"Oh," I said. "That’s because I’ve been asking for help from higher beings – angels, my psyche, big mind, whatever there is – I don’t know. Zen is so self-power oriented.  I thought I'd appeal to a little other power."

"Yeah. Throw it all in. Doesn’t hurt to try. I haven’t noticed they can help out much but they seem to be trying. What are you asking for?"

"Anything that comes up. I say thanks a lot. Like you’ve said, it doesn’t matter if it’s a big or small request. Help me find something, reduce a tooth ache, help me not get in a car wreck, relate to someone, wake up at a certain time, wake up to reality."

"I can enlighten you in a weekend," he said "Go to the top of a mountain and sit there all night facing east in an invocation. You’ll have visions like Christ on the cross and Buddha under that tree. You can stare at a flame for twenty-four hours. That can do it. You can astral travel around the earth or out beyond. But don’t do that if you’re getting an operation or you might not come back. When I had general anesthesia to get my first pacemaker, I put in the request not to astral travel". He’d also say, "Let me ordain you. People will support you, buy you a nice car."

"I’d do that Fred, but I already have a car."

"Get a camper then."

***

Once I asked Fred about my father with "Tell me about Kelly." He took a minute and asked, "Is this person dead?" I nodded. "They don’t like being bothered. It’s sort of like raping them."

"Oh – well don’t do it then."

"I’ll do it if you want. Just telling you they don’t like it." In a while – "He says he worked hard, took good care of his wife and children. Left them secure. Says he had a lot of fun when he was younger. Says he got too serious about religion. He asks if he can go now."

"Sure."

My father did take good care of us but not just with money. He left us with a solid spiritual foundation. He would come home and sit in the living room in his easy chair and read New Thought Christian literature like Mary Baker Eddy, Emmet Fox, Ernest Holmes, and finally William Walter – what I call mind only non theistic Christianity. Jesus as an awakened person, god as a word for cosmic consciousness. My mother was into that too but she was most interested in reincarnation, especially after my father died. She saw the famous medium Arthur Ford in Chicago. Fred knew Ford, had worked with him. He said Ford was a good medium but he kept telling women that they’d been the Queen of Sheba. I said that Ford didn’t tell my mother that. She said he brought her messages with details he could never have guessed.

I asked Fred what he thinks about the many people who dismiss all this psychic stuff, saying it’s impossible, that all psychics are frauds, liars, con artists. They’ll say it’s all done with cold reading – leading one on cleverly to give them all they need to know to fool you.

"I don’t know where it comes from," said Fred. "Maybe I’m making it all up somewhere in some hidden place. Maybe it’s from something I ate. Anyway, this isn’t for everyone and it’s not necessary to believe any of it."

"I don’t believe anything," I said. "I’m just listening and going, hmmm." I tell the so- called skeptics who say these things they’re doing a reading on people they’ve never met, on events beyond their senses, telling me all about and condemning - not just individuals – but a whole class of strangers from afar. It’s their brand of remote viewing.  If Randy, the psychic debunker had his way, he'd bring back the inquisition and they'd all be in prison.

Fred had no guile, no artifice. He wasn’t of the educated moneyed class that most of my friends and I are from. He came from poverty, was a self-made man. He said things sometimes that struck me as ignorant.. He had enormous confidence but also humility. He talked tough but he was always kind. A con artist fakes sincerity to get something. Fred didn’t want anything much, didn’t want more than his share. He was inexpensive too - $25 an hour in the sixties and he didn’t seem to keep up with the time or inflation. I only paid him the first few times. After a while I didn’t ask him much, mainly brought him other people and said hello. I got to where I had an idea what he would say. Anyway, I like to rely on my own intuition.

***

My older son Kelly and I saw Fred in December of 91 at his home in Idyllwild way up above Palm Springs. "You’ve already lived about six lives in this incarnation," he said looking at me. Kelly was eighteen. Fred said he’d been ready to leave home since he was twelve. He’d done that in a way - gotten himself into private schools and had been living in one in Nevada City, California. Fred said that Kelly had a bright blue light on the tip of his nose showing he was eager to live, discover, positive about the future.

