Psychics Have to do Laundry Too

I stacked the tarot cards neatly in a pile and smiled at her. She got up and thanked me for the reading as I gave her a hug.

“What are you doing after you leave tonight?” she asked me as the quiet din of the metaphysical bookstore once again entered my consciousness. While doing readings at Healing Earth Resources in Chicago for $1/minute at the folding table set off to the side of the big store which used to be a Circuit City, I was typically able to tune out the noise of the shoppers and focus on my work. Once finished, however, it all came rushing back in.

Healing Earth is where I began my career as a full-time reader a little over twenty-five years ago. I started in their original location on Lincoln Ave and about a year in they moved to the much bigger location on Ashland Ave. I was there twice weekly on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for a three-hour block of time taking walk-ins who would sign up on a clipboard nearby.

“Laundry,” I replied honestly to my last client of the night’s question as to what I’d be doing afterward.

Her face fell. “Laundry? Couldn’t you have said you were going to meditate under the full moon or something?” she laughed.

“I mean, I could have, but it would not have been honest. Psychics have to do laundry too,” I replied, and off she went. Her opinion of me perhaps changed a bit by the reminder that I was human, just as she was.

“We’re having a full staff meeting,” the general manager of Bub City, the restaurant in Chicago where I had been working for almost a decade, announced one night. I was still in college when I started there, and here I now was at 31 years of age still slinging BBQ and Crabs while acting and directing during the day with The Imagination Theatre Company and squeezing in rehearsals and shows at night. When I was in a nightly play, my bank account grew thin, as none of that ever paid. When I was not rehearsing or in a show, I was a bit more in the flow with money, but the lulls when they came, were a challenge. I was comforted only by the fact that everyone else I knew at the time who was acting was pretty much in the same boat as me. It had been a couple of years since I had acted at night, and I was enjoying being more in the flow when the announcement about the meeting happened.

We pretty much all knew what this meeting was going to be about. Over the past few years Bub City, which had originally seated over 600 people at full capacity with another couple of giant banquet rooms and a full bar next door with a stage and dance floor featuring bands like “The Burnin’ Hunks of Love”, had been cut into pieces, each one lopped off and rented out to other enterprises and businesses. We were down to the bar which had been converted into a dining room and the two remaining banquet rooms adjacent to the bar used for regular dining on busier nights.

“We’re closing, right?” I said to the G.M. when I saw him in the kitchen later that night. The meeting was set for a week ahead.

“Am I the captain of the Titanic?!” he joked, as a way to throw me off and stem the rumors.

As it turns out, he was the captain of a sinking restaurant and we were, closing that is. We had another month there and then we’d all be out of a job. Bub City was owned by Lettuce Entertain You which is a pretty large restaurant corporation with many different and unique eateries in and around Chicago. The management let us all know they would do what they could to help us try to find work at the other restaurants.

“Time to go be you!” I heard from my support staff. I had been channeling at this point for about a year and a half and reading tarot cards for much longer than that. I told them to shut up and applied for a job at Cafe-Ba-Ba-Reeba. It was the only one of the twenty or so restaurants I had to choose from that I wanted to work at.

I got my choice and headed in the week after Bub City closed, a closing which meant saying goodbye to people who had been in my life, some of them almost daily, for over nine years.

I lasted two weeks at Cafe-Ba-Ba-Reeba. I walked in one late afternoon for my dinner shift, my body screaming at me to quit. I walked downstairs to the manager’s office and gave notice. I told him that I wanted that night to be my last night, but he convinced me to give two weeks, keeping me in good graces with the corporation should I ever want to work for them again. I relented.

But when you’re done, you are done, and I was done. Cooked. Burnt to a crisp. He ended up sort of honoring my request by taking me off of the calendar a couple of days later and sending me home due to low reservations on the books the couple of times I had come in. I could not tell if he was fucking with me or not, but I did not care as I was free. Free!

I also was suddenly staring into the abyss, an abyss many of you reading may be familiar with, the abyss of leaving the security of being an employee of another and going out on your own. It is not for the faint of heart, this action, and yet for many of us, it becomes clear at some point that there is no other choice.

