The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,
"I see that none has passed here
In a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."
--STEPHEN CRANE
1
I have never practiced Satanism. I haven't read Anton LaVey's The Satanic Bible, nor did I ever dabble in the darker side of the occult. In fact, barring a fleeting teenage interest in various forms of Neopaganism, I've generally been on the "who cares" side of the spiritual fence. Yet in the fall of 1997, I toured the East Coast playing the keyboard with a Satanic rock band.
I lived in Chicago at the time, and had known the guys in the Electric Hellfire Club for a year or so. I was working off and on as a dance club DJ, and within that underbelly-nightlife milieu, we had a few friends in common. When their keyboardist, Shane--a spindly, soft-spoken man whom I'd briefly dated, with dirty blond hair to his waist and a thin goatee--was killed in a drunk driving accident on the Wisconsin border, I found myself agreeing to take his place on the upcoming tour. I committed to fourteen dates up and down the West Coast, squashed into a Ram Van with five devil worshippers and nearly a ton of musical equipment and gear. My family, needless to say, thought I'd completely foregone the handbasket.
I could chalk up this transgression of good sense to paying some sort of tribute to a dead friend, thereby cloaking it in a nobility of sorts, but that would be only a partial explanation. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that something about it appealed to me on a much more basic level. How could anyone who came of age alongside the advent of MTV and the media-driven glamour of rock superstardom not harbor just a tiny little fantasy of touring with a rock band? Who, when presented with that (albeit tarnished) brass ring, wouldn't grab on tight and see where it dragged her? Opportunity knocked, and, honestly, I didn't much care that it stood out there on my stoop making devil signs and screaming "Hail Satan!" No contract was involved, no sinister clauses were floated about the "party of the first part" surrendering anything fully and wholly to any "party of the second part," and there certainly was no poison pen dipped in blood.
Two nights before the tour began, I drove to the band's practice space to go over the keyboard parts. I hadn't played a keyboard since my parents had bought me the tiny Casio VL-1 Tone sampler as a preteen birthday gift, but I'd studied classical piano for ten years. I wasn't too worried. It turned out, to my surprise, they didn't expect me to actually play anything. The keyboard parts and samples were prerecorded onto a Digital Audio Tape; my onstage responsibility was to start the DAT and then to act like a psychotic sin-drunk minion of Lucifer as the rest of the band abused their instruments and growled out sinister lyrics.
After we ran through the set list a couple of times and I was pronounced "ready" for touring, we gathered around a card table with takeout food, then tucked into a bottle of Jack Daniel's. ("This is where you really find out if you've got what it takes to be a rock star," they told me.) We arm-wrestled one another, loudly debated politics, and told dirty jokes. We sifted through fan mail--Polaroids of somber pubescent boys clutching plastic Halloween pitchforks in paneled rooms of trailers, women who offered themselves as "slaves" in loopy handwriting on drugstore stationery, and a few sick fucks whose maniacal marginless letters were covered in minuscule handwriting and meticulous drawings of knives and hypodermics in blobby blue ballpoint. I laughed at the letters with my new bandmates, though reading them made me feel desperately sad and slightly uncomfortable, hollow. I drowned those inklings at the bottom of a highball glass. Eventually, I found myself leaning on a wall for support, involved in a heated argument with Thomas Thorn, the band's singer. I don't remember the subject of contention, but I do recall the point at which the disagreement transcended harsh words and raised voices.
"Hit me," he said. "Go on, I dare you. Take a swing. You don't have the guts."
I looked at him, my vision doubled with drink, and considered the situation for a moment. I'd never punched anyone in my life. After the syrupy whisky ran thickly down the domed wall of my skull, rinsing the logic out of the cracks and corners of my addled brainpan, I hauled off and socked him right in the eye.
He staggered back, clutching his face and bellowing.
The next thing I remember is being flat on the gray linoleum floor (pleasantly cool against my cheek), with Thomas's bulk straddled across the small of my back and my arm twisted up tight against my shoulder.
"You bitch," he snarled. "What are you going to do now, huh? You can't do shit. I could rape you right now and you couldn't do anything about it."
To this day I have no idea why, but I laughed. I laughed a long, maniacal, cackling laugh of one who's thrown every shred of caution and sense to the devil. I spat, "Go on, I dare you. You don't have the guts."
He snorted and let go of my arm.
I rolled over and looked up at his purpling eye. "That'll be black in the morning. Better put some ice on it."
