Otherworld Marketplace

Detailed coverage of a Psychic Fair, held in the high school auditorium. Skeptical but fair minded. Many quotes from both the psychics and the attendees.

Here's a feature article from my Brooklyn reporting year I was very proud of. I might have sent a copy home to the family. I could have made a brief, straight-news account or even just a photo of a local weekend event, telling how many people attended, noting what the weather was like, and reporting for posterity that everyone seemed to have fun. I turned it into a study on the broad subject of paranormal performers. Gave it a new journalism flavor by giving lots of personal impressions. Employed my fictional powers of scene-setting and character description. I like the results.

I’ll tell a little more detail on my own reading. My memory has always been that I included this in the story, but I see I didn’t.

When the lady read my tea leaves, it wasn’t with an air of  Babylonian magic, or any flourishes and adornments of the occult science—no star-spangled robe, no candle flicking at the faint touch of unseen presences, no silence pregnant with supernatural revelations. It was just a plain, overweight lady sticking her finger in a styrofoam cup, stirring some mucky leaves stuck together at the bottom.

It took place at a folding table, in a row of folding tables, in a noisy school auditorium. The lady looked no more psychic than a chair. But the message she found in that cup did shake me a little.

She said she saw a woman and the letter “A.” She said this female was holding me back in significant ways. She said I needed to give her up.

And I knew, gulping, who she was talking about. She was talking about Amy—or, in another spelling, Ami. The first Amy was a young woman I’d fallen a little in love with just before coming to New York, about three months before. I had almost stayed in Missouri for this girl—on the very slight chance that she would fall in love back, despite being a decade younger than me, and having a boyfriend, and having turned me down when I asked for a date.

I was in a great city now, a thousand miles from where that girl was, beginning a metropolitan life I had aspired to since high school, and planned to sustain into old age—and I was still moping and dreaming about tgat unattainable girl in the Midwest. I did need to let her go.

The second female  holding me back was my computer, a Commodore Amiga, known to its devotees as Ami and commonly thought of in the female gender — Amy and Ami, get it? I knew before this seer brought it up that I was too attached to Ami. Here I had finally achieved a situation in life where I could do a lot of fiction writing (I had found myself a part-time job) and life-observing (I was in New York, that infinity of human detail), and how was I using  my free time? Piddling at the computer.

I could pass whole weekends in front of it, trying out software, waiting for some little interesting entertainment to trickle in through my modem.

I knew I was obsessed, that I was wasting time by the day-full. But how could that nondescript lady with the styrofoam cup have knownit? What were the odds that she would make a guess and land on the same two things I would have said were holding me back?

I remember telling this story to one or more of my siblings by phone. It felt like a miracle, and I had to share it. It still seems miraculous. I’m a skeptic, but I still tell this story.

Feb. 5, 1987—It was like a treasure hunt, or a maze with instructions: photocopy fliers taped along the walls pointed the way, through the echoing, empty halls of South Shore High School, to the “Psychic Fair.”

The trail led to a folding table, where a young lady charged $2 for the privilege of traveling further. A few steps more took one through a set of ordinary cafeteria doors, and the search was over, the maze conquered. On the other. hand, you could say it was there that the maze began to get complicated.

The school’s east cafeteria thrummed with talk and shuffling. It wasn’t the clangor of students eating lunch—this was Sunday afternoon—but the more subdued buzz of negotiating and cheerful babble one hears in a flea market.

It was, in fact, a sort of bazaar. The 15 or so “Top Psychics” were arranged around the room at separate tables or booths, dispensing an exotic miscellany of secrets: secrets about the future, the past, the hidden motives of the psyche; mysterious methods of healing; and, for the do-it-yourselfers, crystals, polished stones and jewelry to help them tap, all by themselves, the realm of secret knowledge and power.

