Side Step

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions…

I just did the math. I met my BFE (Best Friend EVER) 17 years ago. Its gone too goddamn fast. I can’t believe how long we’ve been together now, and at the same time it seems like we’ve known each other forever. Weird how that works, isn’t it?

I remember when I met her. I had moved the store from one side of the theater to the other which had given me a lot more room. It was still a ridiculously small storefront, but it was what I could afford, and it worked. Jewelry is, after all, pretty small.

I’d already been invaded by the first round of leeches. I’ve had problems with leeches all my life, so this was no different. Its only recently that I’ve been able to figure this problem out, and Bestie has been a major part of understanding why I keep getting into that cycle.

It took finding someone who knows how to be a best friend for me to be able to compare and understand who isn’t a friend, to start on that path.

The leeches in this part of my life we’ve been referring to as the “Evil Three.” Not as much for anonymity as because it seems people we never want to see again have a strange way of showing up after we say their names out loud. Call it superstition, call it evocation magic, but it happens an awful lot. Its been nearly 20 years since they’ve been relevant, let alone evil, but we’ll roll with this for now.

The players here are Evil A, Evil J, and Evil M. M wasn’t as evil as the other two; he was as much a victim as I was, however he had a helluva anger issue, and lost all concepts of rationality when he’d get angry. He was also hopelessly (and stupidly) in love with Evil A, so he had a tendency to take her causes a bit too much to heart. To this day, I feel sorry for him.

I met Bestie when she came with Evil J to the store for the downtown business Halloween trick-or-treating. It was more of a social function than anything else, and Evil J was dressing as a witch. Bestie was ostensibly there to help her with her costume which was a witch complete with prosthetic nose.

A nose that Bestie and I realized she didn’t even need. It wasn’t much bigger than her own, frankly.

Now, when I started this store, and for that matter when I moved into this house some ten years later, I thought of myself as at least nominally Wiccan. I’d started drifting into polytheism by virtue of having run into a couple of Deities already, but I still thought in a Wiccan framework. When I set up my “Spooky Room” at the house here, I had four small altars for each of the Quarters, and the main altar in the middle so I could face whatever way I’d needed. Verrrrrrrrrrrrrry Wiccan-ish.

Bestie came in with this energy I was immediately drawn to. She has this bright red hair, a little girl voice that doesn’t match her physique but really matches her child like nature and joy, and she was wearing layers of beaded necklaces. I was so curious, intrigued, and drawn in. I always am curious about people who are different, so I suppose that isn’t all that odd for me. I didn’t want her to think she was some sort of freak show, so I was trying to let her release whatever information about herself she wanted to in a pace she was comfortable with.

That wasn’t easy!

As I remember it though, we took to each other immediately. Talking at a hundred words a minute or more. She was the first Voodoo practitioner I’d ever met, at least to my own knowledge. Curious doesn’t really even begin to explain it. Given I’ve had a hyper-fixation on religious beliefs and magickal practices as long as I can remember, to say I was obsessed is a polite term.

Thankfully, she seems to have felt the same way, and she came back. A lot.

But things happened, as they always do for me. The Evil Three became more and more controlling, more and more manipulative. They also showed up at the store more and more. It became harder and harder for me to get business in as they were generally always there, and it started to look like a hangout.

They weren’t the only ones, either. There was a handful of teenagers, or I should say successions of teenagers who did the same thing. I didn’t mind as much Friday nights as the town had a car show every Friday night so having people in and around the store wasn’t so very odd. But Evil A, in particular, began acting like she owned the place.

Now, I made several of my own mistakes in all of this, and I’m sure to get into those sooner or later. Some of that was that I was too sympathetic to Evil M. As I said, we’ll get there.

Evil J was the particular problem at this juncture though.

