by Suzan Saxman
“And what movie did you star in?” asked a woman.
“Oh, I’m nobody,” I answered.
“That’s not true!” said Jack. “She’s somebody all right. She’s my little sis!” He winked at me again.
Jack was terrible about his diabetes. He was eating candy and drinking soda. I kept having to remind him to take his insulin. He reminded me of my father, who was also diabetic and careless about his treatment. Jack even reused his needles, just like my dad. He really was a fucking mess, but there was also something wonderful and real about him, too.
Gary Busey, who’d once played Buddy Holly, stopped by Jack’s table and said, “I really loved you in Oliver!”
“That guy is so full of shit,” said Jack to me when Busey had left.
Women wanted to pose with Jack and have their pictures taken with him. A B-list blonde came over and flirted with him for a while. “What happened to your hair?” she asked me.
“She looks great,” said Jack. “Don’t talk to her like that.”
“That’s not lamb anymore,” said Jack after the faded starlet had left. “That’s mutton.”
We both laughed. He was really very sweet to me. Throughout that whole day we talked and joked together. I’ve never found it so easy to talk to someone.
That night he was going out with Billy Hayes, who’d played Witchiepoo on H.R. Pufnstuf. She and Jack were still friends, and she felt very motherly towards him. She wanted to buy him some new clothes because after the show he was headed up to the Hard Rock Cafe in Seattle, where the coat he’d worn as the Artful Dodger in Oliver! was going on display.
“Do you want to come?” he asked me.
But I needed to rest after the day, so we arranged to meet later on by the fire.
I called my sister from the hotel room and told her that I wasn’t coming home. “I’m staying with Jack.”
“This is crazy,” she said. “What about Gavin?”
“I’ll come get Gavin,” I said. “I have to be with Jack. I have to.”
Then I fell asleep.
Now, usually, I am a very light sleeper. But that night the fairies made sure I wouldn’t wake up. Later Jack would tell me that he had pounded on my door for over an hour and searched the hotel for me. But I was dead to the world. I slept for fourteen hours without waking once. Thank goodness, too, because the next morning I woke up and I knew something with that same certainty I have when I am in my reading room, and if I hadn’t realized it, I might have made a terrible, terrible mistake with Jack.
What I remembered as soon as I opened my eyes after that fairy sleep was that my father’s merchant marine ship used to dock in the port of Manchester in the 1950s. Manchester was where Jack was born in 1952.
I got dressed and went down to breakfast. Jack was already sitting at a table, and I joined him.
“Tell me about your mother,” I said after he’d told me about trying to find me all night.
“She was blond,” he said, “Very pretty when she was young. Her name was Vera. Her birthday was December 9.”
“December 9?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Why?”
“That’s my mother’s birthday, too.”
“Is it?”
“It is. Isn’t that strange? And you had a much older sibling, like me. And you didn’t feel close to your father, like me. We have so much in common.”
“That’s true,” said Jack.
“Hold up your hand,” I said. “Look at our hands.”
“They’re the same. We could be brother and sister.”
I took a deep breath. “Jack,” I said slowly. “I think we are.”
“Yeah, you’re my little sis,” he joked.
I shook my head. “My father was in the merchant marines and he spent a lot of time in England in the fifties. He had a lot of girlfriends. And your mother and my mother…” I didn’t know how to explain it. “Could your mother have, you know, had an affair?”
I could see Jack trying to take this in. I didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to believe it for me to know that it was true. But sitting there opposite him in that hotel restaurant I knew he was my half brother, a brother in another life and a brother in this one. “That’s why Gavin looks like you,” I said.
“Little sis,” he said, considering the name in a new light. “Well, maybe.”
That day, in between the fans and the autographs, I told him about my past-life experiences, and he, too, it turned out, had memories of dying in World War II. He began to open up to me, too, about the voices he heard in his head. “I’d say I was crazy,” he said. “But I’ve always known not to mention them to anyone.”
I felt very protective of him. Motherly? No, sisterly. There was also the knowledge that if our lives had happened in different ways, he would have been my lover. He was my soul mate. It’s just that in this life he was my brother again. I was sure of it.
Everyone who comes to me wants to find their soul mate. They imagine it happens in every lifetime. But it doesn’t. We’re always missing each other. Sometimes we’re wildly different ages; sometimes we’re the wrong gender; sometimes we only see each other for a moment or two at a subway station. I met my soul mate in California and we spent four days together. Knowing who he was in this lifetime and that ours was an ancient soul connection was enough. I knew he wasn’t going to last much longer, but I had seen him in this life, at least.
Our last day together we walked around Universal Studios. Later on I used a Sharpie marker to give him a star on Hollywood Boulevard. He drove me to the airport in his Toyota.
“You are going to visit me, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’ll come to England?”
I nodded, but I knew I wouldn’t, as strange as that must sound. I didn’t need to anymore. I knew who he was at long last. These four days with him had been almost as much as I could bear in this lifetime. By the time I went to England again, I knew that he would be dead.
We were both crying as I said good-bye. “I just want to tell you that I love you, I have always loved you, and I always will.”
