Psychic Blues

by Mark Edward

  I had read many books about mediumship by then, and what was known at the turn of the century as “mixed mediumship” (applied to a séance group to make them more “psi-conductive”) was something I could have turned to as a rationalization, had I been less skeptical of myself. Making an audience or group more psi-conductive meant that, if you needed to do a few magic tricks to get the psychic juices or belief mechanisms flowing, it was perfectly acceptable. The legendary medium Eusapia Palladino told her investigators that when sitters came to her séances expecting to be tricked, she had no power to stop tricks from manifesting themselves through her and that the sitters themselves had caused her to dupe them. This has to rate as one of the classics in the realm of great psychic excuses. What a piece of work old Eusapia must have been! I knew I was just a con artist, albeit a mildly self-conscious one.

  The mood in the radio studio started to change. My fellow psychics revolved in a game of musical chairs; burnt-out psychics were quickly replaced by fresh-faced newcomers. Peter, Melodie, and several of the other psychics I had met over the time spent with KYAK moved on and found other outlets. Then there were vague rumors of a Mormon organization taking over the entire station and its affiliates. We all knew that any shift in that direction and away from the influence of Steven’s clairvoyant mother would put the kibosh on anything even remotely psychic.

  Word went out that there was also to be a new captain at the helm in the front office. I had a clear, non-psychic vision of Steven’s Asian art collection, including his golden Buddha, being unceremoniously carted away into obscurity by the new reigning dignitaries from Salt Lake City. I never witnessed any changes other than a slow receding of emphasis on the Twilight Mix psychics and a few of the jocks moving on in a desultory manner. In the world of syndicated radio, personalities were flown in and out like lobsters; this ebb and flow was an expected eventuality. What wasn’t expected was an exchange I had one late afternoon as I was making myself some green tea in the studio kitchenette.

  “Are you one of the psychics?” A diminutive little boy in a starched white shirt addressed me from the doorway.

  “Why, yes, I am. My name is Mark. What’s yours?” Kids aren’t normally on display in Hollywood radio studios. My attention was suitably attracted by this anomaly.

  “My name is Matthew, and we don’t believe in psychics.”

  “We don’t, do we? And how old are you, Matthew?” I asked.

  “I’m seven. I’ll be eight next month,” he proudly answered.

  Who exactly the “we” was in this scenario remained to be seen, but I was fairly confident this seven-year-old couldn’t have arrived on his own at any belief or disbelief in anything psychic. Mommy or Daddy surely had strong opinions on the matter, and I was pretty sure Daddy was lurking not far away in his cloistered corner office, no doubt listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Our days as the fabulous KYAK Psychics were numbered.

  We were slowly reduced to a weekends-only shift with the new proviso that each psychic would only be able to answer the caller’s question, after which every call would be dumped without letting the caller verify or have any further on-air interaction with the psychic. It was a one-two punch, followed swiftly by music and even more commercials.

  I knew my eighteen-month stint would soon be over when I mentioned that since there was to be no further interaction between psychic and caller, it was totally unnecessary to have a live psychic in attendance at all. KYAK might as well have a digital rack of stock answers on hand and push a button for the one that fit each love, money, or travel question as it came in.

  I’m afraid this observation made a little too much sense to Ed Vann and some of the other staff. So I packed up my tapes and psychic toys with a smile and never heard another word from the KYAK people.

  Experience has taught me not to outstay my welcome anywhere, particularly while in the guise of a psychic. We are never supposed to be desperate enough to beg with our wizard’s hat in hand. Besides, there is always another venue waiting for our insights.

  Would it be a Hollywood talent agency, a carnival tent, or a gypsy storefront next? Perhaps a tea room or a psychic bookstore? No, I aimed for the real nitty-gritty—that vast morass in New Age America, that shining shrine full of spurious swindlers and swamis: a spiritualist “church.”

