Long Hard Road Out of Hell Read online

  Finally, toward the end of tenth grade, John came up with a foolproof plan to get me laid: Tina Potts. Tina was even more fish-faced than Jennifer, had bigger lips and a more severe overbite. One of the poorer girls in school, she had a slouched, sunken posture that advertised her insecurity and internal misery, as if she had been abused as a child. All she had going for her were big tits, tight jeans that showed off her bovine ass and, according to John, she fucked—which was good enough for me. So I began talking to Tina. But, because I was hopelessly obsessed with my social standing, I only spoke to her after school when nobody else was around.

  After a few weeks, I worked up the nerve to ask her to meet me in the park. In preparation, Chad and I went to my grandparents’ house, stole one of the decrepit generic condoms from the cabinet in the cellar, and emptied half a bottle of Jim Beam from my grandmother’s cupboard into my Kiss thermos. I knew it wasn’t Tina I needed to get intoxicated—it was me. By the time we arrived at Tina’s, which was about half an hour away, the thermos was empty and I was nearly falling over drunk. Chad continued home, and I rang her doorbell.

  We walked together to the park and sat down on the side of a hill. Instantly, we began making out, and within minutes I had my hand down her pants. The first thing that went through my mind was how hairy she was. Maybe she didn’t have a mother to teach her about shaving her bikini line. The next thing that went through my mind as I was fingering her and squeezing her tits was that I was on the verge of coming in my pants because I was so close to getting laid. To keep from losing it, I suggested that we take a walk.

  CHAD AND ME

  We ambled downhill to a baseball diamond and, underneath a tree just behind home plate, I maneuvered her to the ground, not even realizing the significance of where we were. I wrestled with her tight pants, eventually peeling them off her ass, then pulled my pants down to my knees and tore open the faded package of grandfather’s crusty rubber as if it were a Cracker Jack prize. Placing myself between her yawning legs, I began to slide inside her. Just the thrill of penetration was enough to make me orgasm, and before I was even in all the way, it was over. It was literally a pump and a dump.

  To preserve what little was left of my dignity, I pretended I hadn’t prematurely ejaculated.

  “Tina,” I squeaked. “Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.... It’s so soon.”

  She didn’t protest. She just stood up and put her pants on wordlessly. On the way home, I kept smelling my hand, which seemed permanently stained with the odor of high school girl pussy. In her mind, we hadn’t even had sex. But for me and my friends, I was no longer a desperate boy. I was a desperate man.

  I didn’t talk much to Tina after that. But I soon got a taste of my own medicine—courtesy of the richest and most popular girl in school, Mary Beth Kroger. After staring wantonly at her for three years, I summoned all my courage and asked her out to a party when we were seniors. To my amazement, she accepted. We ended up at my house drinking beer, with me sitting next to her uncomfortable and too scared to make a move because she seemed like a complete prude. But my ideal of Mary Beth Kroger quickly disintegrated as she tore off her clothes, jumped on top of me and, without even bothering to use a condom, fucked me like a wild animal astride a high-speed rowing machine. The next day in school, Mary Beth put her prissy facade back on and proceeded to ignore me just as she always had. All I got out of it was deep scratch marks all over my back, which I proudly displayed to my friends, who, in honor of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, renamed her Mary Beth Krueger.

  By this time, my first fuck, Tina, was seven months pregnant. The father, ironically, was the person who had set me up with her: John Crowell. I didn’t see much of John after that, because he was stuck dealing with the consequences of not using a rubber. I sometimes wonder whether they ever married, settled down and raised big-titted burnouts together.

  PUNISHING THE WORM

  Once Tina opened up the floodgates, I went on a rampage. Not a rampage of getting laid, but of trying to get laid. After months of rejection and masturbation, I met a blond cheerleader named Louise when I was drunk on Colt 45 during a high school football game in a farming community outside of Canton called Louisville. Though I didn’t know it at the time, she was the Tina Potts of Louisville: the local slut. She had thick lips, a flat nose and big, smoldering eyes, as if she was part mulatto and part Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles. She also had a Shirley Temple quality to her, because she was short with curly hair, but she seemed more into lap dancing than tap dancing. She was the first girl to give me a blow job. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t all she gave me.

