Psychic Junkie (25 page)

Gina looked amused.

“What she just told you?” I said. “That was word for word what she told
me
. She was reading from a
script
.”

Then, like inspiration from above, Astral Astrid’s name coursed through my head, Astrid being a blind psychic I’d had a quick reading with upon my return from New Mexico.
She
wouldn’t be reading from a script, I figured, unless they made those scripts in braille too, which I kind of doubted.

I forced Gina to call Astrid. The great thing about Astrid was that she didn’t waste time reading cards, because she couldn’t, and thus callers tended to get more bang for their buck. None of that shuffling business, no spreads or meanings.

“Gina,” Astrid said, “recently you’ve been given an amazing opportunity in your career. I see this as a window before you, and it’s now up to you to
shine
through this window. You must seize the opportunity, take it and don’t look back. Your employers are watching, and they gave you this chance because they see you as a rising star.”

“Okay,” Gina managed to say, right before she clamped her hand to her mouth to squelch the laughter. Not only had she
not
been given an amazing opportunity, but it was just dawning on her that she would most likely never be given an opportunity unless she managed to morph into a frat boy with a shaved head who burped and played golf with the partners.

Giving her one more chance, Gina then asked about Mark, and was told that the distance she feels with him is because he’s worried he might fall victim to layoffs at work. “He’s a provider, and he’s worried he won’t be able to provide. What you’re feeling from him is stress and pressure, but it’s
not to do
with his feelings for you.”

“Astrid, thank you so much for your amazing reading. Unfortunately, I just remembered I left a turkey in the oven, so I’m gonna run. Thanks again.” She hung up, and turned to me. “Do you think it’s Opposites Day?”

I sighed. “Tell me.”

“Well, for starters I’m going
nowhere
in that company. You know that, I know that, and the partners know that. To them I’m a shape at a desk, I’m the reason a phone stops ringing. That’s it. Nothing more. And she used the word ‘career.’ I don’t
have
a career. I have a
job
. There’s a difference. Second, I feel
no
distance from Mark. I mean, he just moved in. We’re completely in love. And third, Mark just got a huge
raise
this week.
This
week. A
raise
. We’re talking a thirty percent raise. They love him there, and the company’s doing great. Astrid was high.”

I was teetering on complete and abject depression, though was slightly comforted by having recaptured my tarot cards when Gina wasn’t looking. So Lily was a fake…and perhaps Astrid was just
off
? Surely psychics had bad days. The bottom line was, it was hard to accuse a psychic of being wrong, because until you dropped dead there could still be a chance they’d be right. For all we knew, Astrid was picking up on events that would occur in Gina’s life years later. Timing, I’d learned, was the most difficult aspect of a prediction to get right. Of course, this way of thinking was exactly why I was snared in the psychic trap; it essentially strung me along indefinitely.

I needed the opinions of others who believed, so the second I got home, I pored through the feedback on Psychicdom. Some user names I recognized, people who rated and left feedback for just about every psychic they’d spoken to, which, by the way, was
a lot
. Perfect. I figured, they’re addicts like me, psychic connoisseurs.

The first thing I noticed was that these callers now seemed miffed. For instance, KatyKate922, who used to leave glowing feedback for Erlin and many other psychics—all of her comments interspersed with smiley faces and LOLs—seemed to be…well…possessed. I wondered what the hell her problem was, and then found one particular rant/feedback concerning Erlin that seemed to convey what was on her mind.

Geez,
I thought. She’d only been waiting three months for this prediction to come true, and she was this angry? Talk about overreacting. Three months is nothing. Hell, I’d been waiting for some predictions to come true for
years
!

I paused.

Years.
I had been waiting for years.

When a belief system starts to crumble, it’s like being thrown off a raft. You hit the water, there’s a shuddering chill, and then there are choices to be made, directions to go. But at first? At first there’s a whole hell of a lot of panic.

