Crossing Over Page 3

  Naomi kept asking. I kept saying no. Besides doing her morning-show job, she had her own show that was taped and aired early on Sunday mornings. I told her I wasn’t ready. I did go on a Long Island radio station, with Steve Harper on WBLI, to promote an event where I was appearing. But Long Island I could handle. I wasn’t ready for the big city. Then, a few months later, I got a call from a producer at the biggest radio station in Miami, Power 96, asking me to come on. A cousin of mine who booked commercials for the station had mentioned me to the producer. I was feeling pressure. My guides were letting me know that they were starting to lose patience with me. They were like, “Why are you wasting our time? You know you’re going to do this.” Like I was a child running around the doctor’s office trying to avoid a shot, when everyone in the office knew I wasn’t getting out of there without it. And, truth to tell, I was running away from media as if it was a shot.

  I called Naomi and asked her what she thought about Miami. She gave me a long list of reasons why I should do it, probably figuring that it was her best shot at getting me on WPLJ. Once I got my first time out of the way, I’d relax—and if I did Miami, I couldn’t say no to her anymore. “And if you suck,” she said, laughing, “it doesn’t matter. It’s Florida. Nobody up here will know.” I went on in Miami, and it went fine. I found that I could do readings just as well on the phone as face-to-face. I called Naomi to tell her. “Now you have to do my show,” she said. And I did. After that, Naomi spoke to her colleague Todd Pettengill, who called me at an event I was speaking at and invited me on his show. I said yes, and immediately thought, Oh God. This is New York—and New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut.

  I went on in August of 1995. Between my appearances on WBLI and WPLJ in New York, I was becoming better known. Steve Harper, Todd Pettengill, and Scott Shannon began e-mailing friends in the business. Radio is a small business, and word-of-mouth travels fast.

  Over the next year or two, I assembled a small network of stations around the country whose hosts treated me seriously—though not too seriously—and put me on the air regularly. I wasn’t paid for this. It was just something I felt was worthwhile, and something I enjoyed. I liked the hosts, some of whom became far-flung phone friends, and I looked forward to the occasional trips I began making to their studios. It also led to an offbeat request. The owner of a restaurant in New York called Serendipity 3, which had been Andy Warhol’s hangout, wanted to gather Andy’s friends and have me bring him back for a visit. So I did. It was actually at that event that I received the call from Todd From WPLJ to come on his morning show.

  I was content with radio as my medium. I had no burning desire to be on television, even if I’d the audacity to try. I liked the simplicity of radio, but more than that, the physical anonymity. People didn’t need to know what I looked like because it wasn’t about me; it was about the work. When my guides told me I would be well-known, I saw it as the message getting the attention, not me. I’ve always felt that way. I remember that when I was doing readings at my grandmother’s house, she would look at what I was wearing—shorts or ripped jeans and a T-shirt, no shoes—and ask, “Is that what you wear to see your clients? Don’t you think you should—”

  “What—wear a shirt and tie?” I’d say.

  “Don’t you think you should look . . . presentable?”

  “Oh, Granny,” I’d say, “they don’t care what I look like. They just want to know what I’m gonna say.”

  My jeans aren’t ripped anymore, but I still feel basically the same way. I try to be appealing, but as long as the information is good, people wouldn’t care if I was Mister Rogers.

  After establishing good relationships with a few radio shows around the country, I began going on the road. I would schedule a lecture at a hotel, then fly out and do a radio show in the same city. The lectures, which I had been doing regularly in the New York area, were part seminar and part group reading. I’d get anywhere from fifty to two hundred people. But I was far from a household name. By 1997, James Van Praagh had burst onto the scene with his big bestseller, Talking to Heaven. I was thrilled about the success of the book because it was great for the field. It introduced so many people to the idea of a conscious, interactive afterlife. It brought the idea more into the mainstream, made it okay to talk about. More eyes were looking at this than ever before. When his book reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list, I called James from Dallas to congratulate him. “Wow, number one,” I said. “A book about talking to dead people. This is huge. You’re making all our lives easier.”

  James’s book was a landmark, just as Joel Martin and Patricia Romanowski’s We Don’t Die, about George Anderson, was in the late 1980s. But two things were different when James’s book came out. One is that our society had become much more interested in examining “the soul” and what it means. Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul, published in 1990 and a perennial bestseller, was a leader in advancing the idea that the human race is undergoing a great planetwide transformation—that we’re coming to understand that “authentic power” comes not from what we can see and hear and touch, but from the internal perceptions of the soul. Zukav wrote in a very accessible way that humans are immortal souls who can stimulate their spiritual growth and become better people once they begin to bring their personalities in line with their souls.

  The other thing that had changed was not so esoteric: We had become much more defined by the media and celebrity culture. There were more TV news magazine shows tripping over each other for the same stories. There were endless entertainment and celebrity magazines and TV shows. There was cable. The Internet.

