The Corridor
What I saw when I walked into Windy City Pizza for the first time to begin working in 1987 was a narrow corridor-like space with a black floor. The dish machine was on one side and the shelves to store stuff, on the other. It was in fact a corridor and everyone who worked there often went through it on their way from the office upstairs to the dining room. Looking up at the high ceiling, I saw that it, too, was black. That corridor was far from any window in the building. Though adequately lit, whether I looked up or down, all I saw was black.
I had tried to find a job other than washing dishes but blatantly failed. A friend of mine was working at a Perkins Restaurant as a dishwasher and helped me get a job there as prep-cook. One day they kept me there for twelve hours and when I said I wanted to leave, the woman training me got angry. They took me off the schedule. They must have wanted me to feel inadequate for that job so I would feel I needed to wash dishes instead. My friend was reliable and did good work; they probably thought I was the same way. They knew too that I had been working as a dishwasher at Pearl's Restaurant and I had quit there without notice. They may have thought I had burned my bridges behind me.
That was the end of the Perkins job. It left me paranoid and suicidal to have been used in such a way. My self-esteem was shattered and here I was back at another job washing dishes, in a black corridor yet.
Between jobs, I had walked around for about three weeks with a paranoia that left me weak and indecisive. I couldn't have gone back to Pearls. I had worked there too long and needed a change. Luckily, a waiter I had known at Pearls was now working at Windy City Pizza and they needed dishwashers.
At first, I worked at nights and on the weekends with a bunch of kids under twenty. The servers and waiters would all come down from the office and walk through that dark corridor at the beginning of their shift. I noticed almost no one when one day, Ted, one of the young dishwashers began to attract my attention. He seemed gay to me, and I think he was still in high school. Slowly I began to become aware of more of the people around me. There was another young dishwasher named Jerry. Thought it strange that a man my age would still be a dishwasher. Before I could get to know anyone to form a friendship or a telepathic sex game, I started working days by myself. All of a sudden, the day dishwasher had to return to Mexico because his father had died, so I took his job. The corridor was no less as black in daytime.
Most of the wait staff were college students, young people who liked to party, and helped finance their schooling by working in a restaurant. Slowly but surely, I got to know them as they walked through my station to work. Two of the waitresses began to stand out from the others, self-assured and arrogant, dropping snide remarks as they passed. The one I remember the most, Roslyn, was a young beauty. She had fair skin and dark hair, which she wore loose like Cleopatra, prominent cheekbones and a strong chin. She might have been plump if any heavier. She didn't pay me any attention. Her boyfriend, Tom, worked in the kitchen. A high-spirited sort of fellow, easy to like and get along with, he was reasonably good-looking and wore glasses. Lean and fit, he usually wore a short t-shirt that didn't reach the top of his tight cutoffs. It was July and that kitchen had no air-conditioning. One day another cook asked him where the keys to the cheese cooler were and he replied, "In my hip pocket," indicating with a thrust of his butt. (I thought of going up to him and saying, "I need those keys" while pushing my hand down into that snug pocket.) Gay innuendos everywhere, yet he was Roslyn's boyfriend.
Once, towards the end of the day, right after I had changed the water where the silverware soaked, Roslyn came in from the dinning room with a tray of dirty dishes and said, "Oh what clean water! Let me dirty it," as she blithely tossed a soiled fork into the water.
Dark psychic things
At the end of December, they chose me as Employee of the Month. By that time, with money coming in regularly and my sanity returning along with my self-esteem, I was able to gain a new awareness of that kitchen, a dark emotion to the atmosphere. Everyone was slightly up-tight and easy-to-anger. When I went home after work, I smoked pot and that same dark emotion hung over me. I wondered who was projecting it. One day after the lunch rush, Roslyn came up to me and said: "Bruce, you better be careful because I'm a witch and.…" Before she could finish I interrupted, "You all are." She walked quickly away.
After that confession, though she delivered it as a threat, I didn't have to guess the origin of the psychic darkness. That was when my telepathy became active. One day as Roslyn passed me wordless in the corridor and went on to the dining room, I heard, "We're going to take humanity through the darkest period of its history." But she wasn't the only one, there were two others. One, another college student, would walk around the place as if she owned it, nose in the air. The other, a bookkeeper who visited the office upstairs nearly every day. She would walk through my corridor briskly projecting official dissatisfaction. I had already applied the rule of not relating to her or any of them.
Difficulties
I had often had to deal with the dark atmosphere of a new job. Mine it was to raise it up and away with my own high. But here I met a different story. Instead of getting higher, I was getting weaker and less able to work physically for long stretches. One morning while I was walking backwards hauling the mozzarella cheese into the kitchen to grate using a two-wheel dolly, I fell onto my back with the cheese and the two-wheeler filled with cheese above me. I thought that I would hurt myself, but the handle happened to land between my arm and chest; it reached the floor and was deep enough to hold the weight of the cheese off me. But I was freaked so I cut the beer down from four quarts a night to three. But also, I stopped smoking pot temporarily.
Then it was spring and I began my first writing workshop with the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild. I remember walking up to James's where the workshops were held and, as I passed the local laundromat, I caught a whiff of pot real strong and thought I simply couldn't escape the stuff. So I started to meditate again. I always found meditation to strengthen my mind and allow me to breeze through most psychic intrusion. But now, when I sat down to meditate, I would start to cough. It was as if someone were throwing a dust ball into my throat. I had to give up trying.
After that, the digestive problems began. Each meal began to feel like a stone in my stomach and when I shitted it out, it was only partially digested. That irritating process finally lead to hemorrhoids. It took me a long time to figure out what it was. One day I was consulting Back to Eden when I happened upon the section on aluminum and I realized finally what had been happening to me: an aluminum poisoning. Nearly everything in that kitchen was cooked on or in aluminum, from chicken breasts, which I ate a lot of, to lasagna to roasted almonds. I had gotten into the habit of grabbing a mini pizza for dinner at the end of the shift. The dough had sat rising for the whole day in the pizza dish. I would make a pizza and throw it into the oven to bake. The pizza dishes were aluminum. I was so happy to know what it was and stopped eating anything that had been exposed to aluminum.
By the time I had gotten everything back on an even keel health wise, my feet began to hurt. But Jethro Kloss in Back to Eden came to the rescue again. He gives a recipe for a liniment in there and I started to make my own variation on it. I applied this liniment to my feet every night and they started to get better. But then, my skin started to break out easily, especially in contact with metal, so I began to take vitamin E. I had to take 1,000 I.U.'s a day to compensate and I still do to this day. The corners of my mouth began to crack so I had to add vitamin B. All the damage caught up with me that I had done to my health through drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and neglect.
One day I was helping the prep-cooks after I finished my dishes. I was working with David, the kitchen manager. He turned to me and said,
"I saw you the other day in the library."
"Yes, I was looking for a book to read."
"My sister likes doing that sort of thing, too."
I didn't even know who his sister was…or was it Roslyn? He had her good looks and dark hair. Also, a friend of mine, who had worked with him there before he had been promoted to kitchen manager, had called him a hothead. He would lose his temper easily and yell at people who made mistakes. Someone must have told him he would have to control his temper if he wanted a promotion to kitchen manager since he was never a hothead with us. I heard him say once, "I think it's neat that my sister is a law unto herself." Was this a pair of power trippers, brother and sister, twins?, working in tandem? Was that why the static field at that place was so strong?
I'd go home, get stoned, and find myself motionless. Once I jerked my hand up and forward violently in an attempt to break out and I heard in a stern female voice, "Bruce, that was an awfully violent act." As if we both understood that I was to be nonviolent. For her the violence. She didn't hesitate to jerk my head around at times, the muscles contracting there, in some kind of punishment. It felt like someone striking out at me. It wasn't painful, but the whole emotional atmosphere of the act was an ugly, hateful violence. Her mind had to be overflowing with violence to do that. As she became in tune with me, I began to realize that this was a special kind of power tripper; one who was actually able to do all those things the others could only threaten. Once I heard Roslyn say, "We get to do this."
I heard other things. One afternoon as Roslyn was bussing dirty dishes onto my shelf, the lyrics to a song sprang into my head, that jaunty song from the sixties that was so popular and ends in the phrase: "So happy together." I was letting the snatch of song pass away ignoring an impulse to sing it when I heard: "Sing it." A super emphatic command. I squelched the impulse. Gradually, I realized she was trying to make a play for me. Here I was forty-five years old, and she couldn't have been over twenty-five. I knew what this was. She had singled me out for special treatment. She had made me her husband in her imagination.
