Today is my first day on my new job. I’m a little nervous as I dial the phone.

“Welcome to the network psychic line. You must be calling from a touch tone phone to interact with this service. Please enter your personal identification number,” a computerized voice commands.

I flash back to the challenging test I was given to determine if I was a good enough psychic to get this job. It consisted of one question which penetrated to the very essence of my understanding of metaphysics and the paranormal. “What’s your phone number?”

I took a deep breath, plumbing the depths of my soul for the answer. “288 0960,” I responded.

“You’re hired. Here’s a toll free number to call with your password. You’ll be paid twenty-five cents a minute and must keep your callers on the line for an average of ten minutes or you’ll be fired,” my boss warned, and without imparting any further instructions hung up. My guess was he figured I wouldn’t need any guidelines from him since I was now a professional psychic and would already know them.

I enter my password and hang up. Immediately the phone rings. It’s showtime.

“Hello may I help you?” I ask in my best professional manner.

“Why does me and my’s daughter always be gettin’ pregnant?” my caller asks.

“Because you don’t use protection.”

“I’s got me a dog!” she replies indignantly.

“Ma’am you don’t fuck the dog...”

Click. She hangs up.

My intuition tells me I may need to refine my bedside manner if I am going to have a ten minute average. Thankfully I don’t exactly need this gig to survive because I haven’t worked long enough to qualify for unemployment benefits – and from psychically checking the want ads there aren’t too many job openings for laid off telepsychics. However since I have no psychic abilities whatsoever I could be wrong.

I put the telephone down and express my self doubt to my wife. “You’ll be fine. You’ve never been qualified for any job you’ve ever held,” she reassures me. Unfortunately she’s right. I graduated from an Ivy League university in the mid seventies and embarked on a career in the music business. I wanted to be a rock and roll star but I had lousy hair and could sing on key, so after much frustration I realized I wasn’t going to achieve stardom because I just wasn’t qualified. After failing in that pursuit I decided to become a record producer. To be a producer one should either be conversant in the arcana of engineering or have a deep knowledge of music theory. On a good day I can sometimes get my VCR to work, and I only understood the barest rudiment of music theory which is that if you are in a successful rock and roll band you will get laid by supermodel groupies no matter how much of a geek you are in real life. Despite being nothing more than a charlatan I was able to bluff my way into the studio with a few bands and somehow managed to produce records which sold over twenty million copies and bought me a nice comfortable home in Beverly Hills with two Mercedes in my garage. This is when I made my biggest career mistake. I paid attention, learned both music theory and engineering and began to truly understand my craft. As a result my record sales dried up faster than the bar backstage at a Mötley Crüe concert, and I was forced to find another method of supporting myself. After considering and rejecting careers in teaching (I knew nothing worth teaching), fast food distribution (I could master asking, “would you like fries with that sir?) and yelling obscenities at passersby (extremely tempting, but I couldn’t figure out how I could be adequately compensated for this fulfilling work) I opted to become a novelist, despite never having previously written anything longer than my name. Somehow I managed to get published. But my daydreams of having Michael Ovitz calling begging to become my agent and Hollywood mega-producers trying to lure me into giving them the book’s screen rights in exchange for Louis Vuitton duffle bags full of cash quickly evaporated when my publisher went belly up the day after my novel’s publication.

But like Martin Luther King, I had a dream, and I was determined to achieve success in my new field of endeavor. I just needed a unique and interesting subject to write about and it would be dead easy to get my plans back on track. For the next month I ensconced myself on the couch and sought inspiration from watching television while fending off my wife’s continuous sarcasm, “What does watching the Stanley Cup playoffs have to do with you achieving your dream?” A few days later she poked her head in and sneered, “How do you expect to get Michael Ovitz beating down our door by watching a double episode of Cops?” The following week she ventured into the den during a particularly salacious marathon of Ricki Lake, Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer and finally pushed me into action, “In an attempt to be helpful I went out and bought a matched set of Louis Vuitton luggage in case the only thing holding up your Ovitz scenario was his not having the requisite luggage to dump the cash into; and, by the way you really should get off the couch and get a job because I’m pretty sure the spider in the middle of the cobweb forming under your ass is a black widow.”

The spider wasn’t a black widow. But, while simultaneously contemplating writing a sure-fire best-selling autobiography entitled, “I was justified in killing the bitch” and regaining my breath following my setting the world’s record for the highest jump from the reclining position, I had an epiphany.

It wasn’t one of those run of the mill “you can see Jesus in the crack running across my ceiling – so all you pilgrims can take a haj over to my place and while you’re here admiring this miracle you can stock up on some of our official souvenir ‘Jesus came, and this time He turned the water into beer,’ T-shirts and beer mugs” epiphanies.

No this epiphany didn’t come from heaven. Instead it originated straight from the bowels of Satan’s empire. I found myself transfixed watching a commercial I’d managed to ignore the first hundred thousand times I saw it. Dionne Warwick was extolling the virtues of talking to telephone psychics for the low price of $3.99 per minute. A little voice inside my head instructed me to pick up the phone; all I had to do was take less than one minute, ask the right question and I would know what to write about. Isn’t that a bargain for only $3.99?

Thankfully that is when the epiphany hit the road and my brain kicked back in. My first clear thought was how could anyone in their right mind hire Dionne Warwick, the washed up diva who for the last thirty years has been asking if anyone knows the way to San Jose, as a spokeswoman for psychics? If she can’t even find a map to San Jose, how the hell is she going to know where the future lies? This was immediately followed by my wondering what sort of person would call a telephone psychic. Even if I believed in the existence of psychics, which (my brief moment of insanity notwithstanding) I don’t, I doubt there could be more than a handful of clairvoyants around the world, and certainly not enough of them to staff a nationally advertised operation twenty-four hours a day. My intuition told me there was some sort of heavy fraud going down, a feeling which was not assuaged by the sudden appearance of a legal disclaimer in small print superimposed over Ms. Warwick’s navel saying that “this service is for entertainment purposes only.” I speculated on what necessitated this language. Were they sued for bad psychic readings and as part of the settlement their high priced lawyers formulated this denial of authenticity?

It was then by happenstance, or fate for those believers in the metaphysical, that my friend Alex, a guitarist with whom I had once worked, called.

“Have you seen those ads for telephone psychics?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’ve been doing it for the last few weeks,” he replied, “my telephone has been ringing off the hook.”

“What do you mean by ‘you’ve been doing it’?”

“I’m working as a telephone psychic. It’s how I’ve been supporting myself since our record company dropped us and our singer went into rehab.”

“But you’re not really psychic are you?” I inquired.

“No, but no one from the company cares – and more importantly it pays my bills. I’m making more than I would earn delivering pizzas.”

“But, don’t you feel guilty? I sure would if I went around deceiving gullible people into believing something that wasn’t true.”

“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Aren’t you the one who foisted Poison on the world? I’d feel a hell of a lot more guilty about that,” Alex reminded me of the hair-tosser band I discovered in the eighties.

I admitted that I had slightly more to feel ashamed about than he did. Alex confirmed my suspicions by telling me there was a nationwide shortage of phone psychics, “my boss, Sydney, will hire anybody who has a pulse,” he explained, “and he’s paying twenty-five cents a minute.”

We discussed the phone psychic racket a few more minutes before Alex demonstrated his acute psychic ability, “I’m sensing you’re interested in becoming a phone psychic.”

“It’s intriguing.” I confessed, “I’m sensing it might be something interesting to write about.”

“See you’re already talking like a psychic! I guarantee it will be an amazing experience. You’ll make millions,” Alex predicted.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m psychic aren’t I?” he answered.

“I hope you’re really good at your job. Let me convince my wife that this is a good idea and I’ll get back to you.”

I hung up and went into the kitchen where she was busy slicing carrots. I’m not sure exactly why but her holding a knife has always inhibited the free exchange of ideas between us. So I elected to wait until she finished before broaching my prospective venture.

“Why are you hovering around with that weird look on your face?” she looked up from her work, “are those delusional fantasies of Claudia Schiffer and Rebecca Stamos fighting over you kicking in again?”

“I’ve never dreamed of Claudia Schiffer and Rebecca Stamos fighting over me,” I reply honestly since my dreams actually involved them working in harmony. “I’ve got this job opportunity…”

“Good. Will you be able to support me in the style I want to grow accustomed to, so I can retire?”

“Not exactly. I’ll be making all fifteen dollars an hour, and I’m going to give all of it to charity.”

“You’re going to use your college education to take a job that pays less than a garbage collector makes and then give it all away? Have you gone mad?”

“No I’m perfectly sane.” I describe my plan to become a telephone psychic and write about it. “It’s going to be interesting to see what sort of people are gullible enough to pay $3.99 per minute to call a telephone psychic. I’ll write a social anthropological study, kind of like a modern day Margaret Mead, except I won’t have to go to Samoa. Ovitz will be beating our door down as soon as he hears of my plans.”

“I’ll leave the door ajar…I wouldn’t want him to hurt his hands; and you still haven’t explained why you’re going to give the money to charity.”

“For me to write this book I am going to have to lie to innocent people to convince them I’m psychic. I can’t accept money for lying.”

“What’s your problem with taking money for lying? I went to Columbia Law School for three years to learn how to lie, and I get paid $400 an hour for my skills. Just promise me one thing.”

“What?” I ask.

“That you’re not trying to drive me out of business by lying pro bono.”

“I promise.”

“Do you mind if we put this in writing just to be on the safe side?” she asked picking up her pen.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

If I am going to be able to stay employed long enough to finish my study I am going to have to do better than my first call so I figure I better learn enough to bluff my way through astrology. I steal my wife’s new issue of Elle and rip out the horoscope page. Now I will be able to authoritatively tell my callers what sign of the zodiac they are and, if I can’t think of anything to tell them I can always plagiarize their fortunes from a magazine which I sense is not on the average psychic caller’s reading list.

I’m feeling somewhat prepared for the next ring of the phone.

“Hello, may I help you?”

