Psychic Blues

by Mark Edward

  “Do that. You may be surprised.”

  Of course I had just made that whole brickwork thing up off the top of my head, but I had said she may be surprised. I have learned not to guarantee anything.

  I was almost finished. I could feel it. Plus, she probably couldn’t afford to pay for the call. It was always wise to cut such calls short; otherwise, I might get what the Friends termed a “charge-back,” when a caller simply canceled their phone service and got another phone number rather than pay a large phone bill. A few of these and you were off the Friends payroll.

  “So, I hope I helped you out in some way.” This was my way of either wrapping things up or getting the caller to finally say what was really on his or her mind.

  “You did. You really did. You have no idea how you hit on everything.”

  “Just remember the word balance, B-A-L-A-N-C-E. Write it down and look at that word every day, and it will all work out.”

  “Thank you so much, Mark. Bye.”

  “Bye-bye.”

  As P.T. Barnum once said, there’s a sucker born every minute. And in the 900 business, every minute counts.

  When and how this juggernaut truly got started is anybody’s guess, but I’ll wager that back in the late ’70s, when Dan Aykroyd first played out his sketch on Saturday Night Live featuring a character who answered the telephone shouting “Hello, tele-psychic!” some enterprising person was paying attention and immediately put something together with a few other New-Agers. It soon became an easy way to exploit the biggest lot of both customers and psychics ever assembled.

  Television viewers never knew that the same people owned almost all of the variously named 900 psychic lines. Much like any large corporate conglomerate, these slick entrepreneurs operated supposedly competing psychic lines that vied for the attention of infomercial audiences with different names and promises. For a good five years, they had a complete monopoly on the media-psychic market. If you happened to be one of the smaller psychic lines just getting started, the giant soon swallowed you up, because you couldn’t compete with the constant wave of glossy and expensive infomercials bombarding the airwaves. The conglomerate known as Infomation Incorporated absorbed many of these fledgling celebrity lines.

  In the 1990s, when it was at its peak, the Psychic Friends Network logged an estimated three million minutes per month. Their gross income was approximately $144 million annually. The most successful people in all of this weren’t the psychics or our so-called Friends, but the telephone companies, which took a lion’s share of the profit before sending the leftovers to the Friends, who then tossed us—the psychics—our tiny morsel.

  I eventually heard through the Network’s underground that one of the owners was frittering away his profits, such as spending $1.5 million for a baseball signed by Babe Ruth that sat on his desk. Lavish penthouse suites, international cruises, and other ridiculous perks were rumored to be keeping The Boss far away from the problems that were beginning to cloud the crystal ball in the late 1980s. Allegations swirled about like smoke rising from a smoldering fire. The Friends callously kept escalating their numerous nefarious techniques to rip off the public without any sense of fair play or remorse. It didn’t take consulting an arcane book of knowledge to know the bubble had to burst.

  Linda Georgian and Dionne Warwick, spokespeople for the Psychic Friends, were starting to look a little frayed around their edges by 1990, near the end of the network’s success. Legal matters plagued the organization. Dionne got busted for pot possession. Pundits and investigative journalists mocked the network for not seeing both the ills of their ways and the coming end of it all in their own crystal balls. No “real” psychic had predicted this con unraveling. And what’s more, the biggest mistakes they made could have been avoided.

  Truth be known, I did have what might be considered a psychic vision through all this vexation. I knew if something didn’t change, I would soon go the way of the tulip in Holland. In Charles Mackay’s groundbreaking study of human folly, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841, he chronicled how the tulip had once been considered the rarest of the rare and used as a commodity much like gold or precious stones. Yet, as with any commodity, when this flower became more and more available, it became less and less coveted. Eventually, and inevitably, the overinflated market for tulips collapsed. This is now referred to as tulipomania. Like that flower, psychics quickly became too commercialized and too abundant. Like the Ab Roller or the Flowbee haircutting system, we were destined to be just another over-promoted product disappearing into late-night obscurity.

  Why did I do it? Knowledge about human nature and how the psychic world operates had always fascinated me. It had been an added treat to get paid to work in this realm. A symbiotic relationship between psychic and caller became a mutual addiction. Callers got their psychic fix and I got an education that couldn’t be bought in any school, church, or magic shop. The tales I heard were often stranger than any fiction imaginable. And I knew they had to be true, because who in their right mind (and this was many times debatable) would make up a story then pay $3.99 per minute to tell it to me? Were these people just desperate to talk to someone or did they think I could make them feel special somehow?

  Yet soon I was asked to work harder and harder for less and less money. What once had been an innovative, fun way to make a few bucks became another dead-end job. I came to view it as a Frankenstein held together by thousands of telephone wires, dubious psychic dabblers, and their superstitious prey.

  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnngggg! Riiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnggggg!

  What? Where am I? What am I doing? Wake up and answer the phone! Answer. The. Phone.

  Another late night. Another week, another month. Another call.

  “Hello. Welcome to the Psychic Friends Network. This is Mark, extension—”

  “I need your help.” The caller, Trish, got right to the point.