One weekday at work in the morning, the line cook was getting his utensils from the tubs where I put them after cleaning. Out of the blue, he looked at me and said, "Gouge an eye out," this, out loud. He said it in a mean, threatening way as if he meant every bit of it. Whatever his problem, I spent the rest of that workday shoving it to him in the same way, verbally. He was helpless. Once I overheard him saying to Sharon, the other prep-cook, who was aware of what was going on, "I just want to go home." That day I realized how easy it is to be an asshole. The phrases I needed to hurl at him came automatically to my mind. That cook never bothered me again. I don't think he was a power tripper. He was merely caught up in the atmosphere of the place.
I carried all of this around with me when I wasn't at work, but the only person intruding on me psychically was Roslyn. It was a dismal gloom in my head to the point where it felt numb. I remember wanting to throw her away from me like a dirty rag.
I thought of the time right after I had started working that I was lying in bed trying to be in tune to some erotic telepathy and I heard a dude say-felt like David, "All you have to do is blow that and your problems will be over." I was willing to comply since I was so horny, I might have done even more. But before a firm telepathic sex game ensued, there was a snap, the sex disappeared, and I was alone. Was this set up by the two of them or did Roslyn automatically snap us apart? I went to sleep.
I thought David might be having an affair with Ted, that young dishwasher, since all of a sudden Ted was no longer scheduled in the dish room; he had graduated to pizza maker. One clue among others, no doubt. Not long after that, I was walking on the hill when I found myself walking faster and faster, when all of a sudden, I turned back, and there was Ted trying to catch up to me. My own psyche working against itself. All I could do is say hi. Though I thought and wished that I might replace David as his lover. That sort of thing seemed totally out of joint.
Telepathic sex I could do though. One day I remember, after a sex game with someone, I felt like freedom and sex could still triumph in my life. But even that, with time, would become a less totally joyous and illuminating experience. Some kind of damper Roslyn put on everything.
Accident-prone Kitchen
Not only were the people who worked there easily angered, they were also accident-prone. One day David was working the line and I was in my dark corridor when he cut his finger real bad. He actually needed to get to an emergency room for some stitches but couldn't leave the line since there was absolutely no one else there trained to work it. It was a very slow Thursday in the winter and everyone had already finished their work and gone home except him and me. I don't think Roslyn was working that day. David had to hold his hand up over his head wrapped in a dry towel to keep it from bleeding. That evening when I went home, I reached into the medicine cabinet to brush my teeth and found my hand doing a strange little dance onto my razor less than an inch away and, boom, I tapped the edge of the blade and cut myself pretty good. That is what psychic intruders can do.
What is Psychic Intrusion?
Whatever the mystery of how she was doing it, I had trained myself to pick up on the clues that warn you it's happening and who is probably the culprit. Through taking advantage of the expansion and contraction that governs all organic things, when she's in tune with someone, she's able to bring them much harm by suddenly causing a contraction in an otherwise relaxed muscle. Only this morning (May 10, 2003) she caused a charley horse in my neck muscles as I was laying in bed luxuriating in tune with my psychic lover Brian. I didn't have an erection and didn't come or anything, simply feeing very sensuous. (Did I turn my head in an awkward way to look at the clock?) This is a basic part of psychic intrusion. You feel a sudden constriction of the muscles localized to a section of the body, a neck muscle for example. Everyone is reticent to blame it on another person, perhaps embarrassed too, but ask what price will be paid if we ignore it.
Out of the Dish Pit
By then I had been washing dishes for a year and decided it was time to pursue the goal I had before getting into this mess, that is, getting a prep-cook job. I toyed with the idea of leaving the mess behind, but at the same time, I felt that something similar would happen anywhere I went. I always thought that, once I left the place and stopped seeing Roslyn constantly at work, the intrusion would fade away.
So, I stayed there. I asked David if I could move up to prep-cook at my second review. I had gotten two raises of twenty-five cents each, now I wanted a promotion. David said "yes" since the busy summer season was beginning and he needed more people in the prep room. I emphasized to him that I would not like to return to washing dishes in the fall. He told me not to worry about it.
José was the dough cook. He had emigrated from Mexico quite a while ago and spoke excellent English. His eyes sparkled and he was always in a good mood. He trained me to do his job so he could work in the prep-room more often. What a relief to get away from the wet, the garbage, and the dirty dishes!
The end of May was approaching and I was looking forward to the warmer weather. I had begun to get out of the dish room and was learning something new. I had come through a lot of strange bad health. The writing workshop I was taking brought back a welcome creative and intellectual stimulus to my life.
As Memorial Day approached, I had an accident in the kitchen. It was a busy Sunday afternoon and I had the next day off. I was vaguely planning to hike in the mountains, but I was unable to focus on any future thing precisely. It was time to make the pizza dough. The beater was moving slowly through the flour in the mixing bowl and I was unwrapping blocks of margarine and adding them. I was doing it so quickly that when a piece of wrapping paper clung to the margarine and went into the bowl, I instinctively thrust my hand into the flour in search of it when I realized the beater had taken my hand. I let my arm go limp as the beater pressed my hand against the edge of the bowl. I knew my hand was injured, but I wasn't prepared to see an inch and a half of the skin on the back of my hand laid open. Later on, as I waited in the emergency room for the doctor to sew it up, I could see blood vessels shimmering against the tissue, all the energy of my inner life.
Had I blown it? Barely learning a new job and then a careless accident, a bad one. I got workers compensation and took a few days off. My big priority was to heal the wound as quickly as possible and get back to the dough table. I was afraid David would use the accident as an excuse to send me back to the dish room, but he said nothing. I pulled through it all right and spent the rest of the summer doing the dough and prepping.
Was that accident caused by psychic intrusion somehow? It's hard to say; but I did feel like my judgment was clouded and my focus blurred. Neither Roslyn nor David was working that day. Did I hear, "Now the other hand," at one point?
Come September, I had been working there for over a year, a former employee came back and David gave him a job in the prep room. That meant I had to go back to the dish room. Why didn't I quit right there and then? Sometimes I wish I had. Roslyn still thought she could make me into her docile-minded husband. In the dish room, we were in the habit of using a dry, used cloth napkin if there was water on the floor and someone might slip. One afternoon during that slow season, I was preparing to put a napkin on the floor when I caught Roslyn in the corner of my eye coming through the dark corridor but, blanking out about that, I continue to place the napkin precisely over a damp spot on the floor. And as I get up, Roslyn is there walking over it. As if I had done it on purpose to be gallant to her and pay her homage. She gave a little haughty gesture as she condescended her acknowledgement. Why didn't I stop myself? My mind has a sharp focus and concentration, yet here this young woman befuddled it.
Her intrusion was demeaning and belittling. Even though I was used to coping with psychic intrusion, still there were times when all I could see were clouds. I was still smoking a few cigarettes each night with my three quarts of beer. My health was generally better and I didn't feel like she was really overpowering or oppressing me to an impossible degree. But basically, my second fall and winter in the dish room were pretty bleak. I listened to classical music on my new tape player. Between November and February, I read the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. And then there were the writing workshops to liven things up. I spent time with my friend Dick listening to obscure operas by Richard Strauss.
After that scene with the napkin, I tried to be directly aware of Roslyn each time she passed the dark L-shaped corridor that went around two sides of the kitchen. Adjacent to the dish room, the dough room was on the other leg of that corridor. When I was working there, I could see the wait people approaching through the prep room to the kitchen area. If I saw Roslyn, I would turn to stare at her as she passed to be sure she didn't say or do anything untoward. In that way, I could hang aloof from her and she couldn't even dare say a word to me. The relationship existed solely on the telepathic level.
It wasn't until September of the next year that José got tired of doing the dough so often and I took his place. Finally no more slogging in the dish hole. I was more optimistic and open to people. Many there were fun and beautiful regardless of David and Roslyn.
Psychic Sex
However, working the dough table would eventually have a whole new set of problems.
That very fall, a new waiter began working there, a student named Chris. He always greeted me warmly when he came on his shift and passed by me at the dough table. One night when the first quart of beer had relaxed me, I got an erotic call. It's something you feel, a sudden opening up to sexual arousal. I flashed on Chris immediately. A psychic sex game ensued. I was the bottom and I used a dildo. I jacked off afterward to complete the satisfaction. We continued together telepathically for the next two years when he graduated. We didn't talk much at work and I never ran into him in my neighborhood, but later I learned that he lived in the apartment building across the alley from my second-floor room. But, of course, he was clear on the other side. Still it's strange we never ran into each other on the street. Those were two of the best years of my life. I could be quite content with psychic sex especially since the mysterious disease that people started calling AIDS hung dangerously over everything like a black cloud.