“I wanna know if my wife’s been cheatin’ on me,” says a voice with some sort of southern subtract-one-hundred-points-from-your-IQ accent.

“Before I can answer I need to know your birthday,” I demand.

“I think I’ve already had it,” Forrest Gump’s stupider and drunker brother derails any attempt of mine to use astrology.

“Where are you calling from today, sir?”

“Texarcana, Texas,” he slurs.

“And what makes you think your wife is cheating on you?”

“’cause she’s pregnant,” he answers in a monotone.

“How pregnant is she?” I ask giving the caller a hint that he may not be talking to the fully trained psychic promised in the advertisement.

“’bout four months.”

“How long has it been since you had sex with her?”

“’bout six months.”

“Well sir I have to tell you there is a 99.99 percent chance she has been cheating on you; however it is my duty as a psychic to remind you that the millennium is approaching, and the second coming is due, so there is a slight chance she might be carrying the next Jesus Christ.”

“I t’ain’t never been that lucky.”

I have to hit the mute button on my phone, because I’m laughing too hard. I regain my composure and ask the caller, “You drink a bit don’t you?”

“Yup.”

“How long have you been drinking?” I ask, figuring this guy is so pixilated that he won’t suspect my lack of psychic abilities.

“This time, or in my life?” he asks.

“This time.”

“’bout two years.”

I hear some what sounds like a cash register in the background as I inquire, “Doesn’t this cause you trouble at your job?”

“Nope.”

“Well what do you do for a living?”

“I work at a gas station.”

“Doesn’t your boss mind?”

“I own the gas station.”

I talk to this drunk for about fifteen minutes about nothing more than the weather in Texarcana, the price of gasoline, Hostess Ding Dongs, and how many copies of Hustler he sells from behind the counter (usually 25 copies per issue). Finally he starts to bore me so I ask him if he is aware that the phone call is costing $3.99 a minute.

“Yep.”

“Well I don’t want you to think I’m ripping you off sir, so I want you to do both of us a favor. Every minute we’re on the phone I want you to take four dollars out of the cash register and place it on the counter in front of you, so you know how much you’re spending. Will you do that for me?”

“Okay,” he says, opening the register and taking out four dollars.

We talk for a minute about how many customers buy condoms each day. At the end of this enlightening minute I ask him to take another four dollars out of the till. He does, and we talk more about nothing. Another minute passes, and I instruct him to extract more money from the register.

“All right,” he says, opening the cash drawer.

We talk drivel for seven more minutes. Each minute is marked by the opening of the cash register and his removing four dollars and placing it on the counter. At the eight minute mark I prompt him to extract the next installment from the register.

“Oh shit,” he panics.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“I’m out of singles,” he answers. Before I can tell him to make change from the pile on the counter I hear him asking a customer, “hey mister, you got change for this here twenty?”

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

It's twelve thirty on a Saturday morning here in Los Angeles. Bars are emptying in the Midwest and it’s prime time for telephone clairvoyants as the dregs of society who were unable to get laid stumble home and call the psychic hot line to see if their luck is going to change.

The phone rings.

“Hello, this is Sasha,” I lie using a name which I figure my clientele will think sounds a lot more mystical than Ric. “May I help you?”

“Yes Sasha, My name is Marlene and I need psychic help.”

I ask Marlene for her address and date of birth. She lives in Enid Oklahoma and was born on June 28, 1970, which according to Elle makes her a Cancer. The magazine’s crack astrologist’s advice is:

when there is a lack of planets in water signs you could be hurt by others’ boorish behavior. Pull into your shell and don’t become part of this negative planetary phenomenon. Try not to cut ties that you could simply loosen in a diplomatic fashion.

I hold this in reserve as I ask her what she would like to know.

“I want to know if I’ll ever see the guy I was with tonight again?” Marlene sounds like she’s on the verge of tears.

“Can you tell me a little about him so I can sense his spirit?” I fish for clues.

“Well I think his name is Ronnie and I really like him.”

I pick up on her clue – she thinks his name is Ronnie. “You haven’t known Ronnie very long have you?” I ask.

“No, I just met him tonight.” Marlene starts to cry.

“And you really like him?”

“Yeah, I took him home with me,” she sobs.

“But he’s not with you right now, is he?” I search for another lead.

“No.”

I’m trying to figure out what could have made Ronnie vanish so quickly, so I try the safest statement any telepsychic can say to a woman who is alone at this hour. “I sense you’re worried a bit about your weight.”

“Yes, how did you know?” Marlene asks.

“You forgot I’m a professionally trained psychic,” I state smugly. “You feel like you need to lose a few pounds.”

“Yeah, I lost forty pounds already and am down to 227, but I could lose a few more.”

“How tall are you?” I ask – wondering whether Elle’s astrologer’s comment about boorish behavior part may have been their polite way of saying this woman looks like a pig.

“Five foot two,” Marlene confirms my suspicions.

“I’m sensing it’s been a while since you’ve had intimate relations.”

“It had been about two years until tonight,” she breaks down into a full on crying fit.

“Tell me what happened.” I figure she has already bought into me being psychic and will therefore not notice I haven’t the vaguest idea what the hell has happened to her other than some poor son-of-a-bitch named Ronnie probably sobered up and fled.

“I met this guy Ronnie in a bar and he was really drunk so I took him home and got him in bed. Well, we started to have sex and were doing the sixty-nine and I hadn’t had an orgasm in a long time and he was really good...”

“I see,” I interject truthfully and sadly, since in my mind I have an all too vivid vision of the copulating couple despite my best attempts to purge it from my thoughts.

“I started to come and it was so good I reflexively shut my mouth real hard...and accidentally kind of bit him a little hard. He started to bleed and had to go to the hospital and get stitches...”

I interrupt this painful story before she can go into further graphic detail and answer her burning question. “I don’t think you’ll be seeing him again,” I state with certainty, “but you may be hearing from his lawyer.”

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

It’s eleven o’clock in the evening and I’m trying to relate better to my clientele by watching Jerry Springer. Tonight’s Springer episode seems to be devoted to teenage incestuous lesbian strippers in Tijuana, but I’m unable to follow it because I keep getting interrupted by the psychic line’s incessant ringing.

“Hello this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“Hi Sasha, my name is Diana and I’m calling from Bellingham Washington, and I’ve got a question. I’ve been having an affair with someone and my husband says he knows about it. He claims he has had a private detective following me who has pictures of me caught in bed with my lover. Does he have the pictures?”

“No, Diana he doesn’t. If he had any pictures he would be shoving them into your face and telling you what a slut you are.”

“I see. Does he know for sure I’m having an affair?”

“No, he suspects it, but he doesn’t have any concrete proof. The reason he said he had these pictures was an attempt to get you to admit you’re screwing around on him.”

“That makes sense. Okay, I have one other question. You see I went down out of state to have this affair...”

“You went to Oregon,” I interject deducing this from Oregon being the closest state south of Washington.

“Why yes, how did you know?”

“You called a psychic didn’t you?” I respond somewhat indignantly.

“Yes. I’m sorry. You’re really good. But I have one more question I need to ask about my affair. You see I took my girlfriend Betty along with me and we each took guys with us. We shared a motel room and we had a few drinks and smoked a little stuff and made love with our dates.”

“Yes, I know,” I flaunt my psychic ability.

“Well after we finished with our dates we were really high and somehow we got the idea we should trade partners.”

I sense I may be talking to a future Jerry Springer guest. “Go on,” I instruct her.

“Well I end up with Betty’s boyfriend and I start by having oral sex with him, and then all of the sudden I feel really confused and guilty. So I’ve got this really important question that I need to discuss with someone and you’re the only one who understands.”

“Yes?” I probably sound more titillated than understanding, but it works anyway.

“Does this make me a lesbian?”

“Yes, Diane I’m afraid it does...You’re going to have this urge to cut your hair and teach gym...”

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I've just gotten back from the grocery store and discovered one of the disadvantages of my job. My wife is screaming at me for not picking up any laundry detergent. My protest that laundry detergent was not on the shopping list she gave me falls on deaf ears. “If you’re such a red hot psychic you shouldn’t need a list. You should have sensed it,” she seems to take my new profession a little too seriously.

I change the subject by asking her if anyone called while I was out.

This too is a mistake.

“If you’re so fucking psychic, you should know who called,” she says.

“I am psychic,” I decide to play along with her, “and I’ll prove it. I sense you’re a little P.M.S. today.”

From the ‘if looks could kill you’d be six feet under’ gleam in her eyes I triumphantly realize the force is with me – I might have a knack for this psychic business. Consequently I elect to retreat upstairs out of her sight to the safety of my office. I log on simultaneously to the Internet and the psychic line. Within moments the phone rings.

“Hello this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“Hello. I got me a card in the mail that said I could get a free psychic reading, and I got an important question to ask, so I want to talk to a good psychic,” an elderly woman replies.

“Well we have only bad psychics working right now will that do?” I ask.

“You don’t have no good ones?”

“No ma’am, all the good ones quit last week.”

“Why did they quit?”

“They looked into the future and discovered there was no future in their jobs.”

“You’re a bad psychic then?”

“I think that would be a fair assessment.”

She pauses for a second and asks, “What’s assessment mean?”

“It means evaluation.”

“Oh. So you’re a fair evaluation?”

Since the woman is obviously elderly and confused I do not want to run up her phone bill too much so I decide to change the subject by asking her why she called.

“See I live in a old people’s home and there’s this woman next door who says she’s a witch and is casting spells on me. I want to know if she’s gonna make me sick or turn me into something bad.”

“Don’t worry, she’s not a witch.”

“She says she is. She told me just five minutes ago she was a witch.”

“I think you misunderstood her. She said she was a ‘bitch’ not a witch.”

“She’s a bitch?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Do bitches cast spells?”

“No,” I lie, momentarily reflecting on when I was in my early twenties and dating a Playboy centerfold who had no endearing qualities other than her ability to mesmerize me with her tits, I mean beauty.

“Hold on a second,” my caller tells me. She then calls out, “The psychic says you ain’t no witch.”

