Initiated Page 11

  Around the turn of the century, the Jewelry Store was an indoor mall glittering with gemstones in golden glass cases lined with velveteen. By the time I moved to San Francisco, the space had become derelict, squatted by a bunch of young artists in performance collectives, fire-breathers and unicycle riders. In order to have a little money to live on, twice a month they held illegal raves in the basement. Upstairs was a meditation studio and rehearsal space; the jewelry theme lived on in the bedrooms, all of which were painted in the colors of precious stones, turquoise, garnet, and peridot. The communal kitchen was carnelian, always crowded with people playing the guitar and singing, chopping onions or sitting on the countertops smoking a joint. The entire building smelled of Nag Champa, marijuana, coriander, sweat, and smarmy theater makeup. Most of the residents of the Jewelry Store had the permanent residue of grease paint around their eyes and hairline. Simultaneously vaudevillian and mystical, everything was play for the kids at the Jewelry Store, who’d spend their days drifting between meditation, dance, sex, and psychedelics, each activity generating a state of mystical intoxication. Soon after meeting them, I was often over there performing with a collective called Dream Circus. Created by a young impresario named Paradox, a twenty-three-year-old lanky double Gemini who always wore a red and white striped nylon unitard and had the movement style and the spiritual essence of a squirrel monkey. Dream Circus was spooky; it was spectacle; it was subterranean entertainment and a total way of life. It was hedonistic rites in celebration of Bacchus, magician’s card tricks and sleights of hand. Every action was in allegiance to a decaying form of Romanticism.

  The Romantic sensibility, I’ve come to understand, is one major reason for the contemporary intellectual’s disdain for the occult. Occultists are considered dinosaurs, monstrous prehistoric lizards clinging to the Romantic as if it were a rock. Historically, the Romantic movement represented a turning away from reality. Art history in the West forked in the 1800s, splitting into Romanticism and Realism. Realists depict “reality as it is,” with its economic dialectics, materialism, and class struggle. It deals in facts, in science, in things we can prove; it is not ecstatic but pragmatic, political. Realism tells the stories of real people, the factory worker, the industrialist architect, the provincial housewife having an affair. Not fairies, not women who talk to spirits, certainly not witches. The Romantics, on the other hand, turned away from the modern world as a reaction to the ugliness and brutality of the Industrial Revolution. Retreating into the world of folk and fairy tales, into the exotic, “the Oriental”; the Romantics lived in an opium den of avoidance.

  In one of Romantic painting’s most famous works, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, the hero, a romantic genius, a windswept blond dandy in a velvet suit, turns his back to the viewer and to the world, gazing out over an endless landscape of fog and forest, as if into a primordial wilderness to which he longs to return. The Romantic seeks the mysterious, the divine, and traditionally does so from the position of a white upper-class man who has the privilege of choosing to reject the world of work and manners, preferring to retreat into a wild yet terrifying sublime, a space of somehow still uncolonized “colored people” where he can reign like Colonel Kurtz, or father children with a thirteen-year-old in a grass skirt like Gauguin.

  That’s the criticism: people turn to the occult because they either (a) don’t want to deal with the real horrors of the world and have the privilege of turning away from it, unlike the oppressed who have no choice but to face reality, or (b) are losers who can’t hack it in industrialized civilization and so choose to play Dungeons & Dragons instead. Western post-Enlightenment civilization defines itself as being rationalist and therefore against magic, but all cultures have magical practices, including our own. Christianity is full of magical practices, and the language of economics is permeated by spirits and invisible hands. Magic is everywhere; it’s just that the central power figures of a culture get to determine whose magic is considered “real” and whose is just considered embarrassing. Further, magic is not just a practice of the privileged; otherwise only the privileged would practice it, and that just isn’t the case, as you can see by visiting the fetish markets of Togo, the witch markets of Brazil, or any botanica in Los Angeles.

