LaVey - Fetish girl: a memoir of sex, domination and motherhood

Fetish Girl

Copyright 2018 Bella LaVey

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-63152-435-6 pbk

ISBN: 978-1-63152-436-3 ebk

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945616

For information, address:

She Writes Press

1569 Solano Ave #546

Berkeley, CA 94707

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

Book design by Stacey Aaronson

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

Dedicated to Megan Guppy

My anam cara and memory keeper.

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; Im beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isnt pleasant, its not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

Hermann Hesse, Demian (Suhrkamp Verlag, May 3, 1996; originally published 1919)

I hadnt seen this coming. Wrapped in a Balinese sarong, I crouched barefoot in a small cottage where Id delivered my son, Wolfy, three months earlier. We were here with the babys father, Arjuna, attempting to survive the most powerful storm in Hawaiis history. It was September 11, 1992, and Hurricane Iniki had descended on Kauai.

For at least an hour, tree limbs and debris battered the tiny dwelling. The last hit sounded like someone had whacked the house with a two-by-four. We cant stay here, I whispered to my infant, covering his ears with my hands.

I think it sounds worse than it actually is, said Arjuna.

I didnt want to take that chance. Grab his baby blanket, I cried. Cmon.

The only designated shelter on Kauais North Shore was the luxurious Princeville Hotel, ten miles away. More than a thousand people had crammed into the hotels conference rooms, grand ballroom, and corridors. I climbed the stairs and navigated the hotel with my baby clutched in my arms and his diaper bag slung over my shoulder. Arjuna trailed behind, bopping out an African beat on an air drum. Finally, when we reached the top floor, people in the hallway moved aside and made room. I set my bag down, leaned back against the wall, opened my shirt, and nursed.

Id met Arjuna in California less than a year before, performing on the streets of Laguna Beach. He drummed, I danced. Keeping the beat and sharing the rhythm had been the sole focus of our relationship in and out of the bedroom. He lived at the Laguna Beach Hare Krishna temple where we conceived my son. On the walls of his makeshift bedroom were posters of the blue Lord Krishna playing his flute to a cow and the Hindu god Shiva sprawled on a tiger skin with a cobra coiled around his neck. Just the kind of heady mix of sex and gods that I craved.

Idealistic but not stupid, I knew from the start I was parenting solo. The news of my pregnancy came as an offering I could receive or reject. I was twenty-six years old. Old enough, but without viable support, no college degree, and no stable relationship. I never wanted to be a mother, but I had otherworldly reasons for keeping my child.

When Id broken the news that I was pregnant, Arjuna jabbered on about how abortion was an abominable act, a sin. My eyes rolled. His philosophy was to simply chant Hare Krishna. He was a militant vegetarian and went crazy every time I ate fish. Youre poisoning the baby, hed say. I admired Arjunas spiritual devotion but fantasized about stuffing his prayer beads down his throat.

Music and sex are powerful bonds and despite our differences we moved to Kauai when I was five months pregnant. The Garden Island was the closest Id ever been to paradise. It seemed like the ideal place to bring a child into the world. Plus, Arjuna said welfare was the hippie racket on the island, and wed have no problem getting by on HUD and food stamps.

After the birth, I sought out a relationship counselor. She encouraged me to end my relationship and find a way out of the welfare rut. Without resentment and with only a smattering of irony, I came to think of Arjuna as The Cumtributor. Sperm donor had too hostile and sterile a ring.

Did I tell you he wanted me to name my son Hari Das? I asked the counselor. Can you imagine growing up with a name like that? Hows it going, Harry Ass? We both laughed.

My birth name was Melissa Morrow, but in ceremony my shamanic teacher, a Cherokee woman I loved, had given me the name Medicine Wolf Who Knows No Fear. My son belonged to my tribe. I had my own chants, my own beliefs, and my own practices. I named my son Forest Wolf.

Since graduating high school, I knew I wanted to be a healer and a priestess. I eschewed traditional academics for my version of college. At nineteen I boarded a Greyhound bus from New Hampshire to Wisconsin for a Wiccan-Shamanism apprenticeship with Selena Fox. A year later I studied with Donna Talking Leaves. She taught me how to communicate with a stick, cleanse my spirit with smoke, leave my body with breath, and heal with a feather. At a rainbow gathering in Hearts Content, Pennsylvania I met Starhawk. She led me, and women of all ages, through a rite of passage that brought me into deep communion with my womanhood. I learned the power of ritual, how to weave spells with song, and how to align to the phases of the moon. Perhaps because I was so young and hadnt yet developed a skeptical eye, the magical world embraced me. I was a natural. I understood the energetic realms and innately walked between physical and spiritual worlds.

After a year of travel in Central America, I moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where one of my teachers had offered me a job. I spent the next year and a half as the program assistant to an internationally known crystal energetics teacher. I matched his zealous devotion and took vows of celibacy. But at age twenty-four, after a terrifying experience with the supernatural and the untimely death of my spiritual father, which the police classified as a possible unresolved homicide, I took off my hypothetical robes. I would never regain my spiritual innocence. I lost most of my psychic abilities. I renounced my celibacy and fled to California, where sex and dance became my new religion.

A few weeks into my pregnancy, a monk came to me in a dream. He wore Franciscan robes, like the monks Id met in Arkansas a year earlier. He said: This is your journey. His job is finished. A cryptic pronouncement, but I knew what he meant. I embraced my impending motherhood and scribbled father unknown on the birth certificate. Ive wished at times that that monk would return and offer a little more directionbut dreams like that probably only happen once.

Now I was squatting in a hotel lobby, in the eye of a hurricane, and I needed to pee.