Touch Me, Feel Me, Heal Me!
I approached psychic surgery with an open mind. But as I watched the healer press his fingers on my stomach and produce a gray string of gristle, I vowed to expose his mystical medicine.
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For the first two and a half days I was in Mazatlán, R. managed to avoid me. Twice he agreed to interviews, and twice he failed to show up. “He’s very paranoid,” said Jann Peterson, who had been working with him there regularly for two years. “Just detecting a strange energy in a room causes him to freak out.” R. had not forgotten what had happened in Dallas. A similar raid in Puerto Vallarta had disrupted the powers of another healer. Being led off in handcuffs must play hell with concentration. I told Jann that my purpose was to write about R., not arrest him. As far as I could tell, no laws were being broken anyway. Let the buyer beware. Jann’s own psychic vibrations told her that I was okay. “If he agrees to give you an interview, will you agree not to use his name?” she asked. I agreed.
Jann was one of three psychics on R.’s staff in Mazatlán. The others were an astrologer from Connecticut named Lynn Files and Belle Shiplett, the elderly woman with the kindly smile whom I had seen assisting Angel at WillieWorld. Late one afternoon when R. had again failed to keep an appointment, I got the three women of his staff into a discussion of reincarnation. All zonies have experiences with reincarnation, or past-life regressions, as some call it. Jann told us of her life as a Mayan priest in the seaside city of Tulum. Belle had been the son of an Indian chief in Texas and had witnessed her own funeral near Fredericksburg. Though it was a warm tropical night in Mazatlán, I could see goose bumps rippling up her arms as Belle told the story. Lynn was reproachful. She said that Jann took herself too seriously, then told both of them, “Let’s face it. A lot of people remember being Indian princesses, but there’s only so many Indian princesses to go around.” Nevertheless, I coaxed Lynn into admitting her belief that she had been a young German soldier killed in the early days of World War II. She told us that one night, after numerous drinks, she stood up and sang an old marching song in perfect German—a language she didn’t speak. Despite Lynn’s reproach, Jann took another turn. Speaking in an extremely animated, almost agitated voice (the voice of Elaina, I imagine), she told of her experiences hiding Baby Jesus from authorities in Cairo. “I seem to remember changing his diapers,” she said serenely.
It was a Sunday, my last full day in Mazatlán, when I finally got to meet R. He was younger than Angel (who is a relative by marriage) and smaller—he looked like a jockey. His assistant healer, Dodo, looked like a Filipino bantamweight, bandy-legged and puffy-eyed. Dodo was much more relaxed and cheerful than R., and he offered all of us, including a woman dying of cancer, a Filipino cigarette. The brand name was Hope.
A large room with a balcony overlooking the ocean had been chosen as the treatment place. Sheets of clear plastic were spread over two beds—like Angel, R. treated two patients at a time. Unlike Angel, love offerings weren’t good enough. It was a straight cash deal, $80 U.S. for two sessions—no pesos, please. Ten patients were waiting this particular morning, including Belle, who would also be assisting. Expect for me and a young couple from Houston, all patients were New Yorkers. Grace, a woman with frightened eyes, was dying of cancer. Nick, her son, a pious young man who walked with his hands clasped and talked almost exclusively of faith, remained constantly at her side.
During orientation, Nick asked Dodo if walking on fire will increase faith. Dodo looked as though someone had dropped a cobra in his lap. “Walk on fire?” he said incredulously. “Me?” Lynn tried to clarify the question. “He means his own faith,” she told Dodo, pointing out that fire walking had become popular among zonies of the East Coast. “I happen to believe there is no limit to faith,” Nick added. “No, no,” Dodo said, waving his hands furiously. “No walk on fire. Burn feet.”
R.’s hands were much quicker than Angel’s had been; during my operation, he put on a good show. I had asked him to remove a small knot just above my wrist—my doctor in Austin had called it a ganglion and told me that the folk remedy was to hit it with the family Bible, which if done with enough enthusiasm, would cause the knot to vanish. Compared with curing cancer and blocked colons, removing a ganglion seemed the simplest task in the Christian world. R. rubbed oil on the knot, then shook his head—he didn’t want any part of an affliction that would still be there when he was finished. Instead, he fluttered his hands in the area above my kidneys and produced a piece of gray meat; it was the second time in less than a month that my high blood pressure had been cured.
