Initiated Read online

  Paul widened the door but I stood outside the threshold, looking in. It felt like I’d seen everything in the room before. Every Motel 6 looks the same, a flimsy film set, pretending to be cozy, where any minute the walls could fall back and reveal…what? The void. Nothing. No one. “Come in,” Paul implored. He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me inside, the door shutting behind him with a binding suck.

  Everything in the room was clammy and damp, the air-conditioning vibrating waspish in the corner. I set my boom box down near the television as Paul turned on a lamp, then bustled around moving beer cans and papers from place to place. “I’ve got some speed if you want some.” He flicked his hand toward the bathroom door. “It’s on the toilet.” I craned my head around to look inside. On the back of the toilet was a little bag of sticky yellow powder, a hypodermic needle, and a tourniquet—lurid, thick, and made of a sickly snot green rubber—dangling off the side.

  I was in the motel room of a masturbating stranger. Paul was suggesting that I share needles and shoot up speed with him. Silent, throat dry, I shook my head and focused on my boom box, staying close to it as if it were an anchor or a teleporter, something familiar that was mine. I clicked in my mixtape, expecting it to sound rough. The magnetic tape had grown thin from listening to it so many times: Edie Brickell, the Violent Femmes, Tori Amos, Depeche Mode, The Cure. I wanted to be surrounded by my people. I wanted to hear Tori Amos sing, she’s been everybody else’s girl, maybe one day she’ll be her own, like she was with me and she got it.

  I scanned the room. Boxy television atop cheap veneer dresser. Strappy foldout luggage table holding duffel bag. Beer cans. Big Gulps. Paul had rolled off his underwear so they dangled on his ankle like an animal he’d kicked and killed. In the middle of the bed he sprawled, limp dick in hand, above him a bucolic print of a country lane. Dappled sunlight, a bridge. It reminded me of the most popular book at one of the bookstores where I’d worked: The Bridges of Madison County. One hundred sixty-four weeks on the bestseller list. It got so that when middle-aged women came into the shop, I’d just point to the bestsellers wall in the back and say, “It’s over there.” They always wanted the same thing. To be truly loved. To be truly seen. If they couldn’t have it, they wanted to read about it. Fair enough.

  “Should I just…Do you want me to start?” I asked.

  Teeth grinding, neck straining like a horse, Paul said, “Yeah, yeah, just go ahead whenever. I’m just going to lie here on the bed and jack off; that’s what I usually do. Don’t worry, you’re going to do great.” He lay back and made a swirling motion with his hand for me to do my thing. At first he didn’t look at me. He jackhammered his dick but couldn’t get it up. “It’s the speed,” he told me, apologizing. I bent down to press the button on my boom box. Yeah I like you in that, like I like you to scream…Robert Smith’s plaintive voice warbled and died. My boom box clicked off. I shook it and pulled the tape out, flipped it over, and tried it again. Pressed a few more buttons. “It’s not working,” I told Paul. Maybe that meant I should just leave. I couldn’t dance. I should just go.

  “Don’t worry about it.” He smiled at me. Never ceasing his attempts at masturbation, with his free hand he harassed the remote control until he got MTV. The R & B singer Des’ree appeared in a boxy black suit with military buttons. Marching out onto a plain white cove, she pointed at me as if she were Uncle Sam claiming me for the nation: You’ve gotta be bad, you’ve gotta be bold, you’ve gotta be wiser, you’ve gotta be hard, you’ve gotta be tough, you’ve gotta be stronger. To this day I can’t hear that song without thinking of the first time I stripped in that Motel 6 on Hollister Avenue.

  Over the next few years I grew to feel that this was what the world wanted of me, this was how it saw me and recognized my value. I should capitalize on what sex appeal I had. I should stop crying. I was in hostile territory. I needed to do whatever I could to survive. Called to war, it was my sex against theirs. I knew my side was at a disadvantage, but I would fight with everything I had. I told myself that many people had it worse than I did. I was right. Even in that situation, by comparison to many people in this world, I was lucky.

