XIII: The Little Prince (Of Darkness)

While I was living in the big house with the Lesbian, I took on a summer job at a local college radio station as a weekend announcer.  It was just enough for me to pay for my room and have roaming money.  When I say roaming I mean just that.  I would sleep most of the day and then get all prettied up and roam the streets at night.  I must have looked like quite a freak roaming the streets in my black trench, black hair and Siouxsie wannabe makeup on.  It is amazing that I never ran into trouble roaming the streets the way I did. South Bend, has become quite a rough town since then.

Many people were concerned about me during this time.  I showed all the symptoms of being clinically depressed.  I was just tragically goth, lost in a very difficult breakup and an even more difficult process of reinventing myself. I decided that I needed a new identity, a new energy.  I needed to become a completely different person.  So I set out to do just that.  I no longer felt like the person I was on any level.  I have only undergone those kind of extreme changes a couple of times in my life.  It was like I had suddenly remembered who I was.  My memory has gotten clearer as my life has gone on.

I spent the better part of that year dating, practicing the Black Sun System, roaming the streets and filling out paperwork to legally change my name.  You would be surprised how much paperwork is involved in all that.  Now it would most likely be impossible, this was before 9/11 after all.

Thankfully I had a dear friend that was paralegal and she helped me with all that paperwork.  This was also before everyone had a computer, I certainly didn’t have one, so I had to do all that paperwork on a typewriter and if anyone is familiar with the court system, they are unforgiving.  Everything has to be perfect.

Finally I had everything ready, had done all the prerequisites and was ready to go before the judge.  I was obviously very nervous as I waited for my turn. The woman before me was turned down for a name change and all she wanted was to change her name back to her maiden name.  The judge kinda gruffly told her she should have done that during the divorce and denied her.  I was thinking that I didn’t stand a chance, I mean I was asking to change my entire name!

Up until this moment my dealings with judges hadn’t been all that great.  I’ll go into that story a little later. As I'm standing there oozing Black Sunniness he asks me to approach the bench and asks if I had fulfilled all the requirements. I told him I had.  Then he very candidly asked me why I wanted to change my name.  I said that I had been off of drugs for several years and that I didn’t want my past to interfere in the life I was trying to build.  He asked me if I was trying to avoid any debt, to which I responded no.  He then amazingly said “Granted”.  At that moment I legally became Caleb Ryan Storms.  It is hard to believe I have ever been known as anyone else.

This was by far one of the more complicated times of my life.  I was trying to transfer all my paperwork over to my new name, While dealing with the residuals of a completely different legal matter that was going on.  Plus trying to explain to my family and friends why I was now Caleb.  

My family took it the hardest, they felt it was in some way a divorce from them and took the whole thing very personally.  I actually thought they would be pleased, oddly enough.  I didn’t think they would want to be associated with an openly gay, gender bending mystic such as myself.  I felt like I was doing them a favor.

As far as the other legal matter, this is quite a story all on its own.  It was late one night and I was feeling particularly down, swimming in my own loneliness and self loathing.  I decided to go to Camp Chesterfield to recharge my batteries.  So a friend an I jump in her car and set off.  

We were almost there when we got pulled over in the lovely Whitley County Indiana.  We were apparently pulled over for speeding, although we were coming off of a ramp, so legally we should have had time to decelerate.  That was the first clue that this was not going to be a reasonable officer.  

He took one look at me and decided I was going to jail for something.  So he began to question us about everything.  I of course was the tragic, angsty conversationalist that I normally was in those days and that didn’t help matters.

He took me in his car and ran my license.  This is where the story gets crazy.  I had a ticket from when I lived in Virginia that apparently was showing up as not being paid.  The crazy thing about this is not only did I send them a money order for it.  I also had received a valid Indiana License since then.  Which means that it was not showing up previous in the DMV records.  

On finding this out he said and I quote “I want you to teletype Virginia and see if we can bring him in on this”.  My heart sunk, this ego with a badge was actually going to charge me with driving on a suspended license from another state!  He also decided that I was suicidal and so I had a nice stay in a bright yellow padded cell.  

Being the good little occultist that I was I noticed that there was a camera in my padded pod.  So I started performing the “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram” followed by the Black Sun Casting and then the chanting of God Names.  When I had become quite magickally delicious, I sat down to meditate.  At which point an officer came in to ask me what I was doing.  I exclaimed I had religious freedom and he needed to leave me alone.  I was not a model prisoner in the slightest.

Upon going to court however it was a different story,  I cleaned up and presented myself like a well behaved Catholic School Boy.  Even telling the judge that I worked in the radio department of the University of Notre Dame. Which was true at the time.  He basically said that I shouldn’t have been arrested really and gave me time served with the speculation that I would straighten things out with Virginia.  Which I had already done previous to my court date.  My license was suspended for 90 days and that was the end of it, or so I thought.

As it turns out I was hit by a bunch of fees after the fact because I never went back for my Indiana License.  I was also hit with a fee for not showing proof of insurance years after the event.  This is partly why Caleb Storms never drove much, the red tape I would have to weed through just to get a license is ridiculous.

After the name change, the court case and the lesbian’s house I was ready for a change.  I rekindled my relationship with my online crush through the phone. We decided or maybe I just decided to give our relationship a go.  So I packed a few boxes and headed down to Wisconsin to fulfill my internet fantasy.

My dad and step mom drove me over to Madison, where he lived.  That was a very disappointing reality call.  The person I met was not at all the person I fell for.  My first lesson in internet relationships, before there was really an internet.  Anyway, I think I only stayed a few days and then took a bus back home.  Not having a place to live I stayed on some friends couch in exchange for cleaning their house.  That was the beginning of me really looking at who I was and how I wanted to live  It was during this time that Caleb Storms was truly born.