Long Hard Road Out of Hell Read online

  By then, I was truly lost. During Friday seminars, the girls kept their purses under the wooden chairs they sat in. When they bowed their heads, I would drop to the floor and steal their lunch money. If I discovered any love letters or notes, I’d purloin them as well and, in the interest of fairness and free speech, give them to the people that they were about. If I was lucky, they caused fights, tension and terror.

  I had already been listening to rock and roll for years—but, as my penultimate project, I decided to start making money off it. The person who lent me my first rock album was Keith Cost, a big, dopey, oafish kid who looked like he was thirty but was actually in third grade. After listening to Kiss’s Love Gun and playing with the toy pop gun that came with it, I became a card-carrying member of the Kiss Army and the proud owner of countless Kiss dolls, comics, T-shirts and lunchboxes, none of which I was allowed to bring to school. My dad even took me to see their concert—my first—in 1979. About ten different teenagers asked him for his autograph because he was disguised as Gene Simmons from the Dressed to Kill album cover—complete with green suit, black wig and white makeup.

  The person who irrevocably entrenched me in rock and roll and the lifestyle that accompanies it was Neil Ruble: He smoked cigarettes, had an actual mustache, and had allegedly lost his virginity. So, naturally, I idolized him. Half friend, half bully, he opened up the floodgates to Dio, Black Sabbath, Rainbow—basically anything with Ronnie James Dio in it.

  My other unflappable source of album recommendations was Christian school. As Neil was turning me on to heavy metal, they were conducting seminars on backward masking. They would bring in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper records and play them loudly on the P.A. system. Different teachers would take turns at the record player, spinning the albums backward with an index finger and explaining the hidden messages. Of course, the most extreme music with the most satanic messages was exactly what I wanted to listen to, chiefly because it was forbidden. They would hold up photographs of the bands to frighten us, but all that ever accomplished was to make me decide that I wanted long hair and an earring just like the rockers in the pictures.

  At the top of my Christian schoolteachers’ enemies list was Queen. They were especially against “We Are the Champions” because it was an anthem for homosexuals and, played backwards, Freddie Mercury blasphemed, “My sweet Satan.” Regardless of the fact that they had already taught us that Robert Plant said the exact same thing in “Stairway to Heaven,” once they had planted the notion that Freddie Mercury said “My sweet Satan,” we heard it every time. Also in their satanic album collection was Electric Light Orchestra, David Bowie, Adam Ant and anything else with gay themes that would give them another opportunity to align homosexuality with wrongdoing.

  Soon, the wood panels and high rafters of my basement bedroom were covered with pictures from Hit Parader, Circus and Creem. Every morning I woke up staring at Kiss, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, David Bowie, Mötley Crüe, Rush and Black Sabbath. Their hidden messages had reached me.

  The fantasy element of much of this music soon drew me to Dungeons & Dragons. If every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off of your life, every game of Dungeons & Dragons you play delays the loss of your virginity by seven hours. I was such a loser that I used to walk around school with twenty-sided dice in my pockets and design my own modules like Maze of Terror, Castle Tenemouse and Caves of Koshtra, a phrase that, much later in life, became slang for the sensation of having snorted too much coke.

  Naturally, none of the kids in school liked me because I played Dungeons & Dragons, I liked heavy metal and I wasn’t going to their youth group rallies and engaging in social activities like burning rock albums. I didn’t fit in any better with the kids from public school, who used to kick my ass on a daily basis for being a sissy from private school. And I hadn’t been roller-skating much since Lisa slimed me. My only other source of friends was a study and play group for the children of parents who had come in contact with Agent Orange during Vietnam. My father, Hugh, was a helicopter mechanic and a member of the Ranch Hands, the covert group responsible for dumping the hazardous herbicide all over Vietnam. So from the day I was born until the end of my teenage years the government brought my father and me to a research center for yearly physical and psychological studies in search of adverse effects. I don’t think there were any, though my enemies might disagree. One of the side effects the chemical had on my father was that because he went public with information on Agent Orange, resulting in a front-page story on him in the Akron Beacon Journal, the government severely audited his taxes for the next four years.

  Because I wasn’t deformed, I didn’t fit in with the other children in the government study group or at the regular retreats for kids whose parents were suing the government for exposure to the chemical. The other children had prosthetic limbs, physical irregularities and degenerative diseases, and not only was I comparatively normal but my father was the one who had actually sprayed the stuff on their fathers, most of whom were American infantry soldiers.

  In an effort to accelerate my delinquency and feed my growing addiction to money, I graduated from peddling candy and magazines to music. The only other kids in my neighborhood who went to Heritage Christian School were two skinny, all-American, Latter-Day Saint brothers with matching buzz cuts. The older brother, Jay, and I had nothing in common. He was only interested in the Bible. I was only interested in rock music and sex. The younger brother, Tim, was more rebellious. So just as Neil Ruble had turned me on to rock music, I introduced Tim to heavy metal and bullied him the rest of the time. He wasn’t allowed to listen to music in his house, so I sold him a cheap black tape recorder with big rectangular push buttons and a carrying handle on the end.