  “Fine. I’m an intuitive clairvoyant. That means the more specific you can be with your question, the more specific I can be with my answer. If you don’t have a specific area to focus on, we can consult the tarot cards.”

  “No, no,” she barked out. “I have some very specific things I need to know about.”

  I reached for my cold cup of coffee, which had been sitting on my nightstand since midnight. I was going to need it. She already sounded a bit edgy.

  “I’m listening.” I covered the receiver and tried to stifle a yawn.

  “Well, my dad used to beat me, and my mom stood there and watched. So when I turned eighteen, I moved in with Jason. He took care of me. But things aren’t going so well. He’s talking to his ex-girlfriend, meeting her at clubs, and not taking me along. I can’t leave, because if I do, I’ll have no furniture. But he doesn’t abuse me.”

  “So what’s going on that I can help you with, Trish?”

  “Well—oh, he gouged one of my eyes out.”

  “He what?” I straightened up in my chair.

  “He gouged one of my eyes out,” she repeated unemotionally.

  “With what?” I almost shrieked.

  “His hands. But he feels bad about it too.”

  I took a breath, reminding myself that I was not dreaming. “I see that you will be leaving Jason as soon as it is safe. I see you packing your bags and taking only what you need. I see you in a warm bed in a women’s shelter. It’s somewhere to the north of where you are now. I see many trees around it, and the number three is there in the address.”

  There was silence on the line for a moment. Then she asked quietly, “What’s a women’s shelter?”

  “Trish, I’m going to give you several 800 numbers in your area that are there to help you. Call them now,” I insisted. “What Jason is doing is not love. You think it is, but you are wrong.”

  “But I’ll lose the furniture,” she whined.

  “Trish, you almost lost an eye! That is far more important than any furniture. I see more furniture around you in th
e future, really nice furniture from a really expensive store in New York City, but only if you use the helpline numbers I give you and move away from all the negativity that I sense is around you. Do you understand?”

  I waited. Then the telltale click told me Trish had hung up.

  Oh, well. I had done everything I could. Maybe she would call back or think about what I’d told her. Maybe not. I could only hope she would.

  I had a long list of 800 help-line referral numbers. When I felt I was out of my depth, which was frequently, I attempted to refer these lost souls to a possibly more qualified source. This list covered everything from alcoholics to alien abductions, and I’d made it my business to pass them along whenever necessary. If some of my callers were able to at least listen to this type of advice, maybe I had indeed helped far more people than I knew.

  This was one gift that had nothing to do with being psychic. I did it to retain some semblance of humanity in a business where compassion and empathy were both in very short supply. It not only helped them, it helped me.

  As soon as I set the phone receiver down, it rang again. This meant that the late-night infomercials had started to run on the local cable stations.

  It was time to wake up. It was going to be a long night. Or was it morning? What week was this? I had been sitting next to my phone since ten p.m., huddled under Aunt Sophie’s blanket, waiting for the next call to be sent my way.

  It was a windy January night outside and the fire in the fireplace was comforting, but not quite comforting enough to take away the chill of that last call. I jotted down Trish’s name and the time on my clipboard so I could be sure to get paid. If I had been able to hold Trish for another minute or two, I might have been able to get an extra twenty-five cents, the amount I’d make for extracting the full name, address, and birth date from any unsuspecting caller stupid enough to give such information up willingly. Many were.

  The paperwork I turned in at the end of each week supplied the people who ran this network (and several other networks that appeared to compete with each other on television but which were, in fact, all owned by the same bunch of . . . well, I’ll call them “business people”) with every caller’s birth date and address. I had taken down hundreds of these names, addresses, and birth dates. The information was eventually compiled into huge databases.

  If a lonely little old lady in her eighties called, the “business people” would later send her a postcard on her birthday that read something like:

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

  THIS IS JUST A NOTE TO LET YOU KNOW YOUR OWN PERSONAL PSYCHIC

  IS THINKING OF YOU AND WOULD LOVE TO TALK TO YOU SOON.

  Or, if the call volume had been slow:

  THIS IS A WARNING FROM THE PSYCHIC FRIENDS NETWORK!

  YOU ARE IN DANGER AND MUST CALL YOUR PSYCHIC FRIEND IMMEDIATELY!

  PLEASE DIAL THE NUMBER BELOW AND SPEAK TO ONE OF US RIGHT AWAY!

  These are just two of the devious marketing ploys and manipulative exploitation techniques that eventually drove me away from the 900 world. When I had started, I’d had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the company promising not to share any of their pet secrets, methods, or business practices for ten years after the date of signing. That ten-year period has been over for some time now, so I am free to unleash the truth about their activities as I experienced them. Before I became aware of just how bad all of this was and the whole 900 phenomenon had become such a gigantic monster, I did my best to actually help people. I had thought I was doing some good and making a difference.

