Initiated Read online

  Cities have egregores, and houses; even groups of friends can create egregores. Neither positive nor negative, the egregore is simply what it is, like a volcano or a weasel. You might not want to share your bedroom with a weasel, but weasels do prevent the forest from being overrun with rats. Egregores have their purpose, too, as containers of influence. Once created, egregores have their own agenda and don’t care whether or not you approve. What do egregores want? The same thing as the devil, the same thing as God. The same thing as all of us. To live, to live, to live. And to be seen. The Watchers want us to watch them back. They want intimacy.

  One of the most important initiations for any witch is to recognize that intimacy is synonymous with influence. A witch needs to be able to choose which influences she will accept.

  The Fulton Street egregore had been waiting for me to arrive. Fulton ran a few blocks north of San Francisco’s panhandle: a narrow stretch of meadows slicing down from Golden Gate Park. Eucalyptus, sycamore, and alder loomed like druids there over the homeless wanderers and gutter punks prowling through the dim glow of the antique streetlamps. My friend William had a room on the second floor of a four-story Edwardian house overlooking the street. He’d been sending me letters sprinkled with the spores of the house egregore, who was looking for new hosts to amplify its power. I opened the letters in my little shack in Santa Barbara and breathed the spores in; they gave me a sudden urge to visit San Francisco.

  Towering white and covered in dust, the house on Fulton Street was bound in ornate cornices trimmed in gold. Inside, a sooty stained glass window illuminated the winding central staircase; it gleamed with orange orbs and mounds of Dionysian grapes. William’s room was bare. White walls, a mattress on the floor, a desk with a wooden chair, and sheer drapes that billowed and shifted in the briny air. I was platonically in love with William. At the advanced age of twenty-four, he was six years my senior and seemed impossibly sophisticated to me. He’d lived in Paris and traveled through Europe, visiting all the places to which I’d longed to go. He’d moved to San Francisco out of a gut-wrenching (and to me inexplicable) longing for his ex-girlfriend, a busty crop-haired blonde who did something having to do with computers. But William was special. He had curly brown hair and a Roman nose and we sat on the floor of his room playing Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz” on repeat as he thumbed through a dog-eared copy of Hesse’s Siddhartha and chatted with me about Jung and shamanism from within a dense exosphere of Camel smoke.

  During a tour of the house, William showed me the narrow staircase into the attic where Colette lived. The house on Fulton Street’s longest tenant, Colette was the egregore’s priestess. A stylish Bohemian from New Orleans, she ruled the place from her attic boudoir, fingers of incense reaching down the stairs, beckoning us with some secret scent, sulfurous and chemical. As we walked the halls, William pointed out the rooms of the other tenants: Brett, a Chaos Magician who managed a Big 5 Sporting Goods store, and Donna, a gaunt college student who darted furtively past us without comment, clutching her books to her chest as if we intended to rip them from her hands.

  Alex, a Jewish mathematician from New York, lived on the first floor. He was studying at UC Berkeley. He saw math as some kind of ecstatic psalm inscribed into the universe by God, and as soon as we were introduced, he started ranting about math’s beauty and elegance, eyes wide, hair standing on end as if he’d got his wires crossed while trying to electrify an elephant. I soon discovered that he’d stay up for days in a mania, scrawling advanced mathematical symbols on stacks of loose-leaf paper. Then he’d fall into a peculiar kind of math coma and sleep until deep into the afternoon.

  Beyond Alex’s room was a long, narrow kitchen where a famished-looking couch lurked beneath the window. On the opposite wall hung a Bernard Buffet painting of a sad clown. It loomed over a church pew, which I later learned had been used in Satanic rituals that previous tenants had held in the basement in the 1970s. On this pew sat the two house gargoyles: Stella, a needy shar-pei with a chronic skin condition, and Fang, an elegant but violent Siamese. As we entered the room, Fang hissed and clawed the empty air before her, fur bristling, eyes wild. On the way out, William showed me the last remaining room in the house. A bedroom. Airy, with fifteen-foot-high ceilings, dripping candle sleeves on the lights, a loft bed, and bay windows framing the mist-shrouded cypress trees in Buena Vista park. “This room’s vacant,” William told me, smiling.

