The Time Alex and I Saw a Psychic

Juanita works at the 24-hour massage parlor.  Everyone knows it's really a brothel. It's a yellow building with five-foot-tall pink flamingo on the sides in paint that was probably once very vibrant.  Now, during the hundred degree summer nights, everything in Phoenix seems to be covered in a dusty film.  July in the desert is seen through various filters of pastel depression.  Alex is having a hard time tonight, too, and we figure now would be a good time to get really stoned and get a palm reading.

We want our psychic readings like we want our Taco Bell: cheap, cheesy, and open at eight o'clock on a Friday night.

And that's how we find Juanita.

Alex and I stand in front of the massage parlor's front door.  Like the windows, it's covered with thick iron bars that are slathered in coats of the same faded yellow paint as the rest of the place.  Funny enough, it is built right next to a Taco Bell. Alex presses the call button (also yellow) to let whomever is inside know that the two people who had called and made appointments for palm readings have arrived.  We are a pair, standing in front of a brothel on a Friday night.  Alex has a mohawk and he has started to let his beard grow out over the summer.  I have been losing weight from stress so none of my clothes fit anymore, and my hair is neon pink.  Oh, Juanita, have fun down there with those damned hipster kids.

She shows up with the keys to the front door in her hand.  Juanita is both prettier and younger than I thought our psychic would be.  She's short and round and has a genuine smile. She's surrounded by a very calm and welcoming energy, and as she pulls open the heavy metal gate over the door, I notice a pink canister of pepper spray and I wonder if she has ever been forced to use it.

Alex gets his reading first, and this means that I am being contained in the waiting room that serves both Juanita's clientele and the massage parlor's.  Since I am the only person in the waiting room, I don't mind too much.  The windows in the waiting room are made of stained glass, and every time a car drives by outside, the headlights made the room burst into fractals.   The downside to this is that since cars are constantly driving by, the room is now very noisy and that means I can't eavesdrop on Alex's palm reading.

Ten minutes later, Alex opens the door, and it is my turn.

"So how do you two know each other?" Juanita asks me, referring to Alex.

"He came into the salon where  I work, and we were just kind of instantly friends" I reply, sitting across the desk from her.

I put my hands up on the desk and press my fingers together, then I proceed to fold and then unfold my hands, because I have never had my palms read before; do I wait to be told to present my palms or do I just throw them on up there?  These are things no one talks about and everyone needs to know.

"I am going to do a basic reading," Juanita tells me.  "Very general, nothing too in-depth, okay?  And good or bad, I'm just telling you what I see, no judgement, no hard feelings."


I nod, I stretch my open hands out towards her.  Juanita looks at them one time and immediately begins talking.

"I see here you are a very strong person.  You have been through a lot to become this strong.  I see that you are also a very kind person, but you are not seeing the karmic payback for any of your kindness; you're just getting bad luck constantly and you are thinking this is not fair.  Your life is like a roller coaster, okay?  And you just need to try and get through this down time.  You'll come back up eventually, but not right now.  You started this year very off balance, with an emptiness in you, inside your body, some sort of trauma, okay?  And you're trying to find balance with all the chaos around you."

I can't tell if my amazement is the result of me reading into Juanita's generalized observations in hopes of relief from the summer or if maybe she is the real deal, giving me an honest psychic experience.

"This year is a very bad year for you, and I'm sorry to say it's not going to get any easier until 2016.  That's gonna be your year, okay?  In the meantime, just try to keep your head down and get through this year.  You have very good spirit guides, they take really good care of you, but you have a chakra that needs cleaning and it's creating this gateway, like a portal, to one of your past lives.  You were a very evil woman in a past life...you were a witch."

When she says "witch" I pull my hands away.  I tell Juanita that as a child, I used to have recurring nightmares about being burned alive as a witch.  I know that I should try and play it cool and that this is just giving her more information than I should.  I know that but I tell her anyway.

She goes on.

"I see paperwork, legal documents, a courtroom.  Are you going through a divorce?"

I tell her yes, I am.