“I is too a witch. I’m putting a spell on you right now,” I hear a woman shout.

“She done cast a spell on me,” my caller sobs.

“Did she turn you into a newt?”

“I don’t think so. What’s a newt?”

“It’s a small slimy extremely conservative amphibian, kind of like a frog who votes Republican.”

“I ain’t no frog and I don’t vote.”

“Then she isn’t a witch.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Do you think you have a contract with America?”

“I don’t know nothing about no contracts.”

“Then you’re not a newt.”

“Oh. But how does me not being a newt mean she ain’t no witch?”

“Because witches have strict laws they must follow. Just like the police have to read you your rights when they arrest you, witches have to first turn you into a newt before they can do anything to you. And since she hasn’t turned you into a newt, she’s not a witch.”

“Oh. Then I don’t have anything to be afraid of?”

“No ma’am. Not until you turn into a newt.”

“So I can sleep good tonight?”

“I think so.”

“You’re a good psychic. Thank you!”

“No, I told you I’m not a good psychic, I’m a bad psychic.”

“Okay then. Well have a good night,” she hangs up.

I now know where News Of The World gets its stories.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

“Hello, this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“Sasha? Is that a guy or a girl’s name?” a drunken male’s voice demands.

“It’s my name.”

“Sounds to me like you might be one of them homos. I don’t believe in this psychic shit or homos either so prove to me you’re fucking psychic. Tell me what my name is.”

“Look I answer important questions about relationships and finances. This isn’t some sort of cheap carnival guessing game I’m running here,” I lie.

“Okay, tell me something about myself to prove you’re a fucking psychic,” the caller challenges.

“All right. I can sense you don’t believe in psychic phenomena. But I’m going to prove to you once and for all, beyond a doubt, that not only do I possess psychic powers, but I’m the best in the business. Next time you’re with a woman you’re not going to be able to get it up…”

For some reason he fucks up my ten minute average and hangs up prematurely – a word I hope he becomes all too familiar with in the near future.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

“Hello, this is Sasha. Can I help you?”

“Tell me how’s my trial gonna go down tomorrow?” demands a sinister male voice.

“Well I need your name, address and birth date so I can properly answer your question.”

The caller tells me his name is Chuckie. He is twenty and lives in Detroit.

“What are you charged with?” I ask.

“You tryin’ to rip me off man? You’se supposed to be psychic. I kill you if you be rippin’ me off,” he says in a menacing tone which underscores his intent to do just that if he can figure out who and where I am.

“Okay, I’ll tell you. You’re getting five to seven years,” I say, fervently hoping I’m right.

“Why? I wasn’t the only one holdin’ up the store. The cops didn’t even catch them and they fired way more than I did. That ain’t fair. Why should I be the only one goin’ to jail?” Chuckie complains.

“Well this isn’t the first time you’ve been involved in a holdup,” I guess.

“No.”

“And you’ve used a gun before?” I suggest.

“I’s shot some guys yeah,” Chuckie admits he is a nasty customer.

“Well that’s why they’re putting you in jail.”

“Man I’ll kill you if you be makin’ me goin’ to jail.”

“Hey, Chuckie I’m not the one who shot up the place. Don’t go blaming me. It’s like on Barretta, you know ‘don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time’.”

“Man, if I find you – you be in big shit,” Chuckie is still not happy with his psychic reading.

“Chuckie, how do you feel about anal sex?”

“I likes it. Me and my lady be doin’ it all the time...”

“I wasn’t talking about you doing it. I was referring to you receiving it. In jail they’re going to put you in a cell with a guy named Bubba who has a twelve inch dick...”

“Don’t you be fuckin’ with me man. I’ll kill any motherfucker who comes near me. I’ll kill you too...”

“Wait a second Chuckie, I’m trying to help you...”

“Man you got to help me. I’ll be your friend for life,” Chuckie begs, changing his tune.

“Okay. Just follow my instructions and no one will dare mess with you. You’ve got to stick a razor blade up your ass. Now you know the first thing they do when they book you into jail is shine a flashlight up your butt to see if you’re hiding anything. So you’re going to have to practice getting it so far up there that they won’t see anything. What I want you to do, or should I say what you want to do is practice sticking razor blades up your asshole as far as you can stick them. Then no one will fuck with you for sure.”

“Okay. Thanks man. I’ll do it. Have a nice day,” Chuckie says, hanging up.

Everyday for the last few weeks I’ve been checking the Detroit newspaper on the Internet to see if any hospitals have admitted a deranged felon who has carved himself a new asshole.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Evidently they are running heavy advertising for the psychic hot line and it is working. In trailer parks all across America corpulent unwed mothers are removing their sweaty hands from the deluxe family size bag of potato chips and rising from their couches. Lighting up their twenty-fourth Marlboro of the evening, they reach for the phone and make the call.

I’m working hard trying to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs while halfway paying attention to my callers. I’ve spent thirty-five minutes on the phone with a three hundred forty-three pound chain-smoking white trash welfare mother in an Ocala Florida trailer park wondering when she’s going to meet the man of her dreams.

“You’ll meet your soulmate on the 14th of June at the 7-11. You’ll have sex with him within two hours and be so in love that you’ll be married by the weekend,” I ordain.

“How will I know him? What’s his name?” she asks excitedly.

“You’ll know him by his pot belly. His name is Homer.”

“Homer? Like Simpson?”

“Exactly,” I congratulate her on her destiny.

This was followed by a little boy who wanted to know how he’s going to do on his report card.

“You’re going to get straight F’s, because you call telepsychics instead of studying and doing your homework,” I slam the phone down, proud of myself for having the scruples to bar the kid from running up his parents’ phone bill.

My next call is scary. Before I can even introduce myself a man is ranting about how his girlfriend has left him and he’s going to have to kill himself. I try to humor him by saying she’s really coming back, that all she was doing was trying to go to a girlfriend and practice lesbianism so she could surprise him with a menage a trois for his birthday.

This doesn’t work, and I gradually realize the guy is really hell bent on suicide. I ask him what his name is and where he is calling from. He tells me he is at a certain address in Corpus Christi, and then proceeds to grab a gun and start firing a few shots, scaring the hell out of me. Recovering, I ask him to wait a moment while I do his astrological chart to see if this is a good day for him to commit suicide and then I put him on hold. Using my other phone line I call the Corpus Christi police and explain I’m on the phone with a potential suicide, omitting the fact that I’m his telephone psychic so they don’t just hang up on me like I would if someone purporting to be a telepsychic called me. They thank me for calling and promise to dispatch a patrol call immediately.

I get back on the phone and the man is alternately crying, telling me how much he loves his girlfriend and telling me how many Halcyon tablets he has swallowed. Four minutes later the cops burst into the apartment and grab my client. A cop grabs the phone and tells me an ambulance is taking the guy down to the hospital for a quick stomach pump. He thanks me for saving the guy’s life. I tell him it was no problem and ask him for a favor.

“Sure, anything.”

“Could you not hang up and leave the phone off the hook?” I ask, hoping to boost my average.

The ungrateful bastard hung up on me. There is no such thing as karma.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

“Hello this is Sasha. How can I help you?”

“Ja this is Gita Erbel, I was born on the 4th of August 1959 and I have prepared all my questions because I do not want you to waste any time or money with my reading,” a woman with a heavy German accent states.

“Okay, what’s your first question?” I ask wondering if I might be able to utilize some of the German language skills I somehow picked up through years of touring with heavy metal bands over in the fatherland.

“Yes I want to know if there is any way I can get any money from my second ex-husband.”

“Can you tell me a little about him?”

“I hate him.”

“No, I need his name and birth date.” I stall trying to build up my average.

“Why you say you’re a psychic don’t you know?” she bitches, pissing me off.

“Yes there is a way you can get your hands on his money,” I say very sweetly.

“You must tell me now,” Gita orders.

“Okay you need to talk to a lawyer and,” I change to a deep voice, “kann ich Dich bitte in den Arsch ficken (German for ‘can I fuck you in the ass please’),” and reverting to my normal tone, “ask him to reopen your divorce.”

“What was that?” she demands.

“What?” I ask innocently.

“Someone just said something very naughty in German.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about ma’am. Now as I was saying if you file to reopen your divorce on the third Tuesday of July at exactly 4:16 in the afternoon, you will be able to get your alimony blas mir einen (blow me) drastically increased.”

“Wait, I heard something dirty again in German. What did you say?”

“Ma’am I don’t speak German,” I lie.

“No, it wasn’t your voice, but I distinctly heard someone swearing at me in German.”

“You did? Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am quite sure.”

“Well I’ll listen carefully and see if I hear it too.”

“Thank you. Now go on and don’t waste time. Talk quickly please.”

“When you are in front of the judge you must swear that he beat you du bist sehr geil (You’re very horny) and...”

“Wait! Did you hear it just now?”

“I’m sorry Gita. I didn’t hear anything.”

“I distinctly heard someone being very crude in German. What is going on here?”

“Wait a second. I think I know what you’re talking about. You see I use channeling and sometimes speak in tongues as part of my psychic readings. So I merely voice the thoughts coming from your subconscious. I don’t speak German and therefore don’t know what I’m saying, but evidently from the way you’re acting there might be a disturbed German person deep inside of you. Do you speak German?”

“Yes, I am from Germany and German is my primary language.”

“I see. Then it is definitely your inner child speaking.”

“And you’re saying my inner child is horny?”

“No, I’m not saying anything. You’re saying it.”

She pauses for a moment to mull my bullshit over before finally issuing an, “I see. You may be right.”

So she forgets about her list of questions and we spend forty minutes or about one hundred sixty dollars talking about how men have fucked her over and how she hates all of them with the possible exception of me because I’m so sensitive. Every now and then I say something really dirty to her in German and we discuss what motivated that particular comment.

As she’s finally getting ready to hang up she asks me to concentrate really hard because she wants to talk to her inner child’s voice directly. I tell her I’m trying and after a few moments of silence I ask her in German what she wants to say.

