Crossing Over Read online

  You know how, when you’re young, you open your mind to something, and then all of a sudden you’re really into it? Well, it was that, squared. When I get involved in something, I get involved. It was as if I was being introduced to a new person—and it was me. I was driven by a need to know who I really was. I started spending a lot of time at the library. I began studying tarot and other metaphysical philosophies with a woman named Sandi Anastasi, who ran a little “psychic institute” on the South Shore of Long Island. She agreed with Lydia. She invited me to a class, and halfway through said it was a waste of time for me to be there—my abilities were already too advanced for this class. She convinced me to try working at psychic fairs. “What is it that you do?” the woman who ran the fair asked me when I showed up the first time. “I don’t really know,” I said. “I don’t know what I do.” She had me do a reading, and I was terrible. But she was another one who thought I had “ability.” I was hearing that word a lot. I was trying to get a grasp of what that meant.

  I started doing psychic fairs on weekends. I wanted to be around psychics, to speak to them, learn how they worked. The most impressive one I met was a woman named Shelley Peck. She was an amazing psychic, but was also known for her astrology and mediumship, which I didn’t know anything about yet. She had a background in psychology, and also taught metaphysics and was a certified hypnotherapist who did past-life regressions. That was a lot to digest, but Shelley became one of my closest friends. She was closer in age to my mother, but it didn’t matter. We would talk about our work for hours at a time.

  At the psychic fairs, I was a novelty. I could hear people talking about me, looking at me. It had nothing to do with my “ability.” Sitting at a table among a roomful of middle-aged, tarot-reading, suburban mystics, I looked like I’d gotten lost on my way to the SATs. I was a kid telling people decades older than I was what I thought was happening in their lives.

  Pretty quickly I got my first call for a “house party,” a group reading at someone’s home. I went on the appointed day and rang the doorbell. Through the storm door, I could see a woman on the phone in the kitchen. She looked out, saw me, and yelled, “I just paid you!”

  I just looked at her. “Um, I’m not who you think I am,” I called to her through the door. She thought I was the paper boy.

  She looked again, and suddenly seemed very worried. “You’re not John, are you?” she asked. I nodded yes. “What? Why didn’t you tell me you were just a kid? Oh, God. I have a house full of people coming.” She opened the door. “Okay, come in quick. You’ll have to read me first. And hurry. Because if you can’t do it, you have to get out of here before anyone comes. I might have to call everybody and cancel. Why didn’t you tell me how old you are?”

  I wound up spending six hours in this woman’s house. She asked me to come back. I declined.

  NOT LONG AFTER I STARTED doing psychic readings, something very weird started happening. One day I was doing a card reading for my Aunt Anna, mostly for fun because she didn’t take it very seriously. As I was doing the reading, a woman appeared behind her. She was sixtyish, wearing a black dress. She had only one leg, but there was a serene smile on her face. When I described her, my aunt said it sounded like her late mother-in-law. Then a man appeared, slender, with salt-and-pepper hair. I didn’t know who he was, and neither did my aunt. To me, it was if these people were actually there, standing right in front of me. The images were fast and fleeting. I registered the smallest details—a flower brooch the woman was wearing, a pocket watch the man was holding. He was nattily dressed, albeit a bit out of fashion. When I asked him who he was, he took a barber’s comb out of the pocket of his beige-and-blue pinstriped suit.

  Oh, my God. I see dead people. Sorry—I’ve been waiting to say that.

  And then, at the psychic fairs, I started feeling a different kind of energy. It struck me that I was doing something other than what I thought I was doing. Not that I had any idea what I was doing. Shelley and others had news for me: I was connecting with the spirit world.

  Oh, really. This was not that interesting to me. I was a kid. I didn’t want to talk to dead people. I wanted to predict people’s futures, like Lydia. That was fun. And I was good at it. I was even getting a reputation for it, and people were coming to the fairs specifically to get a psychic reading from me. The kid. But over time, the people I met in the little subculture of the New York psychic circuit encouraged me to develop my skills as a medium, to take them in whatever direction was intended.

