Tales of a Teenage Pagan Superhero: The Cat's Name Is Sun (an Interlude)

I bought my first computer with the last of my bar mitzvah money and promptly got online. I'd been dreaming of this since first seeing WarGames at a highly impressionable age. After embarassing my way across several local bulletin boards, I found my niche and quickly fell in with a whole crowd of teenage pagan superheroes on the other side of town. Most of them were bored rpg nerds looking for a little excitement in weirdness. Some had an actual interest in spiritual growth, or at least using alternative spirituality as a bully pulpit for their perceived moral superiority. Some had an unhealthy interest in BDSM for being all of sixteen years old. And some of them were what we'd now call Otherkin, people who were convinced -- or who wanted to convince everyone else -- that they were actually elves, or vampires, or in one particularly egregious case, a vampire druid with a panther totem who stalked the astral plane in her sleep as a panther spirit. She, dear reader, I dated. But that's a story for another time.

Anyway, so here I am with this clade of teenage pagan superheroes, and out of all of them, Barnaby was their king. He looked the part at over six feet tall and skeletally thin with sunken, brooding eyes, an appropriately gothic-punk wardrobe and haircut, and for fuck's sake his name was Barnaby. Barnaby was highly charismatic, to boot. He could have been a manipulative cult leader, exploiting the girls and sending the guys to do dirty deeds and getting everyone involved in this clade in a fair amount of trouble. Everyone loved him, and probably would've done anything he said, had he cloaked it in a thin veneer of mystic bullshit. Fortunately, life had seen fit to burden Barnaby with a truckload of unwarranted guilt, and so he had a fairly good moral grounding and was mostly concerned with keeping his motley gang of retards from getting themselves killed by bad spirits or gangster thug kids or drowning in their cereal, whichever got to them first.

It was just on the cusp of summer vacation, either shortly before or shortly after, and we were rambling around the suburban developments of Northern Virginia on a roundabout way to Jen's house. Her name probably wasn't Jen, but practically all the girls we knew that summer were named Jen or Sarah, due to the Jen-Sarah act of 1976. This Jen was blonde and fairly pretty, but too spacy to be one of the popular girls, so she hung out with us instead. She took us to her house, where every flat surface was covered in either cats or Precious Moments figurines, introduced us to her mom, and gave us drinks and showed us around the place. As we left, Barnaby waved to one of the cats and said, "Goodbye, son."

Jen stopped, mouth agape, and squealed, "How did you know that cat's name is Sun?" Barnaby just smirked and shrugged in that way that said A Magician Never Reveals His Secrets.

The rest of the afternoon was basically uneventful, spent bumming around in the woods talking teenage crap, listening to gossip about people I didn't know. Later on, when Jim, Barnaby and I had crashed out at Barnaby's house, I asked him point-blank how he knew what the cat's name was. "I thought you'd just called him 'son,' like 'my son,' and when Jen flaked out, you ran with it."

"Hah, no, I hadn't even thought of that," he said. "No, while you guys were getting the nickel tour, I was talking to Jen's mom, and she introduced me to all the cats. 'That one is Sun, that one is Moon, that one is Cassie, it's short for Cassiopeia...'" And I remembered that Barnaby had not, in fact, accompanied us, and I figured he'd just gone to the head. Far from disappointing me and disabusing me of my belief in magick and high weirdness, however, this just taught me that the con job was an important part of magick, the smooth theatrical honey of Performance that made the dark and bitter medicine of the Real Work go down.

I later used a similar trick on a group of teenagers at the Tastee Diner after a show. A group of kids at the next table over had been passing around a cell, and for some reason I wanted to get their attention. I'd overheard them mention their various names when taking over the phone, so I called to the cutest one, Amanda. "How did you know my name?" she asked. I just smirked and shrugged in that way that said A Magician Never Reveals His Secrets, to which she replied, "What, you're some sort of magician?"

And I just laughed.