The origin of recreating myself as Big Freak. My first two girlfriends were Christy and Cindy, twin sisters but not dated with at the same time, who looked like little miniature Bowies down to androgynous haircuts and both having different colored eyes. Starting after I “stole” Christy from Thai the little tanned jock-on-a-chopper-style-bike who wondered why Christy would rather go out with a wild fat kid who rarely wore a shirt or shoes (I took those signs in local diners personally) and told him I refused to fight “for” her because “women aren’t property we fight for, bro.” He backed off maybe because my 6th grade anarchist-feminism-pacifism may have blown his mind. But I did “win” her. And I then snatched a fistful of vividly colorful stolen flowers from a mean humpback neighbor lady’s lush garden and brought them over and bought them foxy girl shell necklaces from the local Woolworth’s with my money doing garden work in the trailer court. I lived in the dumpy overgrown Alison Manor, and they lived in the more upscale next door apartment complex where my brother resided too, where I was still getting my weed and whiskey from his friends. I introduced Christy to my records back home but also comics collection, including the copies of Zap and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers the local bookstore the Bookworm actually let me buy (pretty illegal for them at my age, but they knew I was a smart if feral kid who could handle it). In our consecutive relationships, we would sit in their mother’s meditation pyramid in the living room next to the full-wall Mayan painting, eating fruit leather together and talking about the cosmos and me telling them weird tales, like I did the Boy Scout kids in our class, fucked up sci-fi and horror stories with creepy sexual subtexts I inserted to juice my own strange worldview. I was the Jason Lee Elementary playground shaman, describing narratives of things I’d never experienced but drawn from my dreams of Funkadelic album covers and sounds, songs like “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doo Doo Chasers)” and “Groovallegiance.” Then Grandpa Estey died, a jolly man who once worked at a haberdashery on Second and Stewart and studied to be a Priest but dropped out of St. Martin’s to become one of the first funeral directors at Bonney-Watson’s, after he met my grandmother Marguerite, who was the trumpet player in the first woman-only jazz band in downtown Seattle in the 30s. He was a sweet guy, but they loved their codeine and Gin and beer and fought like two rattlesnakes pumped on speed. While my parents left to go handle his own funeral arrangements, my older bothers and sister threw a huge fucking party with a big pot of cannabis spaghetti and Cindy came over to spend the night as the burn-outs partied in and around the trailer, this album playing for hours near our elaborate blanket fort.
Funkadelic – ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ by Chris Estey
