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Jessica Blandy |
She can’t have children, anyway, but that hurts her. She loves music, many kinds of music, but is has to mean something, it has to awake feelings in her, to hurt her or to beat her or to make her forget, get her to sleep. She writes novels and life stories and newspaper articles and lives in California.
Although she's talkative a times and has put many words on paper about herself, very little is known about her past. Somehow, deliberate or not, she hides her youth in the dark unknown. Perhaps the early years were happy and in too big a contrast with her present. Or perhaps her past was dark and painful, as a forebode to her adult life. We know something though. She was born in Mayetta. Her father was Joshua Blandy, her mother was Rachel. They lived near the railroad tracks. She was afraid for the train that ran on the tracks just on the back of the garden in her parents home. A black smoking screaming colossus, unable to stop at places it isn't supposed to. Just like life.
As little girl Jessica read the books of Henry James. Her boyfriend, Henry, lived in that city too and Jessi did all she could to impress him. When her mother died in 1972 Jessica left the elderly house, feeling unwanted. It was a feeling her father planted in her, a father who never was there when she needed him. Later, when Jessica was in her thirties, her father became involved in a nasty story with ties to the past and Jessica was around to help him. To maybe talk with him over the past, about the years they hadn't visited each other. To catch op the lost years. But in the process of the events that brought her back to Mayetta her father was murdered.
Just like so many men that came in to her life.
When you see Jessica you see a determined girl, a lady with style, a woman with guts, but most of all, you see the blues... When the beat is too heavy, or when melancholy creeps in her room from under the door, see easily hits the bottle. And at the same time she can be hot as the desert and passionate. She did have a habit to fell for the wrong guy or girl though.
She had a big and beautiful sea house, Big Sur, at the Pacific Ocean, near the Pacific Coast Highway, near San Francisco, California. She also had a fast red Ferrari Spider, a classic two-seater.
Blackmail, killers around the corner, rapists in the shadow, maniacs in the swamps, experience with drugs and with death, pedophiles, slave traffickers, worshippers of Satan, political assassinations, professional hit men eager to collect the price on her head, no kind of scum that never crossed her tiresome path. Humiliation, captivitie and forced into prostitution and brutal painfully rape even turned her in to a murderer. Jessida Blandy had it all. Identity theft, false accusations almost impossible to correct, if you can think of it, it crossed her path.
En it keeps crossing her path. She tries to hide dozens of walking nightmares in de corners of her mind, tries to drown them with booze or simply locks them away behind bars of frozen tears. But inevitably they pop up one day and start interfering with her life. And even when a horror is dead, died by her hands or by the hands of others , it still come to haunt her in her dreams.
And there is that other kind of pain, the load on her back and the burning guilt in her brain, the sorrow of the ones that died because of the things she did or because of the things she did not.
She lost so many friends, some through crime, others because of...... Scott Mitchell, the married lover, Stan Oskin, the blues musician, Adria to name a few. The death of Kimberley Lattua in 1996 blew her off the world. Kim had been her best friend, and Jessica was the only women Kim had. Jessica Blandy had had the horrible trip to Ipanema and knew how to use a gun. Occasionally she had practiced with a rifle long before that traumatic affaire and now after the killing if Kim she seriously started to practice with the revolver.
There's a line in a song that says 'everyone I know goes away in the end.' And that is like it is with Jessica. 'Sometimes I have the Impression that it's getting empty around me,' she says to a new wrong lover Connie Boltram, 'Friends leave. They disappear in the shadow and leave me behind alone. Without illusions. Without an echo...'
Artwork taken from vol.1 Denk maar aan Enola Gay... (Souviens-toi d'Enola Gay...), vol.4 De laatste blues (Nuit couleur Blues), vol. 6 Het meisje van Ipanema (Au loin, la fille d'Ipanema...), vol.11 Satan, mijn smart (Satan, ma déchirure), vol.15 Zoals Ginny was (Ginny d'avant), vol.20 Mr. Robinson (Mr. Robinson)
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