Donna, my Donna, lady of the day

Donna is bored. On Second Avenue, she is bored. As bored as a staircase. She stands and warily watches the visitor trump up the one flight from 43rd Street. He doesn't exactly look like a live one. A bit of Prufrock to him. Bald spot in the middle of his hair. Up the narrow staircase he comes. Half-swaying on the banister. She looks down upon him and asks him in her New York nasal: "You gotta coupon?" The visitor stops and shakes his head.

Donna delicately coughs into her fist. Life, she surely thinks, is so much worse than anyone can imagine.

Up he trudges, to the top step, and she invites him into her lair, a four-room railroad flat done up in bright colours. "Sit there," she says. On the table there are tarot cards, crystal rocks, candles, some perfumes. A full mirrored wall behind her. In a room to the side sit an older woman and a teenage boy. They too are bored. They look up once, shrug. "Please sit," says Donna again, a little more insistent, an accent that sounds like a New York traffic jam.

Donna settles in her chair. She is late 40's or so, grey-haired, necklaced. She wears a high white blouse and a business suit. She appears halfway between charming terror and elegant witch. She leans forward. "I can guide you through love, happiness, business success and wealth." The visitor shifts uneasily in his seat. "The first reading is five dollars, second is $15, and our most extensive one is $25." She sounds as if she is already crinkling the dollar bills. "Whichonedjawant?"

Donna's eyes roll when the visitor announces that he will start out with the five-dollar special. She coughs again delicately into her fist. Or rather she doesn't cough, the visitor notices. She belches. Donna belches. She turns sideways and cups her fist, burps as quietly as possible. She turns again.

"You," she says. "will live until you're 98..."

*******

New York is a great city for a scam. See them lined up and down the streets, the three-card monty sharks, the dabblers, the ringers, the hoodlums, the hustlers, the whores, the hotel sneaks, and none more ubiquitous than the storefront fortune tellers. Can't find a job? Penniless? Bad foot odour? Enemies surrounding you? Illegal immigrant? Nobody likes your aftershave?

New York has the answer -- just up the creaking floorboards and past the cambering bannister.

In the Village, in Harlem, in the tony parts of the Upper West Side, you can find them, the Donnas of the world, the Adonises, the Madonnas, the DonnaAllThatMuch's. They're a hardy crew, these streetcorner seers, and happy to fleece just about any idiot who walks by. They are specialists in the cold, canned reading. They don't even need cards or crystal glass to do it. You just sit at their tables and they sum you up in a quick sharp snap: fast food for the spirit world. "I sense a darkness in your aura." "There's an influx of negativity sullying your potential success." "You are at a standstill and being kept from happiness."

Of course the full "spiritual cleansing for the mind, body and spirit" comes at a price. The five-dollar reading is the biggest joke of all. It's really only a teaser. If you take their bait, the fortune teller reels you in. Next time around, for $40, they'll burn some candles for you. After that, for a mere ton, they might "cleanse" some money that's polluting your spirit. Before you know it, you can be thousands of dollars in the hock.

There are famous cases of rabbis losing a quarter of a million dollars, sports veterans placing their livelihood in the hands of strangers, office workers spending their pensions, housewives taking money to be blessed and ending up with a bag of shredded newspaper, TV personalities paying to get rid of curses. But, hey, if it can happen to John deLorean it can happen to anyone.

We are, all of us, relegated to our own peculiar dooms.

*******

It was my first ever time at a fortune teller. Forty-one years old, you'd think I'd know better. But I went in, last week, on a whim. I was Donna's victim, or maybe she was mine. Donna didn't give two hoots anyway – it was a five-dollar reading – and after a quick look at me from unshaven chin to scruffy toes, she had me sussed. She wiped the last of her lunch from the corner of her mouth and fixed on a point over my shoulder.

After a well-rehearsed two-minute speech that dealt with the most spectacular generalities – you have been searching for true love, you are at a turning point in your career, you will find happiness but you must deal with severe obstacles -- Donna had covered all the possible bases and suddenly had news for me. She leaned forward. Allowed a moment of silence. Bold-faced herself. Her right eye hooded. "You have a blockage in your soul," she said to me. "A blockage in my soul?" "Yes," she replied, "and to release it, you must come back." "Oh," I said, "When?" "As soon as possible." "How much?" "Twenty-five dollars, one hundred for an outright cleansing."

There were two chances of me ever returning – the first was none, the second I'll leave to your imagination. Both of us knew it. I felt like a sneak, that I had somehow betrayed her. I smiled. She half smiled back.

"Are you Romani?" I asked her as I stood to leave. I've recently been studying Gypsy culture and I wanted to try out some words on her. She shook her head and said: "No, I'm Greek." Then she delicately turned away from me and quietly belched once more.

I hardly had the heart to tell her that indeed the blockage seemed to be elsewhere.

Skipping down the stairs, I thought: what a scam. But it was real entertainment to be so openly fleeced. It was like going to the carnival in daytime.

I could see her tucking into the last of her lunch with a sigh.

Certain moments are designed to waken the sleep in us. Sometimes we forget what it is we like about life. Momentary and all as it was, my two-minute visit with Donna put a spring in my step down Second Avenue. The world normally runs on very straight rails and it was fun to step off them for just a moment. We slumber so deep in the shitstew of news, opinions and lies, given by journalists, writers, TV pundits, politicians, that it was charming to step out of the habitual, and to meet someone as outrightly brazen as Donna, my Donna, Lady of the Day, queen of Second Avenue, mother of misdirection, purveyor of very fine quality air emissions.

Colum McCann's column for Round Midnight with Donal O'Herlihy RTÉ 1 (11.40pm) goes out every Tuesday night