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100 pages

English

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Max's Fools is about an African-American engineer, obsessed with contacting his mother who passed when Max was only seven years old. It was two days before Max's 77th birthday and his children were throwing him a party at his daughter's house when they asked him to tell the whole story of those unnerving events earlier in his life. Max realized then that it was time to recount his mission into that ungodly world of the occult, and the pain it caused him, his employees, and their families. He also realized, when they asked him to tell them the true facts about what was going on back then, that his activities must have caused pain and much misunderstanding in his own family as well. He told them everything about all the paranormal activities he tried, including the voodoo ceremony and other unusual approaches he took trying to reach out to his dead mother. He was convinced that he was on the right track in contacting her, but he just fell short of actually reaching his goal. He felt that he needed to draw on his own experiences and culture to accomplish the task. Finding a cousin, almost by accident, who was knowledgeable about his family's background into mysticism and the dark arts, he modified his approach and the results were astounding as well as terrifying. Max's Fools is a compelling look into the mind of an educated engineer who was lured into a non-science based approach to try and discover his own demons.

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Fantasy

Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)

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Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	01 novembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781506900483
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0240€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Max’s Fools

Mitchell J. Rycus
Max’s Fools
Copyright ©2015 Mitchell J. Rycus

ISBN 978-1506-900-47-6 PRINT
ISBN 978-1506-900-48-3 EBOOK

LCCN 2015954227

October 2015

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means ─ electronic, mechanical, photo-copy, recording, or any other ─ except brief quotation in reviews, without the prior permission of the author or publisher.
I would like to acknowledge Ms. Lorna Lynch who did a remarkable job in editing the various drafts and for making the story come to life, as she’s always done for me.
PROLOGUE

It was two days before my seventy-seventh birthday and my whole Washington family was there. My children were throwing me a birthday party on Sunday, May 3, 2015, at my youngest daughter’s house in Southfield, Michigan. Both of my daughters and their husbands, along with my sometimes wild twenty-year-old granddaughter, the wise-ass Alyse, were all there. We were relaxing after brunch when Alyse asked me, “Grampa, when are you going to tell us about the time you talked with your mama . . . I mean the time after she had already passed?”
“Huh? What are you talking about anyway?” I asked incredulously. Now how could she have known about that? I wondered. Fileesha, my wife, never even knew until I told her everything, but that was almost forty years in the past. Fileesha died three years ago, but it seems like it was just yesterday. I still talk to her . . . oh, not in the way I wanted to talk to my mother, Alyse—my granddaughter’s namesake—but to her presence which is still a very powerful feeling for me. I miss her very much.
“Was she a white lady?” Alyse asked. “She looked like a white person in that old photo mama showed me and I was always curious . . .”
So it must have been Millie, my daughter, who told her. I had no idea that Millie, or for that matter, Sandra, my oldest daughter, were so concerned about it. I also never knew that any of them had seen that picture of my mother. So it must be Millie who has it. Now how did she get that old picture? I thought.
Oh, how that picture still haunts me and the memories it brings up. I thought that Fileesha might have gotten rid of it long, long ago. But that old photograph of my mother was still very strong inside my head when Alyse mentioned it.
“No, she was not white. She was a fair-skinned Creole woman, but definitely not white,” I chuckled. “And why all this stuff about your great-grandma all of a sudden? What made you think about her?” I asked, feeling more uncomfortable by the minute. Alyse mentioning my mother and reminding me of events so long ago stirred something inside me. Something I didn’t need or wanted stirred.
“Well, first of all,” Alyse was explaining, “you had my mother name me after your mama and I just thought it was about time I knew the whole story. You never told me about her . . . just about your father, Theo, and how much he taught you about education and hard work and all the other stuff that’s supposed to make us better people,” Alyse said in her sassy tone.
“I hardly knew her,” I said, trying to sound casual about the whole thing. “She died when I was seven—that was seventy years ago. And as for me having any conversations with her since she died, well that’s a question that’s never been fully answered by anyone . . . even me. So why would you even think of that?”
We were having a nice Sunday brunch—my favorite meal—at Millie’s and Reggie’s house. It was warm that afternoon so we had decided to sit out on the patio in the backyard where the flowering trees were just showing their blooms and their sweet aroma was heavy in the air. Reggie had just handed me another drink of gin and mint lemonade, my favorite summer drink, and proposed another toast for my birthday.
“Here’s to you, Max, lookin’ for seventy-seven more,” he said with a smile.
“Good God . . . I hope not!” I said and took a long sip of my drink.
After Reggie’s toast we all settled down waiting for me to answer Alyse when Mille said, “Yes, Papa, it’s time you told all of us about that so-called hobby of yours. Mama knew about it, but she told us not to say anything since it was so hard on you at the time. We could all tell something was going on back then, but I don’t know if you ever even told Mama. We—me and Sandra—asked Mama one night what you were doing down the basement for so many hours, and that’s when she showed us your mother’s picture and told us you had been talking to her. Scared the hell out of me, but I never said anything. However, I did keep that picture when Mama died.”
“And that little white baby you brought over,” Sandra said. “What in God’s name was that all about?”
I realized then, with all the misinformation that might have been generated about those events of over forty years ago, that it was time I did tell them the truth. My daughters, and even my granddaughter who was in her junior year at Wayne State, were smart, college educated women and I thought they could handle it all by then. But I must admit there was much trepidation in my voice when I finally started to talk about those disturbing events of so long ago.
There was also my fear that they might want to embark on the same course I did and try to communicate with their mother, my lovely Fileesha, and that it might lead to the same unsettling outcome. However, I decided I had to set the record straight and tell them everything, including the voodoo ceremony and the other unusual approaches I took to try and make contact with my mother.
“Reggie, would you please fill up my glass again . . . only this time put in twice as much gin,” I said as I was about to begin the whole complicated story of my venture into that ungodly world of the occult and the pain it caused me, my employees, and their families. And now, after Millie’s comments, I understood that it also caused pain and much misunderstanding in my own family as well.
*****
“Thanks, Reggie,” I said as I gathered my thoughts and sipped my fresh drink while everyone was sitting around me. “Essentially, it all started over forty-five years ago in 1969 when we hired a young PhD graduate in chemistry from the University of Michigan who was assigned to work in one of my small research groups . . .”
“I knew that some snooty Michigan boy would be in this story somewhere—”
“Alyse, just keep your bad-ass attitude out of it, ok? Go on, Daddy,” Sandra said.
“Well, this young chemist had recently been in contact with a famous professor of parapsychology whose name was J. B. Rhine…”
“Parapsychology? Now what’s that supposed to mean . . . ?” Alyse asked when Sandra said,
“Alyse, if you interrupt daddy one more time . . .”
CHAPTER 1

