The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  “He’s just kind of crazy,” I warned Bob. “Who knows what we’ll see?”

  I decided to go into the real estate office by myself, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to reveal who I was right away. As I approached the door, I heard this boisterous Gypsy music blasting from inside. I knocked, but no one answered. I wasn’t sure if anyone could hear me over the music. But I turned the handle, and the door was open. So I stepped inside.

  It didn’t look like a real estate office. Old suits, shiny from wear, were hanging on the walls; boxes piled high were strewn around the room. There weren’t any glossy photos of apartments or houses to buy. There weren’t any computers. There was no secretary. The walls were yellow with nicotine. There was a cot in one corner covered in rumpled sheets and blankets. The office smelled like the stale butts of a thousand, maybe a million, cigarettes. Nobody in their right mind was going to come here to try to buy a house.

  Two young men, clearly gay, their arms linked, were dancing and gyrating to the music. Behind a desk covered in papers was my father, clapping along and smiling. All three men turned to look at me when I came into the room.

  I hadn’t seen my father since I was seventeen, and now I was in my late thirties. I was tan and blond, not a little black-haired waif anymore.

  “Is this a real estate office?” I asked tentatively. My mouth was so dry.

  “Yes, it is.” Steve was much older but still handsome. A well-worn George Clooney. He was wearing glasses and had another pair on his head. A third pair was dangling around his neck on a chain. His shirt had pockets on either side, and out of each pocket poked a dozen Bic pens. Above the desk was a large Victorian painting of two knights jousting.

  “My name is Suzan Wild and I’m from New York and I’m looking for a place for the winter.…”

  While I was speaking, Steve had taken off the glasses he was wearing and positioned the pair that had been around his neck on his nose. “Sue? Is that you? How did you get here? How did you find me?” He came around from behind the desk and wrapped me up in his arms. It had been over twenty years since I’d seen him, and he recognized me instantaneously. Tears were already pouring down his cheeks. I don’t think I cried. I was in too much of a state of shock.

  I can’t pretend that the filthiness of the place didn’t upset me. Clearly, he not only worked in this room, but also lived there. His clothing was covered in cigarette holes, as if he’d burned himself accidentally a hundred times and hadn’t even realized it. He smelled rank, of old cigarettes, of sweat, of unwashed clothes. There were used diabetic needles littering the floor.

  My feelings weren’t simple. I knew many things at once. I knew that he was hopeless, and that I couldn’t fix him, much less clean him up. He would die soon; that was clear from the cigarettes and the needles. He was such a mess, such a madman, and I was trying to make a go of having a normal life. No wonder I had never gotten in touch with him, even after I stopped living with my mother. What would Bob think of all of this?

  But Steve was gazing at me with such an expression of love that it overcame all of these other feelings. He might be a lunatic, but he was my father.

  “Sue. Sue. You don’t know much I’ve missed you.”

  One of the dancing men clicked off the tape recorder.

  “Boys, we’ll dance tomorrow,” said my father, still holding me. “But I need some time with my daughter. I haven’t seen my daughter in a long time. A long time.”

  The reality of it began to hit me, and I started to tear up. He was filled with such sweetness. He was dabbing his eyes with this old tissue. Everything about him was rumpled. When I was a little girl, I wouldn’t have noticed any of that, I would just have seen the dancing men and his joy. Children can see a person’s true spirit so much more easily than grown-ups can.

  We were both crying now as the men left the office. Through the door I waved at Bob to come in.

  “I have a son,” I told Steve.

  “I heard,” he said. “From your mother once. Merlin, isn’t he? I keep up. I keep up.”

  “Gavin,” I said.

  Steve laughed. “Remember this?” From behind his desk he pulled out a plastic stage sword. It was the one he’d used when he taught me how to duel.

  Bob came in a few minutes later, a bottle of wine in his hand.

  “What a beautiful man!” exclaimed Steve. He took the wine, opened up the back part of his toilet, and stuck it in. “Don’t have a fridge, but it’ll stay cool back there.”

