Letter to Maureen Re: 5 Leaf Clovers

Maureen,

Let me tell you about my cousins Doug, Brodigan, and Harvey. They were good boys. I mean, they read books about vampires, did lots of really intense, mind-bending drugs, and they all worshiped Satan...you know religiously. But they were good boys. All that weird stuff was kind of precious. One time Harvey was in a bit of a jam. He had stolen a purse on the subway, and because he was too drunk to walk all the way back to the flat, he buried the purse by the side of the road in a spot covered by shadows. There he fell asleep. The cold that night was bitter, and you know what? by the time the morning rolled around Harvey was completely dead from hypothermia. He had a bottle of orange juice in his pocket that was frozen solid. I drank it later by mistake. In any case, Harvey was dead and nobody knew about the buried purse. The night Harvey turned into an ice cube and died, Doug and Brodigan had engaged in a particularly intense, and uncomfortable prayer session in honor of some grand Satanic festival season. Their swords crossed at times tenderly, at others carelessly, but no one complained about the clanging. Doug ran out to buy some heavy DMT. According to accounts from the scene, he tried to suck it directly out of a sleeping dude's brain on a wobbly picnic table. In any case, the drugs were not properly derived and they became deadly weapons. Doug and Brodigan injected heavy DMT into their brains. They both also, at the same time, purchased identical revolvers. After purchasing the guns, Doug and Brodigin continued on as two iterations of the same satanic being. Anyhow, sometime later Doug was standing in a field shooting his gun at flowers when he noticed a five leaf clover. He picked it up and married the first woman he saw. Things turned around for Doug that day. You might know Doug by his real name: Harry Dean Stanton.

So, I was on the phone with my brother...

and he was telling me this story about the time we were at my grandparents when we were kids. He said he was messing around in their bathroom and saw a cup he thought was filled with soda...but it turned out to be denture water. He didn't realize what it was until many years later he did the same thing as an adult visiting our parents.