I’m surprised how often strangers are willing to talk to me about their personal shit. I shouldn’t be. If Amazing Grace comes calling that means something fucking up in their life happened that they don’t understand. They’re looking for answers. People in that state will talk to just about anyone.
I met Christie Lane’s girlfriend at Jose Locos which is just up the street from the STD Flea Market where she works. If that name a joke? I don’t get it. She told me they have some good vintage clothes there sometimes. My wardrobe is vintage as fuck.
What’s not surprising is that I drove all this way to talk to someone and then didn’t know what to say. I do that.
She took the lead and talked about Christie Lane for a long time. It sounds like she loved him. I mean really lived him. She said they were going to get engaged before he drowned himself in a Perkins toilet. I didn’t say anything but she must have been able to read “You were going to marry that piece of shit?” on my face.
She said that his bluster and assholery was mostly an act. She said that he was a very sweet and sensitive man in private. Is someone pretending to be an asshole different than a legit asshole? That’s a question for philosophy.
While I was trying to decide how to broach the subject of crazy magic bug stuff she sat back and sized me up before saying “So you were the one huh? You were with him when he died? You don’t look like his type.”
I told her that we weren’t fucking. I told her that we were working on something together.
She was dubious “For his act?”
I asked her if Christie Lane ever talked to her about Chubby O’Sullivan. She didn’t know anything about magic or bug spirits or her dead boyfriend being a serial killer so I didn’t push it.
She had a bunch of stuff she cleaned out of Christie’s trailer that she let me look through. My lame ass story was that I thought I might be related to Chubby O’Sullivan and that I was trying to find out who my father was. I don’t think she believed it but she let me look anyway.
The question she did ask me that I didn’t have an answer for is why Christie would have been helping me if we weren’t fucking. He was a real sweetheart, just like she said.
The best lead I find was an old newspaper interview where Chubby stopped with the old man boner jokes and got serious for a minute. He talked about how he spent time on a farm after the war and had a “spiritual awakening”.
Sounds like a hippy commune but this took place in the 50s, hippies didn’t come around until the 70s I think. Hippies had to come from somewhere though. Groups don’t just spring up out of nothing, they evolve from some other group. Maybe they were pre-Hippy hippies.
Anyway, I’m heading to Waynesville, Ohio the only place that might rival Canandaigua in terms of mystical power.
Rocket Cat 