Dad took Michael and me to see 2010 shortly after its premiere on December 7, 1984. This was a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s epic classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I had never seen. I was thrilled to see Professor Heywood Floyd typing on a beach with the same Apple IIc computer I had recently gotten. In the film, Russia and the US launched a joint mission to investigate what had happened to the ship that was left behind at the end of 2001. The ship’s former commander, David Bowman, had become what you might call an ascended being. He contacted his mother by moving through the electrical wires and appearing on her TV, as sparks of starlight kept flickering in his eyes. He told her something was going to happen that would affect all of us. When she begged him to tell her what it was, he smiled and said, “Something wonderful.” The gravity and power of that moment rocked me to my core. It was triggering deep memories from so many dreams I had had in the past.
The horrible threat of nuclear war loomed in the movie as the two crews were forced apart once tensions exploded between the US and Russia—but ultimately they needed each other to survive. They came upon this mysterious, ancient object called “the Monolith” floating in space by the abandoned ship, and I could hardly believe this had made it into a movie. Then it turned out that a dark spot on Jupiter was growing larger and larger—and when they zoomed in on it, they found it was made with countless legions of monoliths. The mysterious, godlike objects were consuming the entire planet and transforming it into something new.
The crews were given a very clear message that they had to leave. The abandoned ship’s computer, HAL, sacrificed itself and its ship to save everyone else. The entire planet collapsed in on itself and exploded, forming a brilliant new sun in our solar system. A message was beamed all over the Earth by some mysterious force, which was probably from the ascended form of David Bowman: “All these worlds are yours. Use them together. Use them in peace.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about 2010 for weeks. The old man had told me a very similar event was going to happen here, except it seemed to involve the Sun, not Jupiter. Those dreams were starting to fade from my memory, but they were certainly not forgotten. I went out and got the book and loved it—although I thought it was totally ridiculous that Clarke said everyone on Earth had agreed the new sun “had to” be called Lucifer. At the time I did not think this had any deeper significance. Insiders would eventually reveal that Clarke had been given a wide variety of classified information to prepare us for an eventual disclosure. The Cabal was already aware that an ancient builder race had generated marvelous artifacts in our solar system, and was intimately involved in steering us through the ascension process. The groups giving Clarke this information had Luciferian beliefs, and some of it found its way into his works. Nonetheless, I do believe that the overall effect was positive, in that it introduced people to the mysteries of ascension and of ancient artifacts on Earth and in our solar system.
I convinced my mother to rent the movie 2001, which made the monolith much more interesting. It seemed to represent an ancient extraterrestrial technology that was designed to catapult human beings into new levels of evolution. The ending, where David Bowman went through the stargate and became the starchild—the same being we met in 2010—had me in total rapture. I quickly read Clarke’s original 2001 book as well.
On Christmas break, a tough, arrogant jock kid with a square jaw and extraordinary self-confidence whom we will call Brad invited me to go sledding with him and some friends. Brad and I had been friends years earlier, since he lived a few streets away from me. His parents burned wood for heat and had a sign in the house that said, “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink.” This sledding invitation came out of nowhere; we hadn’t spoken since I went over to his house and saw him kill a squirrel with his BB gun. One of his friends was Chris, who had coined the phrase “He’s so smart, he’s dumb”—and had just spent weeks telling me to get new pants and saying I was fat.
Brad’s other friend was Eddie, who was still taking the drumming class in school that I had quickly dropped out of. Mr. Riccobono had demanded I play nothing but slow quarter notes on my practice pad, left-right-left-right, for twenty minutes a day. I was already playing Native American beats on a drum in kindergarten class, so this was a staggeringly boring joke. I felt terrible about quitting, but I just couldn’t take the dullness of practicing, and decided I was better off trying to train myself. Now the four of us were in Mom’s car on the way to Collins Park, and all they could talk about was the dreaded Monkey Hill. It was an extremely dangerous, steep slope that had a big ninety-degree turn after the first twenty-five feet, and then continued on for about another hundred feet afterward. Immediately to the left of Monkey Hill, there was a thick wall of vivid-smelling evergreen trees.
We all went over to Monkey Hill after only a few runs on the safer and easier trails. I watched them all do it, and they kept saying it was important to lean into the turn as you hit it. I immediately decided there was no way I would ever go down Monkey Hill. It was much too dangerous. The next thing I knew, they were practically demanding I run it on my orange plastic saucer, calling me a pussy. I continued to refuse. They grabbed me and forced me down onto the saucer, about fifteen feet to the side of the beginning of the trail. Then, all three of them pushed me to get me going as fast as they could, using the extra fifteen feet like a runway. I screamed down the top of the hill and hit the ninety-degree turn at full speed. Leaning didn’t do me any good. The curve turned into a ramp, and launched me into the air. I plunged a hundred feet down through empty space, soaring about fifteen feet above the ground while descending on a smooth, parabolic arc. This caused me to be airborne for a stunningly long time. All I could do was grip the sides of the saucer in disbelief as it slowly rotated through the crisp-green winter air. I was too shocked and mystified to be scared. It was the closest I had ever felt to the out-of-body experience in my waking life.
