m at a party talking with people about art, politics, books. One person is an architect, the other a microbiologist, the next an English professor. I usually don’t tell people what I do for a living, but this group seems open-minded, so I am lulled into saying, “I’m a psychic.” The conversation stops. They roll their eyes, smirk. Suddenly, my I.Q. has dropped 50 points.
“ Oh, you’re one of those!” the architect finally says. I know he is thinking about scam artists or lunatics. The others chatter on about how they don’t believe in psychics as if I were not there.
In a way, the treatment I receive from believers is even worse. For instance, a couple hire me to entertain at a party, but they don’t want me to mingle with the guests. A psychic knows everybody’s secrets, and what she doesn’t pick up during the reading, the client usually ends up confessing. Perhaps these two fear I will blab that the host has warts and the hostess pilfers from dollar stores?
Because people dread “psychic leakage,” I am a social pariah, as welcome as a peeping Tom. Recently, when I phoned my close friend, her husband answered the phone.
“ Beep, beep, beep,” he chirped.
“ What are you doing?” I asked.
“ I’m jamming you from psyching me out,” he replied in all seriousness.
I’m not ashamed of what I do for a living. But I don’t want people to point to me in a supermarket and say, “There she is, the woman who thinks she’s a psychic.” To avoid that, I usually do readings by phone, using a “nom de psychic,” and accept payment by credit card so that I don’t have to reveal my address.
I am not the only one hiding; my clients hide, too. When they call, they cup their hands over the mouthpiece and whisper. They laugh, nervously, as if answering a personal ad. “I’ve never done this before in my life,” they say, even though it later comes out that they have. And then they proceed to grill me. “What is your rate of accuracy?” they demand, as if I were a sharpshooter at an artillery range. They don’t understand. A psychic reading is not like a math problern. I have to be open to whatever comes into my mind and let the most illogical phrases, the most improbable riffs fly

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is a psychic who lives in New York and is working on a novel about a psychic.

out of my mouth. I was doing a reading over the phone for a woman I had never seen. Unaccountably, I began singing, “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.” “That’s mean,” she said. “My eyes pop because of a thyroid condition.”
Then I had a reading with a man in his late 60’s who had recently immigrated here. “What keeps going through my mind is condoms,” I said, feeling foolish as soon as it was out of my mouth. It turned out his name was pronounced the same way as a popular brand of prophylactics. “My name is a proud one,” he said. “Why does every American have to make fun of it?” He demanded that I cancel his charge.
His reaction was mild compared to what people say when I tell them I can speak to the dead. They think I’m insane or a fraud. And why not? Imagine this expose on television: A medium claims that a filmy substance rises up from him as he contacts the spirit world. The medium warns the disbeliever that the substance can’t be distinguished by look or by touch from ordinary cheesecloth. (It is cheesecloth.) Even clients who have never read Hamlet expect the spirit to deliver a lengthy soliloquy, but what I pick up is like a scratched 45 r.p.m. of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Sometimes a spirit acts out to identify himself, lifting a bottle to his lips to show he was a drunkard in life — a morbid game of charades.
Once, I gave an exceptionally accurate and detailed reading for a client — including a description of his deceased mother’s kitchen wall clock, which was shaped like a cat with a pendulum tail. Just before the reading was over, my client demanded to know his mother’s nickname as proof that I was really contacting her. I didn’t know it.
“ I knew this was a bunch of nonsense,” he told me and slammed down the receiver. I was upset by his rudeness, but I ask myself how much respect can a woman command when she advertises her phone number in newspapers? Men sometimes get my number mixed up with phone sex. They call to offer to be my slave. I decided to get a Web page ad. That very day on the front page of the paper there was an article about how prostitutes are leaving the streets in favor of the Internet.
Reading about malpractice suits, I wondered if I needed an insurance policy to protect me. I phoned my lawyer. “Irwin,” I said, “if someone doesn’t like what I’ve told him, can he sue me?”
Irwin said: “Let him try. I’ll go before the judge and say:‘ Your Honor, the plaintiff was foolish enough to seek the advice of a psychic. I rest my case.


Published in The New York Times, March 1999

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