STORMY FOSTER RETURNS: Chapter Two
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CHAPTER TWO: “ME ABOUT YOU/FIRST LOVE NEVER DIES.” TIME + PLACE: THE YEAR 2050 @ ANTICO CAFFÈ CASTELLINO, ROMA, ITALIA.
I’m sitting at sidewalk caffé table in Rome. Across from me sits a lovely blonde woman in a picture hat, wearing a white ruffled blouse and narrow long skirt that would’ve been the height of fashion at the turn of the 20th century. I’m wearing an ensemble from that same time period: bowler hat, starched white shirt, green tie, a yellow vest and striped pants. We make an eccentric-looking pair, but there are lots of colorful people here. Rome is a bohemian kind of city.
From a distance, you might mistake my companion and I for the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (I’m almost as short as he was) and his frequent poster model, cabaret dancer Jane Avril - straight out of the 1890s. We're nowhere near as notable, though we do possess a certain degree of fame: Me, Dilton Doiley Briseño with my friend and former colleague, Bree Spellman. Both of us are well-known record producers.
I haven’t seen Bree in a long time, so when she got in touch and suggested that we have breakfast together I eagerly agreed. No, you’re not mistaken; she doesn’t much look like Sabrina! This woman is younger, taller and thinner, but it’s Bree all the same. I think I would know her in any guise - but believe it or not, she isn’t wearing a disguise.
While she sips a glass of orange juice I’m devouring a bowl of strawberries and cream. These sweet berries remind me of her ripe nipples, which less than an hour earlier I was kissing and teasing! Now that I know Bree and I are cousins by marriage, I should reproach myself for lusting after her body - but I don’t, and I won’t. I can’t suppress my true feelings for Sabrina; our intimacy began long before I married my late wife Julie. Last night may have been our last time together, but if it was I’ll treasure it always.
SABRINA AND TONY BRISEÑO MAKE THE SCENE IN ITALY.
Bree flashes a seductive smile at me. “You’re thinking how fortunate you are to have an open marriage, aren’t you, Tony?” She winks one of those sparkling green eyes of hers - they haven't changed at all. “I’m fortunate that way, too; though I wouldn’t want to impose too much on the largesse of either your husband or my wife.”
With cream dripping from my beard, I snicker and reply: “Roderick has never minded my extra-curricular activities, and I'm fine with his dalliances, too. Sometimes, we play bedroom "triples" or "doubles" - we've had some delightful experiences together. But just wait until I tell him how you and I made love in Rome, twenty years in the future!"
Bree shrugs off my amazement. "Time travel is easy at the moment of sexual climax, if you know how it's done," she says, "And lately, of necessity, I've had to hone that skill. But bouncing into other time periods doesn't have to occur for serious reasons. You can do it for fun. I thought waking you up in the 2050s would make for a nice post-coital cigarette, so to speak - and as you now know, there are some things in this era that I wanted you to see."
I savor the last of my strawberries in a very suggestive way and then blow her a silent kiss. "Nobody gives surprise gifts like you do, Sabrina," I assure her, "But the greatest gift you’ve ever given me is a grandchild - and I can still scarcely believe it!”
Her smile is thoughtful now. “Yes, Stormy is a gift, isn’t he? But it’s actually Carmen Serna that you can thank for him. She transported your daughter into the past, where she got married and had a baby. Garcy has absolutely no memory of this - although for years, she’s been baffled by an inexplicable sensation of having given birth. Explaining the truth to her will be far more challenging than sharing it with you was!”
I lean forward and grasp her hand in mine. “Having met and spoken to Stormy Foster, I can certainly help with that,” I tell her, “once I fully understand the trajectory of the amazing life he’s lived. Of course, I also want to learn everything I never knew about his grandmother - my second wife, who turns out to have been your aunt! Julie never told me anything about her background.”
"I told you that I suspected your wife was Wiccan," she reminds me, "but I had no idea we were related. I found out after Ms. Della, the Head Witch and a longtime friend of my stepmoms, finally admitted what I'd suspected for years - that she was my biological mother. That’s when the Wiccan High Council finally allowed me to access my family history.
