Initiated Read online

  On the night he asked me to be his girlfriend, we had this conversation at Little Joy, a dive bar in Echo Park with wood-paneled walls, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a scratched-up pool table, and a perfect date jukebox. I wasn’t ready to be his girlfriend. He and I had just started dating, and I’d just broken up with my husband about a month before. Husband is too strong a word for what my ex and I were, though the term is technically accurate. Basically we’d been boyfriend and girlfriend in London with little in common but that we were young when we met and both liked Nick Cave. I wanted to be able to work in London, and he’d always wanted a green card for the U.S., so…we got married one afternoon at the Home Office and didn’t tell anyone we’d done it for six months. But even though we weren’t husband and wife in the “I swear in front of everyone I know to honor and love you until death” kind of way, we’d still been serious about each other, and we still had a painful breakup.

  The night my demon lover took me to Little Joy, it was about two months into us dating each other. Give or take a bit. He’d accidentally “lost my number at a carwash” after the first time we made out, so I was naturally skeptical. But at some point he’d had a change of heart. He wanted me to be his girlfriend. I was trying to explain why I didn’t feel ready to commit yet when this drunk couple came and sat next to us. “She’s too hot for you,” the woman blurted as soon as she sat down. I was embarrassed. It was exactly the wrong thing to say at that moment; he was already feeling vulnerable. He threw up his hands like, “I give up.” I went outside for a cigarette and saw a pedestrian killed by a drunk driver.

  I was in my second year of grad school, tackling two MFAs simultaneously. One in Writing/Critical Theory and the other in Film and Video. Scrambling to complete all my coursework, I also had thesis projects and teaching assistantships for both departments. In grad school I made angry work. Work about women in peril. Women’s images plastered to the sides of telephone booths, legs spread like an advertisement for a hooker, only with the words I want your commitment. Or, You make me want to have children. Let’s get started. Women drowning in a bathtub. Women trapped inside peep show booths inflicting self-harm to shame the male gaze. I looked out at the world and saw all the wrong. I wanted to point all the wrongness out to everyone. I wanted someone to do something about it.

  Despite the fact that I was angry, this period was the first time in my life when I could just concentrate on being an artist. On “living my purpose,” as I saw it. I was not on medication or in need of a psychiatrist, not dating a drug dealer, taking drugs, or risking my life as a sex worker. I had enough money (with student loans, two TA-ships, and a side job at a boutique in Larchmont) to support myself.

  I was free. My teachers expected big things from me; my dance film, letters of recommendation, and my writing samples had all been strong. I was the first student in the history of the school to be accepted into both the writing and the film and video program simultaneously. I meant to make good on my artistic promise.

  So, of course, according to the structure of any good myth, it is at exactly this time, when things were going so well, that I would meet my adversary.

  My therapist at the time, a Zen Buddhist, and one of the best therapists I’ve ever had, told me that Nosferatu was my nemesis because, even though I had everything I needed to create the life I wanted for myself, for some reason I thought that he was the guardian at the gates of my happiness. In other words, I thought I needed him in order to get the life that I wanted. I took all my talents and skills and life force and laid them before him, prostrating myself at his feet, pleading for his mercy. I knew my therapist was a good one when, during our first session together, I lamented a separate situation where a male teacher I knew was behaving badly, having affairs with students and then punishing them for it if it didn’t go his way. The students suffered, while the teacher paid no consequences. “You’re talking about the problem of evil,” my therapist said, reframing my frustration to see the larger picture. “Why do good people often suffer, while those who do bad get rewarded? It’s a problem humanity has been wrestling with for thousands of years.” Because, who are “good people” really, and what or whom is the root cause of our suffering?

  Nosferatu is an obvious title for a demon lover, but that is not the only nickname I had for him. His second name was Buckets. It sounds like a friendly donkey in a Wild West cartoon, but Buckets was an abbreviation for “Buckets of Tears.” Somehow, I was always making my demon lover cry. He cried when, after an argument about what, I can’t remember, I ran off in the rain and he tried to get me to get back in the car but I went to my friend’s house and stood throwing rocks outside her window instead.

