Bob Johnston takes away much of the orchestration and most of the singing ladies - the only time he employs female backup is to sing the French parts of 'The Partisan'. Rounding out Leonard's trilogy is this release, his last one before a lengthy pause and a rather radical stylistic reinvention. Essentially it's just more of the same, but digging deeper, one sees some substantial stylistic differencies. It's not that there's a lot of hate on the record, but there ain't a lot of love, either.
Broken love, sure; morose and grim atmosphere, sure. Lots of, starting with the black album cover and ending with 'Joan Of Arc' - the haunting story of 'romance' between Joan and the fire that consumed her, albeit with rather unclear moral. After a three-year break from studio work, Cohen returns with another LP and certainly pleases the vast hordes of his fans I suppose he had at least a hundred of them by !
Okay, it is a bit more prominently arranged than Songs Of Love And Hate , with all kinds of various instruments from pianos to guitars to saxes to drums to whatever, but they are all hiding somewhere in the background to let good ol' Leo and his female sidekicks do all the main jobs. I'm kinda trying to earn the reputation of a guy who keeps salvaging all kinds of miserable records - heck, so far I've been only really cruel to Rod Stewart, but man oh man did he really deserve it. Not so with this commonly despised and much lamented album, even if, to be frank, Cohen should have entitled it Death Of A Poets' Man indeed, because that's what it is.
Rather hard to believe, if you axe me. Decent Songs - now that I can understand, because they're all pretty decent. Who the heck does he think we are? It's for Chrissake, the age of disco, punk, New Wave, Judas Priest, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, and this wrinkly old Canadian still writes his songs the way he used to do that a decade ago? Dumping Phil Spector, overproduction, cheesy orchestration and the rest of the blah blah? My mother and sister got it just as bad.
Mom basically took care of the whole family, yet was constantly told that she was stupid, useless. After a while she started to believe it. His ability to control and dictate the consensus reality in the household was unbelievable. It was a sophisticated combination of emotional manipulation and an incessant logical hammering, and it was tremendously efective.
No matter how right we actually may have been, by the end of any argument, he ' d have us convinced that WE were the crazy ones. By the time I was 1 0, I was plagued with blinding migraine headaches that would come on sporadically, without waning, and leave me writhing in agony for hours in my darkened room. Things plugged along like this, year after year. I leaned to live with the tension in the house. It was still there, but it faded into the background of things, like white noise.
By the time I got to high school, my father had been promoted and was now required to take frequent trips to Japan on business. Whenever he left, the tension would abruptly disappear, and it was during these times that the fucked-up reality of the situation was brought into stark contrast by its absence. Each time he left it was like a vacation. But we always knew it wouldn't last, and dreaded his eventual retun. Be careul what you wish for. H o l iday During the summer recess between my sophomore and junior years of high school, Bridget and I took a little holiday and lew out to stay with our grandparents in Illinois for a week.
It was about what I expected it would be: I just wanted to get home and drive around with my friends, as I ' d tuned 1 6 that January and my father had bought me a used pickup truck. The night before we were scheduled to ly back, we were all lounging around my grandparents ' house when the phone rang. Grandma answered and within seconds, I could tell from the tone of her voice that something was very wrong. My grandmother glanced over at where I was sitting and when I saw the look in her eyes a feeling crept over me. For a moment she couldn't say anything. Finally, hesitantly, she said, "It's your father.
M y father, crying hysterically. I had never ONCE seen the man shed a tear over anything. Yet here he was, blubbering like a child on the telephone, in my ear. I literally could not even make out what he was saying, he was so panicked. I felt ice melting in my chest. It expanded, quickly spreading through my entire body, traveling up my carotid arteries and into my head. I didn't know what the uck was going on, but I somehow knew that nothing was ever going to be the same. We 're getting divorced. I was absolutely terriied.
That didn't exactly help the situation, as my father hung up shortly thereafter. We knew that we had to get someone over to the house to check on him immediately, so we made some calls and managed to get a hold of the next door neighbor, explaining the situation to her as best we could. She went over to the house and when nobody answered the door, peered in the window and saw Dad passed out on the loor.
