Promises of the Devil

What happened in South Dakota? I agreed to come up there to live with Juan Goma and join our lives. I would give up what little security I had built in Nevada and be with him by Halloween. We’d have a great party. What happened instead was two days before my departure when I was packed with all my stuff, suitcases standing in the hallway, he left me this voicemail saying some things happened. Some things happened, and he doesn’t have the car, and the apartment also didn’t come true. He said to trust him. He is a hustler. He ain’t no snitch.

So I did trust him and I moved there. Three days into winter that just came to South Dakota with a blizzard I began suspecting that he probably has no money. He paid for just three nights in a cheap motel for us to stay in.

‘If you feel unsafe here, I can drive you right back,’ he says.

‘Back to where exactly? The airport?!’ I blew up in anguish. ‘You know that I have no home, no family, nothing to go back to. I just left what little security I had in Nevada, for you, to come here.’

How could you do this to me?

I cried as the disaster unfolded under the dark Halloween full moon. I repeated the obvious to him as we sat on the hotel bed on creasy white sheets. That I am an undocumented immigrant now, a Daughter of Belial, facing different dangers as a woman. This ain’t no country for old men, and I got no work permit and no driver’s license.

Of course, he knew all of that. He was the man who promised to provide for me and protect me. He said ‘I want to make you feel safe. This is my goal number one.’

‘I will get us both health insurance when you come here’, he said. I was so touched by that because my ex-husband neglected me and I fell into ill health.

The Devil may have lost his bet with Johny, but he sure knows how to play that string. I fell for H.I.M. again, for His Infernal Majesty. In His previous incarnation, he was JD Temple in springtime this year. He sent me a video of our new home… ‘You are no longer homeless,’ he said. ‘Your home is now with me.’

Is my home in hell?

‘I will take you on a trip to Washington DC,’ he said. ‘We are gonna see some cool music shows together,’ he said.

‘I love road trips.’

He knows all of my thoughts and innermost desires, and so I am naked when he speaks like this to me through His many vessels.

‘Anima Noira is now my woman. I love her.’

It was said in public, twice this year boasting with romantic pride. It seemed real. And then it was not. Went to make another video, made another love long, for some other woman he went back to. The names do not even matter. It’s the same old story. Repeated over and over as I circle through the Rings of Hell.

The promises of the Devil are always so seductive. He always finds a new angle to trick me with. Even after you have seen the smoke and mirrors fall apart so many times, I can’t resist. It’s a deadly romance.

I knew that JD’s promises of prestige and fame and a comfortable life were a temptation. I know that the humiliation I got from Ruric when he denied knowing me afterward to people was my own doing because he got me on lust.

I still think I can somehow outwit the Devil, and get something out of it. Basic security. It’s what everybody is telling me I must get. Social pressure, and basic survival instinct.

So, this time asked nothing else when I agreed to marry Juan, other than he would have a car and a place for us in eight weeks when I return to South Dakota. In my mind, I am thinking, ‘There is no way he would lie about it, and fail to deliver on his promises. Surely he is trustworthy. He keeps telling me to just trust him. After all, who would have a helpless woman move all across the country for them if they were unable to house her there?’

Flashback. Oregon, 2021.

My fiance Ian just put pressure on me to get married next month. He doesn’t want to be engaged for a year like I proposed, to avoid mistakes of my past. He whips up some doomsday scenario argument, that it is all for my protection, and I cave in. His family seems so nice. Surely they would do something. I mean even if this doesn’t work out and we disband someday, maybe in a few years, I will be set in this country, it’s not like they gonna kick me out on the streets in freezing winter at Christmas?

Surely. Surely. They did. He did.

Lucifer is a sadist. He doesn’t care about anything but the most brunt truth. And the truth is, I didn’t actually truly want any of these temptations. At the core of my heart lies an insanity. An incurable illness, Charles Bukowski called it, ‘A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.’ Any attempt to deny this core truth ends up in more humiliation, loss, and deceit for me.

It is counter-intuitive because I am always trying to do the Right Thing. Go for the real and not the pipe dream, get real, girl you’ve got to keep your shit together. The Infernal Union has eluded me thus far because I keep going for the Fool’s Gold; be it fame, prestige, lust, or, especially, security.

‘The Left Hand Path is more difficult for the woman,‘ Lucifer said, ‘because of biological and societal programming to seek security.’

But to go against it means to fully proclaim one insane.

What is insanity, really? Didn’t somebody say…

‘Insanity means expecting different results making the same choices.’

I am sitting in this diner with my no more future husband, staring into the cold dark winter outside. He finally admits he had seen this coming for at least the last two weeks. He knew that he wouldn’t have it, but chose not to tell me out of cowardice. And for his own benefit, I add to myself. To fully squeeze the last bluff, I assume, he got some free pussy on delivery.

‘I am not just a package you ship around the country and toss around,’ I say.

Honestly, I feel that way though. I feel this is exactly what I have been to all these men. A plaything, whose own well-being, health, and survival don’t matter. I am faced with defeat, and that I came all the way up here for nothing. He makes more promises to pay for the hotel at least, and for my ticket, but I end up putting $800 on the credit card. I closed the books in my heart and my head.

He went back to his ex within days. The one that he said he would never go back to, even if skies were falling. I am not surprised. He sings a love song for her saying that I never loved him and I lied.

Did I? Yes, I lied to myself, again, when I fell for the Promises of the Devil.

P.S. His music sucks.