The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  11

  Hobbits, Beggars, and Angels … or Why I Love Going to England

  Erik had tried to convince me that he was my soul mate. But he wasn’t, and after I broke it off with him, all of my passion became focused on the one who had always claimed it—Jack Wild. I was still bizarrely obsessed with him. If I had been able to find a real psychic for myself, one of the things I would have been curious about was my connection to Jack.

  Jack had completely disappeared from the movies. His child-star days and even the years of smaller parts in second-rate films were over. This was in the days before the Internet, and I didn’t have any idea what had happened to him. Still, he kept visiting me in dreams, telling me he needed me. “Please, you have to come to me.” He said he wasn’t doing well. He wanted me to find him, but he didn’t tell me how. It’s hard to describe how vivid these experiences were, as vivid as if I’d gotten a phone call from an old friend.

  I had to go back to England and search for him, and I decided I’d use his connection to the singer Donovan. I knew Donovan had taught Jack to play the guitar and helped him with his albums. Donovan was still popular enough that I was able to find the address in England for the Donovan Fan Club. There was no Jack Wild Fan Club.

  David didn’t question my need to go. He was still looking for the Holy Grail with his friend Richard, but those days were over for me. I couldn’t reclaim that innocence after Erik. David and Richard tried to give it back to me, but they couldn’t. It wasn’t the same. I had my own quest to go on.

  David was born in 1951, right where the aliens landed near Roswell, and there’s a part of him that has always been looking to the sky for his people. But I’m a creature of the earth. I belong here, not necessarily in this time, but of this soil. Neither David nor I really fit in with ordinary life, but we don’t fit in different ways. But David understood that, and it was his ability to let me go that kept me loyal to him.

  He knew I wasn’t going off to party or pick up guys or even to have another affair. I was looking for a lost friend. David understood that. In any case, we didn’t have enough money for two tickets, and somebody had to stay home and take care of Fiona.

  I flew to London by myself, checked into a hotel, and immediately took the Tube up to Lambeth, an area just north of the city proper. It was a pretty crappy section of town. Laundry was hanging on clotheslines out of apartment windows, and there were lots of teenagers in black leather with spiked-out hair sulking around on stoops. This was the eighties and it was clearly a tough neighborhood, but my hair was bleached blond and parts of it stuck straight up and I also wore long extension braids. I was a lot more confident about how I looked than I’d been as a teenager.

  I’m no fan of punk music, but I liked the fashion and its complete disregard for conventionality. It was a big fuck-you to everything stuck-up and reverent and conservative. The punk kids then, the goth kids, the steampunk kids today—I always have a special affection for them and their desire not to fit in. A lot of the punk kids I saw had pet rats, too, and I loved their willingness to embrace the animals no one else loved.

  I checked the address to the fan club I’d found in a magazine one more time. It was not a very impressive building. I realized that Donovan wasn’t at the top of the charts anymore.

  I walked up a long stairway, past a lot of doors painted red—many red doors—and knocked on the red door to the Donovan Fan Club.

  Two tiny hobbits answered the door. That’s the only way I can describe them. Margaret was plump with auburn hair, and Pat was like a little Beatle with his bowl-cut blonde hair. They were both in their early thirties, just a few years older than me. They were very cute, but startled to find a fan actually at their door. It was clearly their private home.

  “I’m not looking for Donovan,” was the first thing I told them. “Don’t worry. I’m actually trying to find Jack Wild.”

  Margaret and Pat looked at each other.

  “Jack Wild?” said Margaret. “Who’s Jack Wild?”

  “He was a friend of Donovan’s,” I explained

  They looked at me blankly.

  “He was in Oliver!, H.R. Pufnstuf. He made that album Everything’s Coming Up Roses.”

  At last I saw a glimmer of recognition in their faces. Still they couldn’t believe it.

  “No one is looking for Jack Wild anymore,” said Pat. “No one even remembers him.”

  “Why don’t you come in?” invited Margaret.