I was facing backward when I hit the ground, so I did not know when I was going to land. I smashed into the hard snow in an upright, seated position, and the impact was so powerful that my saucer cracked into about twenty-five different pieces. Many of them were triangle-shaped. My tailbone and lower spine were in agonizing pain and I didn’t even know if I would be able to walk again. I was lying there and didn’t dare move in case something was broken. My entire body was throbbing with pain from head to toe. I had a tremendous headache and I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, along with a ringing. The kids quickly sledded down to see if I was okay.
By some miracle, they were able to get me up on my feet and nothing appeared to be broken—though my tailbone was very sore and I was in so much pain I could barely even walk. I hobbled up the hill, found my mother, and got her to take me home. I had a hard time sitting for several days. She hadn’t seen what had happened and was very concerned when I told her why I didn’t have my saucer anymore. I never again went anywhere near Monkey Hill.
The great villains in our planetary script were threatening us with instant death from nuclear destruction at any moment. Some people chose to look for the positive and be kind, while others felt compelled to repeat the trauma and pain they were feeling for others. I was still healing from my fall when Eric decided he was going to show me what a “white wash” was. In the media, when the government committed a crime and covered it up, they called it a “whitewash.” Right in front of my babysitter Ellen’s house, Eric grabbed me, kicked out my leg, and forced me facedown into a snowbank. He grabbed a handful of snow and shoved it in my face, rubbing it around in circles. This went on for a frighteningly long time. He did not allow me to breathe, and the snow was fiercely cold. I was screaming and screaming, trying to tell him I was going to die, and flailing my arms, but I had no voice—and he kept going. I was running out of air and really didn’t know if I was going to make it. Finally he let go. My tortured lungs gasped for breath again and again.
After about seven huge, bellowing gasps on all fours, with my whole body shaking, I got up on my feet and screamed at him in a bloodcurdling, tortured voice, saying he had almost killed me. I used the strongest curse words when I asked him if he was smart enough to realize that the human body cannot live without air, and how would his parents like it if they found out their son was a murderer? I wanted so badly to attack him, but I was afraid I might literally try to tear him to pieces. I also didn’t know if I was strong enough to win that fight. We stopped walking to school together after that event, but for some crazy reason I continued to be friends with him. Everyone else hated us and we both needed protection.
About a month later, Eric convinced me to join him in putting two tacks on the chair of Diana, a tall, lanky, and kindhearted farm girl who obviously liked me, as a prank. I absolutely did not want to do it, and it seemed like he was jealous because no girls liked him. I thought he might try to hurt me again if I said no. He put the tacks on her chair while I stood and watched, and I did not stop him. Other kids witnessed the crime. Diana sat down and screamed in terrible pain, and both of us were sent to the principal’s office. Audrey Farnsworth made it clear that we were in very serious trouble—and Eric sure did cry, just like I did. This only made me resent him even more, and for a while our friendship was over.
I had gotten a Radio Shack electronics kit for the Christmas of 1984. It was a one-and-a-half-foot-wide, three-inch-tall blue plastic box. It had a cardboard top with electrical components arranged on it. Each component had a three-quarter-inch-tall coil of wire poking up on either side of it. You were given a wealth of color-coded wires of different lengths, and by following the instructions, you could build different types of machines with it. I never took the time to build the full radio, but I did several complex projects. The lie detector was by far my favorite. It measured the electrical conductivity of your skin, also known as galvanic skin response, or GSR. You would hold two white wires, which were the longest ones, and get a tone that would rise and fall in pitch. If you were telling a lie, you would become nervous and the pitch would rise. As you relaxed, the pitch went down.
I brought this kit to class one day and ran into the school principal, Mrs. Farnsworth, along with the district superintendent and all the highest-ranking people we never saw. It was a great photo op for her to ask me what I had there. Our local leaders gave one another knowing looks as they fantasized about how useful such a device could be. To my horror, when she grabbed the wires, no sound came out—probably because she had too much makeup on her fingers. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Farnsworth, but you appear to be dead.” All the bigwigs exploded into laughter. Then I used my science buddy to prove that it did squeal just fine when a normal human grabbed the wires. I was genuinely baffled that the most powerful elite I knew in my own school, who had punished me several times with withering shame, did not register on my foolproof device as a normal person. It seemed like a practical joke from the universe, showing me that people in positions of power can become “heartless.” The synchronicity was obviously helped along by the makeup on her fingers, which the makers of the lie detector had never accounted for.
My father had become deeply depressed from the divorce and lost a lot of weight. He got a small house in Scotia and we started going there to see him on Friday and Sunday nights. Dad could cook one meal really well—a London broil grilled steak with white rice and mushrooms. Otherwise we usually ordered a Sicilian-style sausage-and-mushroom pizza. Since Dad loved horror movies, he decided that we were now old enough to watch R-rated films. Many of them were extremely terrifying and disturbing. I was too young to get the “morphine response,” since I had never seen or experienced traumas anywhere near as horrible as what these movies displayed. I quickly learned that I had to remove myself from the film and remember that none of it was real. Another trick was to expect that every single character I saw, no matter how much I was supposed to like them, was going to die in the most horrible and gruesome way possible. That way, whenever they got it, I could just say, “Well, I knew that was going to happen.” It also bothered me that only the villains in the movies had supernatural powers, whereas the victims and the people who fought and defeated the bad guys did not. Insiders would eventually tell me the Cabal was deliberately financing films like this, so that people would feel that only the “dark side” could produce powerful, ascension-like abilities in humans.
