Papaya Paltrow, The Psychic and The Time Machine

By Eliza Gale

Meet Farrah Sniderman, the heroine of Eliza Gale’s mixed genre tale, Papaya Paltrow, The Psychic and The Time Machine. This Hollywood based, fake psychic finds herself forced to move in with a roommate in the valley after her business has gone belly up due to a scathing online expose written by her ex-boyfriend.
While snooping through her handsome new roommate’s personal effects she finds a time machine in his closet. At first she thinks it’s a phony, but she soon discovers that it really can transport her back and forth in time.
Instead of using the machine to kill Hitler, stop people from getting on the Titanic or prevent any other major disaster, she decides to make her own life better, by using the machine to travel to the past and make sure that she never meets her ex-boyfriend. Once this is accomplished and her psychic business is alive and well again and she uses the machine to predict the future by traveling back and forth in time. Soon she finds herself the psychic to the stars.
In the pages that follow, Farrah travels from one adventure to the next. She reads tarot cards and does psychic readings for everyone from A list starlets and singers to Bernie Sanders himself. Everything is going great until she travels too far into the future and finds herself trapped in an America that has become a dangerous positive thinking theocracy lead by the heiress Papaya Paltrow.
Farrah’s journey through time is populated by a host of characters: the cynical starlet Tamera who doubts Farrah at first but eventually befriends her; the insomniac pop star, who wants a good strategy for humiliating her ex-boyfriend in public; a positive thinking cyber stalker, who thinks he can make a girl love him just by wanting her badly enough; a futuristic band of hippies who are traveling to San Francisco in 2041 to join the cities succession from America and most importantly, a sixty three year old version of herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eliza Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311157157

Book preview

Chapter One

The April rain battered the windows of the 720 bus as it traveled from Beverly Hills to Hollywood. When it arrived at Vermont Metro Station we all poured out onto the sidewalk and ran down the stairs as if we would melt.

When I got on the Red Line train, I noticed the four busking brothers of the Metro in the back of the car, so I selected a seat in front. They always told the sad story of how their parents were out of work and needed help. They would proceed to sing Michelle, very loudly and off key until the train riders could stand it no longer and gave them a tip so they would shut up; I was in no mood for such nonsense.

I was on my way to look at an apartment in North Hollywood as my place in Beverly Hills had gotten too expensive. I had screwed up my life a year and a half earlier, and I was about to be evicted. I needed to find a new situation as soon as possible. As I sat there, trying not to listen to the butchering of the Beatles, I began to reflect upon how I had come to live in Los Angeles and upon my whole stupid life in general.

I had made a decision to move to LA six years earlier. Although it might have seemed impulsive to those who knew me, it had actually been in the works for years. Tinseltown had figured prominently in my daydreams for a long time.

When I was a kid, growing up in Denver, movies and television shows were my only refuge from the other kids and my parents. I used to go and hide in my room when my parents were fighting and escape to a land where people said witty things, fought cute and always ended up friends in the end.

When the other kids would make fun of me at school I went home and watched shows about being an adult like reruns of, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Taxi.

Shows aimed at children depressed me as they made me feel that I would never escape my parent’s house and the mean kids at school.  I would fantasize about a day when I would have a career and live alone in a funky, but fabulous apartment with my less attractive best friend living upstairs of me. I fantasized that all the mean kids would grow up to be married and miserable with many bills and many children.

When I was at school I would watch, Lou Grant and make believe that I was an undercover reporter assigned to my school to do a report about bullying. When I was at home, my imaginary assignment would change and I would pretend to be masquerading as a Psychology Today reporter doing a story on bad marriages and the reasons for divorce.

In spite of his on again and off again employment as a charity fundraiser and  his constant bickering with my mother, my father did not seem to understand why I was not a popular, straight A student. One day, when I was ten, I came home, turned on the television and nothing happened. I panicked before I realized that the cord was cut. He thought I was watching too much television, so instead of talking to me he simply came home and cut the cord of the TV.

I begged and cried for a new television, but there were certain conditions. I had to do a certain number of hours with a child psychologist where I would have to explain why I was so unpopular to an adult. He also made me take an intramural sport, so I could bond with my contemporaries. I chose tap dancing.

