The Author Barry Rosenberg overcame the trauma of being born in Philadelphia by finding a home on a seven mile beach in New Zealand at age 47. Between those two points in time, he did PR for establishments as diverse as the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System and the Philadelphia Eagles (he was fired from both) and wrote freelance feature articles for major magazines. In the 1970s he was America’s most popular teacher of mindpower, a position he also held Down Under during the ’80s. Author of the non-fiction book FEARBUSTING Backpacking the World Past 60, he still traipses around remote parts of the world every year. For Timothy, who started the ball rolling; for Peggy, of course, who picked it up, crossed the goal line, and is still running with it; and for Anita: how could a woman as beautiful as you have loved such a funny-looking galoot as me? DIALOGUES with a DEAD FRIEND BARRY ROSENBERG Copyright © Barry Rosenberg 2005 The right of Barry Rosenberg to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted. All rights associated with this publication are reserved. The characters, organisations and events in this book are real. Any similarity to fictitious persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author First published by Tookus Bookus 2005 Head Office 35 Irene Street Wynnum, Qld, 4178 Australia. www.barryrosenberg.net Printed in New Zealand ISBN: 0-476-10501-4 Second Printing: 2006 Pre-word Ours was an odd-bod friendship for sure. Just look at our respective physicalities. Peggy claimed to be 47. She looked to be a hunched-over, white haired 60. Then her size. She weighed 270 pounds on a 5’4” frame. Me, I was late 30s at the time, 5’10”, rolled in around 160. Bald, long hair back and sides, and a six-inch beard. So okay. We looked funny together. But we were different in so many other ways. I was a world traveler, had lived in a zillion places. She’d spent every single day in the same South Philadelphia house – born there, grew up, got married and lived there with her husband, and continued to reside when the old man upped and left her with five kids. I don’t think she’d been to downtown Philly more than a dozen times in her life. The way we met? I’d been teaching a mindpower thing I called Alpha Mind Control since 1972. First at the University of Pennsylvania, where my classes drew huge throngs of people, not just students, but of all ages and from all walks of life. In ’76 I left the campus and started a center called the Relax For Survival Foundation, which was wrapped around my courses. I taught Alpha wherever I could hire a venue: colleges, churches, social and lodge halls. Peggy during this time (as I learned later) was sitting in a chair in her living room, looking out the window and waiting – hoping – to die. During the course of a standard day she smoked two packs of cigarettes and drank a fifth of gin. Times between puffing and sipping, she’d smoke dope. A lot of dope. She had two means of making a living. First as an Avon lady. The image 5 DIALOGUES WITH A DEAD FRIEND of this huge old babe going door to door selling cosmetics… Second means was even more bizarre. She had two medical coverages, neither knowing about the other. Every year she’d have an operation, totally unnecessary. The first coverage paid the bill. Second put money in Peggy’s pocket. With all her scars, that body must’ve looked like the map of downtown Delhi. Peggy’s daughter did my class in the fall of ’76, went home and told Peggy all about it. Begged, urged, finally threatened Peggy to get off her huge bottom and attend the next one. Because of her girth, we had to get a special chair, which was placed right in front. From the top, she beamed this magical, light-up-the-room smile. She affected everybody, me included. When the course ended, the smile remained. She had quit smoking, drinking, and only the occasional toke of weed. I invited her to attend the center’s weekly graduates-only evening at the “Alpha House”, a three-story brick row home in North Philly, where I lived. We’d do chanting, group healings, share food and wine and whatever else people had to offer. Peggy came, she saw, she conquered us all. Everybody loved her. While Relax For Survival was successful in accomplishing its stated aims – an “adult re-education college” that offered, in addition to my own course, around 30 classes per semester on everything from airy-fairy stuff like astrology and tarot card reading to ultra-practical courses such as car maintenance for single mothers, all on a shoestring fee basis – in truth, the center was pounding me into the ground like a tent peg. I was the guru, the administrator, fund raiser, promotion person, and the role I liked least, playing poppa to a dozen volunteers who were supposed to be my support crew. What they were, really, were well-meaning but generally can’t-get-it-together large children. To run the center I couldn’t do without them. But neither could I do with them. They were driving me bananas. One grad-session evening, my head full of projects, deadlines and unpaid bills, I homed in on Peggy. She had a cluster of the center’s inner core people gathered around her. They were doting on her. Basking in her glow. “Peggy,” I said, getting her attention. “I hereby appoint you director of 6 BARRY ROSENBERG the Relax For Survival Foundation. By, oh, two weeks from today, you are to move in here and take over all administrative duties.” She near shit a brick. Two weeks later her two husky sons were carrying cartons up the stairs to Peggy’s new residence. She was incredible. She actually got the people doing things. Not just promising, then disappearing: doing! She was great on the phone, terrific in person. The local CBS outlet, channel 10, did a half hour documentary on her entitled “From Avon to Alpha”. When we were asked to participate in the Philly PBS channel’s periodic fund-raising telethon, a score of us manning phones, I sat Peggy at the most prominent position, stage front/center. Our ragtag group not only pulled in the biggest amount of pledged dollars ever, but the highest percentage of pledges fulfilled. We were invited back several times, each with similar results. But to me, Peggy’s value was in our friendship. She had, we used to say, the wisdom of Solomon yet couldn’t find her way in out of the rain. Often we would talk far into the night. About everything. How could someone who’d never been anywhere, had never finished school, know so much about life? She was real: that was the main thing. And those eyes saw everything. A goya, she knew more Yiddish than I did. And her asshole detector was even more finely tuned than mine. Except where I would simply brush off such people or treat them with disdain, Peggy looked right into their souls, smiled, and got the very best out of them. “Raising five kids on my own with no money,” was how she put it when I one time asked. She walked around the center’s blue collar Irish-Polish neighborhood in her colorful mumus, smiling, waving, stopping to chat with everyone. She would frequently venture over to Girard Avenue, the DMZ of Philly’s most violent ghetto, and do the same. Never a problem. Never a harsh word coming her way. In late 1977 I left Relax For Survival. I’d had enough. Before slinging on the pack and hitting the road, I bequeathed the house (and its mortgage), the program, and a few thousand in the kitty to her and the gang. Six months 7 DIALOGUES WITH A DEAD FRIEND later the center folded. Which I suppose I knew it would. In 1980 I found my way to New Zealand. The idea was to stay a few months, move on. But I fell in love with the place, especially the South Island, truly the finest patch of real estate on the planet. I got permanent residence in 1982, and a year later became a citizen. I returned home twice, in ’82 and again in ’84, and we saw one another a few times. Peggy had bought a tiny, one bedroom house in another North Philadelphia nabe, and I would visit her there. But we never got into those from-the-heart talks. And since Peggy wasn’t much of a writer, my attempt at trans-oceanic correspondence when I returned to NZ went nowhere. And then, early in 2002, dialogues with her suddenly returned. Deeper, richer, more fascinating than ever. There was just one small curiosity. Peggy died 15 years before. 8 BARRY ROSENBERG Prologue: 1972 I was sitting in my room at the Alpha House following my return from the hospital. The knee op, they said, was successful. The plaster cast ran from the bottom of my foot to the bottom of my buttock. Recuperation time: a month, if not more. I was bored out of my skull. Call from a friend. He’d recently got into self-hypnosis and had stumbled upon the concept of the pendulum.