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  Soon after the goddess appeared, I went to visit my friend Milly in Georgia. Milly and I were collaborating on the screenplay about the haunted plantation, and I wanted to do a little reconnaissance. Writing the script, I surrounded myself with the muses of the South, field recordings by Alan Lomax, Atlanta crunk, Will Oldham’s Palace Brothers, Cat Power, and the songs of a rising star of New Weird American folk, who lived in Athens, Georgia, and wrote hymns of such simplicity, humility, and beauty that I immediately fell in love. I’d listened to this musician over and over again while I was in grad school, trying to break the curse of Nosferatu. His music kept me company while I was crying in my bed, or marveling at the stars from the desert hilltops, willing myself forever up and out into the starlight. I’d look at pictures of him on Myspace, sitting on his front porch in the Southern twilight: a blond-bearded frontman with a Southern drawl, a swashbuckling swagger, and a way about him that said he loved the world so much he could eat it, if it didn’t kill him with heartbreak first. I messaged him to see if he would be playing a show during my visit to Georgia. His response was swift. No shows, but if I was in town we should get a drink anyway.

  We rendezvoused at a bar. He kept his pink baseball cap pulled low over his blond curls. Worried who would see him, he wanted to sit in the back. His ex-girlfriend was on a heartbreak rampage. Soon we were at his house. A little farmhouse out on Nowhere Road nearly devoured by kudzu and pine, golden cows lowing in the fields nearby. On the ride over, the musician worried that he couldn’t be consistent emotionally. He’d left his ex-girlfriend in the underworld. He loved her but it was this whole big wild world up in the sunshine he needed to explore. “I’m a dick sometimes,” he told me alluringly.

  In his living room, he turned on the fairy lights swaddling a naked doll with blue blinking mechanical eyes. A phone number was inscribed in black Sharpie across the belly. I suspected that if I inspected the house closely, I’d find many phone numbers. A drum set, an old couch, a drawing of the winged lion Abrasax (the god who blesses the couple in tarot’s Lovers card) taped to the wall over one of two upright pianos. In the kitchen, a handwritten note was pinned beneath a magnet: “Fridge is off. Turn her on.”

  We sat shoulder to shoulder on a piano bench, my head tilted onto his shoulder, his fingers slowly, sadly peddling the ivory keys. “Play me one of your songs,” I asked him, and named my favorite one.

  “You like that one, huh?” He smiled. He loved applause; he was a Leo with a Leo rising.

  I nodded. The song was a dirge, emerging from the pond of memory, dripping plaintive wet, surrounded by fireflies and smelling of a lost childhood.

  “The chorus especially, where you say, Please, I’ve waited, again and again,” I told him.

  “Okay, then,” he said.

  His voice trembled and broke as he sang. I could smell him all salt and beer and sadness and poetry, and I placed my fingers on his beer-colored wrist. And he finished the song and turned to me and curled his fingers in my hair and the breath was sucked out of me and he said, right before he kissed me, “Just for tonight, can we be madly in love?” And I said yes with everything I had. Yes, a thousand times yes. Even though I knew that one night wouldn’t be nearly enough for me.

  Totally a creature of his environment, he emerged from the mean farms of Alabama, where people will take a shotgun to you for standing on their driveway. He was country gospel sung in a field by starlight; he was owls, majestic and fierce, trapped in a cage at a country zoo; he was a teenager practicing on his acoustic guitar to drown his father’s rage as he yelled at his mother in the living room for not stirring the coffee right; he was days spent shirtless shunting tourists in inner tubes down a lazy river; and cocaine-fueled all-nighters recording with a ten-piece band of unshaved womanizers. When he was a child, he had a book about lambs that he loved; he’d read it over and over. One day his parents came in to find him reading the book and crying. When they asked him why, he said, “Because the lambs are so beautiful.” They took the book away from him, saying no boy should be crying like that. He told me his seventh-grade English teacher fell in love with him because he had a poet’s eyes. She was right. He had a poet’s everything. A poet’s voice, a poet’s woundedness, a poet’s ability to recognize beauty, and a poet’s love of wine, women, and song. If wine were beer and Adderall. I returned to California addicted. But the planet Saturn favors sobriety. Saturn’s energy is slow and methodical. True Saturnine work is often plodding and unglamorous. Intoxicants are just a distraction.

