Satan Wants Me (2 page)

Anyway rapping on mandies was a good scene and Cosmic and I went off on another of our riffs. I had been saying that I could not understand why women ever had sex with men, as women were much nicer. Who could ever really fancy a man – all that hardness and hairiness?

‘Pooves can,’ said Cosmic.

‘I can’t stand pooves,’ I replied.

‘That is your hang-up,’ said Cosmic. ‘If you are going to make any progress on the occult path, you have to make yourself ready for anything. The astral is no place to be having bourgeois inhibitions.’

‘But it is so revolting – poking about in people’s arses!’

‘Unnatural sex is customarily used to generate occult energies. You’ve read your Crowley.’

(Actually I haven’t much. It’s Cosmic who avidly reads all that stuff. Cosmic who, unlike me, has not had the benefit of a formal education, is a self-made freak. He has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps to become like a sort of guru on the Bardo Thodol, auras, kundalini sex and shoplifting.)

‘If you are going to get anywhere in Satanism you have to get used to the idea,’ Cosmic continued. ‘It is an integral part of making the dark forces work for you. After all the Prince of Darkness is himself a horny poove.’

‘A horny poove,’ Sally muttered reverently.

‘And one bleak afternoon in winter, he will come looking for you,’ continued Cosmic. ‘You will be walking on Hampstead Heath. You are alone and wish you were not. Then you see that you may not be alone after all. A man – the figure is a bit indistinct – but you think it is a man – is on the path below. He is looking up the hill at you and he is gesturing to you. Then as you watch you see him start to make his way up the path towards you … ’

‘I decide not to wait for him. He, whoever he is, cannot possibly want anything from me. I take a path to the left into the trees. I am walking quite fast and I am optimistic that this man will not persist in his pursuit of me – if indeed it is a pursuit. But then when I look back, I see that he too has entered the little wood and that he is gaining on me. I break into a run. When I next look back … ’

‘When you next look back you see that he has broken into a run too and there is something a little odd about the way he runs. It is a kind of stagger for the Devil has remarkably wide hips and you catch a glimpse of his long prick and wizened scrotum swinging between his legs as he lurches behind you … ’

‘The distance between us is diminishing. With a muffled sob, I throw myself off the path and plunge into the bushes. This was a mistake. The branches catch at my clothes. My face, as it becomes studded with thorns, runs with blood. I have a vague sense of tiny monstrous creatures under foot. The wood is alive with whispering things. Then I am tripped by a branch and the Devil, red-eyed and snout-faced, is upon me. I am hot and flushed. Too breathless to speak, I look up at him and with my eyes, I appeal for mercy. But he, perversely misunderstanding the nature of my appeal, rips at my silver shirt. At the last moment I muster enough breath to cry, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” … ’

‘And he takes you at your word and, rolling you over on your bed of thorns and leaves, he yanks your white flared jeans down. With his claws he pulls the cheeks of your arse apart and sets to coldly sodomising you. The Devil’s prick is very long and cold, like a meat-flavoured popsicle, and, sobbing and sighing with exhaustion and shame, you surrender to its icy assault. Yeah, that’s what sex with the Devil is going to be like!’

‘At least it was not raining,’ I said.

‘Unlike the time you slept with Sally’s corpse,’ Cosmic added.

(It was typical of me to add, ‘At least it was not raining.’ Whenever anything bad happens to me, I always immediately come up with an ‘At-least-it’s not’, kind of thought. Like if I miss a bus, I might think ‘At least the lecture I am going to be late for is on a boring subject’. If I ever end up having both my legs amputated, I shall probably find myself thinking, ‘At least I have still got all my own teeth’. When I heard of my mother’s cancer, I noticed that immediately I thought, ‘At least I haven’t got it too’. I am very aware of such thoughts. If it is possible to achieve total Enlightenment through sheer introspection, then I reckon I’m in the running for total Enlightenment.)

