$$$
While Don didn’t pay me or provide food on a consistent basis, he did provide a gigantic three thousand dollar television. He bought one of those early big screen televisions that weighed five hundred pounds and took four grown men to hoist it up the steps to our living room. Those poor guys. I found it amusing that we had such a large expensive television in such a small inexpensive apartment in the upstairs of someone else’s house. It was another toy for Don. Another problem though. Too often, my brother JP would bump into it and get whooped for it. One time he smeared food on the screen with his fingers and Don went ballistic. A safe zone was established. Violate the zone and he’d get beat. I never got hit even once, but I was sure to use the remote from a distance. Maybe I was smart. Maybe he was just intimidated by the fact I had a crazy father who could pop up from out of nowhere if he needed to. Maybe hitting JP was something else, something personal, and something to do with his own feelings about himself. I wasn’t about to test the theories though.
12
FOR A WHILE I felt hazy. At eleven years old I had strange bouts of odd dopey feelings. I would doze off on the living room couch after a bowl of cereal and wake to a kaleidoscope of colors swirling around on the big screen television. Except the television was turned off.
One night I awoke and I was in the TV being beaten up by professional wrestlers. I knew I wasn’t dreaming or having night terrors like I had had when I was six. Sometimes in those vivid dreams, I was chased down in my neighborhood or just terribly embarrassed in front of a crowd. A psychologist later told me this was a result of some insecurity I had— perhaps my mother’s busy work schedule or a missing father.
This time at eleven years old, I knew I was awake, but something different was going on. This feeling kept me from going to school on a couple of occasions. For a while, I thought it was a virus or an allergy to something, but I blew it off and hid it from my mother. I told her I was just a little dizzy.
The most memorable of these hallucinogenic states was one night around midnight. I was eleven and my little brother JP was only a toddler. He didn’t wake all night, despite my screams. I had been sleeping, again on the couch after lounging around watching television. The TV was off when I awoke in terror. Something felt like it was inside my head. It was closing in chasing me from room to room. My heart pounded. I ran from room to room looking for help only to realize that no one was home. My mother was out waitressing and Don had stepped out. My yelps turned to screams. I pulled the window up in my mother’s bedroom and stuck my head out into the winter night. Poking my head out from the second story window I yelled,
“Help, help.”
When no one answered I just cried to the cold.
After a few minutes, I heard the front door open. The state of panic seemed to vaporize. I thought it might be my mother or Don returning, so I went to have a look. I opened up our door and peered down the hallway to the entryway. A couple out for a walk stood at the bottom of the stairs. They had heard me from the sidewalk.
“Are you ok?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, trembling.
“Maybe you just had a bad dream.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Are your parents home?”
“No, my mother ran out for milk.”
“All right, well just sit tight and wait for her. Do you want us to wait?”
“No, I’m ok. Thank you. I’m going to go back to bed.”
The kind couple left and I sat there for a while at the top of the stairs with my back to the closed door. Had this been an illness? Was I crazy? Was this a panic attack? I had no idea.
$$$
It never occurred to me that some of this might have been an intentional effect I was suffering from. One night some weeks after my episode, I sat on the couch in the dark after waking up in the middle of the night. I was going to get up to go to my room when I saw the refrigerator light on. Don was leaning into the fridge with something in one hand. The other hand lowered the milk back on to the shelf. The door closed and the light disappeared. He turned around, but it was too late. He saw me. I pretended I was groggy from my nap. He too pretended he didn’t know I knew that he knew I saw him.
I didn’t drink milk for a while. In fact, I spilled out that container of milk and made it look like I had used it all up. I’m sure he knew. No one else used milk. My mother hated it and Don had no use for it. I used it in cereal and chocolate milk. As far as I know, I was also the only one going through these weird visuals and feelings. A couple of months passed and I started to use the milk again and never had one of those mental episodes ever again. I’ll never know whether I was just some crazy person’s lab experiment.
13
AFTER WRESTLING WORE OFF, everyone got into music. “Sweet Child O Mine” enraptured us during the summer of ’88. We had become music freaks— denim jackets with patches, tight ripped jeans, and band t-shirts with demons and guns on the fronts. We were crazed by heavy metal in the heat of an MTV revolution of music videos and a top ten where pop music had surrendered to hard rock and metal ballads. We all grew our hair longer. Paul sketched out tattoos for all of us to choose from once we were old enough to get them (still years away). Mine was a heart with flames burning out of the top of it and a sword right down the middle. I was going to slap that one right on my left arm, and then another one above it on the shoulder (likely a girl’s face), and another couple of tattoos on the other arm. We had it all worked out.
One thing we could do now at this age was pierce our ears. My mother took me for my first— one piercing through the left ear. A little while later I popped another two in the left ear after hearing someone tell me how they did it. I bought a couple of sharp pointed stud earrings at the mall, heated up the point, numbed my lobe with ice, and popped them through. They didn’t look bad, considering. Later, I got my right ear pierced at the mall. I wore all kinds of studs and loops. I started to look like a real punk.
We established a band of our own and attempted to play our instruments in Andy and Jeff’s basement. I was the singer and guitarist, Andy played the bass, Jeff was rhythm guitar, Gene was our lead guitarist, and Paul was on drums. Whether it was genuine music or not was debatable. Andy and Jeff’s older brother Trent said I sounded like Metallica with laryngitis. Andy, Jeff, Gene and I all had decent equipment, but we struggled to play even a single chord. The only thing we had going was Paul who actually played the drums in the school band, but he couldn’t move his whole set from his house. He got through it with buckets, pots, and pans.
Andy, Jeff, Gene, Paul, and I were a band, even if it was just for a moment in time, even if we never quite made it past our first and only original song. I envisioned us as the next Guns N’ Roses. I had high hopes, but we really sounded horrendous. At least we had fun.
Steven and I seemed to have our own thing going. He had actually started to fiddle around with a guitar, so he was really the original lead guitarist before Gene. But I guess he was just too much for the whole group to handle. He was better off solo. You can’t group up someone like that for too long— he marched to his own beat. He and I continued to love music together though. We listened to hours of tapes, messed around on guitars, read the metal magazines from the stationary store, and talked about how crazy our favorite bands were.
Steven slept over one night and we stayed up late talking about music. Guns N’ Roses was our favorite band and many of the songs on the Appetite for Destruction album were about drugs and addiction. Some of the band members had been in and out of rehab for heroin. I’ll never forget Steven’s words—
“I’ll never do heroin, Jack. No Mr. Brownstone.”
“Neither would I…the stuff’s evil. I might be a punk, but I’m not dumb.”
$$$
In the midst of our music craze, we would steal audiocassettes from TSS, a local retail