by John Edward
“You did not!” A.J. said.
“I did. I’ll even tell you what he was wearing. He had the same kind of coat that your father wore, and he had the same hat that he’s wearing in the picture on the dresser.”
“You didn’t see it,” A.J. insisted.
“I didn’t want to believe it. I was afraid to say it. And we never, ever talked about it from the minute it happened until right now.”
“You didn’t see it!” A.J. repeated, very upset now. “You just incorporated my dream into your own dream after I told you about it.”
Rick and A.J. never fought, almost never disagreed about anything. But on this, they were diametrically opposed. A.J. was ready to jump out of the car right there on the New Jersey Turnpike. “Okay,” Rick said. “All right. But this guy’s doing us a big favor. He’s got a waiting list. We’re not going there and then not doing it.”
They didn’t say another word the rest of the way into the city.
WE MET AT STEPHEN’S APARTMENT. We said our hellos, and Rick and I did the “You’re-from-Long-Island?-Hey-I’m-from-Long-Island-too” greeting. And then I went into a room with Rick and A.J. and gave them the family-tree rundown: Above you, below you, to your side. This was the opposite of the usual case of the wife dragging the husband. Rick was all ears. A.J. had her hands folded.
The first thing that came through was a male figure above A.J. with an “E” name. It’s like my last name, Edward, I said.
“That was my father’s name,” A.J. said, glancing at Rick.
Another relative came through, a cousin A.J. didn’t know very well, but who was very close to her father. “She’s the one who greeted him when he crossed over,” I said.
“Now, your father, he died, he had an impact. I feel like he was stabbed. No, not stabbed, shot. Was your father shot?”
“Yes.” A.J. looked very jumpy; her mouth was open.
“Three bullets. But was he hit by a train at the same time, or . . . what’s the train connection?”
They both started to answer, but I cut them off. I meant it as a question for A.J.’s father. “Just say yes or no. He wasn’t hit by a train.”
“No,” Rick said.
“He was shot.”
“Yes.”
“Was he shot on a train?”
“Yes.”
“But these guys stalked him. There were three of them, three guys. But he wasn’t shot on the train.”
“Yes, he was.”
“No, he was shot between the cars of the train.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Now, why is he showing me he didn’t die from this?”
“He did.”
“He’s saying no, it’s something circulatory. Like something with his blood.”
“Well, actually, the gunshot wounds that he had enlarged his ribcage. In fact, he had the exact same wounds as Reagan when he was shot. So he got off the train, sat on a bench, and bled to death. Nobody came to help. They thought it was a guy sleeping on a bench. Had they gotten to him within an hour, two hours, he’d still be alive.” It turned out that a conductor had actually seen A.J.’s father being stalked and then shot, but when he saw him get off the train, he thought he might have been mistaken. The conductor didn’t call it in until the end of his shift. By then, A.J.’s father had bled to death on the bench in the station.
A.J.’s father was pulling his energy back now, and then he stopped, as if he had a parting comment. “Your father, he wants you to know . . . why is he pulling me down South?”
“My brother lives down South,” Rick said.
“No, no. What’s connected to the two of you down South?”
“Well, we used to live in Tennessee and Florida.”
“Tennessee. I don’t know what this means, often I get these things and they don’t mean anything to me, but hopefully it means something to you. So I’m just going to throw it out. He wants me to tell you that the man with the hat and the coat over the bed was him, and he apologizes for scaring you.”
Rick and A.J. gasped and looked at each other. Rick excused himself and went to the bathroom. A.J. sat there in shock. She was in a daze.
That same night, another energy came forward, and it was for Rick. I recognized it. “What’s your relationship with Carl Perkins?” I asked him.
“Well, I was his business partner.”
“Oh, okay. Right. Were you and Carl in Texas?”
“Yeah, we were.”
“Austin?” I asked.
“Yes. Austin.”
That’s all Carl Perkins gave me this time. But it was enough for Rick.
He explained: “Carl and I were together in Austin, Texas, and it was monumental, a turning point in our relationship. In Austin every year they have something called South by Southwest, where the entire town turns into music industry city. Every record company, every record executive in the world comes to Austin, and in every bar and every place imaginable there are bands playing, and that’s where bands are signed. I had convinced Carl to go there and be the keynote speaker, which he didn’t want to do. He came up with every excuse under the sun not to go to this thing. I said, ‘Carl you gotta go, you gotta go.’ We had made an album—funny, it was called ‘Go, Cat, Go’—and I’m telling him it’s important for the album, you need to do it, you have so much to say to young artists, you’ve got to be there. And he did go, and it was probably, next to Martin Luther King, one of the greatest speeches I have ever heard. A spiritual speech about how money is not important, how you have to do things because they’re right sometimes. Tony Bennett also gave a speech, but it was a real downer about how the music industry sucks, and Carl’s was that it’s not about the music industry, it’s about the music. It’s about the healing power of music, and if you happen to make a living along the way, great.
