Janelle graduated from Siuslaw High School in Florence one week before her 19th birthday, something that she only managed to accomplish by cheating on her Algebra final. She had missed a year because of another stint in Burlingame, this time for boosting her neighbor's dune buggy and crashing it on the dunes at the South Jetty. Her neighbor sued Terry Kelly for the cost of the dune buggy when it was new and was also awarded $5000 punitive damages for failure to control his offspring. When graduation day finally arrived, Terry and Connie told Janelle that as of her birthday, she would no longer be welcome in their home unless she was paying rent.
They arranged for her to move to Wyoming and live with Connie's sister, Sarah. Terry agreed to pay Sarah $400 a month for two years if she would take Janelle off his hands. Three days before her birthday, Janelle boarded the North Coast Stage Lines, a bus service that would connect with a Greyhound in Portland that would eventually take her to Cheyenne.
Janelle knocked around Cheyenne aimlessly for the better part of a year, narrowly escaping another brush with the law when she stole a bottle of tequila from a state liquor store. She passed the time by experimenting with her own sexuality.
In truth, Janelle was ambivalent about sex, seeing it as a means to an end. She figured that if she could get guys to do things for her by doing things to them, why wouldn't the same thing work for women? So, she decided that she was bisexual and began frequenting gay bars. She did this secretly at first, knowing that eastern Wyoming wasn't the most gay-friendly place. The area was still infamous for an incident that involved a gay guy who had been strapped to a fence and left there to die. She didn't want to die, but she saw other women as a handy revenue stream. After all, gas was expensive. She just wanted what she could get and didn't care which gender she needed to do to get it.
Soon, she became a little more open about her professed bisexuality. She began to delight in the reaction that she got when she French kissed a woman on the street corner. The sex act itself was still not a big deal to her. Being outrageous, though, was.
Her aunt Sarah was appalled. When she had agreed to take her niece, she thought it would be a way to get to know her sister's daughter a bit, and also a way to bring in some extra cash. When her house became a regular destination for cowboys to drive by in their pickups and yell “LEZBO!” she knew that she had seen enough. She gave Janelle a choice. Get a job or go to school, whichever she chose, but do it out of town. When she finished her speech to Janelle by saying, “Why can't you be more like your sister?” Janelle told her to shove it up her ass.
For the second time in as many years, Janelle had to find somewhere to go. She heard there was grant and student loan money available to her if she would take some courses in cosmetology at Eastern Wyoming Community College, so that's what she did.
She supposed that she liked EWCC well enough. The classes were fairly easy for her, despite the fact that she only attended them about 60% of the time. The liquor and weed flowed pretty easily through campus, and Janelle found that there was a drunk or a high available to her almost any weekend night and most weeknights too.
She found college to be tolerant sexually as well. It was during her year in Torrington that Janelle had her first experience in a group sexual activity. She and a couple of her friends, one male and one female, had gotten high on a Saturday night. A convivial good time took a turn for the amorous when Janelle would take a bong hit and then blow the smoke first into the girl’s mouth, and then the boy's. The other two participants would then share the bounty that they had received from Janelle with each other. Soon, the three were wrapped in each other's naked bodies. Janelle found that she enjoyed a man having sex with her more if she was giving a woman pleasure with her mouth at the same time. Before long Janelle adopted an attitude that said, “The more the merrier.” She guessed that this life that society would consider self-absorbed debauchery suited her just fine. It was during this time, though, that Janelle found the only thing beyond herself that started to make any sense.
Janelle had no formal religious training. Where Brandee's family had been nominal Christians at best, Janelle was left to fend for herself to find deeper meaning or a higher power. It was during the winter term at Torrington that she discovered mysticism in a book on Eastern religion that she was browsing in a store that sold used books. Janelle Kelly went from aimless slacker to Mystic to be, almost overnight.
Mysticism, referred to as Spirituality in the Orthodox Catholic Church, refers to beliefs and practices that go beyond the liturgical and devotional forms of worship of mainstream faith, often by seeking out inner meanings of conventional religious doctrine, and by engaging in spiritual practices such as breathing practices, prayer, contemplation and meditation, along with chanting and other activities designed to heighten spiritual awareness. Janelle was fascinated by this and wanted to learn more, so she went back to the same bookstore the next day.
Janelle had always felt like she was different from the other people around her. Things like clothes and parties that seemed to so consume the girls that she had grown up around held no particular interest for her. In mysticism, and the writings of Evelyn Underhill, she found something that mattered. Janelle Kelly had found her path to enlightenment.
Author and mystic Evelyn Underhill outlines the universal mystic way, the actual process by which the mystic arrives at union with the absolute. She identifies five stages of this process.
First is the awakening, the stage in which one begins to have some consciousness of absolute or divine reality. This was what Janelle felt that had happened to her in the bookstore that first day. She recalled later that she had felt outside her body when she discovered the writings that would become so important to her.
The second stage is one of being cleansed of previous unrighteousness, which is characterized by an awareness of one's own imperfections and limitations. Janelle knew that she wasn't perfect but had never stopped to think about what that even meant. That is, until now. Her response in this stage was one of self-discipline. For the first time in her life, she began to examine the things that she did on a deeper level than “If it feels good, do it.”
