I'm Not Gonna Lie Read online

  “How should I know? I’m just saying that maybe if your girlfriend talks to her dog, she’ll feel better. Knowing the dog’s in a better place and all.”

  “Okay, I see, yes, well, this sounds insane. Off-the-charts nuts. Where is this pet psychic freak weirdo, anyway?”

  “Hermosa Beach. You have to pay cash. Plus I heard she’s not cheap.”

  “I bet. She probably charges an arm and a paw.”

  A pet psychic. I couldn’t believe I was even having this conversation. Like I was ever gonna drive halfway to San Diego down the horrendous 405, the world’s busiest, most congested, most migraine-inducing freeway, and pay through the nose—er, snout—cash, so my girlfriend could talk to her dead dog.

  I told my girlfriend about the pet psychic, laughing pretty much the whole time, maybe being a little bit dismissive. I noticed as I was talking that her eyes got wide. When I was finished, she sat up in bed. It was the first sign of life I’d seen from her in a week.

  “We have to go,” she said.

  “To the pet psychic? See, I’m not sure she’s legit; plus we have to go on the freeway—”

  She slid back down into the bed and gave me what I can only call a sad, puppy-dog look. Melted me. That sealed it. I had no choice. I made an appointment with the pet psychic.

  And that’s how we ended up stuck on the 405 in rush-hour traffic at noon, which is not even rush hour, but on the 405 you’re always stuck in rush-hour traffic.

  I was intrigued. I actually wanted to meet the pet psychic. I’ve always been fascinated by death. I don’t know why. It might sound morbid, but I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be dead. I know, of course, that you stop breathing and people can’t see you anymore and you can finally quit worrying about paying your car payment and your credit card minimum and your cable bill, but what does being dead feel like? As we motored down the 405 freeway doing a brisk three miles an hour, I realized I had a lot of questions for my girlfriend’s dead dog.

  Mainly, though, I wanted to find out the answer to the big question:

  What really happens when you die?

  Well, to start with, I think the body is a container for the spirit.

  In fact, I’ve heard people say that you choose your body. That may be so, but as you get older, your body falls apart, and I don’t think you choose that. Maybe you just choose your body in the beginning. How does that work? Does your spirit go to a showroom and pick out the body it wants? Is it like a dealership? Can you haggle?

  “This body is short and dumpy, and I can see the hair is already thinning. I can tell that you’re rolling back the hair. You’re not fooling me with that comb-over. This body is going bald at thirty. How much for something taller and better-looking, with a thick head of hair?”

  I know that whatever body you choose, it will deteriorate. And when your body goes, it does not go quietly. You will leave a little something behind—some farts, some pee, possibly a tiny bit of shit. That’s why some genius invented Serenity protective undergarments.

  So, yes, I had a lot of questions for the pet psychic.

  I had never been to a pet psychic before—never heard of a pet psychic before—but I do believe in psychics. I think that some people have a gift: the ability to see into the future, even, in some cases, to connect with people who have passed on. You have to be careful, though. Not everybody who says they’re a psychic is the real deal. I wouldn’t stop on the way to the airport to get my fortune told by some psychic sitting outside her house in a folding chair. But if I got a solid recommendation from someone I trust, then I would see that psychic. I actually had an unbelievable experience with a psychic once, in the eighties. Totally freaked me out. And got me into a ton of trouble.

  This psychic, I’ll call him Bandini, was really different. He was a hyphenate: He was both a psychic and a comedian. I know that sounds like a joke, but it’s not. He would perform his stand-up in clubs or at people’s homes, and after he finished his set, he would do readings. I went to see his show with a woman I was dating pretty seriously. After his set, I wanted to go to my place and have sex, but she wanted to stay and have her palm read. As far as negotiating our plans for the rest of the evening, we were very far apart. But I told her to go for it. I wanted to make a call anyway.

