Psychic Boston

A field guide to your future

by Alex Shapiro

I must be at some sort of crossroads, I thought to myself while rummaging between the sofa cushions in one more attempt to find some spare change. At least I hoped I was at a crossroads. It had been a solid month of fruitless wheel-spinning, and the future had never seemed so blurry. That's when it struck me.

I needed a psychic.

A flier from Mrs. Gina that I'd found in Inman Square promised good things: "One visit will compensate for all your disappointments!" Another flier, for Boston Psychic Studio on Winter Street, told me: "We have the answers. . . . The answers that could change your life!" This was it. A psychic could offer me advice. A psychic could show me the future. Maybe a psychic could even help me find some rent money.

According to The Mammoth Book of Fortune Telling (Carroll & Graf, 1997), written by "Celestine," there are no fewer than 100 ways to sneak a peek at the future. Some -- like geomancy, a kind of divination based on reading random scratches in the earth -- seemed a little far out to me, and also a little impractical here in the city. So I picked a handful of techniques I felt comfortable with and took the sensible course: I let fate decide who my psychics would be. When I found them, I asked them about love, health, and my career. Here's what they said.

Arsenic & Old Lace

My first stop was Arsenic & Old Lace (318 Harvard Street, No. 10, Brookline), one of our prime local resources for all things occult. From the name, I was expecting a place full of dark corners and weird smells. Not so. Reverend Vincent Russo ("Call me Vinnie"), the proprietor, keeps his store so bright and cheery that even the collection of ceremonial sickles hangs as innocuously as a set of Cutco kitchen knives.

Vinnie does tarot readings behind the counter and down some stairs, in the equally well-lit Pagan Community Center -- which, again, doesn't quite live up to its name. The "center" is a room so bare, save for a lone fold-out table, that it might have been a KGB interrogation chamber in another life. As he took off his satanic finger jewelry and put his long jet-black hair through a purple scrunchie, Vinnie reminded me partly of Yanni, partly of Marilyn Manson. He had an easy manner and a warm smile; he's also a third-degree witch of the Alexandrian tradition, founder of the coven Synchronos, and a legally recognized Wiccan priest.

He sat down and grinned at me, then spread out 13 tarot cards in the pattern of a cross. He read these to me in a special order, explaining as we went.

"If you're happier doing what you're doing, you're going to do what you do better, and if you do what you do well, you're going to be happier doing what you do."

I was feeling a bit out of the loop until he added: "Don't take this the wrong way, but you're getting back more than you're putting in now. It's not like you're slacking, but very soon you're going to have to work harder to achieve the same outcome you enjoy now."

In retrospect, Vinnie had my number. A couple of weeks after his reading, I ended a highly premature retirement and reentered the working world. He also had some advice about my sock drawer.

"Rather than not saying something if you notice that your sock drawer has been moved around," Vinnie told me, "you need to go up to the person and say: Look, my sock drawer is a very personal thing and I don't want you in it."

And what do you know? My ex-girlfriend and had I just moved back in together after more than a year of separation; not only does she keep pictures of her grandparents in the underwear drawer, but I caught her using my lucky boxer shorts to clean a dirty wall the other day.

Vinnie gave me one final warning that seemed benign at the time. "Watch yourself, especially in the next two to five weeks -- you're going to be prone to fall back into old habits. You have to be real careful." I was thinking about how long it had been since I'd gotten really hammered -- and then I realized I was getting a blister on my thumb. I'm a video-game junkie, and my new apartment almost shares a wall with an arcade. I've been playing a lot of VirtuaFighter. Maybe I should cut down.

Ritual Arts

Don't go to Ritual Arts (153 Harvard Avenue, Allston) if you're allergic to animals. The store is home to two black cats, three birds, and a snorting Boston terrier named El Puerco de la Muerte -- that's "pig of death" in Spanish. I received an astrological reading from Miranda S. Remington, a 25-year veteran. (You may remember Miranda as the violinist in Jonathan Richman's band the Modern Lovers, or you may not.)

Miranda told me she was an astrologer, not a psychic, but she did claim to get "psychic impressions." Sometimes -- out of nowhere -- she would pause during her explanation of my chart, look over my shoulder, and sort of tremble eerily.

"The astrological wheel is basically a karmic blueprint of what you bring into this life," she said. "My thing is really karmic astrology. I can do the mundane material stuff, but it's not my thing."

