Exorcising Terry Gray

My hair is a pink wig…an insult, certainly, but necessary. I am not the only pink-haired sexy witch crowded into the Bar and Shield, the local biker dive bar, for the Halloween festivities. Most everyone, elbow to elbow, beer in hand, has come in already drinking or already high, and the pot smokers’ table by the back fence continues to fill. Outlaw country pours from tonight’s band, Terry Gray playing and singing. Local never-would-be, Terry still melted my heart, in his blue flannel shirt that I used to sleep in, and his big black cowboy hat. It didn’t take long for her to push by me… my doppelgänger. Thank goodness ditzy thirtyish pink-headed hairdressers feel the burning need to post their every thought on social media, so copying her costume was the simplest part of the plan. Of course I was more muscular and wore the curves of that black skintight dress far better than my chubby, much-younger nemesis, but nobody would remember that in six hours. Nobody would remember anything unless the family demanded an autopsy, which was unlikely, and then the pink-haired sexy witch had been the one who handed him that last beer. What would she say? There was another one of her who did it? Who would remember, and who would believe her? Finally, a suitable use for large quantities of alcohol and pot. I mingle through the crowd.

That blue flannel shirt…all the nights I had slept in nothing but that, feeling Terry’s arm around me as he snored softly beside me. He didn’t seem to remember anymore, the nights we danced in our stocking-feet in the kitchen, him blowing me deep pot kisses as the secondhand smoke lightened my head and he pulled me close. He didn’t remember the nights skinny-dipping in his pool, under a full moon and a sky of stars, laughing and floating and splashing one another. We kissed, wrapped tightly in each other’s arms, the night air chilling our shoulders…imagine my surprise when he tells me, almost randomly as we paddle kayaks into a remote alcove that Sunday afternoon, that he doesn’t want me at his concerts anymore. He doesn’t want me at all anymore.

“People think we’re together,” he explained, high on mushrooms in the hot afternoon sun. “I can’t pick up other women with you around.” Logical. Practical. Unbelievable. 

“But we are together,” I stated the obvious, and he shook his head.  

“We aren’t really a couple,” he rationalized to me, “we’re really just good friends. And I love you, I do. But I’m not sure…and all the other women at my concerts are prospects.”  

My stomach lurched and I vomited into the lake.  

“You understand, right?” He acted as if we were discussing the weather. Before I could pull the chewed-up pieces of my heart together, SHE appeared on his social media- a decade younger, pink hair, ecstatic to claim she was “with Terry Gray” every time she moved on Facebook. I wonder how long that had gone on before I even knew, how many times when I thought he loved only me… but that was okay. It would be over soon enough.

Numbed with pain and anger, I found that the plan fell together more simply than I would have thought. The poison, easy to acquire from any local home improvement store, time released over a six hour period to destroy both current and returning bugs and pests. My pest weighed 320 pounds, but that simply meant creating a different dilution of the colorless, odorless liquid that mixed easily with draft beer. Terry also didn’t remember all the nights, drunk and high, of telling me about the pest control poisons he used every day. The effects of the poison, he would ramble on, mimic the symptoms of a heart attack if a person were to be careless enough to ingest it or inhale it. It would have served the man to have recalled some simplicities of our love and companionship.  

I smile quietly and demurely as a cowboy and two cheerleaders push past me on the way to the bar. Easing my way towards the bar owner’s wife, busily handing out Halloween pot brownies in her too-tight fairy costume, I grab a penny pair of plastic gloves to help her dispense treats. Drunk space aliens and Playboy bunnies order Bud Lights and brownies, and with that cheap set of plastic gloves and a simulated purpose, I manage to doctor Terry’s beer without leaving a fingerprint. In fact, Pinky’s fingerprints would be the only ones on the glass other than Terry’s and the bartender’s, if ever anyone decided to look into his “heart attack” after the last set.  

But why would they? Terry Gray lived with an extra hundred pounds on a good day, stayed perpetually high and often drunk, and his diet consisted of midnight runs to Taco Bell and Sheetz after concerts. His lifestyle would handily and unquestionably explain the presumed heart attack, and no autopsy would ever be requested. So what if one was? All the drunk and high patrons of the Bar and Shield would remember was the sexy pink-haired witch who handed Terry his last beer, whose fingerprints lit up the glass. There would be no reason to look further. My flight, booked two weeks earlier, would have landed in Mexico an hour before Terry’s life choices killed him somewhere around the backside of the band trailer, doing mushrooms with his bandmates after the show. This witch, having ditched her costume and pink wig for jeans and a ball hat, would be reading a book in flight as her 747 broom passed across the moon on Halloween night. 

A bump from a staggering biker jolts my thoughts back to reality, and suddenly I remember. Pinky stands about seven people in front of me, watching Terry sing. It’s his new song, the one he learned to play on the couch beside me, picking the chords slowly and singing along. God, that first version sounded awful. He’s singing the song he learned with me…2:15am, my legs wrapped around his hips. Weaving through the crowd and tapping her on the shoulder, I call out over the noise. “On the house…for Terry!” I point back at the bar and Pinky waves, bouncing up to the stage to hand her sweetheart his beer before he starts the final set. I can’t believe it could fall into place this easily.

I read a book on exorcism on the flight to Mexico. I had to do it. Terry Gray, the demon who had taken over my heart, my soul, and then threw me away like garbage, had to be dispelled, exorcised. The book said it was the only way to permanently kill a demon and take one’s life back. My sunglasses and long black sweatshirt cover my only two memorable features-my steel blue eyes and the small “T” tattooed on my left wrist; I wheel my carry-on through customs. The Mexican sun shines brightly.