An ambulance was called and my father was taken to the hospital where they were able to revive him. He was put on a suicide watch and was not permitted to leave the hospital. At least he was all right. Back in Illinois, however, we were very much NOT all right. Our stay was tentatively extended for two weeks while things got sorted out back home. Calls made to my mother were not exactly productive, a blur of accusations and crying as she tried to state her case.
I didn 't want to hear it and neither did my grandparents. All they knew was that this woman had put their son in the hospital, and so for the next week and a half my sister and I were inundated with blistering lectures about what a whore and ingrate she was. When my sister had the temerity to suggest that maybe our mother had a good reason for doing what she did, Grandpa sprang forward, caught her by the throat with one hand, picked her of the loor and slammed her against the wall, urious.
He was a huge dude and she just hung there, pinned against the wall, clawing at his hand, bug-eyed. I kept my mouth shut. Things went on like this as the deadline for our retun approached. Finally, my father called back. When I spoke to him, he sounded completely calm and in control, as though nothing had ever happened. I 've had a lot of time to think about things.
Your mother and I have talked it over, and we 've decided that we 're going to work it out. Like I said, we 're going to work it out. She made a mistake, and it's not going to happen again. It's going to take some time, but everything is going to get back to normal. We can't wait for you guys to come back. The sense of dread that had been gripping me began to evaporate. I handed the phone of to my sister and began to pack my bags right then and there, excited to inally retun home. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, but I guessed that it probably wasn 't going to be pleasant.
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My sister and I walked of the plane and our parents were waiting for us at the gate. They both seemed on edge, but in diferent ways. My mother was somehow distant and there was a hollow look to her. I immediately felt the desire to comfort her in some way, but I shoved that down and ignored her, reusing even to look at her. No eyes for Mom. Ater all, she was the one responsible for all of this. Pointedly, I presented my father with a git which I had picked up for him back in Chicago: I opted to ride with my father.
We drove in a tense silence until I inally got the nerve to ask him, "So. Mom 's not going to see that other guy anymore? I had never felt so conlicted. He just stared ahead as he drove. Finally, he glanced over and said, "Yeah. But I ' ll tell you this. I guarantee you, they're never going to forget my name. Her and her boyfriend. I felt the ice again, this time in the pit of my stomach. Once home, the tension remained high. I continued to ignore my mother as she began to go through the motions of preparing dinner for the family.
I went in my room and tried to unpack, but my mind was whirling. I just sat there, staring at the loor. The whole scenario was surreal. Here we were, pretending that everything was okay, attempting to hold on to whatever semblance of normalcy we could salvage in the atermath of Mom's revelation.
God, I was fucking pissed at her. But I was also scared. Scared as hell that something was about to explode. There s no way that this whole situation is getting resolved this easily, I thought. I knew that the other shoe was going to drop sooner or later. As I sat down at the table, nobody spoke.
Family dinner had always been a bit of a drag, what with Dad's pepetual fault-inding and my now-acerbic teenaged recriminations lying back and forth. But this was diferent. Mom dished out the food robotically, zombiied. Looking at her more closely now, I could see something was seriously wrong. She looked traumatized, her eyes like buned-out lashbulbs in their sockets. Dad attempted to make conversation, asking us about the trip. I said meaningless things in retun, doing my part in the charade. Silverware clinked, more awkward conversation lurched its way around the table.
Suddenly, there was a very loud and authoritative series of knocks on the front door. All of our eyes went wide. We sat there, staring at each other. A few seconds passed, then there was a loud crash as the door was rammed in and several large men wearing full body armor and carrying machine guns swarmed into the house. Four of them surrounded my father, who remained seated and calmly placed his hands on his head. As he was handcufed, he looked at me and said, "It's okay. Whatever the hell had happened, it warranted the deployment of what appeared to be the ucking SWAT team.
They continued to clear the house, pointing their guns into our closets and shouting. Some of them spoke with my father, who seemed remarkably composed and cooperative, as if he had been expecting this. I frantically attempted to ask someone, anyone, what was going on, but nobody had any answers for me, the unfortunate kid. The oicers buzzed all around me, removing "evidence" from the house, radios crackling loudly, patrol cars bathing the street in red and blue light as the neighbors stood on their lawns, watching.
