For the upcoming edition of Sentient City, I did an interview with Hollywood actress Sarah Lassez about her book Psychic Junkie, where she describes how she bottomed out on her addiction to psychics. The topic seems timely. These days, everyone is casting predictions about Barack and Hillary. Lots of people are ringing their hands about whether they’ll lose their homes in today’s sub-prime mortgage crisis. Others lose sleep over whether they’ll be laid off or able to get a job in the encroaching recession. By now, fortune tellers are probably racking up more business with psychic junkies than bars are with drunks.

As I prepared the Lassez article, I remembered my old friend Cassia’s run-in with a psychic many years ago. To protect identities, I’ll have to alter the names of people and places, but let me start by pointing out that Cassia was my best friend in college. We both had to work while we went to school and most of our earnings went to rent and utilities. That’s why we used to smuggle plastic bags into gallery openings and stock up for the week at the hors d’oeuvres tables. I worked as a law clerk, but Cassia couldn’t type, so she had to work for Peter Purloin at Mad Hatter Cafe.

Peter answered to many aliases - Detlev Strumberger, Nick Dancer, Blake Borucki - when the cafe phone rang. Sometimes, the police would show up at the cash register, flashing badges. Peter would convey them to the back office and, within 15 minutes, the cops would be walking back out the front door with free cappuccinos. Cassia witnessed these incidents over and over from day one, but a job is a job, so she wore blinders.

Cassia looked like Nico and dressed like she was working a double shift at Warhol’s Factory, 1968. She was svelte and had bleach-blonde Cleopatra hair and alabaster skin. She wore liquid-winged eyeliner, form-fitting dresses, and laced-up chauffeur boots that she used to sashay around in to “Venus in Furs”. Peter couldn’t help but notice that this had led to a meteoric rise in male patronage of Mad Hatter. That’s when he began requiring Cassia to wear a French chambermaid’s apron, which he had stored in the cellar. At first, Cassia balked, but then she couldn’t help but notice that she was cleaning up on tips in that femme de chambre pinafore. After that, she not only wore it, she brought more in from home. (She had them in a special closet, it’s a long story…)

Yet, by her second week at Mad Hatter, Cassia came head to head with a crisis of conscience. It was about 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon in April. The lunch crowd had cleared out. Cassia was doing dishes. Peter was calculating receipts by the espresso-maker. At one point, he looked outside and saw a truck double-parked with its back hatch raised and its hazards blinking.

“Hey, Cassia, see those plants?”

Cassia looked up from the dishwater, “What plants?”

Peter’s mouth hung agape, as though he were looking into the eyes of some long-awaited destiny, “Those ones. In the truck.”

Cassia looked out the front window. “Yeah.”

“Those are African Moonlight plants. They grow long as jungle vines in the dark. They’re rare, worth a fortune. Dad used to have them imported to his garden in Zurich. Oh, and look! Their stalks are so tiiii-neee!” He shook his head in wonder, “Cassia, go get some and bring ‘em in here.”

“What!”

“You heard me. Get ‘em out of the truck. We’ll set ‘em up in here.”

Cassia froze. Peter’s eyes bore down on her. “Quick, before the delivery guy comes back!” A thunderous pause ensued. Water and detergent dripped from Cassia’s wrists and fingertips and on to the doily fringes of her compulsory outer-garment. She felt like Pontius Pilate: my job or my soul? Peter kept his gaze fixed on Belmont Avenue. At last, Cassia gasped, “No!”

Her heart pounded in anticipation of a pink slip, but, fearing the imminent return of the delivery guy, Peter responded, “Fine. I’ll do it.”

As Cassia watched Peter heist the plants two at a time from the back of the truck, she was forced to consider that she was being fed by dirty hands. The idea only became stronger as she watched him arrange all four African Moonlight plants at each of the four corners of the cafe. Just as she was coming to from shock, Cassia observed Peter as he stepped back and surveyed the plants with undue pride of ownership. “Don’t they make a great touch to the place?,” he said, “I feel like I’m back in Zurich with Dad.”

Every workday for the next two years, Cassia passed those African Moonlight plants, barely acknowledging them even as she watered and pruned them in her French maid’s apron; even as their vines began to wrap around the cafe jukebox, which Peter had lifted under cover of the night from an Archer Avenue garage years before with Cassia’s more amenable coworker Kenny; even as the plants were regularly featured in restaurant reviewers’ photos.

