The Order of the Golden Dawn wasn't for me. That much I knew. Still, there was something strange. Even in the Christian orders my mother had brought me through they were chanting in strange tongues and casting demons. I don't mean they were speaking Latin, I mean they were going full-on glossolalia as men and women. They were having visions and they had gifts of the spirit. The Golden Dawn was just a book by Israel Regardie with different stuff in it than the book the Fellowship slung which was variations of canons, Maccabees and Enoch. In fact, the Sons of the Priests of the Christian Fellowship later initiated an Enoch Collective for harps, psalteries, and cymbals.
The Occult. Hidden knowledge was purportedly embedded in architecture, paintings, books, cards, tea leaves, and sins of divinare. There was a store that sold quartz crystals in the University town of Newark to the mystically inclined. Mario advised me that they may be doing something but it wasn't worth paying for. I didn't have any money. Still, you didn't need money for visions and derivations. Nor did you for divinations, but that I was told was wrong. If we could, as men, see what was hidden from us we were looking where we shouldn't. It was a fool's errand to consult an oracle, or to divine through mancy, and an offense to god.
Why then, did these things exist in broad daylight? I had read that women had been murdered because of Ergot on the rye and seen the Wizard of Oz. It was obvious that witchery was wrong. When we drove past a very lushly gardened house with iron gates wound with ivy, the Fellowship's Saul told me that a coven lived there and owned that house. How he knew this I do not know, but he did and let me in on the secret. "Why don't the police do anything then!?" I panicked? "Because witchcraft isn't illegal, the police don't care." I was thoroughly confused.
The world was on end, at it's end, and ending any day now. Like waiting for a bus or a train, I could not predict when, but it was going to come. No one would know when, they told me, because god would not say, but there would come a day that the world would end. "Probably in your lifetime," they told me.
When the worlds of genesis and youth became corrupt with vice and venom I left my small family for the world. The first place I went to was the Preacher's Son. Joshua scratched his head and listened to me tell my young story. Ang, his roommate, told me, "You are good. You will be fine." It was a strange sort of love she sent me and felt like a blessing. Joshua nursed his beer and mumbled about a guitar. He did do me right though, with all of his resources. So then I went feral. I was a young 14 and trying to find my role in the world.
They let me live with them, the college. I became a child of the University. I lived in girls' dorms, guy's drunken flop houses; I lived in houses on sofas as the houses changed tenants, like I was some feature of the edifice. Along the way I met a lot of young people with a lot of ideas. A girl named Sarah was very nice to me and I found myself flattered by affection. I lived with her in a room for a year. Someone compared me to Mowgli from Kipling's Jungle Book. I liked that.
I stole Marny's ritalin and gave myself a good dose of post traumatic stress disorder. Ending up in the University library I began behaving like a criminal trying to steal information. From shelfrow to shelfrow I slipped, searching for that answer that I would pilfer. What the hell was WRONG with me?!? It was in here somewhere, and by god I would find it. The Christians who told me that divination was a sin also claimed my grandmother. She would tell other Christians about how wonderful it was when she just opened the bible and the page fell to something for her especially. That, I felt, was bibliomancy! Well, then, call me a Bibliotecamancer and let me know.
I was totally fucked in the head. I sat there by candle trying to resonate Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Auriel. I didn't have a steel dagger. I had a butterknife. The butterknife became my go-to phurba. After a sojourn to Louisiana buoyed by the Fellowship and one sister of which who had the most lovely eyes and was so beautiful, an Armenian girl, I made an attempt to negotiate a return to domestic living with my mother and sister. I was promptly deceived and placed in a psych ward for youths. On my first visit to the cafeteria I slid a butterknife up my sleeve and then stowed it in my room.
Being so young to have life be so full of amazement with everything and to believe in magical things as I did I was a basketcase for real. For reasons of proper plot coursing, I told the kid in the next room over I would like to borrow his watch so that I could time the 15 min observation period checks from the nurses and techs. He did, but made me promise I would give it back. In fact, I left it on his windowsill on my way out.
Once the door opened and closed I thought I had 15 minutes. In reality, that was a presumption based on the notion that psych ward protocol would be followed precisely. Surely it wasn't. I listened to my roommate's breathing and he snored away on his psych meds. I slid the butterknife under the lock and popped the window open.
To this day I believe that god made that window lock for me. I can't describe it easily in words, but it was basically like they used metal screws and plates to bolt against the lever which would open it and lock that lever down. Even when the window did open when I broke the weak cast alloy plates to free the window, it only opened like 8 inches at max. There was a second catch for the window so that if it weren't locked it would only serve as a vent, not a port.
