Darayl

On a cold January afternoon, my nephew, Darayl, called me: “DD? It’s me, Darayl.”

“What’s up?”

 “I have cancer. I have a tumor on my heart.”

 Apparently, Darayl had been sparring with a boxing partner when he got punched in the chest and his heart stopped. That fateful punch sent him to the hospital, where an MRI revealed a mass on his heart and cancer everywhere. I must have been having a psychic moment because I said, “Oh, you’re not going anywhere. You’re going to have a spiritual awakening.” I told him the tumor was just a metaphor for how closed his heart was and that he’d have to learn to open his heart and let in some light.  Darayl started his spiritual journey on the operating table on February 2, 2005, when he left his body during surgery, floated above the operating table, and had a conversation with a violet light that spoke with a Scottish brogue. He was shown his life as it had been and then was told he was being reborn and that February 2 would be his new birth date. His old energy was being removed, as he was being given new energy to work with, but he’d have to do the journey to heal himself. Darayl came out of the surgery and began a long and arduous course of chemotherapy and radiation. The doctors removed most of the tumor but could not get all of it, as some of it was wrapped around his heart valve, a grim prognosis. The doctors drove home that at best they could try to prolong his life, but he would die from this cancer.

I told Darayl about a medium I knew in Hawaii, Kahu Fred Sterling, and that I would call him and ask about Darayl’s condition. I called, and Kahu channeled an energy called Master Kirael. I asked Master Kirael whether or not Darayl was leaving this plane of consciousness. This is what I was told: It doesn’t look as if he’s leaving. He has a sort of golden heart. Your nephew is a royal wizard, just like me. When royal wizards are born onto the Earth plane, they come in with blueprints packed with crazy experiences and lessons, because they try to pack everything into this one journey. They are the sorts of people who make other people shake their heads and ask, “What’s wrong with that person? Has he lost his mind?” (I would put this entire conversation in quotes, but it’s only a pretty close paraphrasing of what was said).

I called Darayl about a week later and told him I wanted him to listen to the archive of that call. While he was listening, I heard him gasping. I asked what was wrong and he said that the voice of the person on the archive, Master Kirael, was the same voice of the violet light he spoke to in the operating room and that the content of the conversation they had was the same as what Kirael was saying on the archive. Interestingly, Master Kirael is often referred to as the violet flame. From this point on, while enduring chemotherapy and radiation, Darayl listened to my friend’s radio program and received long-distance Signature Cell Healing sessions with Kahu, learned to meditate, and began studying The Ten Principles of Consciously Creating. Darayl endured chemo and radiation for about a year.  After coming to understand the ninth Principle, Masterminding, Darayl, told me that the doctors kept telling him that no one beats this kind of cancer.  He felt that they were setting up a “death mastermind” for him, sucking away all of his hope. So he decided to go the alternative route, and, at some point, when he stopped the radiation, he immersed himself in spirituality, learning to go into deep meditation, and continued his Signature Cell Healings.  Today, Darayl is alive and cancer free.

A look at Darayl’s life might give us some insight into royal wizards, which is what Kirael said Darayl is. Darayl was born on April 3, 1961. His mother (my brother Barry’s girlfriend) wanted a girl, so she gave Darayl to my mother to raise. Darayl was the most magnificent looking baby I’d ever seen. He was petite, had hazel eyes, copper colored skin, and curly hair. He was angelic in every way. He walked and talked at nine months old and was completely toilet trained at a year-old. He almost never cried and was always smiling. He spoke in sentences before he was a year old, although his pronunciation was appropriately babyish. When he was nine months old, he used to say, “Auna kinka wadoo,” which meant I want a drink of water. His babysitter’s name was Mrs. Kennedy. Each morning, as my mother was leaving for work and preparing to take him to Mrs. Kennedy’s apartment, he would say, “Gown see Kinney,” which meant going to see Kennedy. He was so petite and so short that when he started walking, he looked unreal, like a doll. The teenage boys in the projects where we lived used to knock on my mother’s door on Saturday mornings and ask if they could take Darayl for a walk in his carriage. My mom used to permit it as long as I went along. What a sight—four boys and a girl pushing a big baby buggy with this tiny angelic human in it. Darayl had the sort of energy about him that softened everyone, even fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys. These days I can’t imagine any teenage boy asking to take anyone’s baby for a walk.