Elin was visiting family and pregnant. She and I were in the US on vacation from Japan where we were living. I asked Fred about the boy on the way. Fred said you can’t get much from fetuses.

"A fetus," I said, "can’t be harder than reading sperm." Fred had told me he’d tried to read sperm and ended up swimming along and feeling how painful it was when their tails broke off.

"He says he’s coming in to work," Fred said.

Fred would try to read anything. I handed him a cane and he said it came from near a lake. I handed him an envelope with a massive letter to Elin when she was in Taiwan early in our relationship and he said, "Lot a trouble."

Fred said he’d asked some earthworms in a jar where they were from and they said over by the faucet. I told this to a friend who went berzerk and said earthworms don’t speak English and don’t know what a faucet is and I said there’s nothing in what Fred said to contradict that. The words came out of Fred’s mouth, not the earthworms’. When he reads people he doesn’t talk with them to get what he gets. He’s reading a mentality in a sphere we share – images, shadows, scratches, auras, words floating by, who knows what? Oh unimaginative literalism!

Fred was not like a normal person in some ways. I’d look at him and wonder. Maybe like some of the Shamans I’ve met. I wrote a song about him called The Dead Man. He did not always share the values of the subcultures I’m usually around. He’d show prejudice like, "The white race is committing suicide." I’d tell him not to say things like that, that people won’t like it. Muriel would wholeheartedly concur from behind the kitchen counter. He told me he’d gone out of his way to attend a Death by a Thousand Cuts in China, getting himself to the front "by pushing and knocking those little guys out of the way." He said that not hunting animals or not eating them is robbing them of their role in life.

Fred said snakes tend not to care so much if they live or die, that they commit suicide by breaking their own spines or poisoning themselves. I wondered about this. Fred and Muriel went camping a lot. He said he opened the door to their camper one morning in the Southern California dessert and a rattlesnake was coiled up at the bottom of the steps. He said they often come in pairs so he asked it if there was another and the snake said yes, not far away. "I told it you’d better join it now or I’ll kill you. The snake said it didn’t care, go ahead and kill me. So I killed it."

Fred encouraged having a lot of sex, maybe because he hadn’t had much till he married at sixty. He said that when a ship hit harbor, all the crew would go out drinking and whoring whereas he would go looking for the holy people. He said the ones he found with the biggest auras were in India and Egypt. But he urged a sex life closer to what the sailors had. He’d say find someone to have sex with and when you find a better one, dump the first one. "No, Fred," I insisted, "You can’t treat people like that." Muriel concurred shaking her head.

Another thing we’d scold him about was spending so much time doing readings for people betting on races. He had some regular customers who’d call him up and get his hit on race horses or dogs. The calls would only last half a minute. I asked how he got paid for that and he said he’d get checks in the mail and admitted he didn’t keep track. I suggested he get a 900 number to automatically charge them and he said it all evens out. Muriel said he just loves reading animals. That’s what he was famous for. He’d be on national call-in radio shows doing it. I chanced on one of them once – people calling in mainly about cats and dogs. When Kelly and I were there in December of 91, Fred walked us over in the snow to a charming motel near his home and while I was signing in Fred started telling the couple who ran the place about their dog who was lying on a rug near a fireplace. Whatever he said got their attention. The wife asked with incredulity how he knew something he’d said. "She told me. She says it’s alright now, that you’re doing her right." As we walked out of the office they still looked fairly stunned.

I didn’t pay Fred anything on that trip but I took him and Muriel out to dinner with Kelly and me at a fancy Idyllwild restaurant. When the food came I stopped asking him what he could sense about the waitress and some of the other customers. I told him he was just like what he said the psyche, angels, and the whole cosmos are like – ask and it will be answered.