Open Season, Part 4

Finally Some Good News

        The one piece of good news I got during this period was that Milo Yiannopolous had been kicked off of FaceBook. At the very least, the information doxing me was no longer posted there. Still, I prayed. I talked to my madrina. I meditated. I prayed some more. Then, I buckled down and tried to focus on my summer renovation plans. Thank God for Ryan Dannar, my good friend since high school. He checked in on me during all of this. Sometimes he'd bring Wes Anderson movies, because I’m the only other person Ryan knows who wants to talk about them, and I wanted to talk about literally ANYTHING else but my problems. Ryan also helped me keep my spirits up by channeling our fear and anxiety into making art and listening to him play music. We kicked around ideas for getting our musician and artist friends together and putting on an event that would denounce the Yiannopolous charade. When the Yiannopoulis charade got canceled, we went back to watching The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited instead of producing the music event.  Things started to change when the rains came later that May.

        At first, it just seemed like we finally were getting some much-needed rain, even if that rain was real heavy. To me, it felt like some sort of torrential justice coming down. You see, I’d taken the time to learn where Chris Barnett lived and had property. Those areas were getting hit the hardest. The drive-bys had finally stopped, too. For the first few days, I felt better than I had in a month. After the first week, though, Tulsa County was rapidly floating over into Noah and the ark territory. That was concerning. After the second week of rain, my neighborhood was evacuated for ten days because the levees next to us were starting to seep in places. I’m a Hurricane Katrina survivor; you do not need to tell ME twice that the levees done gonna bust, cuz I’ll be gone after the first time you say it. That was terrifying. And that’s the problem with rain, I finally remembered: it falls on the just and the unjust alike. 

        After several weeks of rain and standing water, the floods receded. I eventually returned home without incident and went back to my regular life…of vigilance. My house, and some others on my street, were untouched by the floods. Tulsa had suffered plenty of floods and tornadoes before, but I don’t recall a time prior to this one where the reconstruction and recovery process got moving so fast. Or was so well-supported on the local levels. It took all summer, but most folks were more or less back to some level of normalcy before school started. Everybody except for Chris Barnett. 

        It was late in the summer when Chris Barnett finally attempted the murder that undid him. By that time, I had mostly put him and the whole mess out of my mind. I was getting ready for the new semester to start and planning my curriculum. Then one day, casually scrolling through my algorithmically neutral Google local news feed at lunch, I see a story about Chris Barnett. He had been arrested for shooting a process server who had come to serve papers on a two-million-dollar lawsuit. Somehow, within five minutes of my seeing that story, I got a phone call from Ms. W filling me in on the developments of the case.  

        Barnett’s life had begun to unravel after the rains. The flooding losses, along with a raft of abominable life choices, had bankrupted Barnett. He was fending off creditors and process servers. His parents had cut him off. His businesses had finally failed and were too far gone to be saved or salvaged. He was being evicted from his house. His husband was threatening to leave him. Finally, his last hope at income–those nuisance suits moving through the courts all over town–was lost when his amoral parasite of a law firm dropped him as a client for failure to pay.

        As Barnett became increasingly desperate, his blogging became increasingly deranged and disturbing. He had started recording in grisly detail his plans to kidnap and murder the presidents of TU and TCC, and a few others he held grudges against. But the most terrifying post he made was the one in which he puckishly outlined his plans to “hypothetically” commit a mass shooting at TU Football game. Then, only a few days later, he shot a process server in the arm and claimed it was self-defense. The police did a cursory review of Barnett’s Google search history and found searches for phrases like “legally shoot a process server,” “self-defense shoot a process server,” and “can you legally shoot a process server?” Barnett was caught, dead-to rights, and arrested. Worse yet, this shooting had made Barnett’s “hypothetical” revenge fantasy look more like an actual domestic terrorist threat. Oklahoma already had one of those back in 1995, and another one back in 1921, and we did not want another. This was the angle that Ms. W decided to play next. 

        As soon as Barnett was arrested, Ms. W’s team had gotten their dossier to the DA and set up a meeting. Barnett spend the night in jail for the process server shooting, which gave the DA a day to get a warrant. They got it, and the resulting search recovered in the ballpark of 200 firearms–registered and not–from Barnett’s house while he was in jail. The next morning, Barnett was processed out for the shooting. To my understanding, he was immediately re-arrested and taken back to jail as soon as he got home. This time, representatives from the Oklahoma State Attorney’s office had come up to Tulsa for the arraignment. They told the judge that Barnett was a profoundly dangerous person and a serious flight risk, and that no amount of bail should be granted. The judge agreed. That is how Chris Barnett spent the next few months in jail awaiting trial.

        I was saved, for the moment. Barnett was tried the following February and found guilty on the counts of felony assault and battery. With that, Barnett’s campaign against me crashed and burned. The judge sentenced Barnett to spend the next 32 years in jail and pay a $10,000 fine. If that was as saved as my bacon was going to get, I was happy to take it. That malicious records request would always be a mar on my record, I knew, but at least now Barnett’s website was getting taken down, so I wouldn’t be a simple Google Search away from disaster. The relief I felt was immense and sweet. It became a lot easier to focus on living my life, so I did. I put the entire mess out of my mind and went back to my pre-vigil life.

        One night as I was wrapping up class, I overheard a very interesting conversation between two custodians who had come to clean the classroom after class. Mechelle and LaToya–not their real names–had been working at TCC for as long as I remember. I noticed that they always seemed to like to work together. Their banter always sort of reminded me of Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show. 

