An Intro To RFK Jr. Pt 4: En Route To The Kennedy Compound

photos by Denise Avalos

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, and find your eternity in each moment. Wealth is the ability to fully experience life. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."  — Henry David Thoreau 

Earlier this month, once the Internet realized I was “reporting” from the iconic grounds of the Kennedy compound, my texts and inbox were flooded with enthusiastic interest from friends and strangers alike, all asking the same thing:“How did this happen?” 

The short answer is an invitation from RFK Jr. during the van ride last month. The long answer is the accidental short novel, unfolded with explicit recount in continuing chapters below.  

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4 Months Ago, New Orleans . . .

On a sweltering July afternoon, I'm sitting beside Denise in a flimsy folding chair, shielding my face from the sun, sweat dripping down my back. It's peak season in New Orleans, and I'm nervously awaiting my first psychic reading that someone I know only faintly pressured me into. My motivations in this situation are partly journalistic, partly touristic. Hours before, I was wandering around the home of Lynne Spears, collecting details to include in a story I am still figuring out how to frame. In that wandering, I took note of the ancient tanning bed in one closet, as well as the childhood photos framed on a neatly arranged dresser showing Britney as a toddler, clad in a sparkly gold leotard looking like a gilded cherub. In one photo, one hand is on her hip, the other outstretched with decided purpose—the confident stance of a predestined starlet.

As the psychic, a 30-something brunette in a coral-colored tank top, prepares my cards, I ask whether the work she’s doing is her “calling.” She reveals that previously, she worked as a nurse and could sense when patients “wouldn't make it.” She made a habit of preparing families for their loved one’s impending passing, but in the realm of the afterlife—once she embraced the powers of a darker vortex, the dead started communicating through her, just as they had her mother before her, which ultimately drove her poor mother crazy. 

My demeanor shifts with her explanation—death readings I wasn't anticipating; death readings I'm not excited to be paying for. Instantly, I'm regretting this decision. 

Looking at my cards, she perks up, firing off a string of fairly generic projections: I talk to a lot of different people. I take on their energy. I am weighted by secrets, motivated by truth, trusted by many, but often sacrifice tranquility by lending too much headspace to outside forces. All typical of any writer's lot. 

Several times, she describes me as "career-focused"—eventually expanding on the notion, noting that I'm riding a "new path" into a divinely carved avenue where everything will happen "as it should" as long as I don't succumb to superficial "distractions." With this, my focus is hooked.

Her next batch of interpretations is even more precise. She can see that my house is filled with "a lot of boys," and I am surrounded by male energy in a "circus" style home. All of this is true. We live in a smallish home near the beach with four boys who thrive (and often crash and burn) in their quest for thrills. Our home serves as a rotating hub for the town's teenagers who pass through with broken bones and newly healing injuries attributed to skate and surf accidents.

Her readings indicate outrageous good fortune on the horizon. For 4–7 years, she says my “passions” will remain on an incline. Big money will come. Everything I “ever dreamed of,” every person I ever wanted or needed to meet, will happen for me. “Around March” of this year, she says, is when floodgates will open, and everything will “start to explode.” 

But, she warns that in this whirlwind of predicted “success,” I'll have to cut two people I'm close to out of my orbit, adding that I'll hit some bumps in the road in coming months because I'm prone to be swayed by sinister motives if I stray from the grounding intuition currently powering my path. She says, with steady conviction, that the “wrong people” will temporarily seduce me, but that I'll pull myself out of it in the end. This warning comes with a strong hint that legal aid should be a new priority. I'm more fascinated than concerned by this footnote. 

When the reading is over, I feel an immediate sense of relief. I thank and pay her extra for basically drafting a blueprint for all-encompassing prosperity in “purpose” and for not telling me when my death date will come a-knocking. 

Afterward, I walk over and accuse the person who led me to her table of feeding her information before I arrived. How did she know about my estranged mother? How did she know I was writing about someone in the music business? How did she know I lost a baby, late-term, so many years ago?

