At Raoul’s there’s a spiral staircase next to the bar that runs upstairs to where the bathrooms are located. And up on that second floor, they traditionally host a psychic who does tarot card readings, and the resident psychic at Raoul’s at the time that my mother and I were celebrating her successful brain surgery was a woman named Janet Horton (whom the Imaginary Intern and I would dub simply Janet the Psychic). I didn’t know Janet the Psychic back then because I never got a tarot reading at Raoul’s. I’d just go up to the second floor, pee, and come back down again, which does seem to represent a very common kind of unexamined life, doesn’t it? — drinking and urinating and drinking and urinating, without ever pausing to ascertain what the future might hold in store. But I would meet her several years later, because it turns out that, with great literary serendipity, Janet the Psychic lives in Hoboken and works out at the same gym as I do, the New York Sports Club on Fourteenth Street.
In the spring of, uh, 2014, I went over to Janet the Psychic’s exceptionally tidy apartment in Hoboken, and she did a tarot card reading for me…and I remember there were two beautiful trees in front of her building, a honey locust and a ginkgo with its veiny fan-shaped leaves and its stinky fruit, its stinky nuts, and there was one of those grotesque little drug-addled mercenaries in Heidi braids and thick cat’s-eye glasses patrolling the sidewalk on her Huffy Disney Princess bike with pink streamers on the handlebars…and I could hear her through Janet’s open window, and the Doppler effect of her bell was the obbligato of the entire reading.
The most interesting thing Janet revealed had absolutely nothing to do with me. Before she started my reading, she told me a marvelous story about contacting the spirit of a man’s dead hamster. The man had apparently been extraordinarily close to this hamster, and I think he felt guilty about perhaps not having taken sufficiently good care of the hamster when it was ill. Janet shuffled her tarot deck, closed her eyes, asked the hamster’s spirit how it felt about the man, and dealt the cards out onto the table.
“Your hamster thought you were a god,” she told him, once she’d had a moment to interpret the spread.
As you might suspect, I was extraordinarily moved by this story. It would be wonderful, I thought, to be worshipped by a hamster. I just immediately imagined, of course, a piazza full of swooning anthropomorphic hamsters, singing “To Sir with Love” to me. Or perhaps, instead of a thronged piazza, there are only two anthropomorphic hamsters, just sort of loitering out on the periphery of the piazza, “on break,” indifferent…
I’m not skeptical in the least about tarot card readings. I am very superstitious myself. I won’t leave forks in the dish rack overnight because I believe that the tines attract demonic energy. If I’m at a sandwich shop like a Subway or a Quiznos, I believe it’s very bad luck to watch the person wrap your sandwich, and I shut my eyes or actually turn my back. And I know when I’m about to have a clairvoyant “vision” of my own — I get a little gassy and the tinea versicolor rash on my back starts to itch. Kestrels can see the UV reflection of the urine trails of the moles they hunt, so who’s to gainsay what psychics claim to see? The world is endlessly generating signs, it’s in perpetual blossom. Ask a question, deal the cards, and interpret. I have absolutely no problem with that at all.
You have no idea how many hours, days, weeks, months in aggregate I spend just chewing gum and sullenly throwing a pink rubber ball against a concrete abutment, and imagining random successions of things…
Persephone weaving a great tapestry of the universe…
A hungover Johnny Knoxville in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel…
A father, in a sweat-drenched gray T-shirt, sprinting and propelling a jogging stroller at great speed. Child in stroller — white-knuckled grip on handles, flesh on his face rippling grotesquely like a g-force test pilot…
A parent telling his rambunctious eight-year-old son that if he doesn’t start behaving himself, he’ll be transferred to Saudi intelligence, where guards rip the skin off their prisoners…
Jimmy Kimmel trying to feed a dead mouse to an owl…
Josephine the Singer, in Norwegian black-metal corpse paint, singing “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” on The Voice…
Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade” blasting from a Bose SoundDock on a night table next to a bed…
A hawk with a kitten in its mouth flying over the Staples Center…
Regurgitated yarn…
A bleached-blond woman in her mid-fifties struggling with a wheelchair in the trunk of her Civic. Her severely brain-damaged adult son sits in the front seat of the car, spastically wrenching his head from side to side. A small dog yelps in the backseat. “Shut up,” she says flatly, squinting through cigarette smoke. She rolls her son in the wheelchair perilously close to the edge of the pier. It’s impossible to tell if he’s elated or terrified as he gapes at the river, ablaze with sunlight. The hollow, breaking voices of adolescent boys, flinging chunks of concrete and scrap rebar into the water, resound in the near distance…
A motorcyclist slapping a magnetized bomb on the side of a car…
Superman squeezing a lump of coal in his closed hand until it becomes a diamond…
A professor, using only items purchased from a gas-station vending machine, reconstructs the genome of an extinct mammal…
Along the periphery of a multiplex parking lot, a group of hermits, fugitive serfs, brigands, mystics, and lost children emerging from the forest…
Surgical robots going wild and stalking the countryside, tearing out men’s prostates…
My mind disappearing, leaving behind a trail of thought bubbles…azure thought bubbles that are indistinguishable from the sky…
…and yet these things, these random elements in this “montage,” are trying to form a sentence, don’t you think?…A…a sort of rebus…as surely as the Queen of Wands, the Ace of Pentacles, the Knight of Cups in reverse, and the Chariot cards dealt out on the table of a psychic are trying to articulate something…