Crossing Over Page 4

  “I did,” came a soft voice from an unseen corner of the store.

  The audience heaved a collective sigh. Darth Vader stormed out. It was as if it was good versus evil, and good won.

  On the way to the airport, Mark said, “They really watch your ass. That is an amazing, amazing thing. They totally protected you tonight. Don’t you ever not listen to them.”

  Do Publishers Have Spirit Guides?

  AFTER THIS WHIRLWIND TOUR, after all the national television exposure, I was sure the book would take off. This just in from The Boys: Surprise—not happening.

  One of the standard caveats I give people before I do readings is to leave their expectations at the door. Whatever happens, happens, and for a reason. Value whatever you get, even if it’s not what you wanted or anticipated. I should have remembered that. I mean, my favorite chapter was all about that—“Appreciating the Messages.” But I was clueless. One Last Time was going nowhere, at least by the standard of my own inflated expectations, and I saw nothing to appreciate in that message. Was I naïve? Arrogant? Maybe both. But mostly I was too caught up in the Big Sell to realize that my guides wouldn’t stand for it. Yes, they protect me. But sometimes that means protecting me from myself.

  I have a rock on my desk, a paperweight, that says “Trust.” It has a very specific meaning for me. I don’t easily trust people. I have learned to always trust my guides. I just need to remember that sometimes their schedule is not necessarily the same as mine.

  As far as I can tell, publishing conglomerates don’t have spirit guides. The sales and marketing people thought they might have made a mistake by using my title. One Last Time was too generic, they thought, not memorable or to the point enough. You had to read the book to know that One Last Time alluded to a wish I had shared with my mother many years ago—that people should have one last time to connect with their loved ones, not just before they passed, but after they passed. I didn’t think the title was the problem. I liked the title. It meant a lot to me. But it wasn’t a title that was on a lot of people’s lips.

  The Berkley people may well have considered the book a success. They’d paid me only a small advance, so they didn’t have to sell a huge number of books to make money. Then they could push the paperback, which is what they’d had in mind in the first place. And if that went nowhere? Well, that’s big-time publishing. Churn out three hundred titles a year, give each one about six weeks to make a splash, then move on to the next one. I had always suspected they didn’t have great expectations for me, anyway. Through its various imprints, Berkley’s huge parent company, Penguin Putnam, published all the established psychic stars—Sylvia Browne, James Van Praagh, George Anderson. I was the rookie, trying to break into the big leagues. My editor was wonderfully supportive and enthusiastic. But she couldn’t get books in the stores any more than I could.

  I tried not to dwell too much on the disappointment, still holding out a glimmer of hope that word-of-mouth would somehow build slowly but surely enough to get the book off the ground. Meanwhile, thanks to Rick Korn, I had some other things going on that distracted me from my frustrations and kept me going. I’d met Rick only a year earlier, but we had clicked immediately, and he had wasted no time trying to help me broaden my horizons. Rick was a great talker who told great stories. He had all kinds of experience in television and music marketing, and he was always bubbling with ideas, never at a loss for contacts. It was the phone call to his brother at CNN that first got me on Larry King Live.

  I had made a video version of One Last Time that was ready before the book was. Rick thought I should use the Larry King opportunity to sell it. “Everyone who goes on there promotes something, a movie, a TV show, a book,” he said. “Why not you?” He asked the show’s producer if Larry would hold up the video for a couple of seconds at the end of the show and give an 800 number. The producer said they don’t usually do that, but I guess they made an exception because of Rick’s connection.

  Rick set up a phone bank through a telemarketing company where he had once worked. The night of the show, Larry held up the tape, and the producers were nice enough to flash the number on the screen. I don’t know how many people wanted the video, but enough calls came in to crash the phone bank. Most people got busy signals. So then they started calling CNN’s offices in Atlanta and Washington, and blew out their phone lines, which the network did not appreciate. A few thousand people did get through and placed their orders. But the company we hired to duplicate and ship the tapes . . . well, there’s no other way to put this. They ripped us off. They took the money, twice or three times from some customers, and didn’t send out the tapes. Some people threatened legal action—they’re probably still out there thinking it was some sort of TV scam. We had to scramble to get a new company to get these tapes out, and we had to pay for priority shipping.