  My mother, too, was in love when I returned home. Will, a family friend who would often visit our house with his wife when I was a kid, was getting a divorce. As a child, I remember my mother saying that Will was the only man she ever met whom she could trust. I always knew they had a great fondness for one another, but their relationship had never seemed inappropriate, their interactions never veering beyond anything but friendly. Then his wife had an affair. As a little girl, I had always loved his wife. She’d worked with my mother at Hearst Castle as a tour guide and had long hair down to her waist and sang opera and seemed in fact to be a creature from an opera, petite and fairylike, cooking elaborate French meals and letting me play dress-up in her silk slips and lace dressing gowns. Eventually she grew to feel that Will, my mother’s new suitor, was not glamorous enough for her. He loved model trains and WWII books and B movies from the ’50s with bad special effects. Will’s ex fell in love with a curator from the Smithsonian. But then, after she filed for divorce, after a heartbroken Will contacted my mother and asked her if she might be willing to go with him to the county fair, his ex got cancer. Will rushed in to take care of her. My mother and I worried that all his ex would have to do is crook her finger and he’d go running back to her. But in the meantime, my mother was so happy. She’d talk with him about his love of model trains for days if he wanted. She took down her bun and started wearing her jewelry again. In the morning she’d get up, and instead of shooting up an adrenaline shot of DU, she’d play her “Goddess Workout” tape on the VCR and belly dance. Hips swinging, coined scarves jingling around her waist.

  One day, when they returned from an outing to the model train show, I asked her how it was, and she said, “Wonderful. Just perfect,” all aglow and happy, cheeks pink as cotton candy.

  “Maybe you’ll fall in love and live happily ever after,” I said, but the way I said it made it sound like I didn’t want it to happen. I was shuffling boxes around in the cupboards, slamming food onto the table. My mother came up and touched my arm. Will stood at the edge of the kitchen, silent and still, as if watching a wounded animal that at any moment could leap out and bite. “Leave me alone and stop patronizing me!” I shouted, instantly transformed into a sullen teenager by the magic wand of my mother’s happiness. I ran into my room and grabbed my paper and pen, scuttling out to the front porch, letting the screen door slam shut behind me.

  My mother was falling in love and it felt like the apocalypse. She wanted love, she’d always wanted love, and she’d believed she could never have it, and now it was upon her and whenever I saw them together I had to fight the urge to draw my sword and heave a battle cry. I was terrified that we would be betrayed. Some crisis would come and drop my mother back into her underworld, a dry well she’d claw at until her fingers were raw and bloody and she didn’t have the strength to pull herself out again. If this love failed, I was afraid it would kill her.

  It was late summer, the hottest time of the year, but it smelled like Yule, the pagan holiday where the Holly King slays the Oak King and winter stills the land. It smelled like roasting chestnuts and bonfires; the trailer park was covered in what looked like snow. Except the air was hot as Hades, and the flakes hushing in the leaves were ashes from fires surrounding us on all sides. In the heaving red sky, you could look straight at the sun for as long as you liked, the Sun of Night. You could see the precise disk of it, hovering and smoldering, over a darkened alien world hurtling toward its end. Who knew the end
of the world would be so beautiful? I sat on the front porch and allowed myself to turn to stone, covered in ashes. A grasshopper I’d spent weeks watching as it molted from small electric green nymph to a meaty camouflage locust was slowly, loudly chomping a delicate flower down to the nub. I sat on the porch and cried and felt like a brat, out of control and caught up in a river of dread and anxiety that seeped up from some hole deep inside me where I couldn’t see the opening.

