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  Interested in reading more about Speedy and Reseda? They’re characters from the novel STREET RAISED, which is currently available for the Kindle at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050JL0IM) and for other ereader formats at Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/59272).

  I Was A Psychic Friend (No, Really, I WAS!)

  It was three AM and Carmel was down on one knee in front on her portable TV, trying to tune the boob tube to something watchable; trying to lose herself into the hypnotic alpha-wave sound-byte meaninglessness that comprised the Bay Area TV spectrum.

  She fiddled with the rabbit-ear TV antennas left handed; with her right hand, she turned the channel changer dial through all three networks. Right now they all either had their test patterns up, or else were only broadcasting snow.

  She commenced tweaking the outer channel dial through the UHF stations, patiently tuning in channel after channel. It was station break on most of them. In the course of surfing the early morning airwaves of the East Bay digital wasteland, she learned that Matthews – Top of the Hill, Daly City – was giving away a bike with every purchase of a TV or car stereo. In a jingly furniture commercial, an unseen female vocalist assured Carmel that she’d ‘love it at Levitz.’ And of course, as she already well knew, smarmy Paul at the Diamond Center was her Credit Man.

  She finally lit and stayed at KICU-36 out of San Jose. The MMM Carpet guys were hosting Movies til Dawn, and their film of choice was paralyzingly dull enough to be comforting.

  She knelt there for a while, a foot away from the flickering screen, the picture tube’s cathode rays bleaching her white-make-upped face into an even more morbid pallor. Carmel finally clicked the power knob off, realizing she was only wasting time, delaying the inevitable.

  She strode over and sat at her kitchen table. She fussed with her gear, lining it all up exactly so, organizing her space: her Mister Coffee, full of fresh perked java strong enough to dissolve a spoon; her telephone headset which she put on and tugged carefully into position over her carefully ratted black hair; a fresh pack of squares, newly opened, with a box of matches and a clean ashtray right by; and (star of the show) her tattered, beloved old Tarot deck on a spread red silk cloth awaiting her expert touch.

  Carmel sucked on her first cuppa of the shift as she dialed the master number and got the automated menu recording she could have recited by heart in her sleep by now: “You have reached the Psychic Dragon,” the breathy and obscenely chipper woman’s voice intoned. “If you are a reader logging in please press 'one,' and then use your touch-tone phone to enter your login number.”

  After Carmel logged in there were several sporadic disembodied clicks and then the voice on the other end of the line said, “Thank you. Depending on your priority ranking, callers to our advertised number will be routed to your home phone.”

  Carmel hung up, lit a smoke and shuffled her deck tenderly, warming up her fingers and giving the cards a chance to start talking. She dealt the cards onto the silk cloth in a Celtic Cross pattern and studied the layout. Right now the cards weren’t saying much; all she got was the same kind of white noise the dead channels on her TV had subjected her to. But she supposed even Tarot decks needed time to wake up, just like her.

  She’d figured out quick that she got the most calls, made the most cash, on the graveyard shift – right at the time people were at their weakest and most vulnerable, when their personal demons were clamoring as loudly as her own. That was when the customers called – a mob of insomniacs reaching out to one of their own over the telephone line.

  The phone rang and she picked up on the first ring, eager as ever. “Psychic Dragon,” she said, her voice all-knowing. “Who’s this?”

  Carmel riffled her deck and took a peek. The card was the Five of Cups, showing a man looking down at three spilled cups in front of him, distracted by his pain from seeing the two cups still full and standing behind him.

  “Uh, Joe.” If this particular customer’s body matched his voice, he was one big beefy boy. His words had the dry twang of corn-fed Middle America.

  “What can I do for you tonight, Joe?”

  “It’s like this, see? Lately I been putting in way too much overtime at the bottling plant. 60 hours plus, every week.”

  “Uh huh.” Carmel took a deep drag off her smoke, tapped the ash. “Why the heavy workload?”