In the month to come, I found myself involved in countless more violent altercations with Thomas; but from then on out, we were always on the same side of the fight. It was Us against Them.
2
In the early years of the 18th century, Major Stede Bonnet was a retired army officer and owner of a large sugar plantation in Barbados, near the city of Bridgetown. He was respectably, though unhappily, married and well thought of among the local society folk. Yet, in 1717, at the age of twenty-nine, for reasons unknown, he purchased a small sloop of ten guns which he christened the Revenge and set off literally overnight with a newly-recruited crew of destitute seamen, embarking on a life of piracy. Despite having no experience as a sailor or ship's captain, he made a fair success of this new career, leaving a trail of plundered, burning ships in his wake all the way up the east coast of North America as far as New England.
By all accounts, Bonnet was, despite these early successes, an inept captain. This impotence became most apparent when, in the Bay of Honduras, he fell in with Captain Edward Teach, a pirate better known as Blackbeard. Teach cultivated an alliance with Bonnet and invited him aboard his ship, the similarly named Queen Anne's Revenge. In a matter of days, Blackbeard replaced Bonnet as commander of his near-mutinous crew with his own man, one Richards, a disciplinarian who battened down their dissent in short order. Bonnet stayed with Blackbeard's crew, though whether by force or preference is not known. The two pirates eventually parted ways when Blackbeard, after returning command of the Revenge to Bonnet, made off in the night with Bonnet's share of their communal plunder.
Blackbeard, a pirate of legendary ruthlessness and cruelty, could have simply dispatched the naive Bonnet, murdered or marooned him, and stolen his ship. Instead, he kept him aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge as his "gentleman guest." The two men drank and shared meals together, conversed, and behaved as friends. What must they have had in common, the lowborn Teach and the aristocratic Bonnet? What drew them to one another? Might their mutual affinity lay submerged beneath the motivation of each to name his ship--the instrument of his power--for that bilious toxin of the soul, vengeance?
3
My mother was a few years out of law school, working for a small Southern law firm in Johnson City, Tennessee, when she met Preston Goforth, leader of the biker gang known as the Ghost Riders. He came to my mother's office because he wanted to lease some property the firm was administering in an estate. Preston wanted it for a motorcycle shop.
I never met the man--I was eleven at the time, and only saw the interior of my mother's office for a couple of hours each day after school--but I remember clearly my mother talking about him, her voice full of amusement and intrigue. A biker! Not at all what you'd think. Polite and respectful, she said; every other word was "ma'am." ("He must have had a military background or an old-fashioned mother, I guess.") I'd seen the Ghost Riders, caught glimpses of them barreling past on souped-up choppers as we drove the winding mountain roads to visit family on holidays. The sinister insignias of embroidered skulls emblazoned across the backs of their battered leather jackets held for me the same malignant fascination as the filthy footpads and hamfisted thugs of Dickensian London.
I remember asking, "Preston Goforth . . . is that his real name?"
"Real name?" my mother replied. "It's what he introduced himself as . . . didn't occur to me to ask. Why?"
Preston Goforth. A person could do anything in the world with a name like that, the child-me reckoned, be any kind of man: pirate king, paladin, prince among pickpockets. Across the Technicolor landscape of my young mind, Preston Goforth walked in larger shoes than normal men. His was a name that might as well have figured in one of the beloved books I devoured well past bedtime in secret beneath my coverlet in a quilt-walled cave of my own making, illuminated only by a small yellow flashlight. Treasure Island. Oliver Twist. Tales of boys my age spirited away into underworld brotherhoods where they learned the secrets of piracy and pickpocketing. I envisioned myself carried away beyond the Tennessee hills on the back of a motorcycle, my wind-pinched cheek resting against a death's head grinning liplessly from between the capable shoulders of a man known as Preston Goforth.
At the time, I didn't understand that, being a girl, the "adventures" I daydreamed about so earnestly would likely have been seamy, brutal nightmares, even at their most merciful. A pirate captain, a prince of thieves--fine fantasies for rebel boys, but no fanciful little girl dreams of being Nancy, Dickens's split-lipped queen of whores.
As my mother described him, Preston was physically average in height, probably in his thirties, and not fat but muscular. ("A substantial guy, you'd want him on your side in a fight, and that's for true!"). For his appointments at the law office, she said, he always wore a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and biker boots--his version of "dressing up nice." His hair was dark and not particularly long, but his sideburns, "they were long and no mistake," and his demeanor was friendly. I was fascinated when she revealed he was the chaplain of his group of bikers; in the course of his acquaintance with my mother, he presided over a much-talked-about wedding between a Ghost Rider named Spike and his "old lady," who went by the moniker of Whitewoman.