The illumination stage is one reached by some of the great artists and creative thinkers down through history. As well as being the final stage for many mystics. It is marked by an awareness of a transcendent order and visions of a Utopian destiny. Janelle discovered one day that she wanted to be this kind of visionary in the worst way. She had never given the traditional view of heaven and earth much of a thought. Now she meditated day and night, all in search of deeper truths.
The great mystics go past the third stage to a fourth stage, which Underhill, using the words of St. John of the Cross, calls The Dark Night of the Soul. This stage, rare and blessed is marked by confusion, and a sense of the absence of God's companionship. It is the stage of giving in to the mysterious purposes of the divine will.
Janelle wasn't there yet. This was the cliff from which she was not yet ready to jump. In her new life of mysticism, she was easier to get along with, and the other people in Torrington recognized the positive changes that had come over her. Where Janelle's social life had mostly consisted of acquaintances and people with whom to get high or screw, now she began to develop friendships.
The final stage of Janelle's new belief system is unity and one-ness with The Almighty Divine. Here, the self has been completely submerged beneath the Holiness Transcendent and liberated from earthly bent. Filled with divinity, the freshly minted mystic immerses itself in the world only to fulfill its task, which is to bridge the gap between humanity and eternity. Janelle could only imagine what it would be like to live a life with that much meaning.
It was during the earliest days of her study of mysticism that Janelle Kelly was introduced to the music of Brandee. At first, she listened to the music the same way that people had listened to it generations ago, during the days of American Bandstand. She and her friends at college used to even say about the group's music, “It's got a go
od beat and it's easy to dance to. I'll give it an 88”, imitating a common theme of that iconic show from the '50s and '60s.
The more Janelle listened to the group, though, the more she heard behind the words. It was then that she developed her fascination with Brandee Evans.
Janelle believed that Brandee was doing one of two things when she sang. She was either singing the words that had gone unspoken in Janelle's own mind, or she was singing to Janelle herself. Often enough, Janelle believed that Brandee was doing both.
When Brandee sang “12 Gauge”, Janelle heard the pain of being an outcast in the world. When Brandee sang “Your Ass is Mine”, Janelle heard anger and hurt in the words and she sang them back to Brandee from the privacy of her dorm room at school. When Brandee sang “Voracious Little Girl”, and Janelle listened to it on her iPod instead of listening to the lecture in class that day, it was all she could do not to stand up and howl the words back in response. She had been a voracious little girl, never satisfied with the way things were but never knowing how to make them any better. In Janelle's mind, Brandee was singing to an audience of one, and that one was hearing it with her newly discovered immortal soul.
At first, Janelle's obsession with the singer took on the form of a tremendous desire to hear her in concert. She had found out about the tour in the obscure press release that Brandee had put out on YouTube before they started out. She had followed the tour online by accessing the local papers that would announce when the group was going to be appearing in their town. As the time approached for the group to appear in Laramie, Janelle waited with anticipation for tickets to go on sale. She was the first one online with Ticketmaster a month before the concert, and had her schematic of the seating chart with her while she ordered the precious tickets. She had it all figured out. Being six rows deep just to the right of center stage would give her the best sound that she could get.
The 100 miles between Torrington and Laramie had passed as if they weren't even there. Janelle sang all of the Brandee songs and every last lyric of the songs. She was about to realize her dream.
When she got inside Arena Auditorium, she found her seat, even though she didn't expect to be sitting in it at all during the show. The raucous student-heavy crowd that was there suited her mood entirely. She was happier in that moment than she had ever been.
That was the night that the crowd had chanted the name of the performers by sections of the seating layout. Janelle was in the part of the crowd that chanted “Denice”, but she didn't care. She screamed “Brandee!” with the people seated in the upper deck far above her seat.
When Brandee had come into the crowd during her first number, Janelle had tried to get to the center aisle, but she couldn't make it there until Brandee had gone back to the stage. That was okay. She had seen her idol in person within 8 feet of her. Later, when Brandee brought the crowd to their collective feet with “Bad Girl in Town”, Janelle was screaming the words back to the blonde songstress. Tears of joy were rolling down her face. What a night she was having!
Just as she believed that her night had reached its absolute peak, the group had returned to the stage for their final encore. Janelle saw Brandee brush the towel across her face, and then throw it into the crowd.
The rolled-up towel had sailed into the crowd like it was going to bisect the seats and fly down the aisle. The air currents and the soft towel combined to cause a change in the flight pattern. The towel veered a few degrees to the left as viewed from the stage, landing in the hands of a leaping Janelle Kelly, who started to scream for all she was worth.
Later that night, Janelle thanked the Creator Spirit for moving the towel toward her. Somehow, she believed that this incredible bit of good fortune had happened to her because she was finding truth and enlightenment through her belief in mysticism. Later, when she told her friends her theory, they thought that it sounded like so much nonsense, but what her friends thought didn't matter to Janelle. She didn't have time to explain enlightenment and the Tai Chi to her friends, because she had to pack. She was going to Grand Junction.