  Darshak had always called San Francisco the City, as if there were no other. When I saw it for the first time, all white and shining with pyramids, towers, and tarnished copper domes, I could feel its power before I even got out of the car. Troubled spirits lived in San Francisco. Anton LaVey. The Red Man of the Mission District. To enter the city was to enter the heart of the Romantic, the land of the weirdo and the outsider. The flower children. A boom and bust town, port city and melting pot, full of painted ladies and the barbarous ghosts of sailors and gold miners. A place where many of the rebelling souls of America had come to exorcise themselves, the exiled spirits drifting through the air as fog.

  William and I took a street car to Union Square, then snaked our way through Chinatown. Fingering the spiky foreign fruit, silk robes, and woven finger traps: the harder you pulled, the more impossible to break free. Everything buzzed. The tattooist’s needle, the jackhammers. Metro power lines sparked like dragons across the city skies. San Francisco was full of egregores, manifestations of the spirit of the times, giving form to the mystical volatility percolating beneath the surface of the city. In North Beach we passed a street garden with a temple to Pan, Greek god of wildness and ecstasy. By that time, the city had seduced me completely.

  William took me to Caffe Trieste, a sepia cave with a trompe l’oeil mural of an Italian piazza on the wall and a jukebox that only played opera. The café was named after a port town in northern Italy famous for attracting writers, artists, and other misfits. Behind the counter stood a tall boy with sloping shoulders and angel eyes who kept glancing at me while William and I drank cappuccinos from heavy brown mugs. I was only to be in SF for three days and was eager for a holiday romance. I slipped a dollar bill with my phone number in the beatific barista’s tip jar, whispering, “A secret message for you,” just before William and I left.

  “If that café boy calls me before I leave on Monday, I will move to San Francisco,” I told William as we began our walk back toward Market Street.

  “I thought you were saving up for Europe,” William said.

  “I’m open to fateful interventions,” I told him.

  Cut to three days later. The cute boy had called. I dropped all my classes at Santa Barbara community college, quit my motel stripping gig, crammed all the belongings into the back of my Mustang, and moved to the City. I took the vacant room on the first floor of William’s house. San Francisco was still cheap then. The monthly rent of my new room cost $50 less than the rotting garden shed I’d called home in Santa Barbara. I draped the windows in thrifted floral silks and decorated the walls with my own ecstatic collages. On free days the city’s wealthy would leave their unwanted items on the curb. I scavenged a pink desk that made me feel like a writer in a genie bottle and a moss-green velvet love seat upon which I’d scribble drawings in my notebook. I hoped that in this new home I could turn my attention toward bringing my creative visions into the world. I would leave Anxiety and Mental Instability—raven messengers of the initiations I had refused to recognize—in that old flooded shack in Santa Barbara. I would let them be carried away by the rain, never to be heard from again.

  For work, I grabbed the lowest-hanging fruit and got a job at the Lusty Lady, a woman-owned and operated peep show on Geary that paid an hourly wage and required no physical contact with the customers. The “punters” were all safely behind glass, dribbling their hard-earned quarters into slots, raising and lowering the partitions according to their desires. We dancers whirled around naked on a red velvet stage lined with mirrors, shiny ballerinas in a pornog
raphic panoptic jewelry box.

  In many tarot decks, Major Arcana XI is called Strength, but in the Thoth deck it’s called Lust. The Thoth deck was a favorite of the occultists in San Francisco at the time. They hung out at the Sword and Rose bookstore in Cole Valley and sent messages to each other via arcane symbols spray-painted on sidewalks and doorways, clues to the locations of secret meetings to which only the initiated were invited. Painted by Lady Frieda Harris, under the artistic direction of the infamous Aleister Crowley, the Lust card depicts “the Whore of Babalon,” an embodiment of ecstatic life force energy; she is wildness, the essence of nature and creativity. An essence I was attracted to and wanted to embody. Before I hopped onstage in my feather boa and heels, I loved to stomp through the lobby of the Lusty Lady in Doc Martens, sweats, and a black hoodie pulled down low over my eyes as if I were some kind of assassin. That was the stripper way. We all did it. Backstage the girls would roam without their wigs, scratching their heads, slouching spread legged as they gorged on burritos, talking about how America isn’t ready for them, their love of other strippers, their college courses, and their activist work with Food Not Bombs. I admired their loud laughs and big personalities, the fact that they knew every band and performance artist, and I admired their beauty.

