Crossing Over Page 5

  I was scheduled to appear in Albany at an event organized by Todd Pettengill, the WPLJ radio personality whose show had a lot to do with getting my full-time professional career off the ground. On the way upstate, Sandra saw how down I was. She has never wavered in the conviction that connecting people and spirits is what I’m supposed to be doing. She’s like an earthly guide. But nothing she said could snap me out of it.

  We reached Albany and headed to the auditorium at the College of St. Rose. When I appeared onstage, I was greeted by an incredible sight: People were giving me a standing ovation. I was stunned. Nothing like that had ever happened before. I didn’t know why it was happening now. The energy in the room zapped me back to life. I had a great night, and at the end, I hugged Todd. “You have no idea how much I needed that tonight,” I told him. I looked at Sandra, and we smiled. The way I saw it, they weren’t standing and applauding for me. They were applauding for the work I did. They appreciated it. That’s all I needed to know. It was a pivotal moment for me, because had I not come out of it I might well have gone back to work in the hospital, or done something else.

  Now, two years later, I began to think that not only was I hitting a wall, but there might be handwriting on it. I withdrew from Sandra and from my friends. Rick Korn called me, and I could barely talk to him. I had nothing to say.

  I will never forget this night: I’m sitting back in my chair, sneakers off, as usual when I do private readings. I’m alone in my office after finishing the last reading of the night. It’s about ten o’clock. I look down at my white socks. They’re dirty from walking around without shoes. I wonder if my clients saw them. They’re probably thinking, The guy’s charging $200 for a reading; the least he could do is have clean socks. It makes me think of my grandmother, and I chuckle out loud. Granny would definitely be getting on my case. And then I sit back in the chair some more, and finally I say to myself, “I’m done.”

  I add it all up: I’m having the longest period of discontentment I’ve had as a medium. I haven’t had a worse six months since my mother’s dying days. I’m tired all the time, I’m expending a lot of energy, and not getting a whole lot in return. The past six months have been a paradox. With all the exposure I’ve had, I’m getting more attention—more letters and phone calls than ever. But I’m not making enough money to be anything but a one-person operation. I don’t want to raise my fees. I have a rule I wouldn’t break: I only charge what I would pay. I was so sure the book would be my big turning point. Maybe it was. I went to school for nearly five years, got within a few credits of a master’s. I can do something else. It’s time to move on to the next thing.

  The phone rings. It’s Mark. He and I have been friends since the age of twelve, back when I was telling teachers about their auras. Even twenty years later, we’re like very tight brothers. We chose different careers. I’m a medium; he’s an accountant. Great combination: death and taxes. There are only two times when Mark and I go even a day without talking. One is during tax season. The other is when I’m going through a funk. This time, I’m in a funk during tax season. My meager income for the preceding year doesn’t help. We haven’t talked in days. He’d gotten a call from Rick Korn. I sounded so bad on the phone. Rick was worried.

  “What’s going on?” Mark asked.

  “I’m not doing this anymore,” I told Mark.

  “Okay, what’s wrong?” Mark wasn’t new to this. He’d seen me completely sapped, zombie-faced and shut down after lectures. I’d go into a two-hour zone-out, fall asleep, then bounce back the next morning. He’d also seen me do my share of dwelling on perceived slights. He once tried to pump me up after an event with a forty-five-minute monologue. I just sat there. “I just wasted the last forty-five minutes, didn’t I,” he said finally.

  Now I gave him the I-don’t-feel-appreciated speech, which he’d heard before.

  He gave me the but-you-bring-a-lot-of-comfort-to-people speech, which I’d heard before.

  “This is different,” I said. “I think I want to do something else.”

  “Really,” Mark said.

  “I don’t want to deal with people.”

  “What would you do instead?”

