Author: Frank DeMarco

One night late in February 1970, very shortly before I got a call from Dave’s father saying Dave was dying, I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack. (Oddly, for some reason the thought came to me that I might steal it. I still don’t know why that thought came across, unless merely to underline for me the importance of that book.) It was a science-fiction novel called The Mind Parasites, by an author I’d never heard of named Colin Wilson. I bought it, and that was one more moment that turned my life.

The plot was simple enough. Two scientists at the end of the twentieth century (then thirty years in the future) discover that we are all the unsuspecting hosts to creatures that sap our vitality and our sense of purpose. After sundry adventures, the scientists learn to defeat the parasites, and for the first time begin to take possession of humanity’s unsuspected abilities, including a host of powers then usually called occult.

When I read that book, I was seized with the conviction that the author was telling the truth, that we do have such powers, and they are inexplicably beyond our grasp. What is more, it was clear to me that the author believed it too. The strength of his conviction ran like a strong current beneath the surface of the story, and was spelled out clearly in his preface.

In all his works, as I was to learn over the years, the same underlying message comes through. There is something wrong with life. The unsatisfactory way we live isn’t the way it should be or has to be. We possess vast unsuspected powers and abilities of which we are slowly becoming half-aware. It is our task to exert the intelligently directed will to learn to develop and use these powers.

The message came through to me that night, and filled me with excitement. Something within me went click! and said, “This is how it is.” For a while I pressed this book on all my friends, and was disappointed and puzzled that it didn’t turn their lives as it had mine. But it had turned mine because it was the right book for the right person.

I had read Jess Stearn’s Edgar Cayce—the Sleeping Prophet, and Ruth Montgomery’s A Gift of Prophecy, but not much else that could be called parapsychology or occult. My mental world was filled with history, biography, politics, current affairs. After all, I was going to be a statesman!

The only thing in my life touching on the paranormal was the fact that in college I had hypnotized a couple of my fraternity brothers, eliciting stories that purported to be past lives of theirs. As to drugs, George Washington University was a very conservative school, slow to catch up with the times, and I was a very conservative person—and a timid one—who had his future political career to consider. I graduated without having tried any drug stronger than alcohol and tobacco.

But now this book, that would open so many doors by reinforcing a certain mental bent, had come to me by what people thoughtlessly call “coincidence.”

I no longer believe in coincidence. Instead, I see opportunity and choice. Our Upstairs (non-3D) component nudges our lives to make available to us certain possibilities. We in turn (the Downstairs crew in the 3D) choose. We say yes or no, right or left, up or down, and whatever we choose leads to other choices. That is what we are here for, to choose. And, as I see it now, nudging is what was going on when I picked up Colin Wilson’s book that night, shortly before Dave Schlachter’s father called.

Dave Schlachter died in his hometown at about 11:20 a.m. on March 2, 1970.

(A phone call saying that David was back in the hospital expected to die that night. A hastily arranged thousand-mile drive that brought three of us to be with him. A couple of days while he hung on. And then, he died. In those last moments, one of us held his mother, another held his girlfriend, and I put cooling cloths on Dave’s head and stroked his forehead, and talked to him and said goodbye.)

The following week, we were in northern New Jersey, where his father had family, and on a bitter cold Friday we buried him, as the rabbi and his father said the ancient words that probably none of Dave’s friends believed in.

While we were standing as pallbearers, Dennis, who had been Dave’s closest friend, leaned over to me and quietly quoted Kahlil Gibran: “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses the understanding.” I had plenty of pain, but not much understanding. (I couldn’t even understand why I had pain. Intellectually, I knew Dave was better off dead than trapped in a malfunctioning body. Intellectually, I believed he was now free. Intellectually, I believed in reincarnation, so intellectually I couldn’t see death as a tragedy, right? This from the same brain that was still lacerated from the murders of JFK and RFK, men it hadn’t even met!)

Dave had been one of my three closest friends in college; in some ways the closest. He and I were instinctively on the same wavelength, even though he was a well-motivated, scholastically successful, solidly middle-class Jewish Midwesterner, and I was none of these.

When he was hospitalized, my reaction was fierce: Fight this thing! Something told me that Will would have more to do with Dave’s survival than anyone was admitting. And I wanted desperately to help. Had the feeling that I could help, if I only knew how. But no one could tell me how. Our mutual friends were defeated by it. I read in their eyes that they thought I was merely refusing to accept the reality that Dave had been given a death sentence.