When Darayl was about four years old, he went on a church picnic with my mother. She told me that he was sitting in the back of the bus with most of the children, when he suddenly came running up to the front in tears. My mom asked what was wrong and he said that the children were making fun of an old lady sitting in the back and that made him sad. His first grade teacher, Mrs. Sherman, said she thought Darayl would grow up to be president, because he was so smart, so kind, gentle, and compassionate. He was always concerned about someone else’s feelings. Even as a little boy, Darayl was a gifted artist. I used to keep his artwork on my bedroom wall when I was in college.

Darayl lived a charmed life until he was about 12 years old. That was when his mom “kidnapped” him and held him hostage for a month. My mother was frantic, but when she sought help, she was told that since she did not have legal custody, she had no rights. One day her phone rang and it was Darayl. He told my mom he had not been to school since his mother got him and he wanted to come home. My mother told him to just leave the apartment and come home, and he did. His mother did not attempt to take him back, but he was not the same after that. From then on, he had trouble both in elementary school and later in high school. At that time, I was a lawyer, working in the legal department at the NYC Board of Education. I got him into Harlem Preparatory School, thinking it would live up to its reputation as a beacon of hope in the community. Darayl found the experience unsettling, to say the least. He came home from school in the middle of one particular day. My mother asked him what he was doing home and he said that a kid in his class had been shot. I urged Darayl to quit school and get his GED. I got him into the best GED program run by the NYC Board of Education. He was only sixteen when he received his GED.

When he was eighteen, he tried to enter the Coast Guard but failed the drug test, having tested positive for marijuana. He had to wait six months before he could apply again. That was the end of Darayl’s relationship with drugs. He entered the Coast Guard six months later, making it through basic training the first time around. He said the basic training was the most rigorous thing he had ever experienced in his life. None of us thought he would make it. He was a 90-pound weakling at the time and he couldn’t swim. He learned to swim, to jump into a ring of fire in the water and pull someone to safety, and everything else that went on in basic training.

Darayl graduated and went off into a new world. For a few years, he was stationed in Panama City, Florida, on the Coast Guard Cutter Dependable. Thereafter, he was stationed in Long Beach, California, where he worked in marine hazards and safety. He loved the Coast Guard for the discipline it provided him. He learned responsibility, and to be stalwart, hardy, and courageous. The next time I saw him he was buff and had an edge. His angelic voice and demeanor were gone. He was street savvy and hardened and was involved in things that I’m sure would make my hair stand on end.

Darayl’s edge was especially evident to me when I saw him at his 17-year-old cousin’s funeral. He was very close to my sister’s youngest son, who had died after being accidentally shot with a rusty gun he and another cousin had found. I asked Darayl why he wasn’t crying or showing emotion and he said he’d learned to put his feelings aside.  He said that it was hard having emotions after pulling so many dead bodies out of the water when on drug busts and other Coast Guard missions.  He told me that he no longer feared anything, and that he could handle any situation life threw at him. Darayl was now a very macho man. Over the years, he fathered two children, but was paying child support for three, under the erroneous assumption that all three were his. He married his first child’s mother and divorced her less than a year later. He was, and still is, a non-monogamous lover of women, with no intention of ever getting married again.

He has softened some since his spiritual awakening, but he is enigmatic. He retired from the Coast Guard after putting in 25 years. That was his first concrete step toward softening. Now he never fails to tell me he loves me each time he talks to me, and he is fiercely protective of his family (but without letting anyone manipulate him). He has spoken to cancer survivors about his journey to recovery and he is not shy about touting the Ten Principles of Consciously Creating.

I mentioned earlier that Darayl said he had no fear in his life, but he does. He just doesn’t know it. He is fearful of that angelic child-like being who lives in his cellular consciousness, the one who is compassionate, kind, and gentle. Darayl still embraces those qualities, but keeps them hidden from view. He is a gifted artist, a painter of some note, but will not put a brush to canvas. I surmise that he doesn’t think it’s macho. I, like his father, have told him he will never be happy, never be fulfilled, until he engages his right brain, and resurrects the little child who lives inside him. The journey to open his heart is ongoing. Stay tuned . . .

VIGNETTES IN A LIFE

In the late sixties and early seventies, when I was working my way through college and then law school, I took a position as a housekeeper. I was in my mid-twenties, so I had an air of responsibility about me. The people for whom I worked had beautiful apartments in nice areas of the city. I was living in the South Bronx at the time, so I was always happy to go to work. It was a refreshing change of neighborhood.

It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was interesting and opened a whole new world to me. The first cleaning was the longest, about eight hours for a thorough job. After that, it never took as long to clean. I could clean during long breaks between classes and sometimes I'd start in the morning, go to class, and finish up in the afternoon after class.