That was me. Flailing in the water, trying to figure out what to cling to if not my belief in predictions. I didn’t know how to face the unknown. I didn’t know how to deal with uncertainty. I didn’t know how to surrender control. For years, if I was confused, I called for an answer. If I was scared, I called for comfort. If I was nervous about rounding a corner, I made a phone call to find out what was on the other side.

But now I had nothing. Without my readings, I had only myself.

The next few days were spent reading through pages and pages of notes on past predictions. I don’t know what I was looking for. To believe again? To find proof that things
had
come true, that there was still something in which to rest my faith?

Sure, sometimes psychics were eerily accurate, but it was sinking in that they weren’t
reliable
. To anyone else this might have seemed obvious, but to me the realization was as shocking as when a friend told me that no, the national anthem did not begin with “Jose, can you see.” (In my defense, I
was
an immigrant, and from an immigrant’s point of view this interpretation makes perfect sense.)

But this realization, that psychics weren’t reliable, really hit home once the government got involved. Okay, it’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds. My mother, in a very sweet attempt to understand what the hell her seemingly intelligent daughter was going through, ended up doing some research online. With happiness she e-mailed me an article she’d found, one she thought would make me feel better. With horror, I read it. It seemed that our own government had spent around twenty million dollars employing psychics as part of some Pentagon defense intelligence program. However, and here’s where the horror kicked in, they scrapped the program when they finally realized that the psychics were accurate only around 25 percent of the time. Twenty-five percent! That’s practically the same, I figured, as an educated guess! Maybe it was even worse than an educated guess? I had no idea. All I knew was that these government psychics must have come
very
highly recommended. Their feedback must have been stellar if they’d been handpicked by the Pentagon. And yet, if
they
had only a 25 percent accuracy rating, what did that say about the psychics at Psychicdom?

Still, even with this knowledge, I couldn’t stop calling. I knew psychics weren’t reliable, I knew they weren’t the answer, but I simply couldn’t stop calling. Only twice a week now, Thursdays and Saturdays, but I could not give up those calls. They were my treats for having endured all the other days as a phoneless questioning overwrought mess. Knowing Thursday was approaching helped me make it through Tuesday, and lent me relief and comfort on Wednesday, similar to if I’d known I was nearing a picnic at the top of a mountain, the thought lightening each grueling uphill step.

I knew it wasn’t right, the obsessive calling and checking of e-mails, and yet I couldn’t stop. I had no idea how to fix myself, but I knew I wasn’t getting the job done on my own. It was time to turn myself over to a professional. Not commit myself, of course, but make an appointment with the psychotherapist I’d seen once or twice over the years. She wasn’t cheap, and her swank office proved it, but I’d liked her and didn’t really have the energy or funds to audition new doctors. Though really, what was I talking about, not thinking I had the money? Money seemed to emerge from cracks in the floor when I needed to call psychics. And when I broke it down, my expensive psychotherapist was about two dollars a minute. Erlin was at least double that.

Before I could think twice, I counted up what was left of my paycheck and made the call. There. Appointment set, I felt much better. Almost like I needed a treat for being so healthy. Granted it was only Monday, but really, what was the harm of one more reading?

YOU KNOW YOU LOOK BAD WHEN A THERAPIST—A
person trained in disguising alarm—
gasps
upon seeing you. I guess I still resembled a junkie, and not of psychics, but of actual hard-core drugs. This was something I’d not been aware of. I thought I’d gotten past that stage. Sure, I still couldn’t keep food down, wasn’t sleeping properly, and was an emotionally frenzied and fragmented mess, but no one had said I
looked
bad. Then again, the only people who ever saw me were my Beverly Hills employer and the employees on Rodeo Drive, and in all likelihood my gaunt, skinny, unhealthy appearance made me look just like any other Hollywood starlet after a night out. To them there was nothing shocking about my appearance. In fact, it probably made me look successful.

