Excerpt from Val Kilmer's memoir I'm Your Huckelberry
page 111 -112
In my early trips to New Mexico I had, in addition to my connection with she of the wealthy swagger (a woman he names but it might be a fake name), another pivitol experience. This one was seismic. I encountered an angel I was wide awake. I was indoors. It happened on my birthday. I had just turned twenty-four. I was asleep and awoke suddenly to an amorphous black figure before me. It will ruin the absolute gravity of this moment but in truth this dark angel looked very like Darth Vader though without a helmet. The figure seemed to be covered in a black shroud that every now and again revealed the slightest outline of a face. It took up space in an infinitely eternal way. I was afraid.
I addressed it by saying in my mind, "I can feel you reading my mind."
He replied, "That's not what's happening."
Well, that proved it, didn't it? It's indescribable when someone or thing can read your mind, and I said so - or thought it.
"I have nowhere to hide."
I knew this was a sacred encounter and yet, like Mary or Moses, I felt fear. He then reached in, extracted my heart, and held it before me. It had a purple blackish hue, leading me to joke, "Is it that bad?"
"No," he said. "I'm just giving you a bigger one."
The bigger heart, spinning rather than beating, was placed inside my body.
At first I thought it was the Angel of Death before realizing it was the Angel of Life. I wish I could elucidate the experience more than I have already done, but I can't. It simply happened, I remember pinching myself as hard as I could in hopes of bruising myself, so that if I fell back asleep or was to to sleep by this dark angel, I would be able to prove to myself that this was a real experience I looked at my clock and noticed it was moments before I was born that morning twenty-four years ago. Somehow the spell was over, and just as I thought, I did fall fast asleep and woke up the next day with a bruise on my arm. I have nothing else to say about this, except that I am grateful for the new heart. It has served me well. And I've only just begun to use it.
-Val Kilmer
