Long Hard Road Out of Hell (5 page)

Christian facade. I hated her for giving me nightmares my entire teenage years. But I think I hated her even more for the wet dreams she inspired.

I was an Episcopalian, which is basically diet Catholic (same great dogma but now with less rules) and the school was nondenominational. But that didn’t stop Ms. Price. Sometimes she’d start her Bible class by asking, “Are there any Catholics in the room?” When no one answered, she’d lay into Catholics and Episcopalians, lecturing us about how they misinterpreted the Bible and were worshipping false idols by praying to the pope and the Virgin Mary. I would sit there mute and rejected, unsure whether to resent her or my parents for raising me as an Episcopalian.

Further personal humiliation came during Friday assemblies, when guest speakers would talk about how they had lived as prostitutes, drug addicts and practitioners of black magic until they found God, chose His righteous path and were born again. It was like a Satanists Anonymous meeting. When they were done, everyone would bow their heads in prayer. If anyone wasn’t born again, the failed pastor leading the seminar would ask them to come on stage and hold hands and be saved. Every time I knew I should have walked up there, but I was too petrified to stand on stage in front of the entire school and too embarrassed to admit that I was morally, spiritually and religiously behind everybody else.

The only place I excelled was the roller-skating rink, and even that soon became inextricably linked with the apocalypse. My dream was to become a champion roller skater, and to that end I nagged my parents into squandering the money they had been saving for a weekend getaway on professional skates that cost over $400. My regular roller-skating partner was Lisa, a sickly, perpetually congested girl but nonetheless one of my first big crushes. She came from a strict, religious family. Her mother was a secretary for Reverend Ernest Angley, one of the more notorious televangelist faith healers of the time. Our pseudo-dates after skating practice usually began with making “suicides” at the rink’s soda fountain—discolored combinations of Coke, 7-Up, Sunkist and root beer—and ended with a trip to Reverend Angley’s ultraopulent church.

The Reverend was one of the scariest people I’d ever met: his perfectly straight teeth gleamed like bathroom tiles, a toupee sat clumped on top of his head like a hat made from wet hair caught in a bathtub drain and he always wore a powder blue suit with a mint green tie. Everything about him reeked of artificiality, from his plastic, over-manicured appearance to his name, which was supposed to evoke the phrase “earnest angel.”

Every week, he called a variety of crippled people to the stage and supposedly healed them in front of millions of TV viewers. He would poke his finger in a deaf person’s ear or a blind person’s eye, yelling “Evil spirits come out” or “Say baby,” and then wiggle his finger until the person on stage passed out. His sermons were similar to those at school, with the Reverend painting the imminent apocalypse in all its horror—except here there were people screaming, passing out and speaking in tongues all around me. At one point in the service, everyone would throw money at the stage. It would rain hundreds of quarters, silver dollars and wadded-up dollar bills as the Reverend went right on testifying about the firmament and the fury. Along the walls of the church were numbered lithographs he sold depicting macabre scenes like the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding through a small town not unlike Canton at sunset, leaving a trail of slit throats behind them.

The services were three to five hours long, and if I fell asleep, they’d reprimand me and take me to a separate room where they held special youth seminars. Here, they’d chastise me and about a dozen other kids about sex, drugs, rock and the material world until we were ready to throw up. It was a lot like brain-washing: we’d be tired and they purposelessly wouldn’t give us any food so that we were hungry and vulnerable.

Lisa and her mother were completely devoted to the church, mainly because Lisa was half-deaf when she was born and supposedly the Reverend had wiggled his finger in her ear and restored her hearing during a service. Because she was a churchgoer and her daughter had been blessed by a miracle of God, Lisa’s mother constantly condescended to me, as if she and her family were better and more righteous. Every time they dropped me off at home after services, I imagined Lisa’s mother making her wash her hands because they had touched mine. I was always distressed by the whole experience, but I went to church with them anyway because it was my only chance to be with Lisa outside of the skating rink.

Our relationship, however, soon went awry. Occasionally, something will happen that will change your opinion of someone irrevocably, that will shatter the ideal you’ve built up around a person and force you to see them for the fallible and human creature they really are. This happened when we were heading home after church one day, goofing off in the back seat of her mother’s car. Lisa was making fun of how skinny I was, and I put my hand over her mouth to shut her up. As she began to laugh, she spewed a huge wad of thick, lime-green snot into my hand. It didn’t seem real, which made it even more revolting. When I pulled away, a long string of it hung between my fingers and her face like apple taffy. Lisa, her mother and I were all equally horrified and embarrassed. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of her mucus stretched out and webbed between my fingers. In my mind, she had debased herself and shown me her true nature, proven herself to be a monster behind a mask, much like I imagined Reverend Angley to be. She wasn’t any better than me, as her mom would have me believe. I didn’t say another word to her—not then or ever.

