The Rolling Stones - "Fortune Teller"
1966
Early nineties, psychic on Nicollet Mall just south of Ninth Street, that block that held a Shinder’s, where the Target store is now. Across the street from the office where I worked. Paid twenty or thirty bucks for her to read my palm (check made out to “cash”), hippieish lady in her late thirties, incense burning on the table. Don’t remember my exact fortune, something about how: 1) My writing would become more of a hobby*, 2) The gal I liked who I wonder if she felt the same way did feel the same way but wasn’t sure how to express it, and 3) Things weren’t going to work out with the gal I was kinda sorta seeing. When I got home I wrote a page or two of notes on what exactly she had foretold. Weirdly, a few months later I tore my room apart looking for those notes and they were gone. (And I hold onto my notes religiously, recently I found a friend’s decades-old address from when he lived in another state tucked onto some random sheet of paper in one of the economics textbooks I had kept from college.) So my extended fortune is lost and what I mostly remember from the psychic was this: Towards the end of my reading, she said I was surrounded by a black aura that was dragging me down. This was not good. She could cleanse this aura for $600. When I said I wasn’t interested, she said she could do a partial cleanse for $300. I didn’t bite.** A few weeks later a coworker saw on the news that the psychic was busted by the police for running a scam. Geez: she was a white woman. Minneapolis police must have been bored that month.
* Kinda funny after I threw myself into writing a few years later, I would get miffed when someone would call my writing a hobby— this ain’t collecting stamps or assembling ships in a bottle.
** Then again I didn’t ask if financing was available or if I could pay $150 to just sand off the edges.