At the end of our riff, Cosmic was rabbiting on about how occultists teach that the Devil has no prick of his own, so, whenever he wants sex, he manufactures a temporary prick out of condensed vapours. Also about how the Devil’s prick is very thin – just like Cosmic’s. Cosmic’s prick is short and thin and he was thinking of setting up a League of Men with Small Penises … But all this talk of pervy sex was making Sally desperately randy. So she hustled him out of my room on the pretext that we were sleepy and wanted to go to bed. Then she threw herself on me, saying that she wanted me inside her straightaway, so I hastily started picking her nose, but apparently this sort of penetration was not what she had in mind. Then I attempted normal screwing, but this was not what she had in mind either. Tonight she wanted to do it doggy style and she was woofing joyously as I mounted her from behind. Even when it was over she was still playing at being a bitch, rolling over to have her tummy rubbed and then vigorously licking my face. Next she was going to practice peeing like a dog in the bath, but I managed to dissuade her from this. Her current manner of peeing is bad enough, God knows. Sally has got it into her head that it is degrading for women to have to pee sitting down, so she now pees standing up, straddling wide and with her pelvis thrust forward, but it can be a pretty messy business. I expect she will get better with practice – plus she should give up wearing tights.

Sally made a few snuffly and whimpering noises before drifting off. I stayed awake to write this – my diary. All this on a student grant! Life is really too much! And that really is exactly what student grants should be for – learning about life. Thanks very much Social Science Research Council!

This morning I decided that it was time to bite on the bullet and talk to Sally about how she should stop wearing tights. I was trying to sell her this notion on the basis that it would be easier for her to do her standing-up peeing that way. However, she was not fooled, as she is perfectly aware that I prefer her wearing stockings and suspenders. God knows, the miniskirt is the greatest thing invented this century. Breathtakingly simple, but still a great invention. Surely Mary Quant must be in the running for the Nobel Prize? The mini is like the Veil in the Temple of Mystery, but a Mystery which is easily penetrated. The big trouble with the mini though is that now some women have started wearing tights, so that that entrancing gap between the stocking top and the line of the panties has been abolished. Sally was not too happy about renouncing tights, but since she is my chick she has to dress for me. As I explained to her, the clothes women wear are in a more profound sense men’s clothes, since they are chosen to please men. It is men who like dresses. (However men’s clothes are just men’s clothes as men dress to please themselves.)

Anyway after lingering in bed a bit, so I could watch Sally put on a suspender-belt, stockings and a body-hugging jersey mini-dress, I went round to St Joseph’s with a letter of introduction from Michael and arranged to start observing there tomorrow. Graffiti on the school wall: ‘Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down’. All this sociological observing of the school playground could be a bit draggy. As I see it, doing research is just a way of not working – of putting off getting a job. I just can’t get my head round work. The idea of doing a set pattern of actions or else one does not get enough money to eat is just so weird. I don’t know how people manage work.

Tried to score an LP. Almost bought
Are You Experienced
, but didn’t. Nobody seems to be producing decent music these days. This diary-keeping is freaky, but what’s the point of it? Read more Crowley. A lot of that man’s stuff reads like a joke.

When I woke up this morning I decided that I was dead. I can’t remember how I died or what my previous existence was like, but that is sort of the point. London is the Spectral City in the Afterlife. There can be no other explanation for the strangeness of London and its grey lifelessness. At every hour the big red buses ferry more crowds of the newly dead into the City of Shadows. Sally and I and the rest of us are spirits who have to hover about in this deceitful place until we wake up to full consciousness of our true state and we manage to shed any lingering attachment to our former mode of existence. Aye, and what then? I resolve to be on the lookout for those tiny clues which will prove to me that I am indeed dead. MEMO: investigate the possibility that my dreams may contain confused memories of my previous existence.

Corpse or not, I had my research to do so I went off and sat on a wall and started observing the children in the playground of St Joseph’s. I can’t get my head round where those kids are at. The social world of children is a truly weird scene. Took lots of notes anyway.

Dear Diary, in the evening I went up to the Lodge and
attended my first Black Mass
! Grooved on the robes and incense and the sprinkling of cockerel’s blood. I was gazing hard at the shadows in the corner of the room, because I thought the spirit, Aiwass, was due to make an appearance, but apparently not. Tried to detect the auras of my fellow celebrants and failed there too – unless that faint phosphene-like glow is really some kind of spiritual emanation, rather than some kind of optical malfunction. It is so hard to be sure about supernatural matters. According to Mr Cosmic, there is a powerful Evil Spirit going about on the astral disguised as God. It is impossible for someone who has only normal human faculties to penetrate the disguise. Which reminds me, when Sally asked Cosmic what was the most horrific thing he could imagine, he said that it was to be reincarnated over and over again for all eternity as a slug. If the Evil Spirit who is impersonating God succeeds in taking over completely, that will probably actually happen to Cosmic and, come to think of it, I will end up having sex with someone who is middle-aged. At least I won’t have to do the razor-studded banister as well – or will I?