Oh, and I saw Gina as well, but when she told me I looked really thin, it had actually sounded like a compliment, and she’d said it with a certain amount of longing, perhaps the residue of her anorexic high school days. After all, this is the girl who claimed life would be perfect if only scientists could invent and breed a cute and adorable tapeworm, the perfect pet who would accompany you everywhere and allow you to eat anything and everything. Seriously, the girl was twisted, and I really should’ve known she wasn’t a proper judge.

In my therapist’s professional eyes I didn’t look good. And, I must say, I was shocked to see my therapist. Whereas the last time I’d seen her—years before, during a spell of couples’ counseling with an ex who was actually willing to work on things—she’d had short brown sophisticated hair, now she had long gorgeous fiery red hair, perfectly styled in that bed-head sort of way. I also noticed eyeliner, applied in a fashion I myself still had trouble with. What the hell? My therapist was hot.

I soon identified what had sparked the transformation. She was, it turned out, the resident therapist on a popular reality show. Not only was my therapist now better looking than I was, but she was on a TV show
and I wasn’t
.

I bypassed the sofa and went straight to the leather club chair in the corner. With the news of my therapist’s acting career, it was as if a trapdoor had opened up and dropped me into an even lower level of rock bottom. Where I now dwelled was a musty cavern with no light and no way out, yet in this cavern were two big projection screens, the first one cheerfully playing montages of my predicted life—images of love and happiness and roles on hit TV series—and the other one slowly and excruciatingly playing my real life—images of a frightening-looking girl clutching a phone, essentially
paying
for hope in a tornado-swept room, or scraping the dregs of a jar of apricot jam for dinner. The latter montage stopped with a shot of me in my therapist’s office, realizing that not only did she put me to shame looks-wise, but she also had an
acting career
, while I spent my days searching for discontinued pink nail polish and quilted Gucci dog coats. Then the film looped back around and the fun started all over.

“All right,” Olivia said, forced to sit on the couch. “Tell me what’s going on. It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other.”

In a few sentences I recapped the chain of boyfriends since the one who’d accompanied me to couples’ therapy. The fact that I was able to just flippantly list them off like that was both intensely disturbing and enormously comforting: Each relationship had felt
monumental
at the time, their demises so injurious that I’d questioned whether I’d ever be able to love again. And yet there I was, feeling nothing as I reduced them to a few select words. Would I one day be able to do that with Wilhelm? To laughingly refer to him as “that bizarre metrosexual German sous-chef I once dated”? God, I hoped so. What a truly glorious day that would be.

After bringing Olivia up to speed with my love life, I mentioned my issues with psychics and a certain ex’s e-mails.

“Describe to me a typical day for Sarah. You wake up, and then what?”

“When it was bad, or now?”

“Whichever you feel you should tell me.”

Ah, there we go. Typical infuriating therapist banter. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll tell you about when it was bad, because now I’m only calling psychics twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays, which is pretty normal.”

At that, I noticed one of her eyebrows twitch.

“Right. I said that wrong. Maybe not
normal
, but a huge improvement. Okay. So here it goes, when it was bad.” I rattled off my daily events: the e-mails, the translations, the tarot cards that had crept back into my life with arthritis-inducing fury, the intensive split-end cutting, the crying, and, who could forget, the psychics. “Oh, and I have a job working for this rich woman, so I do get out of the house, which is good.” I smiled proudly, as if that one little factor made all the difference, then added, “Sometimes I do online tarot card readings at work. But only the free ones.”

Olivia didn’t look shocked at all. On the contrary, she was nodding as if this were typical for many people. With a smile, I watched as she made one more little note on the pad of paper in her lap, then looked up at me and said, “You need to be in intensive therapy.”

My smile disappeared.
Shit.
That was so not what I wanted to hear.

“I can recommend one of my associates who works on a sliding scale. But in the meantime, I highly recommend that you join a twelve-step program.”

