Long Hard Road Out of Hell (7 page)

teen dabbler

“I
KNOW SOME NEW TRICKS,” SAID THE
C
AT IN THE
H
AT
.

“A
LOT OF GOOD TRICKS
. I
WILL SHOW THEM TO YOU
. Y
OUR 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, where 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.

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.

C
HAD 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.