“Ich bin geil, aber ich werde mich niemals in den Arsch ficken lassen (I am horny, but I never take it up the ass).

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

My wife woke me up with a blowjob this morning and I’m feeling great. I decide to share my good fortune with my callers. I am here waiting to be a psychic Santa Claus bestowing good fortune and hot romance on all.

“Good morning, this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“Hi this is Lashandra from Milwaukee, and I want to know what’s going to happen with me and my pastor.”

“Can you tell me his name and birthday?”

“Well his name is Henry and he’s eighteen years older than me but I don’t know when he was born.”

I’m starting to believe in my psychic abilities as a premonition overwhelms me. I’m about to be plunged into the very abyss of Sodom and Gomorrah. “Tell me about Henry so my powers can capture his essence,” I do a psychic Fred Astaire tap dance and successfully avoid revealing too much about my ignorance of the actions of Pastor Henry from Milwaukee.

“Well the Pastor and me – we was gettin’ really close and nows all of the sudden, like he be avoiding me – likes I’m the devil or somethin’,” Lashandra explains. I debate for at least a nanosecond whether to open up Lashandra’s private Pandora’s box before asking, “Were you thinking about having sex with Pastor Henry?”

“Yes. How did you know? I never told nobody. Did he tell you already? Is that how you knows? This is so embarrassing.”

“No ma’am,” I assure the caller, “I haven’t spoken to your pastor. You seem to have forgotten you called a fully qualified professional psychic. Now tell me what happened.”

“We was fooling around one afternoon…”

“Were your clothes on?” I ask.

“Not all of them...”

“Were his clothes on?”

“Not really.”

“Did he touch you?”

“He started to, and then he yelled ‘Satan gets behind me’ and runned out the room.”

“Had you touched him?”

“I was kissing him.”

“What part of his body were you kissing?”

“His lips.”

“Is that the only place?” I press the issue since, like that old commercial, inquiring minds want to know.

“No. I kissed his you know.”

“His penis?”

“Uh huh.”

“Did he come?”

“No, but he was going to before he runned off.”

“Have you had any conversations with Pastor Henry since then?”

“No, he’s always there with his wife.”

“You know I sense his wife is bisexual,” I play devil’s advocate.

“Really?” she asks hopefully.

“Does that interest you Lashandra?”

“Uh huh. But does she be liking me?”

“Oh yes,” I assure her.

“How do I gets Pastor Henry and her?”

“Why not just ask them if they both want to have sex with you?” I tell her.

“Will it work?”

“Probably not. I’ve got a confession to make, I’m not a psychic. I’m a fraud.”

“No you’s not. You knows things about me that only a psychic knows,” she insists.

“No Lashandra I’m a con man. There is no such thing as a psychic.”

“Then everything you told me is bullshit?”

“Yes, ma’am I’m actually a writer writing a book on losers who dial the psychic hot line,” I tell her the truth.

“Am I going to be in the book?” she asks.

“Yes, you will,” I assure her.

“Are you gonna use my name?”

“Yes.”

“Well you better spell it right or I’ll be really mad. I don’t want to be in no book with my name spelled wrong,” she says.

“It’s L-a-s-h-a-n-d-r-a right?”

“That’s right. So what’s I going to do with Pastor Henry?”

“I already told you, I’m not psychic Lashandra.”

“Okay. But tell me this, is his wife really bisexual?”

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

They’re airing new commercials for the psychic line. Callers are being promised ten free minutes with a psychic, however there is a catch – rather than being given ten consecutive minutes the suckers get two five minute calls. Callers hear a beep at the conclusion of their five free minutes and hang up. Then they call back and want to continue their psychic reading with the same psychic – but since the calls are assigned randomly, they rarely end up with the same person. As soon as I hear a caller asking to talk to the psychic they were just talking to, I know my ten minute average is going down the drain; so I decide if I’m going to flame out, I’m going to at least have some fun.

“Hello this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“Yes I was in the middle of getting a reading from Judy when my five minutes ran out. Can you reconnect me with her?” a man asks.

“Oh no! You were talking to Judy?” I feign alarm.

“Yes. Why?”

“I have to apologize to you sir on behalf of all the hard working psychics here. Judy wasn’t supposed to answer the phone. She’s not psychic. I bet you she was telling you all sorts of good things were going to happen to you.”

“Why yes. She said I was going to be making a lot of money and meeting this woman...”

“Yeah, that would be standard Judy. I hope you didn’t believe her sir. Just between you and me the only reason Judy keeps her job is she’s having sex with the guy who runs the network. He’s a real sucker for girls with big tits, and Judy’s got torpedoes. She’s a junkie who used to be a stripper until she became too unreliable and got laid off. But my boss is such a horny motherfucker that he lets her answer calls as long as she blows him. But all the rest of us psychics won’t have anything to do with her. In fact we won’t even let her join the telepsychics union.”

“You mean psychics have a union?” the caller asks.

“Oh yes. In fact we’re having a union meeting tomorrow and Judy is the first order of business. We may all go out on strike over her.”

“You mean everything she said was a lie?” disappointment wafts through the phone line.

“Most certainly. However, as a way of making it up to you I’ll issue you a credit for the time you spent on the phone with Judy,” I lie.

“A credit?”

“Yes I’ve just sent a message over my computer to the billing department to not charge you for the call. However, I have to warn you that the people we hire in our billing department aren’t the smartest people in the world. They get paid minimum wage and make mistakes all the time; so I want you to write down this credit number just in case a charge appears on your phone bill. If you are mistakenly billed, I want you to call your phone company and tell them that your psychic gave you a credit reference number and told you the call was free. I guarantee you won’t have to pay. Do you have a pencil and a piece of paper?”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay, write this number down. It’s one, A as in apple, M as in Mary, dash, A as in apple, N as in Nancy, one, D as in David, one, zero, T as in Tom. Just to make sure you’ve got that right, could you read it back to me?” I ask.

“IAM-ANIDIOT?”

“Yes sir. Now would you like a proper psychic reading?”

“Please.”

“What would you like to know about?” I ask.

“Can we talk about Judy?”

“Sure. What would you like to know about her?”

“How big are her tits?”

“Forty-four double D,” I reply.

“I know she’s not psychic, but can I talk to her again?”

“Okay. But, you’ll have to hold on while I go get her.”

“I’ll hold,” he promises.

“All right – if that’s what you want. It might take a few minutes.”

“That would be great.”

I put the sucker on hold and check up with him every three minutes telling him she’s having a business conference with the boss – but “will be out in a moment because she’s usually really quick in these types of meetings if you know what I mean.” The caller gets even more excited and I put him back on hold. He holds on for fifteen minutes, or sixty bucks before finally hanging up.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I’m talking to a diabetic woman from Baton Rouge whose spouse gets liquored up every Friday night and comes home and beats her. I try to get her to call the police, but she is scared her husband will lose his job if he is arrested, which would leave her penniless and out on the street with three kids. I propose she call her friendly local clergyman since he will know a program for battered women, but to my surprise and dismay she tells me her husband is the minister of her church. I tell her to call the National Organization of Women but she feels they are all lesbians. I then try to get her to call Alcoholics Anonymous but, with the exception of her husband, she doesn’t trust people who have ever touched liquor.

I even stoop as low as recommending she call Jerry Springer and see if she can solve her marital problem on national television. Although she seems tempted she declines. Each subsequent suggestion I make is also summarily rejected. Exasperated, I ask her why she is calling a psychic if she won’t utilize the ‘professional’ help I am providing.

She claims I have a nice and understanding voice and she just needs someone to talk with.

Feeling pity for the woman I remind her she’s paying $3.99 a minute and suggest there must be someone equally nice she can speak with who wouldn’t charge her by the minute for the chore – but she insists I am worth every cent of my fee.

I then come out right and tell her I’m a fraud.

She doesn’t care. “I know you’re psychic and you’re only saying that out of Christian charity so I won’t spend any more money. But I need you and don’t want to hang up,” she asserts.

“Okay, you’re right. I am a psychic. Let me tell you your future. Your husband is going to come home every Friday night and beat the crap out of you until one day soon when he kills you. God has chosen a higher destiny for you, so you must not only survive, you must turn him in both for the sake of you and your children and for your husband’s own sake so he can improve himself and serve the Lord better,” I appeal to her religious beliefs.

“My parents didn’t raise me to be a tattletale,” she dismisses my recommendation.

“How about if I call the police for you? That will take you off the hook.” I propose. She declines my offer and refuses to do anything about her misery. I become frustrated and my frustration eventually turns into boredom. Then I start feeling guilty for being bored during her time of need. So I decide to assuage my ennui by turning on my computer and logging onto the Internet while I listen to her drone on. I discover an Internet site which allows you to enter any address and then gives you a detailed map of the surrounding area.

I ask the woman for her address and plug it in. Getting the map I discover she lives a few doors from a police station.

“Do you still believe I’m a psychic?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” she responds.

“Okay, here’s what I see happening if you want your husband, your children and you to achieve the ultimate salvation of heaven,” I hope that I’m right, “God wants you to run outside naked and screaming the next time your husband comes home drunk and swinging, which I foresee happening next Friday.”

“Naked...without my clothes?” she stutters.

“No one will see you, not even the cops from the station down the street,” I pronounce remembering the fable about the Emperor’s new clothes.

“How did you know the police had a station down the street?”

“Because I’m psychic,” I lie.

“And it will work?” she meekly asks.

“If you can’t trust me, your friendly telepsychic...who can you trust?”

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

It’s midnight here in Los Angeles and the phone has been ringing incessantly. “Hello, this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“I want to know about my future. Am I ever going to meet a man and have some money?” responds a woman from North Carolina, tipping me off to the fact she is both broke and lonely.

I start with my reliable lonely-woman-at-night line, “Christie, I sense you’re worried a little about your weight.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“You need to lose a few pounds.”

“Around eighty or so I reckon,” Christie responds.

I’ve learned there is one truism in life. All women are inherent liars. It’s not that they’re malicious, but when it comes to confessing the truth concerning how much they weigh there is no truth serum in the world potent enough to get a female to cough up her true weight. Therefore if Christie says she needs to lose eighty pounds you can be damn sure she needs to lose a hundred and sixty.

