There are few things that make me giggle like an excited school girl than finding out someone I don’t like has a hideous and embarrassing dark past. Perhaps this makes me a terrible person, but I revel in the fact that someone who has wronged me in some way has a nail-bitingly wretched secret. I’ve never denied being an asshole, this is common knowledge, so I feel like I am just being true to my character by dancing in the knowledge of some dipshit’s misfortune.
Over the weekend I was sipping some whiskey with a friend at The Hideout and talking to Justin, the bartender. He relayed a story to us about a group who had come in and caused a huge problem with the 60 or so people they had brought with them. One of the main offenders was a woman I happened to know and didn’t get along with. After listening to his story and being thoroughly upset by their behavior and agreeing with his righteous anger, he told us they were part of a local cult. I nearly choked on my drink at this revelation. Oh, joy, what gift is this that has fallen onto my lap? Now, like most people in America, I have always wanted to know somebody in a cult. I would want to ask them as many questions as possible. “Tell me about the drug-infused sexual rituals you were privy to at the age of 12.” I would sit wide-eyed and elated in my curiosity. “And did you always know you wanted to be brain washed into vicious subjugation or was it simply a result of the constant propaganda fed to you?” So my nemesis was part of an organic eating, LSD taking, communal living, hippie cult. Win. Now, with this newfound knowledge, I had to be careful with my approach. Do I just jump right into the interrogation? Probably not, I have to be cautious so as to not scare her away before my questions can be answered. I view a cult member the way a hunter views a deer. It takes a sense of propriety (which I don’t particularly have) and a beat-around-the-bush attack. You sneak ever so quietly on them, not trying to seem like a threat and then BOOM! Hit them with it. One couldn’t simply say, “So you’re in a cult, eh?” My questions needed to be ambiguous enough that she would betray her own secrecy and offer up little tid-bits I could use for my own entertainment. I tend to fail horribly when I try to tip toe and will instead fuck up the entire operation, revealing my true intentions far too soon. This couldn’t happen, I wanted my information.
I began forming my own back story of her life. I knew she had left to a foreign country when she was younger with a man she planned to marry, but it didn’t work out and ended up coming home to the states. I imagined that she had run away to flee the suffocation from her all-consuming hippiedom and attempted to make a new life for herself; one free of pachouli. tie-dye and Koombaya singing circles. She, of course, would have to lie to him and say she was running from an abusive relationship and must stay off the radar. Hiding in the jungles of Brazil at first, living fairly comfortably off of the wild life and fashioning clothes out of banana leaves in her new amazonian home. Perhaps she had domesticated an anaconda as a pet. Or a Vampire Bat. After a few months, they decided it was safe to leave their sweltering cave and went to Argentina where she sold jewelry on the street and he began a moderately successful clock shop. The cult leaders had searched her out, though, and tracked her down to her vendor station in the streets of Buenos Aires. She was dragged back to her small hut where they waited for her lover. They revealed her family history to her man at this point. His shock and disgust at such a disturbing past had forced him to say “good-bye,” refusing to marry someone who had ritualistic sexual relations with her 30 years older cult leader and danced in pig’s blood to the full moon during the summer solstice. Defeated and broken hearted, she returned with her family (after a period of massive reprogramming) and reassumed her old life.
At this point, I don’t even want to know the real story, because there is no way it could be any more interesting than the one I had dreamed up. I felt a pang of sympathy for the imagined life I had given her. No wonder she was such a twat monkey! She was subject to a demoralizing and highly propagandized cult! It all fell into place. Well shit biscuit. How can I hate such a pathetic creature? There was a reason behind the irrational insanity she projected onto everyone around her. Hmm... so what was my excuse? Oh yeah... I grew up Mormon. A cult without the sex. Fuck my life.
