Long Hard Road Out of Hell (9 page)

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.

“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.

John’s brother lit up the bong, which was already filled with crumbled brown leaves, and took a Herculean puff, filling the room with sickly sweet smoke when he exhaled. I hacked and coughed through my first drags, but I soon felt it. Combined with the Mad Dog 20/20, the Southern Comfort, the bottle of wine being passed around and the
Blizzard of Ozz
album playing in the room, it sent my head reeling. The fact that nobody liked me at school began to fade out of my mind like blue Magic Marker reminders scrawled on the back of a greasy fist.

I sat there dizzily, cycling in and out, as John’s brother began ranting. His face was flushed and twisted, and he was naming dozens of ancient spirits and demons he planned to conjure up and order to kill people: teachers who had failed him, girlfriends who had dumped him, friends who had betrayed him, relatives who had mistreated him, employers who had fired him—basically anyone who had crossed his path since he was old enough to feel hatred.

Pulling a switchblade out of his pocket, John’s brother made a long slice along the surface of his thumb and let it drip into a small bowl filled with a crusty brown-and-white flecked powder. “Bad Angarru!” he began chanting. “Ninnghizhidda! Thee I invoke, Serpent of the Deep! Thee I invoke, Ninnghizhidda, Horned Serpent of the Deep! Thee I invoke, Plumed Serpent of the Deep! Ninnghizhidda!”

He paused and took another toke, then rubbed the bloody powder against his lips, only vaguely aware of our presence.

“I summon thee, Creature of Darkness, by the works of darkness! I summon thee, Creature of Hatred, by the works of hatred! I summon thee, Creature of the Wastes, by the rites of the waste! I summon thee, Creature of Pain, by the words of pain!”

If this was what pot was like, I didn’t want to be on it. I just kept staring at the gun, hoping John’s brother wouldn’t pick it up. At the same time, I was trying not to let him know I was staring at the gun because I didn’t want to draw attention to it. He was clearly deranged, and if he wasn’t a murderer already, there seemed to be no reason why he couldn’t be one by the end of the night.

Minutes or hours elapsed. The bong kept coming around, but the water inside had been replaced with Southern Comfort in an attempt to get us even more fucked up. The Black Sabbath song “Paranoid” was playing on the stereo or in my head, the cat was hissing at me, the room was spinning, John’s brother was daring me to drink the Southern Comfort out of the bong and John was chanting “chug it.” Spineless worm that I was, I lifted the bong to my pot-parched lips, held my breath and downed what may have been the foulest shot ever concocted. Then... I don’t know what happened. I can only assume that I blacked out and became just another canvas for the various subtle cruelties of the Crowell brothers.

I awoke to the sound of hissing at five
P.M.
(which seemed like a late time for me to wake up back then). The cat was still stalking me. I felt my eyes: They were still there. Then I threw up. Then I threw up again. And again. But as I knelt doubled over above the toilet, I realized that I had learned something from the previous night: that I could use black magic to turn the lowly lot life had given me around—to attain a position of power that other people would envy and accomplish things that other people couldn’t. I also learned that I didn’t like smoking pot—or the taste of bongwater.

THE WORM SHEDS ITS SKIN

The first time I realized something was wrong with our family was when I was six and my father bought me a book about a giraffe that had been personalized so that I was a character in the story, going on adventures with the animal. The only problem was that my name was spelled Brain all through the book, which made for a disturbing image of a giraffe with a brain clinging to its back. I don’t think my father even realized the mistake—and he had supposedly named me.

It was emblematic of the way he had always treated me, which is that he didn’t treat me at all. He didn’t care and wasn’t around to care. If I wanted his attention, it was usually given to me with a belt doubled-over to make a loud snapping sound when it connected with my backside. When he came home from work and I was laying around playing Colecovision or drawing pictures, he would always find an excuse, like an unmown lawn or a full dishwasher, to blow up at me. I soon learned to look busy and responsible when he walked in, even if there was nothing to do. My mother always dismissed his violent outbursts as part of the same Vietnam War post-traumatic stress disorder that caused him to wake up in the middle of the night screaming and smashing things. As a teenager, whenever I brought friends home, he would ask them, “Have you ever sucked a sweeter dick than mine?” It was a trick question because, whether they said yes or no, they still ended up with his dick in their mouth, at least in the comedic sense of the question.