  Nearly every day I picked her up and brought her down to my bedroom while my parents were still at work. We would listen to Rush’s Moving Pictures or David Bowie’s Scary Monsters and, now that I was more experienced in orgasm control, have normal teenage sex. She gave me so many hickeys that at one point my neck was too sore to even move. But I didn’t mind, since I was able to wear them like badges of honor at school. She also swallowed, which gave me more bragging rights. One day she brought me a blue glitter bow tie that looked like something a Chippendale would wear. I think she wanted to try role-playing, but the only role-playing I was familiar with was Dungeons & Dragons.

  After a solid week of fucking, Louise stopped returning my calls. I was worried I had gotten her pregnant, because I hadn’t used a condom every time. I had this image of her mother sending her away to a convent and putting her—our—child up for adoption. Or maybe Louise was going to make me pay child support for the rest of my life. There was also the possibility that she’d gotten an abortion, something had gone wrong, she had died, and now her parents wanted to murder me. After I hadn’t heard from her for several weeks, I decided to call her one more time, disguising my voice with a cloth over the telephone in case her parents answered.

  Fortunately, she picked up the phone.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called you in so long,” she apologized. “I’ve been sick.”

  “What kind of sick?” I panicked. “You don’t have a fever, do you? Are you throwing up in the morning or anything like that?”

  It turned out that she was simply avoiding me because she was a slut and having a boyfriend would ruin her reputation. Those weren’t her words exactly, but that was basically what she meant.

  A few days later during math class, my balls started itching. It continued all day, spreading throughout my pubic hair. When I returned home, I went straight to the bathroom, dropped my pants and stood on the sink to examine myself. I instantly spotted three or four black scabs directly above my dick. I picked one off, and as I was looking at it, a little blood bubbled out.

  I still thought it was a piece of dead skin, but when I held it up closer to the light, I noticed that it had legs—and they were moving. I screamed in shock and disgust. Then I smashed it into the sink, but it didn’t splatter like I thought it would. It crunched like a little shellfish. Not knowing any better, I brought it to my mother and asked her what it was.

  “Oh, well, you’ve got lice,” she sighed good-naturedly. “You probably picked it up from the tanning bed.”

  As shameful as this is to admit, I was going for indoor tans regularly at the time. I had a terrible complexion—my face was literally swollen with acne—and the dermatologist told me there was a new type of tanning bed that would dry out my skin and help my social life.

  My mother was clearly in denial that her young son had been fucking girls and getting crabs. Even my father, who always promised that the day I got laid we were going to celebrate with a bottle of champagne he had tucked away while working at Kmart, didn’t really want to admit it. This was mainly because ever since I had discovered tits in junior high, he had been wanting to take me to a prostitute to lose my virginity. So I just played along with the tanning bed story.

  My mother bought me medicine for body lice, but in the privacy of my bathroom I shaved off all my pubic hair and took care of the crabs myself. (At
the time, shaving off body hair was still unusual to me.)

  As far as I know, I’ve never had another venereal disease since then. And, to the best of my knowledge, my parents still think I’m a virgin.

  CHARMING THE WORM

  John Crowell and I stood on top of the hill in front of his house, taking turns swigging out of a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 that we had conned an older kid into buying for us. We had been there for at least an hour, getting wasted and gazing out at the sleepy farmland around us, at the sky bruised and swollen with the threat of rain, and at the occasional automobile passing by on its way to civilization. We had fallen into a tipsy, self-satisfied daze when suddenly there was an explosion of gravel.