        “Oh My GOD,” LaToya said all of a sudden, “Did you hear about that crazy guy who shot that process server a while back?”

        I dropped what I was doing and eavesdropped intently. 

        “What?” Mechelle asked. “...Uh, No.”

        “That governor candidate guy,” LaToya continued, “Chris something–like Barette. He shot that guy, that process server?”

        Mechelle stared blankly at LaToya.

        “You really don’t know?” LaToya remarked. “Well, I overheard a student say that they recognized him from this campus. They said he saw him here with some other dude at night one time looking for a professor.” 

        “That’s some scary shit,” Mechlle replied, “That’s terrible!... Did anything happen?”

        “No,” said LaToya with some disappointment. “Turns out, that professor doesn’t even have an office here.” 

        Being unable to stop myself any further from interjecting, I blurted out. “Yeah. I heard about that. I heard that the professor–they were an adjunct.” Both custodians looked at me for a few seconds while I looked at them. Then, they spoke at the same time:

        “You know that professor?” asked LaToya.

        “He didn’t even have an office?” asked Mechelle.

        “No,” I explained, “they’re an adjunct. I’ve overheard students talking about the same thing all semester,” I cagily replied. 

        Looking up at me with an expression of disbelief on her face, Mechelle then asked, “Who sticks their neck out like that for a part-time job?”

        Indeed. At the end of the day, I think the most ridiculous thing about this entire misadventure is that it happened to an impoverished adjunct without an office, yet the only thing that can possibly exonerate me in the public record is this fact. 

        But the bright side of it all is this: THE SHOW WAS CANCELED. This misadventure took place a little over a year before the failed 2020 Trump Rally in Tulsa. I have to wonder what might be different now if Trump had come to Tulsa and been greeted with the eager fascist bigots who Milo Yiannopoulos had meant to rile up. I am grateful we never got the chance to find out. My whole goal in teaching about the Greenwood Race Massacre in my writing class was to do my part in helping right a historic wrong. I like to think that I have been contributing to this goal in my own small way. Though to be honest, it also seems this misadventure helped prevent even more of that evil shit from happening in Tulsa again–for the time being. 

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3

Open Season, Part 3

Doxed and Stalked

One thing I love about irony is that at its heart lies the pure absurdity of coincidence. Nothing pulls me out of a funk quite as quickly as seeing how absurd whatever situation I am pondering really is. Over the course of the day, before the meeting happened, I just kept thinking about the absurdity of it all and by lunch, I was laughing to myself about it. During lunch, I got a text from Dr. K telling me that the meeting was on. By 3:30, I had cultivated a sort of gallows humor attitude about the entire thing...I was committed to making it as Kafkaesque of an experience as possible for EVERYONE involved. All for my own amusement, because I figured I deserved to get something out of the dreadful experience. Consequently, I was expecting to feel the stark formality of a meeting with cold war Soviet inquisitors when the secretary escorted me to the office. What greeted me was not at all what I was expecting: three kind-faced people, gracious as could be and smiling sadly. It felt like someone was about to tell me I had terminal cancer or something, and that there was nothing they could do about it. 

I was seated and then introduced around. Prof. S., the dean for my campus, along with Prof. K and a member of TCC's legal team, Ms. W. That the latter was included is how I knew I was probably very fucked. My heart sank right to the floor. Followed by my jaw, when Ms. W. pushed a 2-inch thick dossier towards me and said, “We think you might soon have to deal with a very dangerous man. He has submitted an open records request for all digital communications from your office computer or your phone.” My heart stopped for a second. Then it started to race. 

Jerking my head jerked towards them, I protested,  “But I don’t have a computer, and the classroom ones are wiped nightly, and I do zero TCC business on my phone. What does this dangerous man want?”

That was when Ms. W explained who Chris Barnett was and how he had been terrorizing TU, TCC, and the rest of the town for the last few years via malicious litigation. The dossier before me was a part of the records their legal team had been keeping on Barnett, knowing that at some point, out of sheer stupidity, he was going to get himself arrested. Telling the DA that he has been up to scary stuff amounts to hearsay, but producing a pile of material evidence backing up every claim you have made is enough to get a warrant on him at least. Ms. W explained that at this point, TCC was playing a waiting game. The surveillance they had been gathering is how they were alerted to everything Barnett had produced regarding me.  The upshot is that TCC brass had essentially called me in as a courtesy to warn me about Barnett. 

As regards the actual request,  W. told me that Barnett’s request was so far overreaching that most of it would be denied, and asked if I had anything in my TCC email they needed to know about. I told them no. They said that all my emails had to be turned over when the time to grant the request came, but that legal means had quashed the request from getting fulfilled any time soon. Then Ms. W had me turn to the first flagged page. In bold yellow highlighter, a few lines were marked. There were all the allegations regarding my trafficking in heinous contraband from my TCC office and my TCC computer. Ms. W. explained what this would mean for the future of my working for the State of Oklahoma when the OSBI check prior to employment turned THAT up. I idly wondered about filing a defamation suit of some sort against Barnett. Ms. W. made a point of reminding me that the only way to win a defamation suit was to prove you have the truth on your side. What she didn't have to tell me because I already knew was that proving the truth meant opening up everything on my end to prove Barnett had lied and letting his legal team rummage through all of it–because the only defense against defamation is the truth. After that, the malicious lies wouldn’t matter because they would have found something else they really could prove about me and used it to ruin my life. The realization that there was absolutely nothing I could do weighed heavily on me…Then it all got worse.

