Setting: The Coffee House, sometime after dark on a mildly cool evening. Enter a playful Wiccan. Honestly, they do exist. One of those present pretends to take an invisible snowball from the counter. He rolls it, and packs it, smoothing it over with a broad soft circular sweep with each palm, over and over, for about five minutes. After about two minutes, others in the area begin to notice, and want to play. Why not? He starts playing an imaginary game of catch with them, once he is done shaping the air. A young woman in the corner seems frightened by this. The temptation is too great. He shot puts the nothingness in his hands like it's a basketball, right at her. The young woman screams.
You are sitting there with her, wondering if she has lost her mind. She complains that she's been hit with an "energy ball". Saying that she needs to "ground herself", she rises to leave. What do you do?
It was getting late and the neighborhood was not very well lit, so our publisher decided to be a gentleman and come with to make sure that she would be safe, even if she did seem to be a few candles short of a seance. Mary, the young lady, went over to Wicker Park and more quickly than you could say "live the cliche", she proceeded to hug a tree. Our publisher, let's call him "Sam", was informed that trees loved negative energy and drank it up. He had no idea. Neither did the tree, we suspect. Which, at that point was probably quite dead, having fallen most of the way over onto its side, with its roots coming up well out of the ground. Nobody seemed to notice, except for Sam, who was already wondering why he was there.
Seeming relieved but tired, Mary started walking very slowly toward the end of the park and began talking again. The conversation turned to what had been going on in her life, the character traits some of the people involved in it were displaying, and how this was what you'd expect from someone with their astrological sign. At which point, she asked Sam what his was. He said "Gemini". A look of shock passed over her face, followed by a look of fear. She told him to leave, saying that having him there was too weird.
The good news was that she was not alone at that point. Before they had left, Sam had asked a number of people to come with, one of whom agreed. The bad news is that Sam was left to wander the largely abandoned side streets of a dark neighborhood alone which, considering Chicago's murder rate, was really not a very friendly gesture. He got back, having found that a favor had been rewarded with a snub, to discover that almost everybody had left. The evening was over, but at least, he said later, it was warm and bright inside. That lifted his spirits, but not for long. He was asked where Mary was, and told them, then answering their questions about why it was that she had asked him to leave. To his astonishment, they handled the news about his birthday even more poorly than Mary did. Hatred, as he put it, seemed to ooze out of every pore in that room.
He would have left at that very moment, but he couldn't, because Mary and her other protector had not yet returned. As irritated as he was with her, he didn't want her hurt. "At least, not until after I had a chance to strangle her myself", he would say later, shaking his head. He was worried for her, and had some cause to be worried for himself. You see, the law is a little peculiar in Illinois. In practice, if you're the last person who is seen with somebody who vanishes, that is enough to get you convicted of their murder in lieu of all other evidence, even if no body or other evidence of the person's demise is ever found. And Mary and her now sole companion, when he last saw them, had gone wandering in the direction of a really bad corner of the neighborhood.
A few hours later, they came in to find Sam sitting alone in the coffeehouse, grateful that he had brought something to read but really for little else at this point. Far from apologizing, they seemed positively giddy, if a little surprised that he would "dare" to be there, what with his having been born in June and all that. But they were good enough to share with him what had happened - with Mary's boyfriend not being around, they thought they'd found a good time to pop out for a quickie, her temporary companion both being male, and not a Gemini ...
"Good night, Mary", said Sam, heading for the door, hoping against hope that the 72 North Avenue bus would still be running.
Sam avoided Pagan events for a while, but eventually boredom and maybe even a loneliness, all too common in this city, got to him. With the hopeful thought that maybe he had just seen the worst of the community, he gave it another chance. The worst, of course, was yet to come.
He came back resenting Mary, who continued to greet him coldly now that the cat was out of the bag about that June birthday, and soon found good reason to hate her. Back before her episode, when he still regarded her as a friend, he talked about what was weighing on him more than anything else. His mother was dying of leukemia, slipping from stage two into stage three. A few years later, she would be gone. One should not ask what a kind person would do in a situation like that, only what a civilised one would do.
It would certainly not be what followed. Later that night, Mabel, one of Mary's "friends" and Jack, the head of Gay Pagans of Chicago, wanted to go to Whitecastle Hamburgers, and they wanted her to leave and drive them right then. Mary told them no, that she was enjoying herself, and didn't want to leave. They continued to badger her. Sam, back then, some months before the incident in Wicker Park, decided to act like a friend, and back Mary up. Mabel went ballistic, asking him, in effect, how he dared to get in the way of her, when she and her friends were ganging up on somebody. "You don't know who you're messing with", she hissed.
Did we mention that this was over a hamburger? Or that this earlier meeting had been taking place in a restaurant on Broadway, in the middle of Andersonville's restaurant row? This woman as not going mad from hunger at the time. Food would have been easily obtainable where she was. She was going mad just from hearing the word "no". The better part of a year later, long after this encounter, months even after the "Gemini" incident in Wicker Park, Sam met Mabel in passing and had the sense to keep on passing. Would you guess that over six months would be long enough for Mabel to get over a five minute delay in getting a bag of sliders?
If so, then you guessed wrong. Mabel, having noticed Sam's presence, decided that it was time to seek revenge for the denial of her inalienable right to instant gratification. Somebody, and it was easy to find out who, had passed along the news about Sam's mom to her and she decided to put it to good use. Coming home to an empty house from chemotherapy, too weak to attend a holiday family gathering out of town, Sam's mother received a call from somebody threatening to have Sam killed, and his disemembered remains thrown from the State Street bridge. This was the first of a series of calls which would arrive at the home of Sam's parents over the next few months, harassing this critically ill woman and her elderly mate at all hours, until the lethargic Chicago and Naperville police forces could be pushed into action, placing traps on the phones. Fortunately, Mabel and her psychotic friends were none too slick, and had been placing the calls from her place of work.
The reader, we hope, will forgive us for the repetition, but let us spell out the whole situation in its full absurdity : a terminally ill woman, fighting for what life remained to her in the course of her leukemia, was subjected to harassment by telephone at all hours because a grown woman in her 30s could not contain her anger about the fact that over six months earlier, her victim's son had stuck up for one of his friends (Mary), resulting in her (Mabel) having to wait a few minutes to be driven out for some dry slices of ground beef stacked on greasy white bread (the Whitecastle "slider"), while sitting in the middle of one of a major city's restaurant districts. What could Sam say to his mother about this? "Son, where did you meet these odd people?" "At a religious event, mother". "Pardon me?"
As soon as the calls were traced, the word was passed along to Mabel that if they didn't cease immediately, she would be conducting all her future business deals from behind bars, where very few of the national chains were willing to deliver. That, at least, put an end to the harassment of Sam's mother. But Sam's pleasures, and ours, had only just begun.