I’m A Little Dubious Of The $66.66 I Was Charged To Talk To My Dead Friends

My appointment with Lauren is at 4:41. I’m sure this has a deeper meaning, like the $66.66 I’ve been charged in advance. Another mystery: Lauren’s not answering her door. I re-check the address. On the porch are decorative butterflies, plastic mushroom lights and dry cat food. A sign says “WITCHES GATHER HERE.” A black cat naps under a tree. I think I’m in the right place. 

But where’s the witch? 

After more texts and straight-to-voicemails (shocker, it’s full), I accept that this isn’t happening. This visit with a local medium was supposed to be the start of a personal mission to talk to my dead friends, who are legion at this point in my late forties and whose absence defines me more than I’d be comfortable admitting most days. 

Thanks to a certain TV show, there’s been a surge of interest lately in a specific deceased friend of mine who was talented, hilarious, intelligent, influential, and complicated (to say the least). But the truth is, that friend is just one of many—all Tulsans who made an impact creating or supporting art—who are worthy of tribute. I thought I’d try to lead as many mediums as it took to as many of these unsung people as possible. I could hear from my friends again, and I could tell other people about them and their impact, too. 

But things don’t always work out like that: best laid plans and all. The Spirit realm has its own agenda, not to mention a paywall. That being said, mediumship sessions are cheaper than my last therapist, and seem to produce better results. With the exception of Lauren, that is.

I call the intrepid Kathryn Parkman to see if she’ll go to east Tulsa’s Botánica with me instead. I found this place by Googling “Santería near me.” I was raised Catholic but later became curious about religions like Santería and Hoodoo that melded their beliefs to Catholicism to preserve Indigenous traditions. In those religions, saints (adapted polytheistic gods) dispense favors, protection, or blessings in return for tangible gifts like whiskey, money, or cigars. Ceremony is the key. I want to do as many ceremonies as possible, but I’m on a budget and Miss no-show Lauren just cost me $66.66. 

Parkman and I walk into Botánica. Tidy shelves hold candles, ointments, and other supplies. There’s a Santa Muerta altar near the register. A skeletal robed figure with a scythe, “Saint Death” is a Holy Mother Mary for the destitute, downtrodden, and addicted. She provides protection from injustice, violence, and imprisonment. She’s a saint for those who live dangerously, either by choice or by circumstance. I like her. 

A woman and her teenage daughter are behind the counter, speaking Spanish. I ask if they get many non-Spanish-speaking customers. The daughter immediately says no. Some anglos might see this place as sacrilegious, others as a risk for cultural awkwardness, others as simply scary. 

We agree to a $25 reading, including translation from the teenage girl. I’m led to the back of the store. Parkman excuses herself to wait in the car. 

This is when I meet Mr. Arturo, the person who will do my reading. Mr. Arturo is ordinary-looking, but his presence is intense. He leads me to an office. My teenage interpreter and I sit across a desk from him. He has me place my hand on a blank piece of printer paper. He traces it, asks questions. Name, date of birth, husband’s name … and why I’m here. 

I wish to speak to someone who has passed. 

Mr. Arturo has me cut a tarot deck, asks more questions. He asks me about the fidelity of my husband. Very loyal, I quickly reassure him. (It didn't occur to me until later that he might have been talking about my slutty degenerate first husband.) People likely come to Mr. Arturo concerned about their love lives, so it’s a natural place to begin. Is there anyone I’m having problems with? Enemies? 

“Oh wow … maybe?” 

Mr. Arturo looks at the cards. His daughter tells me somebody is “jealous.” I get it; he’s looking for problems to solve. When Mr. Arturo says about five full sentences in Spanish, she turns it into three to five words of English. I’m not recording or writing anything down. 

Mr. Arturo pulls the death card, nodding his approval. We’re on the right path for communicating with the afterlife. 

We finally establish which deceased loved one I wish to contact. Mr. Arturo asks how they died. I feel sadness and guilt describing the horrible details to the sweet, innocent face of his daughter. Mr. Arturo nods as if to say,”Yes, that makes sense.” Descriptions of unpleasant deaths are probably nothing new to a medium. 