  I had been thinking about when I was the happiest with what I was doing. It was back in the hospital. And not when I was the computer guy with lots of responsibility and a promising future. It was when I was drawing blood. The actual job was irrelevant. What I loved was connecting with the patients. I would see them before and after surgery, and I felt like I could affect their lives in a positive way, calming their nerves with some encouraging words, a gentle tease, or just a smile at the right time. Hey, tomorrow’s the big day. I’ll see you when you get out. You’ll be so drugged up you won’t even have the pleasure of feeling me draw your blood. When I was nineteen, just a couple of years before I began working in the hospital, I had spent day after day at my mother’s bedside as she lay dying of a cancer that had been diagnosed just a few months before. Now I felt as if every patient I saw was my mother. Every person who came in to visit was me. To make it a little easier for them was tremendously rewarding. Now that was appreciated. I missed it—I still do.

  “Then you should go back to the hospital,” Mark said. “Go back to health care.”

  But I didn’t want to go back to the hospital. I wanted to return to the feeling of contentment I’d had, but not to the actual job. The hospital was filled with, you know, people. I’d recently added a second Bichon to our family. Now Jolie had a little sister, Roxie. Sandra and I referred to them as “the girls.” I loved those dogs.

  “I’m going to vet school,” I told Mark.

  — CHAPTER 2 —

  My Three Signs

  Princess

  When I was starting college, I thought I’d eventually like to go on to medical school. It was a step up from my earlier ambition, which was to own a deli. I could imagine becoming a surgeon. What I couldn’t imagine was how I would pay for school. My parents couldn’t afford it. Even if they could, I wasn’t sure I had the patience to wait until I was almost thirty to finish my schooling and start my career. So I lowered my sights a little. I thought about training to be a physician’s assistant. I even looked into becoming a cardio pump perfusionist. That’s how seriously I wanted to work in health care.

  Eventually, I settled on health administration. But even before I graduated, I was starting on a different career path, even if I didn’t fully understand it at the time. It was the experience surrounding my mother’s passing when I was nineteen that is the reason that I find myself, a decade later, conversing with the dead for a living. I don’t have to stretch too much to see what I do as health care of a sort.

  My mother was a major force in my life, and she always seemed to be closely connected with everything psychic that happened to me. She introduced me to it as a child, in a gradual, unthreatening way. Later, when I got a glimpse of my abilities, she gently encouraged me to develop them. When I had questions about the meaning of it all, she helped me answer them, even if she sometimes didn’t even know that’s what she was doing. But her biggest lessons of all came at the end of her life and in the dozen years since she has been on the other side.

  Her given name was Perinda, but everyone called her Prin, short for Princess, a nickname given to her when she was only a few days old. A nurse thought she looked like a little princess in her bassinet, and the name stuck. So the ninth of eleven children was the princess of the family, even if she felt like anything but. She told me years later that she had always thought of herself as the ugly duckling of the family, a self-image others did nothing to dispel.

  My mother’s family moved from Brooklyn out to Glen Cove, Long Island, when she was a teenager. A decade later, she met and then married Jack McGee, who later became a city cop and a career military reservist. They moved back over the city line, to Queens, where I was born. I was christened John Edward McGee. To answer the question: Yes, John Edward is my real name, just not my full name at b
irth. But it is now. I no longer answer to McGee. And for the record, it’s Edward. Not Edwards. Some of my friends think I should just get it over with and change my name to Edwards, just add the damn “s.”

  I was born two days and three subway stops away from the 1969 Miracle Mets’ crowning moment of glory at Shea Stadium. You would think this might make me a sports fan on some organic, karmic level. But I’ve never had much interest in baseball, or any other sport. (This is why things like this happen: During a reading, I was shown a Baby Ruth candy bar. It turned out that the spirit had given this person a bat signed by Joe DiMaggio. Not quite getting those sports references, guys.)

