Crossing Over Page 2

  It wasn’t until I was a teenager, after an encounter with a psychic named Lydia Clar, that I began to explore what was going on inside my head, and by college I was spending my free time as a psychic medium. But I never considered “psychic medium” as a viable career choice. It never even entered my mind. Imagine putting that on your tax return. I got a degree in public administration and went to work at a large hospital, first as a phlebotomist, drawing patients’ blood, and later in the computer department. I continued doing private and group readings at night and on weekends, and developed a small following around Long Island. But I envisioned a fulfilling, upward career in hospital administration, and a normal life. I married my dance instructor, and we bought a house on a quiet cul-de-sac. I turned professional and began to teach ballroom myself, and on weekends, Sandra and I traveled the country competing—sometimes against each other—on the proam dance circuit.

  I had always loved to dance—there were always big parties with bands and DJs in my large Italian family—and Sandra turned me into a real pro (and gave me a steady partner). I found that doing the rumba and the cha-cha—anything Latin—was a great physical and creative release, and it kept me grounded as I tried to balance the different compartments of my life. To most of the people I knew at that time, I wasn’t John the medium, or even John the dancer. I was “Sandra’s husband.” Most of my dance crowd didn’t even know about my psychic work. I never talked about it.

  By 1995, my spirit guides were pushing me to put more time and energy into that part of my life. In fact, they wanted me to change course—in their direction. They were leading me to the understanding that I was on a path to a life’s work connecting the physical world to the spirit world. I didn’t leap into it. I loved my job at the hospital, and had serious reservations about building my life around my psychic work. For one thing, I was very insecure about how people would perceive me. What do you do? Oh, I talk to dead people. But the stakes were even higher than that. What my guides were telling me was that I would be more than a practitioner. I would be some sort of noted figure in the field, and I would help a lot of people. Go ahead, roll your eyes—who is this guy, some possessed cult leader? But as pompous as that might sound, it wasn’t anything that I aspired to. I had no interest in being well-known—in fact, it’s still not important to me. Celebrity is fleeting. It’s the work that endures, if you’re doing it right.

  I had a major life decision to make. Stay with a job and a career I loved—and the financial security that came with it—or cross over into a peculiar blend of spiritualism and entrepreneurship. I had always followed my guides, and they had never steered me wrong.

  That year, I made the biggest leap of faith of my life. I left the hospital and actually did put down “psychic medium” as my occupation on my tax return. I gave private readings in my home office, group readings in the living room, and started giving lectures to larger groups in hotel meeting rooms. Even those who had heard I was young were taken aback when they saw me, this twentysomething guy in jeans and a T-shirt who was now going to unite them with their departed loved ones. You didn’t need to be a psychic to know what they were thinking: He’s a kid. But because of my abilities, people old enough to be my parents or even grandparents treated me with a sort of deference I found a little unnerving. I was your average suburbanite, except for the parade of nighttime visitors to my front door. Some had out-of-state license plates. So you know what the neighbors thought. Two of them had moved past the awkward preliminaries and were onto a running discussion of whether it was cocaine or marijuana. They brought my next-door neighbor Hope into it, and she set them straight. No, no, he’s not a drug dealer, for Chrissakes. He talks to dead people.

  Not long after I left the hospital, my guides let me know that I needed to begin working on a book. My human reaction was puzzlement. Who wants to read a book by a twenty-six-year-old kid who says he has special access to “the other side”? But this became a persistent refrain, so I took it pretty much as a given, no more complicated than following a “bear right” road sign without having to slow down, as if just following someone’s instructions. I started thinking about it, making notes of the points I wanted to make in the book and the stories I wanted to tell. I started keeping a file of letters that validated past clients’ readings.

  I didn’t have an agent. I wondered if I should get some help writing it. But my guides told me specifically no—I would do it by myself. I didn’t find this surprising, or a daunting prospect. I felt I was a good writer, and was emboldened by the confidence boost my guides were giving me. Then one night in February of 1996, something very unusual happened. They slammed on the brakes and did a screeching U-turn. You need help with the book. This confused me. It was very odd for my guides to tell me one thing, stay with that for more than a year, and then suddenly do a 180. I was reminded of the 1982 movie Poltergeist—you remember, “They’re ba-ack”—in which a medium named Tangina, who is an “earthly guide,” seems to jerk around the parents of a missing little girl. At first Tangina instructs them to tell their daughter Carol Ann to stay away from the light. But later she tells them Carol Ann should go to the light. The lesson was that different decisions and tactics apply at different times. I wasn’t sure why my guides were suddenly leading me in a different direction, but I wasn’t going to argue with them. They’re called guides for a reason.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, a slender woman with long, dark hair came to my house for a private reading. She was very friendly and had a smile that lit up her face. Her name was Jamie, and when we sat down for the reading, I felt the kind of positive, open energy around her that makes my job so much easier, and a lot more fun. If this story starts to sound familiar, it’s because I told it in One Last Time. But not completely. Jamie was called “Randi” there. And, for reasons that will become apparent, the context of the story was removed. I simply presented it as an intriguing and memorable reading, which it was. But I left out the ending, which was, for me, the most important thing about it.

