"...What passes for companionship among the lost"

This is the fourth installment in a series of short essays inspired by the 22 Trump cards, featuring original artwork by Greg Erskine. (Scroll down for large version.)


The first time someone read my cards, I was fifteen. My hometown, Apache Junction, Arizona, is a tiny town crouching in the foothills of a desert mountain range. Growing up, I’d hear everyone talking (mostly tourists and old people) about how beautiful the landscape was, but compared to the metropolises and lush suburbs that the families on TV shows all lived in, it seemed practically lunar, a biological and cultural wasteland where only the hardest and most obstinate life-forms flourished.

I was not one of these creatures, but in high school knew a girl who was. To a lonely teenager, accepting and finding confidence in your outsider status is probably a lot like waiting for your breasts to grow. Some people fake it, others come into it naturally and flaunt it. I was a late bloomer. I forestalled my development for as long as possible, daydreaming of a future in which I'd make friends and radiate normality. Gwen, on the other hand, was a flaunter. She could have fit in if she really wanted to -- she was dangerously magnetic, with an uncanny beauty and wisdom beyond her years. But she'd already outgrown our world and then some, and the temptation to freak out the credulous and weak-minded in our midst was irresistible.

A small, sheltered high school like ours it was pretty easy to raise hell in, but nevertheless she had a true gift for it. She was gothic before any of us knew what that meant. She wore what were perhaps the first nostril and eyebrow piercings in the history of our entire school district. To the consternation of school officials, Gwen was often secretly barefoot beneath the hem of her flowing skirts. She kept reptiles and arthropods as pets, including a boa constrictor that she would occasionally sneak into school, concealing the thing inside a pillowcase wrapped tightly around her forearm, passing it off to the bus driver as an injury that desperately required the school nurse’s attention. The few times I witnessed anyone making fun of her, she would get affect this cracked-looking smile and then make some of the most terrifyingly violent threats this side of the Ottoman Empire. She was bulletproof, and only too happy to shield the meek and defenseless if the opportunity arose.

Anyone else I’d known who delighted in breaking the rules had seemed to be afflicted with a permanent air of menace and stupidity (often part of a package deal including pure physical ugliness) but in Gwen I found a rare and inspiring exception. She was everything I'd always done my best to avoid, but somehow she was incapable of scaring me away. She claimed a bewildering firsthand knowledge of drug culture and the occult, her aesthetic style was Manson-family chic, she listened to the kind of rock music that concerned adults might refer to as “Satanic”. Nevertheless, the face she chose to show the world was ultimately that of a sweet and carefree person, and this was perhaps her anarchistic coup de grâce.

During my sophomore year we shared an art class, which gave me a chance to study her up close. I longed to be as wild and brilliantly talented as she was, though I would happily settle for merely being friends with her. When she laughed at me and called me her little dough boy, it didn’t sting the way it did when others called me things. I praised her artwork, determined to prove I wasn't freaked out -- not easy, since she drew and painted like Giger on a sugar high. But as the damaged souls of the world depend on each other to get through life three-legged-race style, our unlikely friendship established a special kind of symmetry. She had no conscience and I had no courage, so occasionally we could be quite valuable to each other.

And Gwen read Tarot cards, of course. They were (and probably still are) part of the trusty kit which disaffected teenagers use to carefully cultivate an air of flagrant weirdness. I don’t know how much she actually knew about the cards or where her interpretations came from. Looking back, I doubt she fished far beyond the little white booklet that comes with the deck. But a keenly observant or intuitive person (or an expert bullshitter) can get away with a lot, especially when your audience consists solely of perfectly gullible teenagers.

I can’t vouch for anything Gwen ever saw in the cards for anyone else, but I will always remember the day we sat together in the back of the art room and took turns shuffling her Waite-Smith deck. I'd never seen a deck in person, my experience with the Tarot was limited to the Jane Seymour's scenes in the Bond movie Live and Let Die. I was perfectly unskeptical. Gwen asked me to draw three cards. I turned them over on the table and looked at them with ravenous curiosity. The images made no sense to me: there was the grey Hermit in the center, and on his left and right were the Nine and Ten of Swords. I looked up expectantly, eager for Gwen to interpret them, but she wasn’t looking at the cards -- she was looking at me, her deep brown eyes forcing contact.

I actually witnessed her putting two and two together. “Oh my god,” she said, as if seeing me for the first time. “What’s going on? Are you okay?” There was no hush, no heightening of intensity for dramatic effect. This was real for her. Since reality was something I avoided at all costs, every moment of the day, I was terrified to answer her question. Because the truth is, I wasn’t okay -- not one bit.

