The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  Erik suggested we start going together to the big New York City psychic fairs. What he really wanted to do was make money, a lot of money. He dressed all in black and wore long feather earrings. He wanted me to wear a sequined outfit like I was a circus performer, a high-flying trapeze artist.

  These psychic fairs were held in the conference rooms and lobbies of big tourist hotels. We’d arrive early, driving in from New Jersey in Erik’s truck, speeding on the empty early-morning highways. I don’t even know how I’m alive, the way he drove. Erik was usually selling crystals beside me. I’d sit at a table, just one of ten or twenty psychics in the room, and wait for the customers to start coming in and checking us out. It was like being in a bordello; people were looking me and the other psychics over, trying to decide who was real and who wasn’t. “I choose you!” they often said when they sat down.

  The women who booked us kept us plied with lemonade throughout the day, to keep our blood sugar up, I suppose.

  One after another after another, men and women sat down in front of me. In order for the people who put on the fairs to make money, I’d have to do almost fifty readings a day. I closed every fair I started and was soon the belle of the ball. I got top billing: Seretta was the most popular psychic in the metropolitan area.

  I’d walk out with a few hundred dollars in my pocket and a strange kind of pride. People were devoted to me. They came back to me; they sent their friends to me; they told me that there was no one else like me anywhere.

  A lot of the psychics around me said the same things over and over again to different people. But it was never like that for me. I saw dates and names coming at me from the ticker tape inside my head.

  “I know you said your dad’s name is William, but he keeps telling me to say Charlie is here, Charlie is here.”

  “Really? Charlie?”

  “Yeah, that’s what he wants you to know. Charlie, over and out.”

  “It was my crazy nickname for him, Charlie; that’s what he always said when he was tucking me in at night. Charlie, over and out.”

  Eventually, even the other psychics started coming to get readings at my table.

  It’s interesting to me that the people who came to these fairs were deadly serious. They weren’t there for fun or to just see what it was like. They had desperate questions. They were earnestly trying to figure stuff out. I was often their last resort, their last hope, their only hope. I began to get a lot of women with big hair and leopard skin outfits and great nails asking about their boyfriends and husbands.

  “Does he still love me?”

  “Is Mike messing around with Connie?”

  One day, one of these women dragged her husband over to my table. “You gotta talk to Seretta, Jimmy. Seretta knows everything.”

  This big, surly guy sat down opposite me. He was squirming and looking from side to side.

  “Are we alone?” he finally said, talking out of the side of his mouth.

  “No,” I said. “We’re at a psychic fair. We’re in a hotel lobby.”

  He nodded.

  “Go on, Jimmy, ask her. C’mon!” urged his wife.

  He looked around again and pulled a shirt out of a brown paper bag he was carrying. He laid it on the table. I could tell the stains on it were blood. I could see the bullet hole.

  He raised his eyebrows at me and nodded. I knew what he was asking, and I could have given him the answer without even seeing the shirt. “Tony did it,” I said.

  The man slammed his hand down on the table and swore loudly. People stopped talking, looked over at us.

  The man was breathing heavily. “How do you know that?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I’m a psychic,” I said, pointing at the huge sign hanging from the wall of the lobby. “This is a psychic fair.”

  “Yeah but…,” said the man, peering at me.

  “I told you she was real,” said his wife.

  Before long I had all kinds of goombahs lining up for readings. It was like something out of Goodfellas. I knew who was going to prison and who wasn’t. I touched a lot more bloody shirts. I was the unofficial psychic to the Mob, and I knew a lot of secrets. Even today, I’ll get these guys showing up who make me promise ahead of time not to tell anyone what I know.

  “How do you know this? How do you know that? How do you know about Uncle Luigi?”

  The mobsters were always suspicious of me, worried I might be miked. At the same time, there was something strangely innocent about them. Maybe it was because there was a part of them that was still genuinely religious, but they treated what I did with a certain sacred respect. They’d make the sign of the cross and then ask me about a murder. My mother was anxious that one of them would end up killing me, but I never really worried that they would. They had too much real reverence for my power.

  I was actually in a lot more danger from the ordinary people showing up for readings. They drained me. They took everything I had.

  The desperation of the people at the psychic fairs was often so absolute, so total, that they didn’t even see me as a flesh-and-blood human being. They were frantic for information and seemed incapable of treating the messenger with any honor. I might as well have been one of those machines at the carnival spitting out fortunes, a mechanical psychic in a box. I could have replaced myself with a Magic 8 Ball and no one would have noticed—as long as that Magic 8 Ball knew who Billy was sleeping with, or if Charlie would call again, or if dead Aunt Martha was still there.

  One woman was ready to pay me $10,000 to get her dead mother to testify to her husband’s whereabouts on the night of a murder.

  “You want me to channel your dead mother in court?”

  “No,” said the woman. “I want you to put my mother on the witness stand.”

  “But she’s dead!”

  “Get her ghost there. She’s the only one who knows my husband’s innocent.”

  “I can’t do that, and if I could, I think you should pay me a lot more than $10,000. You’d have to pay me $20,000 at least.”

  The woman’s eyes were darting back and forth. “I can’t come up with that.”