  So back to my mother. She worked for seventeen years as a secretary and office manager at a factory that made typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. Then she moved up to a job in Manhattan. And to her, it really was moving up. She was no longer working at some little factory on Long Island that made a product that was starting to look like a relic. She was the office manager for a multimillion-dollar venture capital firm, responsible for keeping things running on six floors of offices. She felt as if she had arrived. But I don’t think she ever quite shook the ugly-duckling feeling, so she spent her money on clothes, and on getting her hair frosted and her nails manicured. It was important for her to look good. To try to live up to her nickname.

  By that point, she and my father were separated, and Mom and I were living with my grandmother on Long Island, in the house my mother had lived in as a teenager. The reasons for the disintegration of my parents’ marriage were complicated . . . and they weren’t complicated. Isn’t that the way it usually is? She was a strong-willed Italian. He was a strong-willed Irishman. It was a culture clash that was evident in the way they regarded their own families. That my mother refused to cut the cords with her mother and siblings was an issue. As was my mother’s devotion to me, her only child. To her, I always came first, even if it came at the expense of her personal life. On some basic level, my mother and father had an intense love bond, but it was broken by their inability to understand each other. My mom would tell me that they loved each other too much. They just couldn’t live together.

  My grandmother instilled in me a great sense of family, always having big parties with lots of music in what came to be known as “the dancing room.” But as tight as my bonds have always been to the maternal side of the family, I have not been able to match that closeness with my father or much of his family. This isn’t easy, given my philosophy of life. A few years ago, recognizing that I was always telling people to appreciate and validate their loved ones who had passed, I realized I should expand the message to the obvious: We shouldn’t focus so much on communicating with those on the other side that we neglect to appreciate and validate the people in our lives on This Side. But, of course, sometimes, despite the best of intentions, that’s not possible. The simple answer in my case is that my father and I have never been able to be close, for whatever reasons of personality, distance, and experience.

  My closeness with my mother’s side, especially my grandmother and aunts, developed naturally after my parents split up. With my mother off at work in the city, my grandmother was the one who looked after me when I got home from school. I’d come through the door and find her in the same spot every day, crocheting and watching the soaps from a chair between the living room and dining room. And I do mean soaps. She would have two TVs on: One, a big, old RCA console with family photos sitting on top, would be slightly turned toward the dining room and tuned to Another World on Channel 4. The other, the hottest new Zenith, was turned toward the living room and tuned to Guiding Light on Channel 2. My grandmother sat in the middle and actually watched and followed both shows simultaneously, her head moving back and forth as if she were watching a tennis match from center court.

  I would have preferred cartoons, but that wasn’t an option since Granny didn’t have a third TV. We make our choices in life. I went to the Guiding Light side because it seemed to have better stories. I learned to tune out Another World. Granny wouldn’t surrender the TV until 4:30, at which point I would flip over to reruns of Batman. But I usually stayed with that only if Batgirl came zooming across the opening montage on her motorcycle. That meant that the episode would feature Commissioner Gordon’s librarian daughter, who would turn into the red-hot Batgirl, who was played by Yvonne Craig, who I had a serious TV crush on—no matter which character she was playing. And if you got both Batgirl and Catwoman . . . well, life was good. But it turned out that like most crushes, the love didn’t last. It was Guiding Light that I got stuck on. And eventually, my grandmother gave up on Another World. We would sit there on the couch, Granny and I, watching the impossibly complicated goings-on in Springfield.

  My mom, the family breadwinner, would take the train home and walk through the door precisely at 6:30 each evening, looking more like the dads than the moms I saw on TV. She’d be tired after a long day at the office, and not in too good a mood. You didn’t talk to her. You waited for her to talk to you first. Everyone was better off that way. But that was just her—you had to accept that it wasn’t always sunshine and rose petals around my mother. But she was as fiercely devoted a mother as anyone could have, all the more so because it had become clear that I would have a minimal relationship with my father.