He says the person has an important message, but we can’t know what it is without a ceremony. The part we can do now takes about 30 minutes, but the complete ceremony takes three days. He will need supplies such as candles—available for purchase in the front—as well as a photo of the deceased. I can send that via phone if I like, to be printed out. The $370 price is not unreasonable but is more than I can afford. Besides, this loved one was unpredictable. What if they just use this opportunity to say something really mean? 

I try to ask about a smaller ceremony. “Pequeña ceremonia?” I stutter, looking back and forth between medium and interpreter. “For instance, what if I don’t want to know their message but want them to rest in peace?” 

My translator translates. Mr. Arturo is momentarily taken aback. He thinks, then nods, calculating, and writes a new, lower price underneath the first. $137. It’s still beyond my budget. The cards already revealed that I spend money too fast, so he’s unfazed that this too is more than I can afford. It feels like we’re wrapping things up. 

I ask if there’s anything else important I should know. 

Mr. Arturo knows exactly what to do. Our interpreter asks me to stand facing an altar. The medium says prayers while he dabs the back of my neck with a cotton ball soaked in aromatic Florida water. He places the cotton in a pair of tongs, lights it on fire, and sprays a clear mixture from what looks like an unmarked Windex bottle onto it, causing a giant ball of flame to erupt behind my head. He sprays the inside of my wrist and ignites that too, quickly extinguishing it with his own hand and rubbing it vigorously. He holds my wrist and takes my pulse to see if all this has been enough. After a brief moment, he says a prayer and rings a bell. 

“Amen,” he concludes. 

“Amen,” I reply.  

I pay $25 to my helpful translator, forgetting to ask for a receipt. I walk into the parking lot feeling like I got hooked up with some good protection. 

Ceremony is supposed to make a person feel closer to the intangible via the senses. I felt human touch (holding my wrist, snuffing the flames), cool Florida water on my neck with its smell of oranges and alcohol, heat and light from the fire, the clear tone of the bell. I felt fussed over in a good way. I will return soon. 

There has been no direct contact between myself and my loved one … but who knows? Maybe some benefactor will float me the cash to go back and find out what that person has to say. I’m nervous but definitely game to try again. 

After striking out again trying to reach the elusive Lauren, I call a place on Harvard called Spiritual Rose, asking for their earliest appointment. They could do a 15-minute session tomorrow for $30 or a half hour for $60. I ask if we could start with 15 and extend it if things started cooking. 

“Sure we can, darlin’!” comes an enthusiastic reply. 

The next day at 4:30 I meet Amber, manager/intuitive at Spiritual Rose. I also meet Randy, who opened this store a decade ago with his wife Teresa. Randy is not what you might expect in a store of crystals and witchcraft books. The pack of smokes in his T-shirt pocket is clearly outlined underneath a Spiritual Rose work tee. With his white mustache and Sam Elliott swagger, Randy wouldn't look out of place drivin’ a semi, pickin’ a Waylon tune, or runnin’ a muffler shop. Amber has a similar downhome vibe, the easy charm of your favorite diner waitress. I am immediately comfortable with them. 

Amber takes me into a small mood-lit room for our reading. I ask if I can record our session. She quickly agrees. I can see Amber being somebody the dead might want to communicate through. She’s warm and laughs easily. There’s no pretense or gloomy atmosphere. We’re here to talk to the dead, but that doesn’t have to be a sad thing, baby girl! Amber uses well-worn tarot cards and says she also “gets her visions like in old movies.”

“Where would you want to start on your questions, my dear?” Amber starts, shuffling the cards. 

“I’m looking to contact some specific friends who have passed over.” 