  Almost from the start, Jamie’s reading was like an unfolding book—interestingly enough, as it turned out. I was getting information with clarity and detail. Jamie brought a notebook and began scribbling as names started coming quickly. Not the usual sounds or initials, but complete, unmistakable names: Helen. Jacques—not Jack, but Jacques. These were Jamie’s grandparents. And they were with a younger male. “He’s telling me Jon,” I said. “But you know him as Jonny.” That was their grandson, Jamie acknowledged—her younger brother. I told Jamie he was coming through more like an older brother. No, she said, he was nine years younger. She was like a second mother to him.

  “He’s telling me that now he’s your older brother. He’s telling me that you have a piece of his clothing. A jacket, or maybe a sweatshirt. I’m seeing both.”

  “I have two things of his,” Jamie said with a calmness she seemed to be working to maintain, as if trying to not let her emotions overtake her objectivity. “His jacket and his sweatshirt.”

  Then suddenly, I felt a sharp pain at the back of my head, and in the next instant a startling realization. “Oh my God,” I blurted. “This guy was hit with a baseball bat! He woke me up this morning!”

  Jamie looked at me with a mixture of astonishment and confusion. I quickly explained that early that morning, I had been jarred awake by a voice that said, “John, wake up!” I knew it was the spirit of someone who had been hit in the head with a bat—I just didn’t know who it was or why he was showing up in my bedroom before daybreak. I’d assumed a spirit so bold would be connected to me or my family, so I had spent most of the day calling friends and relatives, asking if they knew anyone who had been killed by a blow to the head with a baseball bat. Nobody did.

  “Wow—it was your brother,” I told Jamie. “I guess he couldn’t wait.”

  Jamie explained that her little brother, eighteen at the time, had been killed by a stranger in a video arcade in New York City on New Year’s Day, 1984. “These kids came in loo
king for someone else,” she said. “They had a bat. They wanted to hurt someone. My brother tried to leave, and this kid just hit him in the back of the head.”

  Jonny told me that his spirit had left right away, but his body lingered.

  “He was on life-support,” Jamie said. “We took him off the next day.”

  A strange look came over her face. “This is so weird,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you this because you’d think I was some nut. But I had a dream about your mother this morning. You know how you just know something in a dream? It was your mother. She was shrouded in smoke.”

  “My mother died of lung cancer,” I said. “She was a heavy smoker.” I was blown away by that. I did not know this woman, and how would she know my mother had died? There was something very unusual about this whole thing. First, a spirit barges into my bedroom and wakes me up. Then I hear that my mother has dropped in on his sister at just about the same time. Yes, weird. Even to me.

  The reading continued for more than an hour, and after Jamie’s family pulled back, she and I began to talk. We were both intrigued by what had taken place.

  “You know,” Jamie said now, “I’m a science writer, so I’m skeptical by nature. But I’ve always believed in this. I know that my brother has come to me. My husband doesn’t believe in any of this. He wasn’t too happy I was coming. He thinks this is all a bunch of baloney.”

  “What does he do?” I asked, not something I normally ask a client.

  “He’s a writer, too.”

  At that instant, it was like my guides were saying, Ta-dahhhh. Without even a second’s hesitation—without asking what kinds of things he wrote, or knowing if he was any good, or even stopping to consider that Jamie had just said that he thinks I’m full of shit—I said, “That’s why you’re here. Your husband is going to help me write my book.”

  Jamie let out a big laugh. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  I Love Larry

  ONE FORTY-PAGE PROPOSAL LATER, I started making the rounds of New York publishers with my new writing partner—guess who? Jamie had gone home that night and read from her notebook, and a few days later, her husband was sitting in my living room observing a group reading that—as I had warned it might—included a few stray messages for him. Rick was indeed a confirmed nonbeliever when we met, a when-you’re-dead-you’redead kind of guy with a lifelong fear of the great abyss that Woody Allen would be proud to own. But now Rick was undergoing a readjustment in the metaphysics department. Talk about reconsidering your world view. When he told his friend Josh that his latest project was a book with a psychic medium, a guy who makes contact with “the other side,” Josh thought it was just about the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He snickered at the ridiculousness of it. Josh was a magazine and book writer who specialized in the Internet. It’s obvious where this guy’s getting his information, he told Rick: Off the Net. He had only one thing to say anytime Rick told him about a reading: “Research.”

  I told Rick how I believed our collaboration had been arranged—how my guides had been telling me I would write the book myself, and then suddenly reversed field. Going back over the events, we realized that on that very Sunday night that they had given me the new plan, I got a call on my office answering machine from someone scheduled to have a reading the next night. She couldn’t make the appointment. I called the next person on my waiting list to see if she could grab a late opening the following night. And that, of course, was Jamie.

  The timing struck me as even more interesting when Jamie told me she had been trying to get a reading for months. That’s a long, involved story in itself, but all you need to know is the part about the chance encounter a month before at Abel Conklin’s, a well-known steakhouse on Long Island. Jamie and I had unknowingly sat back-to-back at adjoining booths, each of us at a table with our spouse and another couple—who happened to know each other. Jamie told me that among the hot dinner topics at her table was how hard it was to get an appointment with a medium these days. And then, on their way out, the two other couples saw each other, unleashing a chain of Oh-my-Gods that ended with Sandra insisting on taking Jamie’s number down and promising she’d get a call. I just stared at Sandra—she never, ever did that kind of thing.

