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"One time I went to a sex club with a lover at the time, who liked to drink blood. She ended up making a bunch of cuts on me and starting to drink from it. We just basically went nuts and ended up making out like teen-agers on a bed in the back of this club, while the blood was flowing all over, and she was drinking some of it, and so forth. That's chaos. That scares the modern primitives. They don't want a part of that.
"Your average middle-class Caucasian likes things clean and neat. They like order, they like a process. 'I will have my scrotum pierced. And then I will have a ring on it. And I will run the chain from the ring up to my nose. Process complete.' "
Clark is accustomed to speaking in soundbites that piss people off, and has done so within a journalistic career that dates to his high school years. His physical presence is memorable -- tattooed arms, all-black clothing, black floor-length duster coat, and black leather floppy cowboy hat. He writes a column for The Spectator, and because of his own personal history of blood rituals, he was a natural to provide the text essays that accompany Gatewood's photos in True Blood.
"Just about everybody in this book -- whether they're fucked up, whether they're together, whether they're brilliant, whether they're not so brilliant -- I honestly believe they're all individuals," he says. "And some of them have the trappings of modern primitivism, or goth, or whatever, but I think these are all individuals who are doing this because they think it's a way to transform their own personal reality. They think it. They haven't been told it. None of these people have gurus. They are their own gurus. They are their own demons. Even in those acts of self-destruction, they're hoping to find something in themselves that says they're not a loser. To carve out some space for themselves, no pun intended."
Clark sees four strains of people interested in blood rituals:
1) Members of the S/M scene (he includes himself in this group);
2) New Age-ish body modification types;
3) Alienated goths; and
4) Singular freaks, including (by Clark's classification) Steven Johnson Leyba and the Los Angeles performance group the Aesthetic Meat Foundation, known for its deliberately gory, bloody performances.
Although Clark covers the local sex scene and is a regular at the Power Exchange -- a dimly lit SOMA sex club that caters to consensual whipping, cutting, fisting, and wandering voyeurs -- he admits he's never engaged in blood rituals here on the West Coast. For him, it feels more comfortable to have his skin cut open in the S/M clubs of New York, where he is closer to home.
Clark, who grew up in the small suburb of Hadden Heights, N.J., says he remembers nothing of his father. His parents divorced when he was 2, and all photos of Dad were tossed out. To this day, Clark says, he knows little of the man except that he was a professor.
Overweight and an only child, Clark shared a bedroom with his grandfather, whom his mother had rescued from an asylum. Clark says he read everything he could get his hands on, from comics and monster magazines to his stepfather's issues of Screw, which he would spread out on the bed and devour. He read and reread Stoker's Dracula many times; one scene, Clark says, stuck with him in particular.
In that scene, rather than biting the neck of the woman, the vampire opens his chest and allows her to drink from him.
"In what was mostly a penny dreadful, that was one of the few hints back in the original novel of the kind of depth and passion that comes part and parcel with blood," he says.
Clark claims to have won awards for journalism in high school and at Rutgers University. Then, he says, he worked at Dow Jones News Service in Manhattan. After the stock market suffered the Black Monday crash in 1987, he took a Hustler magazine into the company's lavishly appointed restroom and masturbated three times. "It was just so great, watching the whole military-industrial complex crashing around me! I made sure to not rinse the shower afterwards."
Playing in a band after hours, Clark says, he developed a heroin habit that would propel him into the nether regions of the Lower East Side. He eventually cleaned up enough to land a job covering the sexual underground for Screw. An increasing interest in the fringes meant that he soon would be hired to perform S/M scenes in clubs -- for $100 and an open bar tab. The financial drain of New York brought him to San Francisco. His columns for The Spectator the past two years are a frequently controversial first-person exploration of the local sex biz, and on the side he writes novels and edits anthologies. His parents are completely accepting of his career, he says, although he acknowledges that they might "think I'm kinda nutty."
After another of many rounds of beers, Clark insists on making a religious point:
"All the people in this book are merely seeking to emulate Jesus Christ, whose blood washed away the sins of the world. Or maybe just their own sins. Everybody's gotta start somewhere."
Clark goes on to describe his most profound blood experience. It occurred at a book release party for his first novel, The Wet Forever, held in 1993 at a New York sex club called Paddles. The cover photo of the book was of his girlfriend Jean, a prostitute and singer in his band who had committed suicide by jumping out a window. Consumed with guilt over failing to prevent her death, Clark needed to process the pain somehow. He says he allowed his new girlfriend, dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, to lash him to a wooden crucifix. To the astonishment of the club, she then pulled out a scalpel and carved a big cross into his chest.