Ms. W then had me turn to another flagged page. It stopped me cold. There was a hard copy of a blog post written by Chris Barnett with my picture at the top of it and hideous, foul, vile, lies and libel written beneath. This evil abuse was now just a Google search away for anyone with the right search terms, and there was nothing I could do about it. Then, without prompting, I flipped to the next flagged page. On it was a picture of Barnett, holding an AR-15, next to a picture of what could have been my house with the owner’s name and address listed beneath. This act of aggravated doxing was Barnett’s way of encouraging acts of stochastic terrorism against his enemies, and it was perfectly legal for him to do it because of our First Amendment rights to free speech. 

I sat, feeling myself slide down the gullet of absolute terror and helplessness as the situation engulfed me. I was so emotional that my face had gone mostly blank except for this really fake tiny smile I slap on sometimes in an emergency. Outside of my own terror, another thought nagged at me: This dossier was everything that Barnett had been doing in the past few years. Probably a hundred innocent people and two entire colleges, not to mention several small businesses, were being devoured by this leviathan. The baldness of the evil astounded me; but the banality of the means by which he accomplished it was truly stunning. 

Near the end of the meeting, the assembled officials assured me that TCC was not taking action against me. They asked if I had anything I wanted to discuss. The only thing I could think to say was, “Well. You hired me to teach rhetoric and writing. Sometimes those who teach can also really do.” Dean S. looked at me, shaking his head and grinning wide, he said, “that was a GREAT letter.” At least there was that, which along with $6.50 would get me a latte at Starbucks. I don’t remember exactly how the meeting ended or how I got home that afternoon. But I do remember that when I got home from the meeting, I logged on to my TCC email account. If he was going to look through my emails, I’d make it worth MY while for him to do it. I spent the rest of the evening channeling my terror and rage into petty vengeance. I made dozens of dummy email accounts and sent my TCC email account the same thing over and over: a link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video on YouTube. Have fun sorting through THAT email stack, I thought. 

Thus began a strange month-long vigil. The campus police escorted me to my car after every class I taught. Beyond that safety concession, I mostly tried to keep this mess in the back of my mind while maintaining the veneer of nothing being wrong. It took a lot of work. I was careful in who I told about what was going on, because honestly I felt like the fewer in my professional and personal circles knew what was going on, the better. The rest of the time, I felt numb. Occasionally the numbness was punctuated by the sound of strange cars driving slowly by my house late at night and stopping for a few minutes before FINALLY going on. Soon it became necessary to sacrifice three different social media accounts and a Google Voice number that had been poisoned by trolls spamming me with random rape and murder threats. It was utterly horrific in a slow-motion kind of way, and it eventually became almost unbearable.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 4

Open Season, Part 2

A Fateful and Portentuous Meeting

The letter I wrote and the letter I sent were very different beasts. I knew I had to nail my message in 600 words. Yet, I had made points in the 1200-word version that needed to be read as well, but not necessarily by all the people of Tulsa. After a second I realized that I actually had two audiences to write to: the moderate conservative readers of the Tulsa World who longed for the return of Dubya, if not Barry Goldwater, and the administration of Tulsa Community College. So I wrote the short version and the longer version and sent them both to their respective audiences–like a goddamn fool. In both letters, I more or less raised the question of whether TCC should be forced to platform hatred and stochastic terrorism that speak against the institution’s values and mission statement. But in the letter to the TCC administration, I pointed out that even if TCC is forced to platform hatred, they should prioritize protecting our marginalized students and mitigating the threat on campus posed by a potential upswing in violence against them. 

TCC’s response to the Milo Yiannopoulos mess ended up being pretty incredible. The college president ended up addressing, in a Tulsa World Op-Ed, the concerns I raised in my email, so that the discussion could be out in the open and take place in the community, where it belonged. TCC did, in fact, book Milo and send him a contract, as they were obliged to do in the time frame given. But they had also reasoned, with perfect legal standing, that while they were constitutionally obligated to host Milo Yiannopolous, they didn’t have to pay all of the overtime and the extra security and logistics expenses incurred to keep EVERYONE safe before, during, and immediately after the event. Those expenses were enormous. After they were tacked onto the costs of the event, it became prohibitively expensive. Faced with this economic reality, the event promoter–fascist, gun-lover, and failed 2018 Oklahoma Gubernatorial candidate Christopher Barnett–knew he had to cancel. With the security costs, it had just become impossible for him to continue. 

The speaking engagement fell apart spectacularly. Yiannopolous eventually took to his Instagram to explain how he’d been screwed over by the promoter, Barnett–who had failed to make payment in the specified time. Almost as if the threat had never existed, the entire situation evanesced. Just like that, the danger to TCC and its students was averted. TCC deserves a lot of credit, actually; they did a really amazing job of honoring their legal obligations to the extent of their financial ones. In retrospect, they also did an incredible job trying to protect me, but everything they did just wasn’t enough. 

