The Intuitive

Black Book 60, 9-5-2007

My wife and I are in the process of getting settled in a house in Livingston, Montana, and we don’t yet have wifi, so I’m writing this under the skylights of the town’s beautiful public library.

I’ve been coming to Livingston for more that 40 years, and I’m sure I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about this town over all those years; I wrote much of Till the Wheels Fall Off in a room at the Murray Hotel, but this is the first time I’ve had the luxury to spend really significant time here, so I’ve hauled along ten years of my black moleskins, and I’m going to be sifting through them, organizing and indexing, and trying to pull together all the loose strands of the stories, books, essays, and other nonsense that are scattered throughout their pages.

Today is another random find, and it’s the first installment of a larger piece that was written during one of the many really dark periods of my life. I’ll try to find the rest of it so I can post the entries in succession.

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ONE AFTERNOON IN the middle of my life I rode a bus across town to see the Intuitive. That was, at any rate, how the man billed himself. His business, I’d been told, was strictly word of mouth.

There was nothing whatsoever about the idea of seeing the Intuitive that appealed to me, but at the time I’d been depressed and twisting in the wind for so long that I was desperate. I felt like my skin had been turned inside out and salted. A therapist I’d been seeing off and on for a couple years had essentially thrown up his hands. “At some point,” he said, “we have to start thinking about the efficacy of these sessions, and in my honest opinion that point is now.”

The therapist was a no-nonsense ex-Marine, and I had clearly introduced into his life a greater sense of futility than his professional pride could handle. It was he, at any rate, who suggested the Intuitive, though I should point out that he shrugged and noticeably winced when he handed me the man’s business card. The card had the Intuitive’s name on it, of course, along with a rainbow that made me immediately squeamish, and the words EXPECT THE MIRACLE YOU DESERVE! Exclamation points tend to bug the shit out of me. Rainbows and exclamation points struck me as especially toxic.

Yet there I was, riding the bus clear across town to see this man.

The Intuitive’s place of business, it turned out, was in a run-down house at the very edge of the city—literally: the block in which this house was located was, near as I could tell, the last block in the city. It was situated on a cul-de-sac and perched directly across a narrow lane that ran right up against the bluffs of the river. From the front porch, which was littered with empty cans, dirty coffee cups, ashtrays, old newspapers, and fast food wrappers, you could look out across the river to the runways of the international airport that was sprawled on the other side.

It began to rain just as I stepped onto the front porch of the Intuitive’s house and knocked on the door. An older Vietnamese woman answered the door, turned immediately away from me without actually acknowledging my presence, and shouted something unintelligible up a dark staircase. From the mail boxes in the entry I surmised that the Intuitive was merely a roomer in the house. Two haggard-looking characters were sitting in the living room, smoking and watching Star Trek on the television.

A man I took to be the Intuitive appeared in the shadows on the landing and beckoned me to follow him up the stairs. He was a squat fellow with the build of a compulsive weightlifter. His jeans and t-shirt were both too tight. I guessed he was in his early forties.

I followed the Intuitive into a room and he closed the door behind us. He indicated an aluminum lawn chair and invited me to sit down. The chair was exactly like those my dad would haul out of our backyard shed every summer; the green, interwoven straps were badly faded. The Intuitive took a seat on the edge of the bed and said, “Please relax and have a look around.” At this point it was absolutely clear that the Intuitive’s office, such as it was, was also his bedroom. There were dozens of framed photographs of the same attractive young woman on the walls, and in many of them she was wearing what appeared to be transparent lingerie. She had very large nipples. “Are all these photos your wife?” I asked.

“I wish,” he said. “That is my dear cousin Theresa.”

The room was cluttered with books, clothing, and baseball mitts, most of which seemed very old. There were piles of baseball mitts all over the place. “You play baseball?” I asked.

No, the Intuitive said. The mitts had belonged to a former client who had drowned, and the man had given them to the Intuitive in lieu of payment. He said he would eventually get around to trying to sell them on eBay.

The Intuitive asked what brought me to see him. I said that I had been referred by my therapist. And what, he asked, did I hope to accomplish? I shrugged. “Accomplish?” I said. “I have no idea. What is it exactly you do?”