Janelle was up at the crack of dawn to get an early start to Grand Junction. She meditated on her prayer blanket for 20 minutes, getting centered for the journey ahead. By the time she was ready to leave, it was about 5:30. She was calm and confident.
She loved the Grand Junction concert as much as she had the Laramie one, but there was something more on her mind this time. In Laramie, Janelle had experienced the concert as if it might be a once in a lifetime event. Her giddy quotient had been at an all-time high. In Grand Junction, she experienced the concert with a more analytical eye. She wasn't there just to watch and listen.
She scouted the venue for security. When she was satisfied that the hall was patrolled by one lone retired policeman, she knew that tonight would be the night to act. Arena Auditorium in Laramie had been guarded by several young, strong looking toughs from Allied Security. Access to her idol would have been pretty much impossible without an invitation. Tonight, her task would be markedly easier.
She congratulated herself on having arrived early enough to spot the performers entrance in back of The Opera House. During the portion of the encore when Brandee finished “Honky Tonk Broad”, but before they started “Voracious Little Girl”, Janelle left her seat and made her way through the cheering crowd. She slipped out of the double doors and walked around the building, acting as if she was fumbling for her car keys. She looked as if she had nothing at all on her mind except for beating the traffic out of the lot. Out of sight of the main lot, she slipped between two of the tall bushes that lined the east side of the building.
Just outside the performer entrance, she saw the security guard scanning the area. She had figured that he would soon be heading in to help with crowd control. It was then that she planned on sneaking in behind him, unseen. She saw him take the ring of keys from his pocket and insert the proper one into the lock. From her hiding place, Janelle saw the key turn in the lock. Stealthily, she slipped behind the guard intending to be close enough behind him to be inside before the door closed completely. It didn't quite work out that way. Janelle was stymied by 2 things, only one of which was in her control.
First, she moved too quickly to be as quiet as she wanted. Some of the foliage from the bush that she was behind had been scattered on the ground. Her shoes made a rustling sound when she made her move. She almost slipped to the ground when her shoes fought for traction.
Second, she hadn't accounted for the long shadows that she would cast as a result of the streetlights. Grand Junction boasts of very well-lit streets and for good reason. They had installed Juncoop light emitting diode lamps all over town to try to forestall street crime. The lights almost forestalled Janelle.
The security guard saw her shadow as she came up behind him. He turned around with a surprised grunt and said,
“Hey! What are you doing?”
Janelle tried to run past him but she wasn't fast enough. The officer had been a college football player for Northern Colorado University in his prime and still retained some of his athletic quickness. He reached out and caught Janelle by the arm.
“Stop! Right now!” he shouted, trying to secure his hold on the intruder.
“No!” Janelle shouted as she abruptly twisted her body into an almost yoga-like ball. She knew that the fewer body angles that she gave him the less likely he was to be able to hold her. She elbowed him in the stomach and was satisfied to hear the slight “Whoosh” that came out of him.
He regained his grip and tried to pull the writhing girl into a safe-hold. This would entail staying out of the way of her flailing arms and finding a hold across her abdomen. He pulled her toward him.
She responded to this by going limp. He shifted his grip yet again, believing that he had her under his command. He had been trained what to do with a suspect who goes limp. He bent his knees and prepared to lift her into the position that would best end this tussle.
When he bent his knees, s
he kicked him squarely in the crotch! He collapsed to the ground, momentarily out of breath. She scrambled away from him and regained her feet. She was almost there.
The officer was nothing if not game. He got up before he had fully regained his breathing ability. Janelle had a 15-foot lead on him but he wasn't giving up this easily. He closed the gap on her as she hesitated for the slightest of moments, getting her bearings on the inside of the backstage area. By the time she saw what appeared to be a dressing room door, he had caught up with her and had wrapped his left arm around her from behind. He took the handcuffs that were attached to his belt and started to clap them around her wrist. He intended to connect the two ends of the cuffs really tight on this one. That is, if he could only get her to stop flailing about.
Right then, the members of Brandee came in sight. Janelle only saw them out of the corner of her eye. She was trying to bite the rent-a-cop's face when the group showed up. After taking one snap at him with her teeth, she took advantage of the guard's momentary hesitation and broke away from him. The guard was left holding the dangling cuffs in his right hand.
***
Later, inside the dressing room, Brandee Evans realized that she could take care of two issues at one time. More than anything, she didn't want to have it out with Jake again at the post-show dinner gathering. Normally, this wouldn't be much of an issue. Jake would have usually relented by this time. He was, in her mind, being unusually stubborn. Things had been very strained between the two of them all the way across Colorado and, of course, he had gone off by himself this afternoon. Even though she had agreed at the time that his walkabout would be a good idea, looking back at it, she decided that he had abandoned her during her time of show preparation. She considered that just one more sign of his unfair intractability. Maybe she wouldn't forgive him as easily as she usually did. That might be just the lesson that he needed to learn if he was going to be an ass to her.
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