  And then, a turning point. Shelley Peck wanted to try putting me through a “past-life regression.” Here’s what was supposed to happen: Through a series of meditations, I would be taken on a trip to a different plane of consciousness, where I could retrieve facts and essences of one or more of my soul’s previous lives and convey them unconsciously to her. Sort of a cross between hypnosis, meditation, and time travel. Literal soul searching.

  But the regression went in an unplanned direction. Let’s just say that on the way to my past lives, we stopped off for a meet-and-greet with my spirit guides—The Boys, as they were destined to become known. In retrospect, I think they chose Shelley to make the introduction that day because we had such a great connection. She thought of me as her protégé, this young kid always hypothesizing about the potential of “our work.” I saw her more as an earthly guide of sorts.

  LOOKING BACK, I HAD ALWAYS FELT the presence of my guides. I remember telling my mother when I was a young boy that I felt as though I was living the opening of the Scooby Doo cartoon. It showed Scooby Doo outside in the dark of night, and then all these eyes opening and looking down on him. When I felt this presence, I didn’t know it was my “guides,” of course. I didn’t know who they were or why they were there. I didn’t feel any particular guidance. I just felt that someone was looking in on what I was doing. Five or six of them, in fact. Now we had finally been introduced.

  My mother was thrilled that I had come into the fold. I was now one of them. She became a psychic stage mother, bragging to her friends and relatives about her son, the psychic. More than a few relatives thought she was ridiculous—no less ridiculous than her son. She assured them that I would be famous someday.

  Late in 1987, my Uncle Carmine died of a heart attack. It happened just two months after I’d had a vision, during a meditation, of him clutching his left arm and collapsing. I told my cousin Ro, Carmine’s daughter, and she said her father was scheduled for a physical that very week. She called me the next day and said her father had been given a clean bill of health. His death shook me: Somehow I felt responsible. I had this “ability.” I should have done something. Blame it on the doctor? I had to do better than that.

  At his wake, I learned from relatives that the man I had seen when I was trying to read cards for my Aunt Anna was Carmine’s father. He was a barber. It was totally confusing to me then, but now I realize that not only was the vision of Carmine’s heart attack a heads-up, but so was the appearance of his father. He was waiting to greet his son on the other side. That was a major turning point for me. Spirit messages began coming through so much more strongly. It was as if Carmine had gone into a house, leaving me outside in the dark, and then flicked a switch to an outside light. But it was more like a sixty-watt lamp than a halogen floodlight. I had a long way to go before I could call myself a psychic medium, even if I wanted to.

  UNTIL I WAS NINETEEN, I regarded my psychic work and mediumship as a kind of hobby. I was just okay at it. I had a hard time keeping up with the images and sounds. They came and went so fast. And my interpretations of the symbols were often off the mark. I wasn’t that motivated to work on it and develop my abilities. But then everything changed.

  In April of 1989, my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. It is the mother of all understatements to say it knocked me off balance. I kept my sorrow, my panic, tightly under wraps. I wanted to stay strong for her.

  One day a few months after my mother was diagnosed, when it wa
s evident that she would not survive the year, we began to talk about her transition to the other side. The sense I had gotten from my early experience doing readings as a medium was that the other side was all about peace. None of the things that troubled you on earth mattered anymore, and it made you feel—maybe not superior, but promoted to a way more advanced level, maybe even the difference between kindergarten and graduate school. Evolved, to use a cliché. It was a like a variation of one of those self-help mantras from the ’70s: “I’m Okay; You’re Worried about the Will.” But of course, nobody on this side could know for sure if this was true, or if everyone had such a blissful existence once they were liberated from their earthly shackles. We couldn’t know what the trip was like until we took it ourselves, and we couldn’t know what life was like in that form until our time came to live it. We could only surmise and hope, and devise from that a belief system we could live with. After all, maybe we only heard from the happy ones—a scary implication for everyone else.

