For Three Weeks, I Was a Phone Psychic for Miss Cleo

Dialing In by Heidi Diehl

Remembering this time feels as though I’m listening to one of the callers, to a message from a stranger who is also me. At the start of summer 2001, I responded to a Craigslist ad for “Phone Actors.” I’d just turned 20, and I needed extra income to supplement my summer fellowship at a nonprofit, which paid for my quarter of a subletted apartment on West 108^th Street in Manhattan. Bennett and Frank, a couple, my college pals, had one of the bedrooms, and my friend Laura and I shared the other. All four of us were constantly seeking odd jobs. The week before, Frank had called a Village Voice listing for phone sex operators and was told they didn’t hire young people, who usually couldn’t handle the job’s pressures for very long. Lacking the performance chops for this particular field, I hadn’t applied. Even so, I should have heeded the warning. Listening is intimate too.

Being a phone actor sounded more doable to me—no sex, the ad said. The man who answered cut right to it. “I’m sure you’ve heard of Miss Cleo.” I hadn’t. The commercials for her 1-900 number were always on back then, but as a college student I didn’t watch TV, and growing up, my parents never had cable. Miss Cleo was a phone psychic so popular that the man said his company, the Network, hired a stable of assistants to take her calls. He skipped over the question of my own psychic ability—implied was that I would pretend—and hired me immediately, said it was great if my roommates were interested too. The only training he ever provided was a list of the names of tarot cards.

After we hung up, Bennett and Laura told me they’d seen Miss Cleo’s commercials; she was a commanding woman with strident charisma and a Caribbean accent. She had catchphrases, pithy promises: “You be tippin’, he be tippin.’” Laura explained that Miss Cleo meant it as a warning—if you’re cheating, you can get hurt too. Things are circular; they’ll catch up to you.

Bennett said he wanted to do it too. We had a landline, no cellphones, so we waited until late at night to avoid clogging the line we needed for the rest of our lives. Past 11 p.m., our bosses from our other jobs were unlikely to call. After dialing a 1-800 number and entering my personal code, I heard a recorded welcome from Miss Cleo; her rough encouragement helped convince me this was just a wacky experience, a good story. Then the calls started coming—maybe someone I actually knew, or else a Network call routed in. I wouldn’t know until I picked up, which I had to do in character. Thank you for calling the Network. This is Ruby. (My chosen psychic moniker; Bennett had several—Gabriel, Cassandra.) Much of our time was spent waiting for the phone to ring; anything below a 17-minute call-time average meant the Network would send fewer callers. We were only paid for the time spent on the phone—stingy, but in the end it didn’t matter. I quit three weeks later, and I never got a check.

At first Bennett and I took turns answering calls in our sweltering living room. I preferred doing it together, because then I wasn’t alone with my doubts: that I was ripping off people who likely couldn’t afford it, that I wasn’t clairvoyant, and at just a couple months past teenage, that I didn’t have the life experience to advise an adult.

Bennett took the first call, but I was too nervous to study his technique, instead rehearsing vague platitudes in my mind. I see good things ahead. I took the next one, which came ten minutes after Bennett’s ended.  “I’m thinking of moving to North Carolina,” the woman told me. The living room faced an airshaft, and noises from the other apartments carried in.

“You’re somewhere else right now.” I said this as a statement, not a question, which charged her.

“Yes!” she said, as though we were at a party together, this stranger thrilled to lean in and confide. “My friend Ash is there.”

“You want to be closer to Ash. You feel that strongly.” Riding adrenaline, I paced past our dirty dishes and library books and strewn tote bags, Bennett listening from the flowered couch.

Right, the woman said. She thought she did. Her agreement bolstered me, and we kept going like that, as I parroted her tidbits of information in confident tones, shaping her reflections into destiny. I was just helping her see what she knew already, I told Bennett after I hung up.

He was better at the calls than I was, offering concrete instructions. Take off all your jewelry and put it under your pillow. Open and close your bottom dresser drawer. That kind of specificity in the face of an abstract problem was helpful. It kept people on the line.

For the first few nights, I knelt on the floor with the phone, hunched over my list of tarot card names, which I’d printed at the nonprofit’s office. I listened and scribbled key details. Pamela, 37, Missouri. Wants to know about love life. “I just pulled The Lovers card for you,” I’d say, heart pounding as I scrambled for meaning. “This is incredibly lucky.”

Eventually I came up with a little schtick. “You’re the lone wolf,” I told callers. Today the phrase might connote a bad actor—a lone wolf attack—but back then I thought it was what everyone wanted to hear. You’re alone, but unique, carving your singular path. Really, I was speaking to myself.

“You’re up on a cliff, trying to decide what to do,” I said to Martin, a guy who, likely drunk, had started off affable as he told me about his divorce. “You’ll see what’s next from that vantage point. You have to get out on the cliff to be able to see it.”