  Bob looked at me, laughing, and I knew he was thinking, You were right.

  We ended up going out to dinner at a seafood buffet where Steve not only helped himself to platefuls of fried shrimp, but also casually borrowed food from my plate and Bob’s plate and the other diners’ plates as well. Somehow Steve managed to make the whole thing dreadfully amusing and charming.

  “Thank you, m’dear, for this bread stick.” And the person whose table Steve had taken it from would smile at him as if they were honored that he’d done so.

  I told Steve about my life, my trips to England, and becoming a psychic. He didn’t seem either particularly impressed or skeptical. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He nodded as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “My grandmother was a fortune-teller in the Carpathian Mountains and so was my mother. It makes sense.” But he didn’t ask me for a reading, and I wouldn’t have given him one. While he ate, he lit cigarette after cigarette.

  I felt with my father as I had with Jack. Steve didn’t have much time left. That was the only thing there was left to know.

  “Are you going to eat that?” my father asked a woman, pointing at the baked potato on her plate. He flashed her a smile as she let him have it.

  “Thank you so much,” said my father. “This is my daughter, by the way. I’m so proud of her.”

  “I met Jack Wild,” I told my father.

  “The English actor? The one in Oliver! you had such a crush on?”

  “That’s right, him. We had a very unusual meeting.”

  “Oh, did you?” My father chuckled again. He had finished the baked potato and was peering around the dining room of the restaurant.

  “Maybe we should order some dessert?” suggested Bob. He was smiling in amazement at my father.

  “Did you ever have a girlfriend when you were in England in the fifties?” I asked Steve.

  He raised his eyebrows and made a low chortle. “A girlfriend? I had lots of girlfriends when I was in England.”

  “Named Vera?”

  My father looked at me sharply. “Vera? Yes, for a while. Blond woman like your mother. Married, too.”

  I nodded. I had thought so. “Did she have a child?” I asked.

  My father shrugged. “I didn’t stay in touch with her. I suppose she could have.”

  While we were talking that night, I asked my father what day his birthday was. I wanted to be sure to note it. I was stunned to discover that it was July 27, the same exact day as Bob’s. There are 365 days in a year and what are the chances these two men in my life would have the same birthday? Not that they were anything alike, not at all, unless I looked at the enormity of their egos. Both were men who liked to command attention. But it felt like more than astrology. It felt like destiny.

  The next time I came down to Florida, I brought my father a photograph of me and Jack. Steve put it on his desk next to the one of me as a little girl and the one of his other daughter. It would be the only photo he would take with him to the hospital a few months later. On this trip I also brought Gavin to meet his grandfather.

  Gavin walked into Steve’s office and within a few minutes had whispered to me, “Grandpapa is ape shit.”

  He really was.

  Bob took us all to Animal Kingdom, and Steve was outrageous.

  It turned out that because of his diabetes, Steve was often incontinent, but he refused to wear adult diapers. He only brought one pair of pants and was constantly flapping them out the balcony of the fancy ho
tel where we were staying to try to dry them. He swore like the sailor he’d been. He was wildly politically incorrect. He was racist, rolling his eyes whenever a black person passed us. He was a pig, making lewd comments and gestures whenever he saw a pretty girl. He was kind of like a possessed Archie Bunker, only movie-star handsome still—despite everything, despite the urine stains—and exuding this impossible, reckless, irresistible magnetism.

  When I’d met Jack, he’d reminded me of my father, but now my father made me think of Jack. They were so alike, only my father was so much older and more decrepit.

  Poor Gavin shared a room with him that first night because we had no idea how awful Steve could be. He started calling out and swearing in his sleep and groaning, “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Oh my God! Jesus fucking Christ!” He wailed; he moaned; he thrashed in the bed.

  Gavin knocked on our door. “Mother,” he said. “I think Grandpapa needs an exorcism.”

  Bob and I got up and went over to the other room. Steve had opened the window and was screaming out into the night.

  “Steve, why don’t you just get back into bed,” said Bob calmly. “Say your prayers and head to sleep.”

