About 10 or 15 years ago i hadn't had much experience with alternate realities in any form.Sure, I had smoked some weed and done some acid in high school; and my Navy days had regular trips to inner-city and coliseum-type music shows with the prerequisite experimentation.But as far as co-mingling with other realms I was a complete neophyte. I drank far too much, far too regularly; but most of us in Clearwater County did as young adults. Then I got re-acquainted with an old pal from my high school party days.
He was the guy who had the party trailer back in the day. He was 7 or 8 years older than a lot of the people that partied in his trailer (including me), and had acquired a serious methamphetamine habit as he progressed in life.I could take that stuff or leave it, but a girl I had quite a crush on (and quite a bit of respect for her opinion) said it would be a good idea to start hanging with him about ten years ago. Since I was pretty much a roll-over and play dead puppy dog in those days, I did as she instructed and started hanging around with him again. He was pretty knowledgeable on doing a job the hard way, with little or no money for supplies or tools.And since I wasn't averse to smoking a bowl with him, we did that pretty regularly while doing things.
I had at that time just been deeded 2 of my parents 40 acres of land, and had purchased an old '74 Marshfield 3 bedroom trailer. It wasn't in the greatest shape when I got it, but "Joe" (not his real name) agreed to help me fix it up a bit.As soon as the company I bought it from dragged it in and blocked it up, we set to work.
Money was too tight in those days to do many jobs on it in a month, as I had just started receiving SSDI for what they then thought was only bi-polar disorder. I have now been diagnosed with service-connected PTSD, and can therefore now afford niceties like tailor-made cigarettes all month.
So with no money for quite a bit of the month to spend on my trailer, I would go over to Joe's and help out around the place. He would in exchange supply the meth.
He knew I had the crush on the young woman, and for some reason found the need to torture me mercilessly about her. It was a steady stream of sly asides and innuendo about her sexual habits and mores. Never a direct, to the point statement I could nail down and ask about, but every one a spear through my heart. This went on for close to a year.
There is a small, church-run thrift store in my hometown, and I still stop there on occasion. When I was dead-ass broke I was a frequent customer buying doo-dads for my trailer. On one shopping venture there I noticed a Bible on a shelf behind the counter, and since I didn't have one I asked how much. $5. I snapped it up. It was white leather bound with a zipper enclosure, and came with a cedar box carrying case. I didn't look it over for a few days after I bought it, and when I did I decided I'd rather not read any of what was written in it. The first page I opened to partway through the book was a portrait of Christ(?) standing in a grotto next to a hole in the ground with flames shooting from it nearly to the ceiling of the grotto. He had his arms down at his sides with palms turned out, as if in askance. Over this portrait was a translucent red overlay. It scared me. I put the box containing the Bible on my electric fireplace mantle and tried to forget about it.
Across the clearing from the trailer I was setting up stood (and still stands) a very small, very old house that my brother had brought in when he was deeded his 2 acres. At this point in time he and I had just gotten into a serious altercation wherein his arm was broken. My mother had purchased the house from him when he moved to town after the fight, and now she had a small crew of carpenters there daily remodeling it. Many, many black arts were performed in that house when my brother lived there, he learned them in prison.
At some point in the re-modeling process a crudely crafted spear had been dug out of a wall or the attic, and now stood in the corner. Very strange occurrences happened during that remodeling process. Possibly the strangest was the period of time when I could go out in the clearing, say "when", and the sound of a rifle's action being cycled could be heard from the nearby woods.
One of the carpenters on the remodeling crew was a long-haired local guy I have known all my life. One afternoon I went over to snoopervise the job and found him in the attic , working on what was probably asbestos insulation removal. We communicated verbally and visually for a minute or two and I left, taking the spear with me.
I had grown rather tired of Joe's needling about my crush at this point, but honestly didn't intend the following to happen. I found a free-standing range owners manual in my trailer, wrote something brief but bizarre on it, then waited for sundown. At sundown I collected up the manual, spear, and bible and went for a drive.
First I drove to a neighbor native woman's place (she has "devil" tattooed on her hand) and set the box containing Bible in her driveway. Then I took a circuitous route to Joe's and interlaced the manual in the tines of the spear and set it just outside his door.
I visited Joe a couple days later and he seemed a changed man. No more needling of any sort, and a different, soft look in his eyes.
After we smoked a bowl I told him I had stopped by his place a couple days before and the old look came into his eyes just long enough for him to choke out the sentence "I couldn't get up!". The changed man look then came back into his eyes and he nicely explained how he hadn't been able to rise from his chair for a day after I had dropped off his gift. La La Voodoo.