  Their flat was cozy and filled with old upholstered couches covered in tiny petit point pillows. Little antique tables were covered in more antiques. Margaret and Pat were tiny little people with tiny little things.

  I explained to them that I was a psychic and that I felt drawn to find Jack Wild for reasons I couldn’t really explain. I think I might have done a reading for each of them right then and there, but I can’t remember. I do know that we talked for hours and quickly felt like old friends. Some people you meet and you know you’ve been friends before. It was like that with Pat and Margaret.

  Pat was Donovan’s friend and manager in addition to running the fan club, but didn’t seem to make much money at it. He was just a simple guy who’d gotten mixed up in the music business. But he was very easygoing, and I think I had a bit of a crush on him from the start. He gave me all of these great bootleg Donovan and Paul McCartney tapes.

  With a few phone calls, Margaret tracked down the number of Jack’s agent, and I gave him a call from their apartment. It was a sad conversation.

  The agent told me that Jack was a raging alcoholic. He wasn’t even capable of answering the phone. He was incoherent most of the time. He’d become agoraphobic and drank himself into a stupor every day and never left his apartment. Part of me wasn’t surprised. I’d known he needed help. I tried to convince his agent to talk to Jack, to let me see him, but it didn’t work. Pat got on the phone to speak with the agent, but it was no use. He kept repeating that Jack was a hopeless case who never went out anymore.

  Except to astral travel across the Atlantic Ocean and visit me, I thought. But somehow I didn’t think the agent was going to understand that. It was devastating. Not only was Jack a hopeless, impoverished drunk, but also there was no way I could get to him.

  I felt frantic with frustration. In my dreams Jack was not a loser; he was a smart, handsome man begging for my help. Who was the real Jack? When anyone gets devoured by drugs or alcohol, their souls are in hiding on another plane. Addictions are a kind of possession and to recover our true selves, we need help remembering who we really are. David remembered who I was, and because he did, I could come back from Erik. He held on to my core. I wasn’t looking for a needy alcoholic. I was looking for the real Jack on the spiritual plane.

  Margaret and Pat consoled me, and I tried to accept that somehow Jack had led me to them, that this was, for some reason, exactly where I was supposed to be. I had a home in England at last.

  I started flying back and forth all the time. I’d be home for a few months with David, and then I’d know I had to go back. It was like I got the Batman signal and I had to drop everything and go. Usually it was a dream about Jack.

  Around this time, the musician Morrissey came out with a song called “Little Man, What Now?” “A star at eighteen / And then—suddenly gone…” It was about how fleeting celebrity could be and it was rumored to be about Jack Wild. Pat and Margaret cut out an article for me about the song. It turned out Morrissey couldn’t get to Jack Wild either, although in the article it did say that Jack lived somewhere in the vicinity of Richmond.

  I started walking around the streets and parks of Richmond hoping that I might run into him. Was I a stalker? I didn’t feel like one. I had this knowledge within me that if I could only connect with him, he would be all right … and I would be all right. Maybe I was insane, but I never ran into him, as much as I hoped that I would.

  David got used to me flying back and forth. He was very preoccupied with his medieval adventures, and the
re wasn’t much romance in our relationship anymore anyway. We were old friends, best friends, two abandoned kids making a home together as best we could. I always felt a certain amount of relief when I came back to him, but I never felt any pressure from him to hang around when I needed to go.

  I did a lot of readings when I went to England, which helped pay the airfare. It was a really different experience from being a psychic in New Jersey. I’d go to the pubs and sit in a corner, and people would come over to me very respectfully. The men would doff their hats and place a few coins on the table. The women always said, “Thank you, madam,” and, “God bless you,” when we were done. I didn’t feel like these people were as spiritually empty as the people I met in America. They didn’t want my life force. They had an old-world respect for oracles, even if they didn’t consciously know it. I knew I had found my people.

  Pat and Margaret always used to say to me, “You belong here. You’re not like an American.” But my husband and my cat and my parents were in America, so I never felt like I could stay.

