Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 38

Jonathan Brown.

I administer brain tests. The subjects I work with are usually sent to me by their lawyer or insurance company-you know, after suffering some kind of accident-and the point of the testing is to doc.u.ment what mental damage they've suffered. The tests a.s.sess the functioning of an individual in terms of memory, concentration, mental flexibility, abstract thinking, reasoning, and then some basic reading, writing, and arithmetic-type stuff. In most of these cases, CAT-scans and MRIs aren't very helpful because they don't pick up on subtle deficits or impairments.

We look for something called "aphasia." This is an inability to retrieve words. There's lots of different kinds of aphasias. There's paraphasia, which is trying to think of a word but coming up with another word that may sound similar or rhyme with the word. And then there's apraxia, which is the inability to control movement; and there's prosopagnaia, which is an inability to recognize familiar faces. We also look for perseverations-which comes from the root "to persevere"-which are a repet.i.tion of information that can show up in writing, speech, or memory. For instance, if you asked, "How's your salad?" and I said, "It's delicious," and then you asked, "Where are you going tonight?" and I said again, "It's delicious," or you asked me how old I was, and I said, "Well, I'm delicious," or something like that-that would be a perseveration.

When I'm done with the testing, I write up a report which I then review with a neuropsychologist who signs it. Then the neurologist and the speech pathologist determine whether the patient needs therapy or not. Typically, where I work, they mostly want to put every patient in therapy. Therapy is kind of our bread and b.u.t.ter, it keeps the place going.

In addition to the testing, I'm involved in the rehabilitation therapy program here. I mean the actual administering of the therapy. We've designed a program for our patients which focuses on things that most people take for granted in daily life-concentration, insight, memory, word retrieval, things like that. The vast majority of the people here have found themselves suddenly imprisoned in their own bodies. It's hard for them to move, it's hard for them to remember to take a pot off the stove. Everything is thrown completely out of wack. Some patients are a little unruly, and diplomacy frequently comes into play, but mainly, these people need to be treated as human beings and not as victims.

The sessions usually last anywhere from fifty minutes to an hour and a half, although there are some patients that I spend the entire day with. It's obviously frustrating when the patient is very low-functioning and they have trouble going to the bathroom by themselves, or you're sitting in the room with someone with aphasia and they can't come up with any words and can't talk to you. Or, if they have severe brain damage, their whole sense of ident.i.ty, their whole sense of self has been erased and they have moment-to-moment memories, but they can't sustain a thought, and it's like they live in a perpetual present. It's hard to teach people in that situation. It's hard to remediate someone like that.

On the whole, I think that therapy can help, but not dramatically. I mean we've had patients in therapy for five years. They improve, but we don't know how much of that is due to the organic flexibility-or plasticity-of their brain. It's hard to say how much we've actually helped. So I have my own therapy approach which is kind of different from how I'm expected or supposed to do it. It's based on the fact that, generally, patients respond better to something they're interested in rather than the standardized materials that are designed for remediation-which in a lot of cases appear a little crude or insulting, especially to someone who is very intelligent.

I've had patients who are playwrights, patients who are scientists, doctors, lawyers. Before their accidents, they were extremely highfunctioning, intelligent people, used to being in control, used to calling the shots-and now they're incapacitated but still retain their intelligence. I think it's important to engage them. So what I've started doing is to use their work to help them organize their lives again. I've had filmmakers who came in and we'd watch films and discuss them, break them down into scenes. I have a patient who's an investment banker and we talk about amortization and pro rata shares and we look at a textbook of investment banking. I find that this approach works very well. The patients really respond. It's also wonderful for me because I learn about all these different professions.