  The whole debacle cost me a lot of money—about the starting salary of two public school teachers. Meanwhile, I was having problems with the freelance producer who had made the video. We had met in 1997, after I gave a talk at Starchild Books, a New Age store in Florida owned by Sandi Anastasi, the only person in this field who can claim to be a teacher of mine. This producer came up to me and said we should do a video together. I wasn’t interested. He kept calling, saying how much money we would make. I told him to go away. Then he came back with a different pitch: Think of how many people will hear your message. I bought it. While putting the video together, he was all about what a beautiful thing this was, how important this was, how we would touch so many people. Looking back, though, he seems to have been more about the money.

  I might have taken the hint, that I can’t be out there hustling the spirit world. But no. Let me keep trying this. At least One Last Time. The Larry King snafu was a night to forget, but the guys in the direct marketing business took notice. I mean, it can’t be that easy to blow out the phone lines of a company that only sells stuff over the phone. They asked if I’d be interested in making an infomercial. I began talking to them, and eventually agreed to offer a package that would include a revised video and a copy of the book, as well as another video on developing your own spirit-communication abilities, called Building Bridges to the Spiritual Realm. And, courtesy of Rick, a CD he produced with Annie Haslam, the lead singer of the British group Renaissance. It featured a song Annie had written after reading the book, called Precious One. It was about Mikey DiSabato, the little boy whose spirit had become so close to me over the years that he had gotten his own chapter.

  Books don’t sell on TV, the direct marketing people told me, so it would be the tapes they would focus on. One Last Time would be a “premium”—a giveaway. Hey, whatever it took to get the book in people’s hands. Any qualms I had about hawking myself through that much-maligned art form, the infomercial, eased considerably after I met Chad Murdock, the guy the marketing company wanted to hire to produce and direct the show. The first time I met Chad, I wanted to see if he was right for the job. I asked him about his background and his ideas. But then I realized he wasn’t there to be interviewed by me. He was there to interview me. When he had first been approached by the marketing people, he was wary. They told him I was legitimate, but he wanted to make sure I wasn’t one of those 1-800-Dial-A-Psychic charlatans. So when we met, he came with a lot of questions about my background and work. And it slowly dawned on us that we were interviewing each other.

  Chad and I were on the same page from the get-go. I saw the infomercial as an opportunity to introduce my work to a lot of people and broaden the awareness of spirit communication. I hoped they would buy the tapes and get more out of it, and I wouldn’t mind if it made a lot of money, but I saw the infomercial as an end in itself. Chad was excited, too. He saw an opening to do something special, not the usual infomercial. In fact, he didn’t even want to make an infomercial. He wanted to do a quality half-hour show. At the end, we could simply say something like, “If you’re interested in this, call this number.”

  Unfortunate
ly, the marketing company had no such thoughts. The head of the company was new to the creative aspect of the infomercial industry—in fact, he had never even been on the set of a television production of any kind—so he brought someone in to oversee things, much to Chad’s dismay. And quickly, mine. Forget being on the same page—this guy wasn’t even in the same book. He came in like Yosemite Sam, guns ablaze. Now here’s what we’re gonna do. You—psychic guy—over there. When he thought someone was slacking off—like going home for Christmas when there was vital work to be done—Yosemite demanded that they “BUCK UP!” So we didn’t figure to see a lot of peace, love, and understanding around our sweet little project. I wanted to put a lot of educational information in the infomercial. Fat chance. I wanted it to show me doing readings so people could see how the process works. Forget it—you can’t just give it away. I wanted Judy Guggenheim, coauthor of Hello from Heaven! and probably the world’s leading documentarian of after-death communication, to be the host. Sure, sure, she can be in it, but we’re going with a pro, a redhead, real nice-looking. So don’t expect to see this Judy in the final cut.

