If you wanted to re-create the conditions that child care experts recommend for babies with colic, you would put them in a hotel room with no sound but the white noise of the air conditioner. Then, block out light with heavy draperies. Ensure an utter cryptlike stillness. Be certain that they stayed up the night before until two A.M. sobbing as they watched The English Patient. And voila. Cranky babies and mothers on book tour, sleeping like logs.
I finally— and abruptly— awoke to the impatient rapping of the limo driver on my door and, after glancing at the clock, shot to a standing position with enough fuck-fuck-fuck adrenaline to catapult a cow to Pluto. Fuhhhhhk. I hopped around the room, trying to haul on my nylons. Within seconds I had pulled on my clothes and flung open the door, still fumbling with the straps of my shoes. The irritated limo driver advised me without sympathy that I had ten minutes, exactly, until airtime.
In retrospect, words cannot sufficiently commend the makeup and hair crew of Good Morning America, who managed to process me from sound asleep to made-over-with-helmet-hair in under five minutes. It was remarkable— it truly was. If they could have speed-spritzed my brain so that I wasn't seated there on GMA's happy set as alert as bread dough, for all the consumers of pancakes in America's entire chain of Denny's to see, that would have helped too.
"So, Patricia," began the host, as I stared into the middle distance and thought the thoughts of somebody reading the ingredients on a cereal box, "you have stated in your controversial new book that blahdeeblah, hoo hoo hoo, and we have a critic on satellite hookup from Texas who has been up since yesterday and is frothing at the bit like Gloria Alfred on crack to oppose you. Can you defend yourself, please?"
". . . Uh . . ."
"Well," the host swiftly added, "you clearly believe this controversial and complicated argument, as you laid out in your book, and what is it? We need you to summarize it in a sound bite right this instant before we cut to your critic."
"Um . . ."
Ah, so, you see? This is the quandary. The first step to being influential in America is to wake up on time. If half of the country is religious and derives its wisdom from the Bible or the Talmud or the Qur'an, the other half derives it from people who are peppy.
One morning, years later but also very early, I found myself in the studio of a local Vancouver television show, waiting my turn to sit on a bar stool and chat with the two preternaturally jocular hosts. Ahead of me in the lineup was a broad-chested man with a brush cut and a pointy nose, somewhat reminiscent of a badger, who was promoting his book, Law ofAttraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don't! His name was Michael J. Losier, and his big-shouldered physicality put me in mind of the homicide cops in their ill-fitting brown suits and shiny black shoes that I used to interview in Long Island when I was on a crime beat.
Losier, I learned, listening to the interview, was a former provincial bureaucrat with the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation, who had somehow discovered that he knew the universal law of attraction and could parlay his wisdom into a career on the book-and-lecture circuit. He was very excited, you could tell. Indeed, his excitement and good mood had evidently assisted him with his book, through some sort of process involving vibes. "Vibes," he explained to the TV hosts, "are really vibrations, which are moods." I wrote this down in my notebook. Someone handed me a mug of coffee. Then I caught Losier saying, "So, the law of attraction checks in to see which mood you're in. I've attracted twenty-one people to help me with this book."
He then summarized the steps involved in learning to live your life according to the law of attraction, and I no longer remember any of them except for the last one, which I jotted down. "Allow it," he advised the hosts, "that's the last step." I couldn't understand what that meant for the longest time, but then I finally realized that it meant: "believe."
There was a commercial break. Michael Losier left, and I took the stool that had just been warmed by his vibes. The law of attraction checked its watch, and I said, "Uh . . ."
Speak to Your Dog and Grow Rich
If you are a peppy sort of person who is wondering how to make money, I highly recommend the Learning Annex as a possible venue for employment. I came to this conclusion after noticing that the Learning Annex itself offered a course— by someone named Dottie Walters— called "Speak and Grow Rich." In her picture, Dottie Walters sports a lovely leopard print hat, and she teaches people like you and me how to turn— just stuff we know— into a lucrative speaking and growing-rich career.