“The place was packed with like two thousand people, and everybody was mesmerized. He was supposed to talk for an hour, but because he didn’t want to do this, he had said to me, ‘I ain’t going up there speaking for no hour. If I have to go out there and speak for an hour, you’re introducing me and it better be at least a half-hour long. And I did. I went up there, and the headline in the paper the next day is: ‘Perkins hits high note despite infomercial-like introduction.’ I’m up there selling ‘Go, Cat, Go,’ saying, ‘It’s got Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, all these people. And how many people in this industry besides Carl Perkins could get those people together?’
“And what was so monumental about it was that up to that point, though we were getting close, it was still businesslike. He wasn’t sure of all my intentions because he had been screwed so many times. So right after the speech, he wanted to go out to lunch, just the two of us. He told his band and his sons to go off and do whatever. And he said, ‘I just wanted to spend this time with you, to thank you. I said, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘This was a very important day for me. And it’s a very important day for us. That’s a great thing that you made me do.’ ”
Rick had said there was poetry in the songs that Carl wrote late in his life. I thought that simple message was poetic. He had so much to say to his daughter. But all he had to say to Rick was one thing: Austin. And for Rick, that was all he needed to hear.
That night was also important for Rick and me. Still sky-high from the reading, he asked me why I wasn’t on TV. “You’re like Opie does Dead People,” he said. I laughed. Stephen thought that Rick should try to work with me. That sounded good to me. Rick and I were nearly fifteen years apart. He had the whole suburban dad, Little League thing going, while I had no kids and was flying around the country telling people their relatives may be dead but they’re okay. But we had a great connection and became fast friends. He tried to steer me in the right direction, as he had done for Carl Perkins.
LATER THAT YEAR, Rick and I, along with Lydia Clar, went to Dallas for the event that was destined for disaster—remember the credit card fiasco? But there was one amazing thing
about that trip, and if I had been able to step back and see the big picture, I would have realized that it made the whole thing worthwhile.
The three of us went out to dinner the night before the event, and afterward, with some time to kill, we decided to see what a mall in downtown Dallas looked like. Rick wasn’t wild about the idea. “I am, I guess, a mall-a-phobic,” he said. “I’m not the world’s greatest shopper. I get antsy. Real antsy.” But he was a trouper and came right in, glad to see that it was a pretty dinky mall. We’d be in and out.
After about a half hour, we agreed we’d seen what a mall in Dallas looked like and we could go, which thrilled Rick. I led the way down the escalator. When I got to the bottom, though, I stopped in my tracks and did one of those pirouettes that happen when I’m getting grabbed by the neck. Of course, there were people behind me, and if you stop at the bottom of an escalator and don’t keep walking, people start to pile up. “What’s this guy doing?” someone behind me said.
I pointed to my left and told Rick, “There’s a Carl Perkins reference in that store. We have to go into that store.” Normally Rick would have wanted to check for a Carl Perkins reference, but this being a mall, all he wanted to do was get out of there. But he knew that wasn’t happening. Not after that pirouette. We headed for what Rick proclaimed to be the “world’s biggest tchochke shop.” It was what you might expect if a hundred families hauled their garage-sale leftovers over to the local mall and dumped them in one gigantic store.
Rick surveyed this department store of junk. “Okay,” he said hopefully, “are you getting a feeling?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Nope? So where do we start?”
“Right here.” We were at the front of the store.
Rick tried a shortcut. He went to a person at the front register and said, “Say, do you have anything here that’s Carl Perkins-related?”
The woman looked at him like, who-related? “Mister, we got everything here. You’re gonna have to look for it.”
That look of panic on Rick’s face was the recognition that there was absolutely no organization to the store. So forget a Carl Perkins section. I helped look for five or ten minutes, but after leafing through some old Life magazines, I got bored and went off on my own. I realized that unless it was Elvis Presley’s studded belt, I wouldn’t know a Carl Perkins reference from a Marlin Perkins reference. This was for Rick to find. Lydia was no help, either. She went off to do some Christmas shopping.
Rick was searching the store, looking through stacks of old forty-five records. “Is it Elvis?” he asked me.
“Nope.” He could tell from my face that we weren’t leaving without finding whatever we were supposed to find. I wasn’t doing it for him. I was doing it for Carl. There was no doubt in my mind that this was really important to him.
The woman who worked in the store asked, “Did someone send you here?” Oh, you could say that.
“Beatles?” Rick asked.
“Nope.”
“Here’s a book on Memphis.”
“Look through it.”
Rick looked for something remotely related. Nothing.
After about an hour, Rick said he couldn’t do this anymore. He was sorry, he knew Carl wanted him to find this thing, he would really like to find it, he had given it a try, but now he had to go. “John, can we please leave now?”
I shot him my “no way” look and went back to my own shopping. At which point, Rick turned in frustration, like an impatient kid, and bumped his shin on the leg of a large round table behind him.
“Oh, man that hurt,” he said, bending down to rub his leg. And as he came back up, his eyes landed on a glass snowball music box. And inside the snowball were a pair of little blue suede shoes. Rick picked it up, and turned the little lever. And heard The Song.
“That’s it,” I said.
I figured that the least I could do was buy the thing for Rick. I brought it up to the register. “Found what you were looking for?” the clerk asked. Suddenly it didn’t seem so much like a junk store anymore. The price was $56—as in 1956, the year of “Blue Suede Shoes.”
