Fade from black, but just barely. We're looking at a dark and windswept street corner, and looking ahead we see three women. To be exact, we guess they're three women, though in two cases, we could go either way on that. They stare at the brightly lit glass front of a small coffeehouse. It looks so warm in there. "Kitty, it's as cold as (deleted) out here. Are you sure he's even going to show up?" "Trust me, he'll show up. He always comes." They wait. And they wait ...Sam was not impressed with the arguments he was hearing out of the protesters. Weren't these the same avowed radical feminists who had been screaming about the very idea that somebody might question the criteria a woman might use to choose a mate, just a few months back? Yet here they were, now that the gender roles were reversed, doing exactly what they had attacked some hapless visitor for doing a few months go, only more aggressively, screaming more loudly then they had before. These very same people who would turn irate at the very notion that somebody else might judge another's actions, were adopting a severely judgemental tone of their own as they lodged the wildly unfounded accusation of "going to rituals to pick women up", based on nothing more that the fact that Sam had enjoyed a pleasant (and chaste) conversation with a pretty young woman after the solstice ritual.
But "chaste" was a concept that they couldn't seem to grasp, thinking, like Mary, that any pleasantries between a man and a woman had to be leading somewhere sexual, not at all a surprise, considering who the ringleader of the moment was. And there she was, queen of the night's ball : the woman with the two bed partners, telling Sam how much better off Lucy was without a "double dealer" like himself, who would dare to talk to another woman with Lucy around. "And yet", says Sam, "you're boasting about the fact that you've just flipped a coin to decide whose brains you're going to (deleted) out tonight, and that's cool in your book. So, if I understand your reasoning, the honorable thing for us to have done would have been to skip the small talk, and jump into the sack?! Is there a particular position you'd recommend, or will any form of fornication do to redeem my standing as a gentleman?" And they were most unhappy.
Not that they had ever really been listening. One more visitation was yet to come, again, courtesy of Lucy, who Sam was already wishing he had never walked out to that car.
At first, Sam didn't even know who he was dealing with. All that he knew was that he had a note handed to him, written in a snotty tone, from somebody he had never heard of. She called herself "Kitty". She wanted to know where he had gotten this stupid idea that Lucy was serious, and not just making a joke, or trying to tell him that she wasn't interested.
Sam looked heavenward, shook his head, and started writing a reply. "Yes", he said, "I can see that. Because women frequently give their phone numbers to men they aren't interested in. It adds to the air of mystery that is woman. Kitty, or whatever your real name is, I'm not entirely sure of what sort of proof you'd accept for the radical proposition that Lucy was telling the truth, but when Lucy asked me to call her, I got this strange idea that it was because she wanted me to call her. Apparently you, as somebody who wasn't even there, feel you know better". Handing his reply over with a thin smile, he said "be sure to tell Kitty than I deeply appreciated her input. No, wait, you'd better translate that into the female dialect of Wiccan, and tell her that I said to butt out. Otherwise, she might misunderstand".
Kitty had, indeed, not been present for the Gemini incident with Lucy, a fact that Sam had no trouble guessing, because only he and Lucy had been sitting at that table. Not that he would have welcomed her company. She was somebody who, in the entire course of his life, he had spoken to for a grand total of five minutes. She was the sort of person who thought that if her voice boomed, then she would just automatically become the life of the party. Sam seemed to feel otherwise, wincing in pain and starting to reach for his ears whenever she appeared. He would exchange a few polite pleasantries with her, and then move on as quickly as two long legs could carry him. What he didn't suspect was that to Kitty, this made them life long friends, and she began to believe that she actually knew him quite well. So she saw nothing unusual about writing to Sam about an incident that she wasn't present for, under a name he had never seen, explaining to him what had "really happened", going on to share her wisdom as she explained his life to him. This, with Lucy standing by her side and half-dictating the note, we later found out.
"Who is this person?", Sam had asked. Finally getting the answer to that question just added to Sam's aggravation, as did the news that Kitty wished to pursue this, and was determined to do so somewhere, online or off. "Forget it", said Sam, stating that with apologies to a certain supreme court justice, while he didn't know how to define a troll, he knew one when he saw one, and that she'd make a fine addition to his mailfilter and his killfile. Later on, he was to find out that Kitty was telling people that this meant that he wanted to kill her, and would dissolve into tears because she "was so scared". She got together a group of people to support her, because she needed to have at least two people with her in order to stand on her own two feet. She chose Mary, the tree hugger, and her friend Mabel, the beautiful kindred spirit who had been responsible for those threatening calls to Sam's terminally ill mother.
