Addendum.

When we had entered the cemetery, there were a couple (white) guys ahead of us, with mullets, and in shorts and jackets and backward baseball caps. 

We were both looking around for maps, and so when we were done figuring out that there weren’t any except for one taped in the window of the (closed) office, I was like, “So whose graves you looking for?”.

“Our buddy’s,” the one guy was like.

Memories of St. Louis (6 of 6): An exorcist’s grave.

During the two days I was in St. Louis, me and my one (Dutch) friend visited the 4 sites associated with the exorcism case there that had inspired the book and movie “The Exorcist” (and through that, had helped revive and institute the practice of  exorcism among American Pentecostals and Catholics during the last quarter of the 20th c., continuing into the present) (in order of our visiting them):

- the site of a rectory where some exorcism of the kid had taken place.

- the site of a hospital psych ward where most of the exorcism had taken place and finished.

- the house where the kid’s relatives lived, and where some exorcism of the kid had taken place.

- the grave of the Jesuit who was the exorcist.

The grave was tough to find, but luckily, the plot # was given online.  After a while in that plot, my one (Dutch) friend found the part where all the Jesuits were buried, and then it was just a matter of reading through 5 rows of simple stones, many with 2 names (Jesuits were buried doubled up, perhaps for simplicity, or perhaps since they ran out of room?).

Interestingly, and, as both of us thought, very coolly, the memorial to that province’s founders that towered over the plot included the name of 3 slave couples, with the explicit recognition that their labors were not given of their own free will.

Later, we fortunately stumbled across the graves of Tennessee Williams and William Tecumseh Sherman, who we knew were buried somewhere in the cemetery, but no idea where at all since plot #s weren't available online, so we hadn’t bothered looking for them.

When we were standing in front of Tennessee Williams’s grave, this (fatter) (middle-aged) (white) woman cruises by in her SUV, her (fattish) (middle school-age) son in the passenger seat, and she asked us something about directions to graves, and then we started talking to her, and it turns out that she lives in St. Louis, and the last few weekends she had been going around to graveyards, as well as sites associated with the exorcism that inspired “The Exorcist”, so we told her how to go find the Jesuit grave.

Then, she started talking about how the other weekend she and her son had gone to the kid’s relatives’ house (which is currently a private residence), and they had gotten out of the car and taken like 4 photos of her son, and 1 photo without.

“So I was uploading them to Facebook,” she was like, “And you know how that feature zooms in so you can tag people?  I tagged my son, and tagged my son, and tagged my son, and then the last picture, he’s not in it, but there’s something in the window, like a ghoul face, and Facebook zooms in and asks me to tag it.”

She paused to gulp and wet up her throat, and was like, “So, I put ‘Scary’, because it was!”

Then, after a short pause, she was like, “But when I went back to that picture, there was no tag there, and no ghoul face!  It was gone!”

Later, she was talking about a vanishing hitchhiker who appears outside the cemetery, and my one (Dutch) friend said that was a common story, and then she went to say farewell, and I joked that her car would vanish as she drove away.

“Go back to [my city name]!” she said with a grimace, and swatted her hand at me.

Memories of St. Louis (5b of 5): Night Previous (Last Drink).

On the way home I stopped for a gyro at a 4am bar with a late kitchen, since I was a bit hungry.

To my right were 2 (mid-20s) (white) (hipster-looking) guys, one a (thin) guy in a porkpie hat, and the other a (heavier) (slightly bearded) guy in dark jeans and a thin red plastic-y jacket like from the 80s and thick-rimmed black glasses – and from their talk, it turns out they were both cops.

The one in dark jeans said that if he used force wrongly and killed a (black) guy, he’d pick off the parents too, rather than put up with the bullshit.

The other guy nodded and totally agreed, like the world had wounded him.

Later, the one in dark jeans said that the next time a female partner goes all bleeding heart and tells him to calm down with force, he’ll take her down to the prison and let her find good in the guys there and just stand there while she gets raped.

Again, the other guy nodded and totally agreed, like the world had wounded him.

When I was getting ready to leave, they were talking about “comrade Obama”.

Memories of St. Louis (5a of 5): Night Previous.

The night before I went to St. Louis I was out at this lounge-y urban (= black and Latino) gay bar for young folks on the west side of the city.

Several (early 20s) (thick) (black) lesbians in colorful monotone t-shirts (daisy yellow, hot pink) were twerking each other and occasionally egging each other on to put a dollar in the go-go boys thongs (2 would dance on the bar, while a 3^rd recovered before coming back and switching someone out), and some Latino (Mexican?) gay guys were doing bachata on the darkened mirrored dance floor dais way in the back.

The doorperson was a(n early 20s) very butch Latina in a b-ball jersey and slouchy jeans and a backwards baseball cap and a very masculine big diamond earring in one ear, and this big tooth-y mouth that takes up half their face like very skinny Puerto Rican guys have.

At 1am, a (Latina) tranny in a shimmery blue dress came out and lip-synched a couple numbers while everyone applauded.

Memories of St. Louis (4 of 5): Trip planning.

Since my cell phone service can sometimes be shitty at my new apartment, I went outside and sat on a fire hydrant at the corner when I was talking with my Dutch friend and planning details for my trip.

Then, an SUV went by – fast, but not too too fast – and this little (white) dog walked out like a third of the block down, and the SUV clipped the dog’s hind legs, and the dog started just barking and whining horrendously, to the point where my one (Dutch) friend could hear it all over the phone, and then when a woman came out from the porch to stand by the dog, a window opened up shortly after, and this adolescent girl’s voice just lets out this piercing, unending scream of horror on top of the poor suffering dog’s barks and whines, and neither stops, both just goes on and on and on, and my one (Dutch) friend could hear it all in the background over the phone.

So, I got up and moved.

Cars move fast in my new neighborhood – people aren’t good drivers, and a pedestrian was killed on a decently major street like half a block west of me this fall.

I think it’s the Chinese and Mexicans and working class whites who drive everywhere (bad cultural habits, and to some extent them being bullies with their cars).