  I laughed. “No? Well, I can’t come up with your dead mother either. I don’t reanimate the dead. That’s not my thing.”

  There were women, too (and it was only women), who were convinced that my psychic powers included the ability to mentally destroy people. To be frank, they thought I was some kind of hit psychic. They’d usually driven in from Long Island, I hate to say it, and they frequently wanted me to kill their neighbors or sometimes their mothers-in-law.

  “Can you tell when the Martingellis are going to die? Do you see any car accidents?”

  “My mother-in-law, her name is Charlene, how’s her health?”

  “Can you make it quick? Can it happen in March before we have to head down to Florida?”

  I would have to explain yet again that I could not make anything happen. I also had to be honest that I never wanted to look at anyone’s time of death. It feels too sacred. Sometimes that information arises whether I want it to or not, but I often know that I have chosen not to see that, even if a lot of insurance money might be involved.

  I suppose I could have accepted the advance of a couple grand and told these would-be murderers I’d give it a shot. But I didn’t, of course. They made me laugh, these women. I’ve had some bad neighbors, real wackadoodles, but I can’t imagine wanting to actually off any of them.

  Still, I could have used the money. As hard as I worked, it was the organizers of the fairs who pocketed the big bucks. I’d gotten a job at the FAO Schwartz at the Short Hills Mall. I was still in the toy business, but it was a lot more commercial and impersonal. I’d work all day and then ride the train out to Erik’s store to do readings there, and then on the weekends we’d head to the fairs together.

  During this time, no conductor ever asked me for a ticket on the commuter rail. I thought it was something to be proud of, that I was gaming the system, part of this newfound
power I was discovering with Erik. What I didn’t realize was that there are no free rides. I was invisible. Suzan had disappeared. I was under a spell, and gradually I was slipping into another reality.

  About that time, Erik and I started going to a local dive, The Feedbag, to do more readings at night. I was becoming so weak I could hardly walk. My blood pressure was ridiculously low at 60/54. I was barely alive. I was totally drained from thirty, forty, and even fifty readings a day.

  At The Feedbag, the alcohol flowed freely. The bartender invented a drink called The Seretta with Kahlúa, Baileys Irish Cream, Godiva Liqueur, and Amaretto. It was sweet and chocolaty, like a candy bar, and it kept me going. Sometimes I would pass out during my readings from exhaustion and drinking and yet still continue to talk. My head would actually be down on the table, and I’d be talking. People would bring tape players to record the sessions, and they’d show me later that I’d told them all kinds of things when I thought I was passed out. One night I distantly heard myself repeating the words, “The sword is in the horse; the sword is in the horse.” I opened my eyes and saw an older woman in her sixties staring at me, absolutely astonished.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to lift my head. “I’m sorry I fell asleep. Let me try again.” I barely knew where I was.

  “You told me the sword was in the horse. That explains everything. Thank you. Thank you. You’ve helped me so much.”

  She got up and left, disappearing into the crowd at the bar. To this day I don’t know what she was talking about or what the sword in the horse referred to. Was it a statue? A painting? Was it about some long-lost treasure? Who knows? But it was clearly crucial, life-altering information.

  Sometimes I fell asleep out of boredom as another girl in love with some boy who would never love her back sat down. I’d pretend I was in a trance.

  Erik bought dry ice to put in our drinks so they’d steam mysteriously. Increasingly, I wanted to hide away, but he kept pulling me into the spotlight. We fought terribly.

  He said terrible things about David and tried to get me to leave him, even though he was still living with his wife. At home I picked fights with David, hoping he’d leave me, but he wouldn’t. He endured it somehow. It was one big psychic soap opera. I was out of my mind. I fought with David. I fought with Erik.

  One night Erik and I were screaming at each other in his garage. “I can’t go on like this! I can’t! It’s got to stop!” All the other psychics seemed to be basking in the white light and I was trapped in this crazy darkness.

  “I won’t let you go!” whispered Erik, holding me.

  “Leave me alone!” I begged, pulling away.

  “I’ll do anything for you!” yelled Erik, and he bashed his hand into a rusty nail sticking out of the wall. Blood poured out of his palm like some kind of sick stigmata. “This is what I’ll do for you!”

  It all felt twisted and screwed up.

  He started showing up at FAO Schwartz and staring at me while I worked. If I went to a birthday party with the girls from the store, he’d crash it. Wherever I went, there he was. He was a dark shadow following me around.

  I felt lost and out of control. I stopped wearing my seat belt.

  I realized that he wasn’t powerful at all, that he was just a kind of freakish clown in black who wanted to drain what he could from me. He didn’t know anything special. He didn’t have any real power of his own; that’s why he wanted mine. He didn’t have anything to give me.

  I think in the beginning I thought he had some kind of special magic he was going to share with me, but I began to realize that there was nothing magic about him. It was all just costumes and eyeliner. I was the one who was really powerful. That’s why he wanted to be with me. He was like a parasite feeding off of my spiritual energy

  Once at a ritzy hotel in the city, the Plaza maybe, Erik started attacking David, saying he was a weakling.

  “Why are you with that loser?” Erik whined.

