Bobby (5:35)
Hi, my name is Alexis. I am 34. I am an event producer and a drag performer and currently live in Portland, Oregon with my partner and my two cats, Weegee and Lemmy. I grew up in Orange County, California, specifically Laguna Niguel. It was a brand new track home with white picket fence, ocean blue carpeting, two stories with a beautiful garden in the backyard that kind of butted up to a steep hill with walking trails. I was an only child, so I definitely was left to my own devices a lot of times. I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother who is an artist, but otherwise a lot of Time just kind of playing by myself. My dad was a senior deputy coroner investigator for the Orange County Sheriff's Department. So as a kid, my understanding of that was he goes out and finds dead bodies. And his specialty was solving unidentified or John or Jane Doe cases. And he was always really good with computers, building them from scratch in his free time. And so he was essentially the IT department before they had an IT department. And he went on to create the John and Jane Doe online database because there wasn't a way for other counties or states to quickly cross reference. You know, if somebody went missing in one state and they found an unidentified body in another state. So this way they could kind of communicate with each other or even within the same state. And they even did a KCAL9 special on him in, I think it was like 1999 or 2000 called Detective of Death, which I thought was really funny when I was a kid. He had a really great sense of humor. He also taught classes at the Coroner's Academy there on identification. And he would be talking about tissue samples and walking around with a specimen jar in his hand and while doing the lecture, reach into the jar and take a bite. It was full of beef jerky, of course, not actual human flesh. That was kind of his personality, but I know it was really draining on him. The investigators are usually the ones who have to go in and tell families that their loved ones are deceased. And doing that day in and day out definitely takes a toll. I know he would take like two showers a day just to wash off kind of the smell of death. I didn't realize at the time that because of that anxiety and stress, he was a really high functioning alcoholic. But that definitely came into play later on in our life. And then my mom was a night shift ER nurse, so kind of between the two of them at the dinner table, lots of times it would be like, how was your day, honey? And talking about brains being splattered on the ceiling or some kind of weird metal object stuck in somebody's orifices. And that was just kind of normal for me. So I didn't really know any different. My parents were not religious and we were definitely like a X Files household because this was, you know, early 90s. Watched a lot of horror movies and sci fi, also like ER and Law and Order, which I thought was funny considering that was basically their jobs. So they would get off work and then watch what they just did all day. As I got older, when I was like in middle school, my parents got divorced when I was 10 and my dad was teaching, he would sometimes ask my opinion on slides and it was like, oh, should I use this picture or this picture? And it's a picture of like a woman decomposing in a bathtub. And it's like, dad, I know this is normal for you, but probably inappropriate to show to like an 11 year old. Like, it's one thing to hear about something because, you know, again, we watched a lot of horror movies growing up and so you can kind of distance yourself from that. But if you're seeing like crime scene photos, actual crime scene photos, it's not special effects, you know, it's not. I mean, you know that that's not real. But when you see real pictures, when you smell the smells, it becomes more real. And, and also just the, the heaviness of it, like I was saying, you know, it definitely affected my dad in a pretty significant way. Just the heaviness of having to tell people that, you know, your brother, your mom, your husband, somebody is gone. And sometimes it was by their own hand, sometimes it was an accident. So feeling that kind of like secondhand heaviness definitely made it more real. And you know, ultimately my dad died from alcohol related issues at 52. So he was really young, but he just, you know, couldn't shake it. And it's a lot for somebody to deal with, I guess, like, since I had a handful of pretty impactful kind of paranormal things that happened to me when I was a kid, that really stuck with me because they both of the, like, kind of big things that happened, happened Right, right before my parents got divorced. So I feel like the house was pretty charged at that time. And then after my parents got divorced, my mom moved up to La Garo Head to kind of run away, and my dad moved in with my grandparents, his parents. And my mom continued to be a nurse, but she kind of moved more into admin rather than bedside nursing, which was good for her. I think she needed a break. But my dad stayed at the coroner's office for several more years and I, you know, going through middle school and high school, I kind of went back and forth between them. After my mom had moved back to Orange county, and I have gone several times to the sheriff's department, you know, I would go visit or I would attend events and things like that. But as I got older and especially as my dad's alcoholism got worse, I tried to spend more time at my mom's house just because I grew up being really close to my dad and it was really hard to be around him. Like that. So when I graduated from high school, went to college, went to community college, and then I transferred up to Cal State Long beach. And I was living out of the house at that point. And so