Two days after officially learning of my brain tumor I called Ellis. Robin Ellis, who was actually Robert Leroy Ellis before he chose the androgynous Robin. He was my mentor and dear friend except we hadn’t been communicating for about two years a result of a misunderstanding, which neither of us caused but to which both of us participated. Our codependent friendship was very dependable when it came to periodic raging anger toward each other. But even in anger our love bridged and each of us felt comfortable calling the other for help when in need. This was certainly one of those times because Robin was a seasoned professional when it came to hard living in the presence of medical doctors and the health care system.
Born and raised near Paris, Texas, Robin grew up in the forties and fifties and learned to go beyond the arrogance of the obnoxious Texan. He had through life become a real down to earth guy.
Tragically, he learned the horrors of life early when he had an illyostomy as a young man of fourteen and learned to live with an appliance, which sometimes would have to be cleaned more than ten times a day. While the other kids were roughhousing he was stuck at home reading. But this impediment was only a hurdle for Robin who used it later as a guide to his recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, his quest for healing powers and his quest for self-knowledge.
In the hospital Robin became addicted to reading and did a lot of it. The mere act of reading hour after hour after hour, especially his readings in history, ancient and modern, moved him to become involved with politics and eventually to be successful at the national level of politics. In Texas he became expert at working precinct-by-precinct politics.
Before he knew it he rose to a leadership role in the Texas Republican Party and was picked to join the campaign team for Barry Goldwater. From Time Magazine:
“Saints & Sinners. Out where those votes are, local Goldwater organizations generally have far more volunteers to get the job done than the G.O.P. could muster in 1960. Nowhere are these torrid troops used more effectively than in the South, where Republican organizations are now far more efficient than the long-complacent Democratic groups there. In New Orleans, Texan LeRoy Ellis, 29, plots Goldwater strategy for Louisiana in a "war room" covered with 13 maps pegging population growth and political patterns in every parish. His precinct workers have assembled 600,000 IBM cards containing the name and address of every Louisiana urban voter, all of whom will be reached this month, either in person or from 50-telephone "boiler rooms," in order to determine their party, sex, age, occupation and race. That information, punched on the cards, will be riffled through just before the election to turn up the most likely Goldwater voters.”
Robin had become politically potent from that campaign. Although Goldwater lost, a meeting took place in Michigan in which the future of the Republican Party was to strategize and implement that which was to become their thirty-year plan allowed the elections of Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and brought the country into near ruin. Robin was at that meeting as one of the strategists.
For about seven years after the 1964 election Robin, then Leroy Ellis, was a professional upright politician who sold his services to any candidate, Democrat or Republican, who would pay his price, a price that enabled his wife and five children to live comfortably in Georgetown.
All during this time as the process, both mental and physical, slowly but surely got to Robin. He was pulled in many directions; by the many candidates he serviced, the Republican National Committee and his family. He drank heavily and eventually his job began to bother him more and more. As candidates started to lose and he couldn’t meet the demands of the national organization, he became more irritable at home.
As time when on he and his wife fought. He was rushed to the hospital a number of times because his stomach was unable to digest the food he was eating.
Laying in a hospital bed after one hard episode he remembered when he had been a young teen and had read about the discovery of old texts that some were saying were the lost Gospels. He was interested because one article was about the discovery in Nag Hammadi in northern Egypt in 1945 of the remnants of a library used by a community of Gnostics in the 5th century.
The texts were copies of sacred writings from earlier centuries, when the church was struggling to disentangle itself from the early heresy of Gnosticism, which is what Christ was and it blended Christian ideas with mystical elements from pagan religions of the East and of ancient times.
Robin was fascinated that Jesus had been sent by a heathen God to redeem the world from this demiurge, and Jesus also imparted a secret wisdom, as gnosis, to the select few.
In addition Robin learned that Jesus’ group were the Essene who healed people and Robin’s suffering motivated him to read about the various modalities of healing and in particular Robin became very interested in actions, which he felt he needed, radical and spiritual in nature.
Robin labored on what to do. On one hand he was losing clients and on the other hand his home life was miserable. His body was failing him rapidly and he recognized that if he didn’t do something soon, he would die.
After weeks of full and utter introspection while lying in the hospital, an answer emerged. Even if he became a hundred percent healthy he still had the issue of healing the family and also finding work. He considered his options at home and for work. The journey he believed would have to take would take many years if it worked and he was not sure that it would work at all.
He also realized that for over three decades he had been in the care of traditional physicians and the doctors had not done a thing to help. If anything he felt as if he were a Guinea pig to their endless experiments.
The answer that emerged would likely make a lot of people unhappy. Certainly his wife would be incredibly pissed at him. His clients would be angry at first but soon would realize they were better for his decision. The biggest issue that troubled Robin was the five children. If he died they would suffer, having never really gotten to know him.
Robin decided to simply get up out of the hospital bed and to find his way. That is what he did. He put in his clothes and walked out of the hospital and into the world. He walked everywhere.
In the next seven years he spent time at various holistic communities, which he traveled to by walking and by hitchhiking. He reasoned that to fix his body meant to clean his body and then to build his body. He had successes and he had failures. But during the seven years he became a master of healing and a master at esoteric teaching.
When I first met Robin it was outside my club, New Orleans, a nightclub. I was sitting outside, likely nursing a hangover by tossing down coke after coke. Coming from town was a tall slim man with black hair. I could see he had an orange backpack over his shoulders and he was walking at a steady and rapid pace.