I found out about Dottie Walters shortly after I had completed my book tour, to no financial avail, and had just noticed that Michael Losier was teaching seminars at the Learning Annex on the law of attraction. I figured maybe Dottie Walters was onto something. This got me wondering who else was on their roster, and that— to make a long story short— is how I wound up spending two hours in the company of Rochelle Gai Rodney, area pet telepathist, who explained the trick to overcoming all known laws of nature in order to read pets' minds.
Of course, a cynic would wish to know, who were the chumps surrendering cash for such ridiculous hocus pocus? Well, I was, for one. I'll do anything to overcome my current domestic impasse, in which I never have even the remotest clue what my dog wants, and he never has the slightest, faintest inkling what I'm saying to him.
Kevin, who is my dog, is a cross between border collie and basenji, which means that half of him descends from one of the smartest breeds known and the other half from, easily, the stupidest. He is highly alert, and unable to grasp a single thing. Kevin's entire communicative repertoire, whether he wants water, food, company, exercise, permission to jump on the sofa, relief from boredom, some painkillers, a toy, or a conversation about the hydro bill, consists of padding up to me and staring. He does this about fifty times a day, just stares brightly without moving a muscle, and after seven years of living together, I still don't know what he wants. We coexist in a state of profound mutual incomprehension.
Sometimes I think it doesn't matter that I don't know what he wants, because we have nothing in common. Whatever he wants will be something that I don't want. He probably wants me to get up from my desk and go outside for the rest of the day to barrel after squirrels. I don't want to.
If I were my husband, I'd just let Kevin stare at me until his eyeballs fell out and not worry about it. He takes Kevin for his walks, ensures that his kibble is replenished, keeps the bathroom door ajar so that Kevin can drink from the toilet, and lets him sleep on the bed. That's it. Done.
But I'm a woman, and a mother, and I worry about how everyone is feeling. So I paid the Learning Annex their fee and took my chair in a classroom on a cold night, flipped open my notebook, and prepared to read Kevin's mind.
Rochelle Gai Rodney is a former government bureaucrat who suddenly had the revelation that she wasn't meant to push pencils because she knew what pets are thinking. Rodney arrived for her class carrying a Siamese cat named Moose, whom she introduced as her teaching assistant. Rodney put him down and Moose shot into the closet, where he remained for the next two hours.
"By the end of this class, you will be hearing Moose communicate telepathically," Rodney assured us, beaming. "She's just going to be invisible for a while. That will help you get used to communicating with pets at a distance."
The twenty or so women in the classroom nodded avidly. We perked up our senses and eagerly awaited a message from Moose, such as "Get me the hell out of here." In the meantime, Rodney, a small, happy woman with a disarming giggle, explained what she knew about animal communication.
"The thing that animals want most in their life is to be heard," she said, sitting on a desk and swinging her legs to and fro, "especially the birds. They really have a lot to say because they travel around the world." That's true, isn't it? But they're birds. Surely they aren't going to wing their way back from Florida hoping to discuss the election? "You'll be amazed at what animals have to say," Rodney insisted. "They may want to
design your cottage. I've had a consult with a pug who was an English banker in its previous life."
Oh God. What if Kevin wants to design my cottage? Forget it— he'd create a giant squirrel baffle with fifteen toilets.
"Don't analyze; don't edit," Rodney warned us, about receiving messages in our minds. "Just be willing to say That was real.' I'm at the point where I've convinced myself that I'm totally accurate. So, just believe in yourself. It's real. I'm getting paid to do it, so it must be." I'm just not going to touch that logic.
Rodney had the class divide into pairs in order to practice telepathic communication. The woman beside me was to tune into Kevin, and I was to pick up the thoughts of her cat. We both looked horrified, which suggested that we shared a certain insecurity about the task at hand. But what could we do? We'd paid our money, and here we were, so I offered that her cat was under the bed and wanted to go out. She countered that Kevin was lying in front of the fireplace and also wanted to go out.
