My Male Self’s Meeting with Satan

This true account is excerpted from my memoirs. I refer to my male self in the third person:

In adolescence George was depressive. Amidst a nadir of depression, he half-seriously thought about what he would sell his soul for. One idea was being a rock star.

A few days later George was walking with his eyes to the ground, taking a short-cut that led past the water tower. He was about to duck under the water tower’s access gate when a voice said, "Come here. I want to show you something."

Several paces away, standing before George on the access road, was a very tall man in a black coat and black hat. He had a narrow face, narrow nose, and a goatee. With a leash he held two black dogs. They started barking at George. "Shut-up!" the man shouted and the dogs instantly fell silent.

The man repeated, "Come here. I want to show you something."

Eyeing the man, George’s heart was pounding. He turned without speaking and went the long way home.

Not long after the encounter George came across a French folk tale where a village idiot sold his soul to a man of the same description who was also accompanied by two black dogs.

Four years later, George and some friends asked a Ouija board who George saw that day. The Ouija window spelled "S" and "A" and then inexplicably and rapidly slid off the board.

George met another teenager who claimed to have seen a hoofed man in the woods, which he identified as Pan. This jibed with what George’s psychotherapist had told him; that the sighting could have resulted from a kind of hallucination surfacing from the collective unconscious, a depth-image from George’s ethnic heritage, perhaps even inherited through his genetic code.

That explanation sufficed intellectually, but in practical terms it didn’t assuage the fear George was left to cope with. He felt evil emanating from the darkness where he slept, threatening to materialize in wrathful supernatural embodiments. Not driving, he would take shortcuts at night, making his way through unlit places sometimes at the brink of panic.

Religion was no comfort at all to George. To him its hypocrisy epitomized the satanic.

One day, at age 30 - weeks before George set out for California on the odyssey that initiated him into spiritual life – he was walking at the spot where he had encountered Satan at 14. It was a place he had never seen another person. There, a well-dressed man with a briefcase approached him. His eyes were cold and blue. He asked George, “Do you know where the river is?”

At the time, George was reading Hesse’s Siddhartha, which uses the river as a symbol of eternity. The only river the man could have been referring to was the Potomac, several miles away. It seemed an absurd question coming from a man on foot. George chuckled as he thought over how to explain the way. It was complicated. “From here?” George asked.

“Goddammit,” the cold-eyed man said, “It’s just a simple question.”

“Jesus Christ,” George exclaimed and strode away.

At dinner that evening he recounted the incident to his family. His parents told him, “Things like that wouldn’t happen to you if you didn’t have long hair.”