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I called my grandparents back in Illinois and told them what was going on as my father was being taken away by the police. Ater that, everything just went black. Catastrophe My father was held without bail and charged with an aray of felonies including kidnapping, aggravated assault, and extortion. He was looking at close to 1 8 years in prison if convicted of all counts that were brought forward. There were two trials. In the irst he was able to hire a private attoney and the result was a hung jury. During the second trial he was represented by the public defender and took a plea; he was sentenced to six years in the Califonia State Penitentiary at Pelican Bay.
In court, my mother gave her account of what had happened: Given the extremely unstable behavior already exhibited by my father, she agreed. A couple days after Dad was released from the hospital, he called my mother at the number she had left and convinced her to come over and talk about things. She reluctantly agreed and drove back to the house that evening.
As she walked up the path to the front door, she noticed that the house was completely dark. She got an eerie feeling, and for a second was certain that she was about to discover him hanging by his neck from the raters in the garage. Taking a deep breath, she unlocked and opened the door. It took a second for her eyes to adjust, and she was able to make out the shadowy igure of my father, sitting on the couch in the living room.
He tuned and reached behind the couch. He pointed it at her. A chair had been placed in the middle of the room, and as he walked in he reached on top of the refrigerator and took down a roll of duct tape. When she hesitated, he worked the pump action on the gun, feeding a shell into the chamber. She stripped and he bound her to the chair with the duct tape. That's when the real un began. The torture went on for nearly two days. At one point, while Dad was of in another room making a phone call, she was able to break free; she fully expected him to kill her at this point, and the resulting adrenaline rush enabled her to rip the tape with brute force.
She got up from the chair and ran to the garage. If she opened the garage door and started running down the street, surely one of the neighbors would notice a naked woman sprinting down the block and intervene. Just as she reached the garage, however, my father came bounding after her. Back to the chair. This time, he used more tape. Out came the knife again. Finally, Dad decided that it was time to move to phase two. He ordered my mother, who by this time was completely subdued and resigned to her fate, to call up Don and tell him that she wanted to meet him.
I ' ll come pick you up in half an hour. I ' ll honk when I ' m out front," she said, repeating what my father had instructed her to. They went out to the family Cadillac, the shotgun wrapped in a towel. My father broke out the interior lights before getting in the back seat and covering himself with a blanket. As my mother drove to Newport Beach, she tried to talk him out of whatever he had planned. I can't go back now. Shortly after my mother had stated driving again, Dad popped up from the back seat and said quietly, to Don, "Do you know who I am? They drove to the Ali Baba motel, a skanky little place just off the 55 freeway with a theatrical golden minaret on top.
Again wrapping the gun in the towel, Dad ordered my mother to check in under an assumed name and all three of them proceeded to the room where some more un was had. One particularly droll quote from the court documents had him telling Don, "I could make you a paraplegic right now," as he forced the barrel of the gun into his anus.
My father took out out his knife. I don 't care where, but make sure it's legible. Ater they were done, he inspected the letters. It stands for 'Adultery' and 'Allen. And you ' ll remember me. It had been a long night, but Dad had one more surprise up his sleeve. Ater they handed the cash over to him, he informed them he had made arrangements to have Don's entire family killed should they ever go to the police, or ever see each other again.
They dropped Don off back at his house and went home. And that was it. In my father 's mind, he had gotten away with it. His wife was back, the kids were coming home, and everything was going to go back to normal. In other words, he had gone completely fucking insane. As the story emerged in the weeks ater his arrest, I didn 't know what to believe. It just sounded so ridiculously outlandish. Here was a mild mannered corporate executive who in his whole life had never had so much as a traic ticket, and we were supposed to accept that he 'd just snapped, gone of the deep end and tuned ovenight into a twisted, violent psychopath?
The jury in the irst trial didn't buy it, at least not beyond a reasonable doubt.
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But in the second trial, without his expensive lawyer there to weave a portrait of a vindictive woman out to put her husband away and abscond with the kids, the evidence was just too compelling. The gun, the witnesses at the motel, the "A"s carved into the lesh. It was all there. Beyond that, I knew my mother, and it just did not make sense that she would dream up this absurd story and put herself through two hellish trials. She ' d already let him, that had been deinitive enough. As much as I wanted to believe otherwise, my father was guilty.
