Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation by Adam Resnick

extending numerous (and clearly insincere)invitations to Tony and myself to suck his dick, the kid kicked the E-Meter, which went sailing like a hockey puck and disappeared beneath a shoeshine stand. Then he ran off with his colleagues amid gales of laughter that reverberated through the tiled canyons of the subway station.
    From somewhere down on the express track I heard “Roy! Roy! Over here! Roy!”
    It was just me and the Scientologists again. Tony, justifiably flustered, silently rose to his feet. He removed the book from my hand and tossed it back on the table. Then he retrieved the E-Meter, which thankfully looked no worse for wear. Randy joined him as they collected stray books scattered about the station floor. No one said much of anything. I helped pick up a few copies, but neither seemed to notice. The boys were down in the dumps, and I was looking for a clean getaway. “Hey, guys,” I offered cheerfully, “maybe I’ll stop by the church one day and we can try this again in a quieter setting. You’re over there in the mid-Forties, right?”
    Tony, who was straightening a bent corner on one of the books, gave me a lifeless “Yeah, whatever.” He probably sensed I was full of shit.
    With the enthusiasm for my presence officially depleted, I slowly crept away. Part of me felt guilty for making things so hard for the Scientologists, yet another part thought,
Fuck these guys. I did the best I could.
    Or did I? At the end of the day, isn’t everything my fault? Hasn’t it always been that way?
    I stopped at the newsstand to buy an Aquafina and a pack of Orbit. I screwed off the cap and—
WHAM!
—just as easy as you please, every prick who’s ever distressed, wounded, or fucked me over came flooding back to my head. Some were guilty as charged, while others, perhaps, had been unjustly indicted. I couldn’t decide whether to run back to Randy and Tony or to add them to the list. Christ, what the hell was wrong with me?
    As I mounted the steps leading to Forty-first Street, I glanced back and saw a lady sitting at the Scientology table.
    She was gripping the E-Meter and sobbing.

The Panther
    My brief flirtation with the occult began harmlessly, driven in equal parts by my interest in all things macabre and a compulsive habit of sending away for stuff. By the age of ten, I’d outgrown the callow days of rubber chocolates and exploding cigarette loads and was now searching for something with a little more gravitas. The ball got rolling when I discovered a witchcraft supply catalog laying around my older brother Mark’s room—just another piece of 1970s head shop clutter among the
Zap
Comix
and crushed boxes of banana E-Z Widers.
    The company, Oracle and Pendulum, was located out west in a mysterious place called Toluca Lake, which Iimagined to be a black, gurgling body of water cloaked in a dark forest lousy with imps and naked hags. At the time, the farthest I’d been from Harrisburg was Ocean City, Maryland, so the rest of the country, I presumed, was untamed and barbaric.
    My maiden purchase was a bag of magnetic sand. I wanted to ease into this thing. According to the catalog, magnetic sand would bring its recipient happiness and good fortune. It delivered neither and, quite frankly, was a bit of a mess. In the end, it only managed to cast a spell on my mother’s vacuum cleaner. (
“Adam! What is this crap?”
) I was equally disappointed with the ineffectual Mystic Wealth and Riches Spray, which smelled suspiciously like Desenex, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather skip the embarrassing particulars of Madam Lastlonger’s Emotion Lotion, which required a visit to the dermatologist. Nonetheless, I continued paging through the catalog, looking for that one special item that might change my life, or at least distract me for a few seconds.
    Despite its provocative title,
The Satanic Bible
, I’m sad to say, is about as foreboding as a jar of mayonnaise. But that’s not what I thought when I