For the very low-functioning cases, almost anything that you can do to help is welcomed. I have a patient who fell on his head when he was eighteen and had a very severe closed brain injury. When he came here, he was in a wheelchair and was more or less a vegetable. I have to summon up a lot of energy to talk about this case because I kind of involve myself with my patients a lot. But with this patient, he has a few select catch phrases that he uses over and over again. He only really responds to what young adolescent boys like-Playboy magazines, cars, women, and things that have some indication of power or that can attract a woman, like a fancy car or a lot of money. He is totally driven by his id, and that's all he is-a big id who can't really walk by himself.

When I came to him he'd been in therapy for three years, and he still hadn't really made any progress. I started a different form of therapy with him, sort of self-styled. I actually allowed him to see dirty magazines, took him to a Ferrari dealers.h.i.+p. I played all kinds of games with him. I treated him like a man rather than a patient and talked to him about things. It was kind of like a mentor or big-brother relations.h.i.+p. I'd tease him, curse with him. I'd get him out of his wheelchair and I'd have him dance with me, and he couldn't keep his balance so I'd push him and grab him; or I'd have him cling to the walls and tell him that he was mountain climbing and he'd have to scale the walls. Radical kind of therapy, get right down to the fear- have him lie on the floor and try to get up.

I tried everything I possibly could with him, including being sarcastic and teasing him-'cause this is someone that you couldn't provoke a response out of, he was so impaired. He sat with his fingers all gnarled up and curled up with tension. He sat with drool coming out of the side of his mouth, practically, always gaping with this woeful look on his face. There was some response-he could respond to fear and to pain and to pleasure, but he wouldn't remember it a minute later. You could tell him something and you could always feel safe that it wouldn't be repeated so you could virtually try anything. And now, a year later, he's really shown dramatic improvement. He uses a walker instead of a wheelchair, he doesn't curl his fingers, he can remember people's names.

He can talk but, for instance, if I say, "Tell me about your ideal woman," it can take him a while to come up with a response. But eventually, he'll say, "She's gotta be blond, she's gotta be blond. And she's gotta have big b.r.e.a.s.t.s." Before, he used to indicate with his hands when he meant b.r.e.a.s.t.s because he was afraid to say the word, but now actually he can say the word quite well. Everything just takes a while. I'll ask him to tell me the months or the days of the week and it could take two hours for him to get six of them in a row, and I'll do things like paste plastic vegetables to his face and body for every time he messes up. There was one day where he was completely covered in plastic vegetables. But he usually gets things eventually, although progress is slow and relative. If I ask him to name as many vegetables as he can, he'll name two and then he'll keep repeating the ones he just said. So he'll say, "Banana, orange, potato, orange, banana, banana, orange, potato."

In the movies, they always try and give you this idea that the person who is trapped behind some mental roadblock knows that they're back there, and that everyone is a Helen Keller waiting to be born. And of course, that's not true. In this case, that's been a very big issue for me. I've been very conflicted over whether this kid was aware of a self-that there's a voice inside that he can articulate as easily as we can articulate this conversation, and yet he doesn't have the mechanism to articulate it just because his language area in his brain has been impaired and his memory is impaired. I mean, I'll ask him questions like, "Do you have a soul?" "Are you afraid to die?" "Do you think you should live or die?" Questions kind of like that, trying to out find out if there is a soul inside that he's aware of himself, that he's conscious of his own existence. And he is. He is.

So with this particular patient, it's sort of anything goes; any response is a good response, so any way to go about that was permissible. I did it myself and I convinced the people around here. At first, they reacted with a lot of-not alarm per se-but caution, and a lot of the other therapists were angry with me and felt I was being exploitative, but now they're doing the same thing. Everyone sort of has started to use my therapies that I've sort of invented myself.

Of course, sometimes it's very frustrating. It does get very personal and intense, and a lot of this gets into my bloodstream, and then I actually start to show signs or symptoms of the same conditions as my patients. I allow myself to be somewhat brain-damaged as a form of empathy. I go where my patients are as well as I can. There are times that I've been near breaking down, but that's part of the appeal for me, which is uncovering or being a kind of explorer into that realm. I feel that most professional psychiatrists and psychologists, the higher up they get, the less they really truly understand what it's all about because they're so focused on getting their degree that they miss out on the actual stuff.