The other shoe had dropped. I was not prepared to deal with this. My father was gone. One day he was there, the next, he had simply disappeared forever. I would only see him two more times: That was ten years ago, and I haven't seen or spoken to him since. His side of the family completely cut us of as well. They assumed that we had somehow "tuned against him," and never contacted my sister or I again. Not on Christmas, birthdays. It was as though half of my entire family had been instantly killed in an airplane crash.
No matter how much of a dick he may have been, I loved my father. Now, he was rotting in one of Califonia's most notorious "supermax" prisons amidst hard core felons, rapists and murderers. The sense of rejection and loss was unbelieveable. We had been utterly fucked over by our own father, and for no reason that I could see or comprehend. It wasn 't fair. The same questions kept repeating in my head: Why did this happen to me?
How could he put us through this? This was a pain unlike anything I had ever experienced, and it was constant. There was no escape. This was my reality now. I ' d weep violently until there was nothing let, but that didn't make it stop. Aterwards, I ' d sit there mute, empty and dazed. There was no way to appease it or make it subside. The only thing to be done was to persist, mindlessly, and try to imagine a time when it would be over despite the fact that there was no end in sight. But it didn't work. My mother stood by, horriied.
I was like a wild animal, completely feral and out of control. I was sent to a multitude of therapists. I felt I was intellectually superior to them and that there was no way their little diplomas qualiied them to help me. I let them know this in no uncertain terms. I was quite the sarcastic little prick. One actually told my mother that she felt sorry for her. As the various attoney fees piled up, it became clear that she 'd have to sell the house. I did everything in my power to ensure that this wouldn't happen. I destroyed the "For Sale" signs put up on the lawn by the realtor, until inally he installed a giant metal one attached to a 4"x4" post sunk into the ground.
I ripped up the equipment for the pool and dumped detergent in it. Every day, I ' d punch a new hole in the walls, and my mother would just hang a picture over it. One day, I clambered up and ripped the ucking shingles of of the roof, throwing them all over the lawn. The last straw came when I arrived home from school one aftenoon to discover a lovely bouquet of lowers on the kitchen table, from Don. Enraged, I took them outside, doused them with gasoline and lit them up, nearly buning the house down in the process. Mom banished me to the shed in the backyard, coniscating my house key and giving me a sleeping bag.
Undeterred, I made myself comfortable, using a "beige box" to run a phone line into the shed. It was a constant war of minds. If she put an anti-theft device on my truck in an attempt to punish me, I ' d simply take off the brake pedal assembly, remove the device, reassemble the whole deal and be on my way. Some nights I would sleep in my truck, or just drive around aimlessly, listening to music on the tape deck.
Other nights I would stay in the yard, tormenting my mother by continually tapping on her window with a coin until dawn, or crawling back up on the roof with the garden hose and spraying water down the chimney. I wasn't antagonizing my mother per se; she was just standing in the line of ire. As it became more clear what had happened, I really couldn't blame her any more.
My father had been into the "swingers" scene and had compelled my mother to take part in it since the early days of the marriage. In fact, he was the one who had made her go online in the irst place to look for women to have threesomes with. Instead, she found Don. Logically, this all made sense. My father had always been the authority igure, and now that he was gone, I was free to do anything, without consequence.
I had bought into his idealized "image" of our family, of our lives, as much as he had. When it disintegrated, literally nothing mattered anymore. Nor could I envision a future where anything ever would. The idea itself was absurd. All of the neat little labels and categorizations I had for things were rendered meaningless. Reality had come loose from its moorings and I was now adrit, at the mercy of an incomprehensible, uncaring universe that destroyed lives on a whim.
Nobody was to be trusted or allowed in. After all, if your own parents could uck you over, then anybody could. Schoolgi rls Inevitably, school resumed and I entered the 1 1 th grade. I had lost all interest in such things however, and basically stopped going. In a single semester, my grades dropped from straight "A"s to a "D" average.