"Mother confirmed that the Council had used sorcery to withhold details about my past from me," Bree explains. "I always wondered why my magic crystal couldn't reveal them - well, that's why. So not only didn't I know for sure who my mother was, I never knew that she had a sibling.” She sighs and beckons a waiter to our table. “We’d better have a big breakfast, Tony, because I’ve got a very long story to spin. Eh, cameriere, per favore! Crêpes, uova, salsiccia e caffè per entrambi. Grazie.”
Nearly two hours later, we’re strolling arm in arm together down the Via del Corso, headed back to our hotel. My head is spinning from everything Bree has just told me! I knew nothing about my daughter's ordeal with The New Archies in the 1960s, Reggie Mantle’s near-death experience in the 1910s, or Josie + The Pussy Cats having their entire group history recalibrated! And then there’s the most recent chronological scramble, where a grandson I never knew about crossed paths with them in the 1980s.
THE NEW ARCHIES: A SECOND GENERATION OF POP ROYALTY!
If I weren’t a theoretical physicist, I’d find such anomalies preposterous - they upend every concept of time and space that anybody's ever heard about! But my field of study, not to mention my friendship with a sorceress or two (or three) has definitely broadened the range of things that I now consider possible.
The aforementioned Carmen Serna was a Voodoo priestess - perhaps the most powerful there ever was. She was also an exceptionally gifted singer and dancer, but god help you if you frustrated her ambitions! When Bree rejected Carmen for membership in the new Archies group she put together, she unwittingly cultivated a deadly enemy. Repeatedly, she tried to punish Sabrina by attacking her friends! She sent them hurtling into the distant past, which triggered an unpredictable domino effect on sequences of events.
Bree assures me that the Universal Coven of Wiccans has neutralized the threat that Carmen posed. While they work to repair the historical chaos that she caused, the time stream is in the process of correcting itself. However, that doesn't mean everything will be as it once was. Certain events are radically changed, and so are certain people. Some who died are alive again; and some who lived never even existed! It boggles the mind.
By the way, my knowledge of Carmen's musical talent isn't second-hand. I actually met her before Bree did. This was back in the 2020s - I was working on some music projects down in New Orleans.
Carmen’s mother was a notorious woman named Flame Evangelista, who'd briefly been a singer signed to Archie Records. She and her sisters were in a group called the Candyhearts. Veronica assigned me to work with them and I soon found out what a bad fit that sugary name was - those girls were straight-up thugs and gangsters! They were a bitch to deal with, but their exceptional talent made it worth the trouble.
After they broke up, Flame cultivated a reputation in the French Quarter as a numbers runner and a high-priced hooker. That didn’t surprise me at all, and since I don’t mix with that kind of crowd, I never thought I’d see her again; but we did know each other, and when she learned I was in town, she brought her daughter to me as a potential recording artist.
Well, she was adorable. A mixed-race kid like I once was, with acres of curly black hair, big sparkling eyes and a crooked little smile. I must say, I saw no evidence of mental instability in Carmen at that time. What I did see was her huge potential as an entertainer - her talent came on stronger than a humvee! The singing, the dancing, the charisma - just like her mother and her aunts back in the day, that little girl definitely had something special.
Juvenile delinquency aside, the teenage Flame had been dripping with star quality - but the ensuing years had changed her, and not for the better. Instead of impressing me a lot and scaring me a little bit, which is how it was before, it was now the other way around! There was something about her eyes - they reminded me of a hungry, wild animal - and the way the hair at the back of my neck bristled when she touched me. I’d be willing to bet that she was a practitioner of Voodoo, too, and as I recall, there were rumors about that.
So I wasn’t of a mind to re-connect with Flame on any level, but the real reason I declined to work with Carmen is because she was barely in her teens. However substantial the amount of talent is, I believe that childhood is a time when musicians should be learning their craft. I didn’t even let my own daughter enter the music business at such a young age.
Knowing what I know now, I dodged one hell of a bullet! I’m fortunate that I wasn’t the subject of a vendetta my damn self. But as I watched young Carmen Serna perform a song called “Me About You,” never in a million years would I have predicted who and what she'd turn into - and it's hard to fathom the havoc she wreaked on the lives of Sabrina, my daughter and my grandson.