Chris Barnett was a very dangerous and ruthless individual. He had BIG family money and dozens of malicious nuisance lawsuits–against innocent people who had “crossed” him–going all over town. He was even suing the University of Tulsa over a free speech issue (that in my opinion, actually had legs). But then he was also suing Tulsa Community College for…borrowing props from the TU theater department (RIP) and conspiring to destroy Barnett’s theater major husband in the process, somehow, for some reason. He couldn’t force TU to do anything because it is a private school. TCC is a public school, however, and this is why Barnett had chosen to force Tulsa Community College to platform his Milo Yiannopolous hate speech event.  

Because Barnett is as putrid and foul of a troll as has ever lived, he had a favorite tactic to use against the professors he targeted: he would send an Oklahoma State Open Records request for all digital and phone communications records pertaining to a professor he especially hated. Within days of my sending the letter to the Tulsa World, Barnett filed an Open Records request with the state to secure all of my digital communications and my cell phone and text records pertaining to my adjunct gig at TCC. None of that was legally in his purview to do, as it turns out, but it did not matter. The point is that in these documents, Barnett accused me of trafficking in particularly gruesome and illicit contraband out of my TCC office and using my TCC computer. Every part of that is pure nonsense, but because he filed an official form with the state and I am unable to combat it, the accusations are basically like a note on my permanent state employment record. If I try to work again as a public school teacher in Oklahoma–or for any state, federal, and municipal agency for that matter–that putrid open records request will turn up in my OSBI background report and likely keep me from being employed. This is exactly as bad as it sounds; THAT was Barnett’s end biggest goal…finding more dirt to bury me with would have just been gravy.

I was not the only TCC employee to weigh in on that fiasco in the editorial pages of the Tulsa World. While I did include my name and doctoral credentials in that letter, I chose not to disclose the fact that I taught for TCC. Somehow, though, I was the only one of us that Christopher Barnett came after like he did. There was a reason for this: some alert local fascist shared my editorial on Milo Yiannopolous’ Facebook page, and then another then local fascist doxed my social media, Google Voice number, my class times and places, and at which campus I was teaching. From that, Christopher Barnett was able to get the information that helped him come after me. Now, it would have been just as easy to find that information on the professors who had disclosed their connection to TCC but I’m the only one he really went after. I suspect that of all the letters that were sent to the editor regarding that topic, mine is the one that most influenced his funders. They might have read it and then either refused to give him more money or possibly pulled their funding altogether. THAT is the only thing I can think of that would make me, of all people, worth this much of his precious and evil time.

Of course, I had no idea any of this was even going on. I sent the letters and forgot about it. Until I got a very strange email from Dr. K, Liberal Arts and Communications Division Chair right before class one day. I opened it and read it and then felt incredibly concerned and disturbed. Dr. K was inviting me to a meeting at the Metro campus to discuss some pressing matters. She added that I wasn’t in any trouble, it was just that they really wanted to speak with me. That part seemed especially shady and suspicious; I stewed on it all during class. The fact that we happened to be discussing how Richard Lloyd Jones’ Tulsa Tribune stoked the fires of race hatred with oceans of yellow journalism that ignited the massacre only made things harder. By the time class was over, I felt pretty sure that I would be getting an institutional smackdown of some sort. The irony of that was almost overwhelming. In all likelihood, I would spend tomorrow afternoon having my free speech squelched because I questioned the legal and moral basis of TCC being forced to platform the “free (stochastic terror) speech” of a dangerous hate-monger. Nobody knows better than I the danger of going loud, public, and embarrassing about the wrong thing and the wrong people–the response I expected from TCC admin absolutely made sense politically even if it felt morally bankrupt. 

  My thoughts had so engrossed me that I remained in the room after class was over for the night. The motion-sensor light had turned off, and I was so crouched so far down at my classroom computer that nobody looking in would have noticed me. I was staring at that email, trying to decide how to answer it. As I typed my response, I heard something strange. I heard what sounded like my name being spoken by someone in the hall. Then I heard another voice say something. At first I thought, this must be one of my students, and rose to go see about them. Then, an angry anarchist sort of thought occurred to me: my workday was OVER and if it was really students, they would email me and I would help them with it tomorrow. I needed to answer this email now, and that thought sat me back down. I answered simply that we could meet the next afternoon at 4 pm and left my number so that she could call the next day to confirm. Then, I hit “send.”

As I was leaving the classroom, I felt like I should check to see if they really had been my students. The guard was friendly, and he said that two young men he did not recognize had been looking for my office. He saw that the light in my classroom was off and thought that I had gone for the night, so then told them I wasn’t there. I’ve had students stop by after class on many occasions–even night classes. This wasn’t really all that unusual after all, so with a sigh of relief, I made my way out of the building. As I opened the door leading to the parking lot, another thought struck me: the guard had called them “young men,” and not “students.” Usually, support professionals at the TCC campuses talk about “students,” not “young men” that they “didn’t recognize.” The more I thought about it, the more the thought unsettled me. I didn’t sleep much that night. 