  While my girlfriend was having her reading, I found a pay phone—this was before cell phones—and called this other girl I’d been seeing. Casually. Once in a while. Couple of times. We’d gone to high school together and lost touch. Then somehow we reconnected and had gone out the week before. Casually. Couple of times. To a motel.

  “How did it go?” I said to my girlfriend in the car after her reading, not really caring that much how it went. I cared mainly about getting her back to my place.

  “Interesting,” my girlfriend said. “He read my palm.”

  “That’s kind of a cliché, isn’t it? Not very original.”

  “Call it what you want. He definitely saw certain things.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  I should say that at this point, I thought all psychics were full of crap, able to wow you by telling you a few “amazing” things that they figured out just by being observant.

  “Well,” my girlfriend said, clearing her throat, sounding a little annoyed, “Bandini looked at my palm for a long time. Then he frowned and said, ‘I see that you’re with somebody. The guy you came here with? Is he your boyfriend?’ I told him yes. You are my boyfriend, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course I am. Sure. Why are you asking me?”

  “Because Bandini said you’re seeing someone else.”

  I nearly drove off the road. “That’s crazy,” I said. “The guy’s nuts.”

  “He saw a ‘J.’ Very clearly. He thought her name began with a ‘J.’”

  “A ‘J’? ” I started coughing. “Ha! See? Right there. That’s wrong. I don’t know anybody whose name starts with a ‘J.’”

  “Well, he wasn’t sure about the ‘J’ being the first letter of her name.”

  “That’s because Bandini the psychic comedian is full of it.”

  “He may have been confused.”

  “May have been? He was definitely confused. He was confused because he’s full of shit.” I gripped the steering wheel to keep my hands from shaking.

  “No, he was confused because he kept seeing the word ‘windjammer’ along with the letter ‘J.’ He also saw last Tuesday and Thursday nights really clearly, like in a vibrating purple color.”

  My cough rose up from my chest and clutched my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I would pass out.

  “You okay? That’s a nasty cough.”

  “I’m good. I had a couple of tacos while you were with the psychic. I think the meat was tainted. The sauce was a weird color, too—”

  “It’s not true, is it?”

  “No. Of course not. Not at all. Not a word of it.”

  Bandini nailed it.

  All of it.

  I saw my old high school flame Tuesday and Thursday night at the Windjammer Motel in a sleazy room with purple carpeting, purple walls, and a purple bedspread.

  Oh, and her name?

  Janine.

  • • •

  WE arrived five minutes early for our appointment at the pet psychic. I parked in front of the pet psychic’s house, a small, boxy one-level Spanish on a nondescript street close to the beach. I noticed that the street was a dead end, which, when you think about it, seemed appropriate. We looked at each other, hesitated, then got out of the car. Instantly, all feelings of nervousness or weirdness fell away. A sense of relaxation washed over me. I reached for my girlfriend’s hand. We walked up to the pet psychic’s door and knocked.

  After what felt like at least five minutes, the door opened and a seventy-year-old woman pulling an oxygen tank appeared. She looked like an old
er version of Meryl Streep. Swimming pool blue eyes. A full mane of reddish hair. A warm smile bordered by two deep dimples. She put her hands together in prayer, and sort of bowed.

  “Welcome,” she said. “I’m so happy to meet you.”

  And then, without thinking, I instinctively hugged her. I reached out and put my arms around her. I have no idea why. I just felt compelled to hug this Meryl Streep–look-alike pet psychic. I didn’t want to squeeze too hard, because she felt fragile, and her breathing was labored and came in short spurts, wheezes, but as I hugged her I felt a warm sensation go through me, like an electrical current. I’d never seen this woman before in my life, and yet I was enjoying one of the great hugs of all time.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  She slowly pulled away from me and put her arms around my girlfriend. They hugged even longer, and my girlfriend started to tear up. The pet psychic patted my girlfriend’s hair gently and whispered something, and my girlfriend nodded. The pet psychic closed her eyes and spoke quietly in her raspy voice. “We have a lot to talk about,” she said.