  Next, he needed some music to hide under his bed with the cassette deck. So I began making regular bicycle rides to a place called Quonset Hut, which didn’t allow minors in the door since it was a head shop as well as a record store. I looked exactly my age—fifteen—but no one stopped me. It didn’t matter anyway because the pipes, roach clips and bongs there were a complete mystery to me.

  When Tim started buying the tapes at the jacked-up prices I told them they had cost me, I realized that there were at least a hundred other potential customers at school. I started buying all the albums played during backward-masking seminars and selling them to schoolkids, from third-graders to upperclassmen. A W.A.S.P. album purchased for seven bucks at Quonset Hut was worth twenty dollars at Heritage Christian School.

  Instead of squandering the profits on tapes for myself, I later decided to just steal back the albums I had sold. Since there was an

  honor system at school, none of the lockers were locked. And since no one was allowed to listen to rock and roll, if anyone told on me they’d be incriminating themselves as well. So during class I’d ask for a hall pass and steal the cassettes out of the lockers.

  It was a perfect system, but it didn’t last long. Tim decided that, even if he was to be punished himself, it was worth turning me in. Once again I found myself face to face with Mrs. Cole and a bevy of administrators and disciplinarians in the principal’s office. But this time I didn’t have to explain the music—they already thought they knew what it was all about. They had caught me buying rock tapes, selling them and stealing them; they knew I was continuing to make magazines and branching out into cassette tapes (full of prank calls and dirty songs about masturbation and flatulence recorded with my cousin Chad under the name Big Bert and the Uglies). And I had already been punished in the principal’s office twice in the past few months. The first time was for accidentally hitting my music teacher, Mrs. Burdick, in the crotch with a slingshot I had made out of a heavy-duty rubber band, a wooden ruler and, as ammunition, melted chunks of Crayola crayons stolen from art class. The second was for fulfilling Mrs. Burdick’s homework assignment of bringing in an album for the class to sing by showing up with AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. But all of that still did not add up to an expuls
ion.

  My final desperate caper involved revisiting the dreaded basement of my grandfather and stealing a dildo from his secret workbench drawer. I wore gloves so I wouldn’t get any of the crusted Vaseline on me. After school the next day, Neil Ruble and I snuck into Ms. Price’s classroom and pried open her desk drawer. It contained her own secrets, which were just as taboo to Christian school as my grandfather’s were to suburbia: semierotic romance novels. There was also a handheld vanity mirror, which made sense since Ms. Price was always very concerned about her appearance. At the time, Chad and I regularly attempted to get the attention of two sisters who lived near my grandparents by throwing rocks at cars and trying to cause accidents so they’d come running outside. In the same sick, twisted way, putting a dildo in Ms. Price’s drawer was the only outlet I had for expressing my latent, frustrated lust for her.

  To our disappointment, no one said a word about it in school the next day. But I was definitely the chief suspect, which I discovered when Mrs. Cole called my parents into school. She didn’t mention the dildo; instead, she lectured them on disciplining and instilling the fear of God in the juvenile delinquent they had raised. That’s when I realized that I would never be expelled. Half the kids at Heritage Christian School were from lower-income families, and the school received a pittance from the state to enroll them. I was among the children who could pay, and they wanted the money—even if it meant dealing with my dildoes, heavy metal cassettes, candy, dirty magazines and smut-filled recordings. I realized that if I ever wanted to get out of Christian school, I would have to exercise my own free will to walk away. And two months into tenth grade I did just that.

  teen dabbler

  “I KNOW SOME NEW TRICKS,” SAID THE CAT IN THE HAT.

  “A LOT OF GOOD TRICKS. I WILL SHOW THEM TO YOU. YOUR MOTHER WILL NOT MIND AT ALL IF I DO.”

  —Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

  I lay on my bed, hands clasped on the back of my neck beneath my long brown hair, and listened to the hum of the washing machine in my parents’ basement. It was my last night in Canton, Ohio, and I had decided to spend it alone, reflecting on the past three years of public school. Everything was packed for the move to Fort Lauderdale: records, posters, books, T-shirts, journals, photographs, love letters and hate letters. Christian school had prepared me well for public school. It defined the taboos, then held them away at arm’s length, leaving me reaching for them in vain. As soon as I switched schools, it was all there for the taking—sex, drugs, rock, the occult. I didn’t even have to look for them: They found me.

  I’ve always believed that a person is smart. It’s people that are stupid. And few things bear this out better than war, organized religion, bureaucracy and high school, where the majority mercilessly rules. When I looked back on my first days there, all I saw was an insecurity and doubt so overwhelming that a single pimple was capable of throwing my life out of balance. Not until my final days did I have self-confidence and self-respect, even a measure of individuality.

  That last night in Canton, I knew that Brian Warner was dying. I was being given a chance to be reborn, for better or worse, somewhere new. But what I couldn’t figure out was whether high school had corrupted me or enlightened me. Maybe it was both, and corruption and enlightenment were inseparable.

