Hey there Mama, am I ever gonna feel good again?
Can you hear me every night when I call your name?
I hope you can.
—“Am I Ever Going Home Again”
(Thornton/Andrew)
MY WRITING PARTNER TOM EPPERSON AND I WROTE A MOVIE CALLED The Gift, which was made with Cate Blanchett. It’s based on my mom, who is a psychic. Of course, the studio wanted to turn it into more of a thriller kind of film, and the finished movie didn’t end up exactly the way it was written.
My mom didn’t talk about being a psychic when I was growing up. Me and my brothers didn’t even know what a psychic was. But she took appointments, and we had a coffee table with magazines on it just like at a doctor’s office. In the back, in my mom and dad’s bedroom, there was a room we called the Blue Room because it had blue curtains and a blue wall. I’d get in from school and there would be three or four women sitting in our living room. My mother had a few male clients, but she saw mostly women because men back there, they’re a little more closed off to things like that.
There was a guy that came to our house one night, a businessman who was a big redneck in town. I was maybe twelve or thirteen. We were all asleep. My dad wasn’t there—he was working the graveyard shift at a cable plant—so I went to the door when I heard the knocking. I opened the door, and this guy was standing in a white buttoned-down shirt and holding this troll doll—the ones little girls used to play with. He asked, “Is your mother home?” I said, “Yeah,” and went back and got my mother.
“Mom, there’s some guy at the door wants to talk to you,” I said, and when she saw who it was, my mother told me and my brother to go back over around the corner in the hallway, where we listened to the whole thing.
He started yelling, “If you don’t stop seeing my wife and my daughter, then I’m going to start using your own medicine on you. You see this?” he said, holding up that troll doll. “This is a voodoo doll, and I’m going to use it on you if you don’t quit talking to my wife and daughter.”
He’s been dead forever—ended up having a heart attack while he was sleeping with some chick is what I heard—but my mom’s still traumatized, it shook her up so bad. To this day, she says she has images of him and thinks it’s him every time a doorbell rings.
We got a lot of threats and hate mail. My brothers and I were also teased at school about my mom being a psychic. One time I was walking home from school with a bunch of other kids—we didn’t hang out with them, they were walking down the same street we were—and they pointed at our house and said, “There’s that house where that old witch lives.” That was the first but not the only time we heard someone call our mother a witch. I put my memory of that experience in The Gift.
My mom doesn’t read for people anymore—just a select few who have been her friends for years—but she was kind of a renowned psychic. Still is. The police used to ask her to help them. So would politicians and all kinds of wealthy people. They’d fly in from New York or Memphis. But my mom was not only a psychic—people liked her because she’d also talk and listen to them.