The happy couple was featured in a photograph on the front page of the town paper, the Johnson City Press-Chronicle. I studied their photograph at length with wide-eyed preteen intensity: her frazzled mane bleached white with visible black roots, his hair thinning but stringily long, their arms around each other like old comrades, but their lips pressed together like hungry lovers.
4
Among the artifacts exhumed from the wreckage of the Queen Anne's Revenge, discovered in 1996 off the coast of North Carolina and just south of the barrier islands Shackleford and Bogue Banks, is a curved metal urethral syringe. It's a terrifying piece of archaic medical equipment: a six-inch gunmetal-colored cylinder with a cruel hook of a spout and a hooped-thumbholed plunger at its base. The medicine chamber is dented from its two centuries on the ocean floor, most of which it spent accreted into a sludgy blob of wreckage along with a few musket balls, some ornamental rivets, a surveyor's sight, and splinters of the ship's timbers. Because traces of mercury were found in the syringe chamber, scientists believe it was used for the treatment of venereal disease at sea. Though ineffective against advanced cases of syphilis, the intra-urethral application of mercury often cured the early chancre-stage syphilitic and eradicated gonorrheal infection.
And where, one may wonder, did afflicted pirates in the early 18th century obtain that blessed quicksilver?
Mercury only very rarely occurs in its pure state in nature. Most often, it results from the post-quarry heating and condensation of a rusty red mineral ore known as cinnabar. Cinnabar occurs most frequently in crystalline form, and shares the same class as quartz. It usually occurs in imperfect crusts of faceted spume, shooting off spiny capillary needles like a sea urchin. Perfectly formed crystals of cinnabar are rare, prized by crystal collectors; when it occurs in a twinned formation--two incestual rhomboid spikes joined at their root, forming a spread V of glistening blood red mercurial-sulfide limbs--its value leaps even higher. Cinnabar also occurs in veiny smears as a constituent (along with quartz and a grayish clay known as dickite/kaolinite-serpentine) of the grainy, layered gem rock Chicken-Blood Stone.
The cinnabar jewelry, trinkets, and small carved boxes that are found nowadays in import shops and exotic boutiques are formed from wood and red lacquer or molded from polymer clay, though for centuries cinnabar was mined and used to various ends: crude cinnabar was integral to the minting process of new coinage and valued in the apothecary, millinery, and alchemical markets; rare Chinese artworks of carved Chicken-Blood Stone statues and figurines brought high prices in the colonies and Europe.
Countless merchant ships carrying cargoes from the Orient and Europe to trading ports in the Caribbean fell victim to pirate crews drunk on greed and rebellion. Plunder's rich seduction couldn't inspire constancy in the hearts of men who served under Jolly Roger; they forsook her for the wiles of lust, trading gold for tainted sex, surrendering cinnabar to quicksilver cures.
5
It's been several decades since now, but my grandfather used to pick banjo and saw fiddle in the early days of the Grand Ole Opry. He stood in as-needed, playing last-minute improvised gigs with bands called "The Fruit Jar Drinkers" and "The Cumberland Pickers." He was also part of his own four-piece, "The Roan Mountain Boys," of whom he still owns a faded black and white photo. Every time he shows it to me, he says, "Your great-gran made them shirts we're wearing from her ol' kitchen curtains." Then he points to the man on the upright bass, dark eyes sunk above craggy cheeks, one scarred, surmounted by a shiny wing of oiled black hair. "Great player, that feller, Bud. Good man. For an outlaw." And then he shrugs and smiles every time.
6
Four years before she ever laid eyes on the Ghost Rider Preston Goforth, my mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. For the first eleven years of her experience with the disease, she showed only a few mild symptoms--occasional imbalance, a numb arm or foot upon awakening, anomalies in her vision. So minimal was its deteriorative effect on her, in fact, that she waited until I went off to college at eighteen to apprise me of her condition.
Shortly after I left home, her health began to decline at a much faster rate. She lost more of her motive skills, and her limbs began deadening for longer stretches of time. She began to walk with a cane and to require a wheelchair for distances longer than the average city block. She consulted a flotilla of doctors; a fleet of specialists; and an armada of neurologists, physical therapists, and healers in disciplines from the arcane to the innovative. She tried foul-tasting herb mixtures, complex exercise regimens, and expensive pharmaceuticals with names the length of which rivaled "floccinaucinihilipilification."