“You’re supposed to tell me what’s going to happen,” Martin said, growing angry. “Tell me when I’ll find someone else.”

I was quiet, unsure of what I could promise. Beneath Martin’s frustration and my panic was our shared discomfort. We’d agreed to this façade, and it was crumbling.

“The cards are telling me you’re going to meet someone special,” I said. “Very soon.”

He hung up. A six-minute call.

A recent HBO documentary, Call Me Miss Cleo, traces the celebrity psychic’s fall from grace. In 2002, the Network lost several lawsuits for fraud and paid millions to the callers they’d swindled. Miss Cleo herself was never charged with a crime. In the TV coverage of her legal trouble at the time, the running joke was that she didn’t see it coming. If she were truly psychic, shouldn’t she have known she would get caught?   

I watched the documentary after Bennett posted about it on his Instagram last year. He’s one of the interview subjects, looking back from his contemporary perch. The movie reenacts him as a stressed young phone actor chain-smoking in the dark on the living room floor, tethered by the cord. In reality we had a cordless, and I think we kept the lights on. In his interview, Bennett said while of course we weren’t actually psychic, we were intuitive, good at finding details to construct a narrative. He and I both write novels now.

Twenty years later it makes for a good story—once I was a phone psychic—though I can’t quickly explain the guilt I still carry. Feelings are hard to work into the joke. When I go to union meetings these days, a common Zoom icebreaker is the “two truths and a lie” game, and this is an odd truth I think of sharing, though the remote format leaves me unsure of the tone of my colleagues’ reactions. The logic of icebreakers is that if we’re going to organize together, we need to know and trust each other. My urge to share is complicated; I want the attention this wild story will garner even though it doesn’t reflect me all that well. Would you trust a twenty-year-old who claimed to be psychic? Would you trust me now?

When Bennett told me he’d been speaking to producers with various documentary projects about Miss Cleo, I was offered a chance to be interviewed too. I considered it—the lure of divulgence, the magic of revisiting that time. In the end I said no, cautious about how they might edit my off-the-cuff recollections into a story I didn’t intend.

Call Me Miss Cleo suggests that nearly everything about her was fake: her accent, her clairvoyant ability, the details she told people about her childhood. It also fills in pieces of her actual biography, information new to me. With her background in theater, Cleo was an early character. Eventually she hooked up with the Network and became their star, but even before that, her crafted identity and non-truth telling left questions and doubts in the spaces she’d moved through, at least according to the film’s interview subjects. It’s satisfying to learn this. But it doesn’t give me a clear answer of why she did it, why I did too.

Our neighborhood had a rat alert that summer; the city left pamphlets in our mailbox that offered warnings but no promise of abatement. Maybe that didn’t matter—they knew we wanted someone to notice. Rats could climb extraordinary heights and squeeze through tiny spaces, I learned. After dark I walked down the middle of the street. Keep your trash sealed up, the city’s literature advised. Don’t leave things out or exposed.

Even in June it was oppressively humid, and since the apartment didn’t have air-conditioning, we went to C-Town in the evenings to linger in the freezer aisle. “I figured out the C stands for coupon,” Bennett said. Later that night a caller told me she’d been dipping into the register at work. “No one knows what I’m taking.”

The callers confessed transgressions whose weight I was too green to understand: infidelity in a long marriage, bad choices that had imploded a career. As a kid not yet old enough to buy beer, I responded to these mature versions of despair with a lie: “I know exactly what you mean.” Some of it was strange, like the old woman’s dirge about the dogs under her porch, and some veered toward creepy—the guy who asked, blurred and flirty, what I valued in a mate. All of it was awkward. These cheaters and lonely-hearts assumed my allegiance, impatient for my promise that the future was something I could see.

After a week or so, Bennett and I started doing our shifts separately. It was more practical that way. At first I’d wanted to perform for Bennett and share the story of our weird job, but it grew uncomfortable—both that I was lying and that I wasn’t all that good at it. It wasn’t phone sex, but Bennett said the calls were like prostitution. All that need for instant gratification, and you can’t even get a kiss. There was a fundamental disconnect: the callers wanted to go fast, but with my need to get to 17 minutes, I went slow. People cried and got mad, demanded to talk to Miss Cleo and not me. My contact at the Network had told me to pretend I was trying to find her when this happened—call her name, like you’re looking—as though she’d be there in the apartment at one in the morning, if only I opened the right door.

In the daytime, I worked for a nonprofit, where I traveled with my boss to state representatives’ offices and lobbied for environmental justice issues. My work was compiling testimonies from residents of heavily polluted NYC neighborhoods into useful talking points, and it satisfied me that someone, even a staffer or an intern, was taking notes, promising to bring it all back. I clung to this as the right kind of listening, a useful form of storytelling.