  For me and many of the people I knew at the Jewelry Store, performance was a kind of magic; it was the practice of entering ecstatic and altered states of consciousness at will. The spaces we performed in were often illegal, under bridges, in vacant lots. Or else we invaded the orthodox spaces of the art world, showing up uninvited to opening events with fountains and canapes. We’d slip smoke-like through the crowds, hiding in corners and shadows, naked, painted white, with pointy ears and sharp teeth. Pixies at their soiree with no explanations.

  Rehearsals at the Jewelry Store would rarely start on time. You’d go over and hang out, talk, maybe an impromptu jam session would be going on, so everyone would sing for an hour before rehearsals began. Or some other group might be practicing their fire-breathing techniques in the space you wanted to use, so you’d have to wait. It was all about process and enthusiasm, not about end results. Everything was possibility; there were no boundaries, hardly any form, just ideas and activity tangling in the air like kites.

  One afternoon, I waited in the basement rave hall for our rehearsal to start, a dank underworld, doused with glitter and sweat. Two girls were already down there in the neon half-light, sitting on a blanket as if they were having a picnic. I started practicing in the shadows, casually doing some dance moves while the girls stared at me, giggling.

  Both petite and very pale, one of them had a face full of piercings, big brown cow eyes, and dreadlocks down to her waist dyed various shades of orange with bits of brass and leather smuggled within. She spoke with a British accent. After everything she said, she’d glance at her friend, waiting for a signal that she was allowed to proceed. More androgynous street urchin than ordinary girl, her friend stood just over five feet tall, with fine strawberry-blond hair grazing her jaw in a pageboy haircut. She wore baggy knickers in a soft violet canvas, leather suspenders, and a cotton T-shirt worn thin with holes, repaired by hand multitudes of times with violet thread. Thin white stockings slouched on her shins under leather boots that looked like they’d been pilfered from an eighteenth-century Parisian flea market. She spoke loudly, drawing out her words, throwing her voice to me as if it were a crystal ball she wanted me to catch, bragging about her frequent luxurious intercontinental travel.

  I was used to hanging out with broke people. These girls didn’t look like people you’d expect to fly first class. “What do you do for a living?” I asked the orphan girl. She shrugged and looked at her cow-eyed friend conspiratorially. The orphan girl cocked her head at me. “I have a paper route,” she said. In fact, she did look like a 1920s paperboy who’d shout, “Extra, extra, read all about it!”

  She stood up to introduce herself, loping a bit from side to side like a ferret. Her name was Isla Otterfeld, and the girl was strange. Her legs bowed wide, her toes pointed outward. Batting big blue eyes rimmed with thick, dark lashes, she’d smile, and I don’t know how else to say it, she’d coo. “Mmm, awwww, cooooo,” and then she’d break into peals of laughter one would expect to hear from beneath a toadstool in a Bavarian wood, rather than a dank basement in the Mission, its floors sticky with spilled beer.

  It was uncanny the way people were instantly hypnotized by this diminutive little creature, snapped under her spell. They’d fawn over her and bring her cups of tea and offerings of skunk weed. They’d laugh at all her jokes and defer to her judgment. Though smaller than everyone by about a foot, she was clearly a leader in the Jewelry Store’s band of misfits. She told me her band was playing soon at a space downtown. That I should come. “You should give me your phone number so that I can remind you,” Isla said.

  “I’ll remember if you tell me when it is,” I told her.

  “Give me your phone number, just in case.” She
grinned at me, and I complied. Soon, we were speaking on the phone every day.

  During these phone calls, I would tell her stories and she would listen and laugh as if I were the most fascinating person on earth. She’d tell me how creative I was and how what she loved best about me was my imagination. When the time came for her show downtown, I was so grateful for her friendship, since I always felt like an outsider with the Dream Circus clan, that I found myself wanting to bring her a gift. From the esoteric shop on Polk, I selected an assortment of polished purple amethysts and put them in a gold silk bag I embroidered with an acorn. Fairies live in Oak Trees.