Sean, a kid in school, was now avidly reading the Stephen King novels, and told me how great they were. I ended up buying and reading several of them myself, including Different Seasons, The Drawing of the Three, Pet Sematary, Firestarter, It, and The Stand. Some of these novels were very disturbing—actually much more so than any horror movie. I was amazed at the power Stephen King had to create realistic, fully realized characters. Many of his villains and stupid characters seemed like adult versions of the same bullies I was dealing with in school—and the short story “The Body” became a classic film called Stand By Me that depicted similar bullying characters as kids. Stephen King’s art seemed to be an imitation of life, and I had the strong sense that he had been called “lard ass” in school just like I was.
I made friends with a new kid in school, whom we will call Toby, after Eric had nearly killed me by asphyxiation. Toby took me out to the Mohawk River, where he wanted us to walk over these huge slabs of ice that had broken up out of the water. It was very dangerous, and I agreed to do it but tried to be as careful as I could. Soon after I read “The Body,” in which kids find a dead body in the woods, Toby actually died. He was riding on the back of a hay wagon on his parents’ farm, sitting on top of a load of hay that was four bales high, when the wheel hit a bump and threw him off the back. Toby landed on his head and was killed instantly. This was the first time someone I actually knew had died, and it was shocking. I was overwhelmed with grief for several weeks, particularly since I hardly had any friends. Life suddenly seemed much more fragile than I had ever thought. I realized I had gotten very lucky with things like Monkey Hill and Eric’s white wash. I needed to fight back, as otherwise one of these bullies might actually kill me.
The horror movies and Stephen King novels made me enchanted by the idea that Toby might still exist as some sort of ghost. When my mother took me to the Kay-Bee toy store in the Mohawk Mall, I found something called the Ouija Talking Board, which was sold along with classic board games like Monopoly, Parcheesi, Trivial Pursuit, and Clue. The front cover showed an eerie brown board with all the letters of the alphabet, and a teardrop-shaped, cream-colored pointer that had people’s hands on it. I picked it up, read the words, and realized that this was obviously being used to contact the dead—and apparently it really worked. I convinced my mother to let me buy it.
Since you couldn’t do it alone, I waited until the next time my babysitter Rachel came over, while my mother was off at a music gig, and we tried it. Rachel went into a deep state of meditation, rolling her eyes back and squinting them. Her eyelids fluttered, and she let her head nod all the way back while she kept her hands on the pointer. She had no idea what it was saying or where it was going. I started asking questions and the pointer was definitely moving on its own. I tried to ask questions that I did not know the answers to, and the results were intriguing, to say the least—but the whole thing also had a very creepy feeling. I became convinced that I had experienced genuine contact with spirits through this board, and there was indeed life after death. However, I hardly ever had anyone I could do this with, since it required at least two people to work, and I had very few friends.
One day a friend of mine came up to me and said I absolutely had to read this book he found in the library. It was by Francis Crick, one of the scientists who had discovered the DNA molecule, which had all the codes for life. With a single piece of the right DNA, you could clone a human being. In this book, Crick was arguing that the DNA molecule was far too complex to have evolved by random mutation. This got me tremendously excited. I could not understand why this discovery wasn’t all over the news, particularly considering Crick had actually discovered DNA in the first place. I spent countless hours trying to understand how DNA could have been formed by some sort of cosmic intelligence, and at the time I never came up with a good answer. I continued thinking about it for many years and kept looking for clues, which eventually became a major element of The Source Field Investigations as well as my conferences, articles, and TV shows.
Brad, the same kid who forced me down Monkey Hill, now wanted me to sneak out of school with him. After the last class at around two forty-five, students would pack up, and we were then forced to stand in a group of “walkers” in the gym—while each and every group of “bussers” left, one by one. Brad and I happened to be in the last group of “walkers” who were allowed to leave. We didn’t actually breathe fresh outside air until about three thirty p.m. Brad said this was ridiculous—and just like the Twisted Sister song, “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” Brad had a plan. His friend Oafer got picked up by his grandfather in a Dodge Dart every day at two forty-five. Mrs. Glindmeyer and Mr. Viall just let him go right on by, and never checked to see if there was a car out there. All we had to do, Brad said, was say we were getting picked up—and they never would check. I was scared, but I decided to try it—and it worked. We got out, ducked down in front of the windows so no one could see us, and then broke into a full run when we hit the road, continuing to sprint down the first part of Schermerhorn Street. The sweet old lady who worked as a crossing guard halfway down the hill never asked us why we were earlier than the others. For the last few months of school we did this almost every day—and never once got caught. This became an addictive behavior, and addictions are all about “the hidden.” More and more distortions of reality become necessary if we ignore the signals and continue down that road. Brad was the first person to influence me to lie and take dangerous risks, as up until then I had always told the truth. Later on he would talk me into smoking weed.