None of this crap mattered. The idea of doing "homework" anymore was laughable. I ' d just show up and bullshit the tests, not having even looked at the material. I honestly can't believe that I graduated. My best guess as to how I managed this would be that the administration had taken into account my previous record of academic success in combination with what had transpired, and they felt sorry for me. Ater all, the sordid tale of my father 's gun-toting rampage had been run in all the local papers. Everyone knew about it. The few friends that I had managed to acquire before it all went down started to keep their distance.
It was just too weird for them. Those that stuck around merely did so in order to press me about the juicy details. I can't fault them for it. I mean, shit, if it hadn 't happened to ME, I would have found it fascinating as well. I always wanted to have an "interesting" life; now, I just wished I could be "normal" for a single day. There was only one person that stuck around, and didn 't seem to give a shit about the whole drama. This kid Hudson, a skinny Texan transplant who was almost as ucked up as I was.
He ' d moved to the coast with his mother after his folks had gotten divorced, and was now saddled with a stepfather who he hated. Our ater-school activities revolved largely around modems and weed. We drank all the booze in my mother's house and replaced it with water, as if she somehow wouldn 't know. Eventually, we took to skipping class and dropping acid, driving around and setting things on ire, laughing hysterically.
I just wanted to destroy shit. We used whatever we could ind in the garage to construct various bombs and incendiary devices, detonating them in the corporate parks lining the edges of town. Homemade napalm, mortars and molotov cocktails. As strange as it sounds, all of this may have saved me rom going totally insane. Hudson had a decent social circle, and through him I was grandfathered in, although I would remain somewhat on the fringes of it. As far as girls were concened, however, I was still on the outside looking in. I may have been screwed in the head, but I still wanted to uck.
Unfotunately, I had absolutely no idea how to go about making that happen. While I was busy terrorizing girls that had no idea I existed, I was equally oblivious to those who actually had some interest in me. One aftenoon as my English class let out, I was approached by Kristin, a spooky girl who dressed in black and always appeared to be vaguely depressed.
She handed me a cassette tape. When I got home, I took the tape out. It was labeled with the word "GWAR. We started hanging out a bit, but I never made a move on her, because I igured she just wanted to be friends. The "mix tape gambit" is probably the most obvious come on in the high school girl 's arsenal, but it went over my head. I just didn't believe she could be interested in me in that way. Eventually, the tension izzled out, and from then on we were just buddies. Then there was Anna Becker. Anna was basically, to me, the hottest girl in the entire universe.
Tall, blond, gorgeous, highly intelligent, captain of the volleyball team, etc. Her smile was like a baby polar bear sliding down a rainbow into a pot of gold. I didn't just want to fuck her, I wanted to be her boyfrien. Fuck that, I wanted her to be the mother of my children. I sat behind her in History class, and somehow we began passing notes to one another in order to combat the overwhelming sense of ennui that the nimrod teacher, Mr.
Skidmore, imparted to the classroom. What began as short notes over time evolved into a ull-blown correspondence full of surrealist humor and stream of consciousness ramblings, covering everything from the proper course of action for one to engage in should they arrive home and discover River Phoenix raping a chicken on their front lawn, to illustrations of Jason Priestly in a clown suit with his hands superglued to his shoulders. They were brilliant and hilarious and they crystallized my already intense attraction to her.
We actually began to look forward to Skidmore 's class, when we could continue where we had left off the day before. Anna lived in the same general area as I did, and so we started walking home together every day ater school. When I was with her I felt like I wasn't a complete fucking retard anymore, that all this bullshit with my family didn't exist. After all, she was a goddess, and what was I? A pyromaniac and chronic masturbator. A short, scrawny, pale wimp who lived in a shed. There was about as much chance of her feeling the same way about me as I did about her as there was of her having romantic thoughts about a piece of dog shit.
I didn't press the issue, and eventually Anna started dating some douchebag on the water polo team. I somehow made it to the end of senior year without getting expelled or lunking out. I was going to graduate. When the school yearbooks were handed out, I opened mine and tuned to the page with my portrait on it. I barely recognized the person looking up at me. He stared vacantly at the camera with a tight-lipped, feigned smile, and there were dark circles under his eyes that hadn't been there two years earlier.
So unlike the bright, energetic straight A student who wanted to make his family proud.
