“They would have to be taken in,” he went on. “The pants anyway. Do me a favor, Kenneth. Stop wincing.”
Kenneth looked at him, annoyed not so much at his father’s words but at his own transparent discomfort.
“Tomorrow, go through the pile,” his father said. “What you don’t want, I’ll take to the Salvation Army. There’s no sense
wasting it.”
Kenneth went absently back up the staircase, creasing his brow in feigned consideration. He had forgotten why he’d come down.
His father was always urging him to go outside, to do something physical, always perplexed by the solemn stacks of books he
brought home. But the books gave him documentation, proof of other places, other times, that had nothing to do with this one.
Before long, he no longer wanted to stop, or no longer believed that he would stop. The simple word “men” began to signify
a hidden world of smells and sensations: men shaving, men perspiring, men tucking in shirts and buckling belts. Eventually,
he sent away for a bodybuilding course through the mail. When it arrived, he had a few nights of guilty ministrations before
a series of tiny black-and-white images of a muscleman in dark briefs, lifting chairs or squatting in front of a mirror with
rigid thighs.
There was no way to think about any of it except as a developing illness. It was not that it was evil to give up control over
your own body, or to have a mind so weak that you could not restrain its thoughts for even half a day. What was evil was when
you stopped resisting, when you began to take a secret pride in the foreign places your body could take you.
He wanted to make movies, not just short films on a 16mm Bolex, but lavish epics dense with atmosphere and color. His bedroom
was festooned with dream figures: Isis, Apollo, Bacchus, Orpheus, and also Valentino, Lex Luthor, the Cobra Lady, Plasticman.
His mother tilted her head back in the lounge chair, eyes closed in feigned magnificence. “The magic of Hollywood,” she said.
“But it’s such a nuisance, isn’t it? All the other people you’d have to work with?”
He was angry without knowing why. Then he realized that it was because she was trying to form an alliance with him, an alliance
based on his own weakness.
In the fall of 1944, his sister, Jean, joined the WAVES, following his brother, Bob, who had enlisted in the air force. The
country was still embroiled in the same abstract war, a distant operation conducted by airplanes and tanks and battleships.
He knew of it only through newsreels: deployments of troops, diagrammed tactics, men in barracks posing in their undershirts.
It was a struggle of machines and haircuts and uniforms, all of which held for him an implicit, personal threat. He was sixteen
now, a dark, handsome impostor, thin and broad-shouldered, with a serious cast to his eyebrows, but the effect was ruined
by his effeminate walk and the high lisp of his voice. The world could see what kind of person he was, could tell just by
looking at him what his future held. People like him wound up living in residence hotels. They worked as floorwalkers in department
stores, cooked their meals on a hot plate, spent their nights alone in a bathrobe making up their faces or getting brutalized
in public toilets. He could not summon up any humor to neutralize these stereotypes, nor was he seduced by fantasies of self-pity:
the mental ward, the empty pill bottle, the melodramatic farewell note. What made it worse for him was that he had the same
masculine pride as his father, but with no easy way of expressing it. He would stare at his face in the mirror, the stern
face of a matinee idol, dark-eyed and gaunt. He wanted to live inside that body, not just to inhabit it awkwardly, without
awareness or intention. It led to all kinds of affected postures, placements of the hands, exercises in carriage and comportment
that only made things worse.
He had to go to out-of-the-way places to find what he needed now, rare-book stores in downtown L.A. where he bought pictures
of musclemen, their brows shadowed by sailor caps, their groins covered by dark G-strings called “posing straps.” At night,
he would sometimes sneak out of the house to walk the pier, never approaching the men there but watching from a distance,
looking for the secret signals of canted wristwatches or lit cigarettes. After a while it became an exercise in hopelessness,
until finally he was surprised by a sudden craving for the initial feeling of wrongness, a feeling that no longer existed.