The people I worked with were driven, smart, exhausted. I admired them; they’d found a way to be meaningful adults, to live in New York City and do work that mattered. And so I didn’t tell them what I was doing at night, couldn’t explain why I was so tired.

I didn’t tell my family about Miss Cleo either, but I did tell some of my friends, the ones I thought would see it as funny, performative, good material, rather than morally wrong. The calls were like therapy, I said. It made me feel better to look at it that way, ignoring the fact that I had no training or expertise as a therapist. I also ignored the fact that calling the Network cost $4.99 a minute. I was earning minimum wage; at that time, an hour’s pay was $5.15.

The apartment’s TV picked up a few scratchy channels, and if I were going to write fiction about this time in my life, I’d play Miss Cleo’s commercials for me to watch, cementing my misgivings. But what really happened was Bennett and Frank watched soap operas in Spanish, a language they didn’t understand. Even so, there was pleasure in witnessing the drama —yelling, slapping, faces lit with anger and love—and that was usually enough to find a story.

The news broke less than three weeks into the job, nearly July: Miss Cleo, or the Network, was being served with lawsuits for fraud. When I dialed in with my personal code, the recorded greeting was no longer from Miss Cleo, but from a guy who said although Miss Cleo was facing bad publicity, psychic readings helped people; we were doing important work. His message was absurd, but the lawsuits were a relief—this problematic job would end. A force larger than me would take care of it.

That night a woman named Vicky told me her boyfriend had been hitting her. Her voice was shaky, resigned. I was stretched out on the couch, sleepy until the jolt of this stranger’s revelations.

“Tell me what you see in the future,” Vicky said. “I know he’s a good person deep down.” She wanted things to work—was that what would happen?

“I think you need to leave,” I said, sitting up on the couch. Find a domestic violence shelter. Talk to a social worker, a therapist, the police. I was supposed to frame it as a matter of destiny, what the tarot cards wanted, but I was direct, repulsed by the position I’d put myself in. This person needed help I couldn’t provide.

Vicky told me she was scared. The artifice had broken—we were just two people talking.

“Do you have a friend who could help you?” I imagined the boyfriend coming after her. What was I seeding that I couldn’t control?

“I think so.”

Good, I said. She had to tell someone who was actually there. How awful that I might be missing the chance to save her, for her to save herself.

OK, she said. And then she hung up and I never spoke to her again.

I stopped dialing in after that, haunted by my role or lack of a role in Vicky’s safety. I went back to the temp agency and asked for work. Short stints at offices meant my nights were mine again. Sometimes Laura and I went out to see bands; we met a group of musicians, and after one of them gave me his number, I called it again and again, so unfamiliar with cellphones I didn’t realize that unlike a landline, he had a record of my outreach, a log of each time he didn’t answer.

That I didn’t know this seems crazy, but we were living in a different universe, the ways we communicated and expected things from each other so unlike the ways we give and take now. That’s what I tell my students when we read articles about technology. Many of them are the age I was then. “Oh no,” they say, shaking their heads as I recount asking for directions from strangers on the street.

Call Me Miss Cleo situates her as a product of her time, spawned by the infomercial/1-900 culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s, her services a bridge to the internet era with its anonymous connection and public divulgence. Even so, we always use the available technology to mediate our identities and desires. After my brief run as a phone psychic ended, my urge to listen stayed with me, and I found new ways to indulge it.

That summer ended, and I went back to school in Westchester. In July, a temp job had taken me in and out of the subway station under the Twin Towers, but by September I was twenty miles north. I only saw the smoke from the highway that day.

My roommate Rebecca’s friend JJ came to campus; the people he’d been staying with in Brooklyn left for Vermont on September 12, and he didn’t want to leave the city. He’d traveled across the country to get to New York—arduously, hitchhiking and riding freight trains and sometimes a bike. Bronxville, the college’s suburb, was an acceptable compromise: a dining hall with open windows to climb through, a library and computer lab available all day. JJ showed up sporadically, and for some of that year we dated, if you could call it that, which I didn’t at the time.

When he went back to the city at the end of September, JJ gave me the number of a communal voicemail system so we could stay in touch. Accessed with a 1-800 number, it was a free dial from anywhere, even a payphone, and was shared by a loose community of friends he’d introduced me to. The other voicemail users lived in the city or elsewhere, and I spent time with some of them, doing things that scared me: joining hundreds of cyclists in Critical Mass rides that took over traffic, sleeping in a squat on Houston Street that’s a condo tower now. Their mode of frugality—dumpster diving, squatting, Greyhound scams—landed somewhere along the spectrum of choice and necessity, different for each person but upheld as virtue by all. I didn’t quite fit in with this group, always aware of what I wasn’t willing to do, shy about my desire to be safe. Some of them had chosen names—a rustic word, or their given name spelled backward—and they moved around a lot, so there were many voicemail users I never met, spread around the country. I never found out who paid the bill. And I didn’t learn the rules either, if there was an etiquette, if unspoken was that I should skip over messages clearly not for me.