  She gently broke the hug and started walking toward a room in the back of her small house, dragging her portable oxygen tank behind her like a tail. We followed her past a cluttered living room completely filled with crystals—crystals on an old television set, a credenza, end tables, shelves. In the center of the room, on a coffee table, a gold Buddha sat surrounded by even more crystals. As we walked behind the pet psychic, wind chimes sang outside a large picture window and cast a golden light across our path.

  We came to a back room, a kind of porch, and the pet psychic gestured toward a love seat facing an overstuffed armchair. We sat down and the pet psychic sat heavily into the chair, arranging her oxygen next to her. She smiled at us, and then she closed her eyes. She sighed, let out a long, cleansing breath, and fell into a deep trance.

  After a full two minutes, she said, “Yes. Uh-huh. I see a strange-looking dog. A spaniel crossed with a poodle, maybe. A mutt.”

  My girlfriend looked at me in confusion, but I nearly fell off the love seat. “That’s my dog! From when I was a kid. I had that dog for sixteen years.”

  The pet psychic dropped her head and covered her face with her hands. “This dog liked to go in the car.”

  Wow. How could she know that? Lady, every dog likes to go in the car. This pet psychic was a fake. The oxygen tank was probably a prop, a way to tug at your sympathy and get you to cough up more money.

  “This dog would go crazy whenever you grabbed your keys,” the pet psychic said. “That was his signal. You would grab your keys and he’d think he was going in the car with you.”

  Whoa. She hit that on the head. I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “It was kind of funny.”

  “When this dog got old, he developed problems with his hips. Terrible. Finally, you had to put him down.”

  Damn. Two for two.

  “Yes,” I said softly. “That’s true.”

  “You brought him to the vet and you left. You knew it was the end, but you didn’t stay with him. You couldn’t face it. You knew if you stayed, you’d lose it, that you’d fall to pieces. You tried to pretend that you were tough, that it didn’t matter. But it did matter. You left because you knew that was the only way you could hold it together. You didn’t want to cry.”

  I bit my lip. I could feel the tears welling up.

  “He wants you to know that it’s all right. He understood. He knew how you felt. He knew you loved him.”

  “I didn’t know what to do . . .” I said, the tears trickling down my cheeks.

  “Are you crying?” my girlfriend said.

  “No,” I blubbered. “Allergies.”

  “He forgives you,” the pet psychic said. “Now, he says, you have to forgive yourself.”

  I lost it. I tried to fight back my tears. And failed.

  “He was a good dog,” I said.

  The pet psychic pulled a tissue from a box on the table next to the love seat and handed it to me. I dabbed my eyes and blew my nose. My girlfriend shook her head and rested her hand on my forearm.

  “Now you,” the pet psychic said to my girlfriend.

  The psychic closed her eyes and drifted off into that trance again, this time for a solid three minutes. When she opened her eyes and spoke, her voice seemed higher and had lost its raspy sound.

  “I hear her,” she said.

  My girlfriend gripped my hand so tightly I thought she would snap off a finger. The pet psychic nodded and spoke in an even higher voice. “‘Hey, dying was as much of a shock to me as it was to you,’” the pet psychic said.

  My girlfriend gasped.

  “‘It was quick,’” the pet psychic said in that new voice. “‘I wanted it to be quick, because I knew you couldn’t handle a long illness. Believe me, I didn’t want to go through that, either.’”

  The pet psychic scrunched her forehead; then she coughed and her raspy voice came back again. She opened her eyes and scanned our faces. She stared into my girlfriend’s eyes. “It was a freak thing, wasn’t it? Unexpected. The dog was so young. A puppy.”

  My mouth dropped open like a trapdoor. I thought, “How does she know this? Puppies don’t usually die. We never said one word to her.”

  “Was she in any pain?” my girlfriend asked her.

  “No, no, none at all. She just said, ‘Shocked me as much as it did you.’”

