Requiem for a Very Cranky Lady

May she finally find some peace

I never knew her well. She was a friend of a friend. I’d heard some things about her life, the way her wealthy father had favored her brother to the tune of millions in the will.

She smoked a lot.

And she was the first person to hire me to design a logo for her business. Even at the end of the last century, she saw where public places were going regarding indoor smoking and she was having none of it. Her idea for The Magic Unicorn was that it would be the kind of hangout/coffee shop where people could smoke as much as they wanted while listening to cool local musicians, playing video games, and drinking coffee by the gallon.

She paid me $500 for that logo and it was on all the merchandise. Matches, napkins, bar coasters, ashtrays (naturally), flyers, and a huge and utterly awesome neon sign that hung in the plate glass window. I’ve seen photographs but never the real thing. I was in New York City by the time The Magic Unicorn had come to life.

We can thank our old frenemy, Facebook, for the fact that we stayed in touch over the years. And, as I said, we had friends in common. As such, most of what I know about her from before we met is hearsay. I’ve tried to confirm some of it without success.

For instance, I was told that for a time she owned and ran a vintage car company. The Google couldn’t confirm it, but my sources tell me that her company provided some of the cars seen in “A Christmas Story” in the scenes set in downtown Cleveland.

Our interactions on the FaceTube (my partner’s snarky name for Facebook) were not warm and fuzzy. She was an angry woman who felt that she’d been wronged by the world and she was ready to lash out in any direction. I often wondered what she was like in the 3D world because online stuff is so wildly skewed. Occasionally she would agree with something I posted but more often she’d wade in, guns a-blazing, not giving a shit who might be offended. Or if I’d post something about my cats she’d quickly chime in to let me know what I was doing wrong (she was a real cat person I discovered).

In hindsight, there was something kind of charming about her persistence and consistency. Sometimes I’d post something political knowing full well she’d never be able to resist.

Maybe a year or so ago she reached out to me to see if I wanted that glorious neon sign of the Magic Unicorn. I don’t know how long the joint stayed in business or what took it down, but she had held onto that neon sign until she just couldn’t afford to pay for its storage any longer. Did I want it? Oh, God, yes I did. But I couldn’t afford to have it shipped here and had no way of going and getting it. I don’t know where it is now, but I hope someone took it home and plugged that baby in to wow the neighbors.

Her last post on the FaceTube was June 13th. She “bet the leftists will try to take this statue down next”. The photo is now gone, but I recall it was a statue of a decorated warhorse. About a week prior to that she’d waded into one of my posts with her usual incendiary bombast which got responses she didn’t like. “Go away; leave me alone,” she wrote. I wrote “This is my thread. You don’t like it, you go away and leave us alone”.

Two days after her post about the leftists and the statue our mutual friend called with the saddest, most tragic news about her. This friend understood that I needed to hear this from a person and not just read it on social media.

She’d been found in her car in her driveway with a loaded .357 Magnum on the seat next to her. She’d drunk a combination of ammonia and bleach.

I can’t even fathom the pain she must have been in and for how long that this would be her solution. For weeks I ached for her, not to mention feeling really rotten about that last exchange. I knew she was a lonely, angry woman ready to lash out at any provocation. Obviously there was a lot I didn’t know about her.

From time to time I’ll visit her FaceTube page and the loving tributes from lifelong friends and admirers speak of a woman I should have tried harder to befriend.

I need to be kinder. We probably all do.

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