A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER X
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
OK. OK. You can pray for me. But let go of my hand so I can dance. I don’t mind you kneeling on the dance floor, surrounded by moving bodies, praying to your God about me. I can use all the positive thoughts I can get. But I won’t stop having a gas just to fit the sad character you need to pray for. You follow me around like a teenybopper following a rockstar. Waking me up late at night to tell me of your dream.
Jesus told you that if you came to me and placed your hands upon my head, centered or focused all your faith towards me … directed it to me through your hands … you could heal me. And here you are again. OK. You can put your hands on my head. The last time you focalized the prana energy from your third eye by placing a crystal rock on 12 places on my body. That time you took too long with your rituals, and I had to kick you out of my room because I had visitors coming. Now do what you have been told to do. Every time we go through this, I wish I could fulfill what you wish to do. I really feel guilty when I don’t get up walking and talking. I want to walk and talk for you so your faith will not get shattered when you fail to heal me.
Why do you put your God through such needless tests? Needless because I am already healed. I was healed a long time ago by someone who accepted me the way I was before the change. He healed me because I couldn’t do what I had to do then without a normal body. Now it’s different. I have to have this body to do what I now have to do. I couldn’t do it with a normal body. But the basic principle of healing is the same. You have to accept and love what you are healing … really loving and accepting. Now go back to bed … or read the Bible to find out why I didn’t walk away with my bed.
When Moe carried me out to my spot in the front of the store one morning, something was waiting for us.
“Oh! That poor boy! Does he take vitamins? He should, you know. If he took vitamins, he would walk. There is a vitamin for every part of the human body! That is what Doctor Heamoff says.”
“Is that a fact?” said Moe, while the frizzy, redheaded old woman pulled out a diagram of the male body with arrows connecting each vitamin to a different part of the body with a short description of the effects.
“What was the diagnosis?” the woman, peering over her glasses at me, asked in a hushed tone.
Oh come on, anyone up there … have a heart! This is just too early for something like her. I haven’t had breakfast yet. But OK.
“The diagnosis is Cerebral Palsy … with a slight case of dope addiction,” Moe answered the bag of bones who thought she was a health expert.
“He doesn’t really take drugs, does he?”
“Mother, he’s just kidding you,” quietly said the primly dressed young woman who stood behind the old powerhouse.
“I do take dope.”
“Shame on you! You should take vitamins instead! C, B, B2, A … they are the basics. You should take them every day. I can get them for you if you give me the money. I will get them at the weekly meeting with Dr. Heamoff. And I’ll ask him for the vitamins which will make you walk and talk.”
“Now Mother!”
“The only thing that will cure him is SEX,” Moe said.
“Sex and drugs won’t do anything for him. If you would only give him vitamins … and cut his hair … then he would be normal.”
“What does his hair have to do with his walking?” Moe asked.
“Why don’t you take care of him better … giving him drugs, not giving him what he needs, not cutting his hair?”
“But he doesn’t want his hair cut. Why don’t you ask him what he wants?” Moe suggested.
“No, I don’t want my hair cut,” I said.
“But it is so dirty,” Mother said.
A girl of about fourteen came in the store, took one look at me and cried, “Exhibitionist!” She marched up to Moe and demanded to know how he could use a human, even if I was a cripple, in that way. Then she ran out crying. By that time, the old lady had pulled a brush out of her purse and was approaching my head … which would have been all right with me except that I had not washed it since I arrived at the store due to the lack of a bathtub. My hair was one big, gummy knot. She had only to look at it to renew her attack on Moe.