I started out working for straight people. I stress “straight,” because I ultimately found true joy working for gay people. I found my straight clients removed, serious, and demanding. I didn’t mind cleaning anything, but one person wanted me to scrub the floor on my hands and knees with a toothbrush. We’re not talking about a small surface either. I never understood why anyone would need and demand this demeaning way of cleaning. I came to the conclusion that some people just needed to wield power. I quit that job.

Another of my clients was a psychotherapist who later became a talk-radio host. He was morbidly obese and used to throw up after eating in an effort to lose weight. When he told me what he was doing, he acted as if it were the greatest discovery since sliced bread. After he lost weight, he became an egotistical jerk. I could deal with his being a jerk. After all, he was just my employer, not my lover. I didn’t care how he looked. My problem was that he used to leave the dried vomit on the toilet bowl rim for me to clean up. I had to use steel wool and cleanser to get the stuff off. It was disgusting. I eventually left that job too.

I found another job working for a couple. The husband was a producer at ABC. They lived in a luxury building that was convenient for my commute to school. At the time, my body was slim, strong, and well defined.  In the summer, I wore low-waist jeans and halter tops. One day, the husband unexpectedly arrived home in the middle of the afternoon, startling me. He seemed to have no reason for being there. I realized that his only reason for coming home was to flirt. I spent most of the afternoon dodging all five feet three inches of him, as he chased me around the apartment. Soon he was regularly coming home in the middle of the day, so I quit that job too.

I seriously considered finding some other sort of work, but I was hard pressed to find anything that paid as well and that fit so beautifully into my school schedule. So, I decided to give it one more try. At a party, I met a young gay Frenchman, named Didier, who told me that he was returning to France and needed someone to take over his housecleaning job. I jumped at the opportunity. The following Monday, I met my next employer, a young, handsome, gay psychiatrist.

This psychiatrist just happened to live in the same building as the executive at ABC. As sophisticated as he liked people to think he was, this doctor came from a working class family. It showed in his choice of décor. I entered his apartment through a small foyer. The walls were covered in red velvet. The living room walls were mirrored and a thick white rug with pastel colors in a floral design covered the living room floor. The dining area, which was adjacent to the kitchen, had a glass topped chrome table, over which hung a crystal chandelier. The kitchen floor was covered in red indoor/outdoor carpet tiles. The bedroom, which was just off the kitchen, housed a waterbed that was covered with a spread made of what looked like faux tiger fur. Behind the bed was a mirrored wall.

This doctor was outrageous and funny and his clients liked him. Outwardly, he seemed to be interested in them and their issues, a paragon of concern and professionalism. He was attentive to their every need, took their phone calls at all hours, and offered them lunch (which I usually made)when they arrived in the middle of the day. Of course, you can never judge a person’s character by outward appearances. One day after receiving a phone call, he told me that one of his clients had committed suicide. He was silent for a second and then said, “Thank goodness he paid me before he killed himself.” For some reason, I wasn’t shocked. I’m not easily shocked. I had a feeling from the moment I met him that he was probably emotionally removed from his clients. It seemed to me that he had a wall around him. Intimacy was not his forte.

Whenever I reported to work on a Monday morning, the apartment smelled of “poppers,” the street name for amyl nitrate, a liquid drug usually prescribed for angina. In the gay community, it was used to enhance the sexual experience by increasing one’s heart rate. Poppers smell awful once you’ve popped the vial open, sort of like smelly feet.

I was never sure who I would meet when I came to work. My boss was promiscuous. Often when I arrived at the apartment, a stranger would be in the bedroom. I would greet this person and we would chat while he gathered his stuff to leave. At that time, AIDS wasn’t in our vocabulary. My boss’s promiscuity didn’t bother me. After all, who am I to judge someone else’s life? He seemed to meet nice people and he was not in a committed relationship at the time, and even if he were, that had nothing to do with me. I liked him and I thought his unfeeling attitude toward his clients was a defense mechanism. In any event, I liked him because he treated me well. He was generous and kind. He gave me no reason to dislike him. His deficits were his business. As far as I know, he survived the AIDS crisis, because years later I saw him on Fire Island in the Pines. He looked great. I was happy to find out that he was one of the lucky ones.