Initially, this was a very fulfilling job for me. It's still rewarding, but on one level I feel like I'm a vampire because I take a lot of this for research-for my own research material-and then on another level, I'm really starting to wonder whether I'm helping the patients-if I'm capable of helping them anymore-because I'm starting to become just as bad off as they are in some respects. I allow my mind to wander off with them. I mean, there are days that I want to be engaged and help my patients genuinely and then the frustration kind of overcomes me and I say, I have to be a little more selfish about myself because so much of my time is focused on recuperation of other people, and I feel almost like I'm sacrificing myself for these people.

But I must say that there have been wonderful moments with these patients, beautiful moments. I have felt a wonderful feeling of getting to know one person. And we really learn by getting to know one person well. Of course, the scales are tipped and I can risk interaction with another human being in a way that my patients cannot. I mean, I'm in control always and it's not as much of a risk as if I just went out into the real world and dealt with people who were functioning normally.

I don't have any feelings like I'm going to save the world or discover the secret to schizophrenia-which I initially did when I started in this field. I was ambitious and I thought that I would really learn something and then maybe put that knowledge into another discipline-like philosophy or something. But that didn't happen.

I still gather information, though, about the journey that the soul makes from dawn to twilight, the convolutions of the soul, what makes us tick, what the brain's like when it's unraveled. I try to find some spectrum that we all experience, and see its different intensities and different states, and thereby understand the puzzle or mystery of things.

What really interests me is how people react in enclosed s.p.a.ces. Because, in an enclosed s.p.a.ce, when you put two people together, that's where the soul is made. That's my belief. When I'm dealing with someone who has no real defenses-where all of the subterranean stuff in their brain is exhibited, it's like being on the sh.o.r.e of the ocean, seeing everything get washed up. New things keep being brought to sh.o.r.e every minute. It's like all these sh.e.l.ls that are in the brain that get smoothed and sanded by their journey from underneath to the surface to the sh.o.r.e. They just keep was.h.i.+ng up. You can just examine them and you don't know exactly where they've been completely. All you have is an echo of a former self.

I don't think I'm actually gonna leave this field. Sometimes I think I maybe want to be a patient, that's all. [Laughs] This stuff has a really strong grip on me and I feel if I go too far away from it, I'm missing something essential about the human experience. This is my connection with nature in the modern age. If I spent too much time away from psychiatry, I could get lost. Right after college, I worked in an architecture firm, and I just felt so removed from nature. They say architects rarely get hard-ons, you know? I just feel that this kind of work keeps me connected, really, and it keeps me humane, and it has enough darkness that it satisfies both my tendency toward good and it satisfies my darker nature as well.

We live the old way.

MEDICINE WOMAN.

Dorothy White Hawk.

I was selected for this. The job comes through time. The chief watches you and sort of makes mental notes of what you do and how you conduct yourself, whether you honor the people and walk a good path.

Once you are brought to the tribal council and sit on the council as a medicine person, then that is a lifetime seat. Unless you do something along the way that would cause you to be voted out of council, which would mean something against the people. For example, we have what we call a Path Stone symbol. That is what we call our nation's medicine. If you put that symbol on an item and sell it, then you sold the nation's medicine. That's a big no-no. You may not get thrown off council for that, but there's a good chance you would. Because you did something against the nation. Something less than honorable. If you do something too drastic, you can be banished from the nation, period. And they will never look upon you again as a Shawnee.

My entire life is dedicated to the people. What I do is I get calls from individuals who need to ask questions or to talk. I advise them. I also bless people's homes. I marry people. I do ceremonies to free the spirit of someone who's pa.s.sed on. Funeral rites. Life things. I also go to schools and do presentations for cultural celebrations. The people's spiritual lives are very important. To pa.s.s this on to younger generations-we want to give them strength, culture, and pride. We never want another Indian child to ever have to hang their head because they're an Indian.

