Psychic Junkie Read Free

at two fifteen I found out my boyfriend was a sex fiend drug addict who’d cheated on me with a Baywatch babe. It’d just been one of those days. The way I saw it, my first mistake was waking up, and my second mistake was not going back to sleep.
    Somehow I made it through the rest of the day—a bout with AAA (bastards had a theory about membership fees being required for membership); an audition (I certainly won’t be getting that part); and what seemed like hours of L.A. traffic as I sat in my car, trapped in one of those numb visionless states where an alien could drop from the sky and knit me a sweater and I’d not blink an eye.
    Finally home, I flopped onto the bed, arm flung across my eyes in an effort to make the world go away. Life outside my apartment was dangerous, and the events of the day were proof that I was not equipped to handle it. I’m much more cut out for island living—resort island living, I should say, not Survivor island living. Actually, I realized a piña colada could seriously be the answer. I wondered if I could have one (fine, five or six) delivered, and tried to remember what menus people had so thoughtfully crammed beneath my windshield wipers. A place called “Foo Chung’s Heartbreak Express—We Deliver Booze and Chocolate, No Questions Asked!” would be ideal right about now.
    I was about to journey to the kitchen, when I saw it above me: the water stain from hell. Just this morning it had been a little yellow dot, and yet somehow, in the course of my day, it had been fed a million other little dots and was now the size of a small child. I lay back down, hypnotized by the blistering mustard yellow stain. Hmmm, I thought, it looks familiar. I tilted my head, studying the mark. Oh my God. An Oscar. It looks exactly like an Oscar! It’s a sign I’m going to win an Academy Award!
    But then, as quickly as the hope shot through me, it was gone. I’d have to tell my landlord about this. The ceiling could collapse and kill me in my sleep.
    I started to cry.
    Here I’d just found out that the man I thought I’d loved was a sex fiend drug addict who’d cheated on me with a Baywatch babe (okay, she had just a brief stint on the show, but she was in a bikini, and I think that counts), but it was the water stain on my ceiling that made me lose it. I loved my little apartment: a 1940s-style studio apartment with a view of the Hollywood sign and a charming black-and-white checkered kitchen floor that made me want to wear white gloves and full skirts, and set pies in windowsills to cool. But my landlord was the not-so-wonderful aspect of my apartment. A rotund and prickly man, he acted as if I’d been sent from hell to personally orchestrate his downfall. This, I knew, was because I was a woman, as the men in the building could do no wrong. I swear the guy downstairs could douse his kitchen in gasoline, drop a match, and walk away—yet my landlord would simply study the charred remains, shrug, and proceed to talk about football or basketball or one of the many sports I do not pretend to understand. If I, however, so much as let a strand of my hair touch the bathtub, he’d fly into a tantrum about drains and clogs and exploding pipes and women and their hair.
    To cope with this annoying chauvinism I’d usually enlist whatever boyfriend I had at the time to deal with said fat landlord. But now I was alone. The water stain had waited to emerge (no one lived above me, and I swear it hadn’t rained in months) until I was freshly wounded and newly single, hence illustrating yet another reason why it sucks to be alone.
    Just call, my logical side said. Call and report the ceiling! Get it over with! Be responsible! I was about to reach for the phone, but the image of my landlord standing in my apartment with a scowl stopped me. “Obviously you were on the roof with a jack-hammer,” he’d say, shaking his fat head. No, I had no choice. My only option was to forget about my landlord, brave death