As a side venture, this doctor produced porno films. One time, he asked me if I’d be a script girl for one of his films. I asked what it entailed and he said that I just had to cue the “actors” on their lines. It was an easy way to make $125, which, in the 1960's, was a lot of money for one night's work. I was in college then and money was scarce. So I said yes. I arrived at his apartment that night and it was filled with naked men and women. I was shocked when I recognized that some of the women were students at Hunter College where I was attending classes. The guy actors were all gay and the cameramen were moonlighting after their jobs at ABC. Fortunately, I never had to cue anyone on his or her lines. The one good thing that came from that evening is that I learned to look people in the eye when speaking to them. After all, they were all naked and I didn’t want to look down. Anyway, the only thing I actually had to do was make a buffet lunch for the “actors.” I was pleased, because I did not have to watch the “action,” which I found horribly embarrassing. I stayed in the kitchen and read my psychology textbook in preparation for a test the next day. I occasionally glanced at the reflection in the wall oven to get a glimpse of what was happening in the living room. I would hear the director, say, “Pan in on her c _ _ t. Pan in on her c _ _ t.” The male actors were unable to get aroused by the female actors, so they substituted egg white for semen. It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least.

I found it interesting that the cameramen had nothing good to say about the women in the film. They commented that no self-respecting woman would do that kind of work. Nothing was said about the men, and they obviously didn’t reflect on their own behavior, moonlighting on porno films. That was the first and last time that I ever volunteered to be a “script girl” on one of those films. At the time, I was planning on going to law school, and, being ignorant of the law, I wondered if what my boss was doing was legal. I thought if it weren’t and he got busted, I would have been hauled in with him just for being on the premises.

This doctor had one other “vice.” He used to love to go to the “trucks” on 12th Avenue, where he would have sex with anonymous men. In those days, gay men had sex in the back of the semis parked under the Westside Highway. I don’t know if that still goes on, but it’s a very dangerous thing to do. I once asked my boss why he would risk his professional reputation in such a way. After all, he was affiliated with a reputable hospital in Manhattan. He said that it was the danger of getting caught by the police that made the sex exciting. I couldn’t imagine any kind of sex being worth such a risk. He led a charmed life, because I don’t think he ever got caught. At least, I’ve never read about a doctor being busted at the “trucks.”

I worked for another gay psychiatrist who was a colleague and friend of his. They both worked at the same well-known hospital. He lived on Riverside Drive in a fairly large two bedroom apartment, but it was not lavishly decorated. This guy went for old furniture, some of it antique, and humdrum décor. He was one of the sweetest human beings I had ever known. I adored him. He was fairly “straight” in his lifestyle, except for his penchant for young Latin lovers. For him, they were as dangerous as the “trucks” were for the other doctor. He just didn’t know how to pick them. He always ended up with young gay Latin hoods, the operative word being “hoods.” I used to house sit for this doctor. One time I came home to find my camera and some other belongings missing. I called him at his vacation place and told him that someone had come into the apartment and stolen my stuff. He knew right away who it was. His lover had stolen my stuff and pawned it. He eventually found my camera at a local pawn shop and returned it to me.

On still another occasion, I reported for work and found his young lover out cold on the couch. It turned out that he had overdosed on some pills that were on the coffee table. I called my boss at work and told him that I couldn’t wake the fellow up. He told me to leave, which I did, and he would take care of it. That situation turned out well and the young man lived. However, it took the young man’s stealing the doctor’s car before the doctor finally said, “Enough.”

Another memorable person I worked for was a young gay woman who was a musician and claimed to be a distant cousin of Janis Joplin. She lived around the corner from the ABC studios in a four-story walkup. She had a tiny apartment with a deck off the living room. She was just plain fun and one of the sweetest women ever. Her girlfriend was an administrative assistant for a state assemblyman. She commuted between Manhattan and Albany. She and my employer made an interesting couple. My employer was quite short, about 5'2," and her girlfriend was over six feet tall. They were like Mutt and Jeff. Things were going swimmingly for this young musician until she developed Meniere’s syndrome (for her, it involved a ringing in the ears). Suddenly, she was unable to compose or play her music and she ended up being a copyist, which was a huge step down for her. I have no idea what happened to her after that. I graduated and stopped working for her. I wish I had kept in touch.

I loved all these people. They added a new and interesting dimension to my life. They were kind and generous and fun, paid me well, gave me holiday bonuses and trusted me in their apartments while they were gone. I honored them for that by not judging them and doing my housework to the highest standards. At one time, I even thought I would forego law school and go into the cleaning business on a larger scale just to remain in their employ. However, my better judgment told me that I was destined for other things and that I would be nuts to give up a full scholarship to law school to clean apartments, even though to me, it was more than just cleaning apartments. These jobs were part of my evolution. I grew in wondrous ways.

One would think that life could only get boring after my adventures as a housekeeper, but that isn’t true. My life as a lawyer and a judge took me on different yet just as interesting adventures, but that’s another story.