Part 1  Part 3  Part 4

Open Season, Part 1

A Letter to the Editor

     If anyone had ever told me that the most dangerous thing I would ever do in my life up to this point was writing a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, I’d have thought they were insane. The truth is, there have been–a few–dangerous things…that I only got involved with because I had no idea at the time that danger was even a factor. Autism and openness to experience can be a dangerous combination sometimes–and if you’re not careful it can lead to tilting at windmills….As I discovered anew the spring that Milo Yiannopoulos tried to come to town.         When I moved back to Tulsa, I wanted to adapt a writing curriculum that I had developed while adjuncting at York College in Queens, New York. Prospect Cemetery is over 400 years old–one of the oldest in the state–and it resides on the campus of York College. I collaborated with the Prospect Cemetery Association to create a themed writing course about public art, memorialization, and commemoration centered on the cemetery and restoration efforts. When I began teaching it, the graveyard was so derelict and overgrown that people could no longer visit the graves of their Revolutionary War-fighting ancestors. The cemetery's only regular visitors left things like chicken heads, gris-gris bags, candle stumps…the usual. Fortunately, during the course of my three semesters teaching that course at York College, enough interest was generated that money was made available to renovate and restore it. Prospect Cemetery is a beautiful sight these days, and I like to think that maybe my course helped draw a little bit of energy to the cause along the way. Which is precisely why I wanted to find something in Tulsa to adapt my curriculum again and see if I could maybe help do something awesome there.         What I fairly quickly realized would be a problem is that Tulsa has no overgrown cemetery to drive a discussion about memorialization and public art. Instead, Tulsa has the opposite: a series of hidden mass gravesites related to the almost completely erased calamity that was one of the greatest race massacres in history. Fortunately, Tulsa also has John Hope Franklin Park, Greenwood Cultural Center, Council Oak, Cain’s Ballroom, and the scandalous Sinclair Building basement where the Teapot Dome scandal was first hatched…I had plenty to work with, but I had to contrast what Tulsa DID memorialize with what it DID NOT memorialize–what should have been there and wasn’t. So I built the course around sites of memory and how to deconstruct historical markers…including and especially those that should exist but didn’t. It worked pretty well, I thought.         After three semesters of teaching this course, two realizations occurred to me. The first was the realization that the social conditions of Tulsa in 2019 almost exactly mirrored those of Tulsa at the time of the Race Massacre: the awful economy, social strife, white supremacy, corruption, and nationalist fervor had been just as high in the Spring of 1921 as they were nearly a century later. Many, many, locals were sympathetic to the social concerns of Trump’s agenda as bandied about in the media, even if they “deplored” the methods he used. This brought about my second realization: that the only thing keeping Tulsa from falling prey to that again was the absence of a Richard Lloyd Jones figure– the white supremacist lackey slimeball of a yellow journalist who ran the Tulsa Tribune in 1921 and churned out violently divisive race hatred on the daily in his respected news source. But I also knew–throughout my entire being–that this was all it would take, because Tulsa is the home of Oral Roberts and people here respond like Pavlov’s dogs to self-righteous paplum.         Which is why I spit out my tea when I happened to scroll through Google’s algorithmically neutral local news feed to discover Milo Yiannopoulos was supposed to be speaking at Tulsa Community College in mere weeks. That bastard is the guy who engineered Gamergate in 2015 (with which I’d had to contend when I worked briefly in the gaming industry) from behind his desk at Breitbart. Anyone who watched it unfold knows that Gamergate set the tactics, trolling, and tone that were triumphantly deployed in the Trump campaign the following year. Near as I could figure, this Milo guy aimed to bring fire to my town. Determined that he would do so only OVER MY DEAD BODY, I did what every rebellious college English professor would do–I wrote a sternly worded letter to the editor. That's when everything went off the rails.

Part 2    Part 3    Part 4    

Chuparrosa

Reflection upon my recent brushes with mortality and legacy has led me to reconsider the mysterious brush with Death I had when I visited New York City last December. 

    I had planned the 2 days in New York as a sort of lagniappe. My real purpose had been to travel immediately on to Connecticut to my wonderful madrina, Laura. That visit was phenomenal: high spirits, much love, great Work, and sprightly shenanigans the whole entire time; I hadn’t wanted it to end. Nonetheless, round-trip flights from Tulsa to JFK are a lot more affordable than the same sort of flights to Hartford, so, back to the City for my lagniappe I went. New York, I hoped, would be more or less anti-climactic. Which, thankfully, it was…until the afternoon before I left.

    Mo Shockey, my dear friend–and a truly brilliant illustrator–was putting me up at their place in Brooklyn during my stay. As my flight wasn’t set to leave JFK until 8 pm night, we had most of the daytime to hang out together. Mo knew I liked botanicas and wanted to visit one before I left, so they found a likely candidate to check out during our errand run. Now, one of my favorite things about Mo is that they are uncompromisingly themself on every occasion regardless of circumstances. Part of this total inhabitation of personhood involves Mo’s absolute commitment to self-expression via the queer, working-class goth aesthetic. Mo’s aesthetic definitely influenced my fashion choices that day. I am no goth, but I love skulls and skeletons, so I packed a few pieces in honor of the day Mo and I would be spending together: all-black-everything, with pirate skull-and-crossbones socks, a skull & heart ringer T, a skull-print bolero cardigan, and articulated rhinestone skeleton dangle earrings. Feeling dressed more or less like Mo’s wacky aunty, I set out with them upon their daily errands. 