Roslyn Eases Off
Once I got out of the dish room, Roslyn finally eased off on thinking I would befriend her. She never initiated a conversation, afraid of a rebuff no doubt. I would have been more than happy to sling a nicely chosen quip in her direction. She could sense my critical attitude. Once she was crouching to pick up some things she needed for the dining room in the dish-room corridor, and I heard, "I'm all innocence," meanwhile projecting this earnest image of herself. Another time, she and her brother David were in the prep-room discussing an up-coming party and he said, out loud, "Bruce thinks he's too old to party. But we think different." I had never told anyone that's what I thought. I avoided their parties because I didn't want to give either of them the opportunity to get closer to me. Only a little bit drunk and I may have lost control of myself. I had long since given up going out to drink, and I never liked parties much because I always felt self-conscious. But even when I would have liked to meet some of the other employees outside the work situation, I avoided those parties like the plague.
I went home and enjoyed my beer, pot, and classical music. I always had a book to read and continued with the writing workshops. I started writing poetry again. My one straight friend Dick invited me over once or twice a week for a session. That consisted of pot, listening silently to a side of classical music (usually from an opera), and good conversation before and after. I went home for psychic sex with Chris after a quart of beer and usually more pot. Woke up the following morning feeling pretty content with myself.
A Way to Escape
One afternoon on a day off, I got home and started to relax when I felt an erotic call from Chris. Strange, since it usually happened at night. I begin to protest, thinking it couldn't work like that, without alcohol. I tried anyway. I simulated giving him a blowjob by sucking on two fingers. My arousal followed his. Then on my stomach on the floor with the dildo well placed. I could feel him come. Then I jacked off slowly and lovely until satisfaction fell on us both. I hadn't ever had such good psychic sex.
Being in tune with Chris, I was better able to extricate myself from the tentacles of Roslyn. She was unable to attract my sexual energy because Chris had it. And with Chris, it was an exchange. With Roslyn, it would be a bond. Like a black hole, she would absorb the energy and use it to have me way down. I once heard from her, "Prepare your wrists because you're going to want to slit them." No doubt about it, hearing that from someone, I took it to mean she wanted to kill me through sheer depression and hopelessness. That may be a reflection of my suicidal mood when I had started that job more than two years earlier. I easily imagined she could have succeeded in doing that very thing to someone once by projecting from my own dark moods. Think of someone on his own and vulnerable, maybe struggling financially and hooked on some drug. No one ever wants to admit to hearing voices to avoid the loony bin. It seemed to me at times Roslyn had a well of hate so deep within her she'd never empty it. Enough to drown the lives of a number of people. Enough to stagger the world. But now I had love so she couldn't kill me.
Jake
Some time later a young man named Jake began working there. He wasn't a student; he played in a rock-punk band. He was at least six-three, big boned, but skinny. I got to know him a bit and found him friendly and easy-going. I overheard him saying once, "When I was in high school, I always hung out in the boys' locker room trying to get laid." I wouldn't have taken him for a bottom, much less gay. But I wasn't attracted to him because he was so tall. I don't feel physically compatible with a dude five inches taller than me and a bottom. I found out later there could have been another reason I wasn't attracted to Jake. It was his attitude slowly emerging. He took the punk role seriously without being cynical.
"One down, two to go." he once said to me in passing.
I asked, "What do you mean by that?"
"The Beatles."
Did he mean to say that, since Lennon was dead, he was waiting for someone to kill the others? This attitude ran counter to our town. Everyone there always marked the day of John Lennon's death with reverence.
He also said once, "San Francisco was LSD and love. New York was heroine and hate. New York won." As if I should learn a lesson thereby. Strange, though, because he didn't have any other traits of the power tripper. I never flashed on him psychically and his vibes were cool. By the way, hate didn't win entirely, since I was living a life of love right there and then, in the midst of all that static energy and pestilence. (Though no one knew.)
About that time, Reyes walked out of the kitchen. He'd been working there longer than me. He was from Columbia, short and stout, always a nice guy. When I asked Jake why he quit, Jake said,
"Oh, he just kind of fizzled out here somehow."
I said, "Gee, I hope that never happens to me."
That same afternoon, David and Roslyn passed by. David looked at me with a really serious expression and Roslyn thrust up her breasts and swaggered toward me so exaggerated it became comic. Luckily there was a wastebasket between her and me so she swaggered on by. It all had an aura of threat somehow, so I wouldn't walk out on them, I suppose. Empty threat, of course, since I knew full well there was nothing they could do if I did. Unless they thought what they were doing or could do to me psychically might deter me. My life was improving; I no longer felt oppressed by Roslyn. But I wasn't ready to quit either. I probably said what I did to Jake simply to see what the reaction would be, though I certainly didn't anticipate David and Roslyn doing what they did.
Pain in the Neck
I had been working the dough table for about two years when I realized my neck muscles were getting tight. I just kept working without thinking about the cause. Chris had recently graduated and left so his help was gone.
About that time, Roslyn pulled a caper the likes of which I still find unfathomable. She put up a sign saying, "All the boys must hug Roslyn to show her they care." I saw the sign in the employee's room up stairs at the entrance to the managers' office. Did she really think her silly sign was going to force me to show a sign of friendship and acceptance? After a couple of days and I hadn't complied, I found the word boys childishly crossed out and the word men scrawled above. As if I hadn't understood that she calls all males "boys." After a few more days, the sign disappears.
How do they take themselves seriously in these ways? I wasn't willing to fake reality for her and show her I cared. I didn't care. She and David must have assumed I couldn't see through their act. And that diminishes them even more in my estimation. She parades around like a little Cleopatra, Queen of Upper and Lower Egypt, Priestess of Osiris and expects to be taken seriously? What do people normally think of a person who claims to be George Washington? But the way she was able to cling to me from afar, monopolize my attention, and use me as a sounding board, and at some other times to cloak me in oppression, that was the bad part. She imagined I felt like I was in jail or under house arrest. Once, at home, after I'd first started working there, I went out to switch my laundry from washer to dryer and I heard, "I'm perfectly capable of directing this relationship." The whole gist being to protest that I had left home without permission. Ask her permission before eating, pissing, leaving home? Entering such a psychic game would be surrendering my sanity as well as my dignity. She would be able to lead me straight onto a psych ward. She was doing all she could to me as it was; it didn't make any difference what I did. I could easily act as if the whole problem didn't exist, go about my business as usual. Once, I walked up into the employees' room and there she was sitting on Jake's lap. I glanced over at them in disgust and she said, "Gouge an eye out." No matter: I could hang aloof and deny it my emotional involvement. I'm mature enough not to take it personally. She had to have been aware that was the missing ingredient in her witches brew, my emotional energy. I could avoid all emotional pain. There was only one person on her psychic stage though she wasn't exactly playing to an empty house. Captive audience, I looked up at her curiously.
The tightness in my neck got worse, turned into a bad neuralgic pain. I felt like my very nerves ached. I began to suspect a repetitive motion injury because of the way I had to spread the dough in the pans with my hands and shoulders. A friend of mine had recently been to a chiropractor for a similar problem and felt his doctor had succeeded in solving it, so I tried him out. He took an x-ray, agreeing with me about the repetitive-motion injury, and suggested I apply for Workmen's Comp. I began treatment with him barely in time because for about a month the pain became worse. And I once got a charley horse in my shoulder and back when distracted in an awkward position at work. I had pains at the base of my neck on each shoulder. Once, on my way to get my evening beer, I became acutely aware of those pains and I heard, "My talons sink deep." The woman was psychotic in her evil, criminally insane. But eventually the chiropractor solved my problem too, and, as the pain diminished, I became less vulnerable to her. She could throw salt, but couldn't create the wound in the first place. With the pain gone and my strength returning I was able to tally a real positive on the health side: I quit smoking tobacco.
Around that time, there were a bunch of new workers in the prep-room, among them, Lee. Born and raised in California, he was an accomplished musician and a member of a rock 'n' roll band. I had found a new interest in the music of Kodaly and Bartok, the Hungarians, and so happened, Lee had learned to sing as a child with the Kodaly method. We had a lot in common. I showed him some of my poetry and he confessed he couldn't find any meaning there. During the slow months, I would finish the dough early and help in the prep-room and talk with Lee and some college students who worked there. Never a dull moment. A young African-American dude worked there for a while. His name was Osiris and he definitely let us know he was named after the Egyptian god, that it wasn't a form of the name Cyrus.
I said, " Oh, I thought the name of that god was Orisis. Isis and Orisis."
"Bruce, you're dyslexic," Lee offered.