  “It’s the bills, see? The wife maxed out our MasterCard and now I get to clean up the mess.” Perversely, he sounded as proud of his complaint as he was bothered by it. Despite the resentment tingeing his voice, he obviously reveled in the role of the good provider doing right by his spendthrift woman.

  “So your question is about the money situation.” Carmel took another peep at her cards and was surprised not to see something from the suit of Pentacles (which was the Suit of Loot after all).

  Instead she saw the Nine of Wands, showing a beat-up war-weary guy clutching a fighting staff. The guy stood guard in the midst of a wall of staffs, planted in the ground like the palisades of a frontier fort.

  “No. No, fraid not,” Joe said. “Actually . . . it’s my wife, see? She moved this other fella into the house. He’s sleeping on the couch in the next room right now. He’s home with her all day while I’m working my 12s.”

  “Why?” A vertical crease appeared between Carmel’s eyes to mar her plucked brow.

  “She says she doesn’t love me anymore, see?” Joe’s deep voice had gone quiet and small. “She says she loves him now.”

  Carmel riffled the deck open with her thumb but didn’t even bother to look this time. She’d found that laying out the cards in a formal spread wasn’t that useful on a phone gig sometimes. Sometimes she had to cling to the customer’s voice so as to know what they wanted to hear, what they needed to hear.

  This one was a no-brainer. “Joe, the cards say for you to give this guy the old heave-ho. Toss him and his trash out your front door.”

  “Really?” Joe’s voice was absurdly grateful. He sounded ready and eager, like he’d only needed permission from some outside source to nut up and do what had to be done all along.

  “Okay,” he said in a hoarse shout.

  Carmel winced as Joe’s dropped handset clunked against some hard surface. She could hear a real hullabaloo kicking up through the phone: loud yelling, smashing sounds, and a woman’s screech.

  “Oh, and the cards think you probably need a better old lady too,” Carmel told the fight noises at Joe’s end of the line.

  The phone was still off the hook on Joe’s end and Carmel briefly considered milking it, leaving the connection open. The company encouraged keeping the customers on the line as long as possible ‘no matter what.’ What with all the excitement on Joe’s end, it would be awhile before he noticed the dangling phone handset and realized he’d been charged a dollar a minute for as long as it took him to remember to hang it up.

  Besides being paid by the minute, Carmel had another incentive to keep the connection open. If you didn’t hold the customers on the phone long enough, the company punished you by lowering your priority number. The further down you were on the list, the further back you were in line to have money-making calls routed your way – everyone with a higher priority number than you got automatic cuts in line. You could wait an hour for even a short call if the company didn’t like you.

  Her conscience won this time, but the fracas was still going strong on the other end as she hung up on Joe’s little domestic disturbance. Carmel rested her cigarette in the ashtray, took a sip of her battery-acid-strength coffee and shuffled the deck a bit to wipe Joe’s aura off the cards for the next call.

  The phone rang.

  “Psychic Dragon, how are you tonight?” No one spoke on the other end but she could hear a radio turned low in the background, Gloria Estefan singing ‘Dr. Beat.’ “Hello?”

  “Hola,” a girl whispered, and then rattled off something in machine-gun Spanish, accented differently than Carmel was used to
hearing from East Bay latinas.

  “Wait, wait,” Carmel said. “No habla, okay? Who’s this?”

  Silence again for a moment except for the radio’s sunny beat on the other end of the line.

  “Maria.” The girl sounded disgruntled at having to make up a fake name.

  “Well, what can the Psychic Dragon do for you, Maria?”

  “Okey okey, engles es bueno,” ‘Maria’ conceded magnanimously. “I have this girlfriend, si? Okey, so she works for these fellows here in Miami, this cliqua from Bogota. You know what they move out of Bogota, si?”

  “Si, I know of Bogota.” A sly peek at the deck showed the Five of Swords, with a ferret-faced guy holding a bunch of ill-gotten swords, sneering at the backs of several other guys walking away from him looking all forlorn.

  “Okey. So my friend, she takes this briefcase from the house of these men from Bogota. It’s full of the ye-yo, the white powder, tu se? Many many bags, much weight, primo A-1 coca. But I think they find out who took it.”