    By the time we got to the botanica, I had pretty much forgotten what I was wearing. The temperature had started dropping by the minute, and if I thought anything at all about my clothes, it was that I needed more layers of them. Getting out of the wind and into that botanica was a relief. Mo walked in first. The fresh–faced, 20-something shopkeeper immediately welcomed them into the store, “Holaaaaa!” He grinned wide out from behind a close-cropped beard. His hazel eyes shone out from under his black ball cap, and the large metallic silver skull printed on the cap caught glints of the fluorescent store lights when he spoke. Mo answered him in Spanish and as the two of them spoke, I immediately remembered that Mo also speaks Russian. I slunk in, slow and Spanglishy behind her, kind of wanting to just pop…on…over…into the curio oil aisle alone. I saw the Orisha shrines immediately. They were different from the ones I had seen previously and they were closer to the front than I was used to seeing them. The candles, flowers, and decorations for the orisha were lovely, yet it seemed as if the shrines had seen few recent visitors. Only a handful of coins and a few empty shot glasses suggested anyone had come by, and the dustiness seemed to be from time rather than incense residue. 

    “Alli!” I heard the shopkeeper say, gesturing towards a 4-foot pyramidal stack of HEM incense from whence emanated contrails of Buena Suerte incense. I looked at him. Mo had come in search of incense and skull items and began tottering towards the display. Immediately, the shopkeeper caught my eye and smiled a wide, genuine, and very welcoming smile. I smiled back at him; big, fake, and uncomfortable. Just as I tried to step away, a soft, heavy, vibrating cannonball bounded into my leg. I smelled a faint waft of cat piss at the same time I heard the industrial-strength purring sound and looked down. An ecstatic and massive coal-black tomcat had started rubbing against my leg. He looked up at me with gold-green eyes and a Cheshire cat grin. I looked back up and saw the shopkeeper beaming at me.

    “That’s our cat, Amigo.” He nods towards the cat. 

    I’m confused a bit and say, “Your cat is an amigo, or I am?” as I inch nonchalantly to my right, ever closer to the curio oils and away from this unexpected conversation. 

    He laughs a bit at that then says, “The cat’s name is Amigo. This is his store and he goes everywhere he wants. Don’t let him bother you. He likes to be petted but we can shoosh him away…” He’s looking at me intensely as he trails off. “I really like your earrings,” he says suddenly, “They’re beautiful. Your shirt, too.” 

    I had forgotten what I was even wearing, so when I looked down at my shirt and realized he was talking about skulls and hearts and skeletons, it surprised me. All I could think to do was grin stupidly and say, “Well, thanks. I like them a lot too.” I have never in my life had anyone more masculine than a drag queen compliment my jewelry, so I was surprised to hear this from him. I had also never had a cishet man hit on me by complimenting my clothing or jewelry before, so he wasn’t flirting with me, either. I had no idea what was going on and this fact made me low-key anxious. I just smiled wide at him as I ducked behind a display to peruse the curio oils.  

    As I excavated the overflowing curio shelves, my mind drifted back to Connecticut. It had been a long overdue visit; necessary and revitalizing. Though Laura and I maintain frequent contact in our socials, we hadn’t actually seen each other in ten years. We had a lot of fun and I was amazed at just how much I’d learned from her this visit. I always learn a lot from her. It’s never like schoolmarm lecture learning or cool aunt “advice” giving. It was like …picking up new stuff from someone who is different from you, but whose mind is similar. She had insight and perspectives on everything I had been pondering. Unfortunately, she had no answers. She did have a lot of questions about MY questions, a fact of which I was reminded as I pawed through the shelves. My fingers glided slowly across the cool, round, glass dram bottles with their nubby caps. From under my fingertips, the heady, rich, intoxicating smell of the oils periodically drifted up. They certainly smelled like magic. 

    Curio oils–also called condition oils–are used in various folk healing and magic practices.  The oils treat specific conditions like cheating husbands, chronic bad luck, sadness, lies, injustice, illness, and all the other sad byproducts of living the human condition. Now, I 100% believe that magic exists, but I’m not at all convinced that it comes neatly bottled with names like “Abre Camino,” and “Lluvia de Suerte,” and “Buscame.” I like the thought, though, which is why I collect curio oils. As I rummaged through the rows of bottles, I halfway hoped the name of one of them would jump out at me from the shelf, providing some sort of inspiration that would trigger a Eureka! moment about my next move. Assigning mystic portents to random things is a dangerous business that I happen to be wary of, but at the same time, I do believe in synchronicity. The shelves before me yielded no such synchronicity I did however pick up a few oils that would theoretically be good for a freelancer: “Abre Camino,” “Lluvia de Suerte,” “Atrapa Clientes,” “Exito el Negocio,” and “Lluvia de Oro” and “Contra Mal de Ojo.” I sighed and turned away from the shelf, taking a moment to just be glad I was in a place where I could actually visit a proper botanica and buy curio oils, because the next day I would not be. 

    As I turned away from the shelf, my foot gently swept something that slid to a sickeningly sharp clink and stopped. Nervously, I looked down expecting to see a broken oil bottle. Nope. It wasn’t broken, and every drop of the luminescent cerise oil was still inside it. Reaching down, I retrieved the bottle from the metal display leg I’d kicked it under. Unlike the other bottles, this one was small, and square. I turned it over in my hands and discovered a picture of two hummingbirds bathing in a teacup on the front of it: “Chuparosa.” I smiled at the thought of hummingbirds bathing in teacups.

    The Mayans associate the hummingbird with pure love and a fragile heart, happy thoughts, and communications between loved ones. Chuparosa didn’t really seem like an answer to any of my questions, but it had begun to seem like the answer to having a better mood, so I took it. Synchronicity. I mean, I’d taken a second to feel gratitude and immediately stumbled upon a bottle of magic happiness. There are stupider hints to take. Besides, hummingbirds may be the harbingers of love and joy, but they are also brutal swordsmen when they fight for dominance. Watch two hummingbirds fence each other and it becomes clear that inside every hummingbird beats the heart of Inigo Montoya, and he is prepared to kill you. As I stood there, taking in the faint rose and frangipani scent of the bottle, my mind coalesced around the idea that hummingbirds are dazzling messengers of love who radiate ferocious joy and do not back down. 

