Psychic Blues
PSYCHIC
BLUES
CONFESSIONS OF A
CONFLICTED MEDIUM
BY
MARK EDWARD
FOREWORD BY JAMES RAND1
FERAL HOUSE
Psychic Blues © 2012 by Mark Edward
Images © 2012 by Mark Edward
Design by Sean Tejaratchi
A Feral House Original Paperback
All rights reserved.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PREFACE
CHAPTER I: ILLUSIONS ASIDE
The leap from Magic to Magick and how it all began
CHAPTER II: THE 900 YEARS
The psychic sweatshop and how I got my start there
CHAPTER III: WORLD’S GREATEST
Opportunity knocks and I make the leap
CHAPTER IV: TALKING TO THE DEAD
Making a living talking to yourself
CHAPTER V: RADIO SPIRIT
Hopping on the media bandwagon
CHAPTER VI: THE OC OCCULTIST
Navigating the land of the Woo-Woo Gurus
CHAPTER VII: VERY PRIVATE READINGS
The demands from being too close for comfort
CHAPTER VIII: MY DEAR AGENTS
Those who help make psychic dreams come true
CHAPTER IX: LADIES’ NIGHT
Held hostage for my gift
CHAPTER X: THE CELEBRITY SYNDROME
“Psychic to the Stars” and everything that comes with it
EPILOGUE: FUTURE TENSE
Potentials and pitfalls that await
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
In Psychic Blues Mark Edward has given us an absolutely unique book that also manages to be entertaining and readable. I say “unique” because he has the background experience to write such a book from a totally different point of view from anyone else I know. Until this work appeared, I’d always thought that William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley was the definitive book written from the point of view of one who really knows the art of mentalism from the inside out; now that laurel passes to Mark. While Gresham did all he could to research the secret world of the “closed” psychic operator and gave us—to the best of his ability—the villain Stanton Carlyle in all his perfidious glory, Mark Edward has actually performed as what is now known as a psychic entertainer.
Hollywood’s famous Magic Castle was Mark’s evening home for years, and he officiated at “séances” there that were so convincing to non-magicians that I personally had a difficult time handling the situation he’d created. Mark’s years of working in the trade provided him with that very special inner view of the public’s collective psyche, and this is grandly shown in how his main character reveals the subterfuges of the art. He is unlike others in his profession who hardly care about whether or not their customers really believe them and, if presented with a naïve enough victim, turn from entertainer to swindler.
Mark freely admits that he’s a performer, not of supernatural wonders but of pretty damn clever mind tricks that are revealed in the pages of this book. There are so many lessons to be learned from Psychic Blues and so many points to be made that a companion book enumerating these subtleties could easily be drawn up.
Thank you, Mark Edward. Just don’t wander over to The Dark Side or I’ll have to come after you.
—James Randi
PREFACE
Every time I get a little too high on my psychic horse or start taking myself too seriously, I stop myself from spinning off into the dark world of delusion and psychic self-deception by watching the 1947 film-noir classic Nightmare Alley.1 It helps me cope.
Tyrone Power is the Great Stanton, a carnival psychic. He gives the sheriff that famous standard reading that manages to turn the tables to his advantage and directs the law away from their initial plan to bust him. He convinces the sheriff that his “Scots blood is working right this minute,” and that he somehow knows the lawman’s deepest, darkest secrets. This ruse works beautifully. This same cinematic scene is reenacted all across America on a daily basis, from shady storefronts in Miami to Hollywood socialite parties. This ten-minute lesson in petty fraud is a rare glimpse of just how easy it is for a savvy, persuasive person to claim they have second sight.
Twenty-five years of working the psychic streets has taught me many truths, for better or worse. Sure, I have a pile of testimonial letters. Yes, I can see the future, given the right perspective and information, and of course I can read the paw of your pet poodle. I may indeed have a great gift, but it’s the gift of gab mixed with a healthy dose of imagination and nerve that has allowed me to be a psychic professionally and to now write about it.
My overwhelming interest in the magical realm began when I was a small child, watching in awe as my grandfather made candies and coins disappear and reappear at will. His magician’s hands entranced me. Add to that my propensity to always listen to my inner voice, though in the current New Age it’s been re-tagged as something other than basic common sense and a willingness to pay attention to intuition. Intuition is defined as knowing something without knowing how or why. It’s acute insight. So, is this what we mean when we say psychic?
I’m quite confident that I would know by now if I had a spirit guide or my Aunt Ethel’s watchful ghost alongside me. I have looked and searched, then looked again. I’ve traveled all over the planet and humbled myself in front of everything from Celtic priestesses to UFO abductees and their recruiters. This process has been repeated over and over, only to circle back endlessly into the cul-de-sac of my own personal nightmare alley. There’s nothing there in the dark, though I have frequently found myself wanting to believe there are supernatural elements to converse with and take refuge in. Their existence would have made life so much easier to understand and exploit. Still, I have a head start at getting your goat. And I will. It’s Darwin’s survival of the fittest, and a sideshow tent is never far from a psychiatrist’s couch; there’s just more sawdust on the floor.