The nickname I adopted was "Itsy." Many people liked to make fun of it, and several very stupid and uninformed people asked if it were an allusion to my penis size. They thought that shit was clever. I was just small. I didn't want to be big, I didn't want to be seen. I wanted to be infinitesimal. My prayers were that god take back this whole world, that god would please just undo it. Infinitesimal indeed. "Infi" didn't have the same catch though. I slid through the slim opening and was outside in the cold.
It was frozen, the ground and there was old snow and ice. The air was crisp though, and I felt that electricity, the ether was charged. I placed my neighbor's watch on the outside of his windowsill, figuring that he could either ask one of the staff to retrieve it for him or not, but his puzzle wasn't my problem. I figured out how to get out, he could figure out how to get his watch back inside. The sky was cloudy and there was a purple amber light reflected in the low drawn clouds. HAHAA! I can win. Do not trick me. My mother and her lover had betrayed me and I was no longer her child, nor anyone else. If I could not trust her words then whose words then could I trust? I was a man of my own, father and all, and by no means fit for it.
That night I raced across their hospital grounds and across the street. I ran with such freedom and such natural levity, like a wild animal straight into the woods, knowing only that my instincts would guide me. I bounced over thickets and through thorns, but my freedom made me drunk from any fear or pain. As fast as a deer I flew through the woods until *splash* I was waist high in icy cold water. This was not a good sign, and I had become very sensitive, constantly seeking the omens, growing into my visions, becoming a seer, a ראה. Now I was a very wet young man on a night where ice didn't melt. It was clearly a profound trial.
I found train tracks and the moon lit them blue for me. They would lead north and south. There were people I knew to the south, in Newark that would help me to get dry and sleep in my victory over the tyranny of lies. I suppose I had a 50/50 chance of choosing the right direction, and no landmarks along a strip of rail through the woods. Still, having seen the sun in the psych hospital rise and set once calibrated me and I felt like I knew which way to go so I pressed on. The faster I moved the warmer I was. This was rhythmic and meditative and I sang songs in my head for divinity good and great.
When I encountered the road I was unsure. The brownies -- the county police -- or the bluey staties would surely take interest in such a small man walking down highways in the middle of the night. That would not do. I resolved to walk casually, subduing any fear and repelling the attention of those who would cage me. It was a ritual in its own right. Hitchhiking would attract no more or less attention, though I would be careful not to indicate with my thumb that I was adrift on the seas of suburban roadways until I knew that the headlights and car shape were not similar to patrol cars.
For as long as I can remember, I've hated police. They took away my dad, they came and lied to and were lied to by my grandmother, and my parents used them as armies against each other in some bizarre war that was their own type of love. I still hate police even though I have witnessed them do me a good turn or two, if you consider deciding not to further fuck with someone than you already have a good turn. That they enforce laws which may or may not be Right in the eyes and scales of mens hearts and Divine Omniscience, that they enforce laws which they may not believe are Right leaves me to conclude that they have betrayed their own sense of humility and love, that they have become tyrants faute de mieux. What's worse, they can choose as fallible men to enforce or ignore laws as they see fit. Either way, they're betraying something. Without them, though, I would have different contentions with someone else as an oppressor, and I am no more than them so I hate them with love and tolerance.
Late in the night, a woman pulled over. She was young to be a mother, but she spoke to me maternally. That night she drove me the remainder of the 14 miles between Meadowwood Hospital and Newark. I didn't tell her more than I needed to and she was either tender enough or tired enough not to probe. Maybe she didn't care. She dropped me off in Newark and I had arrived at my friends' friends house. Marco looked at me through confused and grumpy eyes, ready to close the door in my face but I pleaded and he pointed at the sofa. I went to sleep the victor. When I woke up, I had nothing but myself and was unwelcome at their apartment.
As time went by, I made my way and got by with a little help from a lot of friends. As mentioned, I stole Marny's ritalin --which was a horrible thing to do-- and became horribly tortured after I ingested it. I couldn't sleep and my mind raced and raved lunacy. So I stalked my quarry of information, my philosopher's stone deep in the University library. What -was- wrong with me? I could not account for my actions or antics. My thievery and lies were stalking me as I sought their own master, the origin of their motives. I was losing my innocence and was not letting it go without a fight.