It is not a job. It is not a religion. It is a way of life. I am practicing medicine every moment that I breathe. Someone will call me late at night and say, "I've got a migraine. I just can't handle this." And I will leave my home and go to them and help them out.

I live in Caldwell County, North Carolina. Most of the nation lives around here, or in Virginia. But there are handfuls all over. And I travel all over to see them. I've gone everywhere from-for example, I am leaving tomorrow for Tennessee. I have gone to California. I am liable to end up anywhere.

I heal primarily with spiritual energy. Sometimes I will use oils. For minor things like a bee sting or an injury, I'll grab tobacco and make a poultice out of it. In certain cases, like if there is a tiny skin cancer, I'll use bear grease to take that away. All the gifts Great Spirit gave us are there. It is just a matter of learning how to use them. However, these things are not typical of my work. Our medicine people are not "medicine" people. What we do is spiritual in nature, not physical. And it's hard to describe because it's very complex. Also, there are some things that never go beyond us. We don't discuss them outside of our own nation. But I help people get back in balance, you might say. Help them to walk the path.

There is a time and a place for everything-"Western medicine" included. I would never advise someone not to go to a doctor. Those people who need medical doctors should have them. But if people want alternative ways or are beyond a doctor's help, then they turn to us. You can't take narcotics all the time, because then you're so fogged up in your head you can't function. We can help you find another way to deal with the pain, to maintain the pain at a level where you can still function without the drugs. You will have a life. You will not be confined to a chair or a bed all lolled out.

We live the old way. Spiritually the old way, is what I mean. I have air conditioning, a dishwasher, all the modern stuff. [Laughs] Sticky notes. [Laughs] But we live the old spiritual way. If we go blueberry picking, we are taught to pa.s.s by the first seven bushes you come to and treat them as Elders. Then you can pick from the bushes after that, but you are never to pick a bush clean. You leave berries on the bushes because you have relatives there-the bears, the birds, the wildlife. They also eat these berries. So you don't get greedy and take them all. Respect. Balance. If you take a stone from a creek for a sweat lodge or something, you don't just take that stone, throw it in the back of a truck, and go home. You give a gift to the earth in appreciation for that stone. You sprinkle a bit of cornmeal on the ground and say a prayer of thanks because Great Spirit created the earth and this stone. If you kill a deer on a hunt, you thank it for giving its life so your people can live, and one day in return, your body will be put in the earth and over time will become fertilizer to help grow green plants so that the deer's descendants will be able to eat. If you do this with everything, you create a balance. This is the way of our ancestors, the way we try to live.

A lot of people think it is New Age. And it is not! There are some New Age people who incorporate a lot of our ways. Wiccan people, too, take some of our things. But there is a point where it gets turned, misrepresented, misused, something is left out. That is why so many Native people today protect the knowledge of the people, why I won't tell you exactly what I do.

I will tell you one of the most touching things I have done, which is I was called on to free a baby spirit that died. Young mothers come to me-not all mothers do this-but this one woman in particular, her baby died. She cremated her and came to me with her ashes at two in the morning and asked me to do this for her. Of course, I did it. I freed her spirit. And to see what happens to the spirit and what it brings to the face of the mother-there just isn't any reward greater. Because it brings closure. This mother just used a tiny bit of the ashes, and she was a totally different person afterwards. It was miraculous. It was a great honor to be able to help her.

I have no fees. We are not money-driven. Generally, people will give me love offerings, but I don't ask for them. So, if you have money, and you want to give it to me because you feel like I helped you, that's fine. But if you have no money, it doesn't matter. You need me just as much. How can I ever say that I won't open up and give to you what Great Spirit has given to me because of money? Money gets in the way.