Sex Problems
With Chris gone, I was sort of dangling, passing from one psychic sexual encounter to another when a new student, Tim, began working there. He was a bit shorter than me and stocky with red hair and an easy laugh. I had learned some things about AIDS, especially the importance of using a rubber, so I was anxious to try something for real. One day someone asked where something was and Tim said, "Robert has it up his ass," and I realized they were both gay, Robert being Tim's housemate. So I began to cruise Tim and right when I began to feel he had an interest, I heard him admit to a waitress that he was interested in an older man, nodding in my direction, and she said, "Oh, he's too old for you." Tim must have agreed because he stopped showing an interest in me.
About that time, the student health center was testing for AIDS free of charge so I decided to get tested. I went back for the results two weeks later with much trepidation, but, to my relief, I was negative.
There were many tentative opportunities to find a real affair, but they always fell apart somehow. The whole thing made me stop trying.
When Mike began working there that spring, the fourth year, I had the chance one night to play the top role telepathically with him. We had a great time. The next day, he didn't show up for work when he was scheduled so I asked Jane, the head manager, what happened. Sitting right there was Roslyn who volunteered before Jane could answer, "He has an infection throughout his whole body." Exactly as if she knew what he was suffering. She had busted him somehow after the sex the night before. She could really deal a clout at times. We hadn't taken the right precautions or else I hadn't kept with him long enough afterwards. I knew of the danger of getting busted after sex, but somehow Roslyn had managed it. Mike was back to work though, his usual buoyant self, in a few days, but we never had telepathic sex games again. He graduated from college and moved to another town.
Family Reunion
Right after I had worked at Windy City Pizza for four years, in August, I took two weeks off for a family reunion. My older brother, Matt, had divorced and remarried a few years before, and his new wife, Deanna, managed to get us all up to their horse farm in Wisconsin for a four-day weekend. Three of my sisters, two of their husbands, two nephews, one of which brought his wife and three young boys. We went horseback riding through the woods on Matt's property. What a joy to savor the silence in a rural setting hundreds of miles from a major city!
When I got back, a calamity had fallen on the kitchen. The walk-in refrigerator was too warm one day when the health department inspector had come by. David lost his job, though it certainly wasn't his fault. The managers knew there were problems with the walk-in but didn't want to put the money in it right then. Maybe because they had recently opened a new store and all the profits had to go there. Roslyn and David took a vacation to California, Muscle Beach.
The man who owned Windy City Pizza also owned two other restaurants in town and, when they came back, David became the kitchen manager at one, and Roslyn started waiting tables at the other. Where I worked became free of their static influence. I began trying to raise the psychic level there as I was able to do at other places I had worked. But before I could accomplish it, Roslyn returned to wait tables. The first day of her return, someone asked her,
"Roslyn, are you glad to be back?"
"Oh I'm very, very, VERY, glad to be back!!" And, of course, along with her came the static glue again. I had known quite a few power trippers by then; but this Roslyn was by far the worst. She had totally given herself over to the dark side and, like Lucifer, thought herself magnificent. She did have her admirers. Once I heard her saying to a group of young women, something like her coterie, her court, loud enough to ensure I would hear, "Bruce is still being a very, very, bad boy."
Not bad enough since I was still frustrated at finding a lover. Telepathy always of course. I was positive one young dude was interested in me sexually, but he turned out to have a girl friend. I felt dismal for a few days, and then pinned my hope on someone else. I had sort of learned not to commit too much emotion to the process, to keep my heart out of danger, but sometimes I slipped over the brink.
Once when I was doing the dough to finish up for the evening, I noticed I had made thirteen mini pizzas. I quickly shrugged it off, said to myself, "Thirteen isn't an unlucky number," only to turn and see that I had left the water running in a sink in the prep-room and it was now overflowing. So I had to spend fifteen minutes cleaning that up before I could finish the dough and go home.
After close to five years, finally, I had had enough of the place and told the new kitchen manager, Joe, I would be looking for another job. When I told my chiropractor about it, he said I shouldn't do that because they might fire me. I also managed to arrange to do only prep during the coming summer. One thing and another, I never did look for a new job.
A chick named Bonnie started working there that spring. I didn't like her right from the start. Once she was scheduled to do the dough right after me and I did the absolute minimum. When she saw how few pies had been prepared she said, "Is that all you're going to leave me with?"
I stuck my thumb up and said, "Shove it."
Prep-cook
Lee seemed to welcome me when I started full time in the prep-room. It was May and we were gearing up for the busy season. There were many new workers, still the young college students for the most part. During the first few days I gave it everything I had, but about the third day, after I got home exhausted, flopped down in my chair, and got stoned, I went over all the items I'd prepped that day and realized I had done much more than my share of the work. The next day, I slowed down and observed. When all the others went out for a smoke break, I kept working because I didn't smoke anymore. No one seemed too worried about finishing the list. Everyone would stop their work for a while to talk. But the next day, Lee noticed I had slowed down and said to me, "Bruce, you should have been done with the slicers long ago. Hurry up, man." I ignored him, and he didn't say any more. At the end of the day, once, I was working at the slicer and turned to see Bonnie eating ice cream from the five-gallon container we kept in the freezer there for the customers. She never got caught even though the managers and wait people passed right through the prep-room on their way to the dining room. Everything went smoothly right through the summer when I was due for a review.
It was August and I had been working there for five years. I had seen that place go through a thousand changes. There was only one other person who had been there when I started. David had lost his job. Most had found other work or graduated from college and left town. The turnover was constant. Roslyn was still there. I was content because I didn't have to do the dough. My review was coming up and I was anticipating another raise. One morning, one of the cooks, a real hippy, was caught smoking a joint in the alley behind the restaurant and was fired at the end of the day. Some workers questioned that policy. Why hadn't they fired him in the morning right after he was caught? Had they wanted to get rid of him?
When I went up to talk to Joe one afternoon the next week for my review, he let the bomb fall. Saying that I hadn't been working hard enough, they let me go. I could either work two more weeks or leave right then. If I applied for unemployment, they wouldn't challenge it. I could always go to work at the restaurant where David was now working.
When I protested, Joe reminded me, "Bruce, you said you were going to quit six months ago."
So I acquiesced, told him I'd work out the two weeks and maybe go to work with David.
By the next day, I had changed my mind. Since I had an opportunity to go on unemployment, I could leave the whole place behind. A clean break with David and Roslyn. I'd never have to return.
During those two weeks, I learned some more things, however. I overheard the assistant manager say, "Once Bruce is gone we may all get a raise." They had only wanted to free up some payroll by firing me. It was a full but uneventful two weeks and they had a little celebration for me on the afternoon of the last day. Cake and ice cream. Just like a birthday party.
Of course, to celebrate the end of the job, I drank. The next evening I was already buzzing when, on my way to the liquor store to buy some more beer, I ran into Dick. As always, he invited me over for a listening session. Somehow, it was decided that I would buy a pint of brandy and drink it at Dick's while we listened. He gave me a small glass with an oriental motif designed for sake to drink from. I woke up the next morning to discover the insides of my arms were scabby and raw. I vaguely remembered something had happened on the way home from Dick's but didn't learn what until I next saw him. Apparently, when I got up to leave, I was already swaying, having to catch myself from falling over. On the way home, where the bridge crossed the stream, some tall willow trees grew with their rough bark. Dick told me I had thrust myself into and against one of these trees several times. "As if someone were pushing you against the tree. I feel like I'm partially to blame since I suggested the brandy." But I knew exactly who was to blame.
That kind of mishap I can put quickly and safely into my past. My arms healed, there were no scars. I went on unemployment and had a new job six weeks later. Of course, Roslyn kept intruding upon me and I expected as much. And here it is eleven years later and still I'm dealing with her, Windy City Pizza's legacy.
My attitude toward psychic intrusion definitely changed after I encountered these two, Roslyn and David. So this was why earlier power trippers had thought they could do so much to me; whoever initiated them told them the victim had to accept whatever they dished out. Roslyn could do it. She was able to nearly paralyze me, and I had a lot of experience defending against such psychic pressure. I had already written "Power Tripper." I feel it my duty somehow to wake people up to these psychic things we experience but no one ever talks about. I need to make people aware that this is a real problem not simply some dabbling in voodoo or the black arts. I don't want people to go on thinking, "No one could be that bad." One more step in the awareness of evil might be enough to conquer it.
What I saw when I walked into Windy City Pizza for the first time to begin working in 1987 was a narrow corridor-like space with a black floor. The dish machine was on one side and the shelves to store stuff, on the other. It was in fact a corridor and everyone who worked there often went through it on their way from the office upstairs to the dining room. Looking up at the high ceiling, I saw that it, too, was black. That corridor was far from any window in the building. Though adequately lit, whether I looked up or down, all I saw was black.