I read about the Adamites, or the Brethren of the Free Spirits. Hieronymous Bosch, a mysterious man with many names in many places was charged with being a member, a ritualist as an Adamite. His paintings were geometrically profound, I could see through diagrams in books of his paintings what he was saying, the painted images and symbols or at least some of them. The thing is that the Adamites were trying to achieve lost innocence, a prelapsarian state through natural nudity and feral fucking. Unfortunately, though it is one of the better ideas for redemption that I've come across, I don't think it works that way.
After paranoia runs its course, the sufferer either encounters the threat or doesn't and in the process of fighting or fleeing it engages in some criminal or socially perverse antics that may make sense to the sufferer in defense of the Invisible Bureau of Investigation or whomever threatens him or doesn't and finds himself uncomfortable and sad, humiliated, and --quite literally-- emotionally gutted. So I found myself in the medical periodical section hiding from noone and searching for what was wrong with me. Flipping through some journal of Psychiatry inconspicuously I arrived at some article about sociopathy. The word sociopath scared me. I looked it with the nearest Psych reference I could find and read the most horrible things I could think to say about a person. It was all about me! Later I would be told that I am just self-centered and narcissistic, but in that library and on that day my soul was shattering. I was a MONSTER!
I had an answer what was wrong with me but I didn't feel any better. The ritalin hadn't worn off. Lost in a labyrinth of self, like discovering that I bleed if wounded, that I defecate if I eat, that my teeth are dirty dirty dirty and my tongue speaks nothing but hate and I, myself, my whole being, my soul is ugly and filthy and dirty. Do I kill it? I can't, can I? Sitting on the old stone wall of the post office, and staring down at the pavement I have never felt so dead.
Sid slid by and mocked me thoroughly. So quickly and so defensively I mentioned god, and he asked me questions like where did god come from. I spent time seeking the answer in my head. He laughed heartily at my confusion, my pain. Where did space come from? What was space in? The fallen human condition that Bill sprake, my stepfather, about which had roared laughing at me rang again and woke me from the comfort and trust of youth. This time it was in my own heart and there was no escape and no mother to protect me. Sid's perfect smile was joyously unrestrained, and he prodded further.
What is that forbidden knowledge, that light that some "serpent" gave through woman? Even today as a man past thirty I swat away creeping notions that Mephisto himself did visit me that day in young Sid. He taunted me in ways I can not imitate nor describe the smooth and almost gentle evil and brutality with which he did do. In the end, I was only completely certain that I was a monster and doubted that I could be saved from life itself, the great looming Heavens and Hells their own enormous problems on top of it all!
There were unforgivable sins, and perhaps in my flippant antics I had made an errant but blasphemous transgression and was no longer in the auspice of g-d. I was properly and thoroughly fucked.
He left me there and I began in my broken posture to become a stone chimera on the wall surrounding the United States Post Office Newark Delaware 19711-7307.
Mario stopped as he was passing me and I saw his shoes slowly turn to me. I followed them up his body to his head. He looked down at me with his own pout, like he and Sid had been in collaboration to break and mend me, and he was coming along to play "Good Cop". In reality this was all theatrics of my own twisted and drug addled psyche, drawing on the experience and pattern I have felt and seen. Mario was a clinical psychologist and on that day he was a good Samaritan. He asked me if I was OK.
"I'm a monster. I'm a sociopath and I don't deserve to live. I was in the library and..." Mario cut me off from my rant. He asked, "When was the last time you slept?" I had to think about it to answer him. "A couple of days maybe?" He told me in a very weary voice that I was not a monster, sociopath, and unfit to live and that the mere fact that I was so concerned about it eliminated me from that sort of unclinical categoric bullshit. "Get some sleep. I'm serious. Get up from that wall and go get some sleep." I knew a lot. This much I was sure. Sleep would not cure this malady. This was life. For every time you fell asleep you awoke to more of it, more of life, yourself, and your mind. I did find a quiet place on International's White Clay Creek Indian Reserve and I fell asleep. When I woke up I felt better and Mario made a little more sense. I wanted to exact revenge on Sid.
Later Mario took me to a meeting. It was in the Unitarian church. The meeting was for UFOlogists and those concerned with local extraterrestrial affairs. Reynold's had a wrap, a summary of the local sightings and events of interest. Later there was a speaker who did have, he claimed in front of a room of dozens of people, first hand experience with an alien. This man was Riley Martin. The alien he knew and even *represented* was named Tan. He was telling us about the Mothership that would come and collect a set of persons from Earth before the Earth fell apart somehow, and only those who had a "ticket" sort of paper would be collected. These tickets were on 8.5x11 paper, which is convenient for filing in the same cabinet as other papers.