If I come to your home and you have nothing but a few pinches of tobacco or sage inside a little cloth tied up, and you tell me that's all you have, then that is as valuable to me as a hundred-dollar bill- or even more so. Because that came from your heart. And there is no greater gift than something that came from another person's heart. Yes, I have to buy gas and stuff like that, but gifts are wonderful. Like if somebody makes a choker and gives it to you-oh! That is wonderful! Part of them is in that, part of their spirit is in that.

We put very little emphasis on articles that we own because we never really own anything anyway. If you concentrate on money, money always puts a barrier between you and your spiritual life. Between you and Great Spirit. Therefore, we live simply and require little. And our lives are generally more calm, more spiritual because of that.

One day, I will breathe my last breath and cross the Great Divide which is between here and the Creator. And hopefully, I have walked my life path as we have been taught to do, in such a manner so that when I do cross, and I am standing before Great Spirit, I will not have to hang my head in shame.

For now, I'm very happy. I love my job. It's my life-and I love knowing that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing with my life. That brings peace.

Be careful what you pray for.

MINISTER.

Elliot Johnson.

I've been a Lutheran parish pastor for the last twenty-six years. It's something I wanted to do from boyhood. My earliest memories are of going to church, and religion was talked about a lot in our home and prayer was stressed as something important. I was always very interested in it all. Sometimes I thought about doing the typical things that young kids think about-cowboy, fireman, scientist-but I always came back to being a pastor.

I grew up in the late 1950s. Under our Lutheran system at that time, I could have gone to a preparatory high school instead of a regular one. My pastor strongly pushed me in that direction because it was the standard route, but some instinct told me that was not the way for me. So I attended my public high school in rural Wisconsin, then a Lutheran college in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and then I went to seminary for four years in St. Louis.

In the end, I was very glad that I didn't go to the preparatory school because when I got to college and met some of these guys who had been through it, I was totally shocked by their att.i.tudes. I guess I was expecting for them to be pious or something, and they were more into cursing, drinking, and women. And the majority of them, I must say, were not ultimately ordained. So I think that my instincts were very sound in that case and I'm glad that I went the way that I did. [Laughs] I wish I could say that about my whole life.

Upon graduation from the seminary and ordination, I remained in St. Louis, and took my first parish in an area of extreme poverty. My const.i.tuency could really be characterized as the poorest of the poor, almost in Mother Teresa terms. I had a mixed congregation, the majority of them were black, but there was also a strong admixture of poor whites. That's a combination that doesn't come together too often-poor blacks and poor whites. But it's what I had in that church. And the experience, I guess you could say, was the defining experience for me in the ministry. I stayed there for eight years and I've never had anything quite like it since. And I have never stopped missing it.

In that congregation, I came to see the purpose of my ministry as basically to address the marginal and down and out elements of society. I learned to take my cue from Luke chapter IV, where Christ is speaking in his synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, and he takes for his text the pa.s.sage from Isaiah that says, "The spirit of the Lord G.o.d is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised." Ever since, I've always taken that particular text as kind of my watchword in ministry.

After eight years in St. Louis, I felt it was time to move on. A pastor doesn't typically stay with his first congregation forever. So I went to Ohio, to an all-black parish in Toledo which was more middle cla.s.s. I had a good time and a good ministry there, but I was never really satisfied within myself. I guess it wasn't enough on the edge for me. It was a place you could get very comfortable and stay a long time-my predecessor had been there for over thirty years-but it just wasn't me. I only stayed four years. It's funny though, because sometimes I now recall it very nostalgically. I go back there to visit and everybody just seems so wonderful. And in the place where I've been for the last sixteen years, I've had some very good times, but some very rough times as well.

You see, I prayed for a greater challenge and I got it. Since 1984, I've been in the South Bronx in New York City. [Laughs] Be careful what you pray for. [Laughs] In the course of my time here, I've lost my wife, I've had difficulty raising my sons, and I've been dealing with a group of people in the congregation who have very difficult personalities. Very volatile.