My brain was reeling. I’d gone there to be cured, but had basically just been told I’d be the way I was forever. My brain was reeling. I’d gone there to be cured, but had basically just been told I’d be this way forever. Intensive therapy? And twelve steps?! Was she kidding? I didn’t have time for
twelve
steps. I need
one
step. One!
No, no, no, no, no, no…

I took a deep breath. I needed to communicate this with my therapist. I needed to be clear and rational, needed to make her respect me and my concerns. I opened my mouth, but what came out was the “No, no, no, no, no” I’d thought had been confined to my head.

“Sarah? Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Okay, here it goes. Be calm. Be cool. Don’t frighten the therapist.

“It’s just that I don’t have time for intensive therapy. I’m a mess
now
. And twelve steps? Are you
kidding
me?” Uh-oh. I felt the roll I was on and knew I was about to fall victim to the building momentum. “Not only are there
eleven steps
too many, but
which
twelve-step program do you want me to join? Because I looked. Believe it or not, I looked. If I were lucky enough to be addicted to heroin, I’d be at a meeting right now, but I’m not! I’m addicted to
psychics
. And though there are a
million
twelve-step programs out there,
they are for everything else
. Like Messies Anonymous? Yeah, you should see my apartment; they’d welcome me with open arms. Or Debtors Anonymous; I bet my thirty grand of debt would buy me a seat in
that
meeting. Or what about Love Addicts Anonymous? I want love, so maybe that
is
me, but then of course that brings us to Sex Addicts Anonymous, which
also
could be me, because my stupid ex-boyfriend
wouldn’t
have sex with me, so I
obsessed
over it, so maybe I
am
a sex addict now and maybe we
should
add that to my list of dysfunctions, but I’m telling you right now that if you put me in that meeting and there’s some guy who just wants to have sex with me, I’m going to
fall in love with him
, and I honestly don’t think that’s good for me right now, and after all that,
you know what? I’d still be addicted to psychics!
”

Olivia nodded. “Another approach would be drugs—”

“I’ll take them!”

She smiled. “What you have is classic obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

I took a deep, relieved breath.
Yes.
I have something with a
name
. That means it’s curable. I wanted to do a dance of delight, a pirouette of happiness, a jeté of joy. I wanted to twirl around her office and knock down all the degrees from the walls; I wanted to stand on top of the coffee table and sing, “The sun’ll come out, to-morrow! Bet your bottom dollar that to-morrowwww…there’ll be sunnn.”

“I’d recommend Zoloft; that would be a quick way to…”

When I’m stuck with a DAY, that’s GRAY, and low-ow-ownly, I’ll just stick out my CHIN, and GRIN, and SAYYYY…

Drugs! It was so easy. It was immediate, it was painless, it was perfect. I tried to pay attention to what she was saying, but the sense of hope I felt got in the way and essentially blocked her out, presenting me with images of Sane Sarah, a girl who could look at food without cringing from heartbreak, who could pass a phone without itching to pay for a call, who could use her computer for normal, healthy things like out-of-control shopping. I was
sold
. This Zoloft stuff would be my new best friend. I just knew it. Never had I been into Western medicine. I’d always preferred the holistic route: vitamins, herbs, homeopathic remedies and teas. As a matter of fact, I’d always been staunchly
opposed
to antidepressants—which I’m sure I’d always needed—partly because of the fear that if I took them, they could affect my acting, and one overwhelming element of being an actor is the ability to fully feel tortured. But this was a new me. A desperate me. A me who would gobble down any kind of pill if it would make the deep pain I felt go away. A me with no acting jobs in sight.

But alas, I realized once I was in the car, I had no health insurance. My bubble of impending sanity burst, and I fixated on how I’d get my drugs, determined to get them
today
—and fleetingly I noted,
Why, yes, look at that, I am obsessive
—as I knew I’d never be able to think of anything else until I could rest assured my brain chemistry was successfully being altered. Then, of course, I began to obsess over my obsessiveness. It was a vicious, vicious cycle.

