My Point...And I Do Have One

called Gus’s Psychic School.
    My student psychic was named Chuck. He was an ex-soldier who was going to psychic school on the GI Bill. The first thing he said to me was “You are at a crossroads and confused. There are questions you want answered.” “Well, yeah,” I said, “that’s why I’m here. Why else would I go to a psychic?” I should have gotten suspicious when he said, “How am I supposed to know? What am I, Kreskin?”
    Chuck said “Oooooooo” and raised his hands in the air every time he made a prediction. I guess he thought it looked like he was communicating with powerful entities in the spirit world, but to me it looked like he was auditioning for a minstrel show. I knew he was bad because he wouldn’t say anything without first consulting his Time/Life book on unexplained phenomena.
    His predictions were kind of vague, to say the least. “I see you pouring some kind of liquid into your mouth out of a cylindrical object. This object, it’s made of … glass. After you pour the liquid into your mouth, you will no longer be thirsty.”
    “There is someone important in your life whose nameStarts with either the letter E … C …B … F … or M through W.”
    “You have a brother or a sister. Either that or you are an only child.” I told him I had a brother; he seemed proud of himself, then went back to psychicing.
    “Your brother knows how to drive.” As a matter of fact he does. He drives an ambulance. He’s not a paramedic or anything, he just got a good deal on it. It doesn’t get very good mileage, but the upside is he’s never late to meetings.
    “On Letterman tonight, Dave’s guests will be Angela Lansbury and Sting.” I had to tell him that wasn’t a prediction, it was a blurb from
TV Guide
. He tried to cover by saying he has never read
TV Guide
, even though there was one on his desk with the crossword puzzle half done. Then he said that so much came to him, he couldn’t remember if it was a prediction or if he read it somewhere.
    I asked him about my past lives, hoping that I had been Cleopatra or, at the very least, someone who once had lunch with Cleopatra. He told me that once I had been a monkey, but that in my last life I was a spring roll at a Chinese restaurant. Now that’s ridiculous, even though it does explain a recurring nightmare where I’m held upside down over a dish of hot mustard sauce.
    At a beautician school, there is a teacher present at all times to advise the student and make sure things don’t get too out of hand. At the psychic academy, the psychic teacher wasn’t there. He would just call in by phone now and then from his condo in Hawaii to tell his students he knew they were doing a good job. Or he would call and say things like “Tell that woman there’s something caught in her teeth.”
    The student psychic finally admitted that he wasn’t very good. He was, however, able to predict where I would find a good psychic. The session wasn’t a totalwaste because he gave me a dollar-off coupon for the frozen-yogurt place next door.
    Y ou could tell the woman he referred me to was good because she opened the door before I rang the bell. Then she said, “You must be Ellen.” Well, that was the capper. Because Ellen is my name and all. Sure I had an appointment, and she could have been looking through the keyhole, but I prefer to think she had finely honed psychic powers.
    It seems most psychics have names like Esmerelda or Cassandra—spooky kinds of names. Mine was named Shari Lewis. Not the woman with Lambchop the puppet, just somebody with the same name. I wouldn’t trust a psychic who used a puppet. I don’t think it’s because I’m prejudiced or anything. It’s just that it would disturb me to have a little puppet voice say, “You will be successful as long as you never get up on stilts. Avoid
Circus of the Stars
—don’t even watch it.”
    The psychic knew that I was nervous about writing a book. This might be because the first thing I said to her was “I’m nervous about writing a book.” She looked me in the eye (or possibly both eyes, I don’t remember) and without raising her arms or saying, “Ooooooooo,” she made her predictions. The good news, she said, was that my book is going to be on best-seller lists for over twenty-five years and win a ton of awards (literally a ton; they’ll actually weigh them at one point). The bad news, though, was that I was going to have to sit down and actually write the