  I went to a lot of Donovan’s concerts, got my name on the backstage guest list any number of times, but Donovan himself never wanted to meet me. In fact, he ran away from me when he saw me. I felt like he was afraid of me. I did readings for him at a distance. Pat brought me Donovan’s harmonica to see what I could get from it. I knew all of his secrets, said Pat. It didn’t make any difference to me one way or another.

  Strange things often happened when I visited Pat and Margaret. Once, I was doing a reading for some of their friends in their living room and this old-fashioned rotary phone started ringing incessantly through the session. Pat and Margaret just sat there staring at it.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” I said.

  “It’s not plugged in,” said Margaret, wide-eyed. “It’s just for show.”

  The phone was still ringing as Pat lifted the receiver. There was no dial tone. Another time, a record player that wasn’t plugged in began to play.

  But Pat and Margaret weren’t scared by these kinds of things. Not at all. It was just kind of interesting to them. What was strange to me was that from my very first trip, I experienced unusual hip pain from the moment I landed in Heathrow. Maybe it was just the dampness, but even when it was hot and sunny and beautiful I’d still find myself with this terrible limp that I never had back in America. My hip and knee would go out the moment I walked into the airport terminal. I’d be walking down Portobello Road like I was Richard the Third. Once it was so bad I needed to be pushed in a wheelchair around the London Zoo. The rheumatoid arthritis of my childhood came back when I went to England. It was very strange and I couldn’t help but feel it was some echo from a past life.

  I think a lot of ailments are connected to past lives—breathing difficulties, sore throats, stomach pains. That asthma might be the memory of smoke inhalation. That knife in your back might really have been a knife in your back. I know a woman who can’t stand to wear turtlenecks, and I’m convinced it’s because she was beheaded more than once.

  You can’t prove this, of course, but one thing I’ve noticed is that when people connect to these past lives, their health problems often disappear. Chronic illnesses often have deep-seated connections to reincarnation. Birthmarks can be echoes of old burns and wounds. A kid I saw with a hole in his heart had been speared as a soldier. Sometimes children are born with deformities because they haven’t had enough time to heal in the afterlife. They’ve come back too quickly or the injury was too upsetting for them to let go of it.

  The dead need time to heal. The etheric body needs to be healed as well as the physical body.

  I think I came back too fast, and that’s why I was like a jaundiced old lady with rheumatism.

  Still, my London limp didn’t stop me from having fun in England.

  On one of my visits, I brought a friend with me who was as eager to prowl the London streets as I was. By the Thames is a replica of the Egyptian Sphinx, and my friend Annette and I decided to spend the night between her paws and watch the sun rise over the river. We were two attractive girls alone at night in a big city. But I felt totally at peace, totally happy. Just as the sun rose, two handsome guys approached us. They said they were artists, squatters, and beggars, and they invited us back to the run-down building where they were hanging out for a cup of tea. And we went. Just like that. With a couple of self-professed beggars. It was probably one of the craziest and most dangerous things I’ve ever done, but I didn’t feel scared at all.

  I guess that’s the thing about being psychic. I may not be able to do readings for myself, but I do trust my intuition. And I knew these guys were sweet and harmless. We followed them into this decrepit building. They had pasted their poetry and art all over the walls. They had rigged up a hot plate and they made us tea and gave us crumpets. I felt very settled there. Maybe it’s because of my real father, Steve, or my own past lives as a beggar, but I’ve always been comfortable around the homeless. Evil does scare me, but it’s usually not inside of people like this. It’s not even really inside the mafiosi or the thugs in the bars. No. Where I see real evil is in the witch burners. The righteous do-gooders. The Rick Santorums. Those are the people who scare me. And the people who hurt animals, the rich boys who fly to Africa to bag a cheetah or cut the tail off an elephant. Their lack of respect for the life around them I find disgusting. The most evil things are always at war with nature.

  But as Annette and I were sitting there with our squatter-artists, I began to have a prickling, eerie feeling. It didn’t feel like I was in danger exactly, but that danger was or had been nearby.

