by Kari Lizer
I tried to explain my theory to Gene the shrink—who happens to be a man in his midfifties—when he called to check on my son and me. He listened carefully, then suggested maybe I should talk to someone about hormone replacement. “What? Why?” I snapped. “What is it that I need to cure exactly? My liberation? My independence. My clear-eyed revelation?” He wondered out loud if I was depressed. Certainly sleep deprived. “You aren’t listening to me! I’m telling you I feel like I just woke up. Like I’ve been released from indentured servitude!” He wouldn’t get on board. Later I realized that maybe Gene was thinking of his own wife. Now that their children are out of the house, was she going to abandon him? Stop taking care of him when he needed her most? He was probably scared—he didn’t want to be alone. Pussy. Suddenly I hated Gene too. He had to go.
In retrospect, given my mood, I probably should have canceled my dinner date with the perfectly nice man (a friend of a friend) who’d helped hook us up with our temporary apartment. He’d done nothing to deserve me in my current state, but it seemed too late to cancel, and I could use some good food. My son was feeling better, and his girlfriend was bringing him soup. I showered, but I didn’t shave my legs. Fuck him, I thought. We went to a fancy restaurant. I was underdressed and didn’t care. I answered his questions and told the truth. I didn’t laugh at his jokes if I didn’t think they were funny. He offered to drive me home, but I said I needed a walk, and that was that.
On my last day, just before my scheduled flight back to LA, I took Eli to his ten-day post-op appointment with his surgeon.
Dr. Anwar was impressed with his progress, the expertise of the bandage application, and the general state of my son. He was even off all the pain meds. The doctor said, “It looks like someone’s been taking good care of you.”
Elias answered, with tears in his eyes, “I didn’t make it easy on her, but my mom is the greatest. I’m so lucky.” At that moment, it felt like love itself flooded my bloodstream—endorphins or oxytocin or something—and my heart almost burst. I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from sobbing since I didn’t have my crying cushion with me. All was forgiven.
Back at the apartment, Elias asked if I was okay if he went to the dorms to see some of his friends. I said I’d be fine. I just wanted to clean the apartment, stock the refrigerator, and change his sheets before I flew out. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I do. I have to,” I said.
After he’d gone, my phone rang. It was my dinner date. He said he wanted to let me know he had a great time with me.
“Why?” I asked, not making a joke.
He laughed and said women are always trying too hard around him. I didn’t try at all.
“Well, if you want a woman who doesn’t make an effort, I’m your girl.”
He asked if he could drive me to the airport. I said he could. I didn’t shave my legs.
Something to Believe In
I tried to believe in God in high school. Two of my best friends were super religious, and I wanted what they had: a certain relaxation about life because they had an answer for everything. The world made sense to them, and they were never alone. Believing in something bigger than themselves contained them in a way that I craved, so I tried to connect myself to God. I whispered into the dark, “If you’re here, Lord, give me a sign. Doesn’t have to be anything big. I just need a little proof.” I tried to make it super easy for God. My challenges were simple. “If I wake up sleeping on my left side tomorrow, you exist. If I’m on my back, you’re not there.” When I was driving, I’d say out loud, “If that stoplight changes to green before I have to hit my brakes, God is real.” “If I suddenly have a beautiful singing voice, but only when I’m singing about Jesus, I’ll believe.” “God, make that cloud pass in front of the sun now… Now. Now. Okay, now.” But God never accepted any of my challenges. I stayed flat on my back until morning, the stoplight never went in my favor, and even though when I joined the choir at the Pomona First Baptist Church, I thought I sounded pretty good singing about Jesus, the Christian next to me started putting her hand over the ear facing me whenever it was time for my second soprano verse, as if my lack of tone was throwing her whole game.
When I went away to Lutheran confirmation camp, I asked the pastor, who described his belief in God as “solid as the earth and sure as the sun that rises each day.”
“Just tell me how you know it’s true. What happened that made you believe?”
His answer: “Nothing happened. I know because it’s what my heart tells me. That’s what faith is. You can’t ask God to prove himself to you.”
“Why not? He did all those things in the Bible to get people on board. Why did dead people stop coming back to life or turning into pillars of salt? Why did donkeys stop talking and frogs stop falling from the sky and seas stop parting as soon as the Bible was finished? Don’t you think that’s a little suspicious?”
The pastor thought I was a smartass and stopped calling on me when I raised my hand. All I was asking for was one story about a night in his youth where a voice whispered in his ear, “There’s a fire. You must get out.”
And he saved his whole family, hence, his faith in God. How about a near death experience? I would have taken a potato with the face of Mary. But there was no story. At least not one he was willing to share with me. “Just believe it because I say so,” which is what I got from every believer I’d ever questioned, and that seemed like too much to ask, so I eventually gave up on God.
