It's Natural, So It's Good For You

The romance of smelts

Sometimes you must give credit where it’s due. The Way International wasn’t just wrong about a lot of things, they were wrong about almost everything. They were also almost right about fitness and nutrition.

In 1983 my mother joined Way Corps. We moved to The Way College of Biblical Research, a semi accredited theology school in Indiana. The Way Corps were the elite of the elite Way believers and were expected to live by the 5 Way Corps Principals. They are burned into my memory.

1. Acquire an in-depth spiritual perception and awareness.

2. Receive training in the whole Word so as to be able to teach others.

3. Physical training making your physical body, the vehicle of communication of the Word, as vital as possible.

4. Practice believing to bring material abundance to you and the Ministry.

5. Go forth as leaders and workers in areas of concern, interest and need.

CP3 required The Way Corps to be in peak physical condition and eat healthfully. It’s hard to have a problem with that concept. Way Corps students would obsess over making sure they achieved their CP3 goals. I have a problem with that because the motivation was fear, and The Way claimed to eliminate fear. The Way Corps was designed to be a “spiritual version of The Marine Corps”. That could be intense. While I understand the concept of wanting to be “spiritually fit” the Way Corps were often treated with the finesse of an angry Hollywood- movie drill sergeant.

We were taught that the first line of defense against an illness or medical problem is prayer. OK, fine. But the guilt trip that came with needing medical attention was bananas. Why is prayer not good enough to fix you, huh? They would say “Your believing just isn’t there”. A stinging indictment.

This borderline anti-medical stance was made more perplexing by The Way’s interest in natural remedies. We see this in the wellness community today. They’re anti vax but are in favor of drinking colloidal silver mixed in a bathroom sink by Wanda the Yogi. This is where the emphasis on natural health loses me. The Way’s ideas about natural cures and treatments quickly melded from well-meaning to pure absurdity and into a dangerous realm.

I am not against natural remedies, some of them are even proven. Aloe, for example, can help with rashes and burns. St. John’s Wort, which may actually be a natural anti-depressant, can have harmful interactions with birth control pills, blood thinners, HIV medications, and transplant medications. We did not know that in 1980 because the science wasn’t yet known. So, while you may feel less depressed, you’re also now rejecting a kidney. Science matters. I will never understand the homeopathic intersection of wellness types who worship crystals and fundamentalists Christians who think worshipping crystals is Devilish.

I attended several chicken pox parties in the 70’s but somehow never contracted it. There was not yet a chicken pox vaccine. The idea was to go through the inevitable infection when you’re young because a small child would experience a less severe case. This theory was proven true as I was infected when I was 13. It was a severe case. Pox covered my entire body including my genitals. The itch was maddening. The pain was torture. It was a nightmare.

My brain likes to tie music to specific events as a soundtrack to my life. It helps me remember. After discovering my first pock I was bedridden and listening to a radio station that would later be the home of my first radio job, 97.3 WMEE. They interrupted the song “Leave It” by Yes to announce the death of Marvin Gaye. It was April Fool’s Day, and I was hoping it was a bad joke. It wasn’t a joke. They actually interrupted Yes for this.

As I suffered from Chicken Pox, the homeopathic suggestions came pouring in. In one week, I had an oatmeal bath, a witch hazel sponge bath and a hair dryer treatment. None of it worked. The wildest treatment was when my friend’s mom, who was a very nice person, gave me a painful tobacco bath. She broke up a pack of Marlboros and rubbed them on my pox. It felt like fire. Just in case this wasn’t weird enough, this very nice woman had previously suffered a lawn mower accident that cut off some of her toes. She was using her half of a foot to balance herself as she rubbed cigarettes on my open wounds. At one point, her bare half foot was on my face, and I wanted to die twice. Nice lady though. The 1/2 foot and full cigarette pack method, while horrible, also didn’t work.

My first day back at school, I was super self-conscious about how bad my face looked. I literally looked like a noided pizza. Everyone told me it would be ok. It was not OK. I was in the building for three seconds when the official prettiest girl in school, Sheri, looked at me and said “EWWWWW GROSS”. I wanted to die a third time. 7th grade is brutal enough without extra death.

Later that day I was called to the blackboard to solve a math problem, because it is wise to shine a spotlight on the kid with the bloody crater face. I lived the cliché when I was called to the board just as I had an inexplicable but obvious boner. We wore tight pants in the 80’s so I was on display. When I was done Mr. Blackmon said, “well the chicken pox doesn’t seem to have effected your brain...or the rest of you." Sheri was there for that too. She laughed. I was hoping she was also impressed. Later that year we held hands during a roller-skating slow jam. I fell. She was not impressed.

In 1983, The Way took a group of teenagers to a White Sox game. It was bat day. I still have the Ron Kittle bat. I kept it for when Ron Kittle goes into The Hall of Fame. Still waiting. We stopped for fast food on the ride home. This was a treat as The Way Corps diet consisted of lentils, a chicken I just killed and muesli. I don’t know if the fast food was bad or if my body was rejecting the fast food, but I puked. I had to fight for my life as the nurse from 3^rd aid asked if she could give me an elderberry “treatment”. I said “yes” until I found out that this treatment involved boiling elderberries, mashing them into a paste them using a tube to shoot them up my ass. At some point the sentence “I can call some men to hold you down so we can get this done” was uttered. This no longer felt voluntary. Eventually, my mother had to step in and stop my pending enema. I’m still grateful as I have since learned that raw elderberries are poisonous. Natural isn’t always better. Rattlesnakes are natural, just have one of those bite me, while we are experimenting with bullshit remedies.