I had tried to find a job other than washing dishes but blatantly failed. A friend of mine was working at a Perkins Restaurant as a dishwasher and helped me get a job there as prep-cook. One day they kept me there for twelve hours and when I said I wanted to leave, the woman training me got angry. They took me off the schedule. They must have wanted me to feel inadequate for that job so I would feel I needed to wash dishes instead. My friend was reliable and did good work; they probably thought I was the same way. They knew too that I had been working as a dishwasher at Pearl's Restaurant and I had quit there without notice. They may have thought I had burned my bridges behind me.
That was the end of the Perkins job. It left me paranoid and suicidal to have been used in such a way. My self-esteem was shattered and here I was back at another job washing dishes, in a black corridor yet.
Between jobs, I had walked around for about three weeks with a paranoia that left me weak and indecisive. I couldn't have gone back to Pearls. I had worked there too long and needed a change. Luckily, a waiter I had known at Pearls was now working at Windy City Pizza and they needed dishwashers.
At first, I worked at nights and on the weekends with a bunch of kids under twenty. The servers and waiters would all come down from the office and walk through that dark corridor at the beginning of their shift. I noticed almost no one when one day, Ted, one of the young dishwashers began to attract my attention. He seemed gay to me, and I think he was still in high school. Slowly I began to become aware of more of the people around me. There was another young dishwasher named Jerry. Thought it strange that a man my age would still be a dishwasher. Before I could get to know anyone to form a friendship or a telepathic sex game, I started working days by myself. All of a sudden, the day dishwasher had to return to Mexico because his father had died, so I took his job. The corridor was no less as black in daytime.
Most of the wait staff were college students, young people who liked to party, and helped finance their schooling by working in a restaurant. Slowly but surely, I got to know them as they walked through my station to work. Two of the waitresses began to stand out from the others, self-assured and arrogant, dropping snide remarks as they passed. The one I remember the most, Roslyn, was a young beauty. She had fair skin and dark hair, which she wore loose like Cleopatra, prominent cheekbones and a strong chin. She might have been plump if any heavier. She didn't pay me any attention. Her boyfriend, Tom, worked in the kitchen. A high-spirited sort of fellow, easy to like and get along with, he was reasonably good-looking and wore glasses. Lean and fit, he usually wore a short t-shirt that didn't reach the top of his tight cutoffs. It was July and that kitchen had no air-conditioning. One day another cook asked him where the keys to the cheese cooler were and he replied, "In my hip pocket," indicating with a thrust of his butt. (I thought of going up to him and saying, "I need those keys" while pushing my hand down into that snug pocket.) Gay innuendos everywhere, yet he was Roslyn's boyfriend.
Once, towards the end of the day, right after I had changed the water where the silverware soaked, Roslyn came in from the dinning room with a tray of dirty dishes and said, "Oh what clean water! Let me dirty it," as she blithely tossed a soiled fork into the water.
Dark psychic things
At the end of December, they chose me as Employee of the Month. By that time, with money coming in regularly and my sanity returning along with my self-esteem, I was able to gain a new awareness of that kitchen, a dark emotion to the atmosphere. Everyone was slightly up-tight and easy-to-anger. When I went home after work, I smoked pot and that same dark emotion hung over me. I wondered who was projecting it. One day after the lunch rush, Roslyn came up to me and said: "Bruce, you better be careful because I'm a witch and.…" Before she could finish I interrupted, "You all are." She walked quickly away.
After that confession, though she delivered it as a threat, I didn't have to guess the origin of the psychic darkness. That was when my telepathy became active. One day as Roslyn passed me wordless in the corridor and went on to the dining room, I heard, "We're going to take humanity through the darkest period of its history." But she wasn't the only one, there were two others. One, another college student, would walk around the place as if she owned it, nose in the air. The other, a bookkeeper who visited the office upstairs nearly every day. She would walk through my corridor briskly projecting official dissatisfaction. I had already applied the rule of not relating to her or any of them.
Difficulties
I had often had to deal with the dark atmosphere of a new job. Mine it was to raise it up and away with my own high. But here I met a different story. Instead of getting higher, I was getting weaker and less able to work physically for long stretches. One morning while I was walking backwards hauling the mozzarella cheese into the kitchen to grate using a two-wheel dolly, I fell onto my back with the cheese and the two-wheeler filled with cheese above me. I thought that I would hurt myself, but the handle happened to land between my arm and chest; it reached the floor and was deep enough to hold the weight of the cheese off me. But I was freaked so I cut the beer down from four quarts a night to three. But also, I stopped smoking pot temporarily.
Then it was spring and I began my first writing workshop with the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild. I remember walking up to James's where the workshops were held and, as I passed the local laundromat, I caught a whiff of pot real strong and thought I simply couldn't escape the stuff. So I started to meditate again. I always found meditation to strengthen my mind and allow me to breeze through most psychic intrusion. But now, when I sat down to meditate, I would start to cough. It was as if someone were throwing a dust ball into my throat. I had to give up trying.
After that, the digestive problems began. Each meal began to feel like a stone in my stomach and when I shitted it out, it was only partially digested. That irritating process finally lead to hemorrhoids. It took me a long time to figure out what it was. One day I was consulting Back to Eden when I happened upon the section on aluminum and I realized finally what had been happening to me: an aluminum poisoning. Nearly everything in that kitchen was cooked on or in aluminum, from chicken breasts, which I ate a lot of, to lasagna to roasted almonds. I had gotten into the habit of grabbing a mini pizza for dinner at the end of the shift. The dough had sat rising for the whole day in the pizza dish. I would make a pizza and throw it into the oven to bake. The pizza dishes were aluminum. I was so happy to know what it was and stopped eating anything that had been exposed to aluminum.
By the time I had gotten everything back on an even keel health wise, my feet began to hurt. But Jethro Kloss in Back to Eden came to the rescue again. He gives a recipe for a liniment in there and I started to make my own variation on it. I applied this liniment to my feet every night and they started to get better. But then, my skin started to break out easily, especially in contact with metal, so I began to take vitamin E. I had to take 1,000 I.U.'s a day to compensate and I still do to this day. The corners of my mouth began to crack so I had to add vitamin B. All the damage caught up with me that I had done to my health through drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and neglect.
Tom started working the dough table and one day I was finished with the dishes and helped him. Roslyn walked by without saying a word, and I asked him, "Isn't Roslyn your girlfriend?" He said, "Not anymore; she won't even talk to me now." He didn't really seem bummed about it, though. A couple days later, he was wearing a neck brace. I didn't ask him about it but I knew his injury was caused by Roslyn's telepathy. Tom quit shortly after that.
Sister and Brother TeamOne day I was helping the prep-cooks after I finished my dishes. I was working with David, the kitchen manager. He turned to me and said,
"I saw you the other day in the library."
"Yes, I was looking for a book to read."
"My sister likes doing that sort of thing, too."
I didn't even know who his sister was…or was it Roslyn? He had her good looks and dark hair. Also, a friend of mine, who had worked with him there before he had been promoted to kitchen manager, had called him a hothead. He would lose his temper easily and yell at people who made mistakes. Someone must have told him he would have to control his temper if he wanted a promotion to kitchen manager since he was never a hothead with us. I heard him say once, "I think it's neat that my sister is a law unto herself." Was this a pair of power trippers, brother and sister, twins?, working in tandem? Was that why the static field at that place was so strong?
I'd go home, get stoned, and find myself motionless. Once I jerked my hand up and forward violently in an attempt to break out and I heard in a stern female voice, "Bruce, that was an awfully violent act." As if we both understood that I was to be nonviolent. For her the violence. She didn't hesitate to jerk my head around at times, the muscles contracting there, in some kind of punishment. It felt like someone striking out at me. It wasn't painful, but the whole emotional atmosphere of the act was an ugly, hateful violence. Her mind had to be overflowing with violence to do that. As she became in tune with me, I began to realize that this was a special kind of power tripper; one who was actually able to do all those things the others could only threaten. Once I heard Roslyn say, "We get to do this."
I heard other things. One afternoon as Roslyn was bussing dirty dishes onto my shelf, the lyrics to a song sprang into my head, that jaunty song from the sixties that was so popular and ends in the phrase: "So happy together." I was letting the snatch of song pass away ignoring an impulse to sing it when I heard: "Sing it." A super emphatic command. I squelched the impulse. Gradually, I realized she was trying to make a play for me. Here I was forty-five years old, and she couldn't have been over twenty-five. I knew what this was. She had singled me out for special treatment. She had made me her husband in her imagination.