I had a partner at the time, but she was not in a position to support me financially, and going to either of my parents for any real support was not an option (although my mother did design my very first business card for me). So it was up to me to make something happen and make it happen fast, as in immediately, as I was a hundredaire at the time.

I headed first to Healing Earth Resources and talked to Dawn Silver, the owner.

“Do you have any openings for readers?” I asked. There was always a reader there during the daytime hours set up at the first table in the little vegetarian cafe and juice bar that was part of the store.

“I don’t right now,” she said, but I’ll put you on the waitlist in case someone drops off.

“What about at night?” I asked. I had never noticed a reader there at night, and, well, I was set on making this happen.

“We don’t normally have readers at night,” she said, “but you can try it out if you like.”

I took Tuesdays and Thursdays.

On my first shift, someone sat down with me for a forty-five-minute reading. Dawn had suggested she come in and see me. She was like this, supportive of all of us who independently contracted with her and her space, a space she co-owned with her husband Michael.

A couple more people sat with me that night, and I walked out with $100 feeling like I was off to a good start. That would have been a good night for a Tuesday at the restaurant in 1998.

I talked with several different owners of different metaphysical shops in and around Chicago and after a few auditions (Dawn was the only one I did not have to audition for as she knew me pretty well already as a frequent shopper and she trusted her intuition in saying “yes” to me), I had a few other regular reading gigs set up.
“Heaven” — in Naperville (every other Saturday afternoon)
“Carol’s Crystal Castle” in Lombard (every Wednesday)
And “Unseen Insight” in Niles (my regular Friday afternoon into the evening shift).
Each shop would take a percentage of what I made as space rent ranging from 20%-40%

I also told everyone and anyone who would listen what it was I was now doing and set my rates for hour-long private sessions held in my 450-square-foot garden apartment in the Bucktown neighborhood.

The first few weeks were fun and rolling along and then I hit a lull. I would go into one of the spaces and no one or only one person would sit with me, and I would walk out with no new dollars or just a few.

I started to panic.

I got a call from someone I used to work with at Bub City who wanted to know if I could take a catering shift that Sunday. Desperately I said, “Yes,” even though going back to food service felt just like that, going back, but I did breathe a sigh of relief at the guaranteed cash.

A day later I got booked to read tarot cards at a party that Saturday through one of the shops I read out of. Phew! More guaranteed cash as this was an hourly gig.

When the manager for the catering gig called me back with details for the event she referenced it being on Saturday.

“Wait, it’s on Saturday? I thought you said Sunday. I can’t work on Saturday,” which worked out since I really did not want to be waitressing again.

The first few months were filled with many more ebbs and lulls than flows where money was concerned, but suddenly my time felt truly like my own for the first time ever, and the sense of freedom coupled with optimism and faith kept me going.

There was the time I needed $80 for the gas bill, and I came home that day to a check for $84 in my mailbox, a completely unexpected rebate from my car insurance company.

I always had just enough, sometimes down to a dollar or so, but it was worth it to me to be the most authentic version of myself. It was a combination of high anxiety coupled with high magic at times as I was learning to take more responsibility for the pieces of my reality I could be in charge of while letting go of what I could not control.

I scheduled my first channeling workshop at Healing Earth a few months into my first year there and it was a success with the room filled to capacity (we were in the kid’s playroom as the other workshop room was not quite big enough to seat the sixteen people registered).

And bit by bit there was more flow than ebb and the lulls grew fewer and farther in between. When they did happen, I would calm myself, use my mantra, “I am grateful for having enough in this moment,” and then go do something fun. This spell has often been the antidote to getting out of my head, tending to my anxious bits, and opening up to more.

I think there is a projection at times on those we view as healers and guides that they (we) have it more together than everyone else. And let me tell you, this is pure projection. We are all human. I may talk to my “guides” more during times of uncertainty, but I feel it all just the same.

This world is not often friendly to the outliers, those of us who choose to break away from the pack and forge another way through. Just as corporate America is not so friendly to those of us who work for ourselves. The system is set up to reward those feeding off of the corporate teat and punish those of us who don’t.

And yes, we all do laundry.

Join us this Thursday, September 21st at 2:00pm Pacific on Zoom for our annual Equinox event here

Originally published at https://noraherold.substack.com.

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