We reported our findings to the class, feeling like a pair of Pinocchios. On the way home, I daydreamed of ways to earn money by teaching at the Learning Annex: how to breed hens that lay golden eggs, for instance, or a seminar on how to wave your hands up and down and wish upon stars. My husband suggested that I contact Rodney for a personal consultation with Kevin.
"Let her go mano a mano with Kevin," he urged. "Just her and him." I hesitated for weeks because Rodney charges $160 an hour for a private session. That's a lot of coin. That's like a lawyer's fee. In the end, however, while filming a television segment on kids and pets, I introduced the telepathist to her subject, who was conked out on the dining room floor making snuffling sounds, and asked her what he thought.
"He says that you, as a family, should lighten up and enjoy yourselves more," Rodney reported. Otherwise, she said, Kevin is happy with his lot in life, which is to be a teacher to us, to help us connect with our energies, and to receive messages from him. Oh God, this is just a vicious circle. What messages?
My husband interrupted with his own inquiry:"Ask Kevin who killed my nephew's pet gerbil, him or Biscuit?" (Biscuit is my sister's psycho-frisky golden retriever, who can't be in a room two seconds without knocking something over with her tail. She also drags socks out of the laundry hamper to chew on, is the neighborhood's principal consumer of poo, and generally drives my sister bananas.)
Rodney asked the deeply asleep Kevin if he was responsible for a certain gerbil's corpse appearing beneath my nephew's bed last Memorial Day weekend. Then she looked at me. "Kevin says it was sad, it happened very fast, but his back was turned at the time." Upon hearing this, my husband had to leave the room and bray with laughter in the yard. Meanwhile, Rodney offered to tune into Biscuit long-distance in Montreal, to determine if Kevin was evading responsibility here. A moment later, she announced that yes, it was Biscuit. Biscuit had killed the gerbil, "and she's not sorry."
I thanked the pet telepathist and ran like a bat out of hell to call my sister with the news. "BISCUIT DID IT— AND SHE'S NOT SORRY!" My sister laughed so hard she fell off her office chair. That's gotta be worth 160 bucks, don't you think?
Ode to Doreen Virtue, Ph.D.
What I respect most about Doreen Virtue, Ph.D., a serene and comely counseling psychologist from Nashville who teaches widely across North America, is that she is the only living human being, as far as I am aware, who has coauthored a book with the angelic realm. This ought to be world historic news, and I don't know why it isn't. But her paperback, Angel Therapy: Healing Messages for Every Area of Your Life by Doreen Virtue, Ph.D. and the Angelic Realm, is a startling authorial collaboration. According to Doreen Virtue, who presents seminars at the Learning Annex, among other places, the angelic realm dictates messages to her on everything from "job search" to "breakups." They even provide a blurb on the back of the book.
As such, this is an extraordinary development in the annals of modern theological dispute. Even as scholars and clerics debate in endless papers the number, purpose, meaning, and veracity of the heavenly host, here is the entire angelic realm— HELLO?— present and accounted for through the mind of Doreen Virtue, just waiting for the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York to stand up and take notice. I like to think that the pope is aware of the angelic realm communicating through Doreen Virtue or at least that another high Christian official is, perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury. But it is depressingly common, these days, for fantastic revelations to remain within their own strict disciplines of academe, where sociologists are unaware of the data compiled by criminologists and so forth, so perhaps the same blinkered mind-set holds true for Christianity.
I am moved by what the angelic realm says to me about food.
"Earth speaks to you through her offspring, the living plants that you eat," the angelic realm writes. "Think of it this way: your dinner meal is a meeting in which messages and ideas are exchanged." I had certainly never thought of it that way before, so now I am in a better position to know that escarole talks to me as I chew it. To be honest, I can't discern the spiritual import of that, but I realize that I cannot presume.
The angelic realm is very good on dating. "Your essence is charming," they write, "and you needn't worry that you would lapse into a being that bores or repels others." That is such sweet advice. They then promise to be there for you to check in with as you hunker down at the Olive Garden or the Rainbow Room or wherever you go, but they add diplomatically: "Granted, we may come along on your date, but you can also block us out at any time you choose."Thank God, right? Awkward, impulsive, heated sex without being observed by the entire angelic realm, please.