Before celebration of the Mass, we new entrants all had our horoscopes cast by Laura. (She’s the old bag who is the Lodge’s specialist astrologer.) Laura gave me a very peculiar look. Mine was very significant apparently. Partly it was the particular day that I was born, my being Sagittarius and, more precisely, it was the fact that Venus was in Virgo at the hour I was born. Felton and Granville came over and clucked over my birth-chart. Felton said that my birthday was my destiny, whatever that means.

‘And your destiny has brought you to us,’ Felton continued. ‘It may well be that you are the man we have been waiting for all these years.’

He wouldn’t say anything more. But wow man! It was like I was the Messiah or something. I have always rather fancied being the Messiah. Why shouldn’t He be me after all? It could be that I have just temporarily forgotten my true nature. Yet I can’t both be the Messiah and be dead. I shall have to keep looking for clues in order to decide which I am. On the other hand, it is very plausible that the Black Book Lodge feeds this spiel about special destiny to every gullible new entrant.

However I’m slightly fucked off to learn that Mr Cosmic, Ron and Alice have all been assigned to Laura, while I have Dr Felton as my guide during the probationary period. After the rituals were concluded I asked Alice if I could buy her a drink in the pub at the end of the road. She said no, she wasn’t thirsty. I said it wasn’t a matter of thirst, and that I was making a sociable gesture. She said yes, that was what she had thought, but she wasn’t interested in sociable gestures. She was only interested in discovering the ultimate truth about the nature of existence. Then, seeing me look a bit hurt, she added that it was nothing personal, but she had no time to waste on being friendly and she could see from my clothes and hair that I was not a serious person. Jeezus, it’s not even as if Alice is attractive or anything. She has long frizzy hair and scowls a lot. I think the reason she is interested in the ultimate nature of existence is that she looks so awful. There has to be an explanation.

Awoke quite early but lay in bed for ages listening to
Aftermath
and thinking. Most people in films and books are attractive looking. But in real life, most people, the people I see on buses, are actually pretty ugly. The norm is ugliness – which is fine for Cosmic. He says that he actually prefers ugly girlfriends, since they are more natural, less glossy. (Of course, it may also be that ugly girls are readier to settle for Cosmic’s small penis.) But for me, Sally represents the absolute minimum standard of beauty I am prepared to put up with. Last year, just before I met him, Cosmic was going about in the streets and stopping women to take their photos and, only when he had got his pictures, did he explain that he was photographing them because they were so fascinatingly ugly. Most of them were pretty pissed off to hear this, but incredibly he did actually go to bed with a few of them.

Can’t stop listening to
Aftermath
. It really blows my mind. LPs are my spirit-guides on the journey of life. Cosmic was saying last week that the Stones are heavily into Satanism. Maybe, but I can’t see them fitting into the scene at the Lodge. Had thesis supervision with Michael. He was as hung-up as ever and he kept on and on about how important it was to organise one’s material. Finished reading Berger and Luckman’s
Social Construction of Reality
. It’s obsessive. If I could grok half of what the Stones are on about, I wouldn’t be fucking around with all this sociology crap. Sally rang – a long draggy call. She was going on and on about what I had told her about the Lodge and how dangerous it is. Tonight her question was whether I thought sexual pleasure was greater for a man than a woman.

Also she wanted to know if I really was going to submit my diary to inspection by the Satanists tomorrow? And, if so, had I put all the stuff in it about our freaky sex, drug-taking and fantasies about the Devil? I told her natch. If it’s too much for them, then that’s their hang-up. They have to take me as they find me, since, as far as I am concerned, they are on probation, not me. If they are too straight and stodgy to take me as I am, I have plenty of other things to try – like the Process, or Divine Light, or Ouspenskyism, or that witches’ coven in Islington, or Scientology, or Esalen. I’m easy – except that, if I am going to stick with the Black Book Lodge, I would definitely like to see some demons. I have noticed that lots of young men go into occult groups in the hope of meeting and pulling birds, but with me it’s demons I am hoping to encounter.