  I specifically remember one dancer named Lolita, a Riot Grrrl, first-generation Chinese, almost six feet tall with straight black hair down to her thighs. Her costume consisted of thigh-high spike-heel patent leather boots and a navel ring. She loved to dance to Bikini Kill and Rage Against the Machine. “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” she’d sing along in grouchy serenade to the men behind the glass windows. I remember one time a man pointed at her, commanding “the China girl” to come over. “You mean you would like the attention of the Asian woman,” she corrected him, kicking her boots at his goggle-eyed face.

  Often without realizing it, we accept the influence of our generation. Like most of the city’s young countercultural inhabitants of the Gen X period, and unlike today’s San Francisco youth who literally live in their Google dorms, we worked hard not to work hard. Most of us did everything we could to avoid “real jobs” so that we could spend our days reading, drawing, falling in love, hanging out in cafés, and in my case, taking every dance class I could find. Contemporary dance at Alonzo King Lines Studio. African dance at the community college. Feldenkrais movement exploration with Augusta Moore. Contact improvisation. And ballet classes led by one of the most defiantly bitchy Queens in the Castro.

  Caffe Trieste was just a block or two away from the Lusty Lady, and thus I continued my courtship with the cute guy who worked there: Adrian. Adrian was a real live artist. An ex-heroin addict with an MFA from the Art Institute, he lived in a converted loft space south of Market.

  “Hold on a second,” he commanded the first time he took me into his studio. Suddenly inspired, he splashed automotive paint from a can on the floor onto one of the large panels strewn about the room, all of them paintings of flying saucers lurking over empty, alienated suburban landscapes. While he worked, I snooped and found notes for a short story written by a woman to whom he assured me he was no longer involved, a writer his same age (twenty-seven) and already famous—in San Francisco at least. Her notes were stashed all over his loft. Snippets of ideas for stories, or scenes of plays scrawled on the backs of envelopes and inside book flaps. He talked about her as if she was an equal, though an arrogant one who may have gotten above her station. To him, they had a real relationship that they were trying to work out, riddled with adult complexities I was too young to understand. I had lugged my typewriter with me to San Francisco and was writing a novel then, too, about a girl who heard voices and was trapped in the underworld. But my writing lived in the world of dreams, while his friend’s work lived in the world of reality. Writing was how she made her living. I, on the other hand, was a stripper.

  “You’re going to get so much out of knowing me,” Adrian told me humbly. Though it pains me now to say it, he was right. His influence was powerful and through him the city opened to me. During our courtship, he took me to the wave organ: a gulping, slapping stone instrument hidden on a jetty out in the Marina. I could hear the bowels of the city gurgling through its pipes. We went to underground theater, and he introduced me to a set of his artist friends: Akari, a musician who understood the talismanic power of red lipstick. I never saw her without it; it seemed to function both as a weapon and a shield. Her superpower was that she didn’t give the slightest shit what men thought of her. Nevertheless, she had a boyfriend, Sky, a painter.

  The first and only time I went over to their little one-room apartment, the three of us sat together on their bed and they introduced me to Horses, Patti Smith’s urgent battle cry. Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine, Patti chanted, channeling the defiant egregore of her generation. Akari cut me a small, sharp streak of yellow speed. “You don’t have to take this if you don’t want,” she told me. I’d never taken it before. But Akari seemed powerful and mysterious to me, so I took a dainty sniff. Aside from my heart pounding like I’d just run up a flight of stairs, all I felt was a strong desire to talk. We all gabbed breathlessly for the next few hours, until I felt like I needed to go home and clean my room. Before I left, Sky solemnly presented me with one of his artworks, a translucent blue angel, fist raised, powering across the endless void. “It’s Azrael, angel of death and rebirth. It belongs to you. I made it for you before I even met you.”

