From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
The Teachings of Don Carlos (Part 5)
Mike Sager | Scary Monsters and Super Freaks | Thunder’s Mouth Press | December, 2003 | 85 minutes (21,125 words)
***
C.J. Castaneda polished off a tall glass of tap water and turned out the kitchen lights, slowly climbed the stairs to the master bedroom of his rambling, suburban Atlanta house. It was 10:30 p.m. on April 27, 1998, the end of another long and difficult
day. The blond, blue-eyed, 36 year old was bone-weary.
A former real estate appraiser and sometime-inventor with a taste for the good life and a near-genius IQ, C.J. had recently started a new business, a chain of
drive-up coffee kiosks. The logistics of servicing and running his far-flung mini-enterprise
kept him hopping from long before sunup until way past dark, seven days a week.
The toll was beginning to show on his handsome countenance; his weight-lifter’s build had gone a bit soft around the middle. Sighing, he sat down heavily on his side of the
bed, undressed and slipped between the sheets, kissed his wife Lisa goodnight. As was customary, she had settled in with a book, preferring to read for thirty
minutes before going to sleep herself. C.J. set his alarm for 4:40, pulled the covers over his
head. In moments he was out.
Though few people knew it, Carlton Jeremy Castaneda was Carlos’s adopted son,
born to Margaret Runyan and a Mormon businessman named Adrian Gerritsen. As with every other chapter in Carlos’s life, the story of C.J.’s birth was odd and convoluted.
Six months after Carlos and Margaret were married in Mexico, Carlos had come home to their apartment one afternoon and told her excitedly about meeting an old Indian in a Greyhound bus station near the Arizona border with Mexico. Carlos was enrolled at
the time in his first undergraduate anthropology class as UCLA, a course called
California Ethnography. His professor had promised an A grade to any student who found an actual Indian informant for a term paper. For months, Carlos had been making trips
to the desert, searching for an indigenous wise man to teach him the ancient secrets of hallucinogenic plants. Though he’d once dreamed of becoming a great artist, Carlos now had his sights set on a career as a professor of anthropology. UCLA had a
great and competitive department. Surely this desert meeting was an auspicious start on his new path.
Margaret, of course, didn’t see things his way at all. She was deeply in love
with Carlos; she wanted her husband at home. This was her third marriage, and though it had started out quite romantically — a showdown between two suitors
culminating with
a midnight road trip to a Mexican justice of the peace —
things were already beginning to sour. Besides her suspicion that he was seeing other women, a big stumbling block in their relationship was their respective schedules. While Margaret continued working days as chief operator at the phone company, Carlos
was working nights as an accountant in a fancy dress shop in downtown L.A., attending classes during the day. Now, in addition to this hectic schedule, he told Margaret, he was going to start spending his weekends in the desert with this mysterious old
man.
‘I’m leaving soon and I’m taking you and everyone else with me,’ he said.
[Huh? Carlos had already started saying that even way back then? :) ]
Fights and unpleasantness ensued, and soon Carlos moved out of the apartment. Margaret began dating Gerritsen, a tall, handsome Mormon from Utah. Gerritsen was in the clothing business and came frequently to L.A. on buying trips. Finding herself in love
with Gerritsen, Margaret asked Carlos for a divorce, and he was surprisingly accommodating. They drove back to Mexico, to the same justice of the peace who had married them. Unbeknownst to Margaret, however, the official didn’t actually complete the
paperwork for a divorce. Also unbeknownst to Margaret, Gerritsen was an acquaintance of Carlos — it was Carlos who’d actually arranged their first meeting. Furthermore, in a letter filed in connection with a probate case many years later, following
Carlos’s death, Gerritsen would confirm that Carlos had asked him to father a
child with Margaret, a child whom Carlos would then adopt as his own. Margaret and Gerritsen — who was already married to a woman in Salt Lake City — were
married in
Mexico a short time later. Though the newlyweds never took up housekeeping together, a son was born in August 1961.
[It kind of looks like Carlos already had a 'thing' about his 'edge'
way back in the beginning.]