  “Why are you with your wife? Why don’t you leave her?”

  “I have a kid!”

  “I have a husband!”

  “He’s a dork!” Erik taunted. “He’s an idiot! He’s a nerd! He’s a loser!”

  Something broke inside of me, I think I heard my mother’s voice in Erik’s, and I ran across the lobby of the hotel, leapt on his back, and began pounding him with my fists as hard as I could. He was screaming at me, trying to shake me off, but I was clinging fiercely to him, hitting him again and again.

  A well-dressed woman near the reception desk coughed and I heard her say, “When are the psychics going to arrive?”

  “Those are the psychics,” said the hotel manager as Erik flipped me off his back onto the floor.

  I was out of my mind. I had let myself be dragged into a kind of hell. I lay on the flowered carpet of the hotel floor weeping.

  That night, when I staggered home after another day full of readings, I collapsed on the bed, unable to move. Our cat, Fiona, tried to rub herself against me, but I just pushed her away. Quietly, David came over to me and asked if I wanted anything, dinner maybe. I looked up at him, and I don’t know what came over me, but I bit him on the throat. Like a vampire.

  David was screaming, “You bit me!”

  He had the mark on his neck for a month.

  I realized that what I wanted from David was his life force, because mine was disappearing.

  I walked into The Spear of Destiny the next day and broke off with Erik. I wasn’t going to do psychic fairs anymore, I wasn’t going to The Feedbag ever again, and I didn’t care that Erik still owed me thousands of dollars. He wept. He crawled under a table and sulked, but I had to get away from him.

  Years later, I went and found his wife and apologized to her. Erik had long since left her, and I am grateful for her forgiveness.

  Erik used to have a slogan painted on the wall in The Spear of Destiny that said: “There Is No Blame.” What Erik meant, I knew, was that he didn’t want anyone to blame him for anything he did. If he wanted sex, drugs, and rock and roll then he could have it. He had no sense of the sanctity of anything. He could hunt animals in the woods if he wanted. He could drive as fast as he wanted. He could sleep with whomever he wanted. No blame. But he didn’t have any joy either. No blame, sure. But no joy either.

  Erik melted down when I left. “No one else loves me,” he cried. He called my mother, told her he needed me. He begged her to convince me to come back to him.

  My mother called me up and told me that this proved that I was incapable of real love. She was appalled at how I had treated Erik. There was nothing but disdain in her voice. She hung up the phone when I refused to listen to her.

  I decided I wasn’t going to call myself Seretta anymore after that.

  David and Richard made a special dinner for me to welcome me back, and we opened a bottle of wine and raised a glass to Seretta. She was gone. No one from the psychic fairs would ever be able to find her again. None of the thugs from the store had ever known my real name. Seretta was gone, and Suzan was back.

  David had remained true to me through it all and never once did he throw what I had done in my face. No blame. David was the one who understood what it really meant. He was an angel or maybe just a saint.

  Eventually, I went to a little art gallery with a yoga studio in a small town in New Jersey and said that I’d like to do psychic readings there occasionally. They said that would be great. I’d have a candle on a table in a pretty room filled with paintings and see as many people as I wanted, mostly nice people coming to look at the pictures or do yoga or meditate.

  Somehow Erik found me there.

  He roared into the parking lot on his motorcycle one evening and crashed dramatically as he parked. He came into the gallery covered in blood. “Come back,” he pleaded. He was crying.

  But I was free of him. “You’re bleeding on my cards. I don’t want you bleeding on my cards anymore.”

  And th
at was just about the last time I ever saw him.

  Life on the dark side with Erik Jasper

  “Did you ever have a large white rabbit?” I asked the girl sitting in front of me. I could see this enormous bunny hovering over her head.

  “I’ve had pet rats for years,” she said. “They’re white.”

  “I have rats, too!” I smiled. “They make great pets.”

  “They do,” said the girl.

  “But this isn’t a rat. It’s definitely a rabbit. A white rabbit.”

  The girl shrugged. She had no idea what it was about. Still, I was right about her boyfriend and her job, and the girl continued to come and see me year after year. I would never remember her until she sat down and I saw the giant rabbit. I mean, it was a huge bunny.

  “Any idea what the rabbit is about?” I’d ask her.

  She’d laugh. “You asked me this last time.”

  It frustrated me. It really bothers me when things don’t click and I might be wrong. It’s like an itch I can’t scratch. But what was wonderful about this girl was that she didn’t think I was wrong; she just thought we hadn’t solved the mystery yet. She was very open and receptive. She figured one day the rabbit would explain itself and probably explain her life, too.

  I don’t see everything, just bits and pieces. And I don’t understand everything I see, and sometimes my clients don’t either, or at least not at first. Sometimes it can take months and even years for one of my readings to make sense, which is why I have people tape them. Normally, though, a mystery like this would have made me feel insane, but I so enjoyed this girl’s openness to the universe, I actually looked forward to my readings with her. She wasn’t impatient. We didn’t have to figure out everything right away.

  “If you ever find out what the bunny is, you have to let me know,” I begged her.

  “You’ll be the first to know,” she promised.