“Maybe a tad bit more?” I gently call Christie on her fib.

“Well maybe a hundred...” Christie says glumly.

“ A lot of your problem comes from you eating too much junk food.”

“Yeah, I like fast food,” she giggles.

“You go to McDonalds a lot,” I continue.

“I just went to McDonalds. How did you know?”

“You got the big value meal and didn’t even get the Diet Coke,” I accuse.

“I’ve got a big value meal with a regular Coke right in front of me now. Oh my God you really are psychic!”

I press my luck while simultaneously patting myself on the back almost believing I might actually possess some psychic powers. “I see it’s been a while since you’ve had a boyfriend,” I safely predict since she is calling me at three in the morning her time.

“It’s been too long,” she replies sadly.

“ So long that your vibrator’s batteries are getting low,” I sarcastically remark.

“They just died today! How did you know?” Christie is amazed, almost as much as I am.

“I’m a fully trained psychic,” I remind her, while trying to erase from my mind the vision of the Eveready Bunny valiantly sending a last message to headquarters from his plastic coffin while fighting a losing battle between the expanding thighs of my masturbating client. “Send for reinforcements – but make them Duracell, ‘cause I don’t want any of my kids to die this horrible death,” he gasps before going belly up.

“How did you get to be a psychic?” Christie brings me back to reality.

“I’m a graduate of the extremely prestigious International Psychic Academy in Helsinki. In fact I was on the Dean’s list.”

“And they taught you how to be a psychic there?” she inquires.

“Yes ma’am.”

“I’d love to go there someday.”

“You should Christie. When you have a degree from the International Psychic Academy you can command a good job and make lots of money. And since money has been a problem in your life you should send for an application.”

“I need to make some money. Where do I send for the application?” Christie asks.

“That’s the entrance examination,” I reply, “so I’m not allowed to tell you.”

"Oh,” she thinks about this for a minute before asking, “So once I figure out where to send for the application will they let me in?”

"Not only will they let you in – they’ll give you a full scholarship,” I promise.

“I have one more question. Will I be successful? Will I be psychic enough to figure out the address and get in?”

I decide for the sake of humanity to perform a good deed before this woman expands to the size of a third world country. “You’ll pass the test when you stop eating junk food and start exercising. After you lose one hundred pounds you’ll finally shed the veil which prevents you from being able to be psychic. Not only will you get into the International Psychics Academy but you’ll be doing commercials for us with Dionne Warwick.”

“Really? I always wanted to meet her.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because I watch her all the time on those commercials and I know she’s a good person and she’d understand me.”

“In reality she’s a mercenary bitch.”

“You mean she’s in the militia? I didn’t think they took black people.”

“Oh yes, in her spare time she totes an AK-47 and plants bombs at abortion clinics,” I respond, amazed yet once again that there are so many people walking around with IQ innoculations.

Christie is impressed, “I knew I liked her.” Repulsed I decide to be a bastard. “There’s one thing you should know before you say that. She has a fat phobia, and is constantly firing off a few clips at overweight people. So think of that when you’re sucking down that Big Mac.”

“I guess I’d better lose some weight,” she mutters and hangs up.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

There is an exciting pre-recorded message waiting for me when I log on this morning. This week there will be an extra fifty bucks in our pay envelopes for all psychics who put in thirty hours and maintain a twelve minute average. Euphoric visions of a modern day Horatio Alger doing a rags to riches climb through the rough and tumble psychic business dance through my head as I do the math. If I work thirty hours at twenty-five cents a minute and average twelve dollars I can make a whopping five hundred dollars a week. There’s a new information highway out there folks and I’m in the fast lane on my way to the big time! I’m a capitalist, an entrepreneur, a veritable captain of industry! Bill Gates eat your fucking heart out. It’s then that I sober up and remember I’m giving all my hard earned money to charity. Maybe the money will be enough to cure cancer or AIDS, or at least get rid of Sally Struthers begging for money for starving kids on my television. However my first call of the day shatters my grandiose dreams.

“Hello this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“Fuck the Sasha bit Ric, it’s Sydney,” says the ominous voice of my boss. “I’m delivering you a warning. Your average has fallen below ten minutes and the powers that be want to cut you off. I’ve talked them into keeping you on the network for another week – but if you don’t get your average back up quickly you’re history. Have a nice day.”

My boss hangs up leaving me in a foul mood.

P.T. Barnum was quoted as saying, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” If Mr. Barnum had wanted to be truly accurate he would have amended his statement to: “there’s a sucker born every nanosecond,” because that’s how long it takes for my phone to ring and give me a chance to vent my anger and simultaneously repair my average.

“Hello this is Lou Pickwick. I was born on the sixteenth of September 1975,” a very effeminate sounding man lisps.

I ask Lou where he lives, and he gives me an address in Tallahassee, Florida. While I plug his address into the Internet map making site Lou tells me he has one urgent life decision which only a qualified psychic like the great seer Sasha can help him make. Lou wants to become Louise.

“ I always liked the way women’s clothes looked, and I want to be able to wear them,” Lou explains.

"Lou you can wear women’s clothing without having your dick cut off – you’d be surprised at the number of successful happy transvestites there are out there,” I tell him thinking of record company presidents I have known.

“But clothes never fit properly in certain places when you have a penis,” Lou complains.

Not having any psychic insight concerning the fitting of women’s fashions, I try a different strategy. “Lou you’re an okay looking guy, but as a woman you’re going to be butt ugly. As you may have noticed most men don’t like to go out with ugly chicks, so you have to be prepared to lead an extremely lonely life.”

“I don’t think you’re too good of a psychic,” Lou demurs “because I’m going to look spectacular as a woman. I’ve got fabulous eyes and great hair, but more importantly you’re wrong because I don’t want to go out with men. I like girls. I want to be a lesbian.”

“But Lou do you honestly think women will find a sex change attractive?”

“They will as soon as I lose a few pounds – like I said I have great hair – and would you please call me Louise?”

I’ve just clicked on the Internet site which lists all the women’s clothing stores near my gender challenged caller. “I sense there’s a mall near you on the Apalachee Parkway.”

"Yes there is. How did you know?”

“And I see a store called the “Size 5-7-9 Shop” which has all the cool clothes you want to wear.”

“Yes they have all sorts of sexy things,” Lou/Louise states.

“Yes but you’re not able to fit into them, even after you lose the weight from having your dick cut off.”

“Well I have a friend who makes speed and if I take it I’ll lose a hundred fifty pounds and get down to where I want I be, won’t I?”

I decide to come squarely down on the side of law and order, “that would be the worst thing for you Louise. If you take the crystal meth you’ll end up being arrested and sent to a men’s prison where I see you being extremely popular among your peers since I hear the Lane Bryant store at the Apalachee Mall, where you will end up shopping, has a lovely striped suit which will bring out the color of your eyes.”

“So you see me going to prison?”

"If you take drugs absolutely. However if you start exercising, stop eating the garbage you eat, and see a nutritionist, I see you being down to a perfect size 8 in two years.”

“Really?” he gushes excitedly, “that’s great!” For the next ten minutes he effuses about the latest fashion trends and the tragedy of the Versace murder (“I always thought when I got my weight down I would look supreme in Versace,” Louise states).

The call drags on past thirty minutes and I’m feeling good enough about my average to take some chances. “Louise I don’t know if they told you this, but there is a law in Florida which requires all sex changes to mount their dismembered dicks on a plaque, you know like a fishing trophy, and hang it on their living room wall. I don’t think you want to stare at your severed dick every day. It might inhibit you.”

There is a moment of silence while Louise digests my load of rubbish. Finally the quiet is punctured by a few sobs followed by a pitiful whisper, “I never knew anything about that. I can’t believe my doctor didn’t tell me. This ruins everything. Maybe I should just stick to being a transvestite. You can call me Lou again.”

“I think that would be best Lou,’ I concur.

“Can you tell me one more thing then?”

“What would you like to know Lou?”

“Where can I get a pair of platform pumps in a size sixteen?”

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I have developed a new theory for which, my psychic intuition tells me, I should expect to win the Nobel Prize for Anthropological Research if there is such an award. My theory is simple – God put North Carolina on the planet for two reasons. The first is so people from Oklahoma would have some place to look down on, and second is so that losers would have a place to call home. As proof I offer the following; North Carolina is the state which has not only elected neo-Nazi Jesse Helms to the Senate, but then went and reelected him twice. The state appears to be so boring that some local yahoo in an act of civic pride christened the place “the Tar Heel State”, meaning that not only is North Carolina the place where family trees don’t fork, it is also where personal hygiene is defined as something you say as a way of greeting to a guy named Gene. And lastly the state’s misery index is so high that North Carolina is the source for forty percent of all the calls to the psychic hot line. It seems as if at least half of the state could justifiably list me as a dependent on their next income tax form, assuming any of them are bright enough to be able to read the form in the first place. Daniel Winslow from Catawba, North Carolina wants to know why he is unable to achieve financial security. “Why ain’t I got no money?” he eloquently asks.

“You never got much of an education and that is why you’re locked into lower paying jobs, asking questions like, ‘Would you like paper or plastic, ma’am?’” I respond.

Daniel disagrees with my assessment, “That ain’t right. Y’ain’t too psychic, I graduated myself from high school.

“Obviously you didn’t do well in English, because your communication skills are not very good,” I retort wondering whether Daniel means what he said and North Carolina’s educational standards are so lax that they allow turkies like him to pronounce themselves graduated from high school or whether they determine who graduates on a seniority basis (Why Daniel here has been in the third grade for seventeen years, so we gots to either retire or graduate him). “What you need to do is go to junior college and learn how to speak proper English,” I suggest.

“Y’all calling me uneducated? I is educated, I finished the twelfth grade and education stops in the twelfth grade stupid. Don’t y’all know nothin’?” he snorts and hangs up.