Not long after the birth, Carlos came to Margaret and confessed that their Mexican divorce had been a charade, something he’d done to appease her while he did his field work, hoping, he said, that they’d one day reunite as a couple. He explained that
they were still married, and that he wanted to adopt her son. As it was, Carlos
had been seeing the little tow-headed boy frequently since his birth and had developed a deep attachment. He called the boy Cho-cho; the boy called him Kiki. Carlos took him
everywhere — to the beach, to the mountains, to his power spot in Topanga Canyon, to the movies. People got used to seeing the nut brown man carrying the
little blond boy everywhere on his shoulders. Often, he brought Cho-cho along to classes at UCLA.
When asked, Carlos proudly claimed Cho-cho as his biological son, attributing the obvious differences in coloring to the boy’s mother, whom he said was Scandinavian. When Cho-cho was two Carlos appeared at Margaret’s apartment with documents from the
California Department of Public Health naming Carlos as the natural father of one Carlton Jeremy Castaneda. Her relationship with Gerritsen having long since
dissolved, Margaret agreed to sign. A boy needs a father. Carlos was the only one her son had
ever known.
Over the next five years, Carlos saw a lot of his Cho-cho; the boy regularly spent nights in his room at Carlos’s rented house. In the mornings, for breakfast, Carlos fed him bananas and raw hamburger to help him grow, then walked the boy, hand in hand,
to school. In the evenings, while Carlos worked on his book, the two women who
would later become the Witches — Florinda Donner-Grau and Carol Tiggs — read Cho-cho his bedtime stories.
[But wait... Carlos supposedly did not even know who those women were
in his 'ordinary awareness' when CJ was that young. Oops.]
Before going to sleep, Cho-cho would stand beside Kiki at his desk. “What are
you writing?” he’d ask. “I’m writing a book for you, Cho-cho,” Carlos
would answer. “You’re going to make it the most magical of books, because you’re the
biggest brujo on the planet.”
[He has no problem filling his own son's head with tales about 'sorcery'.]
Though money was still a problem, Carlos insisted on paying for Cho-cho’s tuition at an exclusive Montessori School in Santa Monica — one of his classmates was the daughter of Charlton Heston.
[My own son briefly went to a Montessori School in Santa Monica. :) ]
Carlos also paid Cho-cho’s doctor bills and bought him clothes, sent him for karate and skiing lessons. He would continue paying child support through the mid seventies, when he and Margaret were legally divorced.
When the boy was seven, Margaret and C.J. left L.A., a move that pained Carlos greatly. Carlos continued to correspond with Margaret for many years, writing of his undying love for both her and his Cho-cho, and of his intention to leave
any money he
might amass to the boy. “I went by your old apt. in the Valley a couple of days ago and got an attack of profound sentimentalism,” Carlos wrote to Margaret in August of 1967.
[Sager said above that CJ was born in August 1961, and above he says
Margaret and CJ left LA when CJ was 7. That would mean they left LA
in August 1968 at the earliest. Yet here is Carlos being sentimental
about it the year before. Another Sager chronology problem... ]
“You are my family, dearest Margarita…. I owe you a very, very special something. I owe you the most beautiful and magical of all my dreams, my Cho-cho. You brought that dream into my life for one instant, and compared to that instant of dreaming all
my other dreams are nothing…. Take care! And kiss my Cho-cho’s big toe for his Kiki. I keep on telling to myself that I will go hiking with him.”
The following year, Carlos dedicated his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan,
to Cho-cho and Margaret, and he mentioned him in several subsequent books as well, discussing “a little boy that I once knew” with Don Juan, telling him
“how my feeling
for him would not change with the years or the distance.” In 1978, Carlos attended C.J.’s high school graduation in Tempe, Arizona; for the next three years, he paid his college tuition. They were reunited briefly once again a few
years later in New
York.
Starting in around 1993, however, around the time that Cleargreen and the other
companies were formed, Carlos ceased all communications with C.J. and Margaret.
Despite his repeated phone calls and letters, C.J. was thwarted in his efforts to contact
Carlos by members of Cleargreen, who appeared to be handling all of Carlos’s personal business with the outside world. Other friends, including an old roommate and one of Carlos’s favorite UCLA professors, were similarly thwarted in their efforts to
contact the great man. Frustrated, C.J. heard news of a lecture Carlos was giving in October of 1993, and flew to Santa Monica to try to see him.