Karmic astrology seems to consist of a very broad overview of positive and negative prospects for the future, mathematically determined from the time and location of one's birth. Miranda and I sat down on opposite sides of a towel-lined massage table in the back of Ritual Arts and looked at each other for an awkward moment. Then she laid out a computer-generated chart of my life, patted down her bangs, and let her jaw go slack. The reading was under way.

"Part of your karma," Miranda told me, "is to work with the media. Publishing, working with the public." That's accurate, but the perception was not entirely surprising, considering I had already told her I was a writer. Her predictive powers didn't pick up much when we got into my love life. "Relationships will cause problems," she warned, adding: "Be on guard against aggressive women." Fortunately, my girlfriend is a Virgo, and "Virgo is good for you."

I was operating on very little sleep, which may have influenced Miranda's observations of my health. "Sometimes you have lots of energy, sometimes you don't," she noticed. "You need to strengthen your blood: B6, B12. Your bloodstream is sluggish; you need to speed it up. Spinach, broccoli, kale. Stick to fruits, whole grains, health foods, because you're subject to the tides. Eating junk food is not going to help you at all." And why not? "Ulcers, depression, listlessness." Miranda wasn't afraid to sweeten the deal by throwing in a little bonus as I was leaving: "You'll have a long life. You'll be in the body a long time. Your life will be filled with unexpected surprises. Your life will be extraordinary."

Usually when I get a fortune cookie it comes with pineapple.

Seven Stars

Asking around, I kept hearing about the "psychic fair" at Seven Stars on Saturdays. Seven Stars is an odd little bookstore at 58 JFK Street, just outside Harvard Square. I wandered around for maybe a little too long, reading the backs of books with titles like Presidential Sex and The Voodoo Handbook of Cult Secrets, before asking one of the staffers in the front where the psychic fair was.

"Who's your favorite South Park character?" he countered.

I told him it was Kenny, and he smiled conspiratorially. "Follow me."

At the top of a set of rickety stairs was the psychic fair. No balloons, no chips and dip; just six tables in a well-lit room, and a bunch of friendly psychics who wouldn't admit they predict the future. "Fortune telling sounds too much like entertainment," said a spiritual clairvoyant named Shelah. "We see possibilities and can give suggestions," added Yvonne, the store's co-owner. They weren't giving me answers, but I couldn't help noticing a glimmer in the eye of John Holland, a reserved young man who said little and watched me with particular intensity. A week later I received his press kit (yes, he has a press kit), and after botching an attempt to meet, I asked him if he'd be up for a phone consultation.

"I never wanted to do this," said Holland, who describes himself as a "psychic/medium." "I never wanted to be called weird or strange." Mediums talk to spirits from the beyond, the way Whoopi Goldberg's character did in Ghost. Since the beyond is so mysterious, Holland can't really control what direction a reading will take, but he can try. Perhaps because of his sources, Holland's predictions were endearingly random.

He saw me getting big into politics, "real political stuff like Lebanon," but he couldn't really tell me when. I wasn't exactly floored to hear that I -- 24 years old and barely employed -- wouldn't be settling down anytime soon, or that I was possibly in the midst of a career takeoff. Nor did it seem much of a stretch to say, "You're taking your baby steps here." Then, after a number of total gutter balls -- "Whose birthday is in April?" (nobody I know); "Who's Edward?" (got me there) -- John rolled a few strikes. He seemed to know a lot about my girlfriend. He kept "hearing" that he was supposed to be talking about her.

"Did you and your girlfriend break up and get back together?" Yes! "Is your anniversary in April?" Well, no. "Where's her dad? Something with her dad is going on, and she's going to have to go." Hmm. Her father is sort of old-fashioned, and he didn't talk to her for a week after we moved in together. She didn't really have to go home and straighten him out, but still.

Then, a source he identified as my mother's mother came into the reading. Clearly, long-departed grandmothers were more up John's alley. "What's that, dear?" he kept asking. She didn't have much to say to me, other than that I'm burning the candle at both ends and should watch my throat area. For my mother, though, she had a message: she saw Mom becoming more independent, and told her to "go for it."

I relayed this message to my mother and she nearly shat herself. Apparently Grammy was always saying that.

The Original Tremont Tea Room

The Original Tremont Tea Room, on the fourth floor at 48 Winter Street, is like one of those great diners where the waitstaff comes off rude and distrustful at first, then winks at you after you've ordered. There's even a menu, so a psychic can ask, "Whaddya want?"