  I’ve found that when a spirit wants to come into your life, someone will present you with its image. Over a decade later, when I was living in Los Angeles, in a century-old haunted house in Echo Park with clapping sounds and rotten smells in the wall, people kept giving me images of a little girl. About eight years old, she always had black bobbed hair and a headband, and was dressed in her 1940s Sunday best. I had a whole altar to her in the hall: paintings people gave me, photographs found folded into used books; a friend even randomly gave me a patent leather shoe, something she wore in every image. By that time, I had been reborn to my witchly nature, and I knew what to do. I wasn’t surprised when, one night while lying in bed with my boyfriend, he, who was normally a silent sleeper, woke me up sleep-chattering about murder and strife. As soon as my head again hit the pillow, my body was immobilized and the girl from the pictures appeared at the foot of my bed. By then I knew to stay in my power, to check my boundaries, but also to offer to help her if I could. It turned out she was lost, stuck in the middle world. So I took her by the hand and led her to the threshold of the upper world where she belonged. Soon after that, I moved. My presence in that house was no longer necessary. But back when I lived on Fulton Street, I had no idea what it meant to stay in my power. I didn’t realize I was allowed to assert my boundaries, and because of that, I couldn’t yet be of much help to anyone.

  As the months went by at the house on Fulton Street, I became obsessed with angels. Writing down their names: Anael, angel of air; Barbelo, perfect in glory; Metatron, great one and adversary. Typing out a treatise on the spirits I’d been encountering, I spent days making stacks of collages and charcoal drawings in an attempt to locate myself within their cosmology.

  The egregore of Fulton Street was growing more powerful, feeding off our passions and fears. William’s heartbreak had opened him up to a viral, psychotic depression ripping open his heart to be feasted upon by the demon spirit of the house. At that point, he’d sit for hours with his head in his hands, slowly stroking his forehead as if he were a grieving statue. “Does my face look gray to you?” he’d ask in a horrified whisper. “Do I smell like rotting flesh?”

  Alex’s math comas grew ever deeper until it seemed that nothing could wake him. He’d have a dozen alarms going off at a time, until I would barge into his room and try to shake him out of his stupor. In that cacophony of alarms, it felt like the world was ending.

  And Donna, the skinny college student with the downcast eyes, started telling me strange stories. She tol
d me she’d seen a taxicab with a sign on it accusing her of killing Kurt Cobain. At the supermarket, over the loudspeaker, voices would yell at her, “Donna, why did you raise the price of lettuce? Donna, we know it was you!” One time, after a few months of living in the City, with my own visitations from the spirit realms growing progressively more pronounced, I started seeing a therapist provided by the city four times per week and been put on medication. My mother sent me a photocopied dossier on schizophrenia, where she’d highlighted symptoms she saw as being similar to my own. I forgot the photocopy on the kitchen table for a few days, and when I came to collect it, I saw Donna had left a note in a venomous scrawl, “Maybe I just don’t like everybody!” A few days later, Donna vanished.

  Soon after Donna’s disappearance, Adrian the artist and I drove deep into Marin to see the red tide, a toxic algae that glows when agitated. We trekked through the reeds and swamp marsh out to the beach where the sea roared across a wet desert of sand. A pale blue fire bloomed there, then disappeared, ghosting in and out of the dark like something from another dimension.

  We ran through the sand kicking up big clumps that sparked back down to the earth as if the sky were falling. We rolled in those sparks and breathed into each other’s mouths, passing our breath back and forth until we felt high and I lay back suspended in a web of stars. He pulled me close, his thick fingers gripping my flanks, and in a husky voice he said, “There’s been times when I wanted you so bad I could kill you.” I wasn’t afraid of him. It was the kind of passionate declaration that, as a woman, I’d been trained to want since birth: a man so overcome with desire for you that he could fuck you into oblivion. Fuck you until you resumed your place as the void from which all things emerge. The birthplace of the world.