I could have let him continue to walk, which I think about periodically, and then maybe I never would have gotten to know him and not learned what he had to teach me. Something struck me about him and so I said "Hello."
"Hello," Robin returned with a genuine warmth, which also and oddly somehow contained a feeling of "don’t get too close or I'll kill you."
I judged Robin to be about ten years older and later learned I was exactly right. But there was something, which attracted me to Robin and perhaps that was a sense of danger, a sense of a man who had a story to tell that I needed to know.
"Can I offer you a drink?" I asked.
“Yes you can, my name is Robin Ellis," and he stuck out his hand.
Robin sat down and I poured him a gin and joined him with a Heinenken beer. We then proceeded to talk for about five hours each of us getting quite drunk, with me slipping back into the office to get something harder, cocaine or heroine. This was in 1980.
I learned Robin had left his wife and five children in Washington a few years earlier because he had become fed up with the utter indifference and cold-blooded brutality which he hated himself for doing that for he loved the children very much but he loved life even more. He would have died very quickly if he had stayed in Washington. Instead he had become a full-fledged dropout.
He had donned a knapsack and took jobs here and there and also spent many months in the most exotic healing spas existing in America. He also began to read the great metaphysicians and philosophers the world's religious works and then discovered the Gnostic gospels. Like the Essene, he was on a journey and so was I but neither of us knew that for sure as we got drunk together that first day.
He had been helping Stephen Hamilton, Emma Walton and Sybil Christopher set up their Sag Harbor Theater Festival a dream, which the three had put together and still sits at the foot of Main Street in Sag Haror. Robin met Stephen and Emma because their wedding guests stayed at the hotel where Robin worked. They all became enchanted by Robin, Robert Leroy Ellis from Paris, Texas. They should only have known the full story.
And so Robin worked and lived at the Sag Harbor Inn as kind of a loyal servant. But in his private time he read and wrote and helped them build the theater. He had already been into five years of recovery from alcoholism and was fully immersed in an inward voyage as well. From the outside no body knew.
The gnawing truth was that even during his recovery period, the stomach obstructions came periodically. Through either drink or food his colon’s muscles would harden like a vice and not allow anything through his system. Bound, the food hung and Robin would clean his appliance, which would only worsen the runs. Over the years he had become used to these cycles.
To stop the pain and release the muscles he often would drink a bottle of gin in a half day. Most of the time that did the trick but on occasion the obstruction got worse.
During recovery though the method of relief took a different road. If Robin felt an obstruction coming on he would go to the drug store and try to put himself out by buying up all the over-the-counter sleeping pills he could find. His hope was that sleep itself would relive the logjam in his stomach caused by the hardened muscle.
During this period the need to unclog the obstruction became paramount in Robins activities. After three days of abject pain Robin would go to a hospital. That was the last option because over the years Robin had come to loathe the usual events at which he had to be exposed.
First came the humiliation of having neither money nor insurance and thus he became an instant third class citizen who used Medicaid, which meant the most disrespectful treatment of all.
He hated the situation because the solution to his dilemma was to be given a shot of morphine to relax the muscles but doctors and hospitals will feed all sorts of different kinds of toxins to people but morphine is not socially acceptable so they tag a person who asks for it as a drug addict. So when Robin would be really desperate and in pain he would as the doctors directly for the shot and they dutifully called the police to have the "junkie" driven to the outskirts of town. And there, Robin sat lying on the cold wet ground huddled up in a fetal position in deep pain.
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"The chemical formula for oxygen is 02. The chemical formula for Ozone is O3 I need O3," he told me.
I rejoined, "that's funny you should mention that because my friends Michael and Judy just came back from the Dominican Republic and they had spent some time at a health spa there that offered Ozone treatments."
"I would like to be introduced to Michael and Judy," Robin asked.
The meeting took place and Judy told Robin how she had become friends with Lucas Bove who had created San Sousa. For an hour Robin asked questions about this and that and Judy proudly answered each of them. She explained how she had written to Steven Ross, the very flamboyant and well liked Hamptonite and CEO of Time/Warner who had been suffering from prostate cancer about approaching the disease from a different point of view. Judy lamented his death saying that taking the ozone therapy would have saved his life.
I drove Robin back to the Inn and on the way Robin explained how exhilarated he felt by learning what he had heard about the process in the Dominican Republic. He vowed that someday he would find the three thousand dollars and send himself there to finally clear out.
"Clear what out?" I asked.
“The Candida, which is in most of us. It's the real harm. The parasites eat our food and take our energy. This is the cause of disease!"
I left Robin that night vowing to myself that I would help my friend achieve his goal of going to the Dominican Republic and receiving the therapy.
December 7, 1992
Dear Ticket Agent:
Enclosed is my check for $383.00 for tickets to the Dominican Republic for Robin Ellis.
Mr. Ellis will be departing JFK on January 12, 1993 at 10:30 A.M. And will arrive in the Dominican Republic 3:00 P.M. He will fly on flight #611 in seat 9J, a window seat.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Scratch Stanchfield
I had also managed to call Lucas Bove's assistant Lisa and convince her that Robin Ellis was a firm believer in the ozone process and was coming there as a journalist and asked that they accommodate him with discounted treatments. We agreed upon a price and I sent her the money.
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