On the plane home I tried to write him a card, but each pen I used would dry up. I went through pen after pen. It was like one of those frustrating nightmares where you can’t do something no matter how hard you try. I finally got my note written and sent it to him, but that was the last time I ever contacted him. I clearly wasn’t supposed to anymore.
He e-mailed me over the next year from time to time, but eventually he was too sick to stay in touch, and I never responded. It wasn’t that I feared disappointment exactly, but I needed our relationship to stay a fairy tale and not get mixed up with husbands and wives, illness and death. We were deeply connected spiritually, and I’d had that confirmed at last.
“You are much loved, and you will be much missed.” I said that to him at the airport. Later I would find out it was what he had etched on his tombstone when he died.
I think he really was the wild Jack, Jack in the Green, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, a nature sprite, the child who never grows up. The mischievous spirit of youth. And none of us can bear to say good-bye to that.
I continued meeting him in my dreams, however, as if in the world of the unconscious our souls could meet as they really were.
At home there was Gavin, and in him I saw Jack as I had loved him as a little girl, the way he’d been before alcoholism and life’s other struggles. He was the boy I really loved, my own little boy.
I was different when I got back from California. I had been yearning to understand something my whole life and now I had. I had been going back and forth to England for twenty years and now I didn’t need to anymore. I could settle down where I was. Maybe now, for the first time in my life, I could be normal.
Reunited after lifetimes with Jack Wild
Debra was looking for a man. She was a big, blond woman with lots of hair, giant boobs, and long, glorious eyelashes. She was a knockout. She was also very warm and friendly. One day she showed up with a ph
otograph of this man she’d just met.
“He’s the one!” she gushed. She was deliriously happy.
But when I looked at the man’s picture, alarm bells started ringing. Sirens, warning bells, flashing lights were all on high alert. Something was the matter. Only I didn’t know what.
I shook my head. “I don’t trust him,” I told her.
“Honey, honey, you’ve got to meet this man. He bought me a diamond ring. He’s taking me to Hawaii with my daughter, who adores him as much as I do. Even my priest loves him. He’s going to marry us next month. I’m in heaven!”
Sometimes I get such specific information—names, dates, events. Maybe if I’d been able to tell her something about him, she would have listened to me.
But she didn’t. She married him.
They’d only been married for a few months when the police showed up at their door. He was a bigamist. He had two other families, each of which he’d abandoned. He’d changed his name each time he left and started over.
I felt terrible. I wish I could have seen it, but I couldn’t.
“It’s not your fault,” said Debra. “That man fooled us all—me, the priest, you. What a scam artist!”
Still, I worried that my affection for her had interfered with her reading. I’d let her enthusiasm get in the way of what I could see.
16
The Prom King Takes Me to the Ball
A neighbor stopped me in the parking lot about a week after I got back from California. “Something’s different about you,” she said.
“Probably my hair,” I said. It was still orange and spiked.
“Your hair’s always changing colors,” she said. “It’s something else. You’re a different person. I can’t explain it, but I can see it.”
But it wasn’t that I was happy.
Destiny had thrown me a curveball. Yes, I’d found my soul mate, but he was my brother, not my lover. All of my life until this moment, there had been a part of me connected to Jack, waiting for him, reserved for him, but not anymore. I was alone in a completely new way when I came back from California. I looked at my life as if for the first time.
David was still hanging out with his friends from the Society for Creative Anachronism. He was still wearing his medieval garb, and his buddies would come over and talk about Star Trek and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Never reality. It was all so boring. I had outgrown it, and it left David and me with nothing to talk about. Where once I had thought it was charming, now it infuriated me. David was a dreamer, and until I met Jack I had been a dreamer, too, dreaming of lost loves and lost lives. But now I wanted something real and electric—in this life.
I started craving romance, real romance. I didn’t want to be Guinevere or a High Sorceress. I just wanted to be a normal woman. I wanted to try life without costumes.
David and I had been together since I was a teenager, and our life together had become dreary. I usually slept in the top bunk in Gavin’s room. David and I never had any money. I dreamed of living in a real house instead of a condo. I hated having to be on Food Stamps all the time. I was talking to dead people on a daily basis, but I was struggling to buy the groceries. Worst of all, David and I never did anything together. David was still working at the Nature Company, I did readings all day long, and at night we watched television. And that was it. We never went out. I felt old.
Gavin was seven and he was a constant joy to me, but now he was in school for much of the day, and I was alone. As he got older, too, I found myself wanting more security for us as a family. Now he was meeting ordinary kids, and I didn’t want him to feel like he lived with the Addams family. I wanted him to be able to fit into the world the way I never had. David couldn’t talk to me about any of this. He couldn’t even carry on much of a conversation about ordinary life, much less toss a Frisbee with Gavin or teach him to ride a bike. David was too much of a child himself to be a real father, or so I thought at the time in my frustration and desperation.
I just felt so lonely when I came back from California, more lonely than I had ever been.