He made a film of himself in his grandmother’s apartment one weekend when she and Meg were on vacation. He sneaked into the
closet in Meg’s bedroom, where she kept a collection of old costumes she had taken from the MGM lot, castaway gowns once worn
by actresses. There were only a few that he could get himself into: a red-and-white-sequined gown and an aqua silk dress with
silver panels above the hips. It was important to get them all the way on, carefully working his arms into the tight sleeves
and then feeling the fragile zipper between his shoulder blades as he painfully edged it up his back. Encased in these second
skins, he filmed himself before the full-length bedroom mirror, not preening or posing, but glaring at himself with solemn
incomprehension. He did not look feminine at all. He looked like an angry boy, someone completely other and apart.
It was that winter that he discovered a rare book in one of the stores downtown, a worn black volume kept under glass. Its
cover showed no title or author; instead it bore a thin line drawing of an Egyptian eye at the center of a triangle that radiated
shafts of light. There was something about its spare design, its aura of secrecy and contraband, that made him walk around
the store for a few minutes, pretending to browse, until at last he brought himself to ask the man behind the counter for
a closer look.
It was called
The Sephiroth,
though there was no author mentioned anywhere. He found the title on the frontispiece, above three symbols and an invocation
to an Egyptian god called Horus. What followed was a kind of mock sermon, written in biblical cadences, laced with odd, sometimes
contemptuous asides to the reader. A good deal of its initial attraction was this anonymous voice, propounding its information
through a scrim of knowing, private humor.
Thy Will Be Done! The proposition is bald, even basic — as bracing as the gusts of Flatus, or as boring as last week’s beans:
Thy Will Be Done! For who shall chooseth, if not the hand that grasps? And who shall see, if not the eye that yearns? Think
of one thing only, O heedful one, as ye walketh the wide way: Thy Will Be Done! For is not thy yearning like unto a column
of jasper, or the rich scent of hyssop? Is it not as the darkest jewel of Hamman, or the farthest star over Nor? Nay, it is
as the lust of the goat, the blood of doves, the fire in the virgin’s loins! For who shall chooseth, if not thine own hand?
And how shalt thou see, if not through thine own eye?
It was not just the words but the austerity of their presentation — the book’s dilapidated binding, its ugly type, all of
it reminiscent of a student dissertation. It was destined for only the smallest clique of readers, its boastful voice muted
by the fact of its utter obscurity. There was a faintly intimidating allure in its symbols and diagrams, the feeling that
just by looking at the figures — the pentacle, the zodiac, the tarot, the sephiroth — he was exposing himself to secrets.
There was the sense that the author or authors, unnamed and so impossible to imagine, could somehow guess that he was looking
at it, not only the book in general but the specific copy he held in his hands.
He bought it for twelve dollars, a fortune in 1944, when even the bus schedules bore the words “Don’t waste timetables; paper
is a vital war material.” The man at the counter told him casually, almost skeptically, that the author was a drug addict
and famous satanist. He knew before he’d even got it home that he had at last stumbled upon the secret door into that parallel
world he had always hoped was there.
According to
The Sephiroth,
the world was a shifting fabric of reality and dream. There were people who without knowing it took on the attributes of
certain mythological figures or gods. This could make them purposeful and bold, like Prometheus or Cain, or could render them
passive and wounded, like Vulcan, the archetype of the artist. There were cold, solitary spirits like the huntress Diana,
and tricksters like Hermes and Pan, and communers with the dead, like Hecate and Persephone. There were stern, paternal figures,
like Shiva or the risen Christ, and there were law-abiding slaves like Mary or Job. You had little choice as to which of these
spirits inhabited you personally. Indeed, most people spent their whole lives in a futile effort to become someone they were
not meant to be: powerful when they were born weak, wise when they were born to take commands. All unhappiness stemmed from
just this misperception: the failure to know one’s true nature or the obstinate refusal to embrace it. Your date of birth,
the letters of your name, the color of your eyes, the lines on the palms of your hands — everything in the world was encrypted
with the secret and conflicting information that determined the kind of life you were meant to lead.