  I made my mother promise she would come through to tell me she was safe.

  “Johnny,” she said reassuringly, “when I get to the other side I’ll talk to you all the time.”

  I told her it wasn’t that simple. I knew too much, and I would be hurting. How could I distinguish between an actual spirit message, and a thought conceived from my own emotional need? I was a medium; I needed to be objective to do my work. This would be like a surgeon operating on himself. My mother could come to me in an “astral visit” while I slept. Those were unconscious, and I would be able to distinguish between a visit, which is incredibly vivid, and an ordinary dream. That would be fine. But it would be like watching something on tape. I wanted conscious, live, real-time messages confirming that she was okay. There was only one requirement: They had to come through other people. She would have to use other mediums, so I could be sure I wasn’t tricking myself. We decided on three signs that she would use to validate that it was her.

  First, an easy one. Princess. She could show Diana, she could show a crown. She could even show a pink telephone. Or she could just say her name.

  The next sign would be something that was special between us. Ever since I was a little boy, I’d had a thing for Winnie the Pooh. I mean, a real obsession. I started out in kindergarten with a singular Pooh who came with me to school. I kept him in my knapsack. Nobody knew he was in there but me. Right. At lunch, I would take him out so he could breathe. Soon I tired of just the one Pooh, and demanded more and more Poohs. And Pooh wasn’t even that popular then. I’m sure my memories are exaggerated, but it seemed like my mother almost never came home without a Pooh bear for me, and sometimes a Tigger, too. No matter how many I had, I had to have more. I had Pooh sheets, Pooh music, Pooh posters. My mother started calling me Winnie. I dragged her to see Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too seventeen times. Then I wanted to leave. But she made me sit through some Sinbad movie seventeen times. I’m sure there was a lesson in there somewhere. She couldn’t have liked Patrick Wayne that much.

  I wasn’t a fan of the classic Pooh, whom I felt lacked personality. It wasn’t until the outfits like Sears and Disney got the Pooh rights that Pooh’s charm was done much justice by the merchandising industry. That’s just my opinion. They have whole teams of people in lab coats working on the “cuteification” of storybook characters. Even when I was a little too old for this, I saw a Pooh that was so adorable, I had to have it. My mother laughed. “You big idiot,” she said. “How many of these things do you have?” I know, but he’s so cute. She bought it for me.

  The second sign had to be Pooh bear.

  And then, the last sign. I wanted my mother to make an allusion to something that had become a ritual for me: Guiding Light, three o’clock, Channel 2. I had been watching it religiously for more than ten years, and now, in these grim days watching my mother slip away day by day, the soap became an essential diversion for me. My mom wanted to die at home, so I arranged for hospice care. I would spend hours with her, taking only one break when the hospice caretaker was there. Each afternoon at three, I would excuse myself and go to the living room to watch Guiding Light with Granny. “I’m going to Springfield,” I’d say. Not to be flip—I’m sure my mother would appreciate the humor in this—but things weren’t much better there.

  The trouble in Springfield—even more trouble than usual—had started a few years before, when I was in high school. My mother called me at the deli where I was working and said gravely, “John, I have a little bad news for you. I just want you to be prepared for this when you come home.”

  My heart sank to my intestines. “Is it Grandma? Is she okay?”

  “No, she’s fine. But I watched Guiding Light today.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Reva jumped off a bridge.”

  “She jumped off a bridge!?” Everyone in the deli turned around. “Who? Who jumped off a bridge?” they all started asking. “What happened? Is she okay?”

  Reva Shayne was my favorite character on the show. She was an amorous live wire played lusciously by an actress named Kim Zimmer. Three years later, Kim wasn’t renewing her contract, so the writers pushed Reva off a bridge (again) in the Florida Keys, leaving her husband devastated. So now as my mother was in her last days, my only distraction was to mourn over a TV character I had loved since I was in junior high school. I tried to imagine what Reva’s children were going through, how they were dealing with the same thing I would be facing in a few months . . . or weeks, or days.