Philip Geldman had received his PhD in the spring of 1968, and shortly after he graduated he was awarded a postdoc at the University of Michigan’s Radiation Laboratory where he worked mostly with electrical engineers, physicists, and mathematicians.
When I first met him during his interview with our company, Smith & Lowmeir, in the fall of 1969, he told me that it had been an exciting year for him interacting with all those researchers, but unfortunately Phil didn’t publish anything of note while he was at the lab and that greatly reduced his chances of getting a tenure track university appointment.
Phil was in his mid-twenties back then, but he could pass for a teenager. He had a boyish face and a slender frame at five-foot seven and 135 pounds. But with pitch-black hair and dark eyes he was a handsome young man. He had a puckish grin and always seemed to be smiling; but when he was serious his face became a depiction of his thoughts that never masked his true feelings.
Most of Phil’s research at the rad lab —Phil’s expression for the U of M’s Radiation Laboratory—was in the closed literature (military classified stuff), so he couldn’t really tell me what he had discovered, even though he admitted that most of it was not all that exciting.
Phil’s PhD research work was focused on photographic chemistry where he had developed a chemical process for quickly processing color emulsions using newer dyes that had truer color reproduction capability. The Eastman Kodak Company was attracted to Phil’s work initially, but after reviewing his thesis they felt that their own Ektachrome film could not be improved on by Phil’s process so they were no longer interested. Phil was very disappointed, for he had been led to believe that after he graduated he would have received an employment offer from them.
After Phil’s postdoc ended in September of 1969, we hired him as a research chemist at Smith & Lowmeir, the chemical plant I worked at in Sterling Heights, Michigan to do research on paint pigments, a much less exciting program than Phil’s university research work.
Sterling Heights had only recently become a city when Phil started working for me in the fall of 1969 when the city of around 60,000 was booming. The plant was located on Van Dyke near 17 Mile Road in the middle of what was formerly plain old farming country in Macomb County. The county was an almost all white suburb of Detroit with a high median income whose population had significantly increased with middle class whites moving out of Detroit after the urban riots of 1967.
We were a much smaller company than Kodak, but we had good research facilities and Phil was pleased to come on board as a scientist in one of our labs. Phil had recently been married and was relieved that he had acquired a good paying job in his chosen field and assumed that someday, after publishing a number of papers or even a book, he would be able to go back to academia or to a more prestigious c