In 1980, all six people who lived in my W.O.W. home were violently ill with a stomach bug. We were all missing work, missing school and missing the toilet. On day three of our micro pandemic, we were visited by Reverend Tom Burke’s wife Cathy. She looked at all of us and said, “It's too bad we can’t get our hands on Bella Donna.” I had no idea what that meant. Many years later, in college, I was reading an article about homeopathic cures. It warned that a plant known as “Deadly Nightshade”, or “Bella Donna” was used to try to cure the flu but ended up killing an entire family. That gave the words, “It's too bad we can’t get our hands on Bella Donna” new meaning. So did meeting a porn named Bella Donna.

In 1980 my mother’s depression was improving. She was off the couch and was actively part of something. The Way International, gave her a sense of purpose and a new group of supportive friends. Cult bullshit aside, it seemed to be helping her. Then someone told her that she needed to believe God can heal her and that she should stop taking her anti-depressant. Before long, she crashed and was unable to get out of bed. The couch was not available.

Meanwhile, a friend from The Way, Flip, found out I was a big fan of the old TV show Grizzly Adams. Flip, real name Phil, had recently stopped using his nick name because he wasn’t “flipped out” anymore. Phil was a gruff biker type who had some sort of unspoken dark past but now that he was born again, he was trying to change his image. I liked him. He drew me a picture of Grizzly Adams and put it on the wall of the bedroom I shared with my mother. That last bit is something I really hated. I was forced to share a bedroom with my mother, that year.

As her mental health worsened and prayer wasn’t working, someone, I forget who, received a direct message from God. They were told that The Grizzly Adams drawing, which was indeed a chaotic piece of art, was the source of my mother’s illness. It wasn’t that she had stopped taking her meds. No, it was the satanic drawing of Grizzly Adams.

One of my W.O.W. sisters dramatically ripped the drawing off the wall and burned it. I was 9. I cried my eyes out. I asked how it could be a satanic drawing if it was made by my W.O.W. brother? I was told that it wasn’t drawn by Phil, it was drawn by Flip before Flip unflipped and re-became Phil. Makes sense.

My mother went back on her meds and was also given an herbal tea regimen and some sort of mist treatment. All I remember was her holding her face over a pot of boiling water with a towel over her head. Her return to “normalcy” was credited to burning the drawing and inhaling boiling tea. The meds had nothing to do with it. Makes sense.

In Indiana we had a lot of rules that we had to follow lest we be deemed “off the word”. One day, two of them collided causing a conundrum. You ate only what your body needed but also you had to finish any food you put on your plate, lest ye be wasteful. No one was excused from the table until everyone finished their plate. That meant that people would be late for class because you took too much food. The pressure was real. Mealtime was stressful.

Before we moved to Indiana, I was used to eating Puerto Rican cuisine like rice, beans and plantains. I lost a lot of weight in those first few Indiana weeks. I had to accept eating barley, cornmeal mush, gorp and a chicken I just killed. The culture shock was brutal.

On this fateful day, we were served fish sticks. I was excited. It was something with which I was familiar. I scooped many many fish sticks onto my plate. I enthusiastically bit into a fish stick. The breading fell off and a whole fish fell out. An entire fish. I gagged. These were not fish sticks, these were a smelts, a sardine-like fish, only much bigger, eaten whole, bones and all. Why didn’t anyone tell me?

Everyone was going to be late to class and to work because of me so I swallowed at least 24 whole fish, sprinkled with copious amounts of cayenne and kelp. For some reason we didn’t believe in pepper. We had sea salt, cayenne and kelp. Kelp is seaweed that makes everything taste fishy. Fishy fish. Perfect. I had to hold back tears as I choked down the smelts. Then it happened. The girl sitting next to me, Dawn, was crying because she had made the same mistake. Everyone was giving her dirty looks that said “let’s go. Eat the damn smelts so we can go to school”. So, I ate her smelts for her, despite being skeeved out by germs and other people’s food. I ate dozens of smelts. About 36 of them. Perhaps 48. After this gesture, Dawn became my girlfriend. These were very romantic smelts. Yes, I like fish sticks but how is it healthy for me be force fed 60 them? Does this square with CP3?

When I was in the 6th grade I needed my first pair of glasses. My parents both wear glasses so this is simply genetic. But Reverend Kehoe received a message from God that revealed that I had been secretly eating candy bars, and the excess sugar was affecting my vision. I had to confess my candy eating secret. At age 11, I believed that I ruined my own vision with candy. It was explained to me that I “opened the door” for The Devil to blur my vision because I was a future man of God and Satan wanted to render me unable to read The Bible. This scared the shit out of me.

Like any child, I lost my glasses almost immediately. I looked and looked but they were gone. A couple of days into the mystery of the vanishing spectacles, Reverend Moynihan received revelation from God. God revealed that Satan had “dematerialized” my glasses by reversing their molecules and sending them to, perhaps, The Sahara Desert. Satan did this so I couldn’t read the Bible. I didn’t have the heart to tell anyone that I didn’t need my glasses to read, and I certainly didn’t want The Prince of Darkness to find out. Additionally, I was told, only God can make things disappear. Satan can only rearrange molecules to relocate a physical item. So, the glasses seemed like they disappeared but because it was just Satan’s trick, the glasses had to be somewhere on Earth. Makes sense. The mind picture of my glasses sitting in the desert sand and maybe being run over by a camel kept me up at night. Adding to the anxiety was thinking that Satan was constantly messing with me because I was the future of The Way. I mean, it’s flattering but can you please give me a break, Mephistopheles? I deserved this because I broke CP3. I ate candy.

The next day my math teacher Mr. Blackmon found my glasses under his desk.