First off, I realized how little she actually knew. She’d been in a coven, I hadn’t. I wanted to have Wicca 101 classes at night once a week when we were closed. As I hadn’t been in an actual coven, I was a little insecure teaching that part of the religion. I could teach from a sole practitioner perspective, but the coven she’d attended had been Gardnerian. I wanted that input for the class. So I asked her if she’d like to teach the class with me.

The suggestion I made is that I would handle the spell work portion, if she’d handle the ritual portion. We could alternate weeks, and I’d jump in for the solitary work if she wasn’t comfortable with it.

We started off the first lesson with her presentation. I really ought to have discussed more with her before hand, I really ought to have…

Because immediately she got into spell work. She didn’t know the difference between spells and rituals. I don’t even think, in retrospect, that she understood the Wiccan holidays enough to describe them, let alone teach about them.

It was disappointing, to say the least.

Evil J almost immediately, as she saw Bestie and I bonding, started bitching. There was always something wrong about Bestie. It got old, fast. And as much as they were supposed to be best friends at the time, she was constantly putting her down. That is, unless she was bragging about her. If anyone at all said something about Bestie being smart, or cool, or impressed with her in anyway, suddenly Bestie was J’s friend. It was odd.

It didn’t take long for her to start shoving Bestie off, either. She didn’t drive, so she was dependent on the train. Her (at the time) boyfriend would pick her up from the train station. If she wanted to stay later or she missed her train, she would ask for J to take her home. Now J lived to the east of the store, Bestie lived one town farther to the east, about 10 minutes or so.

But it was too far for her. Every single time Bestie wanted to stay and asked if J would take her home, J would say yes, and then J would, without Bestie hearing, ask me to either persuade her to take the train or ask for someone else to take her home. After telling Bestie she would drive her home.

Sometimes I would just wait with Bestie at the train station, making jokes about it being such a “horrible neighborhood” that I didn’t want her to risk being there by herself. Eventually though, I started just driving her home. It was faster than the train, and we didn’t have to stand around at the station waiting, which made it even faster for her. It didn’t seem to take more than a few minutes for me to drive her either, so even though I was a good 45 minutes to the west of there, it wasn’t problematic for me at all.

And it gave us a chance to talk. Alone.

That explains how we got closer and closer. Considering the kind of people we both are, it also explains how we started exchanging information about religion and spellwork. Because of course we did. This also explains how I started to understand Voodoo.

It wasn’t long before we parted ways with the Evil Three. Maybe I’ll get into that some day, maybe not. There’s not a lot there I care about anymore, except for the lessons I learned.

Bestie quit her job and became my “work wife” not long after we saw the Evil Three depart. We spent more than eight hours a day together, six days a week, and never once tired of each other. In all our years, we’ve had one break down (I’ll get into that, for sure…) and I got mad at her exactly once, but it wasn’t even her fault then. I think she got mad at me once, too, so we’re even. In seventeen years. That’s not a bad run.

At some point between her being there sometimes and being there all the time, Bestie met a Babalawo at a local flea market where he had a booth. For those unaware, this is a type of priest through Ifa or Santeria. That’s how the Side Step happened.

Throughout this all, I’m wresting with what I’ve learned. Because someone so burnt by Christianity, who threw it out whole cloth, is going to have issues with Voodoo. Especially someone with one foot already in polytheism who hasn’t completely deconstructed Christianity yet.

Voodoo has a veneer of Christianity over it to this day. Some people have started trying to “restore” it to its original pre-slavery context, making it into some sort of African Polytheism, but that’s not the tradition practiced by most. For the rest of the world, they’re Catholics who happen to venerate the Lwa.

Then, Bestie ends up taking me in to see her Babalawo, who found my ruling Orisha. I had to start smashing square pegs into octagon shaped holes. It wasn’t easy. An awful lot didn’t get straightened out until I began to understand both the history of Christianity better, and the concept of Omnism.

Funny how our paths will seem so straight and predictable for years and years until we just get curious and find that weird path off to the side of the main path and we end up on a completely different, and even less trodden path.