by Harvey Lillywhite
What unreasonable thing can I say about the Devil aimed straight at the heart? My regard for D’Evil, the forbidden, the dark side, an impulse to peek at the victim of the big night car crash on the freeway with police, the fire engines, chaos of blue and red flashing lights—secretly I wish to see a head or bloody body—this nosiness is petty, but not evil.
True evil is a calculation where I’ve fallen out of love with the world, no doubt trying to avoid pain, where I come to see the people and objects around me merely as things, there only for my own use, forgetting that love has got to be, in addition to whatever else it may be, a pain, an astonishing pain. Maybe the Devil is the way out, the transcendent, losing touch, quite literally, with the hurtful and thus truly, albeit only flashingly, enlightening mortal world?
My own encounters with people who were purely evil have been, luckily, extremely few, and even those few who seemed to me purely evil I didn’t know well at all. I have met, however, quite a few people whose grief has transformed them not into more thoughtful and sensitive souls but into frightened, tough bullies willing to hurt anyone to protect themselves. And, being honest, I’ll admit to having some of this angry sadness in me—probably somewhere in all of us.
I did a fair amount of hitchhiking when I was a teenager, both locally where I lived in Salt Lake City and from coast to coast and throughout the western USA in the early 1970s. (Proudly, I recall hitching from New Haven to Salt Lake City in three days at a cost of one dollar, which I volunteered for gas.) Along the way I did meet a few villains.
One great ride I got was through the state of Pennsylvania and through the Lincoln Tunnel right into Manhattan in a VW van with three members of a motorcycle gang (club?) called “The Huns,” who were just returning from a convention. (Checking the internet this morning, I see the “club” still exists today throughout the USA.) The robin’s-egg blue paint of the VW van was faded and rusted a little. The VW logo on front had been embellished. Someone had painted red and orange wings and a gnarly eagle’s head with menacing curved beak and a pair of razor-sharp talons ready to grab anyone who came close.
There were three Huns. One was passed out in the back of the van. They had their big, dirty leather jackets with the gang logo very nicely arranged on the back—the words “The Huns” boastful and meticulously embroidered. They were a bit like the high-school lettermen’s jacket my older brother wore. One Hun had two fingers missing. Two of them had missing teeth. There were no seats in the van besides the driver’s seat. The van was empty (we all sat on the floor, or dozed off) except for a magnificent Harley in the back, polished and shining and a large metal box of tools that scraped back and forth in the back of the van when it made any sharp turn.
When the van stopped for me, I ran up to get in, wondering if I should be fearing for my life just a little. But, in those days, at six foot two and about 165 pounds, in my gray zippered sweatshirt, jeans torn at the knees, and long, flowing hair, I guess I didn’t pose much of a threat to any of them. Pretty soon they regaled me with stories about “The Huns”: there’d been confrontations with the cops, shootings, stabbings, lots of drugs and sex in the oral history I was offered. It had been chronicled in a Connecticut newspapers that the Huns were the most arrested and least convicted motorcycle club in the USA, a fact that the driver, named Rooster, was very proud of. I remember his leather gloves with the fingers cut away, the red bandana he wore as a hat, and his red hair flaming out on all sides. His beard, too, red and stubbly.
Rooster did actually stop twice as we drove through the Pennsylvania mountains to seriously check out road kill. He had a huge knife strapped to his side. The first time he came back empty-handed. But the second time he brought back a mashed raccoon for me to, what? admire? I guess. And then he skinned it by the side of the road while we waited and tossed it into a duffle bag heaped where the passenger seat should have been.
I was strangely unfazed. My own father was a sportsman. I’d seen him skin a few animals. (I have to admit, growing up in the west, I’d cleaned tons of fish and had skinned a rabbit before and helped my brother skin a deer that had gotten hit by our house.) The whole incident was calculated, I think, to frighten me or at least to impress me, to keep me wondering whether I was being given a free ride to NYC or had just been kidnapped. They were, after all, “The Huns.” Or, I guess, just individually, proud “Huns” themselves with a certain image to protect. I got that.
