It affected him like the first manic vision of a would-be saint: his first Hollywood role. Afterward, there would be much struggling and compromise, an endless effort to return to that original moment.
When he was ten, he began begging his father for the leftover ends of film from the home movies they made on their vacations. He examined the black Bolex camera, the riddles of apertures and shutter speeds, the light meter, the different filters for indoors and outdoors. He shot little fragments that evoked unexpected emotions: a few seconds of his sister brushing her hair with her fingers, or stepping out of a car in a long dress. He worked out scenarios in his mind, fairy tales involving kings and sorcerers and princesses, power struggles that ended not with a plot twist but an image: a candle burning on his parents’ dresser, a potted hyacinth on the kitchen table, a patch of sky between cypress trees. He found by accident that if he spliced together snippets from the family’s home movies — group poses at Yosemite or Big Sur — the images took on a different meaning, a lonely, distant quality, as if his family were strangers or dead. The images seemed more real than the moments they recorded. They made everything suggestive and strange, as if highlighted or outlined.
He filmed the family Christmas tree, bestrewn with silver tinsel and colored glass balls. A few weeks later, he filmed its undressing, the ornaments packed away in boxes. Then he filmed the bare, broken tree on the grill inside the fireplace, the flames slowly reaching up to its limbs until it had withered to a charred skeleton. It was only after watching it in his room on the bare wall that he realized what the film was about. It was about the holiday’s actual meaning, the story of Christ told in some strange new language that only he seemed to be aware of.
It was a lot of knowledge to carry around by himself. Sometimes he spent time with his sister, Jean, playing Chutes and Ladders in her bedroom, listening to Frank Sinatra records, watching her try on makeup. He kept going to the movies with his grandmother and Meg. He fell in love with actresses who were elegant and strong, brought down in the end by loneliness or jealousy or age, but always wittier and dressed with more flair than their rivals. He daydreamed that he was a girl himself, leaving home for an uncertain career, embarking on a life of struggle and tribulation.
What it amounted to at first was a certain preoccupation he had with photographs of men, particularly well-dressed, capable men who seemed at ease in their own skin. The sight of their faces would strike him in the center of his chest with a feeling of both menace and safety, as if they could see inside him but were somehow protective of what they found there. Executives who carried briefcases, combat pilots standing before their airplanes, their eyes screened by sunglasses — for a long time, he wasn’t aware of what drew him to these men, only that they made him alert and still. He found them in movie magazines, in fashion ads, in recruitment propaganda for the armed services. They hailed cabs in raincoats, or twisted at the waist to meet his gaze. When he finally understood how important they were to him, how much they cost him in guilt, it was like discovering a new birthmark in the crook of his leg, a stain that had to be studied carefully in order to be assimilated. It was like the feeling of spying or eavesdropping, a practice that became harder to resist once you had started doing it, no matter how appalled you were, until the loathing itself became a part of the fascination.
In dreams, a hive of bees would push itself slowly through the skin of his mother’s face. The family would appear as monkeys, crashing over the dinner table with inflamed genitals, their hands full of food. In the blue glow of a city covered in ice, a young girl with a dog’s slender body would drag a cart full of glowing coals through empty streets. The dreams were full of irrational feelings — a sudden urge to eat rotten fruit, a calm fascination with snipping off the ends of his own fingers — fears that modulated into a cocooned sense of safety. His father would appear as a fat man with a few strands of oily hair and an old-fashioned pin-striped suit. When Kenneth began unbuttoning his father’s vest, he nestled Kenneth’s face against his chest, and Kenneth felt two long rows of nipples beneath his undershirt.
One night, he came downstairs to find his father still awake, reading the newspaper in his armchair. He looked at Kenneth for a moment in openmouthed uncertainty, as if on the verge of sleep. His glasses were slightly crooked on the bridge of his nose, his hair a disheveled spray of dark fronds.
“I want you to look at something,” his father said. Then he rested his paper on the ottoman before him and stood up slowly in his slippers and robe. “I want you to see if there’s anything over here that you can salvage.”
He was indicating a neat pile of his own clothes, which he had stacked on the side table by the door. They were old trousers and work shirts, a pile of laundered garments that had been reserved for work in the garage.
“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 emp
ty 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.
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