  He cried for good reasons sometimes. He cried because I wasn’t ready to commit. I’ve cried for similar reasons myself. He cried because I said in front of his friends that I thought it was okay to cheat if your partner doesn’t find out, which embarrassed him because he said it made him look bad. Later I retracted the comment and apologized. It’s actually a ridiculous thing to say. In my defense, post-marriage-breakup, I had come to the conclusion that I was faithful to a fault, giving my loyalty to people who didn’t deserve it. I don’t blame my demon lover for being upset, but later, his upsetness and indignation would prove to be a real mind-fuck.

  One day, cuddling with him in his bed, I told Nosferatu about an experience I’d had at Unitarian summer camp when I was about fifteen. I had a twenty-one-year-old boyfriend at the time, who did not attend the camp with me. I’d gone to the camp with my family right before the crisis hit, before my parents’ divorce and my moving out, my stepfather’s fury, my mother’s depression, my call to the underworld. Though my boyfriend at the time was cool, an Italian-American artist who liked to draw cigarette-smoking comic book heroes, play pool, and quote Scarface, I’d pretty much outgrown him. But we were still together while I was at the camp where I met this beautiful boy who worked on staff. The staff kids were in their late teens and held a special romantic allure of freedom and non-family fun. They were known to do acid and skinny-dip in the hot tub. This late-teen staffer had soulful blue eyes and black hair, and like every good Anne Rice–loving teenager, I was into his vampire good looks and shy mystery. We spent the night talking in the main hall, drinking Good Earth tea out of hippie mugs and listening to Dark Side of the Moon. He tried to kiss me, but I said no, because I had a boyfriend. Since my boyfriend and I broke up a few months later, I always regretted not saying yes to that kiss.

  As I told my demon lover this story, he sat up in bed, righteous as the Grand Inquisitioner, preaching, “You shouldn’t regret that! You should be proud of that. Proud that you chose to act with integrity instead of on base impulse.” Civilization, he informed me, was based on people controlling their lower impulses and choosing to act on their ideals instead. Nosferatu had been brought up in a born-again Christian household, and though he wasn’t a believer, he still made claims to piety.

  I must confess it had never occurred to me not to regret my abstinence with that gorgeous camp staffer, who is now probably a vampire living in a decaying mansion in New Orleans. To be proud of passing up the chance of kissing those naturally blood-flushed lips was completely outside the realm of my imagination. But now, the conversation with Nosferatu had made me question my integrity, and in so doing, to unravel the code by which, up to that point, I’d lived: one should live to the fullest, should seize every opportunity, should carpe diem, should be an actor despite parental disapproval, should dance like no one was watching…even at a strip club. Up until this point in my life, I believed that one should live by one’s own rules. And my main rule was that I should always follow my passions regardless of the consequences.

  But if that weren’t true, then not only did I not really know how to live anymore, but also, my entire life had just been one horrendous, horrifying mistake after another.

  Nosferatu’s impassioned speech about the civilizing force of integrity was like a little, strategically la
id explosive that, when the main building of our relationship began to crumble, demolished every last structure of myself that remained standing.

  Nosferatu and I only dated for four months. During that time, he told me that he loved me; that the moment he saw me at the orientation event at our grad school he knew I was “the one”; that he believed in love and marriage and wanted to have children and live an intellectual, creative, morally rigorous life.

  But I was still getting drunk with my grad school friends on Thursday nights when the art students would have open studios. He was twelve years older than I and wanted more than I was capable of giving him. He seemed unhappy with our relationship, too, constantly upset and emotional over it. So one night, in an Irish pub just off campus, we amicably broke up.