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That kid was gone. For better or worse, I realized, this was me now. I continued to study the picture, weighing what it meant. A voice snapped me out of it. It was great being in 3rd period Math with you, have an awesome summer! As mine illed up, I was suprised to ind that instead of the usual drivel, people had written some very genuine, heartfelt things.
I guess I wasn't such a loser, after all. When I offered the book to Anna Becker, she declined to sign it. Instead, she presented me with a three-page, handwritten letter which recounted almost every inside joke we had ever shared. At the end, however, it took a serious tum.
I knew she felt the same wa. I should have made a move. But as soon as the thought passed, others rushed in to take its place: She writes that shit to eveyone. She was just being polite. Remember who you are, and who she is. Even f it were true, it s too late. I was assigned to wear the Charlie costume. Kids had their birthday parties there and I would come out dressed as this giant rat, in a sweltering, rank ur suit which was always damp with the sweat of the employee from the previous shit. The children would either scream in terror, or gleefully swarm around me until I was backed into a coner, where they would proceed to kick me in the balls as their parents laughed.
On my break, I would oten retreat into the walk-in refrigerator, remove the head, sit on a beer keg and cry, eating mozzarella out of a bin. Sometimes, I ' d attempt to mitigate the horror by dropping a few hits of acid before work, which resulted in me exuberantly traipsing around the restaurant.
My boss would praise me for my enthusiasm, unaware that I had actually been high as uck and babbling incoherently under the humid, grinning rodent head. I wasn't the only one doing unsavory shit at Charlie's. Many of the employees were illegal immigrants. One of them, a small man from Guatemala, would occasionally get in the Charlie suit butt naked and roam the loor, leering up on young girls and groping them.
In the kitchen, a pair of delinquents named Noel and Matt made the pizza. Anytime an order came in that was overly complicated, they would spit in the dough. If an order was found to be particularly ofensive to their sensibilities, they were known to actually "make love" to the dough before iring it. These dudes were what we called "hessians," violent longhairs who listened to death metal. We had attended the same high school, although they were a couple years older than me. I remembered them as being fairly frightening characters back when I was a freshman.
Noel was a Huntington Beach surf thug who had graduated. Matt, a classic metalhead who dressed in all black, had dropped out. I never spoke with them in school, but now I interacted with them on a daily basis. One evening as I was leaving the restaurant, they happened to be chilling out back, smoking. You're uckin' smart and shit, right? You get good grades? I barely even graduated. My dad's in prison and I just get loaded all the time.
You should listen to Napalm Death, man. You' ll like it. Straight nine ball, brah. These guys were speaking my language. They ran up on him quickly. Matt grabbed him and slammed him up against a wall. You wanna fuck with a cop? Noel shoved him down the sidewalk and said, "Now get the uck out of here before we decide to take you in! They walked back over, laughing. He handed me a small bud of chronic. I drove home, to the new apartment we had moved into ater inally selling the house.
I went up to my room and smoked the nug, listening to Led Zeppelin and blowing the smoke out the window through a toilet paper roll stufed with dryer sheets. I thought about what they had called me earlier: I liked the sound of it. I grabbed a sheet of paper. I drew the number 9 and stared at it, mesmerized. I wrote my name with the roman numeral "IX" after it. It looked so imposing, so regal: I thought to myself, You know what? I wrote it out again, this time in a cursive script. A llen IX Stoned, I continued to perfect my new signature, scrawling it over and over while Robert Plant howled, until my mother began banging on the door.
I lit a cigarette to mask the smell of the weed as she burst in. Dad had blown all of the family's savings, including my college und, on his defense. Beyond that, my grades were dismal. All of this meant that my original choice, the University of Califonia at Berkeley, was out of the question. But my test scores were high, and with the help of student loans I was able to enroll in classes at San Francisco State University. As it tuned out, "enrolling in" and "attending" were two entirely different things.
Life in the dormitory was like a summer camp with booze and drugs. I quickly made friends with others who shared my interests. There was Neil, a gaunt, hairy theater major who was as addicted to pot as I was. Everybody knew that Neil was gay except Neil, but nobody ever bothered to tell him.