  Now it all made sense. My guides had not really reversed themselves. They had merely orchestrated the timing. They wanted to prepare me to write a book, but if they had told me everything at the outset, I would have been sidetracked by the plan. I would have spent too much energy looking for the person I was supposed to work with, rather than doing what I needed to be doing: diving into the swim of being a full-time medium, gathering experience, and—without the crutch of a collaborator—envisioning the book. Thinking it out, writing an outline, keeping notes. If they had to deceive me to get me ready, I couldn’t quarrel with their shrewdness. Because now I was ready.

  Visiting some of the big publishing houses that expressed interest in our proposal, I knew there would be polite requests for me to read the editors who would be deciding whether to buy the book. It didn’t strike me as unreasonable, and I read anyone who asked. We had some nibbles, but nobody was beating down any doors for the honor of publishing the memoirs and collected wisdom of a twenty-seven-year-old psychic from Long Island. Not coincidentally, the best reading I gave was around a conference table with a group of editorial, sales, and marketing people at the company that eventually bought the book, an imprint of Penguin Putnam called Berkley Books. They made the only offer. It was about equal to the starting salary of a public school teacher—all of which went toward the expense of getting the book written.

  While working on the book on and off over the next year or so, I continued trying to follow the path my guides had laid out for me, to be something more than a neighborhood psychic. I had actually taken the first step years earlier, while still working at the hospital. One morning in 1994, a colleague of mine named Pat had come up to my desk and informed me that I had to call WPLJ, a popular radio station in New York. Right away. Pat was a very assertive and precise person who looked just like Teri Hatcher, the actress. She did not give suggestions. She gave statements of fact. I had to call the radio station, and I was going to call the radio station. Okay, what? Today’s trivia question is who played Dr. Bellows on I Dream of Jeannie? No, Pat said—Scott and Todd had a psychic on, and she gave Naomi bad news. Naomi DiClemente was the morning jocks’ sidekick, the darling of the show, loved by all, and the butt of many jokes. Apparently this “psychic” had told Naomi she should cancel her wedding. Pat wanted me to call up the station and uncast this evil psychic spell.

  “I’m not gonna do that,” I said. “I can’t call up a strange woman on the radio and say, ‘You don’t know me, but I’m a psychic, too . . .’”

  “Would you like someone to do that to Sandra?” Pat said. Sandra and I had just gotten engaged. I freaked. I called. I left four messages, including the last one with someone in the office who hung up on me, saying Naomi had heard enough from psychics for one day. But Naomi called me back, sounding nervous but apparently in desperate need of a Good Psychic of the East to counteract the Bad Psychic of the North. So there I sat at my desk in the hospital computer department, asking Naomi the Plucky Morning Sidekick how this psychic had performed this reading. Did she use astrology? No. Numerology or cards? No, Naomi said, none of the above. Did she say anything that was validated in any way to let you know that she was accurate at what she does? Well, no. Then why would you pay any attention to her? Naomi thanked me for calling, said she felt better, and went on to become happily married.

  A few months later, my friend Ernie and I went to a Tower Records store in a shopping center on Long Island. He had just bought a new car and insisted on parking in the next zip code to avoid that dreaded first scratch. The long walk to the store took us past a Filene’s Basement where we saw that WPLJ was doing a remote. We recognized Naomi, who was smiling, signing autographs, and posing for pictures. Ernie w
anted me to go over and say hello, but there were too many people around, and I opted for lunch at Ben’s Kosher Deli. But sitting in the restaurant, I felt this urgency to do what Ernie said and go over and introduce myself to Naomi. The Boys pushing me? I didn’t know. “I’ll go over there and say hello,” I told Ernie, “but only if they make it so there’s nobody around.” (Just so you know—since we’ll be hanging out for a couple hundred pages—whenever I refer to “they,” and there’s no one else around, it means I’m talking about my guides.) It was a safe promise, since there were dozens of people around the WPLJ table when we went into Ben’s. But then we left the deli and went to check the situation at the table, and there wasn’t a soul around. Ernie and I looked at each other, then headed over. I walked up to this beautiful blonde woman sitting in a chair and said, “Naomi?”

  She turned and looked at me. “John Edward!” She jumped up and gave me a big, gleeful hug. I don’t know who was more shocked—me or Ernie. His face said, “I thought you said you don’t know this woman.” One of the people from the station moved in, looking on warily, not having seen that all I did was walk up and say hello. Naomi said later she recognized my voice, although to this day, I can’t imagine how. All I said was “Naomi.” We chatted for a few minutes, and Naomi asked, “When are you coming on the show?” Uhhh, well, umm . . . just the suggestion that I go on the radio—on a big New York station—was enough to unhinge me. Hadn’t she had enough of wacko psychics anyway? I’ll call you, Naomi said. Great, I said.