Initiated Page 17

  After my failure to get into the SNDO the previous spring, Isla and I broke up, but she’d offered to pay my way back to New York if I finally agreed to pose for her “Gallery of Lost Souls.” I was to emerge from a lake in Somerset, England, like a nymph, the images capturing my soul and placing it forever in her fairy circle. Devastated as I was at the time, I no longer worried about putting my immortal soul at risk with Isla’s fairy magic. I was basically like, whatever. She brought me to England to take the photographs, but before we made it to her fairy queendom, I’d called the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance on the off chance they might be willing to give me a private audition. They were.

  I went in and took a first-year Graham class with Marilyn—a former Graham dancer in her fifties. I’d never danced Graham before, but I gave it my best. About ten minutes in, Marilyn asked me to take off my sweatpants so that she could see my turnout and alignment. “But I’m not wearing anything underneath,” I protested. I’d been dancing in studios where everyone wore loose-fitting clothes, thread worn and held up with a shoelace. “Well, that wasn’t very sensible of you, was it?” Marilyn frowned, unamused.

  Terrified I was losing my last chance to dance, on my next turn across the floor I took off my pants and danced in my underwear. If she wanted to see my turnout, there it was. I danced across the floor in my saggy period underwear and did what I could with it. At the end of the class, Marilyn winked at me and said, “You dance with a lot of heart.” Dr. North, the school’s dean, offered me a place in their Dance Theatre BFA program later that day. Unlike the program in Amsterdam, the Laban Centre offered a BFA degree that was as rigorous in academics as it was in choreography and technique. And if I decided to move back to the States, the credits from England would still count. My failure to get into the SNDO had worked out for the best.

  Since dance was my religion, it seemed fitting to me that my new school was in a converted church. My favorite studios had arched ceilings and stained glass windows the color of sand, sea foam, and moss. We leapt, drumming our feet across wooden floors in studios muggy with breath and sweat as the rain fell against the windows and the pianists called our souls heavenward with the pounding of their keys. The BFA program was three years, five days a week, 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., sometimes later with rehearsals. In all three years, I never missed one class. Fridays were my least favorite day of the week, because it meant that I wouldn’t get to take class again until Monday.

  At seven in the morning I’d jog to school through the fog and rain carrying a little yellow rucksack I’d sewn for myself and embroidered with the eye on the Fool’s bag in the Motherpeace tarot deck. After all my trials, I wanted to be like the Fool, to start again—as Vicki Noble says in her book about the cards—fresh and new, without any ideas of sin or transgression. Carrying the bag of the Fool meant that I was on a new adventure, that I would not be plagued by old stories, that I had broken with my past karma, that I trusted the Universe to take care of me. Inside the Fool’s pouch, she carries everything she needs. Of course, I’d already encountered the Fool with Isla, and then been directed to Amsterdam by the Magician. Technically, if I was going to follow the teleological trajectory of the tarot, my next card should have been the High Priestess: the witch of the tarot deck, keeper of knowledge and adept traveler between the worlds. When you calculate my soul cards using tarot numerology, my cards are the High Priestess and the Fool. I was always meant to be the High Priestess, but with all the Fool in my psychic DNA, it’s no wonder I always want to take the scenic route, the circuitous path that leads in and out, away and back again.

  At first, I tried to get by in London without stripping. I knew sex work damaged me, stressed me out, took a big hunk of my soul and kept it locked in a cage somewhere (sometimes literally), far away from me. The worst part was that it made it difficult for me to integrate my upper body with my lower half. Somewhere around my hips, my upper and lower body got confused and didn’t know how to talk to each other. Often, I would lose my balance. I thought, If I use enough force, maybe I can pound my two halves together. We’d be doing pirouettes and I’d knock myself over trying to do as many as possible. “A thousand falls make a dancer,” my teachers would say as I lay prostrate on the floor.

  One day I asked one of my ballet teachers if I could get her signature to sign up for more Pilates classes provided by the school. We already took one Pilates class a week, but I wanted more. “Nope. You’re strong enough, Amanda. You don’t need to work harder,” she told me, shaking her head. “You need less stress. No extra Pilates for you. Try meditation.”

  Sadly for me, and for anyone I dated at the time, I did not yet try meditation as she suggested. How could focusing on my breath make any difference at all? What I needed was more muscle, more core power. In our civilization, it’s drilled into our skulls that if you don’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t put enough muscle into it. But of course, that ignores all the people who attain their trophies not through hard work but through privilege. Not to mention those who do nothing but work and can barely keep their heads above water because our economic and political system is structured to keep them down.

  I had many jobs. I worked waiting tables in Piccadilly Circus, I worked at a bar in Soho and at a tourist’s restaurant on the South Bank. For a time, I worked at a House of Magic as a stage magician’s assistant, making martinis disappear and pulling an endless stream of scarves from a shadow dog’s mouth, strapping yowling women to a chair while the magician lobbed off their heads to roll on the floor like melons. But London is expensive. I couldn’t support myself that way forever. I always owed my school money for tuition. I often couldn’t afford to eat. I didn’t want to see one more potato. I’d walk up the Thames, along the cobbled streets of Bermondsey and London Bridge, and pass an iron cage hanging over the door of some tiny prison museum. In medieval times, debtors and criminals would be locked inside, unfurling their spectral hands, begging for scraps or sips of water from the child laborers scampering below, their faces black with soot.

