I just learned a few minutes ago that a former girlfriend, Patricia Rokke, died in 2012. That is a long time ago but we had not been in contact since my marriage so I was not surprised that I had not heard.
I met her 36 years ago, in the summer of 1992 at King Richard’s Faire. We were both in costume and we just sort of hit it off. Patty was no beauty, unless you saw her from the right angle and then she had a peculiar attractiveness that made her beautiful in my eyes. Even then, in her 20s, she was showing the signs of the physical, and unfortunately, mental health issues that would later plague her.
She was a nurse with an active fantasy life to make up for the pain of reality. I was a businessman of sorts, making my living trading in the stock market, supporting my increasingly insane widowed mother. But oddly at that moment we seemed to be perfect for each other. Me the homely little man with odd hobbies like psionics and she with her copies of books on genealogy and royalty. She dreamed of being carried off by an aristocrat of some sort.
What she got was a Borgia. She was the first to see the physical resemblance between me and St. Alexander VI. We walked through the Faire holding hands and arm in arm. By the end of summer we were going out together. It was then that I met the monsters who were her parents.
They were of a peculiar variety of evil. They had determined that Patty would be raised from infancy to be the family caregiver, and that meant not only them but whole damned clan in Minnesota. When she was 16 her father took her to the veteran’s hospital to cheer up the wounded from Vietnam. They did that to a 16 year old child! I despised them and everything they stood for and they hated and feared me.
They had a hold on her that my parents never would have dared have on me. The weapon I had to hold my mother in line was the always present threat that I would walk out the door and let her drink herself to death. I remember we talked about family a lot and I did encourage her to get out.
She never did.
It could not last. Much as we enjoyed being together the tensions grew and then a disaster in her family caused them all to break open. In June of 1983 we parted. My final words at that time, thinking never to see her again, were, “How did something that seemed so right turn out to be so wrong?”
And that seemed the end of it. We both moved on–sort of. There were things in her life I knew nothing of, all involving that cursed family of hers. We both went to the Faire that summer, each trying to avoid the other. I began a flirtation with a singer which turned out to be extremely funny a couple years later when I learned she was married, but her husband became a good friend too and after my mother died she had me over for Xmas dinner with the whole family and they sort of adopted me.
Back to Patty. This is her story.
Her parents, and remember we are talking about an adult here and they should not have had a say in anything she did, still were afraid that I would engulf their servant-er-daughter in my Satanic influence and arranged for her to move to Minnesota to take care of some elderly surplus population deserving only of euthanasia and being chopped up for dog food.
That was a disaster for her. She returned and a year or two later we met at the Faire again and her first words out of her mouth were, “You were right about family.”
I never knew the details of that but it must have been something horrible.
While all this was going my own abilities were increasing and I could do things then I would have to really work at now. It was the time of miracles.
I was a cold warrior in earnest and dangerous. If I had encountered her parents then I would have exploded their hearts without a second thought.
We talked on the phone every couple weeks and then sort of lost contact again.
My mother, curse her rotten soul, finally died and I was busy making up for lost time in my life. I was so busy making up for lost time that I did not keep track of business. Big mistake.
I went to the Faire a couple times a year now, losing interest in it, frankly getting too old and my always present distaste for children now making me want to avoid them as much as possible.
In the summer of 1992, ten years after Patty and met, I took a friend, Kathleen, to the Faire. Of course me being me and Kathleen being Kathleen, I had her chained and on a leash. How did I get away with it? I was Uncle Chuckie by then and there were better ways to die than to object to anything I did. I had already publicly demonstrated that I could kill with my mind.
We ran into Patty who, at that moment, was completely out of her mind and living in her fantasy world. Her parents had gone to the place in Hell reserved for them and Patty, having no reason to keep living, went insane, clinically, for a time. She was telling us the most amazing stories and I knew they were not true because, well, I knew. I pretended interest and sort of tried to not show how badly I felt for my ex love while poor Kathleen believed everything she heard.
As we drove back home, I had to explain that Patty was really ill and nothing she said was true.
I was right. A few months later Patty called me and told me what had happened to her, including being in a mental hospital after trying to commit suicide.
God, I would have loved to have seen her in a straight jacket. I never even got to tie her up!
Ok, serious. We started talking on the phone again and started going out to dinner occasionally. One time we got talking about her family and, well, it’s a miracle I did not scare her literally to death.
The conversation turned to her brother, whom I always thought was not exactly stable because when Patty and I were going together she was always telling me stories about him losing his temper and doing things like throwing food out the back door. He and I had met once, at the viewing for her other brother. Neither of us was greatly impressed. (Over the years that changed too and I now regard him as man of extraordinary courage and honesty.)
I forget the context, probably politics oddly enough, and she made the foolish mistake of saying, “Doug would kill you.” She was exaggerating of course, but that was the wrong thing to say to me. I take threats seriously.
I laughed and said, “I doubt it. Look at the water glass on the table over there. ” Then I threw a charge at it and it exploded, scaring the living daylights out of Patty and no doubt everyone else in the place. Glasses don’t usually explode. I’m surprised in retrospect that she did not run for her life but the truth is that by then she was viewing me in a way that sort of made her not be shocked at all.
I don’t know if I can do that trick now but it sure was fun then.
One day we were talking on the phone. She had inherited enough money that she did not have to work for a time. She knew I liked theater and she asked me if I would like to go with her to the Kenosa theater. They were doing The Rainmaker, which is one of my favorite plays.
I drove to her place on Mckinley drive and she drove, because she knew where we going, to Kenosha and we watched the play. It is a serious drama but not a tearjerker. Even so, at a certain point in the play, where the female character is telling of a nasty prank that had been played on her as a child, Patty started quietly sobbing.
The play ended, we started driving home, and I asked her what happened. She started telling me the story of her life, and then she said that she chose the play because “You were my rainmaker.”
In all my life, I have never received so fine a compliment. She never married. I think she never even had another relationship. I was the only one who saw the beauty in her.
She is gone now, gone for six years. Rest in peace my love. Your rainmaker has never forgotten you.
He never will.
Addendum: I did not expect her to be still alive when I googled her today. I remember how bad her health could be and was not surprised to be greeted with her obituary, a few lines from a death notice, “beloved sister of,” that sort of thing but nothing more about her life except a few comments from a very few friends. I wish to add to that.
Let the record show that Patricia Rokke was someone that Uncle Chuckie loved in the very early days of his work in Psionics and Radionics, and let my biographers, when the time comes, pay her due notice.
The Wit and Wisdom of Uncle Chuckie 