  Carmel took a long drag off her cigarette. “Maria, the cards know it’s you. There is no friend.” Stoic silence on the other end, except for the still cheerful radio. “Are these men looking for you?”

  “Si.” Maria’s voice was calm. “I am at a motel now. You do not need to know where. When I look out the blinds I see their people walking or driving, searching. They are hunting me.”

  Though it was difficult to do so, Carmel managed to stay detached from the sudden photo-crisp image that formed in her mind of this greedy foolish little Maria, trapped in her dead-end motel room surrounded by a neon-lit kill zone with paid killers trolling endlessly for her.

  “How about the cops?” Carmel asked, repressing compassion to give Maria the objectivity she so desperately needed.

  “No.” For the first time Maria’s voice quavered with the fear she had yet to display while discussing cartel hit men in all probability looking to give her a Colombian Necktie. “No policia.”

  Carmel peeked at the deck again and was chilled: it was the Ten of Swords, showing somebody pinned to the ground with swords stabbed through their body and blood flowing away to soak into the thirsty earth.

  Carmel chose her words with especial care. “Maria, listen to me close. You’re going to be fine, everything’s going to be okay – don’t torture yourself with fear anymore, all right?”

  Carmel tried to make her voice light and upbeat despite the sympathetic dread running through her and making her want to hyperventilate. “You need to look around, check the bathroom, find stuff to change your appearance as much as possible. Whip up a disguise, do your best. Are you willing to leave the coke behind, lighten your load?”

  “No,” Maria said firmly. “I take the coca with me.”

  “Okay. Keep an eye on those hunters. The first time you see a chance to make a break, go for it. Don’t hesitate, don’t look back. And Maria?” Carmel waited, but felt only impatience from the other end. “The cards still don’t think that the policia are such a bad idea.”

  A click as Maria hung up.

  Carmel ground out her smoke, took a deep swig of her now cold coffee, lit a new cigarette. Some of her customers called her back by inputting her personal direct extension number on the Psychic Dragon phone menu. But she didn’t think she’d be hearing from this ‘Maria’ again.

  ‘Maria’s’ had stood out from most of the calls anyway – Carmel only averaged maybe one life-or-death customer per shift.

  In her time at Psychic Dragon Carmel had talked with runaway teen prostitutes male and female; degenerate drug addicts; the suicidally depressed. She’d heard enough sordid tales of adultery, embezzlement, and sheer human moral weakness and vulnerability in action that she sometimes felt like the underside of a bench where everybody had stuck their snot after picking their nose. Carmel was their dumping ground, their confidante, and their (totally unqualified) therapist. But of course, acting as an unofficial psychiatrist allowed her to focus on others instead of on herself.

  Most of her calls, however, were about simple boredom – that, or good old-fashioned loneliness. There were a lot of isolated people out there just needing someone to talk to, seeking any kind of connection. Sometimes she’d talk with a customer for hours like two dear old friends gabbing away. She’d advise and cajole, flirt, talk dirty, conversate about pretty much any random thing at all. But the meter was always running in the background.

  The next call was one of the chatty ones, from a drunk cowgirl in Nebraska wanting to brag about the new pickup truck her sugar daddy had bought her.

  A lot of Carmel’s customers wanted to share a secret with a stranger they knew they’d never meet, knowing there’d never be a comeback after they unloaded their confession’s psychic weight onto Carmel’s oh-so-willing shoulders.

  Her next call was one of the unburdening kind: some kid in Boise telling her about sawing the head off a woman’s corpse in a mausoleum and selling it to Satanists for $300.

  She flashed another psychic snapshot off that conversation: this scruffy ghoul kid all by himself in that bone-cold house of death, down on one knee next to the cobwebby coffin. In the coffin, a headless withered black mummy dressed in rotted lace, ‘her’ leathern-fingered hands crossed at the chest over bulges of material on the bodice that suggested they once enclosed ample breasts before those time-fragile hidden tatas had sagged away into whatever they looked like now under the moldy dress.