"It's not going to go as easily as it seems.  It's going to take longer than you think.  I also see a class?  Something that you put off for yourself awhile back.  Figure out what that is and get back to it."

Juanita tells me that I'm getting ready to go on a trip to see someone I love, in the next three weeks, to somewhere close.  California?

"Yeah, I'm going in two weeks to see my best friend, Charlie, in Hollywood."

"It's going to be a good trip.  Look forward to that, okay?"

I thank Juanita.  She gives me a hug and tells me I can come back anytime for chakra cleaning.  Alex and I pay her, twenty-five dollars apiece in cash, then we go to gay Denny's to discuss and compare our readings.

"Did she try to sell you chakra cleaning?" I ask him.


"No, it was super quick and super general.  Just a few, 'this line means this and this line means this' and that was it.  She did the reading so quickly, she felt bad for charging me full price so she let me ask her a question."

"So what did you ask her?"

Alex shrugs and says, "I asked her if I'd finish my book and she said that I will but that it will be a few years down the road. So she tried to sell you chakra cleaning?  How did that happen?"

I tell him everything I can recall from my reading, so he can analyze it now and so I can remember it all later. The bits about the divorce, the past lives, the starting the year off with an internal emptiness and no karmic payoff...I'm pretty sure I don't leave anything out.  Alex just listens.

"Dude," I say "Did you tell her I was getting divorced or started this year off with one kidney?"

"Nope," Alex says.  "We didn't talk about you.  I didn't talk at all, really.  Maybe I should have said more, then maybe I would have gotten a better reading.  I was too high to respond to anything she said."

I nod, take a drink of my hot coffee, and try to keep my head down for the rest of the summer.

One year

Twelve months ago, everything changed.


Everything.


It's amazing to look back now and to see the effect that surgery would have on every other aspect of my life.  I went into kidney donation thinking I was doing something to help change a stranger's life, and while I'm sure that I did accomplish that, I will admit that I was completely unprepared for the change it would bring about in my own life.


Nothing is the same.

NOTHING.

New home, new job, new car, new diet, new medicines, new freedom, new plans, new adventures, new friends, new stories, new priorities, new outlooks, new books, new life.

And I can trace it all back the one spirit journey, riding the Mission Beach roller coaster at midnight two summers ago during Comic Con.  Things in my life were alright.  I was married to a nice guy, we lived in a cute house in Phoenix, and I was out of hair school and working in a salon that I really liked.  Everything was...fine?  So why did I feel so lost and restless?  I had everything I had told myself that I wanted.  I didn't know what my next step should be, and it was starting to drive me crazy.  So I rode the roller coaster at midnight.  I sat by the ocean.  And a few days later, while sitting at Dairy Queen with my daughter, it just hit me: I was going to donate a kidney.  It was something that I was going to do.  Simple as that.


Then it was a whirlwind of testing and obsessing before it actually happened on December 1st.  Once those lines were cut, once I woke up in that hospital bed,   I felt so... free.  I saw my life for the gift it was. For what it still is.   It's my life!  It's mine to live and it's up to me to spend energy on the things that I love.  It doesn't matter what I've been told is the right way to live.  It doesn't matter what I think I'm supposed to be doing at my age. It doesn't matter that nothing is terrible and that everything is fine. It's not fine. I learned the hard way that if I don't stay true to myself, I will feel trapped and stagnant.  I will spend my time wondering what's wrong with me, trying to figure out why I'm unhappy when everything should be great.

BUT... if I follow the opportunities that make me feel love, I will be shown even more opportunities.  And even if times get hard, even if I run out of money, even if I feel like I'm going crazy....I will not feel trapped.  I will have an infinite amount of opportunities in front of me.  I will be free.

That's what happened when I donated the kidney.  I saw through the bullshit that I had been feeding myself for years.  I saw what I needed to do.  I accepted that I didn't want the things that I once thought I wanted.  I took a chance.  Then I took more.  It wasn't always easy.  It's still not.  But it is my life.  And it's a beautiful, scary, fantastic life. And I am living it so much harder now with more adventure, more openness, more honesty, and with one kidney.