My grades were getting worse and worse, and I was just as shocked as my teachers were when my scores on something called the COGAT test came back. I did extremely well, putting me at a level that was as strong as most high-school seniors. The school year ended with something called Field Day, which I hated, as it included the tug-of-war, the three-legged race, and other athletic events I was terrible at. The junior high school building was on the other side of the fence at the far end of the field, and there was a small military base immediately off to the left, in a series of steel half-pipe buildings. It wasn’t uncommon to hear soldiers marching outside during the day. I never knew why they were there or what was going on in them, but I do remember touring one of them once in Pyramid. It just looked like boring office space with some framed photos of military personnel and flags on the wall.
On the last day of elementary school, I was on my bike and everyone else had already left. I was only about fifty feet away from where I had done my “ESP club” four years before. I had all my books and papers stuffed into my tan-colored backpack. A big, sneering kid came roaring up to me on his bike and shot gravel at me as he screeched to a stop in front of me, sliding out his back wheel. He wrestled my backpack away from me, scattered the papers all over the pavement, and demanded that I cry or he was going to beat the hell out of me. I gave him exactly what he wanted, and he laughed and laughed before calling me all sorts of rude names and insulting my weight. Then he sped off. This made me even more terrified of starting junior high school, where there would be “big kids” from three different elementary schools—my own Sacandaga, as well as Lincoln and Glendaal.
Things got much worse once I started junior high school in the fall of 1985. Now I had a locker with a combination, right next to Shane. I had seven periods of classes that required me to go to a different room every hour, with different books. Gym class now required us to go down to an area with a locker room and showers, but hardly anyone actually used them. We were now forced to play dodge ball, a truly barbaric game. All the jocks would try to slam you in the face as hard as they could with large red playground balls, even though it was supposedly against the rules. They rarely ever got caught, and even if they sent some kid to the nurse crying, their only punishment was to leave the game until the next round.
The teacher would pick two jocks to form teams, and they got to choose whom they wanted one by one. Eric and I were always picked last. The jocks would openly argue over who would end up with either of us, and let everyone know we were completely useless pieces of garbage to them. The whole rest of their team would often join them in their laughter and disgust. There was no recess anymore, and this was one of the only things I had been able to tolerate about going to school, as it gave me a chance to lie down in the grass and relax. The only other thing I had loved was Pyramid, and now that was gone too.
The kids from Glendaal were from wealthy families in the Glenville countryside, and tended to do really well in school—whereas the kids from Lincoln were from less-expensive row houses in the Scotia highlands, and often had the lowest grades. The kids from my school, Sacandaga, lived mostly down by the river, and were right in between Lincoln and Glendaal in terms of economic level and academic performance. I ended up in all the smart-kid honors classes, which were much more difficult, thanks to my COGAT scores—and most of my classmates were from Glendaal. On the first day of school, a tall eighth-grader with long blond hair, a denim heavy-metal jacket, and nasty blue jeans hocked his throat and spat on my leg, leaving behind a huge, disgusting yellow glob of mucus. I truly felt I had descended into hell. School had become prison, and there was no escape.
Even though Brad had been skipping school with me at the end of sixth grade, now he acted like he didn’t even know who I was. He had a locker right near mine, but he avoided me at all costs. He wanted to be cool, play sports, and get girls, and hanging around a kid with a big gut wasn’t going to get him what he wanted. Shane continued to be my friend, and everyone still thought he was a “scumbag” at this point since he was poor and did not have nice clothes.
One day I saw one of the Glendaal kids playing a game called Dungeons and Dragons in the library with some other nerds from Glendaal. He was very witty and seemed extremely sure of himself, to the point of being cocky and overconfident. It was obvious that he was really smart, and he was just as heavy as I was. We will call him Kevin. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and large teeth, and he was always grinning. I started talking to him, and he quickly let me know he was the smartest kid in school. In fact, if he scored less than a 95 on any test, he would be severely punished by his parents, who both worked at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, or KAPL. Kevin and I became fast friends, because we both had an Apple computer with lots of games at home, we shared many of the same interests, and almost everyone hated us for being smart. Kevin quickly recruited me into Boy Scouts, which allowed me to go on camping trips that I really enjoyed. The first one was that same winter, and it was the most fun I’d had since Cape Cod.
I quickly realized, however, that Kevin would do weird and cruel things. The first time I went to his house, he fed his collie dog, Excalibur, a hot pepper, and laughed as she struggled with the pain. More than once, he got angry about something I said and just completely stopped talking to me—for twenty minutes or more at a time. He called it “going into his shell,” and I thought it was ridiculous. No one had ever done that to me before, and it was wasting valuable time I spent at his house—which often involved riding my bike quite a long distance into Glendaal territory to get there. When he came to visit me at my house, he did lots of bad things that got me in trouble—but he didn’t care because his parents were not there to punish him. Another time I squirted him with a bottle used to water the flowers as a joke, and he disappeared. When I came out of the bathroom, he threw a huge pitcher of water all over me, and didn’t even care that it had gone all over the floor. He laughed and laughed about this, and didn’t care when I said it was “too much revenge.”