    Hands full of magic, I made my way through the labyrinthine gauntlet of statuary, incense, jewelry, vessels, books, and decor toward the checkout. Mo and the shopkeeper were chatting as I approached. It took forever.  At first, it had seemed like a small, intimate, and CROWDED store. But the longer I was there, the bigger it seemed to get. It's bigger on the inside, I thought to myself as I deposited my oils on the counter. “They live in Tulsa, and there aren’t any botanicas there,” I overheard Mo say to the shopkeeper. “They’re stocking up while they still can.”

    “I leave tonight,” I piped up, suspecting it might be my turn in the conversation somehow. “Back to Tulsa.”

    “Oh,” the shopkeeper smiled, his gaze steady on mine. 

    “I was visiting my Madrina in Connecticut. She lives there. I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

    Eyes widening, the shopkeeper says, “Your madrina? Oh! You’re here because you’re our people!”

    I sighed and let that sink in for a minute: you’re our people. It felt very strange to be this far from the city of my birth, in a store rarely frequented by folks like me, talking to a stranger I’ve never met but who seems to know me somehow, with one of my favorite people on the planet, right after visiting my madrina, and hear the stranger tell me, “you’re our people.”

    “Come. I want to show you our Santa,” he said, taking my elbow, “She’s here for our people.” I quickly look around the shop and confirm that yes, I probably am his people. I shop at botanicas and know what the products are for.

    Courtesy finally kicked in with me, and I said to him, “My name’s Doc. What’s yours?”

    “Ramon.” He grinned and added, “I’m here one year–from Oaxaca.”

    “It’s nice to meet you Ramon,” I said, not actually sure what to say next, “Thank you for taking us back to see this.”

    “Of course. Of course.”

    Ramon guided me back and Mo followed silently behind. Halfway back sat two very powerful women at a rectangular plastic work table. The tall, solidly built middle-aged one in the white bell-sleeved shirt seemed to be filling store orders, sorting and placing items in various boxes, mancala-style. Her long dark hair was piled in a massive messy bun atop her head. As we passed, she shot us a glance of mild annoyance and suspicion. The older, heavier woman sat at the far end of the table eating empanadas. She was wearing a bright red, floral embroidered dress with long, curly, gold-gray hair parted in the middle that trailed down each side of her chair until it almost hit the floor. She glowered at us between bites as we walked past. It seemed they did not approve. I honestly did not blame them, but I did not stop, because I had this growing feeling that whatever this moment was involved forces beyond my comprehension or control. I went with the flow.

    When we finally got close enough to see the shrine, I was brought up short: Rows upon rows of the same image greeted me: A fierce-faced skeleton smiling out from under a dazzling hooded robe, scythe held aloft in one hand…I’ve seen the Sistine Chapel, Il Duomo, and Michelangelo’s David. The Grand Canyon. The actual Starry Night. The actual Waterlilies. The reefs off of Kona. All stunning. Inspiring. Sublime. Yet none of those experiences even came close to this,  Santa Muerte’s shrine. Her shrine emanated love, warmth, acceptance, and purity like an all-encompassing and irresistible physical force. It was clear that this community loved and tended this shrine often. Something sacred lived here. This place was extremely holy…and I wasn’t entirely sure I deserved to be seeing it. Contemplating Santa Muerte’s grace in stunned silence, I stood there with tears streaming down my face, trying not to fall over.

    Ramon walked over to the back left of the 8’ multi-tier shrine towards a specific Santa Muerte statue. She was 3 feet tall and black with gold accents and silver bones. Her scythe was glittery and her robe was trimmed in rhinestones. She was wearing a gorgeous velvety purple cloak that someone in the community had made for her. Her eye sockets held blossoms of multicolor cabochon crystals. She was absolutely stunning. I wondered at the fervor with which this Santa Muerte had been festooned and bedazzled. I wondered more at the unfathomably passionate devotion that had given rise to this fervor. 

    “You see this Santa?” He gestures. I couldn’t have missed her. He turns to smile up at me, “She travels. When someone is sick or has troubles, we let them take this Santa home with them until the problem is solved. Weeks, sometimes.”

    Through my tears, I started smiling. Really smiling. Face-hurt smiling with my whole heart. Ferociously smiling. 

    Gently fingering the purple velvet cloak, Ramon adds, “She always comes back. And when they bring her back, she always has new clothes or jewelry or something. It’s the people–how they say thank you.”

    Drinking in this glorious Santa Muerte, I realize that her people are incredibly grateful. “I suppose,” I say finally to Ramon, “that she takes very good care of her people.”

    “She does.” Ramon replies. He tilts his head slightly, and then his demeanor shifts to be a bit more serious. He moves away from the traveling Santa and comes towards me with a gentle and kind smile on his face. I immediately started to worry that he’d finally noticed how I had obviously been crying but was now smiling like a madwoman. It was no matter. Ramon stopped in the center of the shrine and then turned to look at it, with a bit of puzzlement on his face. It seemed as if he had sensed that something wanted to be found, so he went looking for it. Reaching down, he retrieved a figurine from the shrine. It was a horned owl carved out of serpentine, perched on a base of white rock quartz. I’ve always loved owls, but this one was so tiny amidst the busy shrine that I hadn’t noticed it until he picked it up. Owls are one of Santa Muerte’s symbols, and a symbol of brujas and brujareia besides. Owl in hand, Ramon finishes crossing toward me. 

