domain. This was achieved after taking advice from Lydia, the downtown psychic. She was this crazy ex-hippie who read tarot cards and palms or told you about your previous lives. I met her first at the psychic fair on Downey Street. She charged me ten dollars to tell me about my past life as a soldier in Napoleon’s army. She said she too had been a soldier in Napoleon’s army and I had saved her life in the battle at Waterloo. She insisted we become friends, although “allies” was the word I think she used. Lydia also looked at my hands very closely and announced to anyone within earshot at the psychic fair, “These are the hands of a healer.” She held up my hands for everyone to take note. Once that was established, she didn’t charge me anymore for advice or psychic services. Teaching me to create an anti-negativity force field she said was “on the house.”
Inside, seated at the kitchen table, it seemed that there were voices talking to me, all saying the same thing. The refrigerator telling me Andrea could not possibly exist, the microwave telling me to get a grip on my life. The goddamn toaster suggesting a reality check. I turned on the radio to distract the voices and that didn’t help. So I went upstairs and turned on my computer, let the dog outside where it peed on the lawn and barked at the sound of imaginary cars programmed into the software.
CHAPTER SIX
I would not tell my parents about Andrea, but I needed to tell someone. So I told Lydia.
Her apartment was tiny, a cramped living space above a used record store down on Argyle Street. She had no doorbell, no buzzer. An old used envelope tacked to the door said simply, “Go upstairs and walk in. You are expected.” Her idea of a psychic’s joke.
Old tabloid newspapers were piled on the steps up to her place, some with headlines like, “Elvis found Alive and Well Living Among Baboons.” Or “Hitler’s Son a Proctologist in Miami.”
I knocked on the door and walked in. The smell in the air was a combination of garlic and marijuana. Lydia called the marijuana an “herb,” and she seemed quite open about the fact that she was a toker. Never once did she offer me any or even ask if I had ever smoked. I was now a non-toker and a non-drinker. I didn’t want to mess with whatever natural chemical process was going on in my brain. That’s why I snubbed even the store-bought pharmaceuticals my parents were squandering their money on.
“Hey there,” Lydia said as a smoke alarm went off in the tiny kitchen where she was burning something in a frying pan. I walked in and tried to reach for the alarm, but I wasn’t tall enough. The shrill sound hurt my ears. Lydia cursed loudly at it and failed to make it stop so she swatted it with a broom, knocking it onto the floor where it split open and spilled its battery, then fell silent.
“Simon, I knew you’d be over today. It’s about a girl, isn’t it?”
I smiled and sat down on a piece of plastic lawn furniture that served as a kitchen chair.
“Good guess,” I said.
“I never guess,” she said. “I know.”
Everyone around town thought Lydia was a phony. Few believed in her psychic powers. I’m not sure I did either. But Lydia was my friend. After Ozzie left town, she became the only person I could talk to about everything and anything. She was opinionated but kind. And I needed that.
“A skeleton goes into a bar and asks for a drink,” she says. “And the bartender tells him ...”
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