  In other words, Yosemite Sam, and his boss, Elmer Fudd, were hellbent on making an infomercial. A yell-and-sell, as they call it up there on the high channels, with the standard-issue infohost dripping with contrived sincerity, selling me like I’m the latest remedy for Male Pattern Baldness. A lot of people saying how great I am, how I changed their lives, blah, blah, blah, and if you call in the next sixty seconds, you’ll get this great eight-in-one knife sharpener, absolutely free. “You can’t sell spirituality,” I told Elmer, in all earnestness. “It’s something that people have to acquire on their own.” Oh, they can acquire it on their own all right—for $29.95. The phone call’s on us.

  Fortunately, the infomercial never saw the light of day (or night), aside from a few small test markets, where it went over like a pitch for a treadmill that only goes backwards. It didn’t convey who I was or what I do. It was disjointed and unconvincing. It was what you might expect: a sitcom-length commercial for soul survival. My guides gave it two thumbs way, way down.

  “I can’t believe it,” Rick said. “This should have been a grand slam.” The marketing company wanted to recut it—make it “edgier.” I told them to forget it. I wondered if my guides just didn’t want these people to make any money from me. And maybe The Boys thought I could do better.

  AFTER THAT, IT WAS CLEAR: Let’s go back to what I know. Just me and a room full of people. No cameras, no phone lines, no used-car salesmen with camera crews. Rick organized an event at a hotel in Dallas for which we booked ballroom space for five hundred people. But after I went on a radio show the day before the event, the response was so strong that we decided to expand the room to a thousand seats, a major commitment of money. It would be the largest crowd I had ever appeared in front of. That was fitting. With me on the trip was Lydia Clar, the psychic who had gotten me started when I was fifteen. My guides had picked her to put me on my path. Now I guess they wanted her to have a look at where the path was leading me.

  The phone lines were fine this time. Everything was looking good. And then there was a slight problem. The company we contracted to handle the event had hired a telemarketing outfit to process reservations over the phone. And they lost the credit card information of everyone who called, or so they said. Rick was on the phone all day, and finally demanded that the head of the company we were dealing with fly to Dallas from Philadelphia. But all he did was apologize a lot. The other guys—they’re all under federal investigation. Why didn’t I know this was going on? What’s the use of being a psychic if you can’t see danger ahead? I’m no different from anyone else. I’m here to learn lessons, too.

  That night, Rick and a coordinator we brought with us sat at a table at the door, furiously writing down the credit card six hundred people who came. They had no idea who had paid and who hadn’t. The rest of the people didn’t even show up because they hadn’t gotten confirmations. It was a financial nightmare, but it was really worse than that. Rick took it really hard. He was a successful marketing consultant. He knew stuff happens sometimes. But he wasn’t used to the kind of spectacular fiascos that were occurring all around me. Rick was a master of marketing who was just doing what came naturally. Lesson for me: Putting business over the work—not a good idea. Lesson for Rick: See Lesson One.

  On the flight home, we were a defeated bunch. Rick opened USA Today and showed me an article about the success of several psychic mediums. I was very happy for them and for the field. They were both getting the recognition they deserved. But I couldn’t help but wonder what I was doing wrong. You want me to write a book, I told my guides, I write a book. You tell me it will reach a lot of people, do a lot of good. I work hard to get it out there. So why is it a flop—and why is everything I touch a financial disaster?