“All I told her is that you write for a living,” he assures me. “I swear.”

Because $100 bought me a flush of good luck and crisp insight, I convince Denise to sit for her own reading next. What a mistake that is. 

When I return from a phone call, I find her in tears, listening intently to this same woman tell her that her marriage is in a fragile state. She is blunt when she reveals that she sees a second divorce in the cards for her. “You are with someone who doesn't value you,” she tells her while I sit with mounting guilt, cursing this choice.  

On our way back to the airport, we drive silently through a southern rainstorm with fleeting frames of the bayous and moss-draped trees looming like silent specters in the rearview mirror. Springsteen comes on the radio. In a hauntingly slow acoustic version of Atlantic City, he asks, on the edge of a broken American dream, “Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?” 

Lyrics I know by heart hit with new resonance—etched by my time in Kentwood, they puncture me in a different way. 

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3 Months Ago, LA

It’s August. I'm sitting in an elegant hotel suite surrounded by a room full of well-dressed Republicans to brainstorm a business plan. They like where I'm headed—specifically with politics—and are genuinely interested in how I might want to "grow" this endeavor to ideally build my own “media empire.” Their wives and sisters are fans; they trust their praise. It’s always the women who get it, who push the men in power to hear me out. My vision, though, I know sounds slightly disappointing to savvy businessmen looking for practical profit. How do I tell them I’m mostly just delighted that people read and pay for long-form writing? Personally, I prefer prose over all the other flashy media options that tend to generate higher viewership and richer revenue. So, the fact that it’s garnered such a large and loyal following is a success in my book. Is it not enough to simply be an enthused writer anymore?  

I tell them I don't want a podcast, or formal interviews, or anything to do with overly polished production. None of that interests or inspires me. And I certainly don’t seek to be at the center of content (on camera, anyway). I prefer subtleties gleaned from the sidelines. All I want is intimate access to knock down constructed barriers so people can see past guarded PR personas.

It’s a challenging selling point. But I keep at it, arguing that unless people are sexually, intellectually, or emotionally attracted to any individual, they don't care to examine them on a larger scale. Relatability, in any scenario, is crucial to curiosity—however slight.

I am embarrassed to expand on the notion, but I do so anyway. I say I’d like to see what Ron DeSantis eats for breakfast, what products Trump stocks his bathroom with, or where Kelly Anne Conway shops for groceries. It all sounds ridiculous said aloud but with a pulse on current culture, I know it's precisely these kinds of details people are craving, as we have (for the most part) thankfully outgrown the era of manufactured likability.

As an example, I refer to the video of Trump driving around town in the dark with Taylor Swift on the radio. He is undeniably endearing in that setting, even to begrudging critics like myself. When the video first popped up, I was fiercely anti-Trump (and certainly not a fan of Taylor’s songs). Still, in this unassuming setting, quietly driving a Rolls Royce through the city while Barron sits shotgun and Melania films from the backseat as Blank Space plays on the stereo, he’s impossible not to like. All it takes is a 30-second clip (without any dialogue) to make someone like me question everything I believe—to think I could possibly (secretly) be wrong about him. 

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Three Weeks Ago, Halloween Day & Night  

Around noon, I check the 7-day weather forecast for Cape Cod before abandoning my packing to swing by my youngest boy's class to drop off snacks for a pumpkin carving party. Once his teacher spots me across the room, working my way through a swarm of overly animated fourth graders clad in various stages of wilting costumes, she rushes over to tell me how thrilled she is about Hayes and this next adventure. Like many of the boys’ teachers, she follows along on Instagram. She knows exactly what we are up to whenever he's missing. Spontaneous absences these days are typically due to campaign events and opportunities that arise without much warning. She loves and supports it because when Hayes returns, he happily educates his class on whatever his most recent political travels included—a fourth-grade pundit in training. 

"I hear you guys are headed to Cancun to see Kennedy!" his teacher says, clutching her hands to her chest. "How cool is that!"

