The Psychic Friends phenomenon first hit in the late 1980s.  I remember it well, because I was just around ten years old.  Remember this was early ESP, way before Cleo or John Edwards.  This even before Dionne Warwick.  I can’t remember how they advertised, probably the same as they do now … late night or early Saturday television commercials … but I remember being inundated by their ads.  My brother and I were absolutely convinced that they were real.

So we called them.

Let me put some context into this before you start to make cheap jokes at my expense.  I don’t really mind cheap jokes mind you.  In fact, I encourage them.  BUT … As I said, I was just around ten years old and I was on a steady diet of Scanners, Manimal, the Master, GI Joe, That’s Incredible, and Silverhawks.  Clearly to the mind of a 1980s child, supernatural phenomenon, particularly telepathy and precognition, were as mundane and acceptable as white basketball players.

There were a few facts that went without question.  First, the Incredible Hulk would beat every other superhero in a WWF Royal Rumble, DC or Marvel.  Second, my He-Man magnet belt actually made me stronger and faster.  Third, birthday parties at school had a x2.7 cool factor than the ones just at home.  Nothing like coming back from recess and having cupcakes for the entire class.  Fourth, my sister Wendy had cooties.  And fifth, stuff goes bump in the night.

Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, the whole shabang-a-bang.  It was all real.

I squirted a little bit of yellow fear in my Batman underwear when I watched Kurt Barlow stalk on the numbingly stupid townsies of Salem’s Lot (FYI, particularly the scene in the jail).  My dad, in his infinite sensitivity, told me that the vampires like the darkness of my bedroom the most of all.  There were many nights when I laid in petrified terror on the bottom bunk, clutching a Gonga, waiting for the bloodsuckers to attack or dawn.

That’s me with said Gonga (stuffed monkey) in front of my grandma’s porch.  Little did I know I was only youthful chattel for vampire overlords …

Or that I would run through my house in gripped fear at night because I absolutely expected Michael Myer’s ghostly white mask to show up in the back hallway darkness.  Just like Jaws at the swimming pool, I could hear the Halloween theme song whenever I was at the back of the house.  Not sure about everyone else’s home, but my dad’s house was old and the back half was an addition of shoddy, non-approved additions with off-kilter floors, uneven walls, and economical use of lighting fixtures.  It looked like Willy Wonka designed a bomb shelter.  How could the Shape not exist within that black void?

So if I was utterly certain that such evil monstrosities existed, isn’t it only fair and logical that “good” supernatural phenomenon could exist as well?  Of course!  Yes, there is a legion of warm-hearted psychics attached to a call queue waiting to help me talk to dead relatives, predict upcoming natural disasters, and collect magic Lotto numbers.

Well, one Saturday morning when my mother and grandma were out of the house and had taken Wendy with them, my brother and I wrote down one such number claiming to have the secrets of the psychic with the plan to call them.  Despite our age, we were very systematic in our approach.  My brother would call from the rotary phone in the downstairs living room and I would secretly listen in from the phone in my grandma’s sitting room.  We wrote down a list of questions.  It was part of the plan, an organized attack.  Our goal was call, listen for ten minutes or less, and the get out.  Mission accomplished.

My brother dialed in the next room and I ran through to the other side of the house and picked up the receiver, sitting in my grandma’s recliner, next to her AM radio and collection of cheap romance novels.  After some beeps, buzzes, and bumps, we were put into contact with our genuine psychic … telemarketer.

But we had our list of questions.  Not a softball among them, all hard hitting and tough.  If this guy was a fraud, a fake, a phony, then our first question would reveal him as the shame that he was right out of the gate.  This idiot did not stand a chance!  My brother asked the first question …

“How do we know you’re psychic?”

Bam!  In your face, bitch!  If this guy was not the real deal, the genuine article, he was surely busted.  He had to be eating breakfast with Elvis’s ghost or playing gin rummy with Rasputin.  If not, sham-a-lam-a-ding-dong!  Checkmate, motherfucker!