I also found out that there was something very weird about his parents. They could not tell him a single thing about what they were doing at work. They would always listen to see if he was around, and if he ever got close they would stop talking. They also were forbidden from bringing him to work. They were obsessed with advanced physics and sci-fi movies, particularly if they were about extraterrestrials. They clearly believed in UFOs and directed him to all these different books about them. They also wanted him to study something Albert Einstein had called the “space-time continuum,” and presented him with the idea that you could create a “wormhole” in this “fabric” and travel through it. It became clear that they thought extraterrestrials were very dangerous and we were all being threatened by them. Years later I found out that many so-called nuclear engineers are only using that job title as a cover while they are actually working in classified programs involving reverse-engineered technology from UFOs. They are told that their entire family will be killed if they ever say a single word to anyone. My firsthand experience of seeing how weird, secretive, and paranoid they were made this feel very personal to me.
My mother’s band was now rehearsing in the basement, and that meant there was a full rock-and-roll drum kit down there. I started playing the drums again and quickly taught myself how to do basic rock beats. That September, the Parents’ Music Resource Center, or PMRC, was formed by a group of senators’ wives, and they were trying to completely censor any music that did not agree with their extreme Christian values. This made both my brother and me very angry. When the lead singer of Twisted Sister testified at these hearings, he instantly became even more of a hero to us—and we told him so the next time we met him backstage. I decided I needed to get a lot better at drums, and I began taking regular lessons with Hugh, the drummer from my mother’s band. He would bring me up into his attic, where there was another drum kit as well as all the amplifiers and speakers. Everything reeked of beer and cigarettes, and there were egg-crate cushions all over the walls. I had many lessons with him, and they were much more advanced than what the school wanted me to do, but I was able to follow along.
The new super-villain was Josh, a kid who followed me home from school every day and tried to beat me up. I started walking with Eric and our longtime friend Dave again. We banded together for protection against Josh, but it didn’t do very much good. Every day we tried to run out of school as fast as we could, and Josh came running after us at superhuman speed. Eric attempted to fight back, trying to hit him with his backpack, whereas I tried to talk Josh out of attacking us. I told him I knew his parents were mean to him, he was in a lot of pain, and I understood that, because I was too. Every day I had to talk our way out of being beaten. Josh may have been chasing us to get my counseling each day as much as anything else—but this was a horrible problem that went on for months.
All through the late fall and into the frosty cold of winter, my teacher, Mr. Empie, made us do something called the Turkey Trot in gym class. We had to run during the entire class, passing by the military base as we got started. The idea was that our speed would get better each day. It was very cold, and I hated it more than anything. I would start coughing uncontrollably and was always dead last in line, gasping for breath. The kid who always finished first was a fleet-footed jock whom some kids called Skeeter, who was also the last man standing in all of the dodge ball games. He was a true hero to many of the others, straight through high school, since he was one of our best athletes, even though he was only a little over five feet tall.
I quickly learned to avoid getting hit in dodge ball by constantly staying aware of my environment at all times. Every kid who got hit in the head was not paying attention when it happened, and the jocks were specifically watching for that. I watched every single kid on the other side like a hawk, and made sure no one could get me. Eric would deliberately let a slow ball hit him early in the game, turning his back or side into it to make it hurt less—but I refused to go down like that. Almost every time we played, I would be the last person on one side and Skeeter would be the last kid on the other. He would hold a ball in one arm for protection while throwing the rest of the balls at me with the other—and all the kids would get mad at me for surviving so long. It was impossible for me to “kill” him with a ball. Everybody would cheer and clap when Skeeter finally “killed” me, and then the whole ugly cycle would start over again.
Empie also made us play a very similar game called “Medic Ball,” in which we had to pretend we were fighting a war on a battlefield, and the red rubber balls were now bullets and artillery. I decided that Empie must have been a Vietnam vet and was using us to act out his horrible memories. Once we got hit, we had to stay down and call out, “Medic! Medic!” until one of the kids with a yellow jersey came over and “rescued” us. The only way a team could win was to “kill” the medics and then “kill” everybody else. When Empie got bored, he would blow the whistle and point his two index fingers at each other, which he called “opposite sides”—and sometimes he said the words out loud. This meant that the kids on either team could now rush over the middle line, to another line that gave the losing side only the final third of their space. It was totally devastating, and mowed the survivors down in seconds—like a huge sickle toppling stalks of wheat. This was usually how Empie helped Skeeter kill me off so they could start another game. Little did I know that Skeeter would haunt me in my dreams for many years to come.
Eric’s behavior got worse and worse. All the bullying was turning him into a real jerk. He started throwing rocks at the bodies of eighteen-wheel trucks as we crossed Mohawk Avenue, and got Dave to do it, but I refused the peer pressure. He also thought it was really fun to start snowball fights, which I definitely did not want. One dark and miserable afternoon, with cold sleet falling and three inches of slush all over the roads, Eric started a snowball fight with a random kid. He had spiky black hair, a freckled face, and a sneering grin. He was clearly a dangerous kid, and he was older than us. As it turned out, even though he was short, he was an excellent baseball pitcher—and a psychopath. The kid found a golf ball–sized piece of rock-solid ice, coated it with a little snow, and threw it right at my face as hard as he could. He hit me so hard on the forehead above my left eye that he crushed the bone, leaving a visible dent I would discover years later. I had never been hit so hard in my life, and nearly lost consciousness. I fell to the ground, screaming in agony and crying profusely. I could taste metal in my mouth. The kid cackled like a hyena and slinked away, victorious. Eric barely even cared that I had been injured.