Having already struggled with my sexuality for years, I’d been pretty realistic in assuming that a certain amount of harassment and abuse would follow me from 8th grade into high school. It turns out that I was tragically unprepared for how bad it would get. My classmates decided that my punishment for failing to affect any typically masculine appearances or interests would be a slow death by a thousand cuts, but the worse the abuse got, the more fiercely I acted as though things couldn’t be finer, convinced that adult intervention would only accelerate my doom. Drawing attention to the problem would only make people wonder how much truth was in those horrible words, I decided. It was such a small town -- if even one person glimpsed the truth, word would spread and I wouldn't be safe anywhere, perhaps not even in my own home. I had already made up my mind. I would die, literally, before I betrayed my vulnerability to the hatred that dogged me at every step. There was no help that I could risk accepting; if survival was possible, it would have to be a solo act.

And so I grew paranoid and dissociative. I became obsessed with reading about the underground survival tactics of German Jews during WWII, about the horrors that awaited them if they were discovered. Instead of doing my homework, I'd lay in my room for hours praying to God, pleading for Him to go ahead and take my life so that I would't be forced to do something drastic. In classes I tuned out completely, making no effort to hide the fact that I was sleeping or reading my own books. Should merciful God choose to go ahead and strike me down, I thought, why waste my remaining time learning a bunch of shitty geometry? In no time I became a straight-D student. Naturally my parents grew concerned and made an effort to pin down the problem, but I was too many miles ahead of them, and too effective in covering my tracks.

“Are you okay?” The idea that one question could resonate so deeply may sound a little silly to you now. It does to me. We share the luxury of seeing things from the other side of that barricade that high school erects to keep reality from intervening. On that day, in that time and place, for the first time in my entire life, I was seen. By someone who was on my side of the wall, who had herself mastered the art of hiding hideous truths in plain sight. I felt words welling up inside me like volcanic islands rising out of the sea -- denials, confessions, words I’d sworn I would never say out loud, but somehow knew I could say to Gwen. And then I replied, honestly, “I... I don’t think so.” It was more of an admission than parents or teachers or small-town family therapists had been able to drag out of me. For an unprecedented moment, I was no longer alone in my world.

Even to the objective eye, there’s something particularly chilling at the sight of the Hermit sandwiched between the horrors of those two Swords cards. The old man seems precariously balanced on his high peak, trying to put himself as far up and away as possible from the misery surrounding him. His head is bent in reverie or resignation, but his arm is reaching out, shining a light that’s visible to anyone who might be watching. I am here. That light can mean many things, depending on whose reading it is. In mine, what could it be but a distress signal?

"You are keeping secrets," Gwen observed delicately. "You think you're protecting yourself and other people, but holding it in is killing you." Because this was a Tarot reading and not just a conversation between friends, I felt no pressure to respond. The cards had revealed everything, but afforded both of us room to hide. It was left unspoken between us, but I left the reading knowing that there was at least one person that I could tell... if I had to.

It was a small, helpful encounter. A hairline crack, if you will, that contributed to profound breakthroughs down the road. For a long time afterward I considered the Hermit to be a sort of mascot, an image that explained my carefully cultivated invisibility. It was “my” card. When I began studying the Tarot in earnest many years later, I finally loosened my grip on the idea of myself as the long-suffering Hermit; the card had simply marked a specific phase in my evolution. And Gwen’s too, I can see now. Looking back, I wish I had accepted more of her help, or had done more to help her, but sometimes small, helpful encounters are all we can spare the energy for, or all we can accept. The card only shows us one Hermit, but he doesn't look as lonely to me as he used to. Now I imagine that the steady pinprick of light hovering in the darkness just out of frame, where presumably another crusty ascetic has planted himself atop his own mountain. Their lanterns call and respond to each other across the vast distance. This is what passes for companionship among the lost.

Gwen and I reconnected via email a few years ago. She vanished after high school, eventually escaping to a rural community in the Appalachians where she became devoted to Christ and settled down to raise a beautiful family. She is now the kind of powerfully religious person whose faith is inseparable from her identity -- or at least, that’s the face she has shown me in the emails we exchange from time to time. The irony of her conversion has never struck me as funny, because I'm too genuinely relieved to know she managed to find the peace she deserves. Once when I tentatively brought up the Tarot cards, she claimed to absolutely detest them now. “I read so many people, misleading so many souls,” she lamented to me. “How much advice I can give now without the use of those worldly devices... sound advice! I thank God that the Tarot cards are gone forever.”

I considered trying to talk with Gwen about the deck’s roots in Christian iconography, but a good friend advised against it. (“I wouldn't want to hear someone who's not a Christian tell me if something is or isn't Christian,” she said.) So when I wrote back to Gwen, I simply reminded her that I knew of at least one person in the world today who had benefited from the things she had said and done. 

 But still, I'm a little afraid to guess whether she has explored my website, wondering what she'd think of it. Will she read this essay, recognize herself through the fake name? I hope that if she does, she’ll accept it in the spirit it's intended, and remember that helping hand is a helping hand, even when the nails are painted black and the thin flesh between thumb and forefinger is pierced with a safety pin.