Call Me Anytime

"Goodbye." Click.

I swill some water, clear my occupationally hazarded throat. I figure I've got about 60 seconds of sweet silence before the next call. I began my shift around 10 this morning. It's now almost 11 and already the neurons in my head feel like automatic-weapons fire. For the last hour I have been inundated with the voices of America's dashed hopes, dilapidated dreams, debilitated romances, and derailed schemes—sprinkled with requests for lost car keys and pregnancy diagnostics. That last call was a keeper. I jot down a quick note in my logbook to remind myself of the conversation's content. It reads: 10:50am. Guy wanted to know if I knew anything about Princess Di's whereabouts on the astral plane. He sounded like Robert Blake.

"People are paying $3.99 a minute for this service ya know."

And then he challenged me: "That old guy on the other psychic infomercial talks to Marilyn Monroe all of the time. If he can do that, why can't you tell me some stuff about Diana?"

I rolled my eyes and said, "Because that old guy thinks he is Marilyn Monroe." A short pause and then, "Something strange has happened to his clairvoyant circuitry. It's a bad neocortex misfire. It's like he's reading into himself. In the psychic biz we classify that as SCWIS, or self-generated circumnavigational walk-in syndrome."

My humor didn't even register. The caller plowed forward.

"Well, I still would like to know if Diana is in a safe place," he persisted. "So what's the number for that other psychic network?"

And that's when I said good-bye. I don't have that number. And I don't have Marilyn or Lady Di's either. Sorry.

Can you read me?

My Plantronics PLX-400 telephone and headset seems to shimmy a little when the next call comes in.

"Hi. This is Frederick, and thanks for calling the psy... "

"Hello? Hello! I'm premenstrual... " The voice on the other end is taut, almost out of breath, and there's a weird grinding sound coming from the background.

G鲡rd Bau베said: "The voice is a second face." But lately I've come to envision the works—head to toe—and in this case: a good-sized woman wearing lots of lipstick and a troubled perm, working up a frenzy on her StairMaster. I try to finish my greeting, the one the company I work for requires. But she isn't having that and continues:

"Does that matter, I mean, to do the reading properly? I thought maybe the PMS thing might disturb the vibrations or something. You know, the frequencies in the reading. So, can you read me, because, you know, like I said I'm premenstrual?"

"Well," I think to myself, "I'm postmodern! Just look at my job."

Bodhisattva, shmodhisattva

Imagine turning 40 and landing a job as a telephone psychic. When I first told a few of my friends, the kind of friends you can actually trust with a secret, that I was a bona fide—REAL LIVE—psychic pal, I was prepared for some derision.

"Look," I said. "I'm having an out-of-money experience, so I took a job working for one of those big 900 psychic networks."

My friend Vedika thought it was charming.

I wasn't so sure. I'd envisioned myself, at 40 for christsake, doing so much more: an accomplished artist, published writer, or at least managing my own Wendy's. Phone psychic: It wasn't exactly the opportunity of a lifetime to work in a business that's hawked on midnight television by former Love Boat crew members and LaToya Jackson.

Always a bit of a Zen-like adviser, Vedika countered my objections. "See what you can learn from the experience, just go with it for a while, something is going to be revealed here," she said. "What's your problem with it exactly?"

I had spent years as a professional astrologer and tarot specialist. I thought my objection would be obvious. "Look, me on a psychic hotline is like Dr. Christiaan Barnard answering calls for Dial-A-Nurse. I'm overqualified, don'tcha think?"

"Sounds like a little bit of hubris to me. Consider it this way: like you've taken a vow of service, to all humankind. You know, a bodhisattva sort of thing," she offered.

I laughed, but a month later, after fielding my umpteenth call, that's exactly what I did. Her suggestion quelled my damaged self-image. And she was right. The array of insights I gleaned, from the hearts and minds of a cross-section of Americans, was enough to send a Gallup pollster into a swoon.

My plan: Gossip and get paid for it

"If you hear any noise, it ain't the boys, it's ladies night."

Kool and the Gang are going at it, thumping and pumping. But I'm not at the Re-bar. During slow slumps on the lines, when the calls dribble in, I load my CD shuffler with Rhino Records' Soul Hits of the Seventies, and blast the classic disco and R&B through my office. The upbeat songs help dispel the dust storms of distress that caller after caller leave in their wake. When the phone finally rings I hit the pause button and slip into oracle mode.