Occasionally, my father promised to take me places, but more often than not something more pressing would come up at work. Only on a few memorable occasions did we do anything together. Usually, he took me on his motorcycle to a strip mine near our house, where, using a rifle he had removed from the corpse of a Viet Cong soldier, he taught me how to shoot. I inherited good aim from my father, which served me well whether shooting BB guns at animals or throwing rocks at cops. I also inherited a bad temper with a short fuse, a headstrong ambition that can only be stopped by bullets or bouncers, a blunt sense of humor, an unquenchable appetite for tits and an irregular heartbeat, which is only made worse by ingesting lots of drugs.

Although I had so much in common with my father, I never wanted to admit it. Most of my childhood and adolescence was spent in fear of him. He constantly threatened to kick me out of the house and never failed to remind me that I was worthless and would never amount to anything. So I grew up a mama’s boy, spoiled by her and ungrateful for it. In order to make sure I clung even closer to her side, my mother used to try to convince me that I was more sickly than I was so she could keep me at home and care for me. When I first began breaking out in acne, my mother told me that it was an allergic reaction to egg whites (which gave her hives), and for a long time I believed her. She wanted me to be just like her, to be dependent on her, to never leave her. When I finally did at age twenty-two, she sat in my room every day and cried until one afternoon she thought she saw Jesus in silhouette against the doorway. Taking her vision as a sign that I was being watched over, she stopped lamenting and began keeping as pets the rats she was supposed to be feeding my snake. In her own overprotective way, she replaced me with the sickliest rat, which she named Marilyn, and not only went on to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the rodent, but now keeps it in a crudely constructed oxygen tent made from Saran Wrap to prolong its life.

As a child, you accept whatever happens in your family as normal. But when puberty hits, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and acceptance turns into resentment. In ninth grade, I began feeling more and more isolated, friendless and sexually frustrated. I used to sit at my desk in class with a pocketknife, making cuts up and down my forearm. (I still have dozens of scars beneath my tattoos.) For the most part, I didn’t bother to excel at school. Most of my education took place after class, when I escaped into a fantasy world—immersed in role-playing games, reading books like the Jim Morrison bio
No One Here Gets Out Alive
, writing macabre poems and short stories, and listening to records. I began to appreciate music as a universal healer, an entryway to a place where I could be accepted, a place with no rules and no judgments.

The person who had to bear the biggest brunt of my frustration was my mother. Perhaps my vitriolic outbursts against her were something else I inherited from my father. For a period, my parents had violent screaming matches because my father suspected her of cheating on him with an ex-cop turned private investigator. My father had always been by nature suspicious and was never able to let go of his jealousy even for my mother’s first boyfriend, Dick Reed, a scrawny guy whose ass my dad beat the day he met my mother at the age of fifteen. One of their louder fights took place after my father went through her purse, pulled out a wadded-up washcloth and demanded an explanation for it. I never figured out what was so suspicious about the item—whether it was from a strange hotel or it had been used to mop up semen. I remember the investigator in question coming by the house a few times with machine guns and
Soldier of Fortune
magazines, which impressed me because I was still interested in a career in espionage. Hate and anger are infectious, however, and I soon began resenting my mother because I thought she was breaking up the marriage. I used to sit on my bed and cry thinking about what would happen if my parents split up. I was afraid I’d have to choose between them and, because I was scared of my father, end up moving away and living in poverty with my mother.

M
OM

In my room along with my Kiss posters, hand-drawn cartoons and rock albums, I also had a collection of glass Avon cologne bottles that my grandmother had given me. Each one was shaped like a different car, and I think it was the Excalibur that sent my mother to the hospital one night. She had come home late and wouldn’t tell me where she had been. Suspecting her of cheating, I lost the temper my father had handed down to me and threw the bottle at her face, opening up a bloody gash over her lip and scattering cheap perfume and shards of blue glass across my floor. She still has a scar, which has served as her constant reminder never to have another child. In altercations that followed, I hit her, spit on her and tried to choke her. She never retaliated. She just cried, and I never felt sorry for her.