Her misinformed enthusiasm causes me laugh aloud. "No," I correct her, "Cape Cod. He means Cape Cod."

"Oh, that makes much more sense," she says, matching my laughter with a tinge of embarrassment. "I was wondering what in the world Kennedy might be doing there."

Our familiar camaraderie comes from when we connected on a deeper level (outside the classroom) during COVID. I was angry and listless, driving around town looking for Newsom recall petitions to sign, when I spotted her and her neighbors splayed out in lawn chairs, looking rather joyous, arranged in a circle in one of their driveways. I stopped, rolled down my window, and asked her if I could join them. From that day on, 10 of us gathered in the driveway laughing, eating, and drinking together well past midnight every Saturday night for the remainder of the summer. This routine became the most wholesome means of dissent amidst a news cycle that had convinced us that close contact with community was a selfish threat to humanity, and picnics like these became our preferred form of extended protest. 

In another chapter of her life, she lived and taught in Boston. She was there when "John John's" plane went missing. Without prompting, among a hectic crafting center, she recalls some of the dismal details of that day: helicopters circling a foggy skyline over the waters in the area, searching for any sign of life while locals gathered on various beaches, watching in disbelief. 

“We're all connected to the Kennedys,” she says, concluding our conversation with a hug. 

That utterance circles my head later in the evening when I return to packing. It occurs to me that there has never been a point in my life where I wasn't aware of the Kennedy namesake or legacy. No, I was not alive to see or digest the horrors of the JFK assassination, but the way my mother spoke about it—in repeated waves of shock and sorrow—made it hard to forget. Like most women her age, she was enthralled with the layered allure of Camelot; idealized glamor upstaged by tragic subplots was fodder for the preferred fairy tales of my youth. From a young age, I was well-versed in the most dramatic aspects of this sprawling saga: John Kennedy was a civil rights hero. After he was shot, Jackie refused to change out of a blood-soaked pink Chanel suit because she wanted Americans "to see what they had done." The country mourned him on a colossal level. His murder shattered the dreams of a whole generation. When his casket passed by, John John stepped forward in a powder blue coat to salute his father like he'd been taught, and all the mothers in America wept. 

I memorized these fated tales with emotional intensity: My mother adored Jack & Bobby and Jackie & Ethel. When their husbands were killed, she grieved hard for them. Strong women overcoming unexpected horrors was understandably appealing to her. She grew up in a military household blighted by addictions and untimely deaths. Her father worked briefly for the CIA, interrogating Russian soldiers. One of them, from what I can recall based on fragmented conversations overheard throughout the years, was shot to death outside their house after a drunken brawl in Germany, blood spilling out of his body and into the snow. 

In the winter of ‘86, similar grief would poison our own lives when one bleak January morning, my mother drove me, my sister, and a friend of my father's to check in on him after repeated phone calls failed to reach him. Parked curbside, we waited while she walked into his tiny shoebox-sized apartment and found him lifeless on the floor surrounded by scattered family photos, with a pillow over his head and a bullet through his brain. 

The screams that followed that discovery splintered my being in ways I'd never try to describe in word or print. Not the kind of thing anything in life can prepare you for.  

After his death, a light in me went out. Each of my 4 siblings handled his suicide differently. I was 6, in kindergarten, and became quickly riddled with all kinds of paralyzing phobias. Eventually, I stopped speaking and sleeping for an extended period in elementary school, which landed me in years of therapy because I refused to cooperate. I shut myself tight as a clam, but in this retraction gained unique skills. I leaned into unspoken means of human connectedness and grew more attuned to befriending broken characters. Innately, I found myself attracted to people afflicted by similar traumas, and developed a keen ability to read people on a semi-psychic level, to the point of knowing what they might say or do before they did or said it. I never told anyone I was capable of such things, nor did I expect it to cultivate anything of significance later in life. As a young girl, at the very least, I felt empowered by a sharply evolving intuition—if only because it gave me the grounding confidence to trust that fate and timing would always be on my side. 