  Engulfed in a cloud of dust, a green GTO veered recklessly into the driveway and skidded to a halt. The door slowly opened, and a black-booted foot struck the ground. A big head appeared above the door, with an enormous skull stretching the skin taut. His hair was curly and disheveled. The eyes sunken deep into his head blazed like pinpoints in the center of two dark circles. As he stepped away, I noticed that, like Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, his hands, feet and torso were oversized and elongated. He wore a denim jacket emblazoned on the back with the universal symbol of rebellion: a pot leaf.

  With his right hand, he pulled a gun out of the waistband of his pants. He raised his arm wildly into the air and squeezed out shot after shot, each kickback jerking his arm further in our direction. When the chamber was empty, he strode toward us. As I stood there stunned, he shoved me backward onto the ground, pushed John and grabbed the bottle of Mad Dog, draining it in seconds and throwing it into the grass. Wiping his mouth on a denim sleeve, he muttered something that sounded like lyrics from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and strode into the house.

  “That’s my brother, dude,” John said, his face, pale with fear moments ago, now glowing proudly.

  We followed his brother upstairs and watched as he slammed shut his bedroom door and locked it. John wasn’t allowed to set foot in his brother’s room under penalty of serious pain. But he knew what went on in there: black magic, heavy metal, self-mutilation and conspicuous drug consumption. Like my grandfather’s basement, the room represented both my fears and my desires. And though I was frightened, I wanted nothing more than to see what was inside.

  In hopes that his brother would leave the house later that night, John and I walked outside to his barn—or at least the wooden skeleton of what had once been a barn—where we had stashed a bottle of Southern Comfort.

  “You wanna see something really cool?” John asked.

  “Sure,” I nodded. I was always up for anything cool, especially if John deemed it so.

  “But you gotta fucking promise not to say a word to fucking anyone.”

  “I promise.”

  “Promises aren’t good enough,” John snapped. “I want you to swear on your fucking mother’s… No. I want you to swear that if you ever tell, may your dick shrivel and grow putrid and wither away.”

  “I swear that if I tell anyone may my dick wither and die,” I said solemnly, knowing full well that I would need it in years to come.

  “Wieners take all,” John sneered, punching me painfully in the muscle beneath my shoulder. “So let’s go, wiener.”

  He led me to the back of the barn, and we climbed a ladder to a hay loft. The straw was splattered with dried blood. Strewn around it were bird carcasses; snakes and lizards with half their bodies missing, and partially decomposed rabbits with maggots and beetles eating away at the flesh still left on their bones.

  “This,” announced John, gesturing to the giant pentagram drawn in dripping red on the floor, “is where my brother holds his black masses.”

  It was like something out of a bad horror movie, where a troubled teen dabbling in the black arts takes things too far. There were even blood-caked pictures of various teachers and ex-girlfriends nailed to the walls and covered with obscenities written in thick, jagged strokes. As if he was taking on a starring role in the movie, John turned to me and said, “Do you want to see something even scarier?”

  I was torn. Maybe I’d seen enough for one day. But I was also curious, and I nodded my assent. John picked up off the floor a stained and tattered copy of The Necronomicon, a book of spells which he claimed contained black magic incantations from the Dark Ages. We walked back to the house and John filled a backpack with flashlights, hunting knives, snack food and a few trinkets he said had magical powers. Our destination, John said, was the place where his brother sold his soul to the devil.

  To get there, we had to climb through a sewer pipe that started near John’s house and ran underneath a cemetery. We walked crouched over in the sludgy, rat-infested water, with no entrance or exit in sight, constantly conscious of the fact that in the mud on all sides of the pipe were dead bodies. I don’t think I’ve ever been more terrified of the supernatural in my life. On that half-mile odyssey, every small noise produced a large, ominous echo, and I kept thinking I was hearing skeletons knocking on the outside of the pipe and undead creatures ripping through the metal, ready to grab me and bury me alive.

  When we finally reached the other side, we were covered from head to foot with a thin film of sewage, spiderwebs and mud. We were in the middle of nowhere in a dark forest. After a half-mile of hacking through the overgrowth, a huge house loomed over us. Weeds had grown all around it, as if the forest was trying to reclaim the space, and every exposed patch of concrete was covered with pentagrams, upside-down crosses, renderings of Satan, heavy metal band logos and words and phrases like “cocksucker” and “fuck your mother.”