  7 A disclaimer is a declaration that “disclaims” that any supernatural agencies or occult forces are in any way involved, and that everything is being done through purely natural means, including trickery. To me, this is like booking a dinner in a fancy French restaurant and, just when the waiter is about to put down your meal, the chef comes out of the kitchen and tells you it came out of a can. What a letdown. All brain processes are “natural,” so whatever happens between psychic and sitter is a natural event, but to initially discount any mystical possibilities that may occur, either in the mind of the sitters or through any events that are revealed though this natural process, is in my opinion a waste of time. Plus, it takes the mystery and much of the fun out of the experience.

  8 As I had predicted several months earlier, the Psychic Revival Network soon after this audition went down in flames, without so much as a tiny rise in their revenue. They lost a chunk of money on this radio deal.

  9 Sadly, within ten months Steven had moved away and I heard later that he had died from AIDS.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE OC OCCULTIST

  Magic is what you can get away with.

  —Tony “Doc” Shiels

  So what does a church have to do with being psychic? Back in 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, stirred up a flurry of belief in spirits and spiritualism by making their toe knuckles crack in the dark, churchgoing took on a whole new meaning. Thousands of churches sprang up that didn’t always feature Jesus as their savior. Mediums and phony psychics taking on the persona of religious preachers were all the rage. During the early 1900s, when spiritualism began to flourish in America, talking with dead people was a major attraction in such popular enclaves as Camp Chesterfield, Lily Dale, and Cassadaga, where whole communities were based on mediumistic stunts and psychic readings.10 Not much has changed since then. If anything, the idea of a church dedicated to “spirits” has grown even bigger since the New Age movement took hold in the late 1960s.

  Orange County is a strange part of the universe. It’s conservative country. It’s John Wayne country. Some of the wealthiest families in the United States come from this sprawling Southern California landfill, but they are notorious for wanting to spend as little as possible on anyone else but themselves. Here, boats, cars, and homes are collected like less affluent people collect baseball cards. Assets per household are some of the highest in the nation. People in Orange County—or the OC, as the locals more frequently call it—are used to getting whatever they want whenever they want it.

  Yet the citizens of this cozy, insulated world are no less likely to crave, and pay good money for, the encouragement and guidance of a clever psychic or spiritual guide. In fact, the psychic business here is one of the busiest and best-kept secrets on the West Coast. A converted church in Anaheim, called the Light Path Foundation, held legions of psychics cashing in on that trend. I encountered many in this wonderful world of the Woo-Woo Gurus who were truly kind, compassionate souls. A few even truly meant well. But to paraphrase Theodore Sturgeon, ninety percent of science fiction is crap, but then ninety percent of everything is crap. Many of these self-proclaimed devotees of metaphysical sharing were merely business-minded opportunists, and I must regretfully include myself among these fortune-seekers. I had come there to learn, but I also needed to make some money out of the deal.

  The OC is a place of extremes. Walk one short mile from Neiman Marcus to the homeless encampments and you will see every economic level represented along the way. The law of the land reflects this mix of old and new, rich and poor without any clear guidelines. What unites this melting pot of culture, ethics, and economics is that everyone wants a psy
chic reading.

  Antiquated county ordinances are slow to change and turn-of-the-century thinking is still prevalent in smaller suburban sectors, such as Anaheim (home of Disneyland), Buena Park (home of Knott’s Berry Farm), Tustin, Brea, Laguna Hills, and dozens of smaller principalities where the new-money X generation live their versions of a lavish lifestyle in made-to-order plastic palaces. The OC is where people play Monopoly with real buildings and have a dinner out on the town that can cost thousands of dollars, and that’s just the price of the limo, wine, and cocktails.

  Just how provincially minded and lowbrow these new-money denizens could be was related to me once by a palmist who plied his trade in and around Orange County. Quinn was one of the top palm readers in town when I first became acquainted with him. While I got to know Quinn and his wife Jeanette, he shared some of the brightest gems of wisdom of any of the psychics I have ever worked with. He was a charming, genuine, down-to-earth guy—the type of fellow you would be happy to talk to about anything. I suspected he was a fugitive from a hippie commune. Shy, self-effacing, and slightly balding, he chose to never appear too “New Agey.” He often dressed in Hawaiian shirts and khakis, and sported a neatly trimmed handlebar moustache. I immediately recognized in his demeanor a kindred soul.

