Member-only story
Corey Mason — Wildhuman Living Alone in the Woods
A Leo in exile. A one man band.
I don’t know if he still lives in his thirty-five acre abode, deep in the woods of South Carolina, or if he passed away and the woods have started to reclaim him. I don’t remember his real name, confided to me in a drunken night of loud vinyl, too much pot, and a thousand stars shining from the pond in front of his porch. He lived only as he wanted to, a Leo in exile. A one man band.
I met Corey when I was 19 or 20 and he was nearly 60. He had a mess of short, white, curly hair, bright blue eyes, and all the charm of a hippie who had known he was cute all his life. He had a guitar and love affairs with women half his age or less. He drank too much and held forth at the one bar that let him in ( he brought his own beers, you see) about the evils of capitalism, environmental genocide, plastic, the meat industry, and every other topic covered in his monthly Earthfirst magazine, I imagine. He was right. He was just a twat about it.
When you are 20, meeting an older person who has survived, maybe even thrived, by breaking all the conventions and living proudly as themselves, especially in a state like South Carolina in the 1990s — well…it makes an impression. I ended up living in a spare cabin he had built years before, after my brief marriage to Mister Wrong (he was 31, I was 20)…