I Was a Hotline Psychic for Miss Cleo

I Was a Hotline Psychic for Miss Cleo

I expected callers to see through my act, but mostly they dialed in ready to believe. Anyway, it turned out I wasn't such a bad psychic. My two years as a submediocre liberal arts major had made me an expert at fraud.

nytimes.com

Our new employer was the Psychic Readers Network, a hotline known for its ads starring Miss Cleo, a motormouthed shaman with a lavishly fake Jamaican accent and a streetwise, no-nonsense approach to soothsaying. She was always barking at advice seekers: “Call me now!”

Instead, they called me. That summer, whenever I could, I stayed up all night smoking out the window and guzzling cheap wine while doling out fortunes over a landline. For some reason, the customers expecting Miss Cleo didn’t seem to mind when they got a clueless, depressive 20-year-old from the suburbs instead.