I did not like the child psychologist. He asked annoying questions that made me uncomfortable. He asked me questions about friends at school and I didn't have any, so I would make friends up. His questions made me feel like I was on the witness stand.  Sometimes he would have me draw pictures and not tell me why I was drawing what I was drawing.

It was in these sessions that I learned about lying. I learned how to lie to the shrinks and I saw how they bullshited my parents into thinking they were doing something useful.

The other kids made fun of me because of the way that I looked. I was extremely pale with frizzy hair and odd, unsymmetrical features. For some unknown reason, my hands shook and when they would tease me, my hands would shake harder.

I hated tap dancing, as well. I was a huge klutz.  Now, instead of being teased until 3:00 p.m. it went on until 4:00 p.m.

When I got home, my parents would ask me about my day, I had no desire to tell them all the mean things that had been said to me that day, so again I would lie and tell them that everything was fine. I missed television more than I could stand.

After about a month of my psychotherapy and tap dancing punishment, my parents bought a new TV on the condition that I get a hobby. I asked to take acting classes. I enrolled in a local school that had a good reputation. 

I liked the classes, no one from my school attended them. Every day we would do various improvisational exercises that I enjoyed. It gave me a chance to use my imagination and to be someone else for an hour or so. My acting teacher seemed to like me as well, she always gave me better reviews than the other kids.

When I would get home from acting class, I would run into my room to watch television. Instead of fantasizing about being Mary Tyler Moore, I fantasized about playing a character like her or someone like her in a movie. Actors could be anything, a lawyer one day or a doctor the next and they didn't even have to go to school for it.

I fantasied about winning an Oscar and thanking all the kids that were mean to me in high school. I dreamed that the mean kids would be sitting at home watching me on tiny television sets, eating macaroni and cheese. They would cry and feel ashamed as they watched the show, but they would have to hide their tears from whomever they had the misfortune of having married.

The next year, the acting school started casting for Peter Pan. I got the role of a lost boy; I had one line. I was a little confused as to why I got such a small part as I was very good at memorizing lines and always felt very comfortable on stage. The role of Peter went to a boy who couldn't sing and often forgot his lines. Not only was he incompetent, but everyone knew the role of Peter was supposed to go to a girl.

The following year, I did not get a part in the play at all. I heard one of the student acting teachers call me ugly, it was a word that I would here over and over again throughout my life. I told my parents that I had lost interested in acting, although it was the only thing I wanted to do, ever. I used to lock myself in my room and read plays. I memorized lines of many great parts.

At school I would hide in the library at recess and read interviews with actors, and dream of a day when I would be the subject of an interview. I read an interview with Dustin Hoffman who said he had been ugly and made fun of when he was a kid; I read it over and over again.

I dreamed of becoming better looking, but as the years rolled by I began to realize that this was never going to happen. The older I got the odder looking I got. I was short and pimply with frizzy hair and my body had an odd square shape. 

I began making other plans. For a while, I thought I might like to be a journalist, but my grades in English would suggest otherwise. In fact, my grades in most subjects weren't so great, and I was sent back to the child psychologist. When I wasn't being taunted by my peers or admonished by my parent I was being dissected by some cold eyed professional, who only made me feel worse. I slowly grew to hate people.

By the time I reached high school, I didn't care what I did for a living, I just wanted to be alone. I moved to Tao's, New Mexico after high school in spite of my father's objections. I tried college for a while, but I flunked out after about a year.

I rented a cheap studio apartment and got a job in a call center taking calls from angry members of a travel club who felt that they had not been treated properly. After a few months of doing it, it felt like every call was a personal kick in the gut.

I changed call centers about once a year. I worked in many different industries from travel to rental real-estate to collections, to junk food. Given that I was ugly and my hands shook, I was limited in the kind of work that I was able to do.

I thought a lot about men. I was 19 and had never had a boyfriend. Most of the men who would hit on me were older and unattractive. I eventually dated a couple of them and slept with one just to get the experience over with.  I had a short-term boyfriend every couple of years until I was 28. 