On January 28, 1986, my old friend Billy called me up after school one day, even though we rarely ever spoke. “The space shuttle blew up,” he said. I rushed over to the television and watched in horror as I saw footage of the Challenger breaking apart in midair. This was even more devastating because it was a special mission for kids, with the teacher Christa McAuliffe on board. Almost immediately after it happened, everyone started telling a whole series of horrible jokes about it, including one in which the weather forecast for Florida included “scattered shuttle.” I quickly realized that people were using this cruel, sarcastic humor as a way of coping with almost unimaginable pain. Scientific studies have concluded that humor is an evolutionary mechanism. We constantly scan our environment and look for mistakes, weaknesses, problems, and failures. Identifying these issues causes laughter, which rewards us with a huge flood of endorphins and enkephalins, giving us a significant pain-killing effect and a natural high. This encourages us to continue looking for weaknesses around us that can be improved. The obvious problem is that taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes lowers our readiness for ascension.
The endless bullying had caused me to develop severe depression, which meant my grades were really going down the toilet. The school kept sending home these computer-printed “progress reports” that had targeted, nasty sentences from the teachers telling your parents exactly how much of a loser you were. This essentially caused me to be in trouble with both parents every day, making my life into even more of a living hell. The report cards came in and my grades were just not good enough for them to be satisfied—there were Bs and Cs, with only a few As. I was also starting to go through puberty, which made me even more depressed. Every time my father saw me, he strongly disciplined me about my bad grades—which usually included yelling.
That summer, Eric and Dave found a huge domed structure hidden in the local bike trails that was made out of tree branches. It was very poorly built, tied together with wires and pieces of old, ripped clothes. It would not do very much to protect anyone in the event of a rainstorm. A weird little sign on the front was made of white and blue straws stapled onto a flat piece of wood, and it spelled out HAVE FUN. There was a dirt floor and a fire pit dug out in the center of the dome, which was about fifty feet wide and twenty feet tall.
It was obvious that the big kids had built this place to drink alcohol, do drugs, and have sex, since the HAVE FUN sign had beer-bottle caps on it as well that formed the male and female gender symbols. Eric decided that we needed to completely destroy this structure, even though it would be extremely dangerous if we got caught. Dave and I begged him not to do it, but he insisted. It took us about three four-hour days of backbreaking work, in blazing summer sweat, to trash the fort. I was incredibly afraid the whole time we were doing this that we would get beaten up or even killed, and worked in complete terror, but Eric didn’t care and laughed quite a bit as we did it. Somehow we made it out alive.
About a week later, I talked Dad and Michael into going to Camp Boyhaven with me on a Boy Scouts trip. We stayed in my cheap three-man dome tent, which was sky blue and barely big enough to hold us. That first night, it started pouring rain, and the tent was absolutely not waterproof. Our sleeping bags were completely soaked through. We had to go inside a big tent that was owned by the scouts, where many others were fleeing the rain. The trip was an absolute, horrible disaster—and we never went camping again. The ruin of my own dome tent in the rain appeared to be some sort of “instant karma” for destroying the domed fort the big kids built—even though I was bullied into doing it against my will.
By the time I started eighth grade, Shane started sneaking into Corporations Park, which was a large former military base that had been converted into factories on the other side of the junior high and high school buildings. He would go into buildings that were left unlocked and take things like power drills. I was really surprised he was doing this, but he seemed to enjoy the thrill of it. He would run as hard as he could and had become very fast. His grades were very bad that year and he ended up flunking, which proved to be the best thing that could possibly have happened to him for his social life. The kids in the grade below us had no idea how everyone else saw him. He took his amazing running skills and put them to work on the track, turning himself into a star athlete with extreme popularity. I was one of the only people who knew, at first, how he got to be so fast. This was the first time I had ever gotten to know someone as a friend who was engaging in criminal behavior. Shane even stole things from me later on, including a Metallica CD, but I still forgave him. When I asked him why he did it, he said he didn’t think I was listening to it anymore. I struggled for years to understand how the trauma of his childhood could have been so severe that he would be okay with hurting his own friends. I definitely believed in karma and was shocked that someone would knowingly do things that would require equally painful, crippling events to happen to them later on.
The bullies in gym class were getting worse and worse, particularly in the locker room. One kid said he wanted to show me a “super kick.” I told him “no thank you,” but he insisted—and did a full roundhouse kick, which landed in my gut. I nearly went down. A couple other laughing kids then grabbed me and got the idea that it would be really hilarious to drag me into the showers and saturate me with water. I was still holding on to my books and smelled the sharp sourness of locker-room sweat and mold as they carried me by the arms and legs, hovering two feet above the ground. I went limp so they would think I had given up. They loosened their grip and relaxed, just as I expected they would. I violently jerked out of their hands, abandoning my books all over the floor, and I scrambled out of there. I thought for sure they would destroy my books in the shower, but when I came back a few minutes later the books were still there, which seemed like a miracle.