C.J. waited in the parking lot outside of the bookstore, and when Carlos spotted the strappingly handsome young man, he seemed overjoyed. He embraced C.J. enthusiastically, kissing him on both cheeks, patting him on the back, speaking with warmth and
animation. Their reunion was cut short, however, by two of the Chacmools, who took Carlos one by each arm and hustled him away. As they were moving toward the van to leave, one of the Chacmools retrieved from Carlos a piece of paper with C.J.’s phone
number on it, balled it up into a piece of trash.
Three years later, frustrated by Carlos’s continuing silence, C.J. paid $400 to attend a Tensegrity workshop where Carlos was slated to appear, once again hoping to reunite with his Kiki. At the door of the workshop, however, he was recognized by the
Cleargreen organizers. They refunded his money and asked him to leave. When he and his wife went across the street to a mall to get something to eat, members of Cleargreen followed at a discreet distance, keeping them under surveillance.
As the 90’s progressed, Carlos’s contact with old friends ceased altogether. Though he was by now nearly blind, and had to be helped to the stage for lectures, he became increasingly litigious.
[Carlos told us wild stories claiming his eyesight was wrecked by 'spinning with the allies'.]
Lawyers for Cleargreen filed suits attempting to block the publication of writings of a woman named Merilyn Tunneshende, who called herself “The Nagual
Woman” and said that she too had studied with Don Juan. In 1995, a suit was initiated by
Cleargreen’s lawyers against a Toltec teacher and old friend named Victor Sanchez, claiming that the jacket of Sanchez’s book about Carlos infringed on
Carlos’s copyrights. And in 1997, Cleargreen lawyers launched a suit against Margaret Runyan
Castaneda and the publishers of her autobiography, A Magical Journey With Carlos Castaneda.
In February of 1997, Carlos made his last appearance at a Tensegrity seminar, in Long Beach, California. A spokesman for Toltec Artists said that Carlos had decided “that the seminars were taking their own course and he did not need to be present.”
Others had a different view of his absence. “He was taking medication, losing
weight,” said one Carlos watcher, “People were becoming suspicious. If Tensegrity was supposed to lead to health and well-being, why doesn’t he look
so good?”
In the winter of 1998, Toltec Artists delivered to his publisher the manuscript
for Carlos’s eleventh book, The Active Side of Infinity. In a departure from his other books, Infinity takes a somewhat apocalyptic view of the mystical universe, defining
it as predatory and populated by shadowy entities called the Flyers, who prey on a man’s glowing coat of awareness. Only by practicing Tensegrity, Carlos suggests, can these dark forces be repelled. He also reappraises once again his
encounters with
Don Juan, concluding strongly that the “total goal” of shamanic knowledge is preparation for facing the “definitive journey — the journey that every human being has to take at the end of his life” to the region that shamans called “the active
side of infinity.” “We are beings on our way to dying,” Don Juan said. “We are not immortal, but we behave as if we were.”
Much attention is given in Infinity to the departure of the old Nagual, and the
notion that an enlightened sorcerer does not die a normal death but is consumed
by “the fire from within,” a sort of spontaneous combustion, gathering his mortal energy
and carrying the body with him into the next realm. As if preparing his readers
for his own leave-taking, Carlos describes in great detail the departure of Don
Juan and his party. “I saw then how Don Juan Matus, the Nagual, led the 15 other seers who
were his companions … one by one to disappear into the haze of that mesa, towards the north. I saw how every one of them turned into a blob of luminosity, and together they ascended and floated above the mesa, like phantom
lights in the sky. They
circled above the mountain once, as Don Juan had said they would do, their last
survey, the one for their eyes only, their last look at this marvelous earth, And then they vanished.”
Now, fast asleep in the master bedroom of his suburban Atlanta house on the night of April 27, 1998, C.J. Castaneda, once called Cho-cho by the only father
he ever knew, became aware of the insistent buzzing of his alarm clock. He opened his eyes, looked
at the time: 4:40. As he reached for the snooze button, he happened to notice, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, glowing a spectral shade of blue,
the great man himself, his Kiki, Carlos Castaneda.
[continued in next message]
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)