In baited breath, we listened for his response.  We listened for a stammer, a stutter, even a pause.  We had just pulled the Holy Grail of psychic questions.  In our little boy hearts, we knew that he’d never been asked this question before.  We were prepared for his back-pedaling.  I wouldn’t have been surprised had he just said, “Fuck it, you got me.  I’m actually a carpenter from Las Calinas.”

Well … it didn’t happen like that.  To be honest, the exact opposite happened.

Rather than our psychic friend suddenly channeling the ghost of Liberace or answering trivia questions about the afterlife, he began a ramble about the philosophical nature of skepticism.  A long ramble.  Long.  We never made it to question two before we came out of our stupor from the mind-numbing rant unleashed by this psionic chin wag.  In fact, we didn’t say another word during the entire phone call other than, “ok, bye now.”

Immediately we hung up and two questions immediately sprung to mind.  First, neither of us could remember a single thing that our psychic buddy had actually said.  Second, what time was it?  What day?  My ear was sore from pressing the receiver against it.  I had eaten an entire box of mini-muffins from my grandma’s secret stash.  One thing we did know … we had talked far beyond our threshold of ten minutes.

We were worried that day as if instinctively my mom or my grandmother would know that we had done something bad and stupid just by looking at us.  When they didn’t and a few days passed, my brother and I relaxed and reverted back to our childhood stupidity and naive bliss.

Then one day, just after the beginning of the first of the month, my mother came to the bottom of the stairs and yelled for both of us to come down stairs.  When she is mad, my mother has a tendency to rely on a few trademarked phrases.  Phrases such as, “get down here, front and center!” or “if you think you can x, then you’ve got another thing coming, bucko!”  I never knew what a bucko was for the entirety of my youth, but I knew that I was one.

Well, she used one of those.  Front and center.

Dutifully, we assembled downstairs in my grandma’s sitting room.  She was sitting with the phone bill in her lap, her face soured into a cross expression behind her glasses.  My mother was playing the role of prosecutor/drill sergeant.

“Which one of you called a #800 number and wracked up a $350.00 phone bill?!?!”

Uh oh.

In those days, for our poor, poor family, 350 US dollars seemed like half a year’s wage.  It was like a million kajillion dollars today.  The most expensive item that I had ever encountered was the GI Joe aircraft carrier, a full six feet of Chinese plastic crafted into toy ecstasy.  And it was only $120.  Eeeh.  I was pretty sure that my life was only worth $299.  For a second, I worried that I’d be sold to work in the salt mines to repay my debt.

I’m sure that for a half-second, we considered the proper course of action.  Lying.  If we could blame it on my sister, Wendy, then maybe we could skate the hellfire that was sure to come.  Granted, neither my mom or my grandma had the furious outbursts that my dad was famous for with his poorly aimed belt lashings.  No, the worst was the face my grandma would make.  She’d be grumpy for several days, maybe even a week.  No more chocolate milk, pilgrim’s breakfast, surprise KFC dinners with honey and butter rolls.  If we could lie, then maybe we could avoid the consequences.  It was a tried and true method.

But we were overwhelmed by guilt.

You see, we were Catholic, sickeningly Catholic in fact.  Raised from the womb to immediately fear and obey any man wearing a priest’s collar.  We sang the entire Glory & Praise hymn collection during cross country car rides … from memory.  My dad bought an electric organ so we could play Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar at home.  Despite our willingness to lie, our faces immediately betrayed us.

We were busted.  All we could offer was a shrug of our shoulders.  My grandma frowned even deeper and sighed at the stack of bills in her lap as if this month she had no idea how she’d make ends meet.  That damn psychic … it was his fault.

As my brother and I shuffled out, my mom asked what type of #800 number we had called.  My brother meekly offered that we called a psychic network.  Surprisingly, my mom’s anger lessened.  Maybe she understood that her boys would be helpless against the lure of such an enticing endeavor.  Maybe she had her own natural curiosity about precognition and clairvoyance.

Or maybe she was just relieved that we didn’t call a porno hot line.

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