  Here’s a little thing that tells you a lot: I was a pudgy kid, the one who always got picked last in choose-up games. My mother would take me shopping at Macy’s & JC Penney’s department stores, and I noticed that before she sent me into the dressing room to try on pants or jackets, she would surreptitiously rip a tag from each one. I found out later that these were the tags that said “Husky.” She didn’t want me to see them.

  For a long time, I thought my mother was also a nut. It was the psychic thing. She was always going to psychics and psychic fairs, having psychic house parties. My father wanted no part of it, and wanted no part of it for me, either. You just make sure Johnny’s not home when you bring these people over here, he’d tell her. That was just fine with me.

  She wasn’t into mediums. I only remember hearing the word séance once as a child. My mother’s brother, Joey, had invited a medium by the name of Reverend Craig to my grandmother’s house for one. I was thrown out of the room for being a child. This five-foot small-framed white-haired medium put her finger in my face and told me to leave, that I would have enough time for this later in my life. An interesting statement given my career choice. But, beyond that, I never heard the word until I was a teenager. My mother wanted to know about the here-and-now, and if you don’t mind, a little bit about next week. And, if possible, anything important in the next twenty years or so. As I got older, I would tease her about being a psychic junkie, but besides finding her obsession inane, I found it irritating as hell. Mom, I’d say, these are con artists. They’re taking your money, and for what? To tell you about your life? You’re living your life. Predict your future? Okay, Mom. Sure. Whatever you say. That I had always been able to know things I couldn’t know did not enter into it. Seeing auras around people and having dreams that seemed to take me outside my own body was just stuff that was a normal part of life, as far as I knew. It had nothing to do with all these “psychics” my mother hung around with.

  When I was fifteen, my mother’s latest psychic came to our house and read various members of the family in my bedroom. Her name was Lydia Clar. From the living room, I’d hear my aunts and cousins go into my room and shut the door, and then the door would open a little while later and the next one would go in. One after another, all night long. When my cousin Roseann came out, she came over to me and said, “John, she’s good. You should get a reading.” No thanks, Ro. But she badgered me until I said okay, okay. Looking back at it now, there was no way my guides would have let Lydia leave our house that night without reading me. She was their messenger.

  I wasn’t in the room two minutes when Lydia told me that I was the reason she was here. “You have highly evolved spiritual guides, and they
are ready to work with you,” she said. “I was sent here to introduce you to this world, to open you to your future.” You can imagine how that went over. Psychic schtick, right? Oh, brother. She must tell that to all the psychic-reading virgins. What are you, the Mrs. Robinson of the psychic set? (Okay, so The Graduate came out two years before I was born. I’ve still heard of it.) But when Lydia sat in my bedroom and told me I was destined to become famous as a psychic, I thought she was laying it on just a bit too heavy. I didn’t even think she could do this, and I’m supposed to believe her when she says I can?

  I figured I’d play along. Lydia told me some things about my family that were true, but I dismissed them as either lucky guesses or just a trick. She could have known all of it from talking to my mother. That was my mind-set, always picking apart the things these psychics were telling my mother at all those psychic fairs she’d go to on the weekends. But then Lydia talked about some things in my life that she couldn’t have known. And about events that would happen in the future. Within a few weeks, everything she said would happen did happen—nothing momentous, teenage stuff mostly.

  I had to admit I was curious. What’s this all really about? I started reading about spiritualism and psychic phenomena. This is weird, I thought. The books describe all those things I thought were normal, things I’ve been doing ever since I could remember. When I asked my mother about the possibility of my “being psychic,” she told me, “Well, you know I’ve always told you that you were special.”

  “You had to say that; you’re my mother.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t mean it as your mother. I was talking about your . . . abilities.”

  It must have taken some self-control for her not to say anything more than that all these years, especially when I was telling her, at age seven, that we had to get home quick because Cousin Phyllis was coming over. That’s Cousin Phyllis from Florida, making an unannounced visit. My mother never made a big thing out of this stuff. She just wanted me to be a kid. My abilities would develop, she figured, or they wouldn’t.