Some fundamentalist freak from a radical all-but-unknown splinter congregation of the Reformed E.O.D. from North Dakota, of all places, spent most of May and June last year waging a one-madman protest of the Jermyn Foundation. He had a set of mostly illegible old-fashioned sandwich-board placards that he wore religiously, and he scrawled a new hand-sign on scrap cardboard he retrieved from the dumpsters that got progressively more surreal and bizarre as the weeks went by. I bribed one of the college-kids, an undergrad student, who worked over at the Jermyn Foundation to collect some of those hand-drawn signs for me. She was able to retrieve six of them for me. I keep them in my room, in my sock drawer, next to the vial of holy water Mrs. Winslow brought to me last Easter from her trip back to Minneapolis and the Cathedral there. That was back when she was still trying to save my soul. I still miss her sometimes. She met another woman through one of her Church groups and ran off to become a lesbian witch in Saint Paul.
After the first few days the protester outside the Jermyn Foundation became something of a celebrity. Kind of. In a creepy, view-at-a-distance kind of way. Then right around the end of the month, they found his body in the alley behind Gillman's Fresh Seafood Cafe & Chowder House. (Their chowder is lousy, by the way. It's always smoky and runny and never very good.) Someone had bound the guy's hands, dowsed him with kerosene and set him on fire while hanging him from a lamp post with cheap wire that looked like it had been salvaged from old electrical appliance cords, like the junk that smelly old man is always collecting, the guy who used to visit blind Clarence, back before he passed away. The wire had been all knotted-together from quite a few smaller lengths. It doesn't get more premeditated than that. Kind of makes you wonder about that there Minnesota Nice stuff.
We were supposed to go out to dinner after our movie, which sucked badly by the way, but the kids were under strict orders not to go to Gillman's, so of course I decided that wanted to go get seafood, maybe some crabcakes, just to have some fun at their bosses' discomfort. That was dumb. Stupid kids took me to the Long John Silver's drive-through instead. I hate that place. Their food always gives me the runs. Damn smartass kids wouldn't even stop off at Burma Bill's for a beer to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. I wish we'd just stayed inside and watched DVDs instead.