One weekday at work in the morning, the line cook was getting his utensils from the tubs where I put them after cleaning. Out of the blue, he looked at me and said, "Gouge an eye out," this, out loud. He said it in a mean, threatening way as if he meant every bit of it. Whatever his problem, I spent the rest of that workday shoving it to him in the same way, verbally. He was helpless. Once I overheard him saying to Sharon, the other prep-cook, who was aware of what was going on, "I just want to go home." That day I realized how easy it is to be an asshole. The phrases I needed to hurl at him came automatically to my mind. That cook never bothered me again. I don't think he was a power tripper. He was merely caught up in the atmosphere of the place.
I carried all of this around with me when I wasn't at work, but the only person intruding on me psychically was Roslyn. It was a dismal gloom in my head to the point where it felt numb. I remember wanting to throw her away from me like a dirty rag.
I thought of the time right after I had started working that I was lying in bed trying to be in tune to some erotic telepathy and I heard a dude say-felt like David, "All you have to do is blow that and your problems will be over." I was willing to comply since I was so horny, I might have done even more. But before a firm telepathic sex game ensued, there was a snap, the sex disappeared, and I was alone. Was this set up by the two of them or did Roslyn automatically snap us apart? I went to sleep.
I thought David might be having an affair with Ted, that young dishwasher, since all of a sudden Ted was no longer scheduled in the dish room; he had graduated to pizza maker. One clue among others, no doubt. Not long after that, I was walking on the hill when I found myself walking faster and faster, when all of a sudden, I turned back, and there was Ted trying to catch up to me. My own psyche working against itself. All I could do is say hi. Though I thought and wished that I might replace David as his lover. That sort of thing seemed totally out of joint.
Telepathic sex I could do though. One day I remember, after a sex game with someone, I felt like freedom and sex could still triumph in my life. But even that, with time, would become a less totally joyous and illuminating experience. Some kind of damper Roslyn put on everything.
Accident-prone Kitchen
Not only were the people who worked there easily angered, they were also accident-prone. One day David was working the line and I was in my dark corridor when he cut his finger real bad. He actually needed to get to an emergency room for some stitches but couldn't leave the line since there was absolutely no one else there trained to work it. It was a very slow Thursday in the winter and everyone had already finished their work and gone home except him and me. I don't think Roslyn was working that day. David had to hold his hand up over his head wrapped in a dry towel to keep it from bleeding. That evening when I went home, I reached into the medicine cabinet to brush my teeth and found my hand doing a strange little dance onto my razor less than an inch away and, boom, I tapped the edge of the blade and cut myself pretty good. That is what psychic intruders can do.
What is Psychic Intrusion?
Whatever the mystery of how she was doing it, I had trained myself to pick up on the clues that warn you it's happening and who is probably the culprit. Through taking advantage of the expansion and contraction that governs all organic things, when she's in tune with someone, she's able to bring them much harm by suddenly causing a contraction in an otherwise relaxed muscle. Only this morning (May 10, 2003) she caused a charley horse in my neck muscles as I was laying in bed luxuriating in tune with my psychic lover Brian. I didn't have an erection and didn't come or anything, simply feeing very sensuous. (Did I turn my head in an awkward way to look at the clock?) This is a basic part of psychic intrusion. You feel a sudden constriction of the muscles localized to a section of the body, a neck muscle for example. Everyone is reticent to blame it on another person, perhaps embarrassed too, but ask what price will be paid if we ignore it.
Out of the Dish Pit
By then I had been washing dishes for a year and decided it was time to pursue the goal I had before getting into this mess, that is, getting a prep-cook job. I toyed with the idea of leaving the mess behind, but at the same time, I felt that something similar would happen anywhere I went. I always thought that, once I left the place and stopped seeing Roslyn constantly at work, the intrusion would fade away.
So, I stayed there. I asked David if I could move up to prep-cook at my second review. I had gotten two raises of twenty-five cents each, now I wanted a promotion. David said "yes" since the busy summer season was beginning and he needed more people in the prep room. I emphasized to him that I would not like to return to washing dishes in the fall. He told me not to worry about it.
José was the dough cook. He had emigrated from Mexico quite a while ago and spoke excellent English. His eyes sparkled and he was always in a good mood. He trained me to do his job so he could work in the prep-room more often. What a relief to get away from the wet, the garbage, and the dirty dishes!
The end of May was approaching and I was looking forward to the warmer weather. I had begun to get out of the dish room and was learning something new. I had come through a lot of strange bad health. The writing workshop I was taking brought back a welcome creative and intellectual stimulus to my life.
As Memorial Day approached, I had an accident in the kitchen. It was a busy Sunday afternoon and I had the next day off. I was vaguely planning to hike in the mountains, but I was unable to focus on any future thing precisely. It was time to make the pizza dough. The beater was moving slowly through the flour in the mixing bowl and I was unwrapping blocks of margarine and adding them. I was doing it so quickly that when a piece of wrapping paper clung to the margarine and went into the bowl, I instinctively thrust my hand into the flour in search of it when I realized the beater had taken my hand. I let my arm go limp as the beater pressed my hand against the edge of the bowl. I knew my hand was injured, but I wasn't prepared to see an inch and a half of the skin on the back of my hand laid open. Later on, as I waited in the emergency room for the doctor to sew it up, I could see blood vessels shimmering against the tissue, all the energy of my inner life.
Had I blown it? Barely learning a new job and then a careless accident, a bad one. I got workers compensation and took a few days off. My big priority was to heal the wound as quickly as possible and get back to the dough table. I was afraid David would use the accident as an excuse to send me back to the dish room, but he said nothing. I pulled through it all right and spent the rest of the summer doing the dough and prepping.
Was that accident caused by psychic intrusion somehow? It's hard to say; but I did feel like my judgment was clouded and my focus blurred. Neither Roslyn nor David was working that day. Did I hear, "Now the other hand," at one point?
Come September, I had been working there for over a year, a former employee came back and David gave him a job in the prep room. That meant I had to go back to the dish room. Why didn't I quit right there and then? Sometimes I wish I had. Roslyn still thought she could make me into her docile-minded husband. In the dish room, we were in the habit of using a dry, used cloth napkin if there was water on the floor and someone might slip. One afternoon during that slow season, I was preparing to put a napkin on the floor when I caught Roslyn in the corner of my eye coming through the dark corridor but, blanking out about that, I continue to place the napkin precisely over a damp spot on the floor. And as I get up, Roslyn is there walking over it. As if I had done it on purpose to be gallant to her and pay her homage. She gave a little haughty gesture as she condescended her acknowledgement. Why didn't I stop myself? My mind has a sharp focus and concentration, yet here this young woman befuddled it.
Her intrusion was demeaning and belittling. Even though I was used to coping with psychic intrusion, still there were times when all I could see were clouds. I was still smoking a few cigarettes each night with my three quarts of beer. My health was generally better and I didn't feel like she was really overpowering or oppressing me to an impossible degree. But basically, my second fall and winter in the dish room were pretty bleak. I listened to classical music on my new tape player. Between November and February, I read the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. And then there were the writing workshops to liven things up. I spent time with my friend Dick listening to obscure operas by Richard Strauss.
After that scene with the napkin, I tried to be directly aware of Roslyn each time she passed the dark L-shaped corridor that went around two sides of the kitchen. Adjacent to the dish room, the dough room was on the other leg of that corridor. When I was working there, I could see the wait people approaching through the prep room to the kitchen area. If I saw Roslyn, I would turn to stare at her as she passed to be sure she didn't say or do anything untoward. In that way, I could hang aloof from her and she couldn't even dare say a word to me. The relationship existed solely on the telepathic level.
It wasn't until September of the next year that José got tired of doing the dough so often and I took his place. Finally no more slogging in the dish hole. I was more optimistic and open to people. Many there were fun and beautiful regardless of David and Roslyn.
Psychic Sex
However, working the dough table would eventually have a whole new set of problems.
That very fall, a new waiter began working there, a student named Chris. He always greeted me warmly when he came on his shift and passed by me at the dough table. One night when the first quart of beer had relaxed me, I got an erotic call. It's something you feel, a sudden opening up to sexual arousal. I flashed on Chris immediately. A psychic sex game ensued. I was the bottom and I used a dildo. I jacked off afterward to complete the satisfaction. We continued together telepathically for the next two years when he graduated. We didn't talk much at work and I never ran into him in my neighborhood, but later I learned that he lived in the apartment building across the alley from my second-floor room. But, of course, he was clear on the other side. Still it's strange we never ran into each other on the street. Those were two of the best years of my life. I could be quite content with psychic sex especially since the mysterious disease that people started calling AIDS hung dangerously over everything like a black cloud.