The Great Stanton in Nightmare Alley starts out his ill-fated voyage as a carnival mentalist who climbs from the ragtag traveling carnival to the giddy heights of super-psychic stardom in a glitzy New York City club. In the beginning of the film, he witnesses the terrifying spectacle of a sideshow geek tearing the heads off chickens in the geek pit and asks the circus owner, “How could a guy go so low?” By the end of the film, Stanton has fallen from the summit of society’s psychic mountain and become that pitiful, alcoholic geek himself. The last lines in the film are between a circus owner and his stagehand, who again asks, “Gee, boss, how could a guy go so low?” To which the owner replies, “He reached too high.”
That line of dialogue echoes in me every time I’m told that I’m “blessed” or whenever I’m praised for how accurate my reading has been. That line never loses its sting. My conscience has never let me get too high—not yet, anyway. It’s been a damn near miss a few times, as the following pages will reveal, but I could never outright lie through my teeth and claim that I see spirits or cheat a sitter by making up only what I sense they want to hear. Instead, I have consistently opted to tell people what I feel in my gut is what they need to hear. Choosing that option has made a huge difference in the lives of the people I have spoken with.
Seeping through the cracks in the mirror of the New Age is humor too. Is all of this comical or prophetic? Have we reached a terminus of rationality or are we returning to our roots? I have witnessed a woman at a health-food store swinging her pendulum back and forth over several raw chicken breasts, trying to determine which
to purchase for her dinner by their various vibrations. Who am I to judge?
I got into the psychic business in much the same way Stan did in Nightmare Alley. I started off as a kid doing magic for whoever would watch. I craved attention. This took me through years of standard magic. But there was a problem. Where’s the drama in watching a dancing cane? I grew tired of turning the red handkerchief into a green one and so got into mentalism—the performance of mental magic that still uses sleight of hand, but without pulling rabbits out of hats or wearing a cheap tuxedo. Mentalism appealed to me because it had a more believable premise. Mind reading, telepathy, extrasensory perception, and moving objects with the mind all seemed as if they might just be plausible. Or it seemed to me, as a teenager, that more people had a serious interest in these possibilities than an interest in fancy rope tricks. Soon, I was on to more bizarre nontraditional magick and there was no turning back.
I kept doing readings whenever possible. I was being appreciated on a whole new level, like the Great Stanton when he seized the opportunity to get out of the carnival racket in order to receive the greater approval, admiration, and remunerations of high society as a “real phenomenon,” not just a cheap trickster. I identified with that character. And I still identify with that character and all the turmoil he went through. In fact, repeatedly watching the rise and fall of Tyrone Power’s character in that film has probably rescued my life more than I can ever fully realize. If not literally, at the very least it saved me from the darker paths I might have chosen had I not seen this admittedly over-simplified version of the tale of Icarus.
This book contains only my observations of the psychic world in its most likely paradigm: a terribly disappointing con. Decide for yourself whether or not what I have experienced is “psychic.” Yet we all have our psychic moments, don’t we?
If reading about my experiences saves you from any of the discomforting realizations that I have made myself a willing witness to, or keeps you from falling into an abyss of callous exploitation, or saves you from either considering a career in this dubious occupation or seeking out the services of a psychic or medium for anything more than a diverting few minutes of entertainment, then writing this book will have been well worth it. But as I part the curtains to the dark world that lies ahead, be warned. This is not an episode of The Ghost Whisperer, Medium, The Mentalist, or even a hilarious rerun of Bewitched. What you are about to read are the true, unvarnished accounts of what happened to me whenever I reached too high.
1 Adapted from William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley (Rinehart & Company).
CHAPTER I
ILLUSIONS
ASIDE
I’m not a weak conformist, but a tired nonconformist.
—Rod Serling1
“Mark, I need to talk to you.”
It was the end of another opening-night set of three close-up magic acts. Each had been a killer show and after the crowd slowly filtered out of the room following my last performance, I noticed the Magic Castle’s booking agent leaning against the wall, watching me closely, a glass of bourbon in his hand.
I quailed briefly, wondering what the problem was. Everything had gone smoothly. I had even enjoyed shaking hands with a few of the happy spectators who had congratulated me on the show as they’d left the room. I was in high spirits.
“Hey, Joe, what’s up?” I asked as I began to pack up for the night.
With a look of dire concern, he said, “You’ve got to get rid of that pentagram.”
“Get rid of the pentagram? What do you mean? It’s the centerpiece of my routine and my signature bit, Joe. I can’t take it out. It’s having the right effect on the crowd and working the room like it’s supposed to. Why should I take it out? It’s a part of my act.”
“You need to take it out. We’ll get letters.”
“Letters from whom?” I asked, incredulous.
“Letters from club members. They don’t like that Satan stuff.”
“Joe, it’s a card trick! The pentagram is a recognized symbol of protection in magic. It’s been around for five thousand years. Besides, the audience loves it when I bring it out. Satan doesn’t have anything to do with it. This is a magic club, not a coven.”