  I toiled as an escort, briefly, showing up at wealthy men’s houses in the middle of the night when their wives were away. I’d leave the house of my Christian landlady, taxiing out in the middle of the night to go to the house of whatever hedonist the agency put me in contact with on my pager. A former Monty Python producer who favored Russian girls because they “really knew how to work.” A Swedish oil millionaire who had a medieval bed with a compartment beneath it where they’d keep the hounds to warm the bed. I worried, “Will he shove me in there?” A disfigured man, a pilot, who was scarred all over his body from the time he ran into a burning building to save a child and as reward for his heroism had to pay women for sex ever after. Even then, I have not told you all. I have not told you everything.

  I always felt in danger. The body I worked so hard to train was constantly under threat. As far as I could see, my body was the only thing I had that the world wanted, but often what it wanted was to misuse and then destroy it. But I was willing to do whatever was necessary to stay in dance school. I told myself I would become a dancer, or I would die trying.

  Now that I am a witch, I understand the power of words, and the spells we cast in our minds, with our intentions. I recommend no one ever say, “I will do X, or die trying.” The Universe will take your maxim as a challenge. It will delight in testing to see just how serious you really are. And if you keep telling yourself, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” your trials will never end.

  I spent years of my youth in various sorts of underworlds. Sometimes literally. The Astral, one of the strip clubs I worked at in London’s Soho district, while named after a transcendent plane of existence, was actually a bougie bar in a basement filled with gilt mirrors and leather chairs and a central stage with a brass pole.

  In the Greek myth, Tantalus was a king who was sent to hell for stealing the fruits of the gods and delivering them as a feast to his people. For this transgression he was punished, ma
de to stand starving beneath a tree heavy with fruit, just beyond his reach; surrounded by a pool of fresh water that would recede every time he bent to drink. In the Astral, the women I worked with experienced a similar kind of torture. Above all, they, we, wanted to be seen and valued. And what we experienced came so close to that, but ultimately it was always a trick. Sex workers are witches, powerful, yet frequently traumatized. Wild and unhinged, ankles circled with parole devices, they wake up in the beds of strangers, still wearing their stick-on rhinestone jewelry. The magic of the wounded is chaotic and thirsty, flung out in every direction. Magic like that often turns on the sender.

  The Astral was an arty club. No fake tits. All the girls with differing daring forms of beauty, all of them hungry to be adored. The club attracted celebrities: restauranteurs, YBA art stars, famous actors, musicians ranging from Eminem and Snoop Dogg to Britpop stars from Blur and Pulp, and old-school punk impresarios like Malcolm McLaren. A bunch of actors from Band of Brothers, the HBO miniseries about young men finding opportunities for heroism and valor during the nightmare of war, were regulars while they were shooting at Pinewood Studios. Even famous women would come in: Kate Moss wanted the dancers to teach her how to “work the pole,” until my friend Cassandra, a feisty Scot, threw a drink in her face in the women’s bathroom.

  The wealthy and famous would compete for us, throw money at us, beg us to go home with them. But at the end of the night, they’d hustle us out the back door of their heiress girlfriend’s apartment and we’d go home to our shitty flats in Elephant and Castle. Every girl there dreamed of becoming famous: an actress, a pop star, a writer. Not because we all had a passion for our craft necessarily, or that we even had a craft, though many of us did, but because we saw that there were people who counted and people who didn’t, and we knew which shitty side of the window we were currently on. We had our noses pressed up against the glass.

  The class divide is made especially clear in London. Just around the corner from the Astral were the Groucho Club and Soho House, “Members Only” clubs my friends and I could get into if we were with the right people. The illusion was that behind those discreet unmarked doors was the land of milk and honey, where everyone took you seriously, life was easy, and every creative ambition you had could be fulfilled. But I was young and naïve; now I know that isn’t true. The underworld is everywhere. Even in the Groucho Club.

  I remember meeting an older man at Soho House, some peripheral film figure, who bought me and my friends drinks. He wanted us to go home with him but we refused. “Get us into Soho House some other time, and who knows,” we told him. A week or two later he came into the Astral and bought a dance from me, glowering the whole time.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked him.

  “I came here to get a dance from you, to humiliate you,” he told me. “To see you naked whether you wanted me to or not.”

  I laughed. I didn’t give a shit who saw me naked. “Why did you want to do that?” I asked him.

  “Because you were using me. You just wanted me to buy you drinks and get you into Soho House.”

  “Pshhhh,” I scoffed. “Did you buy me drinks because you wanted to get to know me as a person? Because you cared about me and just really wanted to make sure I wasn’t thirsty?”