Roslyn Eases Off
Once I got out of the dish room, Roslyn finally eased off on thinking I would befriend her. She never initiated a conversation, afraid of a rebuff no doubt. I would have been more than happy to sling a nicely chosen quip in her direction. She could sense my critical attitude. Once she was crouching to pick up some things she needed for the dining room in the dish-room corridor, and I heard, "I'm all innocence," meanwhile projecting this earnest image of herself. Another time, she and her brother David were in the prep-room discussing an up-coming party and he said, out loud, "Bruce thinks he's too old to party. But we think different." I had never told anyone that's what I thought. I avoided their parties because I didn't want to give either of them the opportunity to get closer to me. Only a little bit drunk and I may have lost control of myself. I had long since given up going out to drink, and I never liked parties much because I always felt self-conscious. But even when I would have liked to meet some of the other employees outside the work situation, I avoided those parties like the plague.
I went home and enjoyed my beer, pot, and classical music. I always had a book to read and continued with the writing workshops. I started writing poetry again. My one straight friend Dick invited me over once or twice a week for a session. That consisted of pot, listening silently to a side of classical music (usually from an opera), and good conversation before and after. I went home for psychic sex with Chris after a quart of beer and usually more pot. Woke up the following morning feeling pretty content with myself.
A Way to Escape
One afternoon on a day off, I got home and started to relax when I felt an erotic call from Chris. Strange, since it usually happened at night. I begin to protest, thinking it couldn't work like that, without alcohol. I tried anyway. I simulated giving him a blowjob by sucking on two fingers. My arousal followed his. Then on my stomach on the floor with the dildo well placed. I could feel him come. Then I jacked off slowly and lovely until satisfaction fell on us both. I hadn't ever had such good psychic sex.
Being in tune with Chris, I was better able to extricate myself from the tentacles of Roslyn. She was unable to attract my sexual energy because Chris had it. And with Chris, it was an exchange. With Roslyn, it would be a bond. Like a black hole, she would absorb the energy and use it to have me way down. I once heard from her, "Prepare your wrists because you're going to want to slit them." No doubt about it, hearing that from someone, I took it to mean she wanted to kill me through sheer depression and hopelessness. That may be a reflection of my suicidal mood when I had started that job more than two years earlier. I easily imagined she could have succeeded in doing that very thing to someone once by projecting from my own dark moods. Think of someone on his own and vulnerable, maybe struggling financially and hooked on some drug. No one ever wants to admit to hearing voices to avoid the loony bin. It seemed to me at times Roslyn had a well of hate so deep within her she'd never empty it. Enough to drown the lives of a number of people. Enough to stagger the world. But now I had love so she couldn't kill me.
Jake
Some time later a young man named Jake began working there. He wasn't a student; he played in a rock-punk band. He was at least six-three, big boned, but skinny. I got to know him a bit and found him friendly and easy-going. I overheard him saying once, "When I was in high school, I always hung out in the boys' locker room trying to get laid." I wouldn't have taken him for a bottom, much less gay. But I wasn't attracted to him because he was so tall. I don't feel physically compatible with a dude five inches taller than me and a bottom. I found out later there could have been another reason I wasn't attracted to Jake. It was his attitude slowly emerging. He took the punk role seriously without being cynical.
"One down, two to go." he once said to me in passing.
I asked, "What do you mean by that?"
"The Beatles."
Did he mean to say that, since Lennon was dead, he was waiting for someone to kill the others? This attitude ran counter to our town. Everyone there always marked the day of John Lennon's death with reverence.
He also said once, "San Francisco was LSD and love. New York was heroine and hate. New York won." As if I should learn a lesson thereby. Strange, though, because he didn't have any other traits of the power tripper. I never flashed on him psychically and his vibes were cool. By the way, hate didn't win entirely, since I was living a life of love right there and then, in the midst of all that static energy and pestilence. (Though no one knew.)
About that time, Reyes walked out of the kitchen. He'd been working there longer than me. He was from Columbia, short and stout, always a nice guy. When I asked Jake why he quit, Jake said,
"Oh, he just kind of fizzled out here somehow."
I said, "Gee, I hope that never happens to me."
That same afternoon, David and Roslyn passed by. David looked at me with a really serious expression and Roslyn thrust up her breasts and swaggered toward me so exaggerated it became comic. Luckily there was a wastebasket between her and me so she swaggered on by. It all had an aura of threat somehow, so I wouldn't walk out on them, I suppose. Empty threat, of course, since I knew full well there was nothing they could do if I did. Unless they thought what they were doing or could do to me psychically might deter me. My life was improving; I no longer felt oppressed by Roslyn. But I wasn't ready to quit either. I probably said what I did to Jake simply to see what the reaction would be, though I certainly didn't anticipate David and Roslyn doing what they did.
Pain in the Neck
I had been working the dough table for about two years when I realized my neck muscles were getting tight. I just kept working without thinking about the cause. Chris had recently graduated and left so his help was gone.
About that time, Roslyn pulled a caper the likes of which I still find unfathomable. She put up a sign saying, "All the boys must hug Roslyn to show her they care." I saw the sign in the employee's room up stairs at the entrance to the managers' office. Did she really think her silly sign was going to force me to show a sign of friendship and acceptance? After a couple of days and I hadn't complied, I found the word boys childishly crossed out and the word men scrawled above. As if I hadn't understood that she calls all males "boys." After a few more days, the sign disappears.
How do they take themselves seriously in these ways? I wasn't willing to fake reality for her and show her I cared. I didn't care. She and David must have assumed I couldn't see through their act. And that diminishes them even more in my estimation. She parades around like a little Cleopatra, Queen of Upper and Lower Egypt, Priestess of Osiris and expects to be taken seriously? What do people normally think of a person who claims to be George Washington? But the way she was able to cling to me from afar, monopolize my attention, and use me as a sounding board, and at some other times to cloak me in oppression, that was the bad part. She imagined I felt like I was in jail or under house arrest. Once, at home, after I'd first started working there, I went out to switch my laundry from washer to dryer and I heard, "I'm perfectly capable of directing this relationship." The whole gist being to protest that I had left home without permission. Ask her permission before eating, pissing, leaving home? Entering such a psychic game would be surrendering my sanity as well as my dignity. She would be able to lead me straight onto a psych ward. She was doing all she could to me as it was; it didn't make any difference what I did. I could easily act as if the whole problem didn't exist, go about my business as usual. Once, I walked up into the employees' room and there she was sitting on Jake's lap. I glanced over at them in disgust and she said, "Gouge an eye out." No matter: I could hang aloof and deny it my emotional involvement. I'm mature enough not to take it personally. She had to have been aware that was the missing ingredient in her witches brew, my emotional energy. I could avoid all emotional pain. There was only one person on her psychic stage though she wasn't exactly playing to an empty house. Captive audience, I looked up at her curiously.
The tightness in my neck got worse, turned into a bad neuralgic pain. I felt like my very nerves ached. I began to suspect a repetitive motion injury because of the way I had to spread the dough in the pans with my hands and shoulders. A friend of mine had recently been to a chiropractor for a similar problem and felt his doctor had succeeded in solving it, so I tried him out. He took an x-ray, agreeing with me about the repetitive-motion injury, and suggested I apply for Workmen's Comp. I began treatment with him barely in time because for about a month the pain became worse. And I once got a charley horse in my shoulder and back when distracted in an awkward position at work. I had pains at the base of my neck on each shoulder. Once, on my way to get my evening beer, I became acutely aware of those pains and I heard, "My talons sink deep." The woman was psychotic in her evil, criminally insane. But eventually the chiropractor solved my problem too, and, as the pain diminished, I became less vulnerable to her. She could throw salt, but couldn't create the wound in the first place. With the pain gone and my strength returning I was able to tally a real positive on the health side: I quit smoking tobacco.
Around that time, there were a bunch of new workers in the prep-room, among them, Lee. Born and raised in California, he was an accomplished musician and a member of a rock 'n' roll band. I had found a new interest in the music of Kodaly and Bartok, the Hungarians, and so happened, Lee had learned to sing as a child with the Kodaly method. We had a lot in common. I showed him some of my poetry and he confessed he couldn't find any meaning there. During the slow months, I would finish the dough early and help in the prep-room and talk with Lee and some college students who worked there. Never a dull moment. A young African-American dude worked there for a while. His name was Osiris and he definitely let us know he was named after the Egyptian god, that it wasn't a form of the name Cyrus.
