Chapter One
"Go through these rings of fire in your life; it is only fear that holds you back; we are here for you," echoed her words to me. "It's coming back for me to tell you this. And I'm not talking about your deceased relatives. I'm talking about angels, guides that are with us from the beginning of our lives." For the second time in my life, I was told by a clairvoyant that I would be writing this and that I was here in this life to help others. The first time was when I was around nineteen. I had gone to see a psychic that I had met at a gay bar in Sayville, New York, known as the bunk house, where I would fatefully meet my life partner. But I'll come back to that a bit later. It was one of a few places where the gays went every Friday night to socialize, and it was there that I had met her. She had offered me a reading while socializing at the bar, and so I took her up on it. I had gone to her home later that week when I decided to contact her, and she told me many things about my young life. I suppose the only difference is now I have over thirty years of experience to share in my journey with you. I remember that I was sitting in her living room all those years ago as she walked around her kitchen while offering me a cup of tea. Her daughter had come home, and there were some exchanges between them, as I recall. And while sitting and waiting for her, a thought popped into my head that I wanted to ask her about but wasn't sure if I should. It was then that she turned to me and said "Yes," without the question having ever been asked. I sat there in astonishment. "I like to put those things out there so you see that I'm real." I would later go on to have many other spiritual and divine occurrences showing me just how our angels and spirit guides are always channeling us in our lives if we're open enough to receive them. And every so often, if we're lucky enough, we get to know that divine connections that we sometimes get to share in our fleeting time together.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anthony Leotta, born to Diana and Rodney on August 30, 1964. I was one of five children born second to the last. There were two older brothers and an older and a younger sister in my family. And like many kids of the '70s growing up was a tumultuous time of transformation, change and identity. I think by the time it came to the younger of us my parents were so caught up in their own stuff there was little left for us. I believe in many ways that I was fated and primed as the co-dependent and the fixer of my family unbeknownst to myself. Another of the many psychics I saw during this journey told me that this was something I was supposed to do in this lifetime, as I will go on to reveal. And it was with no little surprise that I would go on and do it professionally, too.
I'd like to think that my family had saved me as much as I have genuinely tried to save them looking back all these years later. My mom was a wonderful spirited person who had a psychic sense that I got from her but only I had ignored my own. I can say now after discovering and understanding what being an empath is that I have a very good intuitive sense about things. But maybe it has to do with my sun sign in Virgo and with a rising in Cancer. My mom had some deep traumas in her life beginning with abandonment by her mother Louise (aka Dedalumpa). Mom would affectionately give her this name because she used to sing a song to my older sister using this made-up word. Mom was great with assigning identities to people summed up in just one or two words based on some characteristic that she would identify about them. Louise put my mom and her older sister into a taxi as little girls and sent them to live with their wicked stepmother, Lily. Mom described Lily as a Joan Crawford type, and she was also known as "Diamond Lil," because of the many diamond rings that she had acquired over the years. Mom said that when she lived with Lily in their New York apartment that they were the supers of the apartment building in Manhattan because of the cheaper rent they got. Mom said they would have to shovel coal into the furnace to provide the heat to the building. They were also responsible for the cleaning of the hallways and entry areas of the apartment house. Mom said that Lilly would paint their whole apartment in one night and have it all put back together by the next morning. She told me that Lilly had got hit once on the head by one of those heavy steel doors. You know, the ones that you would see propped open on the city streets and leading to basements as you walked by them. Mom said that Lily didn't act right for a long time after her injury. Mom said that sometimes Lilly wouldn't leave the house for days and that she had become fanatical in her ways.
Louise (Dedalumpa) my maternal grandmother had met another man, named Charlie, who was an Irishman and bartender working in the Dikeman Street area of the city. It was predominately an Irish neighborhood during that period of the '70s as I recall, and Charlie was a popular fragrance for women, and of course Dedalumpa had it. I can still remember the bottle sitting on her dresser in her bedroom of their Bronx University Heights apartment that overlooked the Hudson River and the Major Deacon Highway. Charlie would be lying in bed watching TV whenever we visited with Dedalumpa. Mom used to say that she'd have to write Louise first to schedule a phone call, and then to schedule our visit. Of course she was exaggerating this, but I'm sure it was how she felt. My mom hated that fragrance and that was probably because she hated Charlie even more. Louise had abandoned two daughters for this man, and it was also just a few years prior that she had also given up two of my mom's sisters to adoption. I learned that my maternal grandfather Bill was a drinker, and consequently, Louise didn't love him as the rationale for these events. Bill, as I learned, was deemed a hillbilly who was always playing a guitar, as told by Mom's sister.
Dedalumpa never owned up to any of this to my mom and my mom held onto that resentment of her. Looking back on it, I don't know if it was courageous of Louise to go after the man that she truly loved, giving up her children, or if it was just plain selfishness. We would later reconnect with one the two daughters that Louise gave up through a genealogy DNA test given to Mom's sister by her daughter as a Christmas gift one year. My aunt had told me that she never imagined this outcome and only did it to know her family origins. Mom would tell me that years earlier she tried to find her but was unsuccessful. I know that it had always bothered my mom that her sisters were given away, and I knew that she never forgave Louise. In Dedalumpa's defense, I later learned she had experienced some traumas as a girl. She had lost her younger brother Carlton, who had drowned falling through the ice while skating together as children. And I would later learn about Louise's sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Pop Rogers, who would bizarrely end up living with her and Charlie in their Bronx apartment years later and becoming his caregiver. My aunt would tell me that once as a teenager she had seen Dedalumpa having sex in a car with some man and that she was horrified when she saw that it was her mother. It took me some years to figure this out, but these events had set the tone for Mom's life, and perchance my only aunt's, too.
I mean think about it: your mother is giving you away as a three-year-old child? The sense of abandonment that they both must have felt is unimaginable. And I know for certain that everything that came after in my mom's life would come back to this one question for me. It's amazing how impactful the things that a person experiences can make or break us as human beings, and conceivably set the tone of one's life, as I will go on revealing. My mom met my dad while she was a cigarette girl working in the famed Copacabana nightclub in New York City during the mid-1950s, through a crowd of mutual friends. She told me that when she was younger she looked like a young Kim Novak, who was a famous Hollywood actress of that era. And that once Nat King Cole's manager got her address, probably by paying someone off at the nightclub, and that his manager had showed up to her apartment early one morning where she living with Diamond Lilly. Mom said that she told him she was from the South and that her father wouldn't appreciate it, alluding to his race. Her generation was a very prejudiced one, which was is a sad truth, but it's just how things were, and perhaps in many ways they still are.
Mom was beautiful with the bluest of eyes, which all five of us got from her and from my dad, too. She was a pretty rebellious teen for her time in the 1950s. She once told me that she and some of the guys in the crowd jumped off the 59th Street Bridge into the East River of New York. I mean thinking about that now she was pretty fearless and maybe a little crazy, too? I mean, who the hell would ever do that today except for maybe a suicidal person? She once told me that she and a group of her friends were also charged criminally with a felonious assault charge. Mom had the article among some of her photos, and which I remember seeing once: it showed her, along with a bunch of other teens on the street and all were looking down to the ground. Some of the boys had done something to an elderly man and because she was part of the crowd they had charged them all. My aunt would tell me some years later Mom was accused of hitting the man while using what she described as a garrison belt, although Mom never told me...
