Upstairs, between BMV Books and the Subway restaurant on Bloor Street, there’s psychic studio. There’s a little sandwich board in front of the place, festooned with exotic and colourful figures from the zodiac, and there’s a few things stenciled onto the door leading up the place, but there’s not much else to make you want to investigate.
You have to ring a bell in order to gain entrance, and from the street you can see absolutely no evidence of any life or business emanating from the place. It looks like any other stairway leading up to an apartment, but in this case, we’re led to believe that a psychic lived in that apartment.
For a few months, the psychic, whom I imagined as pale and Gothic, occasionally peering out from behind her incense saturated drapes, had hired a guy to hand out pamphlets on the street. He’s long gone now.
He was little more than five feet tall, had long white-guy dreads that hung down to his waist and an assortment of ill-advised facial piercings. One of his legs was about three inches shorter than the other, giving him a pronounced limp that made me think of the Middle Ages—a serf who scurried about beneath the castle tower doing his mistresses bidding.
He was actually a very sweet guy, and his face just lit up whenever he saw me walking our miniature Dashund down the street. However, whenever he bent down to pet her– his hair swinging from side to side– Heidi would recoil and snarl, and this always made his face fall with disappointment. I would apologize and he would cheerfully pull himself together, telling me not to worry, “When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, right? It’s not her fault!” I would nod, “Sure!”
And then he would continue on with his job, hustling after the passing pedestrians, trying to give them a flier that entitled them to 15% off a psychic reading with the Amazing Vivianna!
I never saw anybody enter into the studio, but occasionally, I’d see somebody leaving.
One day, a woman in a pink-halter top. Chewing gum, she flicked her phone open. “Yep, yep, she said it’s true! Just like I thought!”
Another day, a man exited quickly, a mysterious cast on his right arm.
And most recently, an elderly man with sunken eyes, his cigarette lit before he hit the street.