When I was 28 I met Bill, who was a computer programmer and much better looking than most men who liked me. His looks were the only reason I liked him.

Bill wasn't especially smart, in spite of the fact that he considered himself a genius. He would constantly put me down and often tried to make me feel bad for not having a career. He was not funny and never laughed when I told a joke. Nevertheless, I stayed with him because he was nice looking and had a good job and his own apartment; being with him made me feel normal.

Most guys who liked me still lived at home or were on disability or even social security. I thought that by dating him I would be perceived as more normal. He found me attractive and I loved him for that.

Bill's only good quality was that he had great taste in music.  I would go over to his apartment and listen to Jimmy Hendrix singing, All Along the Watchtower and Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday singing, Little Girl Blue. One day, he introduced me to Tom Waits. The first song he played for me was about bums in Los Angeles sleeping on a street downtown.

Tom had a voice that was rough, warm and embracing. He sang of a Los Angeles where freaks were accepted and even formed their own society. With his large hands, deep voice, sharp wit and brilliant insight, Tom was everything that Bill was not. I would listen to his albums and fantasize that we would run off together. I was always incredibly and inexplicable beautiful in these fantasies. When Bill would work on his computer and sit with his back to me for hours and hours, I would watch clips of Tom's old movies and concerts on YouTube.

Bill and I were together for five years, we never lived together because I just couldn't go there. One day, in 2010 he came over to my house and told me he got a new job and we went out to dinner to celebrate. I didn't know it, but it was the last time I was ever going to see him again. After that night, he stopped calling me and whenever I would call him he would make an excuse for why he could not see me.

After a whole month of this, he told me that he wanted to break up. I thought I would never have a boyfriend again, but aside from that, I was happy that I didn't have to see him anymore. That same week, I lost my job at my most recent call center for having low customer retention numbers.

I went to Denver to visit my parents that weekend. I got drunk and went gambling in one of the mountain casinos with a cousin that I hardly knew and I won $3000. My cousin and I rode home together, and she barely spoke to me the whole way. She had lost $100.00

I decided the money was a sign from the universe that I should change my life. As foolish as I knew it was, I felt that I was being pulled towards Los Angeles. I wanted to find the cool, dark, underground part of it that Tom sang about. I figured I had nothing keeping me in Tao's. I had very few friends and no job. My lease was ending soon and I didn't really want to stay in my apartment. I loaded up my old beater with a couple of suitcases, my computer and a coffee table set.

I had rented an apartment in San Pedro over the internet for $700 a month with a $700 deposit. I made sure to order internet service before I left, so I could start looking for a job as soon as I got there.   I had a $1600 in cash in my purse to pay for food, gas lodging and furniture. I climbed into my car, said goodbye to my neighbor, who was one of my few friends in town and I drove to Los Angeles. I arrived in San Pedro to find that the door to the converted garage apartment was located right next to the dumpster. I entered the apartment to find that it was about the same size as a small bedroom. There was one small window and there was a tiny bathroom with a moldy shower.

I went to Ikea and bought a bed for $400.00.  When I got home, I plugged in my computer to find that my internet had not been hooked up yet.  I called the phone company and they said that they never got my order for internet service and it would be at least two weeks before they could hook it up. I was infuriated; how was I supposed to look for work?

I went to the store and bought cleaning supplies, toiletries and a large bottle of whiskey as the heatless apartment was freezing. I set everything up, got a pizza and drank the whiskey as I began to cry.   I wondered how I would get a job without the internet. I wondered how I would pay April's rent. I ate the whole pizza and drank until I passed out.

The next day I went to the library and began searching for a job. I sent my resume to over forty companies.  My phone wasn't connected yet and I only had a cheap pay by the minute cell phone.

I was worried if about having enough minutes on the cell phone to accommodate any potential employers who might call. It turned out not to me a concern as I didn't get one single phone call.  After the time it took to yell at the phone company, I only had a hundred minutes left on my phone. I decided to wait out the ten days and start looking for a job then. I thought that if I ate nothing but ramen, and started working by the 20th I would be okay.

When my internet finally came on I began sending out resumes like mad. Two companies finally called me for interviews. One was a limousine