  Hoping that the dance moves would just come to me somehow, I tried to do a few from my beginning jazz classes at city college, pumping my shoulders up and down. Paul didn’t care what I did. Panting, brow sopping, he made noises like something was scratching him on the inside. I wiggled around and lifted the hem of my dress, spinning in a circle. Untying my shoulder straps, I let the paisley sundress fall to the floor and stood there topless in my white cotton lace-trim underwear from Miller’s Outpost. I glanced up at Paul; he seemed to approve, nodding, grinding his teeth. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, as if trying to convince himself. I dropped my underwear, but they got caught on my shoes. So I squatted and wobbled and took those off too. As the song ended, I stood up naked, bare feet sticking to the mysterious stains on the carpet at the foot of the bed. Not even lasting one full song, my strip tease had taken all of three minutes.

  I still had fifty-six minutes to go.

  The thing about stripping for the first time was that I had expected the world to end. Some part of me had thought I would walk into that room and take off my clothes, and the ground would shake, thunder would blast. I’d be struck by lightning. But there was no cataclysm. My clothes were on and then they were off. “Everything changes you,” my stripper mentor Bethany had told me. We expect change to be instantaneous. “From that moment forward, everything was different…” We have this idea that when the taboos of our culture are broken, we’ll be broken too. But somehow, unbelievably, even when everything feels wrecked and hopeless, life just keeps going.

  What happened next was a blur. “Why don’t you give me a massage,” Paul suggested. “That’s what they usually do. Come here.” I came toward him. He grabbed at my tits, and I said no. “Oh, hmm, usually they let me.” He seized my hand and tried to pull me down on the bed. “Let me fuck you,” he pleaded. I said no. He snapped, “You guys always say that. Next time I won’t ask, I’ll just do it.” I didn’t have time to let his rape threat sink in, or the fact that there might be a “next time,” because he rolled over for his massage, ducking his head with embarrassment, saying, “I’ve got something going on with my…” as he pointed to his shoulders flaming with acne and flaky skin. “It’s from work. Diving. I’m a diver. You know? The wells. The oil rigs, out there.” He gestured his fingers dismissively toward the ocean.

  I preferred it when he was facing down and couldn’t reach me. I massaged his back and he told me I was good at it. That was something I heard often throughout my experience in the sex industry. I was a better healer than sex worker. Probably because I liked healing people, but resented interacting sexually with people I didn’t know or like, who saw me as some kind of faulty yet still magical fetish object they hoped to use to soothe their fears about their masculinity.

  Paul couldn’t lie still for the massage; he rolled this way and that and couldn’t get comfortable. I was trying to move slowly, so that everything I did would take up more time, but Paul was in a sped up world. It seemed like he wanted to enter my world, the slower one, but he couldn’t find a way. He was trapped in his own underworld too.

  “Here.” He scuttled off the bed and pulled out a cold Budweiser can from the mini-fridge. “Stand up.” I got up on the opposite side of the bed. Desperate, he frowned at me from across the room, pleading, “Maybe you could hold this cold can of beer under my balls.”

  I considered his request. If we were standing up and doing something, it might help me avoid being raped on the bed. I walked toward him. His balls were purple and swollen, a lined eggplant accordion. We paced around the room, me holding the beer under his balls, him with his non-masturbating hand thrown over my shoulder as if we were at some sort of perverted prom. We did this for about five minutes. Then he grew agitated. Whatever he was hoping for, this wasn’t delivering.

  “Let me draw you,” he gasped, st
ruck with inspiration. I reclined on the bed like the Degas I’d seen in my art history classes while he squirmed in a swivel chair and drew some sketches with a ballpoint pen on hotel stationery. They were childish and uncertain. He was talking the whole time.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” I responded.

  His shoulders fell. “No. Well, kind of. I’m seeing a girl…Actually, I don’t. You know. I’m away so much because of work.”

  “Is that why you’re sad?” I asked. I didn’t care if or why he was sad. My questions functioned as a shield, deflecting attention away from me. My sadness, my fear, my feelings were irrelevant.