Nothing had any palliative or recuperative effect.
On the recommendation of a doctor whose wife also suffered from MS, she began looking into an experimental treatment known as bee venom therapy. It involved the keeping of a small hive of bees, and on alternating days of the week (with the aid of an assistant, a position my father somehow found the courage to fulfill) extracting with long tweezers eight worker bees and pressing them to the flesh until they panicked enough to sting. My father would gently detach the bees' corpses from their stingers as their reflexes mindlessly continued to pump the poisonous venom into my mother's unresponsive, nerve-deadened flesh.
Afterward, sometimes, she said she could feel something again, like an eddy of warmth in a deadpool; never permanently, never fully, but a reminder, a tiny prismatic flicker of the rainbow of sensation would resurface in her shades-of-gray world.
7
Intra-urethral mercury treatment at the beginning of the 18th century, though intensely painful and cumulatively dangerous, fended off the lunatic dementia of third-stage syphilis. But quicksilver functioned only as a viable medicament for men; Blackbeard's claw-like syringe would have been little help to a disease-ridden woman because its effectiveness hinged on the diseased seaman having a penis. This predicament was of little matter, however, because the number of women buccaneers even at the height of the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" is estimated to have been single-digitally low. The harbor whores frequented by male pirates, whom they infected and were reinfected by, pocketed their coins and allowed the scurvy dogs to inject them with their poison seed until their wombs and hearts and minds filled to bursting with its pollution. Comparably effective cures for women didn't arrive until the advent of penicillin, and even then, because pestilence is always stronger, because viruses mutate, new plagues evolved.
8
I'm not sure what compelled me to do it, to dress up in male drag and go to a local nightclub. I've never really felt particularly masculine. (I've never really felt particularly feminine either, but that's not the point. Or maybe that's the whole point.) Perhaps it was a result of a recent interest in gender issues. Perhaps it was some sort of residual reaction to an ex coming out of the closet the previous month. Perhaps it was just because I could. I don't know.
It was surprisingly easy to turn myself into someone who was perceived as "a man." Whatever I think of myself or feel about my gender, I have an unmistakable woman's physique. I wasn't going to let that stop me, though. I squished and tugged and finally managed to get a girdle around my chest to smash my breasts down. I trimmed down some lace-backed facial hairpieces from Boston Costume so they'd fit my smaller, more delicate features--thick eyebrows, a thinnish mustache, and a small goatee--and spirit-gummed them onto my face. I shrugged into a dress shirt, vest, suit coat, and--my nod to foppishness--an ascot. By the time I was done scraping my hair back with a slippery coil of Dippity-Do, I didn't even recognize myself. A strange man stared back at me from the scarred, old rectangle of my bathroom mirror. The false brows obscured the delicate slope of my forehead. The suit's tailored shaping made my shoulders look broader, and the pouf of the ascot minimized the remains of my once-buxom bosom. I grinned rakishly through my bristly facial hair and raised an eyebrow after the fashion of Errol Flynn, who as the pirate Captain Blood cried to his shipmates, "It's the world against us, and us against the world!"
The cabbie who drove me to the club grunted a low "‘Sup, man," as I slid into the seat. After I instructed him in a low voice where to go, he began to make small talk. Had I seen the Patriots game that night? No. Apparently they ruled, trounced, destroyed, stomped, massacred, obliterated, slaughtered, and blew the other guys right off the field. I managed a half-hearty, "Fuck yeah!" As he pulled up at the door of the club and I fumbled with my wallet, he turned partway around and said, "Have fun tonight, man. This is some kinda crazy club you know. I hear the chicks in there will suck you off in the bathroom if you buy ‘em a drink."
I stepped out onto the sidewalk, feeling a little sick to my stomach. What kind of man did this fellow take me for?
I worked up my nerve and handed the doorman my ID, for once thankful that I'd been photographed stringy-haired and makeupless, squinting at the camera like an adversary. He barely scanned the birthdate before handing it back. A glissando of excitement played up the bones of my spine, as if I had boldly met a test and passed. And, in fact, I had.