  We cleared away the vines and dead leaves covering an open window, climbed inside and searched the room with the beams of our flashlights. There were rats, cobwebs, broken glass and old beer cans. In a corner the embers of a dying fire let us know that someone had recently been here. I turned around, and John was gone.

  I called his name nervously.

  “Up here,” he yelled from the top of the stairs. “Check this out.” Though I was starting to panic, I followed him upstairs and through a cluttered doorway. The room looked inhabited. There was a putrid yellow mattress on the floor, which was littered with hypodermic needles, a bent spoon and other drug paraphernalia. Lying around the mattress, like dried-out snake skins, were half a dozen used condoms alongside disintegrating pages from gay porno magazines that had been smashed into the floor.

  We walked into the next room, which was completely empty except for a pentagram drawn on the south wall and surrounded by indecipherable runes. John pulled out his copy of The Necronomicon.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked.

  “Opening the gates of hell to summon the spirits that once lived in this house,” he said in as ominous a voice as he could muster. He traced a circle in the dust on the floor with his finger. As he completed it, a sharp sound came from downstairs. We stood completely still, barely even breathing, and listened to the darkness. Nothing, except for the sound of my pulse beating like a triphammer in my neck.

  John stepped into the middle of the circle, and paged through the book to find the right incantation.

  A metallic crash, much louder than the previous sound, echoed from downstairs. If whatever we had begun to do had any powers, we weren’t ready for them. The alcohol in our blood turned to adrenaline and we ran—down the stairs, out the window and into the forest until we were breathless, sweaty and dry-mouthed. Dusk had fallen, and a few raindrops splattered around us. We avoided the sewer pipe, stumbling the rest of the way home through the woods as quickly as possible in complete silence.

  By the time we were safely back in John’s house, his brother was hopelessly stoned, roaming the house dazed and red-eyed. The drugs had worn down his aggressive edge, and he seemed almost sedate, which wasn’t any less frightening than when he was manic. A snow-white cat was cradled in his arms, and he kept stroking it.

  “That cat’s his familiar,” John whispered to me.r />
  “His familiar?”

  “Yeah, it’s like a demon that’s taken on animal form to help my brother with his magic.”

  This pure white, innocent-looking cat instantly transformed into a malevolent, dangerous creature in my mind. John’s brother set it on the ground, and it just sat there with its ears pinned back, staring straight at me through shining green eyes. Suddenly, its lips pulled back over its teeth and it began hissing at me.

  “Man, that cat’s gonna kill you,” John said in a successful attempt to frighten me even more. “When you go to sleep, she’s gonna scratch your eyes out and then bite off your tongue when you try to scream.”

  His brother looked us both over, glanced down at the cat, and said quietly, “Come on, let’s go upstairs.” And that was it: We didn’t have to sneak behind his back or play detective. We were allowed to enter the forbidden room: Maybe John’s spell to open the gates of hell had worked.

  Though it was new and exciting to me, the room was exactly what you’d expect from a rural wastoid with a penchant for Satan. There was a black light shining on a poster of the grim reaper on a horse, half a dozen Ozzy Osbourne photos and red candles everywhere. In the back of the room stood a small altar draped in black velvet and surrounded by lit candles. But on top of it, instead of a skull or a pentagram or a sacrificed rabbit, there was a tall cylinder of yellowed glass with what looked like piss water inside. The gun sat threateningly on a table near the bed.

  “Wanna smoke?” John’s brother asked, lifting the cylinder off the altar.

  “Smoke what?” I asked dumbly. I’d never even touched a bong or smoked pot before.

  “The wacky weed,” John grinned devilishly at me.

  “That’s alright, man. I don’t do that stuff anymore,” I lied unconvincingly.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice. It soon became apparent that John and his brother were going to beat the shit out of me if I didn’t smoke their drugs.