my priorities had kind of shifted into my schooling. I went to school for creative nonfiction and poetry. And so I still saw my dad, but he unfortunately was forced to take early retirement because of his alcohol issues. And after that, his health went pretty downhill. So again, it was really hard for me to see him like that. So I had kind of distanced myself until he passed away in 2012. He had collapsed outside of ATM and essentially had put himself into an alcohol induced coma. And I was 21 and I had to be the one to kind of make a decision on what was going to happen with him. And because of his past working at the coroner's office, I knew he would not want to, you know, be a vegetable. I knew he would not want people at the coroner's office to have to come out and deal with his body. Like, he would be so embarrassed by that. And so we had to make the decision about, you know, his end of life. And it was. It was something that was a long time coming, but it was also really sudden, and I was still pretty young, and so that was really hard. So that happened. And then very shortly thereafter, my cousin, who was only six months older than me, he was 22, he went to Taco Tuesday with his friends. He had just graduated from college, he was coming home and his heart stopped and he died. And that was really shocking because we had no prior indication there was anything wrong. He had just been snowboarding. He, you know, was very active. But we found out later that there is a genetic heart mutation that runs on my mom's side of the family that my grandma, who recently passed away, she has or had, and my cousin had it and didn't know. And because of that, he had an enlarged heart from like a virus and just dropped dead, which was really scary and shocking because he was so young and otherwise so healthy. So that really kind of changed my outlook on life. And I always thought, like, I need to just make it past 22. And I also have this genetic mutation, which I found out pretty recently. So nothing is guaranteed, and you just have to appreciate your life while you have it. So just losing my dad and then my cousin and shortly thereafter having a health scare with my mom, all within like four months. I was really just trying to have a fresh start and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I found a online magazine that was hiring and essentially needed an everything person. So I was going to be helping write articles and work on a radio show and go to events up in LA and Orange county and San Diego. So I was 22, this is 2013, summertime, probably May or June, and my editor and I had gone to a art gallery opening up in Hollywood. And I was living in Orange county back at my mom and stepdad's house at the time. So I was driving an hour and a half, two hours each way. When the event was over at about 12:30 or 1 in the morning, I had to drive back home. I think it was on the 4:05 if I remember correctly. But I got in my little black 2008 Suzuki Firenza, had my ipod plugged in and was going maybe 70ish miles an hour driving home. And I was in the second most left lane, so not the fast lane, but the next one over. And I'm going. And weirdly, even though it's probably a Tuesday or Wednesday night, there's not really anybody else on the road, which is great because I just want to get home. I'm going. And all of a sudden out of the corner of my eye, I see a, it was either tan or silver little four door sedan going sideways across the freeway. So from my right to the left, cutting across. And this all happens within a matter of seconds, but it feels like it's in slow motion. I turn the wheel super fast and swerve into the fast lane. And luckily there was nobody there because otherwise I would have hit them. I swerve, this person cuts across the front of my car, hits the center median and starts spinning and they start spinning clockwise towards my car. And there's a brief moment where I see the person inside the car. Like I see their eyes. In that moment, my brain was just trying to process what is happening because a, when is there ever somebody driving sideways on the freeway or any street for that matter? And so there's the moment of kind of puzzling realization, like, wait, there's something traveling in front of my car going down a perpendicular direction to where they should be going. I'm going 70 miles an hour. So regardless, if somebody had like swerved into my lane, I still have to slam on the brakes and they hit the wall and they start spinning towards me in this counterclockwise way. And again, I don't know how quickly or how slowly this was happening, but it definitely felt like it was happening really slowly. Like I can see, see the car rotating towards me and the way the Light was because it's, you know, 12:30, 1:00 at night. There's a few overhead street lamps, but not super well lit. So I can only really see a silhouette of a person. I couldn't really see their face. I honestly don't even really know what they looked like, but I just saw kind of like reflection of their eyes for a second as they were spinning towards me counterclockwise. And we kind of had this passing moment where I looked at them and I can see them looking back at me. And I can only imagine how terrifying that would be. I mean, it was terrifying for me being in that situation. And it just felt like a dream, but it was absolutely not a dream. You know, I had not been drinking. There was no way that this wasn't real, but it felt like this should not be happening. And then seeing them spin so close to my car and just be a couple inches away, like I. I should have hit them and I didn't and them spinning off diagonally backwards towards the opposite side of the freeway and smashing against the wall. I just was in shock. I was frozen. I was maybe five inches away from D.