Rick didn’t want me to pay for it, but I told him I wasn’t really buying it for him. “We need to give this to Debbie,” I said.
Rick wanted to call Debbie and give her the snowball, but her father’s death was still fresh, only ten months removed, and he didn’t want to upset her. So he waited until he got home after the weekend. He called her on Monday. “I started telling her what happened, and in the middle of the story, she started crying,” Rick told me when he called me after talking to her.
Rick told me that he apologized to her, but she just said, “No, no, you don’t understand. . . . After the second stroke, deep inside I knew Daddy’s time was about up. A very dear friend came to visit him and brought him a very special gift: A snowball music box. Inside were the familiar blue suede shoes and, of course, the song playing. Daddy sat there in his favorite chair with his guitar on one side, and I watched him as he watched the shoes go round and round. There was a sadness in his eyes, and I could also see a glimpse of pride as he set the snowball on the table beside him. He reached to get his coffee cup, and as he did, he knocked the snowball over, and it shattered into a million pieces. Daddy’s left side had been left very weak by the second stroke. I rushed to his side to clean up the mess, and I looked into his eyes, and neither of us said a word for a moment. Tears streamed down his face. In that moment, I knew he was very sick and that he knew it as well. How I wished I could have put those broken pieces of glass together as if the accident had never happened. Somehow I felt if I could, Daddy would get well.”
“Debbie, this is just incredible,” Rick said when she told him the story over the phone that day.
“No,” she said. “What is really incredible is that today is my birthday.”
Rick just let that sink in. “Well, then,” he said, “I guess I have your birthday present from your father.”
FOUR NIGHTS LATER, I had a long-scheduled event at Town Hall, the venerable concert hall in New York City. It was a benefit for World Hunger Year, organized by Rick. I did readings, and Todd Pettengill joined me onstage for a little comic relief byplay—“the Psychic and the Psychotic,” as we called ourselves when we appeared together on the radio and at events. Rick invited Annie Haslam, the singer from Renaissance. He had signed her up to record four songs for the CD that was going to be included in the infomercial package, including Carl Perkins’ “Beyond the Blue,” and he wanted us to meet. Rick got her to go onstage and sing a cappella for the first time in her career, one of her songs about angels. She left with a copy of One Last Time.
I came back onstage at the end of the evening, wanting to end the benefit on a high emotional note. In my hands I held Debbie Perkins’ snowball music box. “When something really wild happens, I just can’t keep it to myself,” I told the audience. I began telling the story of what had happened just days earlier in Dallas. Rick had asked Debbie to come to New York and tell the story herself, but she didn’t think she could handle it. Instead, she wrote it down and sent it to us. I asked Todd to read it.
“When you lose someone so close to you, you look back at those moments and you realize you cannot do anything to change things,” she wrote. “I celebrated my forty-fourth birthday Monday without my Daddy. I was so depressed all day. And then Rick called and told me that John had a gift for me that my father had led him to. So my daddy let me know again through John that he is alive and well on the other side. My Daddy never missed giving me a special birthday gift. He found a way to give me the greatest one of all this year.
“My father was bigger than life to me and to many. He penned many songs that were recorded by many people. But he was Daddy to me. Not only was he the greatest daddy a girl could ever have, he was my best friend. From the other side, my father sends me signs that he is alive and that he will always be with me. Death is only a separation in the flesh and not in the spirit. The past year has
been difficult. I long to see my father one last time, and yet I feel closer to him in so many ways now that I can’t physically see him every day. I know he watches over me and speaks to my heart.”
Debbie said that the gift had inspired her to write a song for the occasion. She titled it, “One Last Time.”
Carl had always been convinced that John Lennon gave him the song he wrote for Paul McCartney, “My Old Friend.” In some way, he was doing that now for his daughter. They gave each other their One Last Time.
— CHAPTER 7 —
Medium Cool
The Pitch
Ramey Warren Black was in her car, flying through the clouds after her surprise attack reading that night in October of 1998. She got home and told her husband he wouldn’t believe what had just happened to her. And how she was going to turn that experience into a syndicated television show. So what if Ramey’s new business partner, Adora English, thought she was absolutely out of her mind for even saying the words “psychic medium” and “TV show” in the same sentence. No, not the way to get their business off the ground. Not when they’ve named the company Media-Savvy.
That her partner had greeted her first big idea with an enormous eruption of laughter did not faze Ramey in the least. All she had to do was wait until the next day, which would be the 25th—an odd day. Ramey would be president of Media-Savvy for the next twenty-four hours. If only she could get a deal done in a day. But as Ramey told me over dinner that night, I had to give her a year. Fine, I said. If it happens, it happens. For now, I just wanted to get on other people’s shows so I could talk about my book. But I did have some ideas if she managed to get anyone interested in doing a show with me.
Ramey started by getting me on some of the shows where she had contacts—Roseanne, Leeza, Maury. That gave me both some exposure and some tape. When the time came to try to pitch a show, she and Adora would need to give the people in suits something they could pop into their Sonys. Ramey introduced me to her agent, Richard Lawrence, and he looked like an agent to me, so he became mine, too.