The customers browsed among the booths and stood in line to purchase a word or two of revelation, or a bit of physical healing. At most of the tables they were charged $13.50 per “reading.” Simpler service such as palm readings, color readings and handwriting analysis cost $2.

At any moment, at various places in the room, practitioners would be gazing at people’s palms. their penmanship, their scalp, the soles of their feet. Or they would be studying glass balls, a soup of tea leaves, a fan of oversize cards, a row of colored squares. From some of the customers there were blushes and self-conscious giggles, but most submitted to the unorthodox examinations with a straight face. A few wore the anxious, hopeful look of a patient awaiting a doctor’s diagnosis.

“I believe in all this is stuff,” said Diane Caputo, an area resident who had brought her husband to the fail. “He thinks I’m crazy,” she said, glancing at her husband with a laugh.

“It’s not that I like to consider myself closed minded,” explained John Caputo. “I’m open-minded enough to come here with her and see if anything changes my mind. But so far, no.”

The couple took part in a lecture session on “Polarity Healing,” led by a Brooklyn practitioner named Richard Eisenberg. From a distance, the group appeared to be doing calisthenics in slow motion, sometimes with their eyes closed.

“I really only took part in it because of my wife,” said Caputo. “I didn’t feel any effects one way or the other. When I felt that it got a little silly, I refrained from going on.”

Diane Caputo said she would have stayed for a reading “if I was by myself, but him being so negative holds me back.” She said she has had palm reading and iris readings in the past.

‘It’s changed my way of thinking about life and death,’ she said of her psychic experiences. She was raised Catholic, but “Now I believe in reincarnation, and everything’s not so final.”

Sophia, a computer programmer, spoke pragmatically about her reason for attending the fair. She said she has the ability to see future events, but wants to know “if there’s a point in developing it, if it’s really practical. Part of me’s very skeptical still.”

Sophia said she “was expecting to find something on a deeper level. I thought that through personal contact I’d get more than out of a book.”

She added that her fellow programmers are curious about psychic phenomena, too. She agreed there is some irony in that and speculated that her logic-minded colleagues “need a balance. When you’re very deeply technical, you know something is missing there.”

Rosemary Abruzzo, a Canarsie woman, said she believe in psychic forces and finds them “a lot of fun.” She had herself “read” Saturday on the basis of her color preference. She found that the reading was “very accurate” about her temperament and desires.

A tarot reading “told me some things about my children that were enlightening. She (the psychic) brought some things to light. You could see that it was true.”

Toni Faula of Marine Park said she is “interested in it (psychic phenomena, but I don’t take it seriously. I take it as a joke and see how accurate they are if it happens.”

She said one of the psychics had guessed accurately that she would soon be taking a trip abroad. “Usually they just say you’re going on a trip,” Toni said. Her reading that day “wasn’t just generalization. I’ve been to those people, too.”

The event was organized and run by a Brooklyn woman whose name tag announced cheerily, “Hello. My name is TV Psychic Janet Brennan.”

Brennan had a photo display that showed her being interviewed on the David Letterman show and The Morning Show. Between questions from her customers and workers, Brennan talked about the fair and her feeling about psychic phenomena.

She said it was the second time she had held a Psychic Fair at South Shore High School. Three more are planned for 1987: in March, June and October. She also has fairs planned for Bay Ridge and Sheepshead Bay.

“We tell people it’s for entertainment only,” she said. “They’re not supposed to take anything seriously.” She said she is trying to pioneer a larger following of psychic-believers in Brooklyn, even though others in her field see little potential for such a movement here.

So far she has found a strong interest in Brooklyn, but she was a bit disappointed with the turnout at Saturday’s fair. By the end of the day she had logged about 180 customers, 20 fewer than her goal for a successful fair. Most of the proceeds go to her and the 15-or-so practitioners, but a portion will go to the South Shore adult education program, which provided the cafeteria space, Brennan said.