  Her band was playing at a dive bar. Just barely nineteen, I could only get in because some girl I’d been dating a while back had got me a fake ID. While Isla was setting up, she kept flashing her eyes at me, blushing and shrugging while she tapped the pedals to test her guitar. I talked to a girl nearby who told me she wrote short stories about the sex lives of insects and earthworms. Isla kept shooting me dirty looks as I was talking to the writer girl, frowning and huffing and shaking her fist. I couldn’t tell if she was kidding. I didn’t know that Isla already thought of me as belonging to her.

  After the show, I presented Isla with the bag of amethysts, and she took it as if it were a tithe she was owed. She poured the stones into her hand and held them up into the light and cooed and giggled. “Good! You should bring me gifts.”

  “I should?” I asked, puzzled. Although I was fascinated by her, and grateful for her friendship, I also found her strange, mystifying, and if I was being honest, a total weirdo. I didn’t expect that she would feel I owed her a gift.

  “Yes, of course you should,” she responded. “And you should come back to my place right now. It’s just around the corner.”

  Isla lived in a converted mechanics shop on Minna with a roll-up door made of corrugated metal. She lived there with two other guys: Dave, whom she’d known since she was a teenager in her Georgia homeland, who had a pug nose and mullet and wore shirts with the sleeves cut out to show off his muscles, and this other guy who was somehow affiliated with that band Brian Jonestown Massacre. The guys mainly lived in two little cubby rooms upstairs while Isla had the entire ground floor to herself.

  She took me on the grand tour. First, there was the recording studio, all set up with mics and mic stands and drum sets and amps and equipment with knobs and dials and cords and cables and carpet on the walls to absorb the sound. “You have to be careful in here,” I told her.

  “Why?” she asked, eyes opening wide.

  “Because of the gremlins. Gremlins love technology,” I told her. “They love to chew at the cables and hide behind all the gadgets.”

  Isla giggled and squirmed, grinning up at me. “Aww, but that’s okay. I’m friends with the gremlins. We’re brothers! C’mon.” She curled her fingers around my arm and pulled me up a winding metal staircase. Gesturing to a door on the left, she said, “That’s the dark room, but you can’t go in there right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Narcisse is in there. He might be in the middle of something.”

  “Something, not photography?” I asked her.

  “Let me show you my Gallery of Lost Souls.” Isla redirected me to the hallway. Hanging in a line along the wall was a series of prints she’d made herself. A dark-haired girl in a sheer white dress walked through an empty meadow. They’d been in love, Isla informed me, but now the girl was in a mental institution. In another photo, a punk boy with wounded eyes had an orange Mohawk collapsed across his skull as if he were a defeated rooster. “He broke my heart. Stole from me, tricked me,” Isla said with tears in her eyes. “He died of a heroin overdose last year.” Narcisse from the photo room was one of the people in the prints. A young Frenchman, he was so pale and blond he looked like he might be an albino. Gaunt and ghostly, he only wore white and ate only white food; if he ate potatoes, he’d take off the skin. Mostly his diet consisted of white cheese and skinned apples. Isla told me that when Narcisse shat, it would just be fuzzy white pellets. Nuggets of calcium the size of walnuts clogged his back and neck because his diet was making him sick. But Isla thought it all was adorable, so hilarious, and, in fact, perfectly reasonable.

  Other people were there too; some pale guy with bushy eyebrows kept coming up to her, pulling her away, frowning, whispering urgently in her ear. Isla’d roll her eyes and tell me to hold on. Eventually she led me to her bedroom where, after a flurry of apologies, she told me I could wait.

  My intuition was correct; amethyst was her color. Everything about Isla’s room was lavender. The walls. The rugs so purple they were almost black, thick as bearskins. Beeswax candles dripped off wrought-iron candelabra, their heat shimmering up toward the skylight and loft bed where she slept. Beneath the loft hung a hammock of undyed wool swiveling in slow loops, as if it trapped a lethargic, invisible demon. The room even smelled lavender. Lavender infused into the air with handmade incense, or rubbed into flesh with essential oils, or lathered from the luxurious soaps in her bathroom. I peeked into her closet—a small room the size of the shed I’d lived in in Santa Barbara. It had a mirror surrounded in carnival lights and was packed with leather jackets and silk nightshirts and calfskin booties small enough for a child. Below the dressing table, like the treasures of a modern-day leprechaun, were three canvas mailbags. Each one was overflowing with stacks of money. There was easily over half a million dollars in those bags, which she’d casually nudged under the table with her essential oils and eye creams.