  “But no pain?” my girlfriend said.

  “No. But. Oh. Aha.” The pet psychic scrunched her forehead again.

  “What?” I said.

  “I see her again,” the pet psychic said. “She said . . . Wait . . . Okay, I got it. . . . She said that she did not like being dressed up.”

  My girlfriend let out a small scream.

  The pet psychic raised her head and looked up into the ceiling. She frowned. “I see clothes. A lot of clothes. Tiny clothes. Piles of tiny clothes. I see a teeny pink dress and pink hat.”

  “I put that on her for her birthday,” my girlfriend said, then turned to me. “She looked adorable, didn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, she did. Absolutely. Very cute.”

  “I thought she liked that outfit,” my girlfriend said.

  “Apparently not so much,” I said.

  “The clothes choked her,” the pet psychic said.

  My girlfriend grabbed herself around her midsection. She looked stricken. “Is that why she got sick? From the clothes? Tell me it wasn’t from the clothes.”

  “She didn’t get sick from the clothes,” the pet psychic said. “She just felt uncomfortable. The clothes were too tight.”

  “That sounds right,” I said. “I get very uncomfortable when my pants are too tight. But I can undo them because I have thumbs. I can even take them off. The dog? No.”

  I shook my head sadly.

  “I didn’t realize. . . .” My girlfriend’s voice trailed off.

  “She had a lot of clothes,” I said to the pet psychic. “That’s true. A lot of tight-fitting clothes.”

  My girlfriend frowned at me. “Did you ever think her clothes were on too tight? Did she ever look uncomfortable to you?”

  I squirmed in my seat. I tried to catch the pet psychic’s eye, but she was staring off, avoiding me. I looked back at my girlfriend. “To tell you the truth, a couple of times I thought the dog didn’t really dig it when you put clothes on her.”

  “When?”

  “Well, okay, when I put the Lakers jersey on her, she seemed cool, relaxed, comfortable. But when you put on that tight dress, the pink one, or that hoop skirt, or those snug little capri pants, she would just sit there. She never moved. She would not move at all. When you turned away, she gave me a look that said, ‘Take this off me.’”

  My girlfriend folded her arms. “She did not.”

  “She did. You c
ould see it in her face. ‘I hate this outfit. Take it off me.’ You could see it in her eyes.”

  My girlfriend shot me a look that could kill, then looked past me out the window. “You never said a word.”

  “I’m telling you now. It’s a little late; I grant you that. I was going to say something the next time you put on the tight clothes, but then, you know, she got sick, and then . . .”

  The pet psychic slowly swiveled her head and looked into my eyes. She held her gaze on me, gave me a ferocious stare. “She wants to talk to you,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. She has something important to say.”

  “Really? I’m surprised. I mean, we liked each other, we got along great, but we weren’t close.”

  My girlfriend elbowed me.

  “I’m open. I’ll listen. What does she want to tell me?”

  “She says . . .”

  The pet psychic stopped, then nodded as if she were listening to someone giving her complicated instructions. She began again.

  “She says she’s sorry that she was such a nuisance when you came home. She wants to apologize for barking so much and for running around and around your feet like a lunatic.”

  This was uncanny. How could she know that? Every word the pet psychic said was absolutely true.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Tell her it’s okay. I might’ve jumped or yelled a little bit at the time when she nipped my toes, but I’m over it.”

  “You yelled at her?” my girlfriend said.

  “No. Not at all. Not really. I might’ve raised my voice a little bit. She was biting my toes. I didn’t want her chewing up my nail polish, choking, and dying. I guess it wouldn’t have mattered. . . .”

  “There’s something else.” The pet psychic jammed her eyes shut and scowled. “I’m getting something with . . . golf clubs.”

  I moved forward in my chair. “Golf clubs?”

  “Yes. I see a bunch of golf clubs lined up against a wall.”

  I had to keep myself from leaping out of the chair.

  In my house I keep several golf clubs lined up against the wall.