Inside the club, I stood on the edge of a group of my male acquaintances, pulling on a whiskey drink and nonchalantly listening to their conversation. Someone moved to allow me into the circle, and after a round of firm handshakes ("Hey man, name's Juan"), I began to watch them through male-tinted glasses. The guys were more raucous, more pals-y, more rangey-stanced and jostly than they had been when the female me had stood in their midst on earlier occasions. They winked as they said things about the girls' butts on the dance floor or their own sexual prowess. They laughed louder and were more physically intimate with one another--poking ribs, slapping backs, leaning on one another's shoulders, gesturing with their chins. I felt pulled in by their guileless virile dynamic, and, for a moment, I caught a fleeting grasp of a feeling encapsulated by that hackneyed phrase, of being "just one of the guys." But a part of me--she-me core under the man-rind--stood back and refused to assimilate. To her they were wolves in friends' clothing, unwittingly allowing me--a vixen beneath a fox guise--into the pack.
Then someone placed my face, recognized me for who (and what) I was, and their expressions changed. Their faces belied a range of sharp reactions, emotions that slammed down on their features like fortress gates: betrayal, shame, alarm, anger, and, yes, disgust. I felt a brief stab of fear as it dawned on me I might have thoughtlessly robbed them of a gendered confidence in the nature of manhood, an ordered security of birthright, something they never conceived I could take. I cringed, sheepish, sorry, and scared.
One guy stormed off, another began to laugh. Soon, they were all laughing, yukking it up with that quivery tremor beneath the mirth that almost conceals how uncomfortable a situation is. How else can brethren reconcile a sister?
People laugh loudest when the joke's on them, so the prankster knows they're good sports. They couldn't keep this one to themselves. Word of my secret spread quickly, and strangers were less inclined to grin and bear me. Several people sought me out specifically to taunt me, like horrible children on horrible playgrounds. I held up bravado as a shield and pushed my way through the crowd for the restroom, a part of the club that on previous nights had always provided me with a sort of safe haven, an island of partial privacy where I could escape confrontation, if only for a short time.
That night, however, it was hardly a clear-cut getaway. I wanted more than anything to rush into the ladies' room, lock myself in a stall, and take a break from the bullshit before heading out once more into the breaches and braving the crowd between me and the exit--but dressed as I was, I couldn't do that. The women in there might take me for a man. I plucked absently at the corner of my mustache and decided I'd better head for the men's room instead. As I approached, my heart was a mad pugilist, sparring berzerker-fashion with the cage of my ribs, and my breath was a ragged runner on his last lap.
I can still see the black door, the male stick figure, the word "MEN"; my small hand and thin wrist sticking out of a starched shirt cuff pressing it open; the tiled interior somehow both white and grimy; two men pissing who don't even glance at me as I barrel past them into a stall; me perched on the toilet tank, its porcelain cold through my thin dress pants. My head in my hands, I stare at my knees, blinking fast. I know that if I'm going to sail out of this storm with any dignity, the glitter in my eyes can't be tears.
When the two pairs of feet were gone and my breathing slowed back to normal, I emerged, ready to make the firewalk to the club's front door. Suddenly, the other stall swung open, revealing a man who'd spat a curse at me earlier. We stared at each other, gulping.
"What do you think you're doing in here?" he snarled.
The miniature demon on my shoulder whispered a response in my ear. "Having a pee. What else?"
He snorted. "I'd punch you, but I don't hit women."
I felt a slash of familiar rage, a poison-tipped thorn in my mind. "Go ahead," I sneered. "I dare you."
Thank God, he didn't have the guts. He made a little "pssh" noise and stomped out. I was alone with the smell of urinal cakes and industrial soap. I looked over at the man in the mirror, the mustachioed man that was me. I smiled shakily at him, and he smiled back. Captain Blood, battle-weary. I felt a trilling reminder of that vertebral glissando of passage, grinned a bit more rakishly, and, emboldened, flipped him off. He returned my bird. We said in unison, "What did I come here looking for?" The words just hung there, gibbeted.
It was time to go, and forth I went, cocksure, navigating the crowd with a steady gait, my jaw set. Mercifully, my exit went unremarked upon.
"Hey man, have a good night," said the doorman on the sidewalk as I emerged from the club. His tone was sincere.
I cracked a smile. "Thanks, man. You, too."
I hailed a taxi, this one piloted by a thankfully silent and surly cabbie. I watched the streetlights trail past like flares and fireworks, thinking of pirates and pickpockets, bikers and bar brawls, poison and pestilence and trials by fire; cauterized wounds, vaccines, quicksilver; the difference between throwing something down in anger and just letting go.
At home, in front of my familiar mirror, I peeled away my mustache, and the man reflected there turned back into the woman I knew as myself. The flesh around my mouth was puffy and red, an unforeseen allergic reaction to the spirit gum.