That afternoon, I told my mother I absolutely needed to learn how to fight. Things were getting far too dangerous. She had already been encouraging me to find a self-defense class, and had volunteered to take me and pay for it, because she was genuinely afraid that I might get killed. I went through the yellow pages of the phone book and looked at all the different schools that were available.
My gaze was drawn to the wild-eyed face of a tiger with its teeth bared. It was an ad for a martial arts studio, run by Ronnie LeBlanc. Mom called him up and explained what had happened to me, and then I got to talk to him myself. He said that his school taught you how to survive life-and-death situations, which he called street fighting. Most karate classes were teaching “tournament fighting,” which had lots of rules to avoid people getting hurt and was nearly useless in the situations I was going through. I was sold from this one conversation. When Dad found out about it, he decided he wanted to take the classes himself, and offered to pay for it. He started taking Michael and me to these classes twice a week.
Mr. LeBlanc was a five-star black belt in at least three different major types of martial arts. His wall was lined with plaques showing he had finished first place in every martial arts tournament he had ever competed in. We learned how to throw punches and kicks against an eighty-pound bag. This included kicking the bag up from the bottom and getting it to rise by an entire foot. This caused crippling pain in my shins that made it hard to walk. The shins eventually became extremely strong due to “bone conditioning,” in which micro-fractures heal stronger than ever. We had to block hard punches, which created bone conditioning in my wrists. We were also taught how to break every imaginable type of hold that someone could put you into. There would never be a “white wash” again. I could slam a bully in three different places and greatly injure him before he ever had the chance to knock me down.
Most important, we were going to learn how to go into a state called “Spirit,” in which your body becomes impervious to physical pain. Even if you get a broken bone or a huge, bloody gash, you will still be able to finish the fight. One guy in the studio had had his stomach kicked open by a biker wearing a steel-toed boot. His intestine was hanging down like a jump rope, which he didn’t even realize until the fight was over. He still managed to finish the battle and escape with his life.
In order to develop Spirit, we had to learn something called “The Form,” which was a series of movements from the Pangai-noon kung fu style we were studying. They based it all on three animals: the tiger, the crane, and the dragon. The story was that at least two thousand years ago, the ancient Chinese studied five animals—the tiger, crane, dragon, bear, and snake—to see how they fought. The bear and snake were not used in our style. The tiger used “hard” techniques like punches and kicks—with lots of power but limited accuracy. The crane would coordinate its “hands” and feet to sweep out the legs of its opponent and make combined attacks. The dragon supposedly used “soft” techniques, in which you had to hit certain points with extreme accuracy, but the techniques were so devastating they didn’t require very much force. We would first start learning the tiger form. As we advanced through the sashes, not belts, we would then be scheduled to learn the crane and dragon forms.
Mr. LeBlanc taught us that bullies do not want to feel pain, and will only go after the “easy kill” whom they can completely dominate with fear. If you fight back and hurt them, then even if you lose the fight, they will almost never want to try again. He also explained that even big, intimidating biker dudes in leather and chains will cry like little children if they take a really good strike or get put into submission with a crippling joint lock. The goal of our training was to devastate the opponent in three seconds or less, and then run. It was only meant to be used in life-threatening situations. We also were taught techniques that could kill an attacker with our bare hands in one strike, which I will not reveal here. We were told never to hit someone in a real fight except on one of the “targets,” which removes the ability of his body to continue fighting by interrupting the activity of the nervous system. Cops have shot a three-inch-wide hole through the chest of someone on drugs like PCP only to be killed by that person in the several seconds before he died. If you hit such an attacker on one of the targets, however, he will go down.
We had extensive coaching on the legalities of fighting, and were told that if you killed someone, or even hurt them badly, you had to have absolute proof that they had presented you with an equally severe threat. Mr. LeBlanc also said that even if you were in the right, and had eyewitness proof, you might still end up going to jail—but that is better than being killed. Still, the best strategy was to go into Spirit, strike the attacker in at least one of the targets, and run away in three seconds or less. Mr. LeBlanc had been in so many life-threatening situations that he couldn’t watch movies, because he couldn’t stand seeing fights that went on and on. His blood would start pumping, time would slow down, his vision would narrow into a cone in front of him, and he would become hyperaware. This was all part of what was supposed to happen to you when you successfully went into Spirit—and it is exhausting and very intense.
Within a few months we started doing the Form in a style called “Form with Mechanics,” in which we focused on doing the movements very slowly and very precisely—like a meditation. This led to “Form with Speed,” in which we started practicing the same sequence much faster, and with power behind each of the movements. Just a few weeks later we started doing “Form with Spirit.” I was taught to lock my abdominal muscles down into a wall, so even if I took a perfect punch to the solar plexus, I would not go down. It was extremely frightening to see someone go into Form with Spirit correctly, as the technique was based on the wild, snarling rage that animals would go into in a fight to the death—particularly tigers. You ended up making the same facial expression as the wide-eyed, ferocious tiger in the school’s logo, and the roaring sounds that emerged were extremely fearsome. Just seeing and hearing this would make no one ever want to fight you.