Tremont bills itself as the oldest continually operating psychic room in America; it opened in 1936 and has expanded into telephone readings, online readings (http://www.tremont-tearoom.com), corporate events, weddings, and even bridal showers. This is a psychic chamber with all the trimmings: crystals, incense, candles, walls painted with angry unicorns, and a faux stone-cave entrance.

I spoke with three of the staff and got samples of each of their techniques -- runes, tea leaves, and channeling. Of these, tea leaves produced results that were the most specific, but also the least. After drinking about eight ounces of loose-leaf Chinese tea, I was instructed to swirl the remaining leaves around the cup; my reader, Kasandra, scrutinized them for patterns. She saw Chinese characters -- "but I don't read Chinese," Kasandra said, "so I don't know what it means." She did see me doing "unpleasant yard work," which I suppose is what you'd call picking up after my new dog. Her final warning was to watch what I ate, because I "could get sick off mushrooms."

Ed, my channeler, felt like a good friend from the start, with a manner that had me believing everything he said. He breathed heavily, as if inhaling information out of the air. "Speaking, lectures, writing books," he said. "I see you at a podium." Nothing was shocking, but who says my life is going to be shocking? He predicted I'd be driving West for health reasons, and though I've sworn never to do the West again, stranger things have happened.

My runic reader, Donna-Marie, began by shuffling nine inscribed stones in a pouch, then she laid them out and had me ask the stones questions. The answers cast some serious doubt on the future of my love life: for instance, I've "put romantic energies into something that's meant to be friendship." Then the Jera stone came up, which my reader interpreted as "fertility," extrapolating: "You might want to be extra careful this month." Just as I was joking about picking out a name, I remembered that I was about to start working part-time at a smoothie bar called Jera's Juice. Uh-oh.

Botánica Santo Niño de Atocha

"It's time Santería came out of the closet," proclaimed Luis Odemi -- which was ironic, since the two of us were literally sitting in a closet.

"It's a beautiful religion," he said. "We don't drink or do drugs. We respect nature and our mothers and fathers . . . and we accept everyone." Santería is a Cuban folk religion combining African spirit worship and Roman Catholicism; Odemi is a santo (priest) who gives readings at the Botánica Santo Niño de Atocha (390 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain).

Santería, as it has entered the public eye, has acquired a bit of a reputation. A few years ago the Supreme Court ruled that the town of Hialeah, Florida, could not outlaw the religion's ritual animal sacrifices; Perry Farrell's heroin-drenched movie Gift (1993) included footage of the Santería blood-sharing ritual from his wedding. This kind of thing makes some people nervous, but personally, I was excited to take part in a ceremony from a religion listed in Larry Kahaner's book Cults That Kill.

What I received here was a simple cowrie-shell reading, the results of which were just as generally uplifting and vague as any of my other psychic encounters. No blood, just 21 shells and a colorful mat on a leopard-skin-cloth-covered table in a closet. Odemi began by honoring Eleggua, messenger of the gods, in a loud, Spanish-like tongue, accompanied by the rhythm of drums on tape. He reeled on for a few minutes, shaking the shells around and stopping every so often to say my name and jot down some numbers in his notebook. He started breathing a bit heavily toward the end and seemed to be in a bit of a trance; then he snapped out of it and told me, in English, what he'd learned:

"Alex, the wheel of progress -- the wheel that goes forward and the wheel that goes backward. At this moment Eleggua is saying that the wheel is going back and forth . . . I'll get some clarity on this.

"Do you have a scar on your body?"

Yes, it's right on my forehead.

"I'm going to warn you right now -- everything is very good with you, you have ire arica yale, you have a blessing from God, you have a blessing from your parents -- but you have to be very careful that you don't have surgery, that you don't get sick. Anything that you decide to do right now, at this moment, will work for you. Just please be careful with your health. Don't be a lead-foot, be careful on ladders, be careful if you're out late at night."

Anyone could have been telling me to be careful on ladders, but I could tell Luis meant it. I don't know what ire arica yale means (although I did get him to spell it), but this was one of those cases where the words weren't as important as the dire look in my reader's eyes.

Suffice it to say I've been buckling up and trying to get plenty of sleep since then.

Alex Shapiro is a freelance writer living in Boston.