mercedes’ orbit.
She was quite a package. By all appearances, she was every bit the au courant society matron: designer clothes, expensive shoes, winters in Vail. She ran a bit deeper than that, though. I’d discovered as a very young boy she could do things like look into the future—and very accurately I might add.
I told Pinga I wanted to hold off visiting for a bit. “Panama’s not so nice since the Army left,” I told him. “I’ve just been down there. Everyone’s broke. And hungry. The only safe place to stay is the new city, and we don’t have enough money for that. We’d have to stay downtown, near the barrios, probably at the Covadonga. ”
30 ALICE HICKEY
He knew I was afraid of the area around there. “Stop worrying,” he said.
“Somebody jumps you, you bite their ear off.” I laughed. Sure. “Hey, I’m not kidding,” he snapped back, “You bite their ear off. Or rip it off. You rip from the back forward. It comes right off, like a shingle.” I laughed again, but I knew he was telling the truth. I could tell. “Listen,” he says, “When I was in the army, some fat fuck cold-cocked me for being a spic. I was just a kid. All of a sudden I was on his neck biting his ear off.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“It came off,” he said. “He went crazy, crying like a baby, holding his ear up,
‘You bit my ear off, you bit my ear off,’ but he never went near me again. Hey, it’s easy. Let me show you,” he said and he grabbed my ear. I bolted away screaming laughing scared (I never knew if he was kidding or not). He loved it.
He was hopping up and down. He told me he couldn’t believe my expression.
Sometimes he’d tell me stories so strange and yet so plausible I had no idea what to make of them. I had told him about my grandparents coming from Ireland in the late nineteenth century, and he’d said his were Portuguese, that they’d come from the Azores. “They had been goldsmiths for years. Specialists. They had a shop on the waterfront where they bought gold teeth and melted them down.
People would bring them teeth from all over. They never asked questions,” he said. “It was just a business as far as they were concerned.”
He told me his grandparents started it up again when they came to America and settled in Martha’s Vineyard. “Even my father and mother used do it, right here in Florida. But I never took it up. It wasn’t me.” He told me he still received teeth in the mail from relatives or friends addressed to Kiki. “Here, look,” he said, and he reached up and pulled out a small box filled with gold teeth. They were weird and beautiful. Some had emerald stars.
ALICE HICKEY 31
Chapter 7: Hallucinations
August 2001, Sarasota
I know some will see what had been happening to me as nothing more than a series of unfortunate hallucinations, which is our way of dealing with psychic events. I didn’t see them as hallucinations, though. They didn’t feel like products of a neurological or psychological disorder. If anything, they moved toward the light: there was a truth to them. After all, what distinguishes a psychic event from a hallucination is that sense of a felt truth. There may be a thin line between a psychic event and the neurological/psychological disturbances we should rightly call hallucinations, but it is a very real one.
In a psychic event, we always experience a felt truth, a truth that has an unmistakable authority. There is nothing deranged or confusing about it in the least. On the contrary, it is always deeply comforting, as our recognition of a truth always is. So I had no problem seeing them as psychic events, visitations from another reality. That was easy. By this time, I had long since given up believing that the only reality is that of the physical world. What I didn’t know was what the visitations meant.
It is ironic that in our enlightened culture, one so bound up in the principle of logical truth seeking, that we have been so sloppy in defining the nature of psychic events. The best place to see this is in our popular culture, because that is where that thinking takes imaginative form.
Our popular culture depicts the psychic world as consisting largely of demons that are constantly breaking into this world. Psychics find this laughable, because the psychic world consists of what can best be described as non-physical presences, or intelligences, or more simply put, intelligent feelings, not demons. Some of them may be horrific, as some of the events in our world are, but they are no more the norm than they are in our world.
What the Hollywood demon-driven view is really saying is that the psychic world is inherently dangerous—life threatening—which couldn't be further from the truth. After all, our great religions and spiritual insights are the result of psychic events. So why the demons? The demons pop up because our rational worldview is threatened by psychic events. After all, if the psychic world exists, our current worldview, which insists there is only this world, the world of physical events, would be seriously endangered. We’d be standing on quicksand.
A psychic is someone who has a unique sensitivity to psychic events as well as a unique ability to interpret them. Some of that interpretation is automatic, such as Diane Randall’s reflexive description of ghosts as “see-through people,” which is 32 ALICE HICKEY
how she sensed them as a child.
But much of what is sensed remains a feeling, or takes the form of metaphoric images or words, all of which can be difficult to interpret. A psychic’s interpretative skill can be all over the place. That fact was brought home to me by the intuitives I was working with. Not only did their sensitivity to the psychic realm vary, they each had completely different ways of interpreting their experiences. Jane was very precise but extremely terse. Diane Randall was more easy-going and informative in her descriptions. Joan, on the other hand, was as languid about psychic events as she was about everything. She didn't really like to go any further than describing her feelings, and seldom did. Over time, I became better at figuring out whom to approach about what. That was the real trick.
We often talk about the two “worlds,” but perhaps “realms” would be a better term when talking about psychic events, because “world” suggests a physical location. The fact of the matter is that no one knows where the psychic realm resides. It is invisible to us. It may be within us, a part of us, like our organs, or outside us, or both. No one can really say. More importantly—and here indeed is the rub—it cannot be controlled as our physical world can.
Nor is it a realm that can be easily viewed and objectively shared as we can events in this world, where a group of us can view and talk about a duck until we come to some kind of conclusion about the duck. What's more, and this is crucial, the psychic realm only becomes apparent to us when it chooses to. It is completely unpredictable. We have no say in the matter. So you can see why the psychic realm is science's worst nightmare: it is not of the jointly-observable physical world, which is the only world within which science can operate.
Recognizing that we have no control over the psychic realm whatsoever is crucial if we wish to understand its essential nature. Popular culture loves depicting psychics summoning the psychic world by drawing symbols and grunting and grimacing as if they're horribly constipated. The real truth, however, is that a psychic event occurs when the conscious mind is exceptionally still. Forget all that pentagram-drawing stuff.
This doesn't mean you have to sit like a guru in deep meditation for hours. The stillness doesn't have to last more than a second. Quality, not quantity, is what counts. The ability to access that stillness, by the way, is the main difference between psychic people and those of us who are not overtly psychic. Psychic events can happen to anyone; all it takes is an instant of the right kind of stillness and the crac