  He shrugged, pulling at the skin on the back of his neck as it reddened. “I had a girlfriend once but we had a difficult relationship. She wanted things from me and I…didn’t know how to give them to her. Nothing I did ever satisfied her. Not like you. I think we have a lot in common.” He smiled at me, vulnerable, with his shoulders hunched. “I feel like you approve of me. Do you?”

  “Yes?”

  Seeming satisfied with my answer, Paul stopped and stared at me for a moment, eyes wide like a deer. “You’re really beautiful. Would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime?”

  “I…umm…” but before I could answer, he interrupted.

  “I could never handle it if my girlfriend did this shit like you guys do.”

  Paul spat on the carpet and stood up. “All this is my mother’s fault.” He started pacing around the room. “Seriously, I know people always say that, but in my case it’s true. She’s codependent. Abusive, you know? Manipulative.”

  While Paul was getting another beer, I got up and peeked out the window. Jeremy’s car was gone. I was alone. Pins of adrenaline jammed into my belly in a sudden jolt. I didn’t tell Paul. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I did, but I didn’t want him to know.

  “Your mom was mean to you as a kid?” I asked Paul, trying to distract him.

  He flicked his hand in front of his face, brushing at the dry skin at the corners of his mouth. “I was an only child; she had high expectations that I couldn’t meet.”

  Paul fell back onto the bed and started squirming, pulling at his hair as if trying to get something out of his head. “Did you know I’m also a poet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Come here,” he begged.

  Reluctantly, I inched my way toward the bed, standing just out of reach like a cat. But he lurched and grabbed me and pulled me down, pinning me and trying to pry my legs open. “You’re like a fairy with skin so white,” Paul chimed. “I try for your honey but it’s locked so tight.” As I struggled with him and he clenched me, I could feel his anxiety, his shame, his dread pouring into me. I came to understand that this was in fact what he wanted from me—he wanted me to hold his suffering for him. Holding suffering and looking appealing while you’re doing it is the main function of the sex worker, it turns out. But I was not equipped to hold his suffering, nor to know what to do with it, and furthermore, I didn’t want to hold it. I resisted. I struggled and fought and eventually he tired and let me go. I leapt from the bed and stood gulping for air behind the swivel chair, electricity twisting around my wrists like snakes. I used the chair to barricade myself while I peeked once again into the parking lot.

  “I just made that poem up on the spot, you know,” Paul told me. I shook my head. Clearly we were having two wildly different experiences.

  Jeremy’s car crept back into the lot and I pressed my palm against the window, creating a steam outline on the glass. I wanted to touch that car, I was so glad to see it there.

  Paul held his fists to his eye sockets in a dramatic Grecian gesture. “I think I’m in love with you,” he cried. “Please, please! Will you just hold me? Just hold me for a second, for a few minutes?” He scooted over and patted the space next to him on the bed, pleading and insistent.

  “I…I can’t,” I stammered, collecting my things, pulling on my underwear, tying the straps of my dress. There was a knock at the door. “We’re done.”

  I stood with my hand on the door handle, carrying my broken boom box in the other. “Thank you?” I offered.

  “Yeah right.” Paul scowled, making his way back into the bathroom. “You bitches are all the same. Nothing means anything to you. There’s a tip on the table.”

  The streetlights buzzed as Jeremy and I walked to the car. A seagull pecked ketchup from a greasy wax wrapper and the sky was oily and dark. The streetlamps made everything look grainy, digital, a bad movie on late-night cable.

  “I looked outside at one point and your car wasn’t here,” I said to Jeremy as he unlocked my door.

  “I was here the whole time.” Jeremy shrugged. When we got in the car, we both ignored the Del Taco bag on the floor that hadn’t been there an hour ago. Jeremy reached into his pocket and pulled out the wad of cash, slowly laying twenties down on my thigh. For each bill I thought of the hours I wouldn’t have to spend working at a café job, the many hours of my life I’d get back in exchange for this one. “Here,” he said at the end, slapping down an extra twenty. “First day bonus, cuz.”