  Everyone knew who James was. Few knew who I was. But I had to figure, based on what I had been hearing from my guides for a while now, that this would change once my book was published. I believed that George had blazed the trail, and that James had paved the road. Now I would widen it. I wasn’t being presumptuous or smug—at least I didn’t feel that way. Probably just unsophisticated. Berkley had paid little for the book and was planning to publish it in trade paperback, which, if I had known anything about publishing, would have given me an indication of how much they would put into marketing it. But I just believed in the book. It was human, I thought, and it was honest: Here you go, this is who I am. And these are the people I’ve known, and here are their experiences.

  There was the story of a little boy named Mikey DiSabato, who had drowned in a pool in 1994 and whose spirit had become a regular visitor to me. There was Andrew Miracola, a teenager killed while riding his bicycle who was one of the strongest and most amazing spirits I had experienced. And Tracy Farrell, a car accident victim who got me to surreptitiously order a lab test that wound up saving a girl’s life when I was working as a phlebotomist at the hospital. Rick, my once dubious collaborator, spent many hours interviewing their families. I badly wanted to believe that these stories would touch a lot of people.

  And I wanted to believe I had accomplished my most important goal: demystifying my work and giving people an understanding of the process. I’ve always hoped that when people encounter me, whether in a private reading or in a lecture, whether it’s their first time or their tenth, they leave with a new perspective about spirit communication. The emotional stories of Mikey and Andrew and Tracy were gripping and revealing, but my favorite chapter in the whole book was about the process: Chapter 8—“Appreciating the Messages.”

  By the spring of 1998, the book was finished and set to be published in the fall. I couldn’t wait. It would reach so many more people than I ever could through lectures. I also liked the fact that with a book, there was still a measure of anonymity in a funny way. I insisted that the picture of me on the back cover be one I had taken a couple of years earlier and used on my business card. The lighting and angle gave a kind of mystical tone to it, and somehow it looked like me but it didn’t look like me. So I could be known for my work, not my face. Pay attention to what I do, but leave me out of it.

  With that, I h
oped, would come something I craved. Credibility. For as long as I had been working professionally as a psychic medium, my goal was to be respected by my peers, and for my work to be understood and accepted by the public. There was no denying I had chosen a field tainted by the stereotypes of phonies and flakes, and ridiculed by cynics. If you were prominent enough to be written about in newspapers or magazines, it usually meant they were going to make fun of you. What other profession deals with such a profound subject and is taken less seriously? In my mind, a book was a way for me to take some control of how I—and the whole idea of spirit communication—was perceived. And it meant that I had attained a certain stature. A book was something you could hold in your hands and keep on your bookshelf. It wasn’t going to be lining someone’s birdcage. To have the prestige and credibility of a major publishing company behind me meant that smart, careful people believed in me. At least my editor and the people I worked closely with believed in me. I’m not sure what the people at the top believed, other than that, whether I was talking to the dead or not, I was convincing enough to sell books.

  And make no mistake—selling books is what I wanted to do. I saw no reason to be embarrassed about seizing this opportunity to be paid as much money as I honestly could for my hard work. I am no different from anyone else. I only had to make sure of one thing: Money could be a by-product of what I do. But it could not be the reason. If I let the balance tip, if money became my driving force, I would have problems. It was a lesson I had to learn over and over and over. If I had a mortgage payment due and saw five readings on my calendar that would get me over the top, all five would cancel.

  To get the book out there, I knew I would have to essentially stop earning my living and focus all my energies on promoting it. The publicists said I would have to get on TV. I didn’t wait for them to do it. I started calling people who knew people. I made cold calls to talk-show producers. I sent out promotional tapes. It seemed that after James Van Praagh went on Larry King Live twice within a couple of months, he started his phenomenal rise to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

  I figured Larry was a good place for me to start, especially since a close friend of mine had a brother who was a top-ranking executive at CNN. Larry seemed to like mediums. I went on one night in June, four months before the book was due out. I did well enough with Larry to leave with an invitation to come back when the book was out. A few days later, the publisher decided to publish One Last Time in hardcover. The power of Larry! My first lesson learned.

  The book arrived in November of 1998. The publisher sent me to the big cities, and others where I had relationships with radio stations. Dallas, Denver, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Seattle. I would go on the air, do some readings and horse around with the morning-drive hosts, then appear at bookstores. I had made friends with a woman named Ramey Warren Black, a veteran TV talk show producer who had recently left the Leeza show to start a media consulting business. She made some calls and helped get me on the one-name-TV-host circuit. Roseanne. Maury. Donny and Marie. Catherine Crier, a former judge, had me on her show and was amazingly honest and objective about a topic that was risky for her to embrace. After they preempted me on my birthday, the Larry King producers offered me a night when Larry would be away, the day before Halloween. His fill-in would be Greta Van Susteren, CNN’s legal analyst. I said sure. She would do an interesting interview. And she did. She asked me about my burden of proof.

