Sagabite

Dave sent me this hilarious story of a real life warlock he encountered 20 plus years ago:

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During a long bus trip from Ohio to Minnesota during the mid-1990s, I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. The first part of the trip was uneventful, and I had no reason to think anything would be different after we changed buses in Chicago. When I took my seat, a young woman in the seat in front of me was chatting with a young man in the seat behind me. Eventually, she asked if she could join him, since “the last person I sat next to was a real nut.” He agreed.

At the time, I was sitting next to a beefy kid who was on his way from Atlanta to Seattle and then on to Alaska to work on a fishing boat for the summer. He’d been on the bus for two days already and had three to go; he hadn’t had two seats to himself the entire trip, so I promised him that I’d move if a seat opened up somewhere.

After we left Chicago, the young man and woman struck up a long conversation that I couldn’t help but overhear. I was trying to read a biography of Jackie Robinson, but their chatter was impossible to ignore, especially when he began talking about his membership in the Wiccan religion. He was jabbering about trees and mountains and subsets. He explained that he’d been injured during an Army training exercise and that he was now using his disability income to ride around the country “delivering messages.” I had no fucking idea what he was talking about, but I kept listening anyway.

I knew that Wiccan women were usually known as “witches,” but I didn’t know what men called themselves. “Warlock” sounded good enough, so I continued listening to the warlock spin out a stream of crap intended to impress his new friend. We were riding along an interstate in northern Illinois — a boring, flat ride by any standard — but he somehow managed to convince her that she was looking at the most beautiful stretch of nature on the planet.

That’s right. I was riding on a bus in the middle of nowhere, and the guy behind me was actually hitting on a complete stranger. She was eating it up.

When we reached Madison, Wisconsin, a handful of seats opened up throughout the bus. I fulfilled my promise to my Alaska-bound neighbor and moved; I was now sitting across the aisle and a few rows behind the warlock and his companion. About 20 minutes outside the city, they began making out — rolling around the seat, groping each other in total disregard for the fact that they were still surrounded by other passengers. Everyone else in the area — self included — pretended to read or sleep. Our performances were probably not very convincing. Puzzled glances and shrugs were exchanged by all.

Eventually, things with the warlock and the young progressed much farther than I would have imagined they could on a daytime bus trip. The couple had the decency to try to hide their activities with a large sweater, but that only concealed so much. At least they were relatively quiet.

After the couple finished, they resumed their conversation — though with considerably less vigor than before. After a while, they made out a little more, then appeared to nap. A few hours later, at a stop in western Wisconsin, the warlock gathered his things and left the bus. His new friend did not join him.