  THE INAUGURATION OF THE WORM

  By the end of my second week in public school, I knew I was doomed. Not only was I starting two months into sophomore year, after most friendships had already formed, but after my eighth day in class I was forced to take another two weeks off. I developed an allergic reaction to an antibiotic I was taking for the flu. My hands and feet blew up like balloons, a red rash broke out across my neck, and I had trouble breathing because my lungs were so swollen. The doctors told me I could have died.

  At that point, I had made one friend and one enemy at school. The friend was Jennifer, who was cute but fish-faced with naturally big lips that were swollen even larger by her braces. I met her on the bus to school, and she became my first girlfriend. My enemy was John Crowell, the epitome of suburban cool. He was a big, stocky burnout perpetually clad in a denim jacket, an Iron Maiden T-shirt and blue jeans with a big-handled comb in the back pocket and a crotch area faded white from being worn too tight. When he walked down the halls, the other kids would trip over one another to get out of his way. He also happened to be Jennifer’s ex-boyfriend, which put me at the top of his ass-kicking list.

  The first week I was in the hospital, Jennifer came to visit me nearly every day. I’d talk her into the closet (where it was dark and she couldn’t see my rash) and make out with her mercilessly. Until then, I hadn’t gotten very far with women. There was Jill Tucker, a blond-haired minister’s daughter with crooked buck teeth whom I kissed in the playground at Christian school. But that was in fourth grade. Three years later, I fell in mad, desperate love with Michelle Gill, a cute, flat-nosed girl with feathered brown hair and a wide mouth that probably went on to give good blow jobs in high school. But my chances with her went up in flames on a Christian school fund-raiser hike, during which she tried to teach me how to French kiss. I understood neither the point nor the technique, and consequently became a laughingstock after she told everyone in school.

  Despite my utter lack of experience, I was determined to lose my virginity to Jennifer in that closet. But try as I might, all she let me do was grope her flat chest. By my second week in the hospital, she had grown bored and dumped me.

  Hospitals and bad experiences with women, sexuality and private parts were completely familiar to me by that point in my life. When I was four, my mother took me to the hospital to get my urethra enlarged because my urinary tract wasn’t wide enough for me to piss through. I’ll never forget it, because the doctor took a long, razor-sharp drill and stuck it into the end of my dick. For months afterward, it felt like I was pissing gasoline.

  Pneumonia marred my elementary school years, sending me to the hospital for three long stretches. And in ninth grade, I wound up in the hospital again after I feathered my hair, snapped on my ELO belt buckle, slipped into a pink button-down shirt and decided to head to the roller rink after a long absence. A girl whose frizzy hair, big nose and thickly painted eyeliner stand out more in my memory than her name asked me to couple-skate with her. When we were finished, a huge black guy with thick glasses known in the neighborhood as Frog walked toward us. He pushed her aside and, without saying a word, punched me solidly in the face. I crumpled, and he looked down at me and spat: “You danced with my girlfriend.” I sat there stunned, mouth bleeding and front tooth dangling off a red string from my gums. Now that I look back on it, I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I was a sissy: I would have hit me too.

  I didn’t even like that girl, but she almost cost me my career as a singer. In the emergency room, they told me that the damage was permanent. To this day, I still have TMJ (temporomandibular joint) syndrome, a disorder that gives me headaches and a tight, sore jaw. Stress and drugs don’t help it much.

  Frog somehow found my number the next day, called to apologize and then asked if I wanted to work out with him some time. I declined. The idea of working up a sweat lifting weights with some guy who had just kicked my ass and the prospect of having to shower with him afterward didn’t seem too appealing that afternoon.

  The next time I ended up in the emergency room was because of Jennifer. Back in school after two weeks in the hospital, I roamed the halls alone and humiliated. No one wanted to make friends with a squirrely, long-haired guy with a rash-covered neck poking out of his Judas Priest jersey. Making matters worse were my long earlobes, which hung conspicuously below my hair like misplaced scrotum sacks. But one morning as I was leaving homeroom, John Crowell stopped me. It turned out we had something in common: our hatred of Jennifer. So we formed an alliance against her, and began devising ways of tormenting her.

  One night I picked up John and my cousin Chad in my baby blue Ford Galaxie 500 and drove to an all-night grocery store, wher
e we stole twenty rolls of toilet paper. We threw them in the back seat of the car and sped to Jennifer’s house. Creeping into her yard, we began TP’ing her house, hanging toilet paper everywhere we could think of. I walked up to her window to paint some sort of obscenity on it. But, as I was trying to think of something suitably offensive, someone switched the light on. I sprinted away, reaching a gargantuan oak tree just as Chad was jumping off a branch. He dropped directly on top of me, and I collapsed onto the ground. Chad and John had to drag me away with a dislocated shoulder, a chin gushing blood and a jaw problem that, they told me in the emergency room later, was even worse than before.

  Back in school, I had so many pressing reasons to want to get laid: to spite Jennifer; to be on equal terms with John, who had supposedly fucked Jennifer among many others; and to stop everyone else from making fun of me for being a virgin. I even joined the school band to meet girls. I started out playing macho instruments like bass and snare drums. But I ended up on the last instrument anybody who feels insecure about himself should be playing: the triangle.