Although Jann and Lynn tried to hustle me out of the room as soon as my treatment was completed, I resisted. Finally, R. nodded that it was okay for me to watch as he worked on Belle. I knew by now that I wouldn’t get an interview, but this was even better. In the dim light, I watched R.’s hands. His left pressed into the white flesh of Belle’s abdomen, creating a small pocket, and his right flitted about, distracting attention. Suddenly the pocket of Belle’s abdomen filled with dark fluid, and just as suddenly R. produced several slivers of gristle. “You see?” he said, dangling the meat just out of my reach. The operation had taken about five seconds. Dodo was already cleaning away the mess. There was no trace of an entry wound on Belle’s stomach. “Amazing,” I said dryly. The truth was, if R. had tried to pass off this act on a carnival midway in, say, Wichita Falls, he’d be leaving town on a rail.
Flying home to Austin, I experienced again the uneasy guilt of a trespasser. As fraudulent as I knew the bloody operations to be, the healing was another matter. Maybe it took displays of blood to trigger faith in certain people. On the other hand, I had sensed that beneath the conditioned reflex of faith, there was a deeper despair, a mute surrender to the inevitable. If the believers had indeed succeeded in damming up their fears and anxieties, it wouldn’t take much to break the dam. I just hated to be the one to do it. Nevertheless, I knew there was one more thing I had to do: I had to get a piece of that congealed energy and have it analyzed.
I stopped off at the laboratory of the Austin Pathology Associates, where a doctor friend gave me a bottle of formaldehyde in which to preserve the tissue. Then I telephoned James Ebert and made an appointment to see Angel, who was working that week out of a home in South Austin. I wasn’t sure how the zonies would react when I made my play for the meat, but just in case, I took along two big friends, Bud Shrake and Fletcher Boone, owner of an Austin restaurant called the Raw Deal.
Star Johnson was the first to realize what was happening. I was stretched out on the table, nearly naked, and Angel was humming and producing small pieces of gunk from the area of my kidneys, depositing them on my stomach. When I grabbed the gunk Star Johnson grabbed my fist, and we wrestled for control. Angel began to scream, “You’ll destroy my power. All the thousands of people I have healed . . . Give it back . . . I’ll pray for you . . . I’ll heal you.” All the color had drained from Ebert’s face. “You’re playing with fire,” he warned me. “This is like giving a loaded forty-five-caliber pistol to a four-year-old girl.”
All hell had broken loose in the waiting room too. Shrake and Boone told me that the woman at the reception desk covered her head with her arms and cried out, “Cover yourself with the white light . . . surround yourself with the light before it’s too late.”
Ebert was waiting for me by the front door, but I knew he wasn’t going to make any move to stop me. Instead, he said, “You’ll regret what you did for the rest of your life. It will follow you to your grave. It will haunt your karma. Something will happen.”
“I’d say in about three days’ time,” a voice behind me warned.
As I hurried out the door, I could hear Angel’s voice at the back of the house. He kept shouting, “Bullshit. This is bullshit.”
My fist had been clenched so tightly I wasn’t even sure that I had gotten away with the evidence. But I had—a piece about the size of a pencil eraser. On the way to the laboratory, Shrake and Boone told me that as soon as I was out the door, Angel complained of a sudden headache, grabbed the cash box, and split. “But he did give me my money back,” said Boone with a smile. I heard later on that Angel left town the same day.
The piece of meat didn’t dematerialize, as had been predicted, but it might as well have. The lab report was inconclusive. The meat was a piece of connective tissue, but nobody could say if it was of human origin.
I had about given up hope when Bud Shrake called a week later. While playing golf at WillieWorld, he had come into possession of new and dramatic evidence—the panties that Lana Nelson had worn the day that Angel opened up her lower abdomen. She had been saving them for four months, meaning to have the stains analyzed. “Lana has graciously donated her panties to your investigation,” Shrake told me. I sent the panties by messenger to the Bexar County Regional Crime Lab in San Antonio. The stain did turn out to be blood—bovine blood apparently diluted with water. Not that it will make any difference to the believers, but I had cow ranked third, behind chicken and goat. Cat was moving up fast.
When I called Shrake, he said, “I guess you knew all along it would turn out this way, eh, inspector?”
I didn’t deny it.
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