Return to the Psychic on the Corner!
by Billy Ingram
“I used to be psychic but I drank my way out of it.” — Mark E. Smith
For nearly a quarter-century, there’s been a psychic living on or next door to the corner of Cornwallis and Lawndale Drive, a modest sign in the window advertising her supernatural services. Her name is Dorine (sometimes Doreen) and it’s been exactly 4 years since I impulsively dropped in for a crystal reading then wrote about that experience in Wandering Billy. I decided a return visit was in order.
I consider myself a skeptic with a very definite willingness to believe that it’s possible for someone to possess psychic powers. An interest that was sparked when Mrs. Jean Davis Newman, an English teacher at Page High School in the 1970s (she’d previously taught at Grimsley, later at Smith), decided to forgo her planned Shakespeare lesson, instead regaling us with stories about transcribing clairvoyant sessions conducted by Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), known as ‘The Sleeping Prophet.’ In subsequent research, I could find no record of her involvement but it may be telling that Cayce’s life-long transcriber and unmarried collaborator’s last name was Davis, Mrs. Newman’s maiden name.
My own personal interactions with psychics is limited but not totally lacking. In Los Angeles in the early-1980s, I worked on a 2 week long TV pilot for a daily Entertainment Tonight style program centered around unexplained phenomenon. One of my assignments was to ferry ‘psychic’ Sylvia Browne to and from the studio, that flatulent phony Montel Williams foisted on his audience of shut-ins in the 1990s, afternoon television’s Aunt Hagatha whose future forecasting and accuracy pinpointing missing persons was about as precise as a toddler straddling a toilet. I was the only person that would have anything to do with her, everyone else on set avoided that arrogant gasbag like the plague she became. Whether they were previously acquainted with Sylvia Browne or that was just a visceral reaction, either way, perfectly understandable.
During those 2 weeks, I relished this rarefied opportunity to delve daily into every one of the Whitman’s Sampler of astrologers, tarot card slappers, clairvoyants, palm readers, fortune-tellers and prognosticators serving as the productions’s on-site consultants. Shades of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, they even had a soothsayer predicting next week’s headlines. Truthfully, most of those staffers I conversed with on that project came across as very credible, genuinely gifted in their particular mastery of the mystic arts.
I’ve had more than a few profound occurrences in my lifetime that can only be explained as some form of sixth sense at play. So I entered into my Friday afternoon session with Dorine, our psychic on the corner, with an open but cautious mindset. Asked what medium (so to speak) she excelled in, Dorine insisted that she doesn’t communicate with the spirit world, hers is an intuitive gift.
Being a somewhat spiritual and self-aware individual, just about everything she told me about myself was spot on, corresponding precisely with her reading 4 years ago. I am, after all, the same person so a radically different assessment would have been troubling.
Could she have recognized that I had written about her years ago? She only had my cell number and the name ‘William.’ That was also the case last time. Practically the first thing she asked was, “Have you ever thought about being a writer?” But then she went on to detail traits about myself that I’m convinced no-one could possibly detect 5 minutes after meeting or infer from anything I’ve ever written. Maybe I do walk around with my heart on my sleeve at times but I went sleeveless that day.
As much as I was leaning into the experience, I was determined to remain impartial, stubbornly so. When Dorine asked what my question was to her, I straight-up expressed a desire to understand whether or not she actually possessed psychic abilities. “I feel like I’m under a microscope,” she said at one point. “You are, I apologize!” was my response, attempting to quell any resulting negativity that I might be inadvertently harboring. What she expressed to me and I agree wholeheartedly is that, if a person is not receptive, she can’t possibly do what she does. Therein lies the conundrum underlying any psychic reading.
In our first meeting 4 years earlier, Dorine informed me I would be entering into a relationship in the next year, likely with a physician, that would involve extensive traveling. No such luck. This time it was predicted that traveling to New York is in my near future, not outside of the realm of possibility. She indicated money was not a problem for me and, I suppose when you don’t have any, it isn’t much of a bother. Suggesting that I had been a healer in a previous lifetime she wondered if that had manifested itself in this existence? Possibly so, but if she had intuited instead that I was once a corny 1930’s nightclub lounge act that would have resonated more clearly.
It was more hit than miss, however. “So what are you doing with art?” Dorine asked. I was preparing a canvas that day to do a painting, only the second time I’ve done so in the last 20 years. I do feel she accurately described the painting I completed a few months ago, which is difficult given that it’s an abstract. That genuinely impressed me. And when it came to identifying who I am at the core of my being she was amazingly dead on.
What should one expect from a psychic reading? The Oracle of Delphi or a modern day Edgar Cayce connecting to God’s messengers on the other side? Is keen insightfulness, which this lady clearly posesses loads of, proof of clairvoyance? What impressed me most was, when told she was wrong, she didn’t equivocate or try to say, “maybe that’s true of someone close to you.”
If you’ve never received a psychic reading and you’re psy-curious, or even if you have, I believe Dorine will impress. She definitely doesn’t come across as a con artist or huckster, I had a glancing dance with one of those shady characters decades ago, not to mention witnessing Sylvia Browne’s naked fakery on display, so I would recognize. Dorine’s advice to me was exactly what I needed to hear, what I had been telling myself, in fact. I would recommend the experience, for entertainment purposes obviously.
Now that I think about it, right about the time more than 2 decades ago when Dorine began her paranormal practice on the corner of Cornwallis and Lawndale, that parcel of land has been rumored to be the site of a Walgreens or some other big box store to compliment Lawndale Shopping Center across the street, deeply upsetting the residents of that genteel acreage on the outer perimiter of the Kirkwood community. Given how quickly the dominoes fell under Friendly Shopping Center’s encroachment into its surrounding neighborhoods, perhaps there is an otherworldly explanation for that retail expansion never going forward.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve been watching too many episodes of Unsolved Mysteries.
- - - - -
Billy Ingram watches too many episodes of Unsolved Mysteries.
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