  My late-night shifts were often busy through dawn. At times the phone never stopped ringing and I would drop off from sheer exhaustion. These shifts were also the only time I could make any decent money. I was paid time and a half, if I could make it through the whole night without falling asleep or signing off. I eventually got used to the hours, but it wasn’t easy work. The humor was there in large dark slices, if I took the time to reflect on it, and only now do I understand just how wild a ride that era really was.

  At the time, I called these all-night marathons the Chinese Water Torture Shifts, because like the drips of water that repeatedly fall on the forehead of a tortured prisoner, continuously keeping him or her from rest or sleep, I often found myself nodding off into dreamland, only to be rudely awakened by the jangling torment of yet another phone call, channeled to my home phone courtesy of my “friends” at the Psychic Friends Network switchboard. I shared the lines with what had started out at around fifty psychics across the country and which ended up at over a thousand after the network’s first three years.

  I’d had to wait my turn to receive calls, depending on how many other psychics had signed on to a particular shift. It was a crapshoot how many calls I would receive as well as who I might end up talking to, but like the popular TV game show Wheel of Fortune, this wheel turned round and round, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggg! Ringgg!

  “Psychic Friends Network. This is Mark, extension 7408. How can I help you?”

  “I want some winning lotto numbers and make it quick!”

  “I can give you some numbers based on the ancient science of numerology, if you like, but I cannot guarantee that they will give you absolutely accurate results.”

  “What? I thought you were supposed to be psychic?”

  “I give psychic readings with the tarot, and I am psychic, but if I could obtain one hundred percent accuracy with lotto numbers, I wouldn’t be on the phone talking to you right now. I would be sitting on my private island near Tahiti.”

  “Oh, well. Then, let’s have whatever you got.”

  “No problem.”

  And so it went, week after week. If there was ever such a thing as an honest psychic, I was sincerely aspiring to ascend to that level, even though this was a hopeless endeavor. I suspected that if our Friends at the switchboard ever monitored my more honest calls, I would have been fired. But it became a matter of personal principle to me. Feeling proud for being different from the rest kept me semi-legit and sane. I remained innocent and crafty in equal measure.

  I worked ten long years on several of these nefarious 900 lines, including a proposed dream-interpretation hotline. Callers didn’t always want to pay a total stranger to tell them what their dreams meant, but it was very easy work when they did. There was obviously no scientific method involved. I had no degree or qualifications. All I had to do was speak with authority when I gave them my version of how I thought a professional dream interpretation should sound. Despite paying near-professional analyst fees, the client usually thanked me and informed me that it had all made total sense. The work was not that much different from any of the other 900 lines: sports, sex, legal, and so forth.

  Once I even applied for a job with a company promoting their particular 900 line as having “the world’s only certified genuine psychics.” I always wondered who did the certifying for them but never asked. This brilliant telephone scheme eventually convinced the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office to adopt an actual certification policy for all psychics working in the city, but it fell flat. For any government official to believe someone could sit in command of such a procedure was the height of bureaucratic idiocy.

  While the government tried to work out how to skim money off the psychic boom, I kept busy teaching magic and performing mentalism for private parties and corporate trade shows, but magic had lost its charm for me after nearly twenty years of trying to make it with cards, coins, and ropes, especially when I found that I could earn three times as much money giving tarot readings, with the added benefit of seldom being turned away. People at parties loved to have their fortunes told, whereas doing magic for a living is a little like working as a mime or one of those loud mariachi musicians who strolls up to your table at a Mexican restaurant and won’t go away. “Pick a card” soon took a back seat to “Let me read your palm.” Why try to pressure someone into being enterta
ined by what they know is clever trickery? Instead, why not tell them something personal about themselves? And the 900 racket made it even easier, since I wouldn’t even have to leave home to perform my psychic wonders.

  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnngggg! Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnggggg!

  “Hello. Welcome to the Psychic Friends Network. This is Mark, extension 7408. How can I help you?”

  A soft-spoken Southern voice whispered, “My name is Hillman. I can’t talk for long, and I have to keep my voice down, so listen carefully. I’m a physician and a research scientist. I’m calling from an above-top-secret island facility. I have been having premonitions. Do you know what they are?”

  I was intrigued already. “Oh, yes, Hillman. I’m quite familiar with premonitions, dreams, and psychic phenomena, not only in our time, but also throughout history and in ancient folklore.”

  He rasped in a furtive whisper, “Good. Well, listen. In the last year three of my predictions have come true.”

  “How do you explain that?” I asked. “I can’t be more specific unless you can. Tell me more, if you have the time, please.” My interest was definitely piqued at this point. I always loved the calls that sounded like dialogue from an episode of The Outer Limits television series. So I played along. “I do see something off the East Coast. It’s very remote and highly guarded. Are you sure it is safe to call a 900 line?”

  “You are right about the location. We are connecting on a spiritual plane already.” The caller breathed heavily into the phone. “My psychic side is being suppressed and monitored by the government. I have been involved against my will. I’m a neurologist working on mind-brain connections, and that’s why I’m keeping my voice so low. I’m very concerned about my feelings of impending doom.”