Long Hard Road Out of Hell (4 page)

After several excruciatingly slow minutes, a gruesome noise leapt from his throat, like the sound a car engine makes when someone turns the key in the ignition when it’s already on. I turned my head away, too late to keep from imagining the white pus squeezing out of his yellow, wrinkled penis like the insides of a squashed cockroach. When I looked again, he had lowered his handkerchief, the same one he’d been using to wipe away his phlegm, and was sopping up his mess. We waited until he left and then clambered back up the stairs, vowing never to set foot in that cellar again. If Grandfather knew we were down there or noticed the broken workbench drawer, he didn’t say anything to us.

During the ride home, we told my parents what happened. I had the feeling that my mother believed most if not all of it, and that my father already knew from having grown up there. Though Dad didn’t utter a word, my mother told us that years ago, when my grandfather still worked as a trucker, he was in an accident. When the doctors undressed him at the hospital, they found women’s clothes underneath his own. It was a family scandal that no one was supposed to talk about, and we were sworn to secrecy. They were in utter denial of it—and still are to this day. Chad must have told his mother what we had seen, because he wasn’t allowed to hang out with me for years afterward.

When we pulled into our driveway, I walked around back to play with Aleusha. She was lying in the grass near the fence, vomiting and convulsing. By the time the vet arrived, Aleusha was dead and I was in tears. The vet said someone had poisoned her. I had a funny feeling I knew who that someone was.

A
LEUSHA

for those about to rock, we suspend you

[B
RIAN
W
ARNER
]
WAS JUST AVERAGE
. H
E’S ALWAYS BEEN REALLY SKINNY LIKE A TWIG.
I
WOULD GO OVER TO HIS HOUSE AND WE’D LISTEN TO RECORDS TOGETHER, STUFF LIKE
Q
UEENSRYCHE
, I
RON
M
AIDEN, LOTS OF
J
UDAS
P
RIEST
. I
WAS MORE INTO IT THAN HE WAS
.... I
DIDN’T THINK HE REALLY HAD ANYTHING GOING FOR HIM [MUSICALLY] AND MAYBE HE DOESN’T
. M
AYBE HE JUST GOT LUCKY
.

—Neil Ruble, Heritage Christian school, class of 1987

B
RIAN
W
ARNER AND
I
WERE IN THE SAME CLASS AT A
C
HRISTIAN SCHOOL IN
C
ANTON
, O
HIO
. B
OTH
B
RIAN AND
I
REJECTED THE RELIGIOUS PRESSURE OF OUR EDUCATION QUITE STRONGLY
. H
E, OF COURSE, PROMOTES HIMSELF AS A SATANIST
. I
’VE REJECTED THE WHOLE IDEA OF GOD AND
S
ATAN, FIRST BY BEING AN AGNOSTIC AND THEN RECENTLY BY BECOMING A WITCH
.

—Kelsey Voss, Heritage Christian school, class of 1987

I’
D LIKE TO ASK
[M
ARILYN
M
ANSON
], “D
ID
I
INFLUENCE YOU IN ANY WAY TO THIS LIFESTYLE
?” I
KEEP THINKING
, “W
OW, DID
I
DO SOMETHING
I
SHOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY
?”

—Carolyn Cole, former principal, Heritage Christian school

J
ERRY
, I
SOMETIMES BELIEVE WE’RE HEADING VERY FAST FOR
A
RMAGEDDON RIGHT NOW
.

—Ronald Reagan, speaking to the Reverend Jerry Falwell

T
HE
end of the world didn’t come when it was supposed to.

I was brainwashed to believe, in seminars every Friday at Heritage Christian School, that all the signs were there. “You will know the beast has risen up out of the ground, because there will be heard everywhere a great gnashing of teeth,” Ms. Price would warn in her sternest, most ominous voice to rows of cowering sixth-graders. “And everyone, children and parents alike, will suffer. Those that don’t receive the mark, the number of his name, will be decapitated before their families and neighbors.”

At this point, Ms. Price would pause, dip into her pile of flash cards of the apocalypse and hold up an enlarged photocopy of a UPC symbol—but with the number at the bottom manipulated to read 666. This was how we knew the apocalypse was around the corner: the UPC code was the mark of the beast spoken about in Revelation, we were taught, and the machines being installed in supermarkets to read them would be used to control people’s minds. Soon, they warned, this satanic price code would replace money and everyone would have to get the mark of the beast on their hands in order to purchase anything.

“If you do deny Christ,” Ms. Price would continue, “and take this tattoo on your hand or forehead, you will be allowed to live. But you will have lost eternal”—and here she’d hold up a card showing Jesus descending from heaven—“life.”

For other seminars, she had a card with a newspaper clipping detailing John Hinckley, Jr.’s then-recent attempt to assassinate Ronald Wilson Reagan. She would hold it up and read from Revelation 13: “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.” The fact that there were six letters in Reagan’s first, middle and last names was one more sign that this was our final hour, that the Antichrist was here on earth and that we must prepare for the coming of Christ and the rapture. My teachers explained all of this not as if it was an opinion open to interpretation, but as if it were an undeniable fact ordained by the Bible. They didn’t need proof; they had faith. And this practically filled them with glee in anticipation of the coming apocalypse, because they were going to be saved—dead but in heaven and freed from suffering.

It was then that I began having nightmares—nightmares that continue to this day. I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it, watching movies like
The Exorcist
and
The Omen
and reading prophetic books like
Centuries
by Nostradamus,
1984
by George Orwell and the novelized version of the film
A Thief in the Night
, which described very graphically people getting their heads cut off because they hadn’t received
666
tattoos on their forehead. Combined with the weekly harangues at Christian school, it all made the apocalypse seem so real, so tangible, so close that I was constantly haunted by dreams and worries about what would happen if I found out who the Antichrist was. Would I risk my life to save everyone else? What if I already had the mark of the beast somewhere on me—underneath my scalp or on my ass where I couldn’t see it? What if the Antichrist was me? I was filled with fear and confusion at a time when, even without the influence of Christian school, I was already in turmoil because I was going through puberty.

Sure evidence of this is that despite Ms. Price’s terrifying seminars detailing the world’s impending doom, I found something sexy about her. Watching her preside over class like a Siamese cat, with her pursed lips, perfectly combed hair, silk blouses concealing a fuck-me body and stick-in-the-ass walk, I could tell there was something alive and human and passionate waiting to burst out of that repressed