    “This is for you,” he said as he took my right palm and opened it. Placing the figurine gently into my hand, he said, “She wants you to have it,” and closed my fingers around the owl. 

    “Thank you,” I stammered, unsure if I was thanking Ramon or Santa but knowing this was the right thing to say; “Thank you so  much.” I glanced over to see how Mo was doing; their mouth was slightly agape and their eyes were saucers. Ramon stepped away and then moved back into the store. I soon heard bleeps and clicks as Ramon tallied Mo’s HEM haul on an ancient cash register. The owl felt heavy and warm in my hand as I gazed upon the Santa Muerte shrine in its entirety, lost in my thoughts. 

    Death is no respecter of persons. This is exactly why Santa Muerte is so beloved by her people; she accepts and helps everyone without judgment, especially LGBTQ+ and disabled folks. Santa Muerte considers all of us her children, because we all come to her in the end. As I stood there, I realized that I am very much Santa Muerte’s people, because we all are her people, whether we recognize it or not. And how incredible the people of this botanica community must be, who honor Santa Muerte so magnificently! 

    A different incense smoke drifted hazily toward the shrine from the display that Ramon had just re-lit. I quaffed the rose-scented air around me, and noticed that Traveling Santa was not the only sumptuously appointed statue on the shrine. They were all gorgeously decorated. Many wore clothes that had been lovingly made for them. The people of this botanica have a deep and powerful love for Santa Muerte, which they express regularly through rapturous devotion: making very nice clothes and jewelry for Santa, decorating her shrine frequently and tending it generously. The love so clearly expressed through the shimmering, bejeweled Santas on the shrine positively dazzled me. I thought back to the colorful chuparosa that had seemingly led me to it; wasn’t this Traveling Santa Muerte also dazzling messenger of love? The neighborhood of this botanica was working-class and about two and a half steps from desperation at all times. Yet this shrine was exuberantly happy–seemingly in defiance of the circumstances outside; isn’t this shrine the embodiment of the chuparosa’s ferocious joy? 

    At that moment, I noticed a sort of diorama on the Christmas section of the shrine: a 2-foot, Santa Muerte dressed in holiday red-with-white-fur-trim shared a bottle of tequila with a 2-foot Santa Claus. They were surrounded by yet more Santas Muerte and Santas Claus. Santas gotta stick together, I reasoned. Tim Burton has missed an opportunity, I reasoned further. That sight and those thoughts made me giggle, which was the first sound I’d made in several minutes. 

    With that, I felt ready to leave the shrine. I walked back into the store, toward the register. The women at the table watched me as I walked. No trace of emotion showed on their faces, but no trace of annoyance or hostility hung in the air, either. Both women gave me a small nod of acknowledgment as I passed by. I smiled and nodded back to each of them. 

    Mo stood quietly to the side of the counter, waiting patiently for my return from Shrineland. Ramon smiled as he rang up my curio oils. I had to leave the “Contra Mal de Ojo” bottle, because Ramon had discovered that the bottle was cracked under the label. Some of it had even dropped onto my shirt, though I had not known it. While I was at the shrine, the oil had begun to leak out of the bottle and onto the counter. Ramon did not make me purchase the oil, thankfully. I left money in the tip jar equal to the cost of the oil plus before I left. 

    With salutations and exhortations to return, Ramon bid us farewell. All of the pressing questions that had been festering under the surface when I walked into the botanica seemed very far away as we walked out into the cold, gray, rainy Brooklyn dusk. Mo and I remained silent for most of the ride back to their apartment. The owl sat heavily in my coat pocket.

    A committed and principled atheist who nonetheless studies the history of western hermeticism, Mo does not really believe in synchronicity the way I do. I could tell they weren’t quite sure what to make of all they had just witnessed. A heaviness hung in the air between us, and because I had no idea what to say, I kept quiet.  

    Finally, Mo spoke up. “You know,” they said, turning towards me, “I feel like you are completely in touch with the rhythms of the universe of something,” then they giggled and added, “ and I’m just bumbling around trying to put one foot in front of the other.” 

 

    “Mo,” I said, turning towards them, “I don’t know if the Universe talks to anyone, including me. I’m very sensation-seeking,”  I offered in the way of rational explanation, “which makes me extremely open to experience. Marvelous and strange things just sort of happen to me sometimes.”

    “Yeah, I bet,” Mo chides me, because Mo knows me and my openness to experience. “But still. That…was really something.”

    “It certainly was,” I agreed after a minute, noticing that the rainy dusk had turned to a misty, peaceful darkness outside. “I certainly did not expect that sort of thing to happen today. But I owe it all to you, Mo.”

    Mo looked at me quizzically, one eyebrow rising incredulously behind their retro acrylic glasses, “What do you mean?” 

    “I don’t think you’re stumbling anywhere near as badly as you think you are,” I said as I squeezed them in a conspiratorial shoulder hug. Feeling ever so very grateful for their friendship, I looked them right in the eye and reminded them, “you chose the botanica.”