  But then, when he was driving me back to my car, I suggested that we have one last night together, and then we’d go our separate ways. Suddenly, he changed, whip panning from Buckets of Tears to vengeful Nosferatu. His teeth grew long and foul. “No fucking way,” he spat as if the words were poison he was spitting on a whore. In the dappled half-light of the car, he looked at me as if I were a seething pile of maggots. Totally disgusted, he waved his hand and said, “Get out of the car.”

  I don’t know exactly how it happened, but in that moment his spirit possessed me. I became his minion, like one of the gaping, wide-eyed slave automatons of his namesake. My eyes grew wide, my voice high and shrill; every fiber in my body, every single cell, was possessed by a need to be his partner that went beyond human desire. I had never felt anything like that before, and I’ve never felt anything like it since. It was supernatural. My need gripped me by the throat so that I could barely speak. If he would have commanded me in that moment to get back into the car and drive with him to Vegas and pledge my soul to him until death, to infinity and beyond, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat. But he didn’t. He drove away and he didn’t look back.

  Never underestimate how much a Pisces can fuck you up.

  In the months that followed, I did everything I could think of to get him back. I wrote elaborate letters of apology, I tried to explain, I started going to therapy. For the most part, he remained unmoved. Except for one night when he came over drunk after a night out with some mutual friends. We had sex and he kept saying, “I loved you so much. Why didn’t you just let me love you?” He kissed me all over and begged me, “Just let me, let me love you, please, let me. Let me love you.” I was thrilled. I wanted to let him love me. I couldn’t wait! I’d seen the error of my wanton ways and I was ready to change.

  But then, the next morning, he got up and left without even saying goodbye, and when I cornered him for an explanation a few weeks later, he told me that it would never work between us because I didn’t believe in love.

  Something about that idea, that I didn’t believe in love, cut into the center of my being. The bombs exploded. My building fell. Whoever Amanda had been crashed to the earth in a chalky gray cloud. Amanda was no more.

  I spent my final year of grad school trying to pick up the pieces. Demon lovers are known to cause their victims to deteriorate. I broke out in hives and started losing my hair. I cried every day. People would tell me that when I was around him I totally changed, like I was hypnotized. It seemed like I was “dangling on a precipice” one friend said. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. My mind circled on him like a black hole with a gravitational pull from which I could never escape. I tried taking medication after my friends begged me to do something. They were worried I’d harm myself. But the medication only made me tired. I couldn’t cure my obsession and I didn’t know what to do.

  Growing up in the ’90s, obsession seemed like a romantic idea. Kate Moss and anonymous boy model careening through a white corridor, in a hungry pursuit only a malnourished waif could understand. But I hated being obsessed. Hated feeling like my mind was not my own, and that essentially I was his unwilling slave.

  To the degree that I was diminished, his power seemed to increase, not just to me, but to everyone around us. Other women wondered what all the fuss was about him and became curious; he started taking on young men as protégés. My obsession only advanced his reputation.

  And reputation he had. In the year and a half of suffering that followed our breakup, I learned quite a bit about his reputation. There were countless girls obsessed with him. One who told me they’d dated when she was young. He took her virginity and then lost interest. He ghosted. His pattern was to find women at vulnerable points in their lives, young, or just post-breakup, or grieving, and immediately try to make them his girlfriend. When the girl balked and said it was too soon or seemed confused, he’d drop her and then act like she’d broken his heart. The girl would start doubting herself and her integrity. She’d keep going back to him like a rat to a cocaine bottle, trying to get herself fixed.

  “It’s called intermittent reinforcement,” my Zen therapist told me. “CIA agents use it during interrogations because it’s so effective.”

  He knew what he was doing. I know because he counseled other young men at the school to come on strong, then turn away, because it “gets them every time.” A young male spy of mine told me that my demon lover had instructed him quite explicitly: If you make a woman think there’s something wrong with her, she’ll always come running back for more. She’ll want you to take her pain away and then you can do what you like with her.

  To discover that he had a technique, and that I had fallen for it, was totally humiliating.