  One evening Quinn told me he had worked a private party in Laguna Beach. The police had shown up and summarily handcuffed Quinn, taking him to the police station for nothing more than performing as a palmistry expert. It seemed there was a law on the OC books stating that it was perfectly legal to read the lines on a client’s hand, but if the palm reader touched that person’s hand or made physical contact anywhere else, this was considered “massage,” and if the citizen decided this constituted a severe breach of etiquette or that the palm reader had somehow gone too far, that reader could be arrested on the spot. Charges could even be brought from a third party who had witnessed the exchange. Unfortunately, it’s always the sitter’s word against the reader’s. And the reader could be jailed simply because a sitter didn’t like what the psychic had said during the reading, or had decided the reader was a gypsy (read: vagabond or transient), or even if that sitter disliked the psychic’s cologne or the cut of his or her clothing.

  Every time a client in the OC wanted to book me for a performance, I remembered Quinn’s plight and crossed my fingers. I still prefer to have professional agents and event planners take the heat from megalomaniacal lunatics who book parties and frequently invite the most punitive, vindictive, and mercenary guests. If I discover a client lives in Orange County, I will ask a lot more about the who, where, and why of an engagement before I agree to anything. Fortunately, there were a few venues that offered a safe haven for psychic readers, though whether or not they had any special legal arrangements with the powers that be within the OC city council was an unspoken mystery.

  I had honed my magic chops and built my profile early on while working at a members-only magic club on Lido Isle called Magic Island. This was the OC version of Hollywood’s Magic Castle. In its early years, this elegant Egyptian-style club was a recognized jumping-off point for OC millionaires and their mistresses. Hundred-dollar tips were easily had for a mediocre card trick. It was here, in the splendor of Magic Island’s main bar and lounge, that I first became aware of the appeal of tarot cards and palm readings.

  I was completely dazzled watching my friend Jules Lenier receive five to six times what I was earning as a magician (in cash, no less) by cannily chatting up the very richest of the rich. Luckily for me, Jules was happy to share his secrets. Jules has said I have him to blame for much of my slightly depraved and duplicitous psychic background.11 But it took years before I even began to catch up to the level of charm Jules could exude and the profits he could make. Both grew slowly for me, and part of this growth came from the Light Path Foundation, a place that was just about as far away from a dark, seductive bar scene as one could get.

  One particularly slow Sunday afternoon in 1991 I was working a small psychic fair in a hastily converted industrial mall in Fullerton, California, with my friend from the KYAK days, Peter. Psychic fairs were like small farmers-market arrangements that rented halls or rooms at hotels and attracted a decent amount of interest from the local neighborhoods. It was hit or miss waiting for the bookings to come through. Peter and I were not doing well, psychically or financially. So Peter suggested that I contact his friend Betsy, who was the general manager at Light Path. Many psychic veterans, the walking wounded from either the Psychic Friends Network or the KYAK years, were gathering at various psychic fairs and venues in and around Los Angeles during the 1990s, and the biggest and busiest of their psychic supermarkets was the Light Path. Peter told me that people like Sylvia Browne and Kenny Kingston—two luminaries in the big-time psychic business—were regulars at Light Path and that the foundation’s reputation was top of the line, as far as working the masses went.

  I called Betsy, dropped Pete’s name, and was greeted by a giddy-sounding woman with the happiest of voices. I liked her immediately.

  “Hey, any friend of Pete is a friend of mine! Great to hear from you! We have psychics working every day, but our big psychic fairs are on Saturdays. We have a big one coming up next weekend. Why don’t you come on down and we can talk?”

  “Sounds like a plan. If it’s okay for me to ask, how many psychics do you have working when you do a big fair?”