The worst of it was that I could see that Dave thought so too. In those days, even more than today, the surrounding culture called despair realism. In 1970 the consensus was that his only hopes were medical intervention or spontaneous remission (whatever that was supposed to mean) or a miracle. Medical intervention had failed, spontaneous remission wasn’t happening, and I don’t think anybody in Dave’s hospital room believed in miracles. I did, I suppose, but I sure didn’t know how to summon one.

Two weeks after he died, I was writing this in my journal:

Remembering times with Dave,

Like when he drove me to Solomon’s Island because I was sick with anger.

Like when we watched the inauguration together.

Like riding, talking, till 4 a.m.

Like discussing all the things that need discussing on the way to growing up.

Like sitting in my room choosing the 20 greatest men who ever lived.

Like planning a congressional race.

Like watching kindred minds follow kindred paths.

Like him arguing with me when I was depressed.

Like me arguing with him when he was depressed.

Like talking out all the doubts and half-fears that moulder and paralyze.

And so forth. Dave and I had had that kind of relationship. But he had died, not quite 23 years old, and we who were left had to live; had to figure out how to live.

Our lives read like straightforward narratives, but they live more like braiding. This happens, and then that happens, and then the other happens, seemingly without follow-up, and then something else happens that incorporates them; depends upon them; makes sense of them. We look back and say, “Well sure, it’s obvious.” But it isn’t obvious until after the fact. In the year after I graduated from college, four strands braided together to move me toward a future I could not have imagined.

Looked at thematically, they would seem to have little in common: a walk in a riot zone, an early death, a science-fiction novel, a final gathering of friends. But look how they braided.

1. The news

While in college, I never gave a thought to how I would make a living afterward. I couldn’t imagine a path. Just as well. It would have been a waste of time trying to imagine the path that did open up.

In April, 1968, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, sparked wild rioting in black neighborhoods in cites all across the country.  The western limit of the riot zone in Washington, D.C. was only a few blocks east  of campus. I was curious. I took a walk past police lines into the riot zone, wrote up my impressions, and sent them to the editor of my hometown newspaper, who printed some of it and sent me a note asking to see me next time I was in town. A year later, I began working for his paper as news reporter.

I was still taking it for granted that I would run for Congress in 1974, at age twenty-eight, though I did nothing to prepare for that far-off day. (That was entirely typical. I was very unworldly.) Meanwhile, I threw myself into becoming a reporter.

At first, it was fun. Being a reporter is a license to kibitz. As low man on the (short) totem pole, naturally I got the most routine, unexciting assignments: hospital admissions, police blotter, night court. But it was a change from sitting in class taking notes – not to mention quite a change from working in a factory or (as in college) working at a grocery store. And gradually other things came up. I never got what you could call training, but I stumbled along, and, as I say, it was interesting.

We were an afternoon paper, which means we put it to bed midday, which meant we had all morning (starting at 7:30 a.m.) to write our stories. And since I was living in my parents’ house, and for the first two months was unmarried, often I would return to the newsroom after night court and sit and talk to Al Wallitsch. Al seemed pretty old to me, but I suppose he was in fifties. He had seen and done a lot, and read a lot (he was a particular fan of Thomas Wolfe and Ben Hecht). He was a real reporter in a way I would never be, but he seemed to like shooting the bull with me That part was fun. But it didn’t take long before disillusionment set in.

Strike one. I wasn’t there long before I got thrown out of the police chief’s office. In my defense, I was innocent, sort of. We had heard on our police scanner that a couple of cops had gotten into a shoving match with three or four black kids. Nothing major, but not the first such incident. My editor told me to see if I could find out if we were building up to a race riot. So I combed through the incident reports at the station and didn’t see anything about it. When I asked the desk sergeant, he went through an elaborate search through the flimsies and said I had everything.

So I asked the police chief, and he said everything is fine, no incidents, no information on anything happening overnight. I could see the canary feathers sticking out of his complacent lying mouth, so I said, “What about the four black kids that put a crack in the windshield of car 308 Tuesday night. That didn’t happen either?”

Ralphie shouted, “Get out of here.” (A la Steven Leacock: “Shut up,” he explained.)

By the time I got back to the newsroom, Ralphie had already talked to both editor and publisher, and they had agreed to kill the story. I was hot. I asked if we were going to put up with letting the police lie to us and kill the story. My editor said, “Ralphie’s been police chief a hell of a lot longer than you’ve been a reporter.” In retrospect, he had a point, but at the time all I could see was the silent censorship.