“Let me just have one of their first names to start so I don’t get the energies mixed up,” she says. “Let’s see … Marta would be great to talk to,” I suggest, thinking about her screenplay that director Caleb Emerson turned into a batshit crazy Troma-film-style indie movie (incidentally, Marta and Caleb met on the set of the Troma film Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead). Their movie is called Frankie in Blunderland, and is truly one of the weirdest and most original pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen, with a main character modeled on Marta’s ex and best friend, plus inside jokes meant to pay back a certain friend of his who would often drink all their beer and occasionally set their kitchen on fire. Marta, who was also a talented visual artist, tragically died in 2010 before Frankie could premiere. I grieve for the screenplays she would have written. Writing movies was her dream, and she did it—something we could have never imagined happening back in our shared apartment on 13th and St. Louis in 2002. 

Marta would be great to talk to, but the things Amber’s saying don’t quite make sense in relation to how she died. Marta would also probably torment Amber with horrifying visions straight out of a Dario Argento movie, just for kicks. 

After a little more exploration, Amber picked up on something that could indicate a head injury, and we decided we might be talking to my friend Missy, who was fatally injured in Woodward Park in October of 1999 when a bunch of high school jocks attacked our group of friends. Their assault against a pack of supposedly helpless weirdos turned into something more like a scene from Larry Clark’s movie Kids, courtesy of two mohawked guys on our side who wielded their skateboards to defend us. After losing that fair fight, the jocks went to a nearby party and recruited a bunch of guys to come back in truck beds wielding baseball bats and two-by-fours. It ended in a tragedy straight out of a S.E. Hinton novel.  

Conclusions from our reading with Missy are as follows. Amber says Missy liked chaos. (This is certainly true.) She had something written down that was important, and she was possibly dating a younger guy right before she died? (News to me, but Missy often dated the wrong guys and hid it.) Past patterns were always “biting her in the butt.” (No lie there.) She was trying to separate an older guy and a younger guy during the attack, there was lost footing, it was an accident. 

It might have been an accident. We’ll never know for sure because, as in a more recent incident at a high school in Owasso, no one was ever held accountable for the killing. Before Missy died, we suspected that the adults around us didn’t care about us. After she died, we knew it was a fact. 

Maybe this place never changes. 

Missy died 26 years ago this month. She was my best friend, though I only realized it after she’d passed.

Amber wraps up with Missy, and we move onto the next dead friend I’ve wanted to contact: Wilhelm. Wilhelm was a friend, mentor, and longtime supporter of my creative endeavors. He was a local legend, an old-school punk, journalist, music critic, collector, lover of dogs and books. He knew about all the cool stuff when it was really difficult to learn about all the cool stuff. Wilhelm went to see Polyester at the Williams theater downtown when it premiered and saved the original Odor-rama™ scratch n’ sniff card, which he later bequeathed to me. 

This exchange is more lighthearted and filled with the kind of humor he would have appreciated. Takeaways: I have Wilhelm’s permission to sell the comics I inherited from him to start over if needed; he doesn’t particularly care what we do with his ashes (he suggested making an art piece with them, which is very Wilhelm); he’s watching over all his “children” (his counterculture mentees and dogs, I guess); and he’s sorry he couldn’t talk more to his friends before he died. Wilhelm was smart, funny, supportive, compassionate, generous, twisted, cool, amorous, stubborn, curious, well-read, articulate, and a whole lot of fun. I miss him. It was good to hear from him again.

Amber and I wrap up our 15-minute session. I feel like I’ve been on a long journey in a short time. We’ve gone a few minutes over, but Amber isn’t concerned. She mostly wants to make sure that I feel good about everything. I happily pay $35 ($30 for the session, plus a $5 tip) and leave feeling positive. Listening back to the recording now, I did more talking than I needed to and wasn’t completely objective. I want to believe in an afterlife as much as the next person. Maybe even more so because I have so many people on the other side. 

Still no word from Lauren. I’m calculating how many metal butterfly decorations “someone” could steal in order to add up to $66.66. Perhaps the next medium can let me know how these things are handled. It seems like a bad way to scam people, leading them directly to your house, but she’s the professional here, not me. 

Botánica yerberia la bendición, 11165 E. 31st St. 

Spiritual Rose, 2929 S. Harvard Ave. 

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