Well, right before my dad was murdered by the Club of Rome on October 14, 2010, a “friend” from grade school and intermittently throughout high school, Colleen McMahon, suddenly resurfaced in my life.

At that time she was living in Brookhaven, NY with her parents, sister, and the menagerie of children she’d acquired up to that point (a nice upgrade from the humble apartment she’d lived in in Electchester, when we first became “friends”).

Since sixth grade, Colleen had always been “hot and cold” in her “friendship” with me. She would claim that we were best friends, even going so far as to give me the “St Ends” half of a heart shaped “Best Friends” necklace pendant, and we had many sleepovers and outings together. We laughed a lot together back then. I thought that she had a great sense of humor, and we always had fun. My mother thought that she was a little bit “wild”, but since she knew her parents, she usually gave me permission to spend time with her at her apartment over in Electchester.

Later on, in high school, when I went Saint Francis Prep, she and Jen Sullivan went to Saint Agnes, but we were older then, and took buses and stuff after school and hung out. We also used to hit the local “teen club” in Mineola, known then as “The Angle”. I often felt like the third wheel because they lived close together in those projects over by Jib Lanes in Electchester over there, and I was farther away, in Jamaica Estates. Nonetheless, I had tons of fun with those girls.

(Elizabeth Seales, another girl from that group, wasn’t really around during that high school time, nor was she around during my dad’s murder, but she resurfaced later at my mother’s wake after her murder.)

Once, they met me in front of my high school with another girl named Liza and we all jumped on the city bus that I took to go home. There was a girl sitting in the seat in front of me from my class who I really didn’t know. She had long hair. She turned around and said, “Ow, my hair!” I said, Oh sorry….I guess her hair had gone over the bus seat and perhaps I had inadvertently pulled it. Forgotten…or so I thought.

Colleen acted like it was a huge insult from the girl and continued to stare at her, and tried to stir up drama with her. “What the fuck?”, she asked me, fuming. “Who the fuck is she? I saw her, you weren’t doing anything, oh my God, what a bitch”.

“Forget it Colleen, it’s not a big deal…let it go”. It was really nothing.

Apparently, right before we all got off the bus, Colleen had yanked this girl’s hair. The next thing I know, a HUGE posse of girls from Ozone Park/Howard Beach got off the bus one stop after ours, screaming at the four of us, and started chasing us.
WHAT THE FUCK? Oh yeah, Colleen didn’t tell me – she had yanked the girl’s hair, and I didn’t see her do it.

We ran down into the 179th Street train station (I jumped down an entire flight of stairs and landed on my feet) and those bitches jumped the turnstile and got away. I turned around to go home (I lived right nearby) and the whole angry mob of girls were like, we want your friend’s number, she pulled her hair, why did she do that, blah blah blah.

Loyal friend that I was, I did not give them Colleen’s phone number, despite the fact that these girls continued to harass me for months afterwards for it in school. Those girls will kill Colleen, I’d thought. Even though I was pissed at her, I did not want to be involved in her catching a serious beating.

Yeah, now I wish I had. But who knows? With her, she was always a fake friend, acting in some racket.

Fast forward: September/October 2010. Right before my father’s murder:

Colleen and I had rekindled our friendship and I was going over to her home in Brookhaven to hang out with her a lot. She would post invites on my Facebook page for a band called “Mean Machine”, and invited me to come over and spend the night. She also told me that she had joined the “NA” (Narcotics Anonymous) program and had me accompany her to meetings when she got her key tags and all that stuff. (Now I know that most Twelve Step programs are no more than fronts for CIA agents, but I didn’t even realize that back then.) For someone who allegedly was “working the program” and trying to stay “clean”, she certainly smoked a lot of weed, I thought. Now I also realize that like many of my other “friends” from the past, she had a vested interest in getting me to partake in drugs and alcohol – anything that would blunt my perceptions so that I’d be less likely to pick up on their true intent and machinations.

The day they tested my dad’s electronic defibrillator, Colleen had scheduled me to go somewhere with her and pick me up at my family home in Babylon, west of her family’s home. When I arrived home later that afternoon, my father had told me that the defibrillator had “fired”, and the force of it had actually thrown him out of his bed and onto the floor.

A week or so later, it had fired again, killing him.

I now realize that Colleen was working for someone who had instructed her (and her family) to keep close tabs on me and monitor me during that time.

She was also how I met my first real boyfriend, Adam, when I was sixteen years old. I will probably save that story for a later post.

Like Colleen, Jen Sullivan was also a fake friend to me. In my thirties, I admired the way Jen’s life seemed to have turned out and would often go to visit her and spend time with her and her three school aged boys. This increased after the death of my father, which I’d still believed was due to natural causes. (Like most of the people close to my mother and I back then, she knew that it was not, but said nothing to me to disabuse me of my erroneous belief.) We would bake brownies, drink coffee, and gossip. We blew up each others’ Facebook pages during this time with things like silly skits from SNL and other things that made us laugh.

Occasionally, her husband Will (Kunkel) would pass through. I wonder if his parents came to this country through Operation Paperclip. But I digress.

Fast forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, 2017. All these things can be seen just by looking at my texts and Facebook posts from that time, and phone transcripts, which I’m pretty sure have been preserved.

I had flown up to New York from Florida and was staying at my mother’s apartment in Bay Terrace for about ten days (the one that her brother Eugene basically forced her to move to so that she’d be even further under his thumb right before he’d planned to kill her). I tried to make plans with Jen because – heck, I was going to be in town for ten days! I had also planned to visit my treacherous aunt, uncles, and cousins on my father’s side, but interestingly, neither Jen nor any of my father’s relatives were available at any point during that time! Looking back now, it’s like, duh, but I remember being really disappointed. I think she’d blamed her lack of availability on activities of her sons or something.

Anyway, fast forward to my mother’s wake, after her murder (I was under the Stockholm Syndrome spell during that time, and had believed the staged scene that they had acted out for me, when in actuality they had farmed her organs and blood before poisoning her). Jen arrived and was giddy and acting like she was at the prom or something, laughing and talking about her son Liam having a party while she and Will were out of the house.

I remember Will and Shawn Nagle (my cousin Candice’s husband) sat down and got along like a house on fire. I hadn’t even known that they were friends, but then Jen explained that they had been schoolmates at Molloy High School. All the people at my mother’s wake had such a great time – except for me, that is.

I’ll write about that scene in more detail further down the line.