  In the snapshot the ghoul kid holds ‘her’ heavy severed head up in defiant triumph, his fist knotted in the head’s still wavy coif of tarnished gold hair, the head’s mouth fallen wide open in an eternal frozen scream, exposing long yellow teeth jutting from the long embalmed black gums in an enviably perfect grill.

  The ghoul kid is oblivious that all the other dead in that cemetery, whose buried faces he’d walked across getting there, were writhing in their coffins laughing at him. Row after row of interred carcasses beneath their tombstones and monuments, within their mausoleums and sepulchers, filling that graveyard’s murky, enfolding subterranean darkness.

  You cannot disrespect us, those Boise dead say to the ghoul kid silently, with surprising kindness. You will be with us soon enough . . .

  The caller after the ghoul kid was from a little old lady in Baltimore eating cat-food out of a can, wondering if her overdue Social Security check was finally coming the next day or not. Carmel hung up on her quick – no way the old biddy could afford it.

  Those were the ones she always cut short: the ones with dust-covered hopes, where it was obvious they didn’t have the money. People telling her they were getting evicted and wondering if their dead spouse had hidden any valuables in the house. Single moms on welfare with no food in the cupboard, wondering if their ex was going to feed the kids soon.

  Carmel blew all those ones off fast. The hell with company orders. The hell with the fact that her priority number was already starting to drop and she could look forward to getting less and less calls as unshirkable conscience sabotaged her meal ticket.

  After she hung up on the little old cat food lady, the phone didn’t ring for a while. Her ranking was already falling then.

  No good deed goes unpunished: the tumble had begun.

  Was she relieved? Or was it dread she felt, knowing that soon she’d have to focus on her own life instead of being an eavesdropping voyeur spying on the suffering of others?

  Carmel made a fresh pot of coffee, just as happy to have this break no matter what the down-time portended for her current ‘career.’ She only had a few smokes left but she chained two in quick succession, shuffled and dealt the cards into a Tetractys spread and then a Horseshoe, keeping her spiritual link to the deck open.

  The phone rang.

  “Psychic Dragon,” Carmel said, going for a seamless optimistic flow of words with this one, steeling herself to milk the call hard. “How are things tonight?”

  “Not good,” the woman on the other end said, with perfect conviction. The woman
’s voice was strong but had the papery creak of an over-tightened guitar string being plucked too hard.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Well, I’m just wondering when I’m going to get my daughter back.”

  Carmel opened the deck: the Nine of Swords, showing a woman sitting bolt upright in her bed in the deep of the night, both hands pressed tight to her face in a desperate and futile effort to hold in the mortal agony, swords suspended in the darkness above her and about to fall. Not a good card, nope not at all. A really bad scene for this particular lady.

  “I see,” Carmel said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “I know it’s difficult when you’re separated from your loved ones. You must be worried about her.”

  “No, actually I’m not.” Again no sign of doubt in her voice.

  Carmel stropped the edge of the deck with her thumb and racked her brain, feeling for the vibe but just missing it, her intuition conveniently deciding to come up blank on this one.

  “I’m sure you two will be together again soon?” Carmel mouthed a silent curse at herself as she realized she was asking rather than telling, a mortal sin for a phone psychic claiming to actually be able to make predictions.

  “No,” the woman said. “Sarah’s in two counties right now, so they’re saying. I just want to know if it’s true, and if so when they’re going to give all of her back to me. And I want to know if they really won’t be able to find her head in time for all of her to be buried together.”

  Carmel laid her deck down aghast, cards and phone-psychic-ing forgotten for a moment as empathy crashed home against her will. “Ma’am, can I ask what happened?”

  “Well, they tell me she was murdered,” the caller said, not mentioning the sordid fact that it was Carmel that was supposed to have all the answers here. “If they’re to be believed, they identified her from her tattoos. Sarah has this beautiful yellow sun inked on the small of her back, with blue birds flying over it. The Gila County sheriff says he has that part. She has this angel on her right ankle – Sarah always calls it her guardian. The coroner up in Flagstaff claims to have that leg.”