William Peter Blatty - Finding Peter: A True Story of the Hand of Providence and Evidence of Life after Death

FINDING PETER

Copyright 2015 by William Peter Blatty

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blatty, William Peter.

Finding Peter : a true story of the hand of providence and evidence of life after death / William Peter Blatty.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-1-62157-390-6

1. Blatty, William Peter. 2. Screenwriters--United States--Biography. 3. Future life. 4. Bereavement. 5. Grief. I. Title.

PS3552.L392Z46 2015

813'.54--dc23

[B]

2014049619

Published in the United States by

Regnery Publishing

A Division of Salem Media Group

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Washington, DC 20001

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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For those who have lost a loved one to that liar and fraud named Death.

CONTENTS

Theres a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.

Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2

If, after being asked why the greatest and most intense of physical pleasures is the one achieved through the sexual act whose consummation is essential to the continuation of human life, and after long and due thought you continue to believe that evolution lacks a Purposer, then, friend, I suggest you put down this book as you are doubtless too stupid to understand what is in it.

Anonymous Middle Eastern Sage

W hen my dear friend Shirley MacLaine and I were chatting over lunch in Malibu last year and I suggested I Used to Not Believe in All This Shit as a possible title for her forthcoming book, she smiled warmly, flipped me a delicate bird and replied it might serve me very well to do the same. Well, she might have been right except that she was wrong for Id believed in the supernatural and in a good and giving God ever since at the age of four and in the wilds of the Bronx I had thumb-pudged a penny into a Wrigleys gum machine and not one but two packets of gum coughed out.

There. So much for full disclosure. In the meantime, this is me, Bill Blatty, writing in the voice of my comic novels, which is really my own true voice, as it happens, and wanting to share with you the joy of something so extraordinarily wonderful that has blessed me so late in my life, which is the gift of not merely believing but actually knowing there is life after death! All right, let me say it plainly: ever since his passing in 2006, our beloved son Peter has been giving me and his mother almost unremitting evidence of his continuing, active, and unbounded existence and I intend to pass this evidence along to you, for the task of this book, its sole and entire purpose, is to win your belief that human death is a lie and give ease to the hearts of those reading this work who have lost a loved one, most especially a child. But I must go slowly, very slowly, for first I must win your belief in me. Not the writer. The person. Me.

A secondary theme of these headlong jottings straight from the heart is that mysterious something long known to us as Providence. In grade 3A in a mid-Manhattan public school, Mrs. Gedney, our gray-haired and late-middle-aged spinster teacher, once whirled around suddenly from writing on the blackboard and caught me in the indisputably felonious act of throwing a spitball at the back of the head of a pigtailed, foot-stamping girl named Dulcy who expanded the dimensions of the act of pouting several light-years beyond the ordinary powers of the congenitally sullen. In a fury, her eyes wide and shining with hatred and loathing, Mrs. Gedney shrieked at me in a high, squeaky voice, like some demonically possessed Minnie Mouse, You little sneak! True. And I mention this because Providence to me is the sneaky spitball word you can safely use in place of God these days without some atheists or the ACLU or Satanists for Justin Biebers Right to Exist wanting to haul you into court or to denounce you as a putz of intergalactic standing afflicted by toenail fungus of the mind, because to them the existence of You-Know-Who helps make the case that we are endowed with souls. So then, fine. So I wont say God or even The Schwartz. Yes, let no one write obdurate on my tombstone. As I said, we are strictly talking Providence here, though, for those in good will, kindly notice that I capitalized the P.

In the meantime, I believe we have a problem of communication, by which I mean that if this non-existent deity were to suddenly appear atop the Chrysler Building at the stroke of noon amid thunder and lightning after darkening the sun and then causing it to slash the incredulous sky with fiery figure eights and Immelmanns by way of showing its Creator I.D. before demanding we be kind to one another or else, for a time most who witnessed this would instantly believe, though soon enough they would be doubting their senses, citing mass hallucination or perhaps wishful thinking on a stupefying scale, while as for those who retained a grip on their belief, they would be doubted by anyone to whom they recounted it, the exceptions being those who knew the witness so long and so well that lying and self-delusion would be deemed about as likely as the FDA approving the marketing of suicide pills with a mild laxative side-effect. So what Im planning to do in the pages that follow is to tell you a very great deal about myself, from my grimy and disheveled boyhood to my supposedly glamorous Hollywood screenwriting days, although only so much of it as I think may be needed to convince you of my truthfulness and credibility when I repeat that, without the slightest doubt, I dont simply believe but rather I know there is life after death, and that the multiple firsthand encounters that Ill be giving you as evidence of this arent coming from some gullible New Age whacko who wasnt born on this planet but in point of fact landed here with the manuscript of The Exorcist tucked under his arm. And so now may we begin? Yes? Good. Fasten your seat belt.

M y parents emigrated to the United States from Lebanon on a cattle boat in 1921, and from the moment I toddled into the age of reason my Lebanese mother, a saint in all things in which the heart alone matters, initiated vast attempts at driving me back out of it with incessant verbal blasts about the beauty and wonder of the old country. Will-