I acted impressed. And I thanked them, like brothers, when I hopped out of the van in NYC. I think the driver invited me to their next convention: “If you’re up in Albany next June, be sure and look us up,” I think Rooster said as I waved good-bye. “Sure thing,” I returned. These days, I think they may be part of the tea-party movement? I know they’re not overly fond of the government coming around to help.
No, these weren’t Devils, just some guys who’d manage to find an alternate reality that worked for them and made them feel good about themselves—real successes in life— which is a good feeling for any of us to muster. In their case, their personal success was quite obviously true. I admire the Devil who is true to himself, I suppose, and above lying to himself.
The trick is to find a set of standards you can live down to, a comfortable set of standards by which you can assess your own life and deem yourself a great one. What’s the use of comparing yourself to standards that are unreachable and just make you depressed all the time? Well, now we’re into psychology, public policy, and civics. The standard for The Huns seemed to be a single word: freedom. An awfully big word, I admit. But at least it can be interpreted in ten thousand ways, so there’s something there for just about everyone.
Another, more tragic, villain I met up with hitching when I was 20 or so, about 15 miles from my home, in a place north of Salt Lake City called Rose Park, where I’d been taken to a giant party. A very ugly place, by the way. What’s in a name, right? The party was horrid, and I got angry at the friends who’d brought me there. To show my anger, I decided to walk all the way home without telling them. (Yes, I was quite a rebel and trouble-maker.) It was around two in the morning. The neighborhoods I was walking through were bad (don’t laugh—Salt Lake City has its share of murders and bad neighborhoods, even back in 1973).
I didn’t have any money with me. I decided to hitch a ride home. The guy who stopped in a ’58 Chevy turned out to be a kid I went to school with. He was a Greek kid. His parents spoke almost no English. They’d come to Utah to work in the mines. Back in the 4th grade, George Xiahose, was a scrawny, clumsy, and sort of dumb kid.
There were a clutch of Greek families in the little mining town I grew up in. Most of them were very well off. The kids were like, well, Greek gods and goddesses. (I was in love, from a distance, with Georgina Angelopoulos all through the 11th grade. But she was a good girl, waiting for a doctor to marry….) But not George. Nobody liked him. He was teased and bullied endlessly, mainly because he was small and foreign. But I walked home with him most days in 4th grade.
He taught me the Greek alphabet and a few Greek words: “As to thialo,” “archimalakas,” and “pa na gamy-thees.” He told me I didn’t know the Greek alphabet until I could repeat it three times before a match could burn out. He’d light a match—something I remember he liked to do back then—and I’d recite until I could finally do it.
So it had been about ten years already. I had heard that George had became a tough guy in high school, but I literally never saw him. I think he went to Viet Nam when he was 16 and may have just come back at that point, but who knows. When I introduced myself, George remembered me, I think. He looked a little sickly, but in a tough way. He explained that now he sold drugs and guns for a living. And he didn’t take any shit from anybody anymore. He pulled a pistol out of his coat. “This,” he said, wagging the pistol, “is my muscle. This is how I do my talking. Anybody mess with me, I’ll kill the sonofabitch. I don’t care.” And I knew it wasn’t just talk. He was dead serious.
I wondered if I’d been mean to him at all at any time in high school. But I truly couldn’t recall a single meeting with him. I felt like reciting the Greek alphabet to make him remember me and better days. Or maybe I could remember some of the Greek swear words he’d taught me. But I decided that calling him an asshole, even in his native tongue, might not be the best thing to do while he had a gun in his hand. Life had corrupted him and seemed to make him forget much of what’s good. No more the empty cup I had known waiting to be filled with wonder.