Most of the people here are extremely beautiful, but some of the ones who are under me-the officers, the governing body-the people who control what little money we have-they squabble about everything. They b.u.t.t heads with each other and with me on an almost daily basis. They fight over every procedural detail, every policy, everything-from tiny things in the weekly memos like who's getting credit for a meal for the homeless or who's getting credit for the gospel choir, to very serious and fundamental things like how we administer our school and church office.

I've had subordinates refuse to follow certain policies and I'm convinced that at least two of them are suffering from serious paranoid delusions. It's very bad when you get a very psychologically unhealthy person in a powerful position in the church. I have one particularly acute case in a very leading position right now. The basic reason why these people get elected to these offices is because no one else wants to hold them and yet I'm supposed to be able to wave a wand and work miracles and control them. But it's humanly impossible.

Sometimes I feel that a deluded need for power and ego is what's really running my church. I have to constantly remind myself that most of these people are very powerless in their personal lives. Therefore the church becomes an arena in which they can exercise some personal clout, so they stake out their turf, and defend it to the death. I understand that, but it's been rough, especially the last few years since my wife died.

Of course, I am still performing my duties. I'm still very busy. I'm in my office almost every day and I conduct services every Wednesday and Sunday, which means I write a new sermon every week. Then I'm also very devoted to hospital visitations and shut-in visitations, and we're getting an increasing number of those because the congregation is getting older with all the attendant health problems. We also have younger people with health problems too, especially AIDS, which has devastated this community. So I visit these people to encourage them, pray with them, read Scripture with them, and just talk with them about whatever is on their mind. I also spend quite a bit of time counseling in my office. Some of that is very fruitful, but I'm not at my optimum point in ministry right now.

I'm just burned out. I mean, it's not so bad that I would fail to share the good news where I see it is needed and will be received, but in terms of running a parish and the inst.i.tutional aspects of just keeping certain programs going and keeping the congregation interested, I've been burned out by all the conflict and I feel that I need to move on.

I've asked to be moved elsewhere, but it's a church issue and it can be a very slow process. I just have to wait. I would like to be in a little more multicultural congregation, not all black. That has never been an issue for me before, but I feel that some of the very few people that are attacking me right now-the antagonists that I'm dealing with-I think that race is right on the edge of their anger, even though they don't necessarily come out and say it.

But I don't want to go somewhere just to be going somewhere. If I really had my wish, I'd take maybe six months and go into a retreat-type setting to get my mind and spirit together. We Lutherans are not big on monasticism, but we do have a couple of monastic communities scattered around the country. And that's really what I would like to do-retreat, meditate, pray, get in a quiet kind of place. Regroup. But it's just too impractical when you've got the responsibility of a family. I mean, I can't go into a monastery with my son being in high school and my being solely responsible for him. So I don't know. I was even thinking, now that my mother is a widow, maybe I'll just go home for a while and hang out there and live off of her. But, you know, I'm fifty-seven-that's a little old to live with your mother. So I don't know.

I still believe I have a calling. And, simplistically, I suppose I can say this is the only thing I'm trained to do. [Laughs] I mean, I'm not equipped to do anything else even if I wanted to. You could almost say I'm trapped. But I definitely feel that this is my calling, that I want to serve G.o.d in this way. I want to continue and be faithful. As I indicated, I felt this calling inwardly from a very early age. And it's a very real thing to me. It cannot be undone. I just want to be able to follow it with gladness, and it seems that I can no longer do that in the particular setting in which I am.

I'm just a person who can actually,

you know, see things more clearly.

PALM READER.

Ronnie Reese.

I do different things: palm readings, tarot cards, crystal readings, aura readings, full energy readings, past-life readings. A lot of things. I've been doing this for the last twenty-two years, since I was around eleven. I work out of my apartment on the Lower East Side of New York. I'm usually open all day and well into the night on the weekends. I live here with my whole family, so we're all involved. If someone comes by, well, that's money, so they come get me. My daughter helps. She does this too. She started when she was around nine. [Laughs] She's pretty good.