He’s right. I am stupid. The call lasted a minute and a half, and my average took a nose dive. Unemployment looms, or maybe even worse – when I’m laid off I might be working right next to Daniel Winslow at Burger King.

I have little time to dwell on my gloomy future. Five seconds later one of Daniel’s fellow Tar Heels is in need of my services. Cecilia Obendorf of Kannappolis, who was born on January 14, 1959, is spending $3.99 a minute to find out where she is going to find the money to pay for her three thousand dollar psychic hot line phone bill. “I called telephone psychics every day and each time they would tell me I was going to make a lot of money.”

I ask Cecilia why she keeps calling, “if they always are telling you you are going to make some money, how many times do you need to hear the same message?”

“I just wanted to make sure nothing is changing,” she replies.

“I sense money has been pretty tight for you lately,” I feel pretty secure with my prognostication.

“You got that right. They just repossessed my trailer this morning. I had to make this call from my ma’s.”

“So you’re running up your mother’s phone bill now instead of yours?”

“I guess,” she replies.

“Well Cecilia I’ve just done your astrological chart,” I lie, “and your fears seemingly are well founded. Things have changed and your fortune has taken a decided turn for the worse.”

She gasps, and begins to sob, making me feel guilty. “So Cecilia I see there is a way for you to change your luck back to the good.”

“How?” she is now crying full on.

“If you never dial another 900 phone number again, I can assure you your luck will change for the better. You will discover that not only will you have money, but you’ll be able to keep it.”

“What good is that? I won’t know the future!” she complains.

“Do you actually believe in psychics?” I ask her.

“They know the future,” she insists.

“Then how do you explain that they were always saying you were going to make a lot of money?”

“My ship just hasn’t come in yet. It will. All of the psychics told me.”

“Ma’am they, like me, are all frauds. They kept you on the phone so you would spend all your money just like I am doing now. So why don’t you call the phone company and tell them you were a victim of a fraud? By law they must remove the charges from your bill. Also you should call your Congressman and your Attorney General and tell them your story so they can shut down this whole fraudulent operation. The only way to know the future is to live it. Just let it happen naturally.”

“You’re saying you’re not psychic?” Cecila asks.

“I promise you I’m definitely not psychic.”

“Then why should I believe you? What the hell do you know? Can you switch me to your boss? I want to complain about you, and get them to connect me with a real psychic like the girl in your commercial.”

“Cecilia, the girl in the ad is my wife, and she isn’t psychic either. She’s a hooker. She always wanted to be on television, but actually she’s a dominatrix and does S&M tricks for the owner of the psychic network. In exchange for her tying him up and making him wear women’s clothing he lets her be on television.”

“And this guy is your boss?”

“He signs my checks.”

“And does he know what you’re saying about him?” she shows concern for my employer.

“No, because he’s not psychic either.”

“And you say your wife is a hooker?”

“She’s the finest whore in the state of California,” I proudly declare.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Why? She doesn’t charge me anything, and at least our trailer hasn’t been repossessed yet unlike some suckers I’ve heard about recently.”

“Are you calling me a sucker?” Cecilia shows a bit of agitation.

“Well you haven’t hung up yet – even after I told you I am a fraud,” I reply.

“That doesn’t make me a sucker. At least I don’t live with a hooker.”

“I guess ‘sucker’ was a poor choice of words. Maybe ‘loser’ would be more appropriate.”

“I’m not a loser,” she says defiantly.

“Well let’s see. You’ve spent three thousand dollars on the psychic hot line and it cost you your home. Now you’re calling me from your mother’s house…”

“ She doesn’t have a house. She has a trailer just like mine,” Cecilia interrupts.

“You mean ‘just like yours was’ don’t you?” I may be guilty of insensitivity.

“I guess so,” she mutters glumly, “but I’m no loser.”

“I think you fit the definition of loser to a ‘T’. If you don’t believe me I’ll be more than happy to look up ‘loser’ in the dictionary. I think I’ll probably win this debate.”

“Do you have a dictionary?” Cecilia inquires incredulously, having probably never met a person who owns a book, much less a dictionary.

“I have one in the west wing of my home. Would you like to hold while I look the word ‘loser’ up? It will only take me five minutes to walk over to that side of the house.”

“Sure, because I know I’m no loser,” she reiterates before changing the subject. “How big is your house that it takes you five minutes to walk to the other side?”

“Oh it’s about forty thousand square feet,” I lie, “my wife makes a lot of money hooking and I make even more by hustling losers like you out of your life savings at the rate of $3.99 a minute.”

“Golly that’s a big house. I wish I had a house.”

“You could if you stopped calling psychics,” I point out.

“Maybe,” she concedes before adding, “but then I still wouldn’t know the future.”

I read her the definition of ‘loser’ in the dictionary. According to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary it’s, “a person who loses.”

We debate for twenty minutes whether she qualifies under this definition. “Let’s see –you’ve lost your home, and your life savings. From where I sit you sure would seem to fit securely in the category.”

“At least my wife isn’t a whore!” Cecilia takes the offensive.

“So are you saying you have a wife? Are you a lesbian?” I ask.

Cecilia corrects herself and the call drags on for another twenty-five minutes. No matter how much I try to antagonize her she will not end the call. Finally I have to go to the bathroom and I hang up on her. My average is up, while my faith in the intelligence of the average North Carolinian has skidded to its all time nadir.

However, as soon as I return from the call of nature another North Carolinian is on the line, making me believe that Dr. Leakey wasted his time digging up bones in Kenya in an attempt to find the earliest primitive man. All he had to do was go to North Carolina, and he could have engaged him face to face over a beer, or maybe two, or perhaps a six pack, or even a case, or, let’s be honest here, a whole keg.

“Hello this is Sasha. Can I help you?”

“This is (hiccup) Earl Wallace (belch),” my customer slurs.

“And when were you born?”

“Hmm. (hiccup) A while back I guess, I don’t rightly remember.”

“Earl, where are you calling from?”

Earl pauses for a moment while he considers my difficult question. “My (hiccup) phone?” he guesses.

“No, Earl I meant what city are you in?”

“Oh, I get it. North Carolina.”

“Earl, last time I checked North Carolina was a state. What city in North Carolina do you live in?”

“Hold on a second, let me ask my wife.” Earl drops the phone and I hear him stagger across the room. “Cheryl wake up…Come on now…rise and shine…The phone psychic asked me a question.”

“What question?” I hear a groggy and slightly angry woman ask.

“Uh...um...(hiccup) I forgot...Hold on a second...Let me go ask him...I know it was important.”

Earl makes his way back to the phone, and, on only his second attempt, picks it up. “I forgot what you asked me.”

“I wanted to know what city you live in.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right.” Earl drops the phone again and navigates himself back to his wife. “He wants to know what city you live in.”

“Raleigh. Now let me go back to sleep.”

“Thanks honey.” I hear furniture being bumped into and then the sound of a glass shattering. “Shit!” Earl swears. He stumbles to the phone and tells me to hold on a second, “I got to pick up some broken glass.”

For five minutes I can hear Earl collecting the shards of whatever it was he broke. $19.95, or five minutes later he’s back at the phone. “Sorry about making you hold,” Earl apologizes, “but my wife would be pissed off if she stepped on a piece of her stupid vase. Now I remember you were asking me something, but I forgot what it was.”

“I asked you what city you live in.”

“Oh yeah. Oh shit, now I’ve gone and forgotten.”

“Let me help you out here Earl since I’m psychic. I sense you live in Raleigh.”

“That’s it! You’re right. Man you’re good.”

“What was it you wanted to know this evening, Earl?”

“Oh. Hold on a second. What was it? …It’s on the tip of my tongue…something important…you’re psychic maybe you already know what I was going to ask?”

“Where you can get more liquor?” I postulate.

“Where’s that?” Earl asks.

“At the liquor store,” I utilize my psychic abilities to their fullest.

“That makes sense,” Earl agrees, “but I don’t think that’s why I called. Let’s see, oh yeah, I just remembered. I want to know where I put my car keys.”

“Why do you want to find your car keys? You’re far too drunk to drive.”

“I need to go to the liquor store.”

Surprising myself that I’m not a complete bastard I suggest this might not be the best time for him to get behind the wheel, “Earl if you drive anywhere you will be immediately arrested and thrown in jail.”

“For what?”

“Driving under the influence of alcohol.”

“No I won’t. I’m out of alcohol, so how the hell can I be under its influence?”

I decide to change tactics. “Okay Earl you left your keys with someone who you’re going to have to call to get them back.”

“Do you know their number?” he asks between hiccups.

“Yes, I do. Call 9-1-1 and tell the person who answers you have an emergency. You need your keys back so you can go out and buy some more booze.”

“And they’ll bring me my keys?”

“I promise. Psychics honor.”

“Okay, I’ll do that. Thanks a lot. You’ve been a great help.” My satisfied customer hangs up. We’d been on for forty minutes, leaving me to surmise that, since ignorance is bliss, North Carolina must be the happiest place in the world.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I’m channel surfing at three in the morning and cable television sucks. I have seventy-two channels and all of them seem to be airing infomercials. Since I’m basically a slob I don’t have any interest in any new miracle cleaner sold by some dodgy guy with a fake British accent wearing red suspenders. I’m content with my thinning hair, or pattern baldness depending on which commercial I’m watching, so I don’t need any new European tested hair replacement ointment. I’m not fat so I don’t need some buffed toy boy on steroids to sell me revolutionary exercise equipment. I’m not thinking about attending any real estate seminars where some guy with perfect hair and a Pepsodent smile, for the nominal fee of $499 will teach me the exciting art of how to buy properties in foreclosure. Therefore the only thing left to do is watch the thirty minute psychic hot line infomercial and see how a genuine textbook telepsychic operates.