There were a few rare souls who saw through to this pattern in things and could change it according to their wills. These
people were called magi, bringers of the age of Horus, the old Egyptian sun god, who would put an end to the submissive, feminine
sway of Isis and the prohibitive, masculine sway of Osiris. They were the children of Lucifer, the bringer of light, who signified
the end of all opposites and dualities.
Male and female, self and other, reality and dream. At the meeting point of these opposites was a zone of energy and pain
where the spirit of Lucifer burned in isolation. It was the wild chaos of orgasm, the music of war, the entranced stupor of
hallucination. Only a few could even perceive this zone. To penetrate it was to negate any difference between good and evil,
life and death, desire and fear.
He kept reading
The Sephiroth
even when he could no longer think about its words with any acuity. He kept looking at it even when he knew it was not going
to give him any more Pleasure, but only fatigue and hollowness. It was something he had to keep struggling with, like his
body, even when its mystery was no longer interesting but blurred and tangled and exasperating.
He had a dream one night of a mob chasing after him: the soldiers from the newsreels, the students at his high school, the
cruising men on the piers, all of them chasing him down, tearing at his clothes. They forced him to the pavement and began
to kick him and scratch his face. When he woke up, he was unable to recognize his bedroom for a moment. Then, as always, the
pictures of gods and heroes on his walls appeared to regard him with a solemn, knowing complicity. For a moment, they were
more real than he was — they were the hidden movers inside him. It was in this way that he had his first visceral understanding
of what was meant by the word “magick.”
For a brief period that fall, a boy named Ted Drake had attended his school. He was a tall, hawk-nosed kid who in some misguided
effort to make a place for himself would pick fights in the parking lot. Kenneth had seen him in the hall one day with a dark
cut over his eye and a broken hand wrapped in bandages and tape. He wore work clothes: chinos and thin cotton shirts and black
engineer’s boots. A few weeks after school had started, he stole a car and forged some checks and tried to run away from home,
after which they sent him to a juvenile detention facility outside Sacramento.
According to
The Sephiroth,
there was a difference between the “self” and the “soul.” The self was a set of conventions, an outer garment that the soul
was forced to weave out of its various encounters with the world. It was in the delinquent Ted Drake that Kenneth saw his
real soul, the true essence hidden inside him. He saw that to be true to that soul — to escape the fraud of his self — he
had to somehow find a way to live inside Ted Drake’s skin.
He had something like this in mind when he entered the small rotunda at Palisades Park where they housed the camera obscura,
a dark box fixed with a lens that took in images of the park outside. It was a concrete room with a white table at its center.
On this table, the camera projected a surprisingly sharp rendering of the palm trees and the pathways and the beach beyond
its walls, an image you could rotate by means of a large metal wheel. It was the kind of place (like the pier, or certain
bars downtown) that you knew about if you were someone like Kenneth.
He waited for nearly an hour that afternoon, moving back and forth from the rotunda to the bright sidewalk outside. Finally
the right kind of man approached, a middle-aged man with the last bits of an ice cream sandwich pinched in his fingers. He
wore a faded gray work shirt and dark trousers with loose, fallen cuffs. When he took the last bite of his ice cream sandwich,
he threw the wrapper to the ground behind his heel and wiped his hand on his hip. He eyed Kenneth indifferently as he stepped
inside the building, then stood for a moment at the metal wheel, his back turned, one hand in the back pocket of his pants.
On the nape of the man’s neck, above the collar, were thick creases that looked almost like scars. Kenneth stood watching
while the man casually spun the wheel, watching the rotating images, then moved farther back into the rotunda. It was only
when he had reached the far wall that he looked over his shoulder at Kenneth, then turned again, his hands crossed in front
of his waist so that his elbows could be seen beneath his rolled-up sleeves. He said nothing, which was the only clue Kenneth
had to go on.
To the right, against the back wall, there was a small alcove that led to the toilets. That was where the man went next. Kenneth
stood outside the beige door for a moment, no longer knowing what he expected. His mouth was dry and he put his hand flat
on the dimpled surface of the door and stared for a moment at the shifting cloud of red light behind his closed eyelids.