I said, " Oh, I thought the name of that god was Orisis. Isis and Orisis."
"Bruce, you're dyslexic," Lee offered.
Sex Problems
With Chris gone, I was sort of dangling, passing from one psychic sexual encounter to another when a new student, Tim, began working there. He was a bit shorter than me and stocky with red hair and an easy laugh. I had learned some things about AIDS, especially the importance of using a rubber, so I was anxious to try something for real. One day someone asked where something was and Tim said, "Robert has it up his ass," and I realized they were both gay, Robert being Tim's housemate. So I began to cruise Tim and right when I began to feel he had an interest, I heard him admit to a waitress that he was interested in an older man, nodding in my direction, and she said, "Oh, he's too old for you." Tim must have agreed because he stopped showing an interest in me.
About that time, the student health center was testing for AIDS free of charge so I decided to get tested. I went back for the results two weeks later with much trepidation, but, to my relief, I was negative.
There were many tentative opportunities to find a real affair, but they always fell apart somehow. The whole thing made me stop trying.
When Mike began working there that spring, the fourth year, I had the chance one night to play the top role telepathically with him. We had a great time. The next day, he didn't show up for work when he was scheduled so I asked Jane, the head manager, what happened. Sitting right there was Roslyn who volunteered before Jane could answer, "He has an infection throughout his whole body." Exactly as if she knew what he was suffering. She had busted him somehow after the sex the night before. She could really deal a clout at times. We hadn't taken the right precautions or else I hadn't kept with him long enough afterwards. I knew of the danger of getting busted after sex, but somehow Roslyn had managed it. Mike was back to work though, his usual buoyant self, in a few days, but we never had telepathic sex games again. He graduated from college and moved to another town.
Family Reunion
Right after I had worked at Windy City Pizza for four years, in August, I took two weeks off for a family reunion. My older brother, Matt, had divorced and remarried a few years before, and his new wife, Deanna, managed to get us all up to their horse farm in Wisconsin for a four-day weekend. Three of my sisters, two of their husbands, two nephews, one of which brought his wife and three young boys. We went horseback riding through the woods on Matt's property. What a joy to savor the silence in a rural setting hundreds of miles from a major city!
When I got back, a calamity had fallen on the kitchen. The walk-in refrigerator was too warm one day when the health department inspector had come by. David lost his job, though it certainly wasn't his fault. The managers knew there were problems with the walk-in but didn't want to put the money in it right then. Maybe because they had recently opened a new store and all the profits had to go there. Roslyn and David took a vacation to California, Muscle Beach.
The man who owned Windy City Pizza also owned two other restaurants in town and, when they came back, David became the kitchen manager at one, and Roslyn started waiting tables at the other. Where I worked became free of their static influence. I began trying to raise the psychic level there as I was able to do at other places I had worked. But before I could accomplish it, Roslyn returned to wait tables. The first day of her return, someone asked her,
"Roslyn, are you glad to be back?"
"Oh I'm very, very, VERY, glad to be back!!" And, of course, along with her came the static glue again. I had known quite a few power trippers by then; but this Roslyn was by far the worst. She had totally given herself over to the dark side and, like Lucifer, thought herself magnificent. She did have her admirers. Once I heard her saying to a group of young women, something like her coterie, her court, loud enough to ensure I would hear, "Bruce is still being a very, very, bad boy."
Not bad enough since I was still frustrated at finding a lover. Telepathy always of course. I was positive one young dude was interested in me sexually, but he turned out to have a girl friend. I felt dismal for a few days, and then pinned my hope on someone else. I had sort of learned not to commit too much emotion to the process, to keep my heart out of danger, but sometimes I slipped over the brink.
Once when I was doing the dough to finish up for the evening, I noticed I had made thirteen mini pizzas. I quickly shrugged it off, said to myself, "Thirteen isn't an unlucky number," only to turn and see that I had left the water running in a sink in the prep-room and it was now overflowing. So I had to spend fifteen minutes cleaning that up before I could finish the dough and go home.
After close to five years, finally, I had had enough of the place and told the new kitchen manager, Joe, I would be looking for another job. When I told my chiropractor about it, he said I shouldn't do that because they might fire me. I also managed to arrange to do only prep during the coming summer. One thing and another, I never did look for a new job.
A chick named Bonnie started working there that spring. I didn't like her right from the start. Once she was scheduled to do the dough right after me and I did the absolute minimum. When she saw how few pies had been prepared she said, "Is that all you're going to leave me with?"
I stuck my thumb up and said, "Shove it."
Prep-cook
Lee seemed to welcome me when I started full time in the prep-room. It was May and we were gearing up for the busy season. There were many new workers, still the young college students for the most part. During the first few days I gave it everything I had, but about the third day, after I got home exhausted, flopped down in my chair, and got stoned, I went over all the items I'd prepped that day and realized I had done much more than my share of the work. The next day, I slowed down and observed. When all the others went out for a smoke break, I kept working because I didn't smoke anymore. No one seemed too worried about finishing the list. Everyone would stop their work for a while to talk. But the next day, Lee noticed I had slowed down and said to me, "Bruce, you should have been done with the slicers long ago. Hurry up, man." I ignored him, and he didn't say any more. At the end of the day, once, I was working at the slicer and turned to see Bonnie eating ice cream from the five-gallon container we kept in the freezer there for the customers. She never got caught even though the managers and wait people passed right through the prep-room on their way to the dining room. Everything went smoothly right through the summer when I was due for a review.
It was August and I had been working there for five years. I had seen that place go through a thousand changes. There was only one other person who had been there when I started. David had lost his job. Most had found other work or graduated from college and left town. The turnover was constant. Roslyn was still there. I was content because I didn't have to do the dough. My review was coming up and I was anticipating another raise. One morning, one of the cooks, a real hippy, was caught smoking a joint in the alley behind the restaurant and was fired at the end of the day. Some workers questioned that policy. Why hadn't they fired him in the morning right after he was caught? Had they wanted to get rid of him?
When I went up to talk to Joe one afternoon the next week for my review, he let the bomb fall. Saying that I hadn't been working hard enough, they let me go. I could either work two more weeks or leave right then. If I applied for unemployment, they wouldn't challenge it. I could always go to work at the restaurant where David was now working.
When I protested, Joe reminded me, "Bruce, you said you were going to quit six months ago."
So I acquiesced, told him I'd work out the two weeks and maybe go to work with David.
By the next day, I had changed my mind. Since I had an opportunity to go on unemployment, I could leave the whole place behind. A clean break with David and Roslyn. I'd never have to return.
During those two weeks, I learned some more things, however. I overheard the assistant manager say, "Once Bruce is gone we may all get a raise." They had only wanted to free up some payroll by firing me. It was a full but uneventful two weeks and they had a little celebration for me on the afternoon of the last day. Cake and ice cream. Just like a birthday party.
Of course, to celebrate the end of the job, I drank. The next evening I was already buzzing when, on my way to the liquor store to buy some more beer, I ran into Dick. As always, he invited me over for a listening session. Somehow, it was decided that I would buy a pint of brandy and drink it at Dick's while we listened. He gave me a small glass with an oriental motif designed for sake to drink from. I woke up the next morning to discover the insides of my arms were scabby and raw. I vaguely remembered something had happened on the way home from Dick's but didn't learn what until I next saw him. Apparently, when I got up to leave, I was already swaying, having to catch myself from falling over. On the way home, where the bridge crossed the stream, some tall willow trees grew with their rough bark. Dick told me I had thrust myself into and against one of these trees several times. "As if someone were pushing you against the tree. I feel like I'm partially to blame since I suggested the brandy." But I knew exactly who was to blame.
That kind of mishap I can put quickly and safely into my past. My arms healed, there were no scars. I went on unemployment and had a new job six weeks later. Of course, Roslyn kept intruding upon me and I expected as much. And here it is eleven years later and still I'm dealing with her, Windy City Pizza's legacy.
My attitude toward psychic intrusion definitely changed after I encountered these two, Roslyn and David. So this was why earlier power trippers had thought they could do so much to me; whoever initiated them told them the victim had to accept whatever they dished out. Roslyn could do it. She was able to nearly paralyze me, and I had a lot of experience defending against such psychic pressure. I had already written "Power Tripper." I feel it my duty somehow to wake people up to these psychic things we experience but no one ever talks about. I need to make people aware that this is a real problem not simply some dabbling in voodoo or the black arts. I don't want people to go on thinking, "No one could be that bad." One more step in the awareness of evil might be enough to conquer it.
Copyright © 2008 Psychic Freedom Now
PSYCHIC INTRUDERS
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