Strike two. The paper sent me to cover a press conference with the president of the new four-year state college they were setting up in Atlantic County. I went there thinking of myself as a rookie next to these Philadelphia-area professionals. But every single one of them asked variants of the same question: “Is the college going to concentrate on offering a relevant education?” That was the buzzword of the time, relevance. I was the only one who asked other things: What kind of students were they looking for, what did they intend the school to specialize in, what kind of special needs and opportunities did they see in the South Jersey area. These media professionals never considered asking anything beyond the universal topic du jour. I had been thinking about becoming a real journalist, because after all, I was good with words. But did I want to become like them?

Strike three. And then there was the question of favoritism, something everybody else knew about from the cradle, but that I in my innocence didn’t consider. I was reporting night court, and six kids were getting charged with possession of marijuana. One of them was a kid I had known in school, but I when I wrote down the names for the police report, it never occurred to me to leave his name off the list. It wouldn’t have been ethical. But the next day, my roundup piece included his name, but not that of one of the others. Turns out that boy’s family and the publisher’s family were close friends. From that moment, I learned how to read the news in a different way. It became clear how some stories got slanted and some were smothered. It stank, and there was nothing I was ever going to be able to do about it.

I could still do the job, more or less, but the thrill was gone.

David’s second operation, to go in and fix the tube, which had stopped draining fluid, was May 21^st, and there was all of it do again: the hospital sounds, the hospital smells, the hospital waiting-room furniture, the strain of waiting, the bad jokes, the silences, This time we brought our schoolbooks, for it was the beginning of finals week. but mostly we held up the walls, and griped about school, and wondered whether Nixon really did have a secret plan to end the war. We talked about pretty much everything except what we were there for.

We had been there perhaps an hour when Dr. Sachar came in, surprising me. I had known he’d talked to the Schlachters, and I had been there once when he visited David. But finals week was finals week for professors as well as students, so he couldn’t stay long. He visited, and he sat with them, and he expressed his prayers and mindfulness to them, and had a few kind words for “you boys” and left. It was a small thing, maybe, but I was touched at his kindness. Doubly touched when he reappeared at 11:30 just to reassure himself that the operation was over (which it wasn’t). I learned something of the different worlds young and middle-aged and old live in. I learned it as much by the difference in his voice and manner with the Schlachters as by anything he said. Plus, there was the difference between what he had done and what I had thought he would do. While I sat absorbing that, we learned that the operation had been successfully concluded. Another success. Why did it feel like failure?  Why did it feel so much like nothing at all? Like numbness?

Somehow we got through finals,  For Dennis and me, the last obstacles in four years of classes, jobs, fraternity, dating, drinking, and talk. We got through finals as we had gotten through so much else, on confidence, bluff, and a fine line of bullshit. Even as we were doing it, we laughed at ourselves and at the system we were manipulating. It could be funny to walk into an exam, read the questions knowing that there wasn’t one thing there that you really knew, and then write bluebook-length essays carefully crafted to sound like you knew more than you could say. It reminded me of the time in sophomore year I had picked up an English Lit midterm exam and laughed at the disparity between what I knew and what I was expected to know. (But, I had eked out a B in the exam.) Or the time I aced the final because its three questions referred to the only three pieces I’d read all semester.

Funny, yes. But it had the flavor of having been cheated, too. Of having cheated myself. Still, we got through finals as we had gotten through the rest, and our college career was effectively over.

Dave, still lying down in his hospital bed, looked up at me.  By this time he could talk again, though haltingly. (Of course this is reconstructed, not remembered, but it went more or less like this. )

“So, greasy one. They are actually. Going to let you.  Graduate. I can’t.  Believe it.”

“A travesty, isn’t it? But it looks like that’s just what they’re going to do.”

“So therefore. You aren’t even. Going to show up. Next Sunday.” Dave was smiling, his smile pushed through with great effort.

“Oh, I’ll be back, just not for the ceremony. They got all that tuition money, they don’t need my presence too. I’m going to come down to tell you about my first week on the job.” I had gotten a job as news reporter in my home town, and my first day at work would be Tuesday.. My father was listening to the Schlachters praising his son.

I leaned closer. “Dave, I’ve got to go.”

“I know. Good. Luck in scenic. Vineland.”

“Thanks.” I made myself go on. “Don’t give up, Dave. It can’t lick you if you don’t give in to it, I’m positive of that.” (From this distance, it is clear that the certainty wasn’t wrong, but knowing that a thing can be done,  no matter the source of the knowing, is not the same as knowing how to do it.)