I know that Doreen Virtue has trained many, many other Americans to be certified angel therapy counselors, bringing the gracious and gentle advice of the angelic realm to humans, for a moderate fee. I wanted to ask her about this and started hoping that she would show up on Larry King Live, where I could call in for free. Not many people watch as much CNN as I do, given that I have had it on constantly ever since 9/11 just in case I miss something, but certainly some people will have noticed, as I have, that Larry King has a fondness for interviewing people who pluck answers out of thin air.
This does not bother me, for I understand that these people are tuning in to a frequency I cannot detect. For that matter, my TV tunes into a frequency I can neither detect, exactly, nor explain to my children with confidence. As far as my household is concerned, Larry King himself is as much a leap of faith as the talkative deceased relatives of his viewers.
One Good Friday, not long ago, I went down to the Metro Convention Center, where faith ran its consoling current through the downstairs exhibit hall.
"Oh, look at this," a palm reader murmured, tracing lines on my hand with her pen. "You can communicate with aliens." Her announcement was certain and full of admiration. She sat back in her chair. We were in a corner booth at the Psychic and Astrology Expo, where God had been trumped by "personalized healthy balls."
The palm reader, seeking confirmation, gazed into my face with baleful blue eyes that wavered in and out of focus behind smudged bifocals. I knew of my powers all along, did I not?
"Oh, you're psychic, girl." She squeezed my hand. She nodded. I nodded back. My face must have been utterly blank. I usually say: "I know what you mean" and contribute some confession to encourage a fledgling connection. But I've never dated an alien, haven't written them any letters. I'm not going to bother searching my mind. She nodded again, more briefly—" it's true, girl"— and moved on to warnings from the left side of my palm about impending osteoporosis.
Flipping my hand back and forth like a disembodied object, patting it, drawing on it, she added that I would make lots of money after I'm forty. I had a "karmic crisis" when I was fourteen, she noted, possibly referring to the night I necked with Chris Sutherland in Garth Somebody's basement and got labeled a slut at school.
And I make someone else do the dishes, "Right?" Nudge, nudge, the sharing of a conspiratorial chuck
le.
"Oh! Here's something really good!" She clapped. "You're never gonna have a nervous breakdown, lady!" Well, the definition slides.
In truth, it doesn't matter what she said. Psychic fairs are like red-light districts for the heart. Lonely people cruise their aisles, looking for a stranger they can pay to understand them, someone to say "it'll be all right," the way a lover would. I paid my palm reader thirty-five dollars to make me feel important, and loved, and revealed. "Yes, I can tell what kind of person you are," a handwriting analyst informed an overweight young man with carroty hair, one of several solitary young men in the hall. And she'll only fathom the good things. Never that he's a jerk, or a man about to die.
"People take what they need," an off-duty psychic observed to another in the cafeteria upstairs, both of them drawing on cigarettes, tired from guessing secrets all day. Their potential clients wandered quietly and carefully through the aisles, sizing up the Renowned British Psychic, the Famous Irish Psychic, the International Psychic, the Aura Photo booth, andYogi Narayana, Super Psychic, who once predicted that Margaret Trudeau would become an evangelist. All the seers had snared a client. There must have been eighty lives being sensed all at once here, in a clamorous traffic jam of auras and vibrations. It's curious that the psychics don't get addled when they work these fairs. They must pick up random frequencies, like crossed conversations on a cell phone, from one another's clients just a few feet away. Maria Graciette of Hollywood presided over her Tarot in a leopard-print blouse, facing a woman in a fuchsia pantsuit. Was she "feeling" that this woman wanted her mum to buy her a horse? Because across the aisle, the gemstone reader Marlene had an adolescent client, shy with braces. I had seen two of the psychics before on this circuit. I blew one hundred dollars between them one awful November day about five years ago when I couldn't stand the friendless silence of my flat. Marie Claire was a beautiful French medium from Montreal with a seductively husky voice.
Area Woman Blows Gasket Page 9