After a hectic day filled with holiday errands, we end up at a friend's home for a potluck after trick-or-treating. Picking at an island crammed with chili, various dips, and discarded pizza boxes, the PTA mothers circle me to inquire about the Kennedy trip they've heard rumors about. When the husbands overhear our conversation, they abandon their discussions and move closer to us to see the hiking photos on my phone. Donnie, from South Africa, has never heard of RFK Jr., but he likes what he sees in these raw file images. As I scroll, they are all asking, wanting to know more about him. To condense the knowledge I have, which is what most people want when they ask about anyone they’re unfamiliar with, I hit them with the highlights: He’s the son of Robert Kennedy, an accomplished environmentalist attorney who took on and won multi-million dollar lawsuits against major corporate monsters, fights for clean water, is heavily against censorship and dependence on the military industrial complex, is a prominent and controversial Covid skeptic, Fauci-loathing, dynasty-Democrat-turned-rogue-Independent, married to a popular TV actress with a fantastic smile, politically rejected by a few family members, prone to wandering around barefoot, with more than a few sex scandals and a history of heroin addiction under his belt. 

None of these details or accomplishments interest the guys more than the images I’m scrolling through on my phone, showing him pulling up in that shitty old van with a pack of dogs trailing behind him in dusty Levi’s to hike up a steep hill.

"This guy's got a Clint Eastwood vibe," Julia's husband exclaims. "I like it!"

Seeing their enthusiasm for rugged imagery, I pull up the video of him snatching a rattlesnake by the head in the dirt and bringing it closer to the camera with a thumb pressed firmly into its skull. This one grips the PTA husbands instantly. They watch it again, then again, impressed more with each viewing, proving—in an era of faltering masculinity—that a man tackling elements in nature is still equally stimulating to both sexes. Apparently, animalistic thrills evade bias and don’t expire.  

When I leave the house, all the men in attendance are now following and paying attention to Robert Kennedy Jr. I predict, based on past experiences, he'll be a hot topic upon my return. In the coming months, they’ll expect me to know and answer everything about him—just like Depp, Britney, Ghislaine, and Elon before him. The seed has been planted, therefore new —and riveted—interest is secured. And all it took was a wordless 30 second clip. 

Back at home exhausted, Mike and I drag our luggage to the trunk so we don't have to deal with it in the morning. My neighbor, whose kid is classmates with Hayes, is standing outside on an elevated stoop, smoking a joint, watching us. 

"Have fun in Mexico!" she yells, three houses down. "Can't wait to hear all about it!"

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3 Weeks Ago / A Cape Cod Arrival 

Our flight to Massachusetts is smooth and uneventful. We arrive in Cape Cod around 8pm and drive around the downtown strip, quaintly accentuated by twinkling lights and raindrops glittering on small shop window panes. Starving, we decide on a steakhouse with 5-star reviews. The restaurant is warm and homey, like being invited into someone’s perfectly cozy coastal abode with multiple brick fireplaces roaring in different corners around the room. We order tacos, fried calamari, salads, and 3 glasses of wine, toasted with intention. 

Approaching the compound after dinner feels as surreal as I anticipated, driving into that long driveway is like entering a gleaming dreamscape built from imagination, but executed by some sort of simulated reality. The windows of the house glow yellow in the dark. There are stars scattered overhead, and an American flag made of wood tacked across the roof at the entrance.

Inside, Keith—"the oyster guy"—greets us barefoot, The Godfather midway through on the TV. The house is warm and unassuming. I walk around with a permeant smile. But in the kitchen, unloading a small bag of snacks, I notice two pots full of boiling water on the stove in what looks like preparation for a meal he maybe planned for us. It’s the kind of detail that can easily devastate my mood. I feel terrible that we chose expensive tacos over whatever he had brewing.

When our excitement over arriving and ending up here in this historically charged moment in time together subsides, he suggests we walk down and see the water, which we do, but because it’s so dark, and cold, and haunting at that hour, we quickly retreat back to the house, counting on the morning’s view as a better introduction.  