It’s fucking nauseating

The male television telepsychics, the paragons of my profession, look like supernerd Ken dolls dressed in K-Mart suits as opposed to me who looks like a refugee from a New York subway train dressed in my JonBenet Ramsey “Daddy’s Little Girl” T-shirt, a pair of jeans with drool marks and accompanying muddy paw prints from my two golden retrievers, and a pair of extremely dirty ersatz Nike athletic shoes for people who aren’t athletes but like to think they are. But worst of all they seem to be suffering from some sort of disgustingly cheerful optimism that could only be found in real life by Moonies on Prozac. Obviously they are frauds, because anyone who claims to see into the future knows one thing for sure, we’re all going to croak. Some of us will be leaving this life prematurely via some sort of car accident, or in the case of many of my callers, by some monumental act of criminal stupidity (“Here lies what we could find of Billy Joe Darnell, who died while trying to steal the copper insulation out of some live power wires”) but the vast majority of us are checking out via some sort of slow disease which strikes us when we’re all aged and decrepit locked away in some nursing home with the Muzak gently broadcasting renditions of hits by Chicago and the Doobie Brothers. It’s enough to make you puke. But the model telepsychics are flashing smiles worthy of Rose Bowl Queens on lithium. They’re obvious frauds, but they have wonderful smiles as they beckon losers to call.

I go through a moment of introspection, the time of self reflection which can only be properly done when you’re suffering from insomnia at half past three in the morning. I shouldn’t be so cynical, I shouldn’t despise these psychic Adonises. I shouldn’t be jealous of them since they are my role models. I should strive to be as compassionate as these smarmy swindlers and deliver only the good news. To my legions of unemployed men I’ll award free beer and blowjobs, the only type of jobs many of them are qualified to receive. For the women I’ll be doling out painless liposuction, faithful spouses and new pickup trucks replete with gun racks.

I log on, and wait for a call from a fellow insomniac.

Sure enough the phone rings.

“Hello this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“This is Carl, and don’t bother wasting none of your bullshit on me because I don’t believe in psychics. I’m drunk...I like being drunk... so don’t bother telling me I need to stop drinking. I know I need to stop drinking, but I’m seventy-eight years old and if it kills me so fucking what? The reason I’m calling is ‘cause I hate my kids and I hate my relatives even more so I want to make sure there’s nothing left in my bank account when I die. Shit! I hate these teeth, they hurt too damn much...hold on a second...yep...thas besser,” he lisps.

“So what do you want to know about from me Carl? Where to get better false teeth?” I ask in my most sympathetic voice.

“I don’t want to know nothin’ from you. Psychics are bullshit. You’re bullshit too – but I like you, and I jess wanna talk,” Carl’s removing his teeth makes his already deep southern accent even more difficult to understand. “I’ve got me a bottle of Old Crow and I got a check for $160 from the Social Security so I aim to talk until I’ve used both up.”

“Carl, if you don’t believe in psychics, why are you wasting three ninety-nine a minute on a fraud like me, instead of buying yourself a case of Old Crow or maybe a hooker?”

“I got me enough Old Crow to last me until I die, and I hate women,” Carl mumbles.

“Are you gay?”

“No I’m not a queer. I like to fuck girls as much as the next guy, it’s just I don’t like them. All they care about is my money and I’d rather waste it on an out and out fraud like you, especially since my son and his wife are going to see my phone bill and shit bricks when they see I spent all this dough on a 900 number.”

“Why don’t you give the money to charity?”

“Because my kids would think I’d gone soft and done something good. Then some bastard would get it in their head that I might be sociable and the next thing you know they’d be over here trying to ingratiate themselves with me – so I’d have to shoot them with my luger. I haven’t killed anyone since Korea, and I don’t really want to, although a few of them could use it, so I’d prefer not to kill them unless they were Chinamen – ‘cause I can’t stand them ever since I was a prisoner of war.”

“You were a prison of war?”

“Oh they captured me in Korea…kept me in a cage underground for five years. I was MIA in every way…I got drunk every night on fermented roots and didn’t come back to the States until rock and roll was invented. Rock and roll sucked, but it did make girls want to fuck and that was good, so I decided to go into music. I wrote songs and made a lot of money; but I pissed it all away on wives, kids and whiskey. Only the whiskey was good. That’s why I hate Chinamen.” Although I am in fully aware of the connection between rock and roll and sex, which is why I worked in the music business for twenty-five years, the connection between Chinese people and rock and roll is more elusive (I defy you to name one Chinese rock and roll band) and I try and get Carl to explain it in case I missed something important to my own educational development.

“You see Chinese are the Jews of the Orient, and Jews run the record business except for the Wops who own the Jews. Wops are all in the Mafia, and I hate them. You know this bottle of Old Crow costs eight dollars and ninety-five cents. If it were Nehi Cola, the same amount would cost only a quarter. It’s the Dago Mafia who make it so fucking expensive – and that’s the truth. So you understand why I hate Chinamen?” he asks giving him enough time to reload via a full swig of alcohol.

Meanwhile I’m wondering how my Ivy League education did not supply me with this vital sociological economics lesson. Maybe I can sue Cornell for malpractice. But then I remember my call from North Carolina and realize education stops in the twelfth grade so I shouldn’t concern myself with this. I try to change the subject, “Carl do you gamble?”

“Why? You wanna bet whether I’m telling the truth?”

“No. I was just wondering why you don’t blow all your dough at a casino. They let you drink for free as long as you’re gambling, and I figure you’d probably be able to get mighty drunk before you finished losing all your dough.”

“I don’t like casinos. They use fake air in those joints. They pump it so full of oxygen that you can’t get full on drunk, and what’s the point of drinking if you can’t get full on drunk? All that happens is you’re standing in a urinal pissing in a bathroom while some Mexican keeps trying to hand you a towel to wash your hands with. I hate Mexicans.”

“You seem to hate quite a few people,” I observe.

“You’re damn right. People are what makes this world so fucked. If it weren’t for people this world wouldn’t be so bad,” Carl states, making me realize I’m speaking with a major philosopher. Forget pedantic Georg Hegel, fuck the obtuse Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein is a boring old fart and Simon Kierkergaard can suck my dick, here’s Carl from Arkansas spewing the truth in plain language which every person can understand.

“So Carl with your unique grasp of the world you should be on television. Why don’t you get yourself a talk show?”

“Television is run by homos. I hate homos,” Carl puts the kibosh on my plan.

“Is there anyone you do like?” I inquire.

“Nah, I hate everybody, except for my dog. He’s loyal and knows his place. Everyone else can kiss my ass,” Carl pauses for a second to take a gulp of booze. “How long have we been talking?”

“Around forty minutes,” I yawn as finally I’m getting tired.

“Good I’ve pissed away this check. I’ll call you in two weeks when I get my next one. It’s been a pleasure,” he hangs up.

I log off and go to bed. The psychic network is one hundred sixty bucks richer. I’m up ten bucks, and my average is doing fine, but more importantly I’ve finally spoken to someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about. People are generally detestable – which is what makes them so goddamn interesting.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I’m in a foul mood this morning. My day started at seven in the morning when I was woken up by some asshole trying to sell me on AT&T as my long distance phone carrier. I ask the bastard for his home phone number. He gives it to me, and then asks me why I wanted it. “Because I’m going to call you at four in the morning and see how you like being awakened by an obnoxious bastard,” I yell into the receiver as I hang up on him.

Unable to get back to sleep, I crawl out of bed only to step in some fresh vomit courtesy of one of my sadistic felines. After cleaning up the mess I walk and feed my dogs. I turn on my computer to discover an e-mail from my record company telling me that my recently released record is rapidly becoming the Ishtar of the record business and I shouldn’t expect to see any royalties.

So I go back to the relative comfort of bed and turn on the television. The stock market is plummeting, and a feeling of dread engulfs me as I realize if the rest of my life goes like this I may someday need to keep the money I’m earning from my job as a psychic to make ends meet.

Halfway ashamed of my capitalist avarice, I log on and wait for the first call. It takes only a minute.

“Hello this is Sasha. May I help you?”

“Yes this is Lurleen Richmond from San Antonio and I called for my ten free minute psychic reading.”

“Well you get what you pay for,” I respond snidely, “What do you want to know?”

“Can you tell me whether my mother is going to keep on living?”

I debate whether to tell Lurleen her mother is a goner, which would be the right bastard way of responding, or whether to tell her she is going to keep on living, which from the sounds of the question might not be too welcome a prospect either. But, since I’m working for charity, I elect to play it safe and stall for time while taking the middle ground, “Lurleen no one is immortal, not even your mother.”

“So she’s going to die?” Lurleen sounds hopeful.

“Eventually.”

“Can you tell me when?”

“You seem awfully anxious. I sense you and your mother don’t get along too well.”

“She’s a bitch and she’s got cancer. So I want to know when she’s going to die so I can collect my inheritance.”

I take out some of my aggression on Lurleen, “Did you know your mother cut you out of her will?”

“She what?” Lurleen panics.

“She cut you out of the will. She decided to give everything to charity since she suspects you of being ungrateful.”

“She doesn’t know anything. I never told her I want her dead or anything.”

“Mothers have a way of knowing things. So do you still want her dead?”

“More than ever. When is she going to die?”

“Lurleen let me concentrate. I’m going to put myself into a trance so I can give you the exact date and time. It’s going to take a couple of minutes while I connect with the spirits so hold on, okay?”

“Are you sure you’re going to be able to tell me?”

“I promise. Now I’ll be in a trance for five minutes during which you may hear some strange things because the spirits will be talking through me. If you have any questions you can ask me when I come out of the trance and I’ll be more than happy to answer them.”

I pick up the newspaper and check the sports section in search of some good news while I mumble some mumbo jumbo to string Lurleen along. My favorite hockey team, the St. Louis Blues, are on their annual Stanley Cup deathbed right alongside Lurleen’s mother, and then I turn the page to a story on the A.S.P.C.A. desperately needing to find homes for dogs, lest they have to put them to sleep which is the polite way for them to say they are going to murder them. This day isn’t going right at all, and I turn to my human punching bag – Lurleen Richmond. I slam some books down on the counter, causing my beloved dogs to bark, and summon up the deepest voice I can muster, “Why have you dragged me out of the shower, oh master psychic?” I ask.

