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He stops and gazes across the cafe at a young girl with tattoos, sitting by herself. One of his models, somewhere in the past.
"I thought she was dead," he says.
Eventually his blood documentation was extensive enough to publish. He showed sample images to Ron Turner, owner of Last Gasp Comics (publisher of underground comics since the 1960s), and explained the idea: a full-color coffee-table book of in-your-face blood photos, unrelenting crimson close-ups of seeping wounds and splattered breasts, with text supplied by Danielle Willis and David Aaron Clark.
"I want it," Gatewood remembers Turner saying. "Let's do it, and let's get it on the press before the Commies take over Hong Kong."
The book, True Blood, is scheduled to be unveiled this week, precisely three years after Gatewood helped unleash the blood phenomenon by premiering his short videos at the Artists' Television Access (ATA) space in the Mission. In the audience that night was a 23-year-old kid who had just moved to the city from Arkansas.
Carrying a tray of grapes and cheese cubes, the handsomely androgynous Clint Catalyst glides through the crowd at "Roderick's Chamber," a weekly South of Market goth club where he is co-host. He is featured in the True Blood book, and has been involved in blood sports since seeing Gatewood's video at ATA.
"I was floored, and everyone around me was, too," Catalyst says. "I felt uneasy, but in a good way. It was so beautiful, the movement, the flow, the way the blood was being flicked around."
And just months after leaving his parents' house on a dirt road outside Conroy, Ark., Catalyst was in the Mission doing his first public blood performance: 13 cuttings on his shoulder, administered while he sat on a chair constructed of 10cc hypodermic needles.
"It was a psyche fuck," he says. "I consider my cuts injuries, but they were injuries that were done for a sort of empowerment."
Catalyst says he knows exactly why he is attracted to blood. He was sexually abused as a young child by neighborhood boys. For years, he says, he had no way out of the pain. Then, one Tuesday night, as his parents watched a TV movie of the week in the other room, he locked himself in the bathroom and deliberately cut his finger with his father's razor.
"I felt I was carrying round all these fingerprints of other people for so long, so in wanting to claim my own flesh, I had to begin digging for my own answers."
After finishing college, Catalyst moved to San Francisco, and immediately settled into the goth scene, working at the House of Usher club and publishing the literary zine As If. He is frequently seen posing for magazine fashion shoots, while working on a master's degree in writing from the University of San Francisco.
He seems torn about sensationalism in the blood scene. Although he performs with blood, and takes those performances seriously, he knows that blood sports can also appear cheesy:
"Of course a lot of people scoff at it. Come on, I scoff at a lot of this stuff too: 'Oh my god, that's so sensationalistic. That's so ridiculous. That's stupid.' But blood is a very salient topic, particularly for the '90s. I consider blood a symbol of the life force. The initial cut hurts, definitely, but then there's the rush, and it definitely gives me energy. If it makes people think, then I feel I've accomplished something.
"I mean, who hasn't had sex unprotected? And is that any more dangerous than some sort of blood sports?"
Catalyst feels that a cultural emptiness propels people to search for meaning through blood ritual, the goth community, or, in his case, both.
"A goth is someone who makes his or her own decisions, and says, 'This is how I'm going to live my life, and this is how I want it to be for me.' A person then who is autonomous, I believe, is gothic because he or she is saying, 'I feel, and I feel this way, and that means that I feel extremely.'
"Feeling extremely in this day and age is a very rebellious thing, because people are so desensitized. They have all this information coming at them from all these different sources, and so they've become inured. They don't want to have to be an activist for anything anymore."
Catalyst's explanation of childhood abuse coincides nicely with the work of Pacific Heights psychologist Daniel Lapin, who specializes in child trauma, and who contributed an afterword to True Blood. Lapin's recent book The Vampire, Dracula and Incest outlines his theory that an abused child has undergone a form of psychic vampirism, that something has been taken from the boy or girl against his or her will, and as a result these children feel dead inside. Many patients who were sexually mistreated in their youths have dreams about vampires, he says, and documented episodes of abuse periodically occur in the private lives of vampire authors, including Bram Stoker.
"Who hasn't been abused?" David Aaron Clark wonders aloud over a pint of beer. He lifts a match to his cigar stub and watches without expression as a Capp Street prostitute in white hot pants steps out of the bar's restroom, her john following behind. Clark, a 37-year-old porn journalist, lifts one eyebrow as if to say, "It figures," relights his stogie with a tiny smirk, and continues.