After this little group was gathered, John Bohac, none other, wrote to warn Sam of the planned "ambush" at the next meeting. Which, Sam hadn't been planning on going to anyway, given the late hour and the fact that he was meeting one lunatic after another there. But for the organizers, he would have had no reason to go at all - and he was seeing them elsewhere, anyway. John, at that point, informed Sam that Lucy had gotten her friends to initiate the hostilities that had followed his redux of "the Merchant of Venice", because she was unhappy with what he had said - a point that Lucy would later make, herself. Almost as if John was speaking for her. Which, of course, he was.
What John wasn't advertising at the time was that he and Lucy were now making the beast with two backs when his girlfriend wasn't around, and that the agenda he had hidden was Lucy's, as well. Acting as if he had Sam's best interests at heart, John advised him to "play to win". Sam asked him what he meant by that. He said, "decide what you really want, and decide how to get it". He then made sure that Sam understood that Kitty was out for blood. Sam thanked him for the warning. Expecting that, as usual, he wouldn't have a chance to get a word in edgewise in person, Sam expressed his displeasure with her, and her behavior, doing so in public before the ambush was scheduled to occur. He into detail about everything he found unappealing about her, she of the coke bottle glasses, from the way her voice went from booming and coase to a simpering lisp in the blink of an eye, to the way she constantly joked about being called "young man", not noticing that when she was called that, the other people weren't joking. Or would that be "he" in Kitty's case, Sam asked, pointing out that it would be awkward for him to ask Kitty for clear this one up. "Where's a good androgynous pronoun when you need one?" "Out for blood, are you Kitty?", Sam thought to himself. "Then I'm sure you won't mind if I draw a little of my own".
The community was aghast. Sam had spoken of one of them almost as harshly as they had spoken of him, and with no better justification than the fact that he had been speaking the truth. And the truth was not kind. What could one say on behalf of a group of people who had decided to gang up on a lone individual as they caught him by surprise, in order to rant at him about their delusions? John Bohac, in shock that his efforts at manipulation had produced the exact opposite of the hoped-for results, adopted a 'proper' tone of outrage that Sam hadn't been a proper coward. (*) He would later tell Sam that, "As someone who has your best interests at heart ... " (when I'm not rocking Lucy's bed) "... I feel that, no offense, you were being stupid". No, Sam was being noncooperative.
What John never got was that it wasn't an absolute given that others would want the friendship of just anybody, and that real friendship began with fair treatment. Sam did exactly as John had suggested. He fought to win, it's just that his criteria of victory were different from John's. After he got done attacking Kitty, all of his anger at her was gone, used up. After he got done attacking her some more, after a while, a feeling of peace and contentment came over him. "And what about Kitty?", someone would ask. "What about her?", Sam would reply. "She made her choices freely, she can accept their consequences. It is not my concern". Some of those present then wrote to John, who had graciously vouched for the fact that Sam was not a potential sex offender, as Lucy's friends were suggesting, then wrote in to ask him about how he felt now that Sam had (deleted) him". Out of what, was never explained, but John made sure to share. Apparently, Sam hadn't minded his place well enough.
Sam didn't even pretend to care. He turned his back on these people, who he felt by now had been given ample opportunity to come to their senses, and decided that he would like to do so forever. Though he didn't consciously see things in such terms at the time, he was weaning himself away from an experience which had promised him so many memories, but hadn't provided him with very many good ones. He headed for home.
Three shivering young women stand on a street corner. The fading dusk has turned to pitch black, and the wind risen to a gale. Another truck pitches through a half-frozen puddle. One of the girls doesn't jump quickly enough. "(deleted) this, Kitty. If he comes, he comes. But I'm going to get some (deleted) coffee" "Could you get me some?" "Get your own".
A few more minutes pass, another girl gives up, and Kitty, remembering why it is that young gentleman walk young ladies out to their car at this hour, decides not to stand outside, alone. She opens the door. A welcome blast of warm air rushes past her face, pins and needles striking her cheeks as the blood rushes back into them. "Kitty?", asks somebody. "What?", she responds, trying to speak through a face grown numb with cold. "Some guy dropped by today, and left a note for you".
She rips it open. "Kitty", it reads, "as much as I was looking forward to being shrieked at by a pack of neurotic harpies, two of my aunts dropped in from New York, and I haven't seen them for months, so I'll have to take a raincheck. But there's always next month, so keep that oil boiling". She tears the note apart, and begins to scream ...
(*) I trust the reader won't be terribly shocked to learn that John, too, turned out to be on medication? In fact, almost every Wiccan in attendance was, as well.