Let me tell you about my old friend. The DIY Queen. Stitched her own clothes. She was that kinda chick. I am sure she would have homeschooled her kids, had she lived long enough to have kids. She was just that kinda wonderfully eccentric. Licked her stamps, long after stamp licking went out of fashion. She refused to buy the stickers. You couldn't tell her half of nothing! Patched her bicycle tubes with the old-fashioned patches. Thats how they got her DNA (the stamps, not patches), the detectives who tracked her down somewhere between Boulder, Colorado and Roswell, New Mexico. She wasn't able to run no more. She had broken her leg, on stage, after eloping with a clown. Such is the common result of fabricating your own shoelaces from yarn. Eloping with clowns, that is, not breaking a leg.
She was long gone just before then, long gone from California and where we grew up together. She sent a postcard to the State Fair and all its entertainers. That's how they caught her. Through those postcards she wrote to create alibis for herself, the profilers later said on the news. Selfish-like! That's the reason I decided to write this, here. Because someone needs to set the record straight. And I can tell your for damn sure! She never sent a postcard selfish-like in her all-2-short life! I know. I even have the sweet postcards she sent me, to prove it. But it's all too late for that, now. They claimed for a fact she wrote postcards selfishly, for appearances. Not to cement friendships. And she prioritized the envelopes with little sky blue Par Avion stickers, thinking flight would hasten delivery from out of state. She conveniently forgot the extra postage required, they suggested.
She addressed the postcard in question to: 'family '. Yet those damn fool profilers and lawmen done her wrong, simply to do her wrong. Because she was the diy killer. Well, let me tell ya. She may be the diy killer to you, but she was my diy Queen!
The postcard was delivered by a truck without wings. The driver of the truck drank coffee from machines, and endlessly smoked smokeless e-cigarrettes. Just like her. Lucky for him, commonality ended there. He was simply an inconspicuous courier for the communique of a murderess, they said. That's why they could not pick her up sooner. She was too much of a yarn-laced straight shooter. An environmentalist. Contributor to the Save the Manatee campaign. No ifs. No ands. And No butts. She gave a shout out to technology, before they remotely switched the fatal dose of electricity into her (After her last request e-cigarrette with the near fatal dose of chemicals, in an e-filter she had put together DIY style during her many clocks on death row).
All the wannabe amateur tattoo artists shed an extra ink tear that day, for her. She had revolutionized the making of ink guns behind bars, among other things. The pivoting needles she made with smuggled ball bearings and button wheels, had earned her the nickname Rosie the Pivoter, which was a great promotion from her original name Suzie the Shuffler. She had not been overmedicated, however. Little did they know when they named her, she was simply effecting static electricity by the soles of her shoes.
No one at the California State Fair could remember her at first. The bearded lady finally ID'd her, with help from the psychic and a lineup, and some vague threats and from certain cops, not the least of which was to shave her face. This happened after the suggestion of near future financial windfall (not the shave, the ID). In the midst of a healthy reward, posted by an cuckolded clown. The bearded man (a detective) turned the whole thing over and over in his mind looking back. He felt disturbed. He had a strange attraction to the bearded lady. This attraction became an immense and lifelong distraction and burgeoning addiction to hirsute porn. So they say. He stuck the postcard to a lonely corkboard, with a paperclip he straightened into a pin. When questioned about his methodology by the chief of police, he suggested he was trying to live inside the head of the alleged diy killer. The chief screwed up his eyes, then called upon the local stock employee to stock the detective's office desk with pushpins.
They had the diy killer by her own confession, finally. What other way could there be? She took great pride in having taken the law in her own hands so naturally, in her vainglorious DIY-style. Her band, the Bacon Maybes, may have made their debut the following year, had she not been locked up. No one will ever know what kind of fame they would have achieved, Rosie the Pivoter and the Bacon Maybes, outside of her great infamy.
Far as I can tell, she was the first DIY Queen, I mean, she was mine. We made our own kombucha. She taught me. It was a nasty start, but it was a start. Ultimately she made good on her promise to one day have her own hens to lay her eggs she could crack in the frying pan. Plenty leftover to trade for milk and cheese at the farmer's market, or for hard boiling. Hell, if she had lived long enough to have had her own land, I wouldn't dare bet against her trafficking in just about anything the earth can turn up. Give her the sun, a hose and some dirt, and pretty much anything and everything was made possible.
But not men. She did quietly outsource them her whole life. She confided in me how she loved the adrenaline rush of a one night stand. Made me shiver. She was a modern woman. Not a feminist. Not traditional. Just a single mom by choice. She didn't hate men. She loved whomever was worthy of her love. Whom just so happened to be clowns, most of the time. Not losers, mind you. Clowns. Entertainers. Entertainers of children and families alike. They loved her, and she loved them. She could accessorize a clown with enough of her inventions to draw his act out a half hour or more. And you thought flowers that spit water and noses that honked like horns were special? Please. I don't have time to go into it, but please! We are talking about my diy Queen.
She just made her choices, with the experiences she had been given. Long ago, when she was still a teenager, she got caught up with a boyfriend turned sneaker pimp. Soon he had her pulling tricks. By proxy of another bad habit she learned from him: phenobarbital washed down with margarita mix. The storebought kind. Corn syrup with a whole tie-dye list of artificially flavored, numbered colors. The nightmare was over almost before it started. She was far from a pimp's paradise. Within a year or two, well, she was sleeping in her own bed again. He was nowhere to be found. Not just not in her bed, I mean. Nowhere. The sneakers, without the pimp.
The way I like to look at it? I guess one of them was bound to disappear, anyhow.
I choose to remember my friend, I knew. Not the DIY whore she became. We used to chew on licorice stalks, and talk serious about light things like cloud formations on an otherwise partly sunny day. She had this magic of making light of what was serious, and vice versa. We made eachother laugh. She inspired me to see things differently. We once had an benevolent kinda influence on us. Evolution of trust. if you ever heard of trust before. Trust existed way back when, before tv and sedentary life of suburban planning, when people had to rely on people to survive. Before culture began to stall like seems to do, now. Before shit got so comfortable. Before the able became the dysable. So simple it makes no sense, no more.
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