Then reverting to my normal voice, but in a Zombie like intonation, I ask, “I’d consider it a personal favor if you told me when Lurleen Richmond’s mother was due to croak.”

“Check her life line. It’s very short. She shall precede her mother in death unless you get her to repent and change,” the other half of my schizoid self intones.

“Cool. Sorry to bother you spirit. Have a nice day,” I say in my zoned out tone. Then I slam the book down again and mumble incoherently for a few seconds while Lurleen panics.

“What’s this about my life line? He said I was going to die first unless I change. What does that mean? I don’t want to die first. Please help me.”

I return to normal and tell her to calm down. “There’s still hope for you Lurleen.”

“Please. I’ll do anything,” she begs.

“Okay Lurleen I need you to first put your left palm over the mouthpiece of your phone so I can see your life line. Let me know when it’s there.”

“It’s there,” her muffled voice comes through the receiver.

“Oh my! The spirit was right as usual. Okay you can take your hand away from the phone Lurleen. Now do you see the long line across your left hand?”

“Which line?”

“The first long one which goes from your left to the right,” I bluster.

“Yes, I think I see it.”

“Well you need to do is lengthen your life line so it goes all the way up to your index finger.”

“How am I going to do that?” she cries.

“Do you have a sharp knife, or a razor blade handy?” I ask.

“Yes, I have a knife in the kitchen.”

“Go get it,” I order.

Twenty seconds later Lurleen returns with a knife. “Very gently, so you only barely break the skin and don’t go too deep, I want you to cut yourself so you have a scar line extending all the way to your knuckle,” I advise.

“Ow! That hurts,” she cries.

“Good! Are you bleeding?”

“A little bit. Did I do it right?”

“Yes. You can now get a bandage and close the wound.”

Lurleen tells me to hold and returns a few seconds later, saying she has a Band-Aid. “Am I going to live long now that I’ve done what you said?” she asks.

“Only if you promise to stay on the line for twenty more minutes and if you swear to God you will treat your mother nicely from now on.”

“And will she put me back in the will?” her greed flares up.

“If you go down to the A.S.P.C.A. and adopt a homeless dog who is on death row, you can salvage your place in her will.”

“I don’t like dogs.”

“Well kiss the money goodbye then.”

“No, if that’ll get me back in the will I’ll get one until she dies.”

“No you must keep the dog and fawn over it for the rest of its life. The dog will bring you both unconditional love and luck. If you treat the dog well the money you inherit will grow into a sizable fortune. However, if you get rid of the dog or treat it badly, you will suffer for the rest of your life and the rest of eternity.”

“Are you sure?”

“The spirits have spoken,” I keep it vague.

“I guess I could get to like a dog. Okay I’ll do it.”

Lurleen and I talk for eighty dollars about proper pet care and the importance of living by the Golden Rule, before I figure she has learned her lesson and allow her to hang up.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I have often noticed women are easily swayed by English accents. No matter how scrawny, malodorous, or drug addicted he is if a guy has an English accent he is going to get laid big time. How else can you explain Rod Stewart having married his gaggle of fashion models?

The guy is fifty years old, has bad breath, still wears spandex, and has the annoying habit of drawing penises on any inanimate object like a jar of aspirin or a light switch, which I learned about when I was recording an album in the same studio complex that the over the hill rocker was working in. Since at least seventy-five percent of my callers are women I decide to put on an English accent and see if this produces interesting results.

“My name is Heather Jenkins and I wanted my free psychic reading.”

So I go through my usual delaying tactics of asking Heather for her birthday and her address, discovering that she lives approximately four blocks from where I grew up in Clayton, Missouri.

This is going to be fun.

“Heather my name is Sasha, and the telephone lines are all mucked up in the United States right now so all the American calls are being forwarded to the British division of the Psychic Readers Network here in London.”

“London England! Really? I’ve never talked to anyone in England before. This isn’t going to cost extra is it?”

“No Heather all the phone calls are switched automatically across the pond via our exclusive Psychic Network Karmically enhanced fiber optic system at absolutely no extra cost to you.”

“Wow! I didn’t know you were an international operation.”

“Oh yes. In fact we handle calls from all over the world. We’re in every country except for Iraq since that unfortunate incident involving Saddam Hussein.”

“What incident was that?”

“Oh one of our psychics told Saddam he was going to suffer a rather embarrassing defeat if he went ahead with his planned invasion of Kuwait. Well he got really pissed off that a psychic knew about his invasion plans before he actually implemented them, so he decided to send death squads after every psychic who worked for us. We lost nearly two dozen psychics – although I must say they weren’t among our best people since if they had been better at their craft they would have sensed the hit teams coming and avoided their rather nasty demises. It wasn’t until our company sent Dionne Warwick to Iraq to negotiate a peace treaty that any of us felt safe.”

“They sent Dionne Warwick to Iraq? I never knew!”

“You must have missed it. It was in all the papers. You see Sadam Hussein’s favorite song is ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’, which was her last hit record some twenty-five years ago.

She hit the bottle really hard and for the last ten years Ms. Warwick was on skid row working part-time as a singing waitress at a Chuckie’s Cheese Restaurant outside of Flint, Michigan when we found her. Our boss made an agreement with Ms. Warwick that if she would go through detox and then go meet with Saddam Hussein he would give her a job doing commercials for the psychic hot line. She consented and flew to Baghdad, and quite literally seduced Saddam and in return got a job for life doing commercials for the psychic network.”

“You mean Dionne Warwick had sex with Saddam Hussein?”

“Only anally,” I reply, “but ever since we psychics have been able to rest a lot easier.”

“Dionne Warwick is a drunk and does perverted sex? She seems like such a nice lady in your commercials.”

“Well quite frankly Miss Warwick has to get pissed out of her brain before she can even act nice. In reality she’s really a mean bitter woman with a drinking problem.”

So we waste about five minutes talking about Dionne Warwick, her sex life, and about the life of a psychic in England. I tell her both Fergie and Princess Di used to call me every Monday night until I told Di she was going to catch the crabs. Di got really upset and refused to talk to me again, claiming to Fergie that it was my fault when she actually caught them the following week. It was her being nailed with the crabs which was the real reason behind her divorce from Charlie. The princess was at the chemist buying some Kwell at the exact moment he was there buying a packet of condoms – a situation which would have been totally avoidable if she had only called me – since I would have warned her away from this particular chemist.

Anyway we’re about fifteen minutes into the call before Heather finally remembers she called for psychic advice and changes the subject to something more immediate to her life. She wants to know if her boyfriend is being faithful to her.

“Is sense you live near a street called Hanley, and it intersects a street called Davis Place. Is that very near you?” I ask, knowing full well it’s just down the street.

Heather is astonished, “How did you know?”

“Yes and there is a primary school for grades one through seven called Meramec right near you?”

“Yes there is. It’s a block away from me. You’re amazing!”

“When you go in the school’s front entrance just to the right is the principal’s office,” I say from memory having spent quite a lot of time there as a ten year old juvenile delinquent.

“My son goes to Meramec and you’re entirely right. But how does that relate to my husband?”

“He drops your child off there occasionally?”

“Yes.”

“Have you heard of the French expression cherchez la femme?”

“You mean he’s having sex with someone in my son’s school?” Heather gasps.

“Well you’ve suspected him for a long time, haven’t you? That’s why you wanted to know whether your husband was being faithful isn’t it?” I use the old tried and true Telepsychic’s Plan A – if they think their significant other is cheating – play into their fears and agree with them. It’s bound to keep the call running.

“Not exactly. I just wanted to know if he was being faithful to me since I wasn’t being entirely faithful to him.”

The one thing I’ve learned as a telepsychic is you have to dance quickly if you want to keep them believing. I ditch Plan A. “Yes, I knew that. You’ve been seeing another person, someone your husband knows,” I try the slightly newer, somewhat less tried and less true Telepsychic’s Plan B.

“Yes,” Heather admits.

“And this man...”

“Actually it’s a woman,” Heather interjects.

“But she has masculine characteristics,” I do the telepsychic jitterbug.

“Yes. You English people know everything about me don’t you? You’re the best psychic I’ve ever spoken to!”

“And you don’t love your husband any more?”

“No actually I love him a lot,” Heather throws me for another curve.

“Have you considered sharing him with your lover? All men fantasize about having two women at once.”

That’s gross. You wouldn’t suggest that to Fergie would you?”

“Well actually Heather I have made that suggestion repeatedly to Fergie, and six months ago she took my advice on this very matter. She started hooking and as I am sure you have noticed recent photographs of her show a much more contented and fulfilled princess.”

“Princess Fergie is a hooker too?”

“Right alongside your Dionne Warwick. In fact they do many of their tricks together, although it is prohibitively expensive. Only rich Arabs can afford them in tandem which is great because most Arabs have a fetish for girls with big arses – which is an attribute Ms. Warwick and Fergie share.”

“Really?”

“As sure as I’m sitting here in London, everything I have told you is true,” I respond, while my wife shoots me a dirty look. I tap the mute button on the phone so Heather can’t hear me. “What are you looking at me like that for?” I ask my wife.

“First you can’t go around slagging off Dionne Warwick and Fergie like that – someone might figure out who you are and sue you for libel. Second you’re losing your English accent. She’s going to see right through you.”

I unmute the phone as Heather is still immersed in the concept of big butted celebrity hookers.

“You know Fergie was telling me the other day she was looking for another girl to work with her. I could mention you as a possible tag team partner.”

“Me with Princess Fergie?” Heather is in heaven at the thought.

“Yes she’s going off to America next week to do a very high priced trick with an American talk show host, Jerry Springer. Have you ever heard of him?”

“I watch his show every day.”

“Well Mr. Springer wants to film himself and Fergie getting it on with another woman for a segment of his special sweeps week show entitled ‘Immigrant big butted lesbian royalty hookers who have talk show hosts as Johns’. Would you like to be the other woman?”

“Me on television?” She is actually believing me!

“You, Princess Fergie, Jerry Springer, and his film crew.”

“How many people are on the crew?