  A smile broke across his face; I could see his heart bursting rainbows of joy. “That’s right,” he exclaimed. “I was using you! I don’t care about you. I just wanted to have sex with you. I was using you, and you were using me!” He squirmed, elated; he wasn’t just being duped by some strip club slut; he was actually using her as well. He was so thrilled, he didn’t even finish our dance; he leapt up to hurry back to Soho House while I finished out my night hustling for the limey dollar. It always amazes me how people don’t see the power they have and in fact feel that they are victims of the world. Truly, that amazement extends to myself as well. I didn’t see the power I had at that age; I thought I was at the mercy of silly men like him, and so I should scramble for whatever scraps I could get. But a witch needs to recognize her own power. If she doesn’t, she can never escape the underworld.

  For years I was surrounded by sex workers who wanted to be celebrities and marry film directors. Sex workers raising their children alone. I danced next to a woman who had a pointy face and slanty eyes like a friendly fox. The men were crazy for her, even though most dancers couldn’t figure out why. We’d ask the clients what they saw in her, and they’d say, “She’s just so kind.” What they didn’t know about her was that she’d seen her entire family shot to death in Kosovo.

  All around me, girls dropped like flies. The beautiful Russian twins, nineteen years old and identical, willowy with high full tits, blue eyes, and manes of tawny hair. They only spoke Russian and never left each other’s side. They finished each other’s sentences, sharing their lingerie and the cherries in their cocktails. They smiled at how easy it was to make money while the other girls watched them jealously from the DJ booth, worrying that we wouldn’t make enough that night to cover our house fee. But within months they’d started to look harder. Their eyes darting and nervous. The slob of a middle-aged man who had married one of them to bring them to England was a porn producer. He got the twins to have sex with each other in videos. To get them to do it, he got them strung out on amphetamines. Their once lithe bodies became gaunt, their eyes hollow. Soon they stopped working altogether. I don’t know what happened to them.

  Many people who enter the underworld never make it out alive.

  Once you’re abducted into the underworld, you’re constantly reminded you have no right to complain. There’s always someone who has it worse than you. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, Persephone. At least you’re not having sex with your sister, married to a porn producer and strung out on crack.

  By the time I stripped for the first time in that dingy Motel 6 in Southern California, I’d already been force-fed the fruits of the underworld. Thus, I was bound to it, and eventually succumbed to its temptations. My Scorpio nature lured me into the cracks and crevices. Eventually, I came to believe that if I traveled in deep enough, I might be able to conquer the final monster. Maybe I could rescue my own princess. Maybe I could beat the game. The underworld is supposed to yield men defining moments, moments of courage. I thought the underworld would teach me strategies for overcoming despair, that I would be confronted with the most profound realities of existence and grow larger because of it. What I hoped to find in the underworld was a bigger, more badass version of myself. In its depths, I wanted what the young male hero hopes to find in war.

  But the deeper I went in to the underworld, the harder it became to find my way out again. The more I participated in it, the more it took from me, and the more fragmented I became. In fact, my fragmentation was the entire point. People who perpetrate sexual abuse might believe that they’re doing it to scratch a personal itch, but the consequences of that abuse sprawl out across our entire civilization; abuse has far-reaching political consequences. Abuse makes it so that the very people who might grow up to be powerful resisters to the status quo instead expend their energy searching the underworld for their lost fragments, trying to sew the pieces back together with disintegrating thread. When the Medusa’s head was severed from her body, she no longer posed a threat. Not only that, but her power was co-opted by the “hero.” Whoever held the head of the Medusa held her power. The real power the patriarchy wielded over me was the way it made me see myself.

  The deeper I tunneled into the underworld, the more I realized that there was nothing there, just a vast, dark wasteland, filled with ghosts, abused children, torments: proximity to wealth and value but no ability to attain it. The walls of my underworld nightmare would only come crashing down when someday, some prince would come and kiss me awake. When someone recognized the value in me, saw beyond the costumes of the underworld that I wore and recognized that I was worthy of protection and love. I didn’t know that in order to break the spell, that someone needed to be
me.

  One of the best things about England is that the museums are free. On my worst days, I’d wander the streets. It would be raining, it always was, and I’d end up in the Hayward Gallery, a brutalist goblin castle squatting along the river. London is crowded and urgent, but inside the Hayward was silent as the grave. I’d press my palms and my forehead against the cold stone walls in the stairwell, drawing in their power. Inside the walls of this fortress, weirdness reigned.

  Wandering the galleries, I’d walk through rooms stained pink with neon, voices chanting from the walls, spectral figures looming in the corners with horned crowns, holding fur teacups. Western civilization had worked hard to disenchant the world. But the realms of enchantment still persisted in art. The art objects flew against the dim window of ordinary reality and cracked it. Art is magic because it makes the things we imagine visible to us; it pulls them into material reality and changes the way we experience the world.

  But the difficulty with all this was that I was straddling the worlds, the art world, the dance world, the world of relationships, the world of women and sex workers, the safe houses of ordinary reality and the hinterlands of the exiled witch. Though I loved to dance, the dance world didn’t feel like home to me. I didn’t fit in with the other students, so many of whom had come from sheltered backgrounds. The art world was beautiful in theory, but in practice, both from the YBA artists I’d encountered at the Astral and in the stories that I’d heard, the art world was just as misogynistic as anywhere else. I didn’t know where I belonged.