With the password JJ eventually shared, I could listen to all the messages and not just leave one at the beep. I miss you and meet me here and the subtext of an agitated tone. A soap opera I could dip into from anywhere—my room or the payphones that were on every block, which offered something akin to the way we now stop to scroll at a red light or subway platform, for a blast of gossip or news. People left long folksy accounts or litigated their side of a romantic spat. Sometimes a dispatch was meant for one person, sometimes for the group—they’re throwing out whole pizzas on University & 12^th—and the lines blurred. As a fringe member of this group, I rarely left messages, and only quick logistics. I’ll be twenty minutes late. But I listened all the time, playing through strings of 10 or 20 messages while lying in bed, my sense of not fitting in—the lone wolf, perhaps—dislodged temporarily even as it was also intensified by listening to other people open up. Their confiding took the place of my own. Remembering those listening sessions—Hi Sweetums and Not cool, man and I’m just really tired of you being away—reminds me of the queasy feeling I get now when I scroll for too long. Something far away becomes close.

The voicemail served as an early prototype of social media: leaving a message offered a way to perform intimacy for a crowd. And the communal mailbox marked a cultural shift from the more private confessional Miss Cleo offered. In the ‘90s and early 2000s, daytime talk shows exploited the thrills of voyeurism and oversharing, paving the way for schadenfreude-inducing reality TV. Maury and Montel, Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones: these hosts made public our timeless urges—to hold someone else’s drama, and to confide, so someone can hold yours.

I wanted these things too. Just like Miss Cleo’s calls, listening to the voicemail fed my appetite for narrative, and the tensions of eavesdropping were relieved by the fact that the message-leavers willingly said these things knowing other people would hear. A voicemail is meant to be a greeting for one person, but this was more like a notice on a bulletin board, a comment on a thread. Spaces that assume an audience.

I shouldn’t have listened. Eventually I heard messages back and forth between JJ and someone else, their flirtatious check-ins and shared plans. What stung was not only JJ’s moving on but also what we now call FOMO, the two of them part of this group gathering to do things I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. Loneliness is worse when you’re not alone.

At the time I felt like a victim, though I’d never pushed for a more defined relationship with JJ, infected by the voicemail crew’s anarchist vibes. How could I have expected someone to know what I wanted if I didn’t say it out loud? If I’d had one of Miss Cleo’s flunkies to confess to, or divulged my feelings on an unburdening voicemail, maybe then I could have figured this out. Perhaps overhearing JJ’s other romance was cosmic retribution for the lies I’d told for Miss Cleo, for what I’d listened to and taken from those calls. You be tippin’, he be tippin’.

I didn’t listen to the voicemail anymore after that, though I remained friends with some of the users, connections that have eroded over time. These days, our contact is mostly through social media, where I look at what they post about their lives.

Call Me Miss Cleo suggests her redemption: she became an activist toward the end of her life and found deep connections with people who, when interviewed, cited her ability to see and commune. The film doesn’t fully grapple with the fact of her dishonesty. It paints her not as an agent of her own hoax, but a pawn of the self-enriching hucksters behind the Network—really just passing the huck. 

It’s probably unfair to expect a verdict. Maybe it’s better to accept ambiguity. Or recognize that someone else may have struggled, as I did, to find the right way to listen and share. What’s surprising is that after watching the documentary, I began to feel a certain kinship with Miss Cleo, who in the past had been the con artist, the butt of the joke, whenever I talked about that job. Like me, she found a story of herself through the experiences of other people. Eventually it caught up to both of us. I wanted something impossible—to listen without the story touching me, to take someone else’s drama without revealing my own. But I wasn’t actually safe from the story. I was always part of it, even when it wasn’t mine.  

As a twenty-year-old kid, I thought Miss Cleo’s callers were naïve to expect accurate prophecy from a 1-900 number. But as a middle-aged person who’s lived through Geraldo and The Bachelor and Facebook, I see that I was the naïve one. At least some of the callers must have known exactly what they were getting, what the voicemail users wanted too: a ready stage, a mirror to serve as a guide. And now, as I write this, I’m gratifying those same desires. 

Right before we graduated, I ran into Bennett in the campus computer lab. He wanted me to join something new called Friendster. Soon after that I got a cellphone. My new place in Brooklyn didn’t have a landline, and I didn’t want to sit at home all day while I waited for calls from the temp agency. Yes, I told Regis, the recruiter at Temporary Alternatives, when he said they had lots of openings for short-term receptionists. I was pretty good on the phone.

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