Next, I started looking for someone to believe in, but people are a disappointment, especially when you’re expecting them to magically fill your life with meaning and purpose. Especially especially when you date actors. One particularly ill-equipped guy whom I decided I loved—a short, bald drama student with the intensity of Brando, according to himself—told me he couldn’t get serious because when he got famous, he wanted to be free to fuck Daryl Hannah. I continued to love him even though he provided none of the things I was seeking, and our last moment together was me lying on the floor, sobbing, “You don’t love me enough.”
His response was, “No one possibly could.” Men were not going to be my salvation either.
My uncertainty turned to superstition the older I got. Without faith to keep the world safe and with an ever-expanding knowledge of how many bad things could really happen to myself and the people I cared about, I started knocking on wood and honking in tunnels—thinking if I did these things, I would be successful, planes wouldn’t crash, my children would stay off drugs. When a hair on my arm grew longer than the others, I decided it was my lucky hair, and as long as I left it alone, all would be well. I wasn’t insane. I knew it wasn’t true. Well, I knew it probably wasn’t true, but on the very remote chance that it was, I let it stay.
And how is my lucky hair any crazier than the nutty things other people believe? People sprinkle water on babies’ heads to keep them from eternal damnation and don’t put a milk glass in with a plate from a roast beef sandwich to keep souls from getting contaminated. I can have a lucky hair. I understand why people cling to their nonsense: if you don’t believe in something bigger than yourself, life and death are just dumb luck, which means anything can happen at any time to anyone, and there’s just no comfort in that.
Then, finally, when my sister, Lisa, died, I wanted to believe in ghosts. At the end, when her brain tumor had won and she’d stopped being Lisa, I’d sit on her bed, hold her hand, and tell her, “I want you to haunt me. Okay? But if you can, do it in a nonscary way. Like, don’t show up behind me in a mirror. Try doing it during the day.”
Lisa was thirteen months older than me, and she’d already haunted me in life. She was a perfect student, never earning less than an A from kindergarten through college.
She was valedictorian, magna cum laude, president of things, chairwoman of others—she was a force. When I’d walk into a classroom the year behind Lisa, a teacher’s face would light up. “Lisa Lizer’s sister!”
After Lisa died, I stayed vigilant, trying to feel if she was with me from the other side. I got hooked on the TV show with John Edward—not the politician, the psychic medium who claimed to communicate with the dead. His show was called Crossing Over with John Edward, and it was on right about the same time I was crawling into bed with my dog and coffee mug of chardonnay. There were two back-to-back episodes on five days a week, and I became obsessed. I got it into my head that my sister was going to send me a message through John Edward, and I had to pay attention. He worked with a studio audience and called out random images, pictures that flashed in his mind, until someone in the audience connected to what he was saying and they’d raise their hand. He’d say, “There’s a police officer. I’m getting a G name.”
A woman’s hand shot up—they got her a microphone. The woman tearfully said, “My father, Gary, was a police officer.”
John would continue to make sure they were talking about the right guy. “I’m seeing a short illness. Nobody thought he was going to die from it. Even his doctors.”
The woman nods frantically. “Yes! That’s Dad!”
John continues: “He says you were all in the room when he passed.”
The woman, starting to sob, says, “We brought him his favorite black-and-white cookies from the deli. And he went into cardiac arrest.”
John says, “He wants you to know that he had a bigger problem than the doctors realized. It was nobody’s fault. Nobody is to blame. He’s making me feel like this is very important. No one is to blame. Does that make sense to you?”
The woman can barely breathe. “We filed a civil suit against the hospital.” The studio audience gasps. So do I. But this message wasn’t for me.
Weeks went by with dozens of episodes and not a word from Lisa. Then, one night, as I was about to put the sleep timer on, John Edward said, “I don’t know why, but they’re showing me that episode of Will & Grace where Grace gets the water bra.” I sat up in bed. I was writing for Will & Grace at the time.
“Is that you, Lisa?”
No one in the audience was connecting to what John Edward was saying except me. He went on to describe the episode further until one man finally raised his hand because he thought his mother had a cousin named Grace, but I knew Lisa was trying to tell me something.
The next day at work, I told another writer, Jhoni, about the episode. Because she was a good friend, she agreed that it sounded like my sister. We needed to get in touch with John Edward. When we called the number at the end of the show, we got a recording that said John Edward was booked up for the next two years, both for private and group readings and even audience tickets for his show.
I would have probably given up there, but Jhoni tracked down the number of the production company and called in her official capacity as the executive producer of Will & Grace. She left a message for John saying that we were interested in using him as a guest star on the show and asking him to please give us a call back. Her phone rang within five minutes; it was John Edward. Jhoni flattered him and flirted with him and asked if he was, by any chance, going to be in Los Angeles anytime soon. She’d love to get together with him and talk about his part on the show. He said he was coming to LA the following week to do some talk shows, but his time was all spoken for. He said he’d call her if something opened up. I still wasn’t sure how we were going to scam him into connecting me with my deceased sister under these false pretenses, but Jhoni felt confident, so I was hopeful.