  “Say my prayers?” bellowed Steve. “You think I pray to God? I don’t. I pray to Lucifer! That’s my only god. Lucifer!”

  But Gavin had been going through Steve’s things. “Then why do you have a card, Grandpa, saying you’re a Catholic and that if anything happens to you to call a priest?”

  Steve looked at him, wild-eyed, but didn’t say anything. Finally, Bob and I got him to settle down and go to sleep.

  The next morning at Animal Kingdom, though, he was in fine form again. We went to the Monkey House. One of the exhibits was a display of all the artwork that these two gorillas had painted, with real paintbrushes and everything. The paintings were selling for thousands of dollars to raise money for the zoo.

  “So what do you think of the paintings, Steve?” asked Bob. “Shall we get one?”

  “I could paint these with my balls,” bellowed Steve. “My balls are better artists.”

  Everyone was staring at us. Bob, Gavin, and I quickly hurried Steve out of the room. But Bob wasn’t embarrassed by Steve; he thought he was a riot.

  Steve lit up a cigarette as soon as we were outside.

  “Please don’t smoke around the animals, sir,” said a guard.

  “Fuck the animals!” exclaimed Steve.

  Bob couldn’t stop laughing, and the love I felt for him was growing stronger by the minute. His acceptance of my father was his acceptance of me. He let me love my father for who he was, despite everything, and I was overflowing with gratitude—for my son, for my father, and for this man who had made it possible for us all to be together.

  I wanted so much to create this brand-new family, but Gavin refused to cooperate. Bob and I bought a house on a lake in New Jersey; we got pet cockatoos; we traveled back and forth to Florida. But Gavin wanted to be with his real father. He wanted his dad, not Disney World. You can’t force love. It took me a long time to understand that.

  Bob insisted on taking my father on a cruise at one point. “He’ll love it,” Bob explained to me. “You will, too. It’s so relaxing, and there’s nothing to do but eat and sleep and hang out.”

  He insisted on buying my father a whole wardrobe, and he also, somehow, managed to talk my father into wearing adult diapers at last. Going through security, however, to get on board the ship, my father managed to set off all the alarms. Bells were ringing and clanking. Guards were rushing over. “I’m sorry, Mr. Citta, we’re going to have to take you out of the line.”

  They frisked him, patting down his arms and legs. They sent him through the screener again, and again all the alarms went off.

  “Do you have any guns or weapons on you, sir?” asked security.

  My father shook his head. They had him take off his belt and his shoes. They frisked him again. He went through the gate again, and again the alarm was blaring.

  At this point a lot of people were staring at us. Bob was looking at me and shaking his head. “Leave it to your father!”

  My father was making all of these faces at us like he couldn’t figure out what was the matter.

  “Sir, do you have any metal on your person that we might have missed?” asked a guard.

  My father thought for a moment and then finally nodded. He knelt down, rolled down his sock, and pulled out a six-inch hunting knife. “Could this be doing it?” he said.

  Eventually Steve’s diabetes got so bad he had to have his leg amputated. He was in this awful VA hospital, but he eventually escaped in his wheelchair and ended up hiding out behind the hospital. One morning he tried to cross a thruway and ended up getting bumped by a car and toppled out of his chair. He was alive but badly bruised. Bob and I flew down to be with him and he was as irascible as ever, Robin Hood imprisoned in the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle.

  Steve kept trying to show Bob his bloody stump.

  “There are many things in life that I want to see, but not that,” laughed Bob. He was so gentle with Steve, spooning him his food while we visited with him.

  I told my mother what had happened, and all she wanted to know was what had happened to the leg.

  “I’m sure they threw it away in some special container or something.”

  “That seems like a waste,” she said.

  “What?” She’d resolutely had no opinion up until now about my new relationship with Steve.

  “The leftover leg. You could mount it, put it above the fireplace or something.”

  I thought she was joking, but my mother never joked. She was always trying to say the proper thing, and this was clearly in no way proper. It was bizarre. I realized that my mother, too, was deteriorating. It was the first sign we had that she was becoming demented.

