ANGELICA
“You’re not doing it the right way,” Angelica said. We were in a rented high school gym in LA, practicing a series of “magical passes” taught by the Witches and Chacmools, don Juan’s and Castaneda’s disciples. “You lift your right arm like this, and then your left arm,” Angelica demonstrated.
As athletic as I had been after years of obsessive tennis playing, I found the passes difficult and uncomfortable. “It’s your muscle memory,” said Angelica, who I learned was an M.D. raised in Mexico but now living in Niagara Falls, New York. “You need good muscle memory to master these passes.”
Angelica had not only read Castaneda’s books but had become deeply involved in Tensegrity. That she had been raised in Mexico near the Sonoran Desert—don Juan’s turf—made me pay attention to her when she criticized my oafish movements.
Toward the end of the second day of our weekend workshop, Angelica and I were in one corner of the gym practicing, when two of the Witches, Florinda and Taisha, approached. They were not interested in me but focused intensely on Angelica. Ignoring me, they moved her away, seeming to glide without touching the floor, to another corner of the gym where they spoke while gently caressing her hair and neck with their hands.
When their conference was done and the Witches had floated away, Angelica returned to me. “I have been chosen,” she said.
“Chosen for what?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.
We exchanged phone numbers at the end of the day.
During the next few months, we’d speak frequently by phone, speculating on the intrigues going on in Castenada’s inner circle. During one of those calls I heard a click in the background and Angelica stopped talking to listen. “I think I have another call coming in,” she said. “I’ll call you right back.”
“A patient?” I asked.
“No, not a patient. I think it is He.”
She didn’t have to explain to whom she was referring. I surmised it was Castaneda himself.
From that time, these interruptions of our phone calls came often. What they talked about was apparently secret. When I asked her, she was silent.
After a month of this, she announced that she was moving to L.A. She had now been accepted as a member of His innermost circle.
I didn’t hear from Angelica, nor see her at any of the subsequent workshops until after Castaneda’s death.
At a workshop in San Francisco, in a large group that seemed to be several hundred people, I was practicing a new Tensegrity movement when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Angelica.
She studied me, appraising. “Is this the way you look now?” she asked, her face unfriendly.
“How did you expect me to look?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice fading, losing interest. She seemed disappointed with what she saw.
Her attitude, in contrast to our several months of flirtatious telephone calls, was standoffish. She seemed to have adopted the attitude of others I’d met in Castaneda’s inner circle. Some, like “The Cousins” were especially aggressive, poking my chest with their fingers when they spoke to me.
I tried to engage her. “Please tell me what you have been doing now that you are a part of Castaneda’s group?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you.”
She seemed ready to walk away, but, if this was to be our ending, I wanted closure. I invited her to lunch. Reluctantly, she met me in the cafeteria.
She was mostly silent as I filled the quiet air with the news of what I’d been doing. I had almost finished writing a book. In fact, I had a deadline and would have to leave the workshop early.
Angelica looked doubtful. “What is this book?”
I told her the name of it—Firing Back—and that it was to be published by a New York publisher, John Wiley. I promised I’d send her a copy.
To get her onto the subject of Castaneda’s death (I’d learned earlier that he’d ordered her to California to be his doctor), I told her of the death of my poetry mentor, David Ignatow. His last book was about to be published, and I had corrected the proofs. Ignatow’s attitude toward his impending death was stalwart and touching. I thought Angelica, mourning Castaneda, would appreciate these poems.
I wanted to ask her about Castaneda’s death to validate the promise in the don Juan books that sorcerers don’t merely drop dead like common mortals but, instead, “burn with the fire from within”—essentially, by spontaneous combustion—that propels them into other worlds where their lives continue indefinitely. According to Carlos, he had seen don Juan leave the world in this way, and he had promised that he would, when the time came, leave that way, also. I was almost certain that this was a fairytale, another of Castaneda’s fabrications that had begun to unravel, but I wanted Angelica’s confirmation of it, one way or another.
I asked her as delicately as I could about Castaneda’s death.
“Well,” she said. “He died. I’ve had patients who died. His death was no different than the others.”
As she abruptly stood and walked away, I realized, sadly, that there was nothing more I cared to ask her.
©️ 2024 by Sandy McIntosh, all rights reserved
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