One woman asked, "I have 11 cats. I don't want to go anywhere without my cats. Can I bring my cats?" Another explained, "I don't like being all cooped up. I need to walk around, stretch my legs and breathe fresh air. Is the mothership big enough to walk around on?" Riley satisfied their concerns and allayed their fears. Immediate family would be counted in the number and all would be well. Mario looked at me and said, "Any time you feel like you're crazy, like there is something wrong with you, remember this." I love Mario Pazzaglini for being that good to another soul, to my soul. Tickets were twenty dollars and could be purchased in the back of the room after the session.
As Mario and I approached the ticket table, Riley informed us that our tickets would be twenty dollars each. I just looked at Mario and said, "I don't have any money." I didn't. I never did. I don't now. Riley Martin looked at me with an intensity. He said, "You have a MAGNIFICENT spirit! MAGNIFICENT!" Mario concurred. I walked out with a ticket to the mothership on the house. I have since lost that ticket and will have to be content to be a really MAGNIFICENT spirit without any guarantee to be aboard that great vessel of salvation, the Mothership.
Sitting there with a butterknife and a candle, surrounded by lithe and perfect girls and acting like I do, they regarded me as insane I suppose. Only David reconciled my behavior with his older authority against their already fickle social calls. I really was trying to perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. It was the beginning of the book. At least I could sort of understand this one. The visions they had in that Fellowship sometimes devolved into casting judgement cloaked in prophecy on other souls and became a comedy to me. I spoke in tongues because surely -I- had the Gift of the Spirit and not just the one, either. Visions, apparitions, smoke and mirrors. I had them all.
One day in the hot hot summer of I don't know when, Yaysung's cousin brought me along to work a day for pay. I was to be a carnie in Penn's Grove, NJ. He told me that Bruce Willis might even show up. It sounded good, especially if I were to be paid. When we got to the lot and set up from our truck, Yaysung's cousin and his own friend gave me the short end of the stick. I had to lie to every paying customer. It felt so fucking bizarre, the whole thing. The idea was a baseball pitch radar. The problem was that I wanted the kids to feel super so I lied too big. The first little kid and his dad came up and paid. I pointed the Radar Gun that was completely not a Radar Gun but a stupid piece of plastic across the trajectory of the pitch.
"The Radar Gun gave the kid 37mph. Not bad for a first pitch!", I barked. I was a natural. I started commenting real loud like it was a baseball game and the television is turned up so loud that your deaf-ass great grandfather can hear it in case he can't see it. "The kid's setting up... He's got his signal...Looks like a fastball!!! WOW!!! THE RADAR GUN CLOCKED THE KID AT 88MPH! HE'S A KILLER!" You see, I thought I was being conservative since the Rocket Roger Clemens back when he came up with the BoSox was cracking 100. The problem was that the father knew I was full of shit and the Radar Gun wasn't plugged into anything.
He demanded to see the result. Suddenly the gun "went dark". It does happen sometimes, you know. "Give me back my money." he was fucking serious. The father started looking around for an authority greater than myself to settle this with. There were two local cops leaning on their patrol car just twenty yards off. My boss, the kooky cunt that he was, raced the father to the police and explained, "The Radar Gun must have gone on the fritz. Do you think we can use your radar officer?" The police consulted each other and then gave us a negative. My job was over after my first client as a carnie. They paid me ten bucks for the day. I was pissed.
My mother looked down at me and god knows what she thought of my ululations and palatial clicks. I was all about beat boxing the Wholy Spirit. It was a parade of greatness every Sunday. When it got quiet and the lights were turned off the prophecies came out. I was never allowed to give mine. I did dig though, deep in my psyche and heart for the truth for all of us. It just wasn't there I suppose. I was, after all, a rather nihilistic youth in some ways but I still saw god presiding over all the nothingness. If they would have let me, I'd have given them the ripdown on the mic when it was praise and glossolalia. God would have really liked that.
I'm sitting at a table with a projection of cardinal posse of archangels around me and teenage girls confounded and an older brother who somehow understands my intent and wants to help me. At least I stole the copy of Regardie's Golden Dawn, and the literary goliath that is Border's Books caught the cost. David was telling me something important when he said that you can't make everything fit together. I don't think his statement as I represent it is true, but what he was telling me was not to go insane. I didn't listen. East is the direction of the dawn, indeed. Later I just learned to throw salt at the corners, and yes I am insane.
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