“I can do whatever you want, within reason,” he said.

“And if I don’t know what I want?”

The Intuitive raised a harmonica to his lips and blew a few notes. “Then I will tell you what you want,” he said.

I leaned back in the lawn chair and closed my eyes. What the fuck? The rain was pounding away on the roof outside the window. I was so fucking tired. From across the river the sound of jets taking off and landing rattled the window in the Intuitive’s bedroom. When I opened my eyes again, the Intuitive was speaking, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying over the racket from the airport.

The Intuitive shuffled the harmonica from hand to hand, and kept raising it to his mouth to blow a few notes. These notes seemed random. They comprised no recognizable tune, and gave no indication that the Intuitive actually knew how to play the harmonica. He must have sensed my confusion, because he waved the instrument in my direction and said, “This? I use it as a sort of prompt, or you could think of it as a tuning mechanism. I’m trying to find your key.”

“Let me know when you’ve found it,” I said.

“You’re badly out of tune, that much I can tell you. I’m sure that’s no surprise. Pretty much everyone who comes to see me is out of tune, but you’re especially discordant. I’m trying to figure out where to start.”

He rolled his head around between his shoulders as if he had a kink in his neck.

“When was the last time you took a piss?” he said.

I told him I couldn’t recall. It seemed like it had been a long time.

“Good” the Intuitive said. “That’s very good. Let’s try to hold onto that piss as long as you can.”

The Intuitive closed his eyes and we sat in silence for a what seemed like fifteen minutes. It continued to rain, and the darkness outside the window gradually overran the sky and the lights from the airport began to emerge like beacons. Many of the lights flashed on and off, and some of them jerked around like searchlights, creating strange effects in the fog that had begun to settle over everything. Outside the door of the Intuitive’s bedroom the house seemed eerily silent. I listened and concentrated, but could hear no sound other than the steady breathing of the Intuitive on his bed. I studied the more revealing photos of the Intuitive’s cousin.

At that moment, the Intuitive suddenly rolled his head violently from side to side, and without opening his eyes he said, “Something’s really got you by the balls, and your heart is like a clenched fist. It is a miracle you are alive. When you sleep do you ever dream you are a bird? If so, what kind of bird? Do you know?”

I told him that to the best of my recollection I had never dreamt I was a bird. This was the truth. I very, very seldom recalled my dreams in any detail.

“Let’s try something,” the Intuitive said. He asked me to close my eyes and keep them closed. I did so and felt him moving around behind me. Some sort of blindfold was tied tightly around my head, and the Intuitive then put his arms under my armpits and raised me out of the lawn chair.

A great deal of time seemed to pass. Perhaps I dozed off. The Intuitive was still behind me, and I was dangling from his arms. I could hear the rain on the roof, the rattle of leaves being scattered by the rain. This, of course, was between the bursts of noise from the airport. In these interludes I could also hear the breathing of the Intuitive. He then began to steer me, moving me slowly forward using his arms and knees.

“I can see your heart,” he spoke directly into my right ear. “It isn’t broken; hearts very seldom are. In most hearts, though, you’ll find small dark scars, almost like the cigarette traces you often encounter in the sorts of motel rooms where prostitutes take their clients. These scars are the result of serious, regrettable mistakes and bad decisions. Your heart is covered with such scars.”

As he was speaking these words the Intuitive was once again dragging me somewhere, and I heard a door open. The Intuitive rolled me in his arms so that I was propped up against his hip, or perhaps against a door frame. I heard the sound of moving water. It sounded like a stream splashing up against rocks. I could also smell something that reminded me of the hay in an old horse barn I often visited as a child. The Intuitive, I realized, was taking a piss.

I was then shifted in the Intuitive’s arms, so that his lips were once again directly behind my right ear. “I’m going to put you in a boat now,” he said. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to do anything. Just relax. The boat is sound, and the water knows where to take you.”

I had the very real sense that I was in fact being lowered into a boat, and I could no longer make out any light in the margins of the blindfold. I reached out with my left hand and felt water. The Intuitive gave the boat a shove and I began to move.

“Will I come back here?” I asked as I moved away.

“That all depends on how far you go,” the Intuitive said.