  “Usually between twenty and thirty readers work the floor at one time. That includes astrologers, tarot readers, runestone readers, reflexologists, healers—you name it, we have it. We also have a huge marketplace where vendors sell books, incense, crystals—all that kind of stuff.”

  “Wow, it sounds like a busy day. I hope you’ll have room for one more psychic.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. The main church chapel has all the pews removed and holds a lot of people. What do you do?”

  “Mostly tarot and palm readings right now, but I have also worked with ghost-hunting and mediumship over the years.” I was hedging my bets here. The more skills a psychic can offer and more versatile he or she can be, the better—especially when dealing with someone who might like to turn a profit on those skills.

  “If you’re a medium, that opens up a whole lot of other possibilities. Are you clairaudient or clairsentient?”

  “Eh, well . . . I hear ‘em and see ‘em both, I guess. It’s hard to describe. It comes to me in a lot of ways. It doesn’t always happen in the same way twice in a row. It depends on the situation. Usually, it’s pictures that come to me. They make more sense later.”

  “I totally understand.”

  So it was pretty much open season for creatures of all spots in the OC. My “pitch” would have been a much harder sell in Hollywood.

  When Saturday morning dawned, I put on my best peasant shirt, packed my mojo bag with all of the goodies I thought would impress the boss, and an accumulation of press I had garnered from the Psychic Friends and KYAK. I finished the grueling hour drive into the heat and smog of Anaheim and pulled up to a small church, complete with miniature steeple, that stood in the middle of a strip mall, which also included a pizza take-out joint, a thrift store, and a television-repair shop. A large red-and-white banner fluttered above, proudly proclaiming CAMELOT PSYCHIC FAIRE TODAY! What Camelot had to do with Anaheim I was yet to find out.

  A bustling crowd of bystanders milled around the front door. I made my way through them into the formal church entryway and was met with an unexpected sight. Packed in from the back wall of the church to the front, where some steps led up to the altar and the main pulpit, were eighty to a hundred people sitting perfectly still with their psychics, some with their eyes closed. Each of thirty or more small school desks contained a seated psychic animatedly gesticulating in different modes of dramatic expression while the client they faced sat perfectly still with eyes closed in a semi-trance. The crowd was a cross section of gothic Americana. Charles Addams12 would have felt right at home.

&nbs
p; Every table and desk was a marvel of personal sculptural significance, festooned with a glittering array of New Age trinkets that advertised each psychic’s individual character in complicated assemblages of angel and Buddha statues, crystal balls on wrought-iron stands, fans of gypsy cards, numerology charts, and all manner of flowery mumbo-jumbo. People scurried about holding tickets and clutching armfuls of booklets, flyers, and incense sticks. Everyone looked ecstatic and gleefully determined in his or her quest for the divine. This fascinating beehive of occult activity would never have been apparent to a random passerby, considering the church’s front parking lot was littered with pizza boxes and mountains of abandoned television sets.

  A matronly woman—whose gauzy purple, tightly laced bodice accentuated her Rubenesque pulchritude—quickly materialized in front of me with a cheery, “Greetings, seeker of knowledge! We have a special deal today, a two-for-one tarot reading. Buy one half-hour reading and get the second reading for free. Are you interested?”

  “I’m always interested in two of anything for one,” I replied, not able to avoid looking straight down at her ample cleavage. “But I’m actually here to see Betsy.”

  “Oh, sorry, honey. She’s in the back office. I’ll go get her.”

  Her voice had changed immediately from a goddess’ bright melody to a chain-smoker’s croaking rasp, and her posture had reverted to more of a slump as she moved away from me. This was going to be fun.

  I noticed that many of the women in the room wore medieval costumes, plus many were tottering around in tall wizard hats with flowing scarves attached or fancy turbans to match their dresses. I figured this was what the Camelot angle was all about. I had to admit that it did add substantially to the overall magical feeling in the vaulted chapel. Without this theme, the group would have looked pretty much like any other church ice-cream social.