Brennan started holding psychic fairs because “I wanted a place where people could get honest readings, and to give the real psychics a job.” She said she had screened more than 150 psychics “just to get 20 good ones, ones I feel are really sincere in their work.”

She admitted she doesn’t fully understand the forces she uses and promotes, but she spoke enthusiastically—you might even say affectionately—about the value of psychic readings.

There was the time she brought peace of mind to a mother who thought her daughter had been kidnapped. Brennan “saw” a green building in the Bronx, which was the clue the worried mother needed to locate her daughter. The girl had simply paid an unplanned visit to a relative.

“Do you see how it’s really valuable?” asked Brennan.

Yet many readings are not that specific, she said. She speculated on the reasons for that.

“It’s a love exchange, she said. “If they resist, you can’t get anything. They block you.”

Other times, a reading may be vague because “it’s not for the person to know. In a way, it’s negative energy to know the future, because you’re supposed to rely on yourself, be responsible for your own future.

“What if the psychic has a bad day?” she asked rhetorically. “They (the customers) are supposed to stay responsible for themselves.”

But even a vague kind of reading can be “valuable,” she said. “It helps a person confirm what they’re already thinking—it gives them hope when they don’t already have it. Most of the people are more shocked when I have something good to say.

“I always ask myself, ‘What’s the value of it? Why am I doing it?’ But how can you resist it?

“I just think it’s fun.”

How does psychic knowledge come? “All it is is flashes,” said Brenna, who has been practicing professionally for about 10 years. “You just have to trust. your hunches. You never know if you’re right. That’s why you’re a nervous wreck all the time.”

Should people base decisions on their readings? “I never give advice,” said Brennan. “We just try to give a clear perception of the way things are going.”

One way that psychic perceptions are “abused a lot” is in telling a client bad news, said Brennan. Sometimes, believing in a hidden illness or an impending tragedy can cause those things to come about, she said.

What a psychic sees are only possibilities, options, according to Brennan. “Nobody’s death date is set. They have the chance to change it.”

In spite of that, Brennan said she encourages her psychics. not to give “good-time readings, where we tell people whatever they want to hear.”

She noted that most of the customers at Saturday’s fair had been “very loving people. I don’t get people that are desperate. I get people that are more intelligent and open.”

That did seem an accurate description of most of those present. There was an air of fun, of experimentation, with only a trace here and there of something more earnest: hands—those of psychic and patient—locked in a firm clasp. Some of the practitioners had the serious demeanor one would expect of a seer. One, a crystal-ball gazer, was decked in gypsy-style turban and robe. Others, swapping jokes and snacking on junk food, would have seemed right at home in an ordinary flea market, selling baubles instead of visions.

Was it for real? Were ordinary people, for the price of a hamburger or T-shirt, receiving knowledge that run-of-the-mill wisdom and science can’t access?

Brennan’s husband, Joe, considers the question somewhat irrelevant. He was giving personality appraisals on the basis of color preference and the haze-like “aura” he claims to see on people’s heads. Joe admitted that his insight comes largely from reading, reflection and constant observation of human nature.

“To me it’s an intelligence,” he said “‘Psychic’ is just a label they made up. You’re using your mind. Everybody can do it. You just develop it.”

He said his TV Psychic wife is the most gifted psychic he has met. But even Janet, described by her handbill as a “clairvoyant since birth,” is unable to explain what makes psychic vision work.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I know it comes from something good, but I don’t know.”

Captions

The psychic Inez gives a reading a Saturday’s Psychic Fair.

Visitors try out meditation in a lecture at last weekend’s Psychic Fair, held at South Shore High School.

Sandra J. Loeff treats a Psychic Fair customer with Reflexology, a non-psychic method that uses gentle pressure on the feet to “relax and rejuvenate” the body.

The psychic Masha gives a crystal-ball reading. At right, TV Psychic Janet Brennan, organizer of the Psychic Fair. Richard Eisenberg demonstrates Polarity Healing.