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Can I Read Your Mind?

It was the same spiel I’d heard around town, nearly word-for-word, somehow even more desultory in Sylvia’s presentation. Maybe it was because she was sick, or perhaps it was the presence of the man in the next room waiting to continue the argument I’d heard as I walked up the stairs (the women make the money, but often it is the men, the “managers,” who wind up with it). Whatever, there was an awful weariness about her. She could barely summon the energy to pitch me the crystals that she dolefully declared came straight from “the holy mountains of Jerusalem.” With those piercing eyes, orbs that could—and no doubt had—convinced gadjé and Rom alike of many things, she seemed to say: Help!

Not that this was an option, at least not from me. First off, Romani women do not have anything to do with gadjé men. To do so would be to risk being declared marimé, in a state of spiritual pollution, which can lead to excommunication from the community. Living within the Rom code, with marriages often still arranged among the various extended families, is not easy. But to be cut off is the ultimate calamity. No, it was not likely Sylvia would be taking a swell job as a legal secretary anytime soon. She would remain a psychic, no matter how rotten she appeared to be at it.

Still, I was becoming a sucker, a Gypsy’s fool. Not quite curse material, I began to look forward to forking over $20 for a palm reading, $45 for a full tarot deck. It was fun sitting with Dee, on Rivington Street. Since her spot is located a couple of doors down from the feminist sex emporium Toys in Babeland, Dee’s customers often arrive with shopping bags full of double-pronged dildos and glow-in-the-dark condoms, which may add a rakish touch to her readings as she cajoles you to purchase the “spiritual work” you so desperately need.

Linda, a younger, rapid-fire tarot reader who cheerfully admits to making her own “holy crystals” and keeps a large-print King James Bible along with much Christian iconography in her second-story place near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, operates with a different business plan. For $240 for the first month, and $8 a day subsequently, if she is not busy praying for one of her clients, Linda will answer your call at any time of the day or night to advise you about a troubling matter. To me, this seemed an excellent offer, way better than those of most shrinks, maybe even better than Prozac. There was only one catch. During this process, Linda cautions you not to see other readers. This will “conflict with the energy” emitted by the angels she has summoned on your behalf and result in her being forced to “pull the rug out from underneath you” without warning.

A strange thing happened soon after I visited Linda. On the F train, I saw a woman, an older black lady, whom I’d seen earlier that day in a psychic’s office. Recognizing each other, we smiled and held up our open palms. Like: You never know.

That was the core of it. On one hand, I justified giving money to these fakers as a form of grifter tax, a perverse appreciation of the long-running, ritualized con. But there was more to it than that. Hunted by the Nazis just like the Jews, the Rom might weight the wheel for the gadjé, but that didn’t mean they didn’t believe, totally, in the all-encompassing vagaries of chance and fate, or what they call baxt. “Baxt is everything,” one fortune teller told me. In fact, if you want to shake people up, sign on to a Romani Internet chat room (they exist) as prikaza, which means “bad luck.” You will be told to leave immediately.

As with a Coney Island ring toss, knowledge that a game is fixed doesn’t stop the urge to play anyway. It didn’t make sense, but there it was, beckoning me in. That’s what these ladies offer with their bogus candles, crystals, and cheesy maps of the palm: an escape to a world of old-style irrationality, where baxt is everything.

I was thinking of this as I drove out to see El Indio Amazonico, a storefront psychic who sports a full Amerindian headdress and a large white feather through his nose, and who refers to himself as “el mejor . . . guia espiritual,” no small claim on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, where the 7 train clatters overhead and the parasicologia y metafisica parlors are thicker than spinning spits of pollos a la brasa. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude tells of gifts Gypsies would bring to the Colombian countryside, but El Indio Amazonico, late of Bogotá, drew a blank when asked if he was Rom. Then again, he could have been fibbing, since the walls of his waiting room (along with the large-screen projection TV playing Mexican soap operas and the piles of supposedly discarded crutches) were plastered with promises to cure problems of love, luck, and business through testing by huevo, agua, and other Romani staples.

El Indio, who looked to be any age over 150, spread my tarot across a table covered with the green felt cloth usually found on a roulette table. Even in Spanish, the findings were not unfamiliar. I would live a long time, 98 years exactly. I was a good person, an honest person, I wanted to do good things for others. But there was a problem. I wasn’t totally happy. Things could be better. Here, El Indio added a Latin macho spin to the proceedings: My sexual activities had led to a dropping-off of potency. Placing a sandy substance that appeared to be cornmeal on the table, El Indio said he could arrest this decline. But it wouldn’t be easy. First I would need a major overhaul, a “spiritual vaccination.” Asked how much this inoculation would cost, El Indio wrote “$1,000.”

“A thousand dollars? Es muy alto!” I replied.

El Indio smiled sheepishly. He’d been around forever. He knew a live one when he saw him. Likewise, he knew the tourists, the dabblers, the ringers. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a foot-long piece of rope with seven knots tied in it. He told me to untie one knot on successive Fridays and make a wish. These wishes would come true.

But what about my sexual potency? I asked.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” El Indio Amazonico said, waving in the next client.