  From the mountains came a black road, unfurling across the sky. Thousands and thousands of vultures flying in an endless ribbon. It seemed impossible. Black winged, red gelatinous heads jangling, hissing and grunting, coasting on wings a full man across. I’d never seen anything like it before. I’d never even seen a vulture in Ojai before, and now here they were by the thousands, flying toward the fire rim, toward what I imagined was a battlefield of burnt carcasses.

  In Vedic astrology, Saturn corresponds to the god Shani, Lord of Karma and Justice. According to Hindu scholar Subhamoy Das, Shani “governs the dungeons of the human heart and the dangers that lurk there.” Astride a vulture, Shani rides his way through our astrological houses, herding us like a sheepdog. Our work is to ride that vulture with him, into whichever house Saturn appears in our birth chart and do our work there. Our work is liberation. Our work is always liberation. Saturn commands us to storm the Bastille in the house where he dwells and free the karmic prisoners languishing inside. But unlike Mars, the planet of aggression, Saturn’s battles for liberation are not all fireworks and glory. Saturn’s fight is a war of attrition. To achieve Saturn’s agenda—ultimate liberation in the spirit of Love—we must demonstrate endurance, patience, diligence, and discipline. We must be willing to delay our immediate gratification for future rewards. But those rewards are far reaching; they extend deep into future generations.

  In the tarot, Saturn corresponds to Major Arcana XXI, the World card, the last of the archetypal cards of the major arcana. The World card signifies the completion of a long journey. But that completion is actually a new beginning. As you begin again, you show up not inexperienced and naïve like a newborn, like the Fool, but wise and engaged, like the Anima Mundi, the dancing angel in the World card. When the World card shows up in a reading, you know you are on the right path, the path toward wholeness, the path toward self-realization.

  To know where in our lives our Saturnine battle of liberation must be waged, we look to our natal charts, the circular drawing that describes where the planets were at the moment of your birth. Wherever we find Saturn, there we will find our Bastille. The Bastille is the eighteenth-century French prison that held the beggars and debtors; when the paupers of France broke in and liberated it, they launched the French Revolution. My Bastille is in my fourth house: the house of the ancestors, the land, the chthonic, of things buried, of gems and caves and lava and the shades of the underworld. The fourth house is our umbilical cord, spiraling into history, into our DNA. When Saturn dwells in your fourth house, your task is to excavate the stories of your family lineage and heal them. In medieval astrology, the fourth is the house where you’d seek buried treasure. Famed astrologer Liz Greene calls the fourth house a great subterranean river moving beneath the surface of the personality. She says, “Any planet placed in the 4th points to something hidden in the psyche that must be discovered and brought to the surface before it can be dealt with constructively.” Not surprisingly, Saturn shares my fourth house with my moon. In astrology, the moon not only represents your moods and patterns in this lifetime, but also your mother and her family line. Each of us are like characters in an epic novel, spanning generations. If we do nothing to change the stories of our ancestors, they play out again and again. My task was to resolve the narrative of my family lineage. I may not like this task, but nevertheless, it was the task that had been given me. In resolving my family’s stories, I would generate new ones.

  As I sat in stillness, watching the vultures, I could hear my mother and Will returning from their walk. “It’s not that she doesn’t like you,” I heard her whispering to him. “She’s afraid. Every time I’ve ever gotten involved with a man, she ends up getting pushed out of my life. She’s trying to push us out first, so she doesn’t get hurt.”

  “I can understand that. But she doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Will whispered back to her. “I’m here for as long as it takes, for you, for your children. For all of it.”

  A month passed and I found that, rather than working on my screenplay, or finishing my novel about Persephone, I was writing the musician love letters. Rather than calling him by his given name, I addressed the letters to Orpheus, for the women he’d left in the underworld, and for the bacchantes who’d sidle up to him at his shows, wanting a piece of him. I should’ve been more careful in my naming. In the myth, Orpheus leaves his true love stranded in the underworld, and the other women in his life? They become so furious with him they tear him limb from limb, leaving only his head to sing in a cave, bobbing in a cauldron of goat’s milk.

