The most troubling aspect of my relationship with Conspiracy was that my thoughts and beliefs were colored by his, almost to the point they stopped being my own. Conspiracy influenced not just minor decisions, but major ones, such as my outright refusal to join a secret society.
One of the first notions Conspiracy filled my head with was the idea that secret societies were evil, satanic, white-male cults that ran the world badly. Conspiracy ran down the list of recent U.S. presidents and vice presidents, pointing out that every single administration had ties to either Yale or Harvard. As an added flourish, he named which secret society each of the various men was linked to.
Skull and Bones, Yale's most prestigious secret society, received special scorn. Conspiracy described it as a "bunch of punks sucking on Geronimo's skull," regaling me with the tale of how George H.W. Bush's father allegedly dug up the Native American leader's body and brought the stolen remains to New Haven.
It didn't help that the secret societies referred to their buildings as "tombs." The more prestigious groups had huge, imposing, windowless buildings that were said to house great luxury and hide strange rituals.
A few of my upperclassmate friends had been tapped by secret societies, and had shared some of the secrets with me. One of my roommates described holding hands with her fellow society members outside their tomb and singing to the building in a foreign tongue. Another muttered sourly that his society, which featured a swimming pool in the basement, was overrated and that he hated the Sunday-night get-togethers. Still another told me the breathless story of how someone put a hood over her head while the members of the society hissed like snakes.
It all seemed like devil worship to me. Being Catholic and half-Creole, I tended to be very superstitious. My association with Dollar the Psychic had made those tendencies even worse.
And so it was, in the spring of my junior year, that the phone rang. It was a young woman's voice, inviting me to be tapped into the secret society that was casually known as the "people of color" society. It wasn't specifically an African-American group, but it was known to be more inclusive than the others.
I immediately heard Dollar's voice in my ear. She had recently done a tarot reading for me, in which she predicted that "someone was going to call me and try to pressure me into doing something I didn't want to do."
In a rude tone of voice, with Conspiracy hovering over my shoulder and Dollar living in my head, I told the caller that I wasn't interested. I didn't consider joining, not even for a split second. I could feel the society representative's disappointment and puzzlement as she hung up.
At the time, I didn't know that getting tapped by secret societies was the primary reason that many students chose Yale. I didn't consider that having valuable access to the world's movers and shakers was not inherently evil. I didn't understand that maybe, just maybe, joining that society might ease my transition into the working world.
I let Conspiracy (and Dollar) do my thinking for me.
And because I let them think for me, I will never know if I made the right choice.