Mr. LeBlanc explained that you were never supposed to be angry while you did this, despite how it looked. It was the “Spirit of Protectiveness,” intended to save your own life and the lives of those you love. It naturally happens to animals so they will have a better chance of surviving a fight to the death, even if they have been seriously injured. Most people never reach this state even in a terrible fight, due to how we are programmed to be afraid and to avoid pain. If someone does manage to achieve this state of consciousness, it is usually a blind rage of total wildness, in which the person is unable to move or strategize effectively. Typically they will shake so much that they can be very easily knocked over and defeated. We were taught to enter into this state in a split second, lock down into our stance, and have complete control and awareness of our environment once we were in it. Everything went into slow motion, which made three seconds seem like plenty of time to finish the fight.
I strongly disliked doing it, but he was right—I would feel time slow down to a crawl, I would have the feeling of Kool-Aid running through my veins, and I would become hyperaware of the world around me—almost super-aware. Even though I looked and sounded extremely frightening, the goal was to be completely in control of the experience. The speed and precision of the movements I did in Form with Spirit made me very fast, tremendously improving my dexterity. Just as Mr. LeBlanc had said, it became painful to watch movie fights because of how slow they were. I cringed in The Matrix when Morpheus told Neo, “You’re faster than this,” and they continued moving like they were trapped in molasses. CGI was used to make Neo’s arms appear to move faster in one scene, but at the shoulders, where it really mattered, it was still slow. This training also helped me develop the ability to play blistering-fast drum solos by the time I graduated college with a jazz minor.
I did feel something like an extreme runner’s high from doing Form with Spirit, and afterward I would be exhausted—but we continued practicing the technique. We were also told it was extremely important never to tell anyone that we knew Form with Spirit, as people would invariably ask you to spar with them. In our system, everything involved devastating the opponent in as little as one strike. The goal is to completely shut down the normal functioning of the opponent’s body. This meant I had to be very careful in a typical school fight, so I could avoid seriously damaging or even killing someone. The reason I am sharing this with you now is I feel it is very important to learn self-defense. I was able to walk fearlessly in any area and know I could take care of myself in any situation. I realized that fear was a “nudge” that could be greatly reduced, if not eliminated with meditation. My out-of-body experience had convinced me of the reality of life after death, and therefore I didn’t even have to fear a situation where I might get killed. I would always exist. This training ultimately gave me the courage to step into the front lines of the battle we are all facing against a global villain who wishes to kill billions of people.
My next fight happened very early in the training, before I even started learning Form with Spirit. A skinny kid with long brown hair and crooked teeth came up to me in a classroom when only a few others were there. He started insulting my weight with curse words, while laughing and smiling. He was absolutely surprised when I suddenly rushed him. I grabbed him by both shoulders and roared like a lion as I slammed his body through about seven desks. His back hit the wall—hard. I had just rearranged an entire quarter of the room, clumping all the desks together into a cluster on either side of my path. The impact partially knocked the wind out of him. I kept him pinned there and looked at him with the eyes of a murderous tiger, letting him know if he did anything else I could tear him to pieces. He was totally shocked, sucking wind in wide-eyed terror, and he backed off. I let him go and he never tried to bully me again. The word quickly got around that something had changed, and the number of bullying episodes immediately went way down.
By the time I had my next fight, I had been doing lots of work on a technique called “close-quarters fighting,” or “sticky wrists.” The idea was to invade the opponent’s space, so you were only a foot away from his face. This would make him uncomfortable and he would try to back up to hit you, which would be his downfall. You kept both your wrists against his wrists, so you always knew where his hands were going. Then we were taught all these fluid movements that would allow us to block his hands while still being able to get strikes in at every opportunity. It was like a martial arts chess game, and a successful punch usually involved curving around one of his arms. We practiced this for long periods of time at a slow speed; the idea was that it would come naturally by instinct once you needed it—and would be happening at a much greater velocity.
This jock kid, Steve, thought it would be funny to try to slap me outside the gym one day, after he had repeatedly tried to check me pretty hard in the class with his lacrosse stick. I wasn’t even afraid of him. I started smiling as I effortlessly blocked every strike he tried to throw, while repeatedly tapping him very lightly in the forehead with my fingers, again and again, with both my left and right hands. By doing this, I let him know I could have completely devastated him. Other kids saw this and started laughing. I was at least twice as fast as he was, and he didn’t stand a chance. I laughed like a sarcastic bully as he got more and more upset, and it broke my concentration. He backed up and got one really good slap in on my left cheek—hitting me in the face so hard that he left red fingermarks. I shoved him back, causing him to tumble helplessly to the ground. “Don’t ever do that again.” He never did. In fact, he decided it was a lot safer to be nice to me, and even joked around with me after that—but he did knock me over badly in a lacrosse game two years later. There was always a payback. Not only did you have karma to worry about, you had the people themselves—and their friends.