[CanYoAssDigIt] My Date With the Exorcist

This story has always gotten a big laugh from anyone I've told it to. I
hadn't thought of it for a while, but I was at one of the locations
involved tonight and was reminded. And now, with these discussion
groups, I’ve found my dream audience.

You’ll have to take my word for it that this is true. It has an
extremely dark side in that it’s a sickening tragedy for this woman’s
poor son. Still, I defy anyone not to laugh. It do go on for a bit, so
you may want to grab a bottle of some monastery liqueur to sip and
remind you that the Catholic church was at least good for one thing.

May, 2002: The romance was like a fairy tale, in that it was improbable
and really stupid. We met by chance, she liked my hair, I liked her
face, this is America, what else should matter? We talked several times
on the phone before going out. It was established that she was a
godster, I wasn’t, and we could both live with it. In retrospect this
seems a ludicrous proposition. My excuse is that I had just started
antidepressants, and as a side effect was going through a priapic second
pubescence. Her excuse is that she’s crazy.

We went to Mercato, a rather upscale joint, at least for a working class
schmuck like me. The food was great, the tiny table shaky, the
atmosphere vapid. Expensive nonetheless. I was out of my element, with
vinegar and oil to dip the bread in, crème brulee, yadda. I remember the
dinner conversation being pleasant, although I couldn’t tell you what it
was about. But, boy howdy, I can remember what we talked about later.

On the way home, we stopped at Ralph’s (That’s a supermarket, for our
friends in Tacoma and Seattle.) for some reason or other. After checking
out, we sat on a bench in the foyer. Which happened to be near Ralph’s
book section. Although Ralph’s has the usual selection of
below-lowest-common-denominator magazines, all of their books proper are
christer merde. She pulled one off the shelf and told me that it would
be a very good thing if I were to read it. So much for the belief system
détente.

The book was by a home-town (Lacey) author, and a story of demonic
possession. Not fiction. My date thought it important that I be warned
such things can happen. Even in Thurston County, I guess. From this
point on, those readers among you who have seen the movie “True Stories”
can get a fairly accurate picture of my expressions by remembering John
Goodman’s character, Lewis Fyne, as he listens to what The Lying Woman
is telling him on their date.

Well, okay, thinks I, it can’t get worse. (Fucking Celexa, anyway.) She
went on from there to tell me that the same thing had happened to her 17
year old son. Of the many spooky goings-on in their household, the one I
remember in the most detail is about the demon manifesting outside the
boy’s body, without a host.

The boy, y’see, had been given a phone number by a buddy he met at
Catholic youth camp in California. This buddy knew exactly what to do in
case of possession, and had advised my date's son to give him a call in
case it happened. Good friend, because you just never know when that
might happen. The son was lying on the couch, possessed, physically ill,
just ALL messed up. He had the phone number with him. But who should
come in and steal it but the demon in the guise of mom! I never quite
understood how the demon was possessing him and outside of him at the
same time. (See? At this point the story started not to make sense.)

Mom took him to St. Peter Hospital. (btw Isn’t that kind of a foreboding
name for a hospital?) The shrink diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. Mom
did not like that. No paranoid schizophrenics in our house, are there
dear? She sought a second opinion. And a third. This being after all a
Catholic hospital, she eventually found a “doctor” who puts the “quack”
into AFLAC, and this doctor said: “This is not a matter for medicine. It
is a matter for The Church.”

Mom took the kid, who was not paranoid schizophrenic at all or anything
like that, home and got on the horn to the local diocese (-I think. I’m
not too swift with Catholic taxonomy). It turns out that western
Washington, hell, all of Washington, is slap out of exorcists. Finally
she found one in Chicago, who talked her through the procedure by phone
and fax. (Wasn't it nice of God to invent the fax machine?) It worked.

Since then, the kid wears a St. Christopher medal and about a dozen
others, and Mr. Demon has not been back.

To paraphrase Nigel Tufnel: “We shan’t date together again.”

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CanYoAssDigIt/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
CanYoAssDigIt-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/