  “WHERE’S THE PATHFINDER?” Sandra asked over the phone. It was a few days before Thanksgiving, and I had arrived in Los Angeles for another stop on the book tour. She wanted to know where I’d left the car. In the driveway, I told her. No, really, she said, where is it? In the driveway, I said. Right where I left it. It’s not there, she said. Sandra, you saw me get in the cab to go to the airport. The Pathfinder’s in the driveway. Well, it’s not there, she insisted. I was getting annoyed. I had a lot to deal with—Entertainment Tonight was doing a story, and there were problems—and I didn’t need my wife calling from home to say she’d misplaced the car. Sandra! It’s in the driveway!

  A pause. “Well, psychic boy. One of your Boys should have told you that your damn car was going to be stolen right from your driveway. Because it’s not there.”

  Not a good way to start a day on a book tour. Something tells me I’d better stay a little more tuned in than usual today.

  I was scheduled to appear at a Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica that night, and a crew from Entertainment Tonight was going to be there to shoot footage, and interview me for a segment they were doing. The show’s producers told our publicist that it would be the cover story. My guides said this was a bad idea. Don’t let ET be there. Not tonight. I had no idea why. But I figured I missed something about the Pathfinder being stolen; I’d better pay attention now.

  If you wonder what it’s like to live inside my head, this is what it’s like sometimes: I have to call the publicist for a major New York publisher, which is spending a lot of money to send me around the country to get as much attention as it is possible to get in two weeks, and tell her that under no circumstances should she allow Entertainment Tonight, which is doing a cover story on me, to come to a public event and shoot footage of me in front of several hundred people who think I’m terrific—and I have no idea why. Poor Kristen, the publicist. The conversation goes like this:

  “They can’t come. Not tonight. You’ve got to change it.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “My guides are telling me they can’t be there. I don’t know why. They’re just saying they can’t be there.”

  “Well, I’m not canceling because of that.”

  “Well, then, I’m not going.”

  “You’re not going?”

  “I’m not going if they’re coming. My Pathfinder was stolen out of my driveway, and I didn’t get a heads-up. They didn’t tell me about that, but they are telling me this. They can’t come tonight.”

  “Your Pathfinder was stolen so I’m supposed to . . . John, you’re being ridiculous.”

  “Kristen, do I have to show you my business card?”

  “I’m not canceling them.”

  I called Ramey. She didn’t question it for a second. She called the producer from ET, who was, like just about every talk TV producer in town, a friend of hers. Listen, Ramey told her. Forget Barnes & Noble. That’s pedestrian. How about this—John’s doing Leeza tomorrow, my old show. Shoot him doing that. Much better stuff. And then you’ve got the whole cross-promotion thing. They’re Paramount. You’re Paramount. Sold.

  Thank you, Ramey. “So what do you think’s going to happen tonight?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know. They’re not telling me. All I can think is either nobody’s gonna show up, or I’m gonna suck.”

  I arrived at the Barnes & Noble with two of my close friends, Mark Misiano and Rick Korn, who were with me on the tour. We looked around. It was a good-sized crowd. And when I began my talk, they were extremely receptive. Everything seemed fine. Maybe I was just out of sync today, some kind of psychic jet lag.

  About halfway through my talk, a tall woman in a long coat entered the store and walked along the back wall. She came in unobtrusively, but she had a dark energy that everyone in the room seemed to sense. People turned to look at her as she made her way left to right and found a place to stand in the corner. The positive energy I took from the crowd abruptly shut down. Okay, this might be a problem, I thought as I kept talking. I knew this woman was the reason Entertainment Tonight had to be deflected over to Leeza. I didn’t know why, didn’t know what she was going to do, but it was definitely going to be something I wouldn’t want to see on television. Her negative energy was so strong that she was blocking out spirits that I had felt on that side of the room before she entered.

  Then the woman screamed out, Where’s the proof?

  Everyone turned to look.

  You can’t prove th
is scientifically! This is nonsense!

  The audience started murmuring. A man yelled at her, “Go write your own book. Shut up or leave.”

  You’re all stupid fools!

  Before it got too ugly, I stepped in. “Wait, wait,” I said. “Let’s respect everyone in the room. This woman obviously has her own belief system, or disbelief system. So why not listen? I always tell people to keep their skepticism. This lady will play the role of the skeptic. I’m not here to convince anyone of anything, but let’s entertain her questions. But first”—I looked at her—“I have just one question for you. Do you believe in God?”

  No!

  “Well, then I don’t think I can help you, because this is something that is driven by a belief in God. It’s the energy from that force that I think allows us to create this energy.”

  The people applauded. This woman was my first heckler. And this nasty little scene would have been the centerpiece of the ET report. No doubt about it.

  I got back to the audience. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, rubbed my hands. “I’m coming over here,” I said, walking to my right toward a middle-aged woman. I noticed that a man had been sitting with her but had gotten up and left. The woman acknowledged a few things. Meanwhile, Darth Vader was rolling her eyes. I tried to stay focused. It’s your daughter who’s coming through, I told the woman. She’s saying she was murdered. The woman validated virtually everything I told her over the next few minutes. “I only wish my husband was still here to hear this,” she said finally.