“Well I. Guess we’ll see. A lot of work.”

“I know, but don’t give up, okay. I don’t want to wind up going to grad school by myself.”

That got a little smile, a tired smile. “Don’t kill yourself. On the road. Next week, Woppy. I want to hear. All about life in. The real world.”

I said, smiling, “I have the dismal feeling that it’s going to be GWU and SPE all over again. Maybe more so.”

Dad came over to see if I was ready to get on the road. I took Dave’s hand to say goodbye, shook hands with Mr. Schlachter, got a warm hug from Mrs. Schlachter, and then dad and I left. I did see Dave the following Sunday, and once or maybe twice more, and then at the end of July his parents took him back home to Iowa, and I didn’t see him again until the following March. the week he died.

In the parking lot was dad’s car, loaded with my things from college, waiting to begin the trip that would take me finally from college to whatever lay beyond.

I saw Dr. Redding in his office. I said, very uncomfortable, “Dr. Redding, I sort of have to ask you for a favor.” I don’t know why I started out that way. I knew even as I said it that it would mislead.

“Do you?” Very dry, very reserved.

“It’s about a friend of mine, Dave Schlachter. He’s in your Negro History class.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I know Dave’s probably getting a good grade from you, he always works hard –.”

He waited me out, giving no clues. I couldn’t tell if he even knew who Dave was. It was a large class.

“Dr. Redding, we – a couple of his friends – we’re asking his professors to give him a passing grade without his having to take finals, so he can graduate.”

“And why are you doing that?”

“He’s in the hospital.” I didn’t know Dr. Redding. He was an old man, and I had only had him for the one course. I wasn’t about to give him any clues either. I said it as flatly as I could. “He isn’t going to be able to take finals. He has a brain tumor. The doctors say they can’t remove it. “

Dr. Redding seemed to be filled with indignation. “Do you mean to tell me there is a 21-year-old boy in the hospital with a brain tumor, and nobody can do anything about it?”

I couldn’t relate to his reaction. It felt as if he were blaming me. Besides, Dave was 22. “That’s about it,” I said, imitating what I imagined Dennis would say. It felt good to act hardened, tough.

I tried it with Dr. Sachar, too. I went up to him just as his class ended – it wasn’t a class I was taking – and asked if I could speak to him. He knew me, naturally. I had taken three of his courses. But he was still Sachar, brilliant, impatient, not  very approachable. I began in the same blunt, inappropriate way, saying I needed a favor. Like Dr. Redding, he stepped back, all but physically, waiting to hear the newest excuse for unacceptable work. But then he may have realized that I was not in any of his courses that semester, because I saw, or thought I saw, wariness change to guarded curiosity.

In a few words I told him about Dave’s situation. “So we’re trying to get him through his courses so he can get his degree,” I said.

“This type of request should come through his parents, I should think,” he said. Probably he was just thinking aloud, but I thought he was turning me down on a technicality. I shrugged impatiently and turned on my heel, something I would never have done ordinarily. I was a very well-mannered middle-class boy who had been taught to be polite to his elders.

Before I could take a step, Dr. Sachar said, “Just a minute, Mr. DeMarco. Tell me a few things about your friend. What hospital he is in, for a start. Where his parents are staying.” I still thought he was concerning himself with technicalities, but he had seen through the bravado to the pain.

“They say they don’t know how long,” I argued at supper that Friday. “How do we know it isn’t going to be 20 years?”

Dennis shrugged, skeptical, taciturn, depressed. He started to say something, changed his mind. He picked at the chicken on his plate. Andrews said, “Certainly I hope you’re right. I hope it’s fifty years! But I don’t see any realistic way we can nudge the scales. I wish I could. I hope you can convince me.”

I turned to Bill. “You certainly ought to know what I’m talking about. You know what Cayce said, mind is the builder.” Fiercely: “Let’s put our minds to building!” I could see that they weren’t merely unconvinced. They were embarrassed. “So maybe it won’t work. How do we know, if we don’t try? If the four of us put our minds to it, and we can get David to put his mind to it, do you mean to tell me that anybody can know for sure that we can’t do it? Isn’t it worth a try?”

Dennis still didn’t have anything to say. Bill cleared his throat. “After what we’ve seen this year, or I should say what you’ve seen, since I’ve been mostly providing the entertainment, I’d say we don’t know very much about what is possible and what isn’t.” He was talking about our summer’s experiments with hypnotism, where he had repeatedly come up with what seemed to be tales of past lives. “I mean, you were there. We all were. We have the sessions on tape.”