A
NGEL IN THE CLOUDS

Disillusion had begun to set in at Christian school as well. One day in fourth grade I brought in a picture that Grandma Wyer had taken on an airplane flight from West Virginia to Ohio, and in the photo there appeared to be an angel in the clouds. It was one of my favorite possessions and I was excited to share it with my teachers, because I still believed everything they taught me about heaven and wanted to show them that my grandmother had seen it. But they said it was a hoax, scolded me and sent me home for being blasphemous. It was my most honest attempt to fit in with their idea of Christianity, to prove my connection with their beliefs, and I was punished for it.

It confirmed what I had already known from the beginning—that I wouldn’t be saved like everybody else. I knew it every day when I left for school trembling with fear that the world would end, I wouldn’t go to heaven and I’d never see my parents again. But after a year passed, then another, then another, and the world and Ms. Price and Brian Warner and the prostitutes who were born again were still there, I felt cheated and lied to.

Gradually, I began to resent Christian school and doubt everything I was told. It became clear that the suffering they were praying to be released from was a suffering they had imposed on themselves—and now us. The beast they lived in fear of was really themselves: It was man, not some mythological demon, that was going to destroy man in the end. And this beast had been created out of their fear.

The seeds of who I am now had been planted.

“Fools aren’t born,” I wrote in my notebook one day during ethics class. “They are watered and grown like weeds by institutions such as Christianity.” During dinner that night, I confessed it all to my parents. “Listen,” I explained, “I want to go to public school, because I don’t belong here. Everything I like, they’re against.”

But they wouldn’t have any of it. Not because they wanted me to have a religious education, but because they wanted me to have a good one. The public school in our neighborhood, GlenOak East, sucked. And I was determined to go there.

So rebellion set in. At Christian Heritage School, it didn’t take much to rebel. The place was built on rules and conformity. There were strange dress codes: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we had to wear blue pants, a white button-down shirt and, if we wanted, something red. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we had to wear dark green pants and either a white or yellow shirt. If our hair touched our ears, it had to be cut. Everything was regimented and ritualistic, and no one was allowed to stand out as better than or different from anyone else. It wasn’t very useful preparation for the real world: turning all these graduates loose every year with the expectation that life will be fair and everyone will be treated equally.

Beginning at age twelve, I embarked on an ever-escalating campaign to get kicked out of school. It started, innocently enough, with candy. I’ve always felt a kinship with Willy Wonka. Even at that age, I could tell that he was a flawed hero, an icon for the forbidden. The forbidden in this case was chocolate, a metaphor for indulgence and anything you’re not supposed to have, be it sex, drugs, alcohol or pornography. Whenever they showed
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
on the Star Channel or in our rundown local movie theater, I would watch it obsessively while eating bags and bags of candy.

At school, candy and sweets—except for the Little Debbie snack cakes on the lunchroom menu—were contraband. So I would go to Ben Franklin’s Five and Ten, a neighborhood store that looked like an old soda shop, and load up on Pop Rocks, Zotz, Lik-M-Stix and

those pill-like pastel tabs that are glued to white paper and impossible to eat without digesting small shreds of paper as well. Looking back on it, I gravitated toward candies that were the most like drugs. Most of them weren’t just sweets, they also produced a chemical reaction. They would fizz in your mouth or make your teeth black.

So I became a candy pusher, peddling the stuff during lunchtime for as much as I wanted because no one else had access to sweets during school. I made a fortune—at least fifteen dollars in quarters and dimes—in the first month. Then someone narced on me. I had to turn in all my candy and the money I had made to the authorities. Unfortunately, I wasn’t kicked out of school—just suspended.

My second project was a magazine. In the spirit of
Mad
and
Cracked
, it was called
Stupid
. The mascot was, not unlike myself, a buck-toothed, big-nosed kid with acne who wore a baseball cap. I sold it for twenty-five cents, which was pure profit because I copied the pages for free at the Carpet Barn, where my dad worked. The machine was cheap and worn down, with an acrid, carbonlike odor, and it never failed to smear all six pages of the magazine. In a school starved for smut and dirty jokes, however,
Stupid
quickly caught on—until I was busted again.

The principal, Carolyn Cole—a tall, slouched, prissy woman with glasses and curly brown hair piled on top of her birdlike face—called me into her office, where a roomful of administrators were waiting. She thrust the magazine into my hands and demanded that I explain the cartoons about Mexicans, scatology and, especially, the Kuwatch Sex Aid Adventure Kit, which was advertised as including a whip, two oversized groin grinders, a fishing rod, nipple tassels, metal shop goggles, fishnet stockings and a bronzed dog dick necklace. As would happen many times later in life, they kept interrogating me about my work—not understanding whether it was supposed to be art, entertainment or comedy—and asking me to explain myself. So I exploded and, in exasperation, threw the papers up in the air. Before the last one had fluttered to the ground, Mrs. Cole, red in the face, ordered me to grab my ankles. From the corner of the room, she picked up a paddle, which had been so sadistically designed by a friend in shop class that it had holes in it to minimize wind resistance. I was given three hard, fast Christian whacks.