  To make matters worse, a few months after we broke up, he started dating an eighteen-year-old undergrad from some double-digit population town in the Midwest who dressed like her mother sewed her clothes based on fashion advice from Laura Ingalls Wilder. I liked this girl; she seemed innocent and earnest and kind. She came from a conservative Christian family, and seemed a bit overwhelmed by the debaucherous atmosphere of CalArts. Everyone knew he cheated on her constantly. One of his many scorned lovers had graffitied his name on the stall of a girls’ bathroom in the basement: he’s an asshole who will fuck you over if he gets the chance. I didn’t write it, but I may as well have. I lived it. But still, I couldn’t shake it.

  There was some kind of strange relief in Nosferatu’s accusation that I didn’t believe in love, that somehow my love light had grown dim, or even blown out. It was a relief like getting a medical diagnosis that, though perhaps unwelcome, at least explains why you’ve been feeling so sick. Before he and I met, I hadn’t recognized how cynical and angry I’d become. My adventures in the underworld and beyond were empty if there was no North Star of Love to guide me, no ultimate goal but simply “more experience.” More experience to what purpose? Adventure, to what purpose? Even art to what purpose? Without love, what was the point of doing any of it? But then, what did Love even mean?

  Searching within myself, I seized on Love as if it were a rope, the only thing I had to hold on to if I were to navigate myself out of my deep dark lostness. Above my bed in pink Sharpie I scrawled a text culled from Trinie Dalton’s compendium on werewolves, a testimony by the poet Amy Gerstler:thius

  I believe in the glory and despair of requited and unrequited love, fucked up love, hopeless love, love that goes for the throat, waning and waxing love, love that prowls at night, untouchable loves, earthly loves, groveling love, snarling jealous love, never revealed love ripening like aging wine in oak casks in a chilly, dripping cave near the top of an almost inaccessible mountain. I believe in love as holy stubbornness, as duty and surprise and privilege and miracle and ethical stance and whetstone and elating shame and goad and secret power source. As scourge and blessing. As the steel wool of emotions—a real soul scourer—remover of some of the rust from our patina-ed psyches. And I believe that love or trust or deep emotional connectedness does occur between willing humans and other animals—animals we once were, still are, and have ambitions to re-inhabit and know ferociously—to read from the outside in and the inside out.

  I was going to prove
my demon lover wrong about me. I did believe in love. My experiences in the underworld had not taken that from me. I wasn’t permanently corrupted by them. Love gave me something to believe in when I didn’t know I needed anything to believe in.

  Trouble was, the more I found out about my demon lover, the more difficult it became to believe that love meant anything to him. He left a trail of devastation wherever he went. Grieving, hallow, haunted women, pining like wraiths in a cave, followed him everywhere. He’d lied about everything: where his money came from, his previous career. He’d convinced most of the faculty that he was a genius of the first order, mainly by critiquing the work of other students, until they realized…he never made any work himself. He was faithless. He cheated. He aimed to destroy. But his convictions about love had caused me to change my entire system of belief.

  One time he and I were looking at a photograph of some Jonestown-esque massacre, with everyone lying there dead. Women, children. Strewn about their jungle compound. And he said, “It’s just so beautiful.” And I was like, “What do you mean? They’re dead. It’s horrible.” And he said, “Yeah, but aesthetically it’s powerful. Look. They’re all wearing the same Nikes.” He was like a cult leader, convincing people salvation was at hand, if only they would commit mass suicide.

  At the time, there was some documentary out on the girls of the Manson Family, and I remember realizing with horror that I understood now how they had been seduced. Before my experience with my demon lover, it would’ve been impossible for me to understand someone allowing their mind to be controlled by some bushy weirdo creeping around on Venice Beach. But after Nosferatu, I had more compassion. I saw how easy it is. All your demon lover has to do to possess you is find your deepest wound, the one you don’t even know you have, and squeeze.