What was I going to do? When all I could think of was ordering the drugs from Canada (too expensive) or venturing off to Mexico (too risky), I called all my friends to see how they went about being mentally ill. To my dismay, everyone acquired their antidepressants through their insurance, and I realized that in order to afford mental illness one also had to be able to hold down a full-time job with benefits. Somehow that didn’t seem right.

Speaking of jobs, I realized as I pulled into my driveway that I’d forgotten to go to mine today. Somehow, in all the excitement of the therapist’s office and my new disorder, I’d totally forgotten to call my boss to tell her I’d be late, and then I’d totally forgotten to be late and had instead just been
not there
. She was going to kill me. I yanked up the parking brake, turned off the ignition, reached for the door handle…but couldn’t move. I sat there, fingers curled around the handle, and yet I simply couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t even open the door. Nor, I realized, did I want to. It was actually nice in there, warm, like a sunny spot on a carpeted floor.

Was this what being numb was like? Had I finally gone numb from all the stress and worry, or was I just really tired and now suddenly cozy and peaceful? I stared at the peeling paint of the garage door. It looked like at one point it had been turquoise. A bright turquoise garage. I kind of wished I’d been there for that. I took a nice, long, deep breath, appreciating the air freshener I’d stuck in my car’s console—a scent that normally drove me crazy because it smelled exactly like a scratch ’n’ sniff sticker I’d had when I was young, yet for the life of me I could not figure out which one. Usually, when in my car, I’d smash the air freshener against my nose and furiously breathe in while driving, racking my brain to identify its place in my childhood sticker album. Yet I was only ever able to conjure the joyful bubblegum machine (Looking Good!), the grinning caramel apple (Stick to It!), or the bashful slice of pizza (Hot Stuff!).

Now I let it sit there. Now it didn’t torment me; now it was just absolutely lovely.

Maybe I was numb, but my composure was beginning to worry me. I should be a lot more freaked out. I was officially afflicted with something that had a name, and yet I couldn’t afford to make it go away. It was like the curse all over again. Okay, now I was freaked out. I was afflicted, and I had no way to get better.

Before I lost it, I had to call my boss. Lip quivering, I dialed her number.
Just make it sixty, maybe ninety, seconds, Sarah, that’s it. Then you can lose it.
She picked up and I started speed talking, lasting a total of about fifteen seconds before my lip did one final quiver and it was over. In my parked car, in my driveway, with my seat belt still on, I began weeping. As if this in and of itself wasn’t already a fabulous way to impress one’s employer, I then managed to explain, through gasps for air, that I was mentally ill and needed Zoloft.

And to this she said something remarkable. She said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

All at once it hit me, the reason she was so rich, the source of funding for her far too numerous Gucci and Prada requests: She was married to a doctor.

“Sarah? So you promise you’ll be in tomorrow? As soon as I wake up, I’d like you there. I really need you.”

As soon as she woke up meant one o’clock in the afternoon, but to be safe I got in at twelve forty-five. Immediately one of the crew of housekeepers informed me she was still sleeping, so quietly (not that she could hear anything with a bedroom approximately four thousand square feet from where I was standing) I made my way to the kitchen for some orange juice.

I kid you not—there on the counter, held magically in a ray of sunlight from the skylight above, were
boxes and boxes of Zoloft
.

I ran to them. I picked one up, held it lovingly, and admired the little cartoon smiley-faced bouncy ball with the lone tuft of hair. How had she done this so fast? She was a wonderful, wonderful woman who must have really, really needed something done today. I tore into the box and hastily determined how many were in there, multiplied that by all the boxes, and with delight learned I had months’ worth. Jackpot! Best get started! I poured myself a glass of orange juice and popped two little blue pills into my mouth, imagining them smiling their way into my bloodstream, gleefully tickling my brain, and laughing joyfully as I promptly became the contented person I longed to be.
There,
I thought,
I feel better already
.