“Yeah, I know. But I think you should take it out.”
He took a slurp of his drink. Joe looked like a paunchy version of the late clown Emmett Kelly, only for real and not in makeup. He was wearing a red plaid sport coat that was too small for him over a dingy yellow shirt complemented by a huge Western-style bolo tie. His eyes were swollen from years of severe alcoholism, and his speech was slightly slurred. I’m sure, in his day, Joe must have been a magician of sorts, but how he got to be in charge of booking the Magic Castle’s acts was anybody’s guess.
“Okay, Joe. If it means me not working my twenty shows this week, I’ll take it out.” I needed the money. It was the slow season, and there was no use arguing with management. Once you were on the bad-boy list at the Magic Castle, you were soon out for good.
I folded up the offending parchment pentagram and put it in my bag of tricks. It was quitting time and several bartenders were upstairs waiting for my financial support.
“Oh, by the way,” Joe added with a wink, “you’re working the Sunday brunch. Be sure to be here by nine thirty. Your first show is at ten.” He quickly turned and lurched past me toward the exit.
What fun. Now I’d get the pleasure of working Saturday night until two in the morning then coming back for the Sunday morning crowd, which would include plenty of darling little children with their doting parents. No wonder Joe wanted the pentagram out. Kids wouldn’t understand the greater magical context, but more importantly, neither would most of their parents. Ah, well, that would add up to twenty-five shows for the week and an extra fifty bucks, plus a free Sunday breakfast.
I marched up the ersatz grandeur of the Magic Castle’s main staircase, thinking there must be a better way to make a living. Magic was an ancient art. It deserved better than balloon animals, sequined coats, and pastel-dyed doves. Was I a magician or a Magician?
Ever since I’d outgrown my boyhood fascination with it, I had questioned standard magic. Professional magicians were a lost cause, in my opinion. A rabbit pops out of a hat, so what? Other than eye candy for Las Vegas-style entertainment, which is fine, what’s the reason for that to happen? Mentalism, and any form of psychic work, based its reasons in the existence of another world and some form of superior knowledge or higher power. Because of this association with the miraculous, anything goes.
This supposedly more arcane belief in the miraculous has always been held in higher regard by the average person than disappearing bunnies or card tricks. There are now ghostbusters and mythbusters, and degrees in parapsychology being awarded in universities around the world. In fact, the use of the pentagram has only recently fallen into disrepute, largely due to its misunderstood applications by occult practitioners like Aleister Crowley and hyped-up rock performers like Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson, but pentagram imagery has been used as an amulet of protection for thousands of years. Until the Church of Satan and other posers began turning it upside down to resemble a goat’s horns, it was quite acceptable in most spiritual contexts. So what could be so horribly wrong with me using a pentagram?
The pathos of my situation irked me, but I soon drowned my aggravation in a single malt scotch, joining the vast brotherhood of fellow magicians who had passed so gloriously before me in like fashion.
At the end of that week, on closing night, after my final show, a cocktail waitress entered the room to clean up the empty bar glasses, napkins, and swizzle sticks that littered the floor, and my friend Joe poked his head in again.
“What happened?” he asked, knitting his brows with a sorrowful look that even Emmett Kelly might have liked to appropriate—an exaggerated expression of pity, as if his plastic prop flower had just wilted.
“What do you mean what happened? Everything’s fine. I’m done fo
r the week. I’ll see you around, Joe.” I continued packing my case, but Joe persisted.
“Wait . . . I mean, I watched your first show tonight and it just didn’t seem to have the same punch as when I saw it earlier this week. What happened?”
I summoned my last bit of energy and faced his bourbon breath head on. “Well, Joe, maybe it’s because I took the pentagram out of the act like you told me to.”
A faked spirit photo from the Houdini Séance Room
at the Magic Castle, Hollywood, CA, 1998.
A moment of semi-blank acknowledgement flashed in Joe’s eyes. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and looked back at me with an expression of epiphany. But then it was gone. He walked away, silently shaking his head.
I instantly determined that if I wanted to perform audience-pleasing magic, whether it included a psychic reading or not, I should not pay attention to what anyone else told me. This, I knew, was doubly true with anything another magician might tell me. I would be myself. I would go with my gut. Why not, when this advice holds true with all of life’s other battles, psychic or not?
Séancing in the Houdini Séance Room, 1998.
The next weekend I was booked for two séances in the Houdini Séance Room at the Magic Castle, instead of the close-up room. At least in the séance room I was free to explore all the acting abilities I could muster in my role as the Medium. I would have two fifty-minute mini-plays to develop my persona and also do what I was really starting to enjoy, playing up my character as “a medium with a message.” My dramatic presentations were re-enactments of what a traditional Victorian séance looked like and included the standard rattling tambourines, floating spirit voices, and thirteen people sitting around a circular table holding hands. I occasionally even had the opportunity to use a tantalizing lever that can push the sitters from the merely magical to the truly mystical: giving an accurate and believable psychic reading.