“Yes,” Dennis said, “We know the sessions happened, but what we don’t know is what they mean.”

“That’s my point. Nobody can say. We just don’t know enough.”

Andrews said, laughing, that his grandmother had always said you can do anything you set your mind to, “but I’m not sure this is the kind of thing she was talking about.” In a conciliatory way, “Still, you read about people dying when they want to and not a moment before. I suppose you could look at this as a special case of the will to live.”

I said, “I was talking to Dave this afternoon, and I put it to him that maybe it all comes down to how hard he’s willing to fight.” I had waited until his parents were out of the room, getting an early supper. “He said,  that under the circumstances, he was in no position to care who prayed for him, even him. ” I tried to carry Dave’s humorous intent, but somehow it only emphasized the odds against him. “Anyway,” I said, it’s worth a try. Isn’t it worth a try?”

I can furnish certain exact phrases, even sentences, from what Dr. Tenley said, because for weeks afterward, at times chose my no logic I could ever figure out, odd bits would play back. Finally I wrote down what I was hearing, and they ceased coming.

“David is afflicted with a tumor about the size of a pea, located on the pineal gland [sketching rapidly on the chalkboard], which is …”

“The paralysis and vision-blurring he experienced were due to the pressure exerted on the brain by the growing tumor, pus fluid which has been building up in the area. We have drained the fluid and removed the pressure for the moment …”

“… whether there is a high degree of malignancy. Quite possibly it may prove to be benign. However …”

“… inserted a tube which will ease the pressure by allowing the fluid to drain. This is, however, only a staying process.”

“Due to the position of the tumor, it is inoperable [inoperable, inoperable, inoperable] and must eventually prove terminal.” (Memory says that this statement was followed by a long blank silence, but I don’t think it was, really.)

“It could be two days, or two years, or possibly longer, but the tumor must eventually grow to the point that it will fatally affect the operation of the brain …”

“The tube which we have inserted to drain the fluid and thus to relieve the pressure on the brain will give David some time. He will probably walk out of the hospital in two or three weeks. But I must caution you against any sort of optimism. There is no hope of ultimate recovery….”

And that was that. The efficient, impersonal doctor (so he seemed to me) said, “I am very sorry,” the first and only crack in the professional façade that we were allowed to see. Mrs. Schlachter was crying, silent devastated tears. The rest of us were stony-faced. Dennis met my eyes once and then we each looked somewhere else. I realized that my teeth were clenched. David was going to die? Like hell he was!

Somebody would have to tell the house, and Dennis didn’t want to be the one. I decided it might as well be me. I thought I could get through it okay. But I was supposed to go to work at four, and it was already nearly 3:30. I called the house and told one of the brothers that I was calling a special house meeting in half an hour and asked him to post a notice on the bulletin board and otherwise pass the word.  I called Mr. Berkeley, the store manager, and told him I’d be an hour late to work and I’d tell him why when I got there. Then we left the hospital, and I wondered if  the Schlachters were sorry or relieved to be by themselves awhile. I could feel the pain it gave them, seeing ordinary life going on around them.

Ordinary life going on. Walking down G Street, we found ourselves in the middle of crowds of students changing classes. It was hard to realize that for them it had been just a normal Monday. It was still considerably less than 24 hours since we had returned from the Jersey shore.

Ordinarily I would have no business calling a house meeting, not being one of the officers, but the brothers knew it had to concern Dave’s operation. When I walked into the house, .it looked like a real house meeting, only quieter. Every seat was taken, and several brothers were sitting on the floor or leaning on the wall around the entryway.

I thought it would be easy, and at first it was. I used my tough-guy, man-of-the-world voice, my great stone face.  I told them I’d make it short.

“You know they operated on Dave today. It was a success in one sense: They removed the pressure and that removed the paralysis. But he has a tumor, a damned little thing the size of a green pea, they say, and it’s in a place they can’t get at. So, they can’t take it out.”

The brothers were silent.

“The doctor said it could start growing again at any time, and when it does” (I paused to steady my voice) “he’s dead. A couple of days, a couple of months, a couple of years. And there isn’t anything anybody can do about it.” Sudden tears, unexpected, blinding me. I walked out of the room, ashamed to let them see me cry.

Fortunately, we all had immediate problems to tend to. The Schlachters needed to rent a place nearer the hospital, and Dale and Bill offered to help them find it. Dennis and I would concentrate on getting Dave graduated. He’d take three of Dave’s professors and I would take the other two, professors I had had classes with.