  A week or so after we got back to New Jersey, I woke up one morning and knew we had to get right back to Florida. It was as powerful a psychic intuition as I have ever had. Bob got us tickets at once. We had to fly into Miami, though, then drive to Fort Lauderdale, and when we got there we couldn’t find Steve anywhere. He had checked out of the hospital and his office was closed. Nobody had any idea where he’d gone. Nobody had seen him for days.

  We drove all over Fort Lauderdale with nothing to go on. We called my half sister who was estranged from Steve. We talked to the doctors and nurses. At last, defeated, we got in the car and decided to drive back to Miami.

  We were on the highway out of the city when we saw a man in a wheelchair by the side of the road. This is the God’s honest truth. It was Steve. If we hadn’t been driving to Miami, we never would have seen him.

  Bob pulled the car onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes. Cars were whizzing past. Steve looked up at us, smiling.

  “What are you doing here?” I yelled as I hugged him.

  “I was praying that you would come. I was praying and praying. And look at that, you found me, just by accident.”

  He was filthy.

  Did we find him because I was a psychic or was it simply because I loved him? I think Bob and I found him because we both loved him so much. I think love finally is the most powerful psychic power of all.

  Steve was begging us to take him to the Olive Garden. He was ravenous. But he was such a mess, smelling of cigarettes, urine, and feces.

  “I’m sorry, Steve, but we can’t take you to a restaurant like this.”

  “I’m dying to go to the Olive Garden,” he insisted. “I love their shrimp.”

  We had no place to bathe him, but we bought him some fresh clothes and got take-out shrimp that we all ate in the car. We didn’t have any idea what to do with him or where he should go. He wanted to go to the homeless shelter where he’d been earlier, so finally that’s where we took him, though later I wished we hadn’t.

  “How did you know where to find me?” he kept asking.

  “I don’t know. We just found you. We all need to check into a hotel.”


  But Steve insisted on having us take him to the homeless shelter first. He felt more comfortable there, he said.

  “We’re going to get a house, though, where you can live with us,” said Bob.

  “Are you sure you won’t come to the hotel with us?” I asked again.

  But he wouldn’t. We arranged to meet him at the Winn-Dixie next to the shelter the following morning.

  All that night at our hotel I dreamed about him.

  The next morning we went to the Winn-Dixie and waited and waited. He never showed up and finally we went to the shelter.

  An older man who was sweeping started shaking his head. “Didn’t anybody tell you? Didn’t you get a call?”

  An hour after we’d dropped him off, Steve had died of a heart attack.

  If we hadn’t found him, I would never have seen him again. But Bob thought maybe the shrimp we’d given Steve had killed him.

  “No,” I said. “He loved those shrimp. We just gave him one last great meal.”

  “I think I’ve been in your life to make sure you were able to be here with him at the end,” said Bob.

  I never knew what happened to Steve’s body. His daughter in Florida didn’t want to be in touch with me. Growing up with him had been harder than finding him at the end, I guess. But my father was gone again. There was no funeral, no final resting place to visit and pay my respects. Bob and I went to the McDonald’s Steve loved the most, and I wrote “Rest in Peace Robin Hood” with a permanent marker on the concrete of an outdoor table. Years later when I visited, it was still there. That’s the only memorial I was able to give him.

  “You know your father was mentally ill,” said my mother when I told her he was dead.

  But was he really? Or did he just not fit into our crazy culture? My mother could pass in polite society, dress properly, and say the right things, at least when she was out in public. But she was, I think, much more deranged than my father. Steve’s problems were right out in the open. My mother’s were expertly hidden inside her heart. It’s hard in our world today to sort out who’s really crazy and who isn’t.

  Soon after he died, my father began visiting me in dreams. He is always young and always dressed as Robin Hood. He stays close, and I can tell he’s happy. For a crazy man who didn’t believe in anything, it sure seems like he didn’t have any trouble finding heaven.