SATMATC 2: Sean and Shea

During my time of Alethea-related madness, I made a lot of long distance phone calls to my friend Sean, who at the time was stationed at Ft Drum, NY. This is in upstate NY, fairly close to the Canadian border.

Sean had lived next to Jim and I when we first moved in together. We spent several months nodding to each other in that lone male sort of way, when we passed each other on the stairs at night and in the morning. He thought I was a vampire, leaving my house to go dig myself into the dirt under the foundation somewhere. I thought he was a shift worker at, oh, the tire plant or something. Which, in retrospect, means he should be the one writing a blog.

One afternoon I came home to find what could be loosely termed our "couch" pulled out onto the front porch, blocking the door, with the strange neighbor on it. I naturally assumed this had something to do with Jim's current probation situation, which meant he only came home every fourth or fifth weekend, usually when I was trying to make out with some girl.

Short and sweet, Sean and I became good friends, dropping a lot of acid and drinking a lot of beer together. He turned out to be an ex Army Ranger, and had fallen on hard times after getting out several months before I met him. He'd been trying to make a living stealing cars, but it was sketchy work, and as he put it "hell, if those two idiots from next door could figure out what I was doing, I had no chance against the cops." Ultimately he reenlisted, with the stipulation that they send him back to Alaska, where he was from. They promised. Then they shipped his ass to Ft Drum.

The night before his departure, he brought over his younger brother Shea. Like many older brothers, Sean felt a great deal of protective instinct for Shea, and I made the obligatory promise to look after Shea in Sean's absence.

Unfortunately for everyone (except maybe for me), I didn't do too good of a job keeping Shea out of trouble. He started hanging around the wrong crowd (Jim) about the time I moved over to the place on 36th, and by the time my relationship with Alethea was pulling a Hindenburg, everyone in town was ready to see this annoying goober get gone.

Shea was a nice guy, but not much good for doing anything other than heavy lifting. He had spent most of his life in the Alaskan wilderness, literally packing mule, and thus didn't have much in the way of conversational skills. Or social skills. Come to think of it, he wasn't terribly coordinated, either. Imagine Dudley Dooright. That's Shea.

I love the guy, I still do. He once saved my ass from a pissed off boyfriend, which is another story that you probably will never hear, but spontaneous bodyguards always have a place close to my heart.

Oh yeah, the syntax on that last one was weird. It wasn't my boyfriend. It was the boyfriend of the girl I was...engaged with. Jesus. I used to get laid a lot, didn't I?

I'd been talking to Sean and Shea about a road trip, driving my car with Shea's (supposed) help from Oklahoma to upstate NY to visit him for three or four days. As this plan became finalized, Sean suggested that I could make quite a bit of money if I procured a bunch of LSD, since no one he knew up there could find any, and apparently his whole crew were veteran psychonauts. I duly located a hundred lot of acid, and began making preparations for the journey.