TWELVE: Channeling Jack

I am writing this installment on the plane back to Oakland from San Miguel de Allende, a beautiful colonial town in the mountains north of Mexico City. My wife Gloria and I met there in 1991 when we were both on a one year sabbatical. At the end of that year, we got married, exactly 15 years ago today.

On my first day in San Miguel, a few days before I met Gloria, I met Jack Slater, a tall, black, gay writer who ran the literary readings. We quickly became the best of friends – a year later he was my best man at my wedding. I had heard from a mutual friend before I met Jack that he was HIV+, a far more serious condition then than it is now.

Jack was a delightful character with kind words for everyone, voluble, charismatic. He would ride in the rear of San Miguel’s rickety busses, towering above everyone, shouting hearty greetings to all of the people he knew, which were legion, gringo and Mexican.

Jack was writing a novel about the homeless in Los Angeles and asked me to collaborate with him. Though we never talked about it, I knew he felt he needed a co-writer because he wasn’t sure he would survive long enough to finish it himself.

We spent a week on LA’s skid row sleeping in the missions and fleabag hotels and interviewing dozens of homeless men and women.

In late 1994, he succumbed to the very Mexican bug, cryptospiridium, which might cause some diarrhea in a healthy person, but was fatal in people with compromised immune systems. He returned to Los Angeles, where he spent his final days in a squalid nursing home on public assistance, losing his mind along with control of his bowels.

One day, Gloria and I were lying in bed in the early morning when a small voodoo doll we kept as a folk art knick-knack, startled us by jumping off the shelf at the head of our bed, seemingly on its own. Gloria and I looked at each other. We both knew. “Jack,” we said.

Within a half hour, the phone rang. We also knew. It was one of Jack’s friends telling us he had died.

We flew to LA to help with the arrangements and then to San Miguel to execute his estate, such as it was, mostly books and papers, a few paintings. We organized a memorial service.

The night before the service, I smoked some dope to help write my eulogy. I had a weird feeling.

“Jack?” I wrote on my computer.

“Yes, Henry,” he dictated back to my fingers. And so it began, a collaboration beyond the grave.

Together, we were able to finish the novel, Show Me the Way to Go Home. Our mutual friend Clifford Irving called it “gritty real, almost too real.” In subsequent drafts, Jack emerged as a character in the narrative.

Did it really happen? Did our communication really cross the boundary between life and death? It was clear to me that I was doing what people called “channeling.”

Yet when I tested the circuit, tried to get out of him some unique piece of information that only he could know, he failed the test. I couldn’t prove this experience was real.

I concluded that, yes, my imagination played a major role in this conjuring, but that the imagination itself has tentacles that penetrate the spirit world. The imagination is also the vehicle that creates our sense of reality. There is no clear boundary between reality and imagination, just as there is no clear boundary between life and death. Take a plant seed, for example. Is it alive? If not, how could it create a living tree just by dropping to the ground?

It may be that if you believe in something strongly enough, if you can muster sufficient faith, you can make true what you want to be true.

I still have shrine to Jack in my study, complete with the little voodoo doll. Once the book was finished, we stopped talking to each other.

Gloria was pregnant with our son when Jack died. So we named him Slater. Jack lives on in other ways, in memory, which also has no clear boundary with imagination.