  “Did anything ever happen in this building?” I asked the boys sitting on the floor across from us, sipping their tea.

  “Oh yeah,” answered Mark. “This is White Chapel, after all. Jack the Ripper is supposed to have killed his first victim right around here, probably in this building.”

  I explained to our new friends that I was a psychic and I could feel that energy. They didn’t seem to be freaked out. “That’s cool,” they said. So many people I met in England were almost blasé about the fact that I was psychic. They were connected to spirits, to hauntings, they lived in a country that was thousands and thousands of years old, and they still had a connection to those old energies. Graves are everywhere in England, and everyone knows it.

  When the beggars found out I was psychic, they wanted to know if I’d ever been to Stonehenge, which I hadn’t. We ended up going to Glastonbury first and getting to Stonehenge after it had closed. There was a full moon in the sky.

  Stonehenge is inside of this compound now and you can’t get very close to it, but I felt this almost primal urge to touch the stones. “Get me as close as you can,” I said to Mark and Tony. I’m very small, and together they picked me up and held me over their heads like I was flying, so I could see over the wall. And then they began running as fast as they could so I could see the stones up close. Guards were shining flashlights at us and yelling at us, but I didn’t care. The moon was full and I was at Stonehenge and I was flying.

  Every visit to England felt this charmed, but I couldn’t make a decision to live there. Annette came home from our trip together, quit her job, moved back, married a bloke, and settled in Nottingham. But I was torn and confused about where I was supposed to be.

  I brought various friends over with me to help me get clear about it all. One time, I brought my sister, and we did all the touristy things together and finally found ourselves at Canterbury Cathedral. It’s so massive and beautiful, and maybe it was the medieval setting or something, but I saw a man in front of the entrance steps offering Tarot readings and I was sure he was the real thing. He had long dark hair and a long dark beard, and I was sure in an instant that this was the guy who could explain where I’d been and where I was supposed to be now.

  I waited in line patiently while my sister took the tour through the cathedral to see the stained glass.

  Finally, I sat down opposite
him, respectfully passed him a five-pound note, took a breath, and asked him to tell me what he saw. He had very mystical eyes and stared at me intently for a long time before he spoke. He spread out a Tarot pack before me and told me to choose five cards and lay each one down on the table faceup. I relaxed, I let my mind grow still, and I pulled out a card. And then another. And then another. Honestly, I don’t remember what the cards were, because the next thing I know the psychic was consulting a Tarot interpretation book on his lap.

  “That’s not how you do it!” I screamed.

  “What do you mean? Of course it is.”

  “No, it’s not. Anyone can read a book. I can read my own book. If you’re a real psychic, you should be able to look at me and just know things.”

  “Like what?”

  I was furious and I could feel that trapdoor in the back of my head opening wide. “Like the fact that your father was too strict and used to spank you all the time and then when he left when you were eight years old you thought it was your fault. His name is Allan, isn’t it? And he died a few years ago. You’ve never been to his grave, but he wants you to go. Bring lilac when you go. Those were his favorite flowers.”

  “How did you do that?” He was pale and stricken, collapsed in his chair.

  “Do what?”

  “Know those things about me. Who told you?”

  “I just got off the tour bus. No one told me. I saw it. I’m a psychic. That’s what psychics do.”

  He leaned close to me, a look of amazement on his face. “Can you teach me to do what you do?”

  “No,” I said, which was true, but I was too enraged and disappointed to just walk away. “Look, I came to you because you looked like you knew what you were doing,” I said in one last desperate attempt to get some truth out of him.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said hopelessly. “Please teach me how to be real.”

  I stood up and walked away, but the line of people behind me waiting to see him followed me into the cathedral, begging me to do readings for them. I ended up getting back on the bus way before everybody else just to escape them. No matter where I went, people wanted me to look into their lives, but I couldn’t find anyone to tell me about my own. “You’re going to be married three times.” “Someone will propose to you, but you should stay in your own house and just visit him on the weekends.” I said that stuff all day long. Should I move to London or stay in New Jersey? I didn’t know.