I didn't learn how to do this. It was something I was gifted with. It's not something that you can be taught, although people are trying. They offer cla.s.ses at New York University-extension cla.s.ses about psychic abilities and tarot cards and palm readings and stuff like that. I think that they're full of s.h.i.+t.

Many people are born with psychic abilities and I believe everyone has some type of ability to see things or feel things. I'm just a person who can actually, you know, see things more clearly. It runs in my family. My mother is also a psychic. She helped me when I was young to develop my ability and not to be afraid of it because it can be kind of fearful for a child to be able to see other people's auras and see the future. It was very painful, even for me, as an eleven-year-old, to suddenly start seeing bad things that were going to happen to people and not have any control over it. But I was brought up into the environment. My mother was always reading other people. So she actually coached me and told me it's okay. That helped me a lot- just knowing it's okay to be psychic. It's simply in our background. We have this gift.

We're not gypsies. Well, part of us maybe are, but part is not. Let's just say I'm Romanian. [Laughs] I mean, there's all this criticism about gypsy fortune-tellers, so I don't really like to talk about that.

I get all kinds of people in here-professionals, models, creative people, business people, students, travelers. Some come in for fun. Some are very regular clients who come every week. Most everybody only cares about their love life or about their job. That's it. But that is very important. [Laughs]

When a person comes in, they choose what kind of reading they want and how deep they want me to go. The tarot cards are much deeper than the palm reading. The palm reading only tells you what's going on at this time and in the near future. But, you know, I can do a card reading or a full aura reading, and I can tell you what's going to happen in minute detail for the rest of your life.

With an aura reading, I determine the colors in your aura and how you should make some changes and what you have to do to uplift those colors. It could be that there are some people around you or something that is taking too much energy away from you. Or maybe there's a color that you should be focusing on. Different people have different colors. Some people are based on lavenders and purples. Others might be blues, yellows, pinks. The colors are your energy. Everyone has energy. It surrounds you. It's a protective aura. If you go through some kind of traumatic experience, the colors in your aura change. When you are in a better mood, they uplift again. So one day your aura could be an incredibly beautiful color. Then a week later you could be going through some kind of difficulty and it might look a little darker.

Your colors change a lot, but an aura reading is not that complicated. Past-life reading is the big one. That's a couple hundred bucks. It goes much deeper-into deeper thoughts and much more about the future. We sit down and you give me your full name, date of birth, and a couple of people that you've been connected with romantically. And what I do is through meditation and focusing on your colors, I find out what you were in a past life. People are curious to know that because, you know, they've been to places that they thought they were before and with people that they felt very connected with and probably they were connected with them in another life. And I help them with that.

I don't look at people or talk to people when I read them. I just observe their energy. Even with a palm reading, I don't read every line in their palm, because the lines change over time. So you can't base it on that. It's the energy that I'm feeling, that I pick up from a person-that's what I read from. Even when I use the tarot cards it only works because I'm picking up the energy. The crystal readings are also all about energy. I give you a quartz rock crystal, and you hold it for a while. And I find out what energy the crystal has given you and I give you a reading on that-while you are holding the crystal-because it needs to stay warm while I'm reading. It's all done by observing the psychic energy wavelengths and watching how they change. Because we change every day. Nothing stays the same. Whether you want it to stay or not, nothing ever stays the same. And your energy reflects that.

I just had a man here. He used to work in the architectural business. He was working for someone, and I told him that this person is a very limiting, selfish person to work for, and he needs to get into his own company. He says, "I'm afraid to do that." And I told him, "You cannot be afraid of doing something on your own. You're doing everything for this person. You don't need his name on top of the building. You need your name on the top of the building." Still, he says he doesn't think he can do it. But now, five or six months later, he comes back and gives me one of his cards because he did open up his own business, and he's doing wonderfully.

