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"I was both trying to expunge my guilt and at the same time take myself back bodily. Half of me was living in this other world where Jean still was alive. The place was insane. This was far beyond the S/M there. I went into God knows what galaxy. It was fabulous."
In the audience that night was an artist named Steven Johnson Leyba.
May 3, 1997. Blowup dolls hang from the ceiling of the San Francisco Mart South of Market. Male and female strippers gyrate for the likes of the mayor, city supervisors, San Francisco 49ers executives, and the usual second-string political suckerfish who habitually trail in the wake of such events. Jack Davis, the city's premier heart-for-hire political bulldog, the mastermind behind the last two mayoral elections, is turning 50 in high style.
The bars are flowing, music blares, colognes mingle with perfumes and the sweat of caterers. Off in one corner huddles vampire novelist and blood-sports performer Danielle Willis, wearing a Pocahontas dress, shivering under a coat. Two days earlier she had been in a Walnut Creek recovery house, her parents standing around her bed, trying to convince her to stay in the East Bay to kick her heroin habit. But she has refused their advice, and braved the elements tonight to honor a previous commitment -- to strap on a Jack Daniel's bottle and sodomize the bloodied backside of artist Rev. Steven Johnson Leyba in celebration of a birthday. After all, what are friends for?
Most of San Francisco and much of the rest of the world knows what happened next. The infamous Apache Whiskey Rite commences. A dominatrix named Mistress Izabella Sol cuts a satanic pentagram into Leyba's bare back, pees on it and him, and scoops the blood-and-urine mess into a bowl. Leyba slurps from it, but before he can finish performing a satanic curse on the politicians assembled at the party, his microphone is cut off.
Willis sodomizes him nevertheless. The cast is congratulated by the drunken crowd. Union workers ask Mistress Izabella if the group would be interested in performing at their Christmas party. David Aaron Clark, who has videotaped the scenario, shares a laugh with Sheriff Michael Hennessey, then hoists Willis upon his shoulders, her crotch in his face, and the two hit the dance floor to the strains of AC/DC's "Back in Black." Leyba is invited up in front of the entire party by Jack Davis, where, wrapped in an American flag, he is allowed to finish his curse.
Within days the bloody affair is the subject of front-page articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. Still photos from the Whiskey Rite appear on CNN, the offending images discreetly masked with black boxes. Saturday Night Live's Norm MacDonald includes a joke about the party on "Weekend Update." Discussion threads appear in the alt.satanism Internet news group.
Somehow -- could it have been dead voters? -- the campaign for a bond issue to help build a new 49er football stadium -- a campaign run by Davis -- gains the narrow approval of S.F. voters.
Sitting in a Mission coffee shop, not far from the apartment he now shares with Clark, his mohawk still visible, but grown out around the sides, Leyba ruminates on his relation to blood rituals. One table to his right, a young woman sleeps with her mouth open, a full latte clasped in hand.
"The thought of being cut on, it terrified me for years and years. I didn't know until I actually started doing bloodletting that on a lot of levels it's sexual," he says. "I can't explain."
Does it matter that every time he's been cut, it has been by a woman? He smiles. "That helps."
Although his chest scar provides the back cover image for True Blood, Leyba feels little connection with others who participated in the book.
"Vampires? It's ridiculous. I find no attachment to that imagery. For me, bloodletting is a way to give back to the Earth. That might sound bizarre, but the native way is, when you receive something, you want to give something back, and the best thing you can give of yourself is your blood."
Leyba's childhood was spent in the Southern California suburb of Pomona, a life of skateboards and Hang Ten T-shirts. His parents divorced when he was 3, his father, Benny, preferring the lifestyle of a full-time eccentric. His mother remarried, and at 13 Johnson found himself living on a ranch 10 miles from Camden, Ark. He remembers being shy and introverted, surrounded by homophobic football jocks. "Nobody talked to me, except for other weird kids."
Studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Academy of Art led to a curiosity about his half-Mescalero Apache heritage, and a dislike of what usually passes for Native American art -- coffee-table books designed for tourists. He wanted more, and moved to New Mexico to learn his own culture. He watched a Fourth of July ceremony performed by Crown Dancers, and was taken with the character of a sacred clown named the Labeye, played by a small boy with a bag over his head, whose role was to imitate and mock the Crown Dancers. To him, the rituals felt stale; the clown's meaning had been lost. The clown, he felt, was supposed to shock people out of their complacency. Something inside him clicked, he adopted the Labeye clown name as his own surname, and constructed his own Crown Dancer mask and headdress, much to the anger of tribal elders.
In April of 1996, he decided to be cut. He had already been putting his blood into his paintings. His roommate had a friend who was visiting, and who was skilled in the art of cutting skin.
