A Personal Vision A personal vision: Not just a psychic but a guide By Al Sullivan, Hoboken Reporter Staff Writer, a weekly New Jersey news publication January 26, 1995 JT doesn’t do hair, although his small reading table sits near the front window of Mira’s Hair Salon on Washington Street, and his small blue neon sign saying “Eyes on the World” glows in the front window just under the hair designer’s. JT or John Traficante (though he likes to be called JT better) does readings, psychic readings, although the sweet incense just barely covers the lingering scent of hair dye and permanent solutions. Yet somehow with a burning candle and a room divider, JT manages to make you forget the salon. Although pressed for a prediction about Hudson County or at least, Hoboken, JT wouldn’t venture to make one, saying his readings depend upon the human spirit. Inanimate, abstract entities like Hoboken or Hudson County lack the vital spark to make any reading possible- a lesson many local weather prediction freaks should learn after the startling inaccurate predictions of endless snow storms by the Farmer’s Almanac this year. Instead, JT has the same kind of relationship with his clients as a doctor or lawyer, but unlike other reading centers- of which there are a surprising number in Hudson County, at least three in Hoboken with a few scattered around the county in places like Secaucus and Bayonne- JT doesn’t give clients the old hodgepodge of dark-haired people and portents of evil. His advice, which is the crux of his readings, focuses on the positive. Just where his ability to reach into people comes from, JT doesn’t know. He was not taught. He didn’t go out and learn it. The ability simply came to him. Oh, he says, there were portents along the way. When he was fourteen, he had an out-of-body experience. “I thought I was dying,” he says, “and then later, knew what it was when I learned more.” From then on, he began to gravitate towards the spiritual; he had hunches and could predict things among his friends. By the time he was eighteen, he figured out he had a gift. At which point, he acquired a deck of tarot cards and he was on his way. “I don’t read them in the conventional way,” he says. “I use them to focus.” Yet the more he used them, the more they allowed him to see. Now, at age 27, he is firmly convinced that there is more to life than the merely usual human experiences, more entities in the universe than those merely human. Early on after learning to use the tarot deck, he started doing readings for his friends. “I found I was making a difference in people’s lives,” he says, and hopes by continuing this he can help direct people through the winding and often emotional channels of everyday life. “But I don’t tell them anything negative. I simply focus on the positive and go on from there.” No one in JT’s family is psychic- although family members tell him that his grandmother was very intuitive. His father is a down-to-earth fellow, a carpenter, who JT says was as surprised, but not negative. JT says these Hoboken natives were remarkably supportive, partly because each had heard people talking about their son. “My mother was on a bus one time talking to some people,” JT says. “These people said they were going to have a reading done in Hoboken by someone who was supposed to be very good. My mother asked who the psychic was. They told her that the psychic was me.” JT says it left him with a strange feeling to have people talk about him like that and have his parents pick up on it. Yet Hoboken is essentially a small town and word about this gets around very quickly. Still his parents had a clue to his gift earlier. While he says he’s never done a reading for them, he has interpreted dreams and things of that sort. He says he never thought he would be a psychic, though was intrigued by them. Yet when he went to have his fortune told, the readings were hardly grand. “It is difficult for one gifted person to read another,” he says. “Psychics put up walls.” Even with non-gifted people, JT sees more for some than others. He uses no organized layout the way many books suggest. He’s never read a book on tarot. “It comes natural,” he says. “It has to do with the person-to-person relationship.” But he doesn’t want people to come to him because they think he can supply a magic cure. “I don’t want them to come to touch my hand,” he says. “That’s absurd. I’m not selling myself, I’m trying to give people direction. Sometimes what they get from me is wonderful, sometimes it comes easy.” He says he doesn’t exactly have goals. “I’m going where life takes me,” he says. “If I get more people interested in what I do, that’s fine. If not, I’m comfortable." Other articles about JT: Readings for the millennium: Where the new light will take you on your journey By Louise Thach, Hudson Current Staff Writer, January 04, 2001 Psychic helps the dead comfer loved ones left behind, A daily New Jersey news publication, 8/25/00 A real psychic friend, A weekly New Jersey news publication, 8/5/99 Psychic spreads hope: Says Princess Di directs his charity venture, A weekly New Jersey news publication, 11/30/97