He told me that he was rich now. He told me he had all the women he wanted. He even asked if I wanted to go to a party. But I realized that parties in Rose Park and around West High, where we were then, were not so great. I also recall, just at that point, passing St. Marks Hospital, where I was born. A strange confluence of events. I felt like the mouse who’d pulled a thorn from the lion’s paw only to meet up with the lion years later. Like a timid date, I asked George to take me home, which he did. I never saw him again. Maybe he had become the Devil. But, to me, he was inexplicably generous. I think he would have granted me my deepest wish had he been able. My immediate wish then was simply to find my way safely home.
There was also a pathetic driver of an 18-wheeler, who gave me a lift once in Colorado. He told me, as we chugged very slowly up a Rocky Mountain pass, that we were coming to a rest stop and that if I didn’t have sex with him he’d kill me. That was scary.
I sat with my backpack in my lap. I opened the door and leaped out. We were going so slow I wasn’t hurt much. My clothes were a little ripped up as I tumbled. I had a big scrape on my shoulder, but I survived. Who knew if he was serious. Maybe he was the Devil.
Finally, as I think about the Devil, enemy of God and humankind, tempter, soul-killer, agent of decay and chaos, I’m reminded of something Stephen Hawking said: “We live because of the imperfections of creation.” As a child of TV cartoons, I remember the figure who contemplated—a white, haloed angel hovering on one shoulder, a red, horned devil on the other shoulder—whether to steal the apple pie cooling in an open kitchen window, the aroma visible as a wispy vapor tickling his nose. I’ve known people at war with the devil and with the angel. Luckily, though, I’ve made peace with them both, have accepted them into my life.
So I wonder about evil, about the Devil.
I know there’s a church of Satan. Here’s the first thing you see on their webpage:
Welcome to the official website of the Church of Satan. Founded on April 30, 1966 c.e. by Anton Szandor LaVey, we are the first above-ground organization in history openly dedicated to the acceptance of Man’s true nature—that of a carnal beast, living in a cosmos which is permeated and motivated by the Dark Force which we call Satan. Over the course of time, Man has called this Force by many names, and it has been reviled by those whose very nature causes them to be separate from this fountainhead of existence. They live in obsessive envy of we who exist by flowing naturally with the dread Prince of Darkness. It is for this reason that individuals who resonate with Satan have always been an alien elite, often outsiders in cultures whose masses pursue solace in an external deity. We Satanists are our own Gods, and we are the explorers of the Left-Hand Path. We do not bow down before the myths and fictions of the desiccated spiritual followers of the Right-Hand Path.
Fair enough. But what’s truly interesting to me is the small print at the bottom of the page:
[The entire contents of this site, unless otherwise noted, are copyrighted © 1999—2010 c.e. by the Church of Satan and/or Hell’s Kitchen Productions, Inc., and are thus protected by international copyright and trademark laws. YOU MAY NOT MODIFY, COPY, REPRODUCE, REPUBLISH, UPLOAD, POST, TRANSMIT, OR DISTRIBUTE, IN ANY MANNER, THE MATERIAL ON THE SITE, INCLUDING TEXT, GRAPHICS, CODE AND/OR SOFTWARE WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE ABOVE NAMED OWNERS. You may print and download portions of material from the different areas of the site solely for your own non-commercial use provided that you agree not to change or delete any copyright or proprietary notices from the materials.]
I guess even “alien elites,” people who are their own Gods, who say they don’t “bow before the myths and fictions of … desiccated spiritual followers of the Right-Hand Path” still depend on “the law,” on history, on conventions such as legal corporations, international copyright protection and trademarks laws, and that most civilized of institutions, permission. Does Evil ask permission? I think not. Even the Satanists seem to respect certain human rights.
So have I met the Devil? I try to stay in touch with everything around me in as loving a way as I can. That’s not saying much sometimes. I try to be honest, even about the evil in me. But, warned by poets like Rumi—“If you are unwilling to undress / don’t enter into the stream of truth”—I know how quickly you can come to a place where the world seems so incredibly small. Not a good place to be.
Finally, the forces that kill and give life, side by side, are woven into the structure of the fabulous pink blossoms that have suddenly popped on the cherry tree in our backyard this week. How is it I’ve managed to keep my balance between them?