The next week, we didn’t hear from John. Jhoni tried calling him again through his production company, but her messages weren’t returned. On Friday, I was picking up the kids from school when Jhoni called my cell. “You need to get to West Hollywood right away. One of John Edward’s appearances canceled, and he has a couple of hours before he goes to the airport. He said he’d meet you.” I was wearing slippers and sweatpants—school pickup line attire because I didn’t have to get out of my car. Jhoni was insistent that I didn’t have time to go home and change. I asked another one of the moms, who was waiting in line for her kid, if my kids could go home with her for an emergency play date. She loaded my kids into her car, and I headed over the hill to the hotel where my medium was staying.
It was a classy, small boutique hotel on a quiet side street in West Hollywood. I had instructions to go straight through the lobby to the elevators and go up to the fourth floor, and if the privacy sign was on the door to his room, I shouldn’t knock, just wait—it meant John Edward was still with the person he was reading before me. Outside his room, the privacy sign was on the door, so I went into the stairwell and waited. I could hear muffled voices through the wall but couldn’t make out any words.
I silently whispered a little prayer to Lisa to please talk to John Edward. I asked her to say something really specific so I would know it’s her. After about twenty minutes, I could hear the hotel room door open and John Edward saying goodbye to a man and a woman. As soon as I was sure they were gone, I came out of the stairwell and knocked on John Edward’s door, where the privacy sign had been removed. A moment later, he opened the door.
It was weird. This man who had been putting me to bed every night was now standing in front of me. John Edward is from Long Island. He’s very tan, with very white teeth and product in his slicked-back hair. He wears tight sweaters to show off his big muscles. He’s exactly the guy I would dance with and inevitably make out with in clubs the year and a half I lived in New York. The waitresses I worked with at the Comedy Cellar in the Village questioned my “bridge and tunnel taste,” but my attractions were formed when I saw Saturday Night Fever more than twenty times in high school—that movie really worked for me. John Edward was even a former professional ballroom dancer.
I only mention these things because everything about John Edward makes him the most unlikely psychic medium you’ve ever met. It’s also part of my answer when people ask if I think he’s a charlatan. In order for someone to pull off what would be such a monumentally complicated and cruel scam on each person that he reads, either privately, on his show, or during his national sold-out tours—to pick up their body language, to study every twitch of each person’s eye, probably do some kind of background check when he had access to a name and dig up information to produce as a psychic “hit,” to exploit people’s grief for his own gain, this guy would have to be some kind of evil genius. John Edward is warm, engaging, funny, adorable. Definitely not evil. And—I say this with love—not a genius. He’s just a dude.
I tell him Jhoni is coming, too, but she’s going to wait for me on the roof by the pool. She’ll come say hello when we’re done and, you know, talk about his part on the show. He didn’t seem particularly anxious about that, which was a relief to me, though in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think, If he’s psychic, why doesn’t he know that Jhoni and I are kind of running our own scam?
John Edward and I sit across from each other, and he asks me if I got there early. I tell him I’ve been sitting in the stairwell for about twenty minutes. He smiles and says that there was a very bossy person who came through in his last session—came through meaning from the other side, the dead side—that his last client didn’t recognize. It must have been for me. This person was very strong, wanted to do things her way, didn’t want to wait.
I smiled and said, “I think I know who that is.” Sounds like my sister, the chairwoman, I thought, but didn’t tell him. I was still interested in testing him—and didn’t want to give him too much to go on.
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br /> He asked, “Who’s the young male that passed? An A name?”
“I don’t know,” I told him.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “The bossy one says you do. She really wants you to know the young male with the A name is with her.”
“Well, I really don’t think I know a young male with an A name.”
“Yes, you do,” he tells me confidently.
John Edward paused at this point and seemed to be gathering information from the great beyond, then continued. “This bossy person is not really above you. She’s not in charge, in spite of what she thinks. You know how kids say, ‘You’re not the boss of me’? That’s what I’m getting. Is this your sister?”
I confirmed with a nod, suddenly afraid to speak and scare the moment or the ghosts away. Then things started moving fast. Bits of information. Snapshots of random things, some of them specific, some of them not. He talked about Lisa’s children and said Lisa was grateful for the woman with the P name for taking care of them. Their aunt Patty, I think. He tells me Lisa says she sees her daughter in church. I didn’t know Kady went to church, but when I ask later, I find out that she goes regularly. He talked about Lisa’s last days with details of the hospice room and the nightgown I bought her. And about every ten minutes, he’d say Lisa was insisting again that I know the young male who is with her. The one with the A name. I don’t know. “Yes, you do,” John Edward and my sister continue to insist.
At one point he started talking about someone whom my sister was bringing through. A man who had taken his own life. I was confused at first; then I gasped, “I think that’s Jhoni’s brother! Should I go get her?” He told me to go. I ran up the three flights of stairs to the roof and found Jhoni, who was sitting in the shade, reading a script. “Jhoni, your brother’s here!” Jhoni jumped up and ran back down the stairs with me, grilling me about how it was going. Did I talk to my sister? “I think so,” I told her. “I don’t know. It’s crazy. You’ll see.”