  Heart racing, I ran over to the other side of the room, afraid. I knew I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. Something that made the enchanted life on Isla’s fairy isle possible but that I sensed we were never supposed to discuss.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, shuffling her way back into her room, oversized shirt slouching off her shoulder, a child wearing her mother’s clothes.

  “Nothing,” I stammered, turning to face her CDs. “I was just looking at your music.”

  She closed the door with a kick. “Find anything you like? Anything you want you can have.” She came up to me, so close I could smell her lavender musk. “I need a do not disturb sign.” Stroking the tips of her fingers down the small of my back, she told me, “Go upstairs. I’m going to find some music to capture your spirit.”

  We lay by candlelight on her indigo blankets, opium swirls of incense crowning our heads as we drifted along to Pink Floyd’s song “Echoes,” a twenty-minute epic to rival Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” It begins:

  Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air

  and deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves…

  Isla was stretched out, leaning on her elbow above me, eyes violet and hypnotic. “You know, we met before that time at the Jewelry Store,” she told me, her gaze gripping mine, charming my cobra soul.

  “When?” I whispered back.

  “At that Butoh performance. I saw you in the parking lot. I was driving in with my friends, and we all saw you from the car. And we all said, ‘Who is that?’ But I…I knew you. I recognized you and I knew you were mine. A creature from another place. From the fairy world. Don’t you remember? In the lobby. We spoke.”

  Known as the Dance of Death, Butoh was created by the Japanese as a reaction to Americans dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I did start to remember, vaguely, leaving a theater of grimacing white figures, as if leaving a dream in a graveyard, entering the wet light of the lobby that shone all over everything, and through that light appeared a strange loping figure. A petite girl, dressed like Oliver Twist. “Oh yeah, now I’m starting to remember,” I told her. “You were so friendly. I thought you were trying to pick my pocket.”

  Her eyes narrowed, petulant and fierce, as she leaned in. “I knew from that moment we were supposed to be together. My intuition is always right. I figured you knew the Jewelry Store people; that’s why I went that one time. I knew you’d be there.”

&nb
sp; My stomach lurched. A jungle adventurer who realizes the panther has been tracking her for days, hiding in the undergrowth, leaping from tree to tree. Caught in a sudden delirium, I was sucked into the music, echoing pings, the calls of birds. Isla lay back in a dreamy fugue. “I love that line about the lullabies,” she said, but she seized her throat and turned her face away.

  “I used to love it when my mother sang to me,” I whispered. “I still remember the words.”

  But no one sang to Isla as a child. Raised by a single, drug-addicted mother with a series of pharmacist boyfriends in Savannah, Georgia, under hanging trees and kudzu vines and Spanish moss, in dingy houses where she felt alone, there was no one to discipline Isla. No one to make her close her eyes. She entered the fairy world and never returned. She was the fairies’ favorite child. And she called out to the other fairy creatures in this miserable world like a beacon. And when she saw me walking by in that parking lot, she recognized me: a creature from another place, from the fairy caves of Avalon, from the Summerland, from the land of Tir Na Nog, the first territory on the other side of death.

  “Summertime. And the living is easy. Fish are jumping and the cotton is high,” I sang.

  Before my eyes, Isla became a watery creature, white bellied and slippery. She curled her fingers in my hair and pulled me close, placing her lips on mine. Eyes fluttering backward, she sighed. “I want to treat you better than I’ve ever treated anyone,” she declared. My dual citizenship with the spirit world, the porous nature of my reality, which had so terrified Darshak and Adrian as it tugged me in and out of the realms of the imagination, did not scare Isla. It fascinated her. For her I glowed in the dark, a prehistoric fish at the bottom of the ocean.