  My ego was taking a beating, for sure, but not as brutal as the pummeling my bank account was getting. Traveling to promote the book, I was not earning my living giving readings and seminars. And, of course, I didn’t have a job to fall back on. Meanwhile, Sandra and I had invested borrowed money so she could become a partner in a dance studio. By December, we were really struggling. A lot of people outside my immediate family and closest friends assumed I’d hit it big. I had a book out, I was on TV—I must be a millionaire. It couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  I couldn’t imagine how this could possibly fit into the universal plan I thought I was following. But it did. I was just too close to see it. Perspective is everything.

  Life’s a Bitch —

  and Then You Don’t Die

  I HAVE A SIMPLE PHILOSOPHY about the whole idea of destiny and choice. If you meet with obstacles, you try to overcome them. You fix what you need to fix to reach what you believe is your goal. If you still can’t fix it, if you’re hitting a wall, it probably means you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Change careers. Change direction. You’re meant to be doing something else.

  For me, the wall was this: I was playing by the rules—at least I thought I was—and yet I was becoming weighed down by some of the nastiest energy I’d ever known. The downside of the Information Age is that the bad stuff is impossible to control. It spreads like a retrovirus. All of a sudden, people I’d never met were attacking me with a vengeance on psychic message boards and Amazon.com. Most of the comments on Amazon were very positive, but of course I focused on the negative ones. That the book was cookie-cutter, new-age stuff, or worse; that I was a fraud preying on gullible, grieving people, using stories that were obviously fabricated. Taking the hits in stride had been a struggle for as many years as I’d been a medium, but now I was a bigger target—even if my book was a flop. I didn’t read the criticism on my computer, but people faxed me printouts. Hey, thanks for thinking of me. I tried to shrug them off. But it was infuriating that these Internet critics—the kind of people who give free speech a bad name—were telling the world that the stories in the book were made up when I knew they were completely true, verified by a respected journalist, and written without any exaggeration.

  After the book tour, I came home and got back to doing private readings. I had moved my office out of my home and into a commercial building after I’d had one too many drive-bys, one too many “Just in cases,” as in “Just in case you had a cancellation, I thought I’d knock on your door.” The new office was in a two-story building on a busy Long Island thoroughfare called Jericho Turnpike, upstairs from the salon where I had my hair cut. It was a corner office with lots of windows to let in the light.

  I was in a different place emotionally as well. Coming off the frustrations of the past six months, I was much more sensitive than usual to the ups and downs of my workaday world. Private readings have always been important to me; they are my roots, and they keep me on the ground. Like a comedian who goes on television and appears in movies but needs to come back to standup in small clubs to keep his balance, I need to be doing one-on-on
e readings in my little office with nobody else there. I need that intimate, personal connection. But the last thing anybody needs is my filling the room with negative energy. Step away from the medium.

  I would read someone in my office, and the person would let me know she was disappointed that her son didn’t come through, or that I didn’t get her husband’s name. Or I would have what I thought was a great session with someone, both on a professional and personal level, and two days later I would go to my mailbox and find a scathing letter from that same person, who had apparently decided after leaving my office that it was outrageous that I charge money for what I do. These kinds of attacks were not new to me. Nor was my own dismal reaction. A particularly wounding comment or incident, or a personal attack on my integrity, was entirely capable of putting me out of commission for a couple of days. But I’d gotten better at letting the shots whiz past my ear, usually with the help of a nice letter from a happy client telling me how much peace and comfort her reading had brought. But now I was finding it harder to climb out of the hole.

  I’d never been this chewed up. The closest I’d come was in the spring of 1997, at a time when I was stressed out about the physical and emotional demands of my work and feeling a little sorry for myself. “People don’t understand how hard this is,” I had told Sandra. “They don’t realize how much energy it takes. And they’re only too quick to criticize. ‘Why didn’t my mom say this instead of that? Why didn’t Grandpa come through instead of that Uncle Tony that I hated?’ How could these people not appreciate the gift they’re getting? Their people are trying to come through for them, and I’m working like hell to get them through. But they’re not satisfied. They want more. What’s wrong with them?” Nothing worse than a pissed-off medium.