  He laid the money out on my thigh and it all made sense, a thousand clicks whirring into place. I could have money to the degree that I suffered. I could suffer fast, like I did in the motel room while risking my life, or I could suffer slow like I did at the coffee shop, physically safe but grueling away my hours, not being able to eat well or pay rent or be creative or afford a therapist or medical care, maybe for the rest of my days. I chose to suffer fast.

  For many years, I remembered my whole “first time stripping” experience as funny. I forgot about the rape threat. The speed on the toilet. The squalor. I forgot that I went back to my little shack that night and cried, curled into a ball on my squeaky cot, feeling like my life was spinning out of my control with no one I could turn to for help. I forgot how the next night the storms came and I wandered the streets drenched, shook by thunder, walking through rain that came in heavy veils. Around 2:00 a.m., I found myself alone at the end of the pier. I sat with one arm circling a wood post sticky with tar, my feet dangling off the dock into a black oblivion. Water ran down the back of my neck and into my eyes. More than I could see, I could feel the water two stories below me. The great Pacific, heaving and lowing, pulling on my bloody, bloody heart with all the inexorable power of the moon. I thought of the 10 of Swords in the Motherpeace version of the tarot deck, the one my mother had used when she taught me how to read, a gift for my first initiation, the Rite of Roses. In the tarot card, priestesses of the Goddess know the patriarchal hordes are coming for them; they know theirs is a lost cause, so rather than submit to rape and pillage, they toss themselves off a cliff into the amniotic waters of the Mediterranean.

  I sat on the end of that pier for hours, feeling it rising and shifting and creaking with the tide, lightning flashing ever nearer on the horizon. I wanted to go home to my underworld Goddess, restored and happy in the oblivion She offered. Then I heard a voice, flashing with the lightning, a crack in my mind. She gave her command: “You’re not done yet. Stand up.”

  For many witches, their first initiation drags them into the underworld. But there are many underworlds. All interconnected. The witch’s first experience there depends on where she enters. My underworld was a labyrinth of sex and power and patriarchy. I stepped inside and the demons began feasting on my sense of self-worth. “The only thing that’s valuable about you is your sex,” they cawed, poking and squeezing, “and even that is defiled and cheap.” For seven years I wandered the halls of that underworld and couldn’t see a way out. Every attempt at escape just led me further in.

  When the Inquisitions of Europe came, they told us that witches were the queens of hell. They didn’t know the half of it. We witches are the Queens of the Underworld; we’ve been there so often that by now, collectively, we know its every chamber. Alone and unadorned, the witch has to figure out how to make it out of th
e maze. The harder her passage, the more powerful her initiation. Powerful initiations amplify her magic when she gets back home. But not every witch makes it out of the underworld alive. Sometimes even the bravest and strongest fall, their bones and tufts of hair littering its labyrinthine pathways. Witches witnessing these bone warding cairns would do well to remember: the underworld does have doors. Keep your guardians close, remember who you are. When the Goddess appears to you, follow Her. Whether you realize it or not, finding Her is the reason you were sent there in the first place.

  3 Patricia Monaghan, The Book of Goddesses and Heroines.

  Chapter 6

  The Egregore

  In the movie [The Exorcist] the men were repulsed by the devil and the stench of the devil; they told the devil to leave the girl and to cease to exist. Of course the devil couldn’t do that. The devil had come into this girl for a reason and it wasn’t going to leave.

  John Haskell, “The Faces of Joan of Arc”

  Within the occult there is an entity known as an egregore, a kind of angel. The word egregore comes from the Greek, meaning “watcher.” Spiritualists and theosophists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called these spirits thought forms: energetic beings created by people’s highly charged thoughts and emotions. Simply put, an egregore is the spirit of a group. Egregores can arise spontaneously from a roaring crowd at a football game, a political rally, a church meeting or a concert, and then disperse just as fast. But if enough energy is poured into them, eventually they become immortal. Jesus is an egregore, as is Mohammed, or Aphrodite, who still speaks to us through our dreams and in songs. When we pray to egregores, paint pictures of them, write hymns to them, they take on a life of their own.