One night after a long day of readings, of advising people on who to be with, on what to do next, on why this or that had happened in their lives, I ran out into the woods near our apartment complex in a state of complete despair. I lay down on the ground among the fallen branches and the roots and the dry leaves. I wanted to disappear. I shouted up at the stars, “If there are aliens out there, this is the time. Come and get me. Take me back. If you exist, please, come get me!” I felt trapped, like there was no way on earth that I could escape.
I’m not justifying or excusing what I did next, only explaining it. If I could go back and change one thing about my life, this would be the mistake I would not make. But we don’t get to do that. And maybe I had to make that mistake, even if it did hurt Gavin beyond measure. I don’t know. Whatever speaks through me to other people almost never offers me any guidance about my own life.
When I got back from California, a lot of messages had piled up on the answering machine from people who wanted readings. I called them all back and penciled in their appointments on my calendar. There were my regulars and the newcomers; there were always new people seeking me out. Like I’ve said before, I never turned anyone down for a reading in those days. If they needed me, that was what I was supposed to do. I had to offer my gift to them.
But there was one phone call I didn’t answer.
A man who identified himself only as Bob had left me three messages. He was a real estate lawyer who worked for our condo complex, he explained. A lot of people had recommended me to him. He needed a reading as soon as possible. It was urgent.
From the moment I heard his voice on the phone, I knew he was going to turn my life upside down. I had no idea what he looked like or what his situation was, but I knew in my deepest being that he was a can of worms I didn’t want to open.
What I liked most about the sound of his voice was how normal it sounded, like a grown-up on television. It didn’t conjure up past lives or magical enchantments. It was a deep, mature, ordinary voice, the voice of a regular guy.
He kept calling. But I didn’t answer the phone, and I didn’t dare return his messages. Still, he was persistent. Weeks went by.
“Hi, it’s Bob again,” he’d say. “Perhaps you’re away, but I really need a reading as soon as possible. I’ve got a big decision I’ve got to make. It’s kind of a desperate situation. Other people are involved.”
Finally, I just couldn’t put him off anymore, and I called him back with an opening for the next week. “I’ve been really busy,” I explained. At least that much was true.
The day of his appointment, I was scared to death and I didn’t know why. I found myself peeking through the front window to catch a glimpse of him before he arrived, like an overanxious teenager waiting for a date. Each car that drove past made my heart flutter. I think there was a part of me that already had a crush on him, or at least his voice.
Right on time, an expensive sports car pulled up in front of our building. Out of it stepped the handsomest man I had ever seen, with the classic good looks of a taller Tom Cruise. He was wearing a dark, elegant Italian suit. He was well-groomed, without any authentically medieval facial hair like the men I usually hung out with. The medieval lifestyle does not emphasize hygiene, and after fifteen years it and David were getting a little old and a little ripe.
When the doorbell rang, I started trembling.
This was not the kind of person who usually came to me for a reading.
Guys like this don’t need my help. They have all the answers. They have it all figured out. They have money in their wallets, plenty of girls; they’re moving up the ladder. They don’t need a psychic to tell them what to do. They know what to do.
I opened the door.
Later on, Bob would tell me that I wasn’t what he was expecting either. He was imagining the old Gypsy fortune-teller, a kerchief tied under her chin, bangles on her arm, the usual war
ts on the nose. Instead, I was a young mother in her thirties. I was blond. My hair had grown in since the California manicure scissors massacre, and I’d dyed it to a more natural shade.
He had a kind of effortless confidence as he chatted with me on the way to my kitchen. I was struck by the smell of his cologne, the cut of his suit. They were both expensive and carefully chosen. He had so many decisions to make, he told me, about women and money.
When we sat down at the table in my kitchen, he showed me two photographs—one of his ex-wife and one of his fiancée. “I’m feeling really confused,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing with the ladies anymore. Was I right to leave my wife? Should I get married again? My girlfriend’s pressuring me. I just don’t know. What do your cards say?”
The cards didn’t say anything, but a voice in my head, clear and ringing, announced, None of these women are the right girl for you. I am the girl for you.
Why couldn’t I be with a man like this? I’d offer him the spiritual guidance he so clearly needed, and he would give me the comfort and security I craved. Maybe the spirits were finally giving me something easy and fun, a simple normal life. My husband was a bit of a kook, and here was this great guy right in front of me. That was why he had been so persistent about coming for a reading. Some force had driven him to me. He didn’t even understand it. But what could I say?
“These are not the girls for you,” I said, looking at the photos as if I were examining them but really trying to collect myself. “Your wife, she has a horrible energy.”
He laughed bitterly. “You’re telling me!”
I swallowed, looking at the picture of his fiancée. “And this woman, well, this woman, she’s not the girl for you either.”
The voice in my head was shouting now, I am the girl for you. I am!
No way was I going to say this. I was married. I didn’t know him at all. I had just met him. I used all of my willpower to keep the words inside of me. It was the first and only time I have ever lied during a session. I’d never made up a reading before, but this time I did. I had to say something. I couldn’t say what I was really seeing, which was us, together, surrounded by sunshine, a pretty house, a white picket fence.