Then, one day, a stout, olive-skinned woman in a purple turban and black widow’s dress came into Mad Hatter. She plunked herself down on a stool at a table in the dead center of the cafe and opened a book on Vedic astrology. As the woman flipped to a bookmarked page, Cassia noted her plum-colored nail polish, mood rings of varying colors, and bracelet with silver and gold trinkets.

In the throes of a Polish Catholic upbringing, Cassia had stumbled on the writings of Ayn Rand and, ever since, had come to deplore anything having to do with religion, superstition, or divination. Nonetheless, the woman was a customer, so Cassia did her best to disguise her contempt long enough to take her order. The woman smiled at Cassia and said in an Eastern European accent, “Latte, thank you.” Cassia made the drink and brought it to the woman’s table. But, unlike most customers, the woman didn’t take this as her cue to reach for her purse.

With Ayn Rand passages churning through her head, Cassia mustered up her last dregs of politesse to ask the woo-woo woman, “Do you want to pay now or when you’re ready to leave?”

“When I leave, thank you,” the woman answered before turning to the natal horoscope of Idi Amin in the “Tyrant Personality” chapter of her book.

Cassia walked back behind the counter and threw her dishtowel down on the mini-refrigerator. The more the woman sipped her latte, the more Cassia hated her. This sorceress, this purveyor of illusions, this priestess of false doctrines and paternalistic dependency! She’s no better than televangelists. She’d better tip big.

A new round of customers began filing in. Between making drinks, changing money, doing dishes, making sandwiches and waiting tables, Cassia hadn’t noticed that the woman had disappeared. When it finally dawned on her, Cassia tore over to the table to see if she’d left any money. She hadn’t. But, in exchange for beating the check, she had left two vouchers for free tarot readings at Singha Psychic Center.

Cassia stomped over to the counter, the furies of hell raging in her blood and bones. She whipped the vouchers down on the counter and checked to see if there was any phone number on them. Sure enough, there was, along with an address that looked to be a couple doors down on Belmont. Cassia picked up the phone and pounded in the digits. A man answered, “Singha Psychic Center.”

Cassia put her fist to her hip, “Hello. I’m calling from Mad Hatter Cafe. One of your employees came in here this afternoon. She ordered a latte and left without paying.”

“How do you know it was my employee?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, sir. But she did leave two vouchers for free tarot readings at your shop and she definitely looked the part.”

“Oh,” the man exclaimed, “You’d like a tarot reading.”

“No. I don’t want a tarot reading.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want your tarot reader to come back down here and pay for her latte!”

“Wait a second. Where did you say you were calling from?”

Unprecedented allegiance rang in Cassia’s voice as she answered, “I’m calling from Mad Hatter Cafe.”

“Mad Hatter Cafe?,” he snapped back.

“That’s right, just two or three doors down the street from you.”

“Wait a minute!,” he screamed, “Are you the ones who stole my plants?”

All at once, memories of that day two years before - the day of the truck, the day of the heist - came flooding back to Cassia. She threw the phone on the cradle and rushed to pay for the woman’s latte out of her tip jar. What else could she do? The evidence against her was high as the ceiling and long and wide as the room. Sure, she hadn’t stolen the plants, but she’d watched Peter do it; she’d kept the job; and then she’d watered the African Moonlight plants twice a day for two years until they’d even outgrown her. That made her an accomplice.

To settle her nerves, she began filling extra sugar, pepper and salt shakers. They clanked in her hands as she lined them all up on the shelf above the sink. A man walked in with a black Labrador Retriever. In a fit of misdirected rage, Cassia lit into him, “You can’t bring your dog in here!” The man raised the harness on the dog’s back and barked back, “I’m blind!” Cassia gave him a large Rosehip Tea on the house and dissolved into tears.

Minutes later, the man who’d answered the phone at Singha Psychic Center stormed in, demanding his plants. By now, Peter had come back from his meeting with his investors downtown. He invited the man to the back office. Fifteen minutes later, the man walked out the front door with two free lattes - one for himself and one for the woo-woo woman, Cassia presumed - and without his African Moonlight plants. Six months later, Cassia learned how to type. And she never worked for Peter Purloin again.

The moral of this story is simply to follow Buddha’s advice. Take refuge in the dharma, not in psychics. We’ll explore this issue further in the next Sentient City in an interview with actress Sarah Lassez.