And this man, he was seeing a girl, and I told him she was the wrong person for him. He didn't believe me. And then he comes home and he finds someone else in his bed. I was right about her. Just from reading this man's aura, I knew about this girl. I knew she was all wrong. He had wanted to marry her. He'd bought an engagement ring. And there she was, in bed with someone much younger than him. In his house. I told him it was going to happen. I even predicted it'd be someone much younger, but he trusted her more than he did me. [Laughs] Not now. [Laughs]

Sometimes it hurts to do this. Sometimes it's very pleasing. I've had people come in here that I actually had to get them away from me because there was so much negativity around them. Their auras were so bad, I told them to get out. I don't have time to waste on negative people. I have people come in here that are wasted, drunk. They come from the bars across the street. They come in for fun. I take it very seriously, and I don't like to fool around with what I do. I think I have a strong ability, so I don't want to waste my talents. I don't like people coming in here driving me nuts. And a lot of people do. That's the only bad part of the job-when I deal with skeptical people. They think they have to test my abilities. If you go through that like five, six times a day it can be depressing, and sometimes it's like that, especially on Sat.u.r.day nights. People just come in and they challenge me. They want to see whether I know them very well. They want me to guess their birthday. I don't do that. That's absurd. These people want to see much more proof than I can give them.

I love what I do, but testing me sometimes can be nerve-wracking. I take it as a disrespect-these skeptics. And you know, I'm a skeptic too. I'm skeptical of a lot of things. But I have a gift and I've demonstrated it. I've never had anyone come back to me and say that I was wrong. I've had a lot of people come in here and tell me that I'm between ninety-five and ninety-eight percent accurate in the readings I give them.

But the thing you have to remember is that when these people resist me, they give up something of who they are. You can see it in their energy very plainly. Because they're trying to hide so much and resist so much, their energy comes out much stronger, much darker, than a person who just comes in here with an open heart. That's my consolation, you know? They hurt themselves much more than they hurt me. And I could have helped them if they'd come in with an open heart.

You never want to predict death.

TELEPHONE PSYCHIC.

Ken Jorgarian.

Six years ago, I was unemployed and looking at the cla.s.sifieds. One week I saw an ad that said, "Astrologers/Psychics," and I just gave them a call. I had no special training, but I made it through a series of auditions. They test you out, so to speak, for accuracy and ability to carry on a conversation and things like that.

Accuracy is very subjective because what happens is the clients are paying three dollars and ninety-nine cents a minute and they have a vested interest in getting their money's worth. They don't want to feel like a fool. They want to be able to tell their friends they talked to this wonderful psychic, not that they got gypped. So the main requirement is just listening skills, having the ability to tune in to a client. I'm not talking psychically, I'm just talking about being sensitive to what the client is saying and wants to hear.

If you can listen to what somebody has to say and give them some positive encouragement, then most people are going to think that you're an accurate psychic if you're even close with your predictions. I mean, if I tell someone their boyfriend will come back in three months and the boyfriend comes back in seven months, well, he came back and they'll be like, "Oh, you said he'd come back, and he's here!" And I'll say, "Well how long was it?" And they say, "Seven months" and I look at my card and see that I told them three months. I know that I'm off and yet they're crediting me with having it exactly right. If I tell them they're gonna get a job in aeros.p.a.ce, but they get one as a receptionist, I told them they were gonna get a job-they got one-and they're ecstatic. They'll argue with me that I told them they were going to get a receptionist job, not an aeros.p.a.ce job, and I'll play along with it because they're happy. People are just really eager to have a phenomenal psychic in their lives.

And the companies who run these lines know this, so they don't care about accuracy. They're looking for psychics who're interesting enough to talk to so that the caller will stay on the line for as long possible. They're pretty up-front about it. Even in the advertis.e.m.e.nts they'll say, "For entertainment purposes only." They call it a "psychic hotline" but there really isn't a commonly accepted definition of "psychic." It's just what people think is psychic. The companies don't say that we're unerring, or whatever.