My True Psychic Story

by Lorrie Kazan

I won the story of the week in Kajama Digest and also Divine Whispers for this true account:

I had been dating a handsome but bad news guy named Jesse and my life had been going steadily downhill. Now I was physically sick too, on antibiotics for an ear infection. I was ready to break away from him. But he kept showing up. Late that summer night, he stood under my Venice Beach balcony and pleaded with me to go out with him just one more time.  Though everything in my gut said don’t go, I finally agreed to go one last time.

I slipped into the passenger seat and Jesse started driving, somehow getting angrier and more argumentative as we circled nearby blocks. In the midst of this circling, I glanced up to a second-story window and saw Sean, a street guy from the Venice Boardwalk.  I’d just been thinking of him, though apropos of nothing and now here he was, indoors at the Victorian unit I’d tried unsuccessfully for months to rent. “There’s Sean,” I said which somehow convinced my furious driver that I was cheating on him with this man whom I’d supposed slept in doorways.

We had a direction. We’re going to a coffee shop in Santa Monica to talk. We shot down the street full speed despite my asking him to slow down. (around 90 miles an hour both Jesse and the police later told me.)

From the opposite direction, A VW Bug, without warning, cut a quick left turn in front of us. And Jesse lost control of the car. I don’t know how long it takes to skid for 250 feet but it felt like long enough to assess my situation. “We’re going to die,” I thought, as I was lashed with glass from the shattering window, the car careening (at 90 miles per hour, I’d later learn) loudly crushing whatever was beneath or in front of it: ( 7 small trees, I later learned, a wire mesh fence.)

This is how we die, I thought. This is my last moment. Then I felt a force hold me back.  It was gentle but yet strong, and infinitely present. And I thought, “if I never believed in God, I sure do tonight.”  I’d never felt anything like it before. I’ve had miraculous things happen to me since, but I’ve never felt anything like that. Such a clear, kind presence holding me. I was not alone. I knew we would not be killed. Even as we sliced off the side of a building–on my side of the car–and finally crashed into a light pole. Then everything stopped except for aching sounds, reverberations from the car.

Then firemen were there. They pulled us out of the missing front window. Jesse had passed out and been flung across the seat where I was stuck pinned beneath his dead weight. I heard a fireman said the car was ready to go up in flames. I couldn’t move on my own. “My leg’s broken,” I said, into widely amazed eyes. No one had expected us to be alive. The building, the trees, the light pole– any of it could or should have killed us. Now they eased us from the remnants of the heavy car.

And there was Sean. I don’t know who arrived first, Sean or the firemen?  How had he gotten all the way down here? He’d heard the crash. “I was a medic in Viet Nam,” he told me. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. Not leaving even when the fireman harshly ordered him to.

As they were shutting me into an ambulance, Sean broke through. “Here’s your purse,” he said, reaching over the arms of someone pushing him back. My fat brown leather purse with my money and my insurance card.  I didn’t yet know that without that purse and that insurance card, I’d have been sent downtown to County where my wait would be hours. I’d broken a bone in my back and the bones in my right ankle.

When I tell the story, I always emphasize the sense of that incredible force holding me gently back while the car chaotically lurched forward at breakneck speed. It was like an angel of God, invisible and yet so present. I tell them about Sean. Wherever he went he was treated as an intruder, inferior. The hospital staff acted like that when he tried to see me. But he showed up anyway, this man whom I’d only known from my lost walks along the Venice Boardwalk. He’d seemed like a person with heart and I’d been kind to him because I’d had no reason not to. I felt like an intruder myself. I’ve never said until this writing that I’d had a host of angels that night.

Recovery was hard and at the time I would rather have died than gone through it, but I believed something wanted me to be alive.  Despite myself.  Later, sorting through insurance paperwork, I was startled to see the name of who it said was driving the car.  Jesus. I don’t remember Jesse’s last name, I never knew his real first name. What a strange night that would alter the course of my life. I don’t say this from a religious standpoint but a symbolic sensibility; at my lowest point, the paper said Jesus was sitting beside me.

I’ve had a few God-shots since, but some of this one can be documented with newspaper photos and hospital records.

Lorrie Kazan
www.lorriekazan.com