  Reva’s body was never found, but years later she was back in Springfield. When I saw her for the first time, I thought: Wouldn’t it be great if in just this one way, life imitated—well, if not art, maybe daytime TV? We have the potential of spirit communication, but that is never enough. No matter how much I believe in reaching across dimensions, it can’t ever be the same as when they were here.

  “Guiding Light,” I told Mom at her bedside. “That’s the third sign.” But I realized that might be a hard one for her to get across, unless I happened to be with a medium who was a fan. So I gave her an easier way. “Take me to Springfield,” I said. “I don’t care if it’s Springfield, Illinois, or Springfield Boulevard. You can show a spring and a field. I don’t care how you do it, but just get me to Springfield. Get me to Guiding Light in some way.”

  “Johnny, I’ll do my best,” she said.

  That night, I made a vow that I would not reveal the three signs to anyone. I wanted to be sure, beyond any doubt, that when they came, they came directly from her.

  ONE DAY A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, with her room crowded with relatives, my mother looked at me and started telling me how sad she was that she wouldn’t live to see my twenty-first birthday. The others began to get teary and started clearing out to leave us alone. My mother and I didn’t cry. We wanted to be strong for each other. This was the moment some people never get to have, a One Last Time on this side. She gave me a gold ring and a matching diamond bracelet for the birthday she wouldn’t be around to celebrate with me. She wanted to leave me with this moment of love, and I wanted to give her the same thing to take with her on her impending journey. We were both absorbing the power of this bond that we knew would not end just because she was leaving me physically.

  My mother departed at four in the morning surrounded by her family. A few seconds after she took her last breath, I walked out of her bedroom and into mine and began to talk to her, trying to help her make the transition to the other side. I told her she would be okay, that soon she would be greeted by her father and by Uncle Carmine. And then I asked her to give me a quick sign that she had arrived, that it was as blissful and blessedly unworldly as I thought. I wasn’t asking for one of the signs we had talked about that needed to come through another medium. Something tangible that I would see. I asked her to show me a white bird. It had to be personal, not just a random white bird flying in the sky. It had to be obvious that it was meant for me. I had to know that there really was an other side, and that she had arrived the
re safely. A sickening wave of uncertainty was washing over me; suddenly I had the same fear of the unknown that everyone else feels. I told my mom to go toward the light. And let me know she’s safe.

  On the afternoon of the last day of the wake, my cousin Anthony came over to comfort me. “So many flowers,” he said. “Yours stand out the most. Those white birds are beautiful.” I went over and saw that there were two plastic, feathered white birds nested in a colorful arrangement. I’d overlooked them for three days.

  “Why did you say they were my flowers?” I asked my cousin.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Roseanne and Joey picked them out for you.”

  I asked my cousins if they’d requested the birds. They said they hadn’t. I called the florist and asked the owner why there had been birds in my flowers. “Oh, I’m sorry, those are for confirmations,” he said. “We were really busy yesterday. One of my girls must have put them in there by mistake. I’m very sorry.” No apology necessary, I said. They were beautiful.

  On that last day of the wake, I found my favorite Pooh bear, the one I had gotten when I was too old, and brought it to the funeral home. After everybody left and I was alone with my mother for the last time, I tucked the bear in next to her in the casket. The next day, she was buried with it.

  My mother’s death was, of course, a profoundly sad time in my life, one that stays with me all these years later. But it changed my life in a positive way, too. My sense of loss, my need to somehow stay connected to my mother although we were separated by this mysterious dimension between the physical world and the spiritual one, was so powerful that it was nothing short of a revelation: Oh my God. So that’s how these people feel. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives—they all went to mediums to lessen their pain, to keep the kind of bonds that I needed so desperately now. If I can do this for them, I realized, then I have to.