  Anointing myself with oils of rose, dizzy with tinctures of valerian, when my mother was out on date night, I’d whirl myself into trances and call the spirit of Orpheus into my candlelit room, visualizing sigils traced on the floor in blue flame. In these sessions I’d receive visions from Aphrodite and inscribe them into letters I’d send him swollen with flower petals and sealed in the pheromone juices of sex magic. Soon his responses went from being casual and slightly aloof to fevered and poetic, comparing me to a long-limbed, big-eyed doe. After another month or two of love spells, letters, and phone calls, he called for me to join him on his upcoming tour. Mission accomplished. Goodbye, screenplay. Goodbye, novel. I promised I’d write them from the road.

  On the tour, Orpheus and I were so in love. By night he played Baltimore, Boston, DC. In the day we went to the museum, saw dire wolves and mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and other beasts long since extinct. I smiled at the man next to us, holding his daughter up to see the animals frozen in their amber tableaux. Suddenly Orpheus was upset, walking into the sculpture garden. I couldn’t get him to talk. “What is it? What is it?” I asked him, but he just shook his head. Eventually he said, almost with dismay, “I’m so in love, I don’t know what’s happening to me.” He looked up at me. “I don’t know if I’m cut out to love. Love churns up petty emotions in me. Jealousy. Melancholy.” But his storm soon passed and we were back on the road again, traveling through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, unable to stop touching each other, unable to be out of each other’s sight for even a few minutes, having sex in bathroom stalls and greenrooms and the back seat of the van. And then he’d get onstage and he’d sing, in cavernous crowded clubs or tiny backwater roadhouses, with women swooning in the audience and batting their eyelashes. Every night, it was as if he were singing just to me. If we were across the room or across the universe from each other, our molecules were bound; if he turned, so would I.

  Simultaneously, everything was a miserable disappointment. Orpheus had warned me that touring wasn’t glamorous, and he was right. We rarely slept in hotels. Instead we slept on the cat fur floors of some bouncer’s studio, frequently without blankets or pillows, having to drink ourselves silly so that we could pass out or risk facing a night of snores and hallway drafts and sirens from the street. Every day the van accumulated trash: wrappers, boy sweat, damp jackets and socks, over-brimming with gear. When we got out at a gas station, I’d stand looking in the open door of the van: a whale cut open revealing a ton of plastic in its guts. I couldn’t believe I was going to climb back in that thing. Some of his bandmates resented me and the space I was taking up (even though I tried to do what I could, bought a hotel room sometimes, paid for breakfast, tried to be generally amiable). I was taking up precious space in a van that was constantly breaking down. He didn’t yet have the tour bus he rides in now. And, like his sad little van, Orpheus was just on the verge of breaking down himself.

  While Orpheus focused on receiving his adoration, I spent most
of my time waiting for him to be free to be with me. My intention was to write on tour, but it proved impossible in the cramped vans and cacophonous bars. But the tour was short, and when Orpheus invited me to leave Ojai and move in with him in New York, I expected things to change.

  We moved into a brownstone in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, full of a bunch of other up-and-coming musicians. These musicians were always working. They’d walk in and drop their bags and be playing guitar before their asses hit the sofa. Orpheus would stay in our room, hypnotized by Pro Tools’s sacred geometry. He put his drum set in the center of our room, with tambourines and amps and umbilical cables sucking at the walls. The bed was shoved into a corner at a weird angle. I was desperate to rearrange things. He had invited me there, to that house, but it wasn’t mine. There was no room for a desk. No place to write in the whole house, where I had all the solitude of an indie rock orchestra pit.

  In New York, I worked all the time to make ends meet, first at an art-book publishing company, and then at a restaurant that specialized in fancy margaritas. On a typical day, I’d return home to find the boys from the band crammed into our room, recording equipment strewn around, the boys lazing in their Vans, mustaches, and jeans. They’d be listening to the playback tracks. A brooding piano, a trumpet somewhere, sounding way far off. Orpheus said, “That trumpet sounds pretty wounded back there. I don’t know if we want it.” They didn’t look up when I entered.