Up a flight of creaking stairs, Keith directs us to our designated sleeping spaces, then he’s off to bed, later than he likes. His schedule is still aligned with a fisherman’s internal clock, which means he wakes at 3am and retires early, around (or before) 8pm. I know because he sends me meditative texts often, usually a couple hours before I wake. And I’m known as an early riser myself. The tarot card (the hanged man) he pulled for me on the day of arrival read:

“The Hanged Man says you need to look at the beliefs that are causing you stress and hanging you up.  To get rid of a limiting belief – create a new, opposing picture in your mind – affirm that the belief is not a reality, then generate the opposite emotion.  This opposing picture will differ from the picture your physical senses are reporting to you and it is precisely in this area that change is required.

Your inability to get free of social pressures is caused when you do what other people expect or demand of you, rather than listening to your “inner” Self.  Your awareness of life becomes secondary and never a direct experience.  When you fear change and fight your “inner” self by accepting your environment and circumstances – you become preoccupied with material matters and refuse to accept that there is more to life than the practical, rational world.  Suspend your judgments, even your expectations if you hope to receive higher knowledge – be willing now to make your mind a clear, reflective vessel.

Accept your reality – you can not deny who you are – your own “ego” has created these “false” securities.  Surrendering to your reality opens the doorway to a new and “better” reality.  Trust your abilities, build your plans and accept that outward appearances do not always present a true picture.  Seek the “inner” light – the stability that will never change.  Use your intuition and you will be able to perceive directly what is going on. You will understand that everything is working for you.  You need nothing at all to complete who you are – you are always free to love and experience love, because you no longer need to cling to people or be jealous of them – you now realize that you are complete “with” or without them.”

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At the top of the stairs, we are given the bedroom with a wide window overlooking the entire expanse of the Kennedy compound in all its green-grass glory. The infamous flag on the front lawn of the main house where Joe Kennedy lived stands tall and unmoving off to the right—as stoic from this vantage as it appears in all the old photos. 

I unpack a few things. Mike and Hayes, nestled into an A-frame corner of our room with a weighted comforter that seems to swallow him whole, fall fast asleep almost immediately.  

I linger at the window alone, hypnotized by the iconic framing of Hyannis Port bathed in moonlight, the eerie glow casting long shadows on the weathered shingles of the Kennedy homes, arranged in close quarters, facing a stagnant shoreline. The main house is instantly and heartbreakingly familiar, even from a distance—situated in front like a domineering, silent witness to decades of joy, victory, and sorrow, where I imagine the interior walls still echo the past: the laughter of children now grown or gone, the thrill of political promise on the edge of implementing revolutionary shifts in America, the solemn hush of mourning that has enveloped this domestic setting over decades of repeated tides of grief. Home to unconventional presidential quarters, scene of idealistic summer memories forever immortalized as “Camelot,” sailboats, birthdays, weddings, funerals, murders, overdoses, and a host of other violent and unjust tragedies that have come to collectively define the Kennedy name. 

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I send Denise an exaggerated text before I put away my phone: “Here's the plan: RFK says he wants to run the "most transparent" campaign in American history. Surely we will honor that. No one answers a call for "transparency" louder than us. Which means we go through his kitchen drawers and cupboards, scour the bookshelves, flip through photo albums-- Maybe there's another diary floating around? If we find skeletons, we go live. Otherwise, love you and goodnight lol!”

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The plan: To judge a man based on his summer home, his vacation habits, and his family surroundings. If he's a “plant,"— might domestic dwellings expose it?

It’s a lot to take in on the first night. I climb into bed, close my eyes in spite of the enchanting landscape I’m facing, and pray for uninterrupted sleep to prepare me for two days of vested research and adventure in Hyannis Port. 

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Up Ahead: Detailed celebrity interest in the compound, a presumed Cape Cod killer, owl connections examined, Gossip on RFK Jr. via anon sources, family photo albums shared, a JFK museum breakdown, pent-up covid rants unleashed, + one longwinded conclusion dedicated to divine purpose.