Maybe I just forgot because I was high. There was Daphne, a hot Greek cheerleader who had inexplicably fallen in with us.
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I didn't care why. There was Che, an aspiring ilmmaker who I felt to be a kindred spirit of sorts. A disaffected punk rocker who had no tattoos but at least a dozen piercings, Che was quite possibly the whitest Mexican I had ever met. He had grown up in Stockton which gave him a bit of a rough edge, yet at the same time he had a soft side; he would brawl with anyone at the drop of a hat, and in the next breath he ' d remind you to call your mom on Mother 's Day. Pot dulled his rage attacks, both road and otherwise, and he smoked it liberally to help keep them in check.
When he was a teenager his parents had moved to Santa Cruz and opened a skate shop. This gave him status with the other kids, and as a result he had been getting laid since he was 1 3. It wasn 't a big deal to him at all. He never approached girls but was somehow always getting ass. Finally, there was Amy. She was a shy girl with huge boobs who came from a good, Christian family. As the irst semester ended, all of the gang had become close, but I felt a special ainity for Amy: We began spending more and more time together, to the point where the others began making comments.
To my surprise, she felt the same way. We became boyfriend and girlfriend on the spot. We lost our virginity together, at the age of 1 9, on the ratty mattress in my dorm room. I stopped going to class completely, opting instead to stay in my room and fuck, up to ten times a day, until my dick was raw and near bleeding. Somehow, I managed to avoid lunking out, relying on whatever intellect I had left to pass tests without studying. To make some extra money, Che and I started selling dime bags of Mexican dirt weed to our fellow dormitory residents.
He ' d travel out t o Stockton and pick up this nasty, bricked-up headache weed, a pound at a time. In the dorms, it sold quickly. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. When the school year ended, the clique decided that we would move in together in an apartment of campus. Amy and I shared a room upstairs. We were completely, utterly in love with each other, with the kind of fatalistic abandon that's only possible with your irst. She made me feel calm and excited at the same time. Most importantly, I didn't feel alone. I had found somebody that I could trust, somebody who wasn't going to reject me and fuck me over.
She gave me solace and in retun, I gave her everything. All of the feeling that I had kept locked down in the wake of my family tragedy sprang out, and I focused it on her like a laser beam. I would have done anything to protect her, and I could sense the same feeling lowing through her. I felt a drive to succeed again, to secure our future together. It was about a month after class had resumed in the fall when it happened. I woke up and Amy was moving around in the room, packing a suitcase. Some friends from our church came here to pick me up.
What the fuck is going on? You can't just leave like this. I ' ll be back. Several evenings prior to this, we had decided to drop some acid. Not an unusual event by any means, but on this particular night, for some reason Amy insisted that we attend services at the local church ater taking the drugs. Not unsuprisingly, this triggered a "bad trip," during which she had called her parents back home and told them everything: Representatives of their church were dispatched immediately to retrieve their daughter from the brink of damnation.
She was placed in an inpatient rehabilitation facility, which essentially amounted to a undamentalist Christian "re-education" camp. Although 1 called every day, I wasn't permitted to speak to her for over a month. Her parents would just tell me, "She doesn't want to talk to you. Finally, after being released from the facility, Amy called me back. It was so good to hear her voice. As 1 began speaking with her, however, 1 could sense that something was off. Well, 1 guess that was to be expected, given what she ' d gone through.
It was all over now, and we ' d b e together again soon enough. I ' m getting along with m y parents, which is something I never thought I ' d say. She seemed t o be dancing around the real issue. I know I hurt you really bad and I am so sorry, more than you' ll ever know. You know what the priest told me? He gave me countless numbers of people who have died from LSD, ecstasy and pot, people he has had to bury and watch their loved ones suffer. Please, Jeff, go to a counselor. Things are diferent now. I walk with Him.
What are you talking about? I ' ve leaned that our relationship is destructive. So I think that it is best, for both of us, if! I ' m enrolling down here and hopefully I ' ll igure out what to do with my life. My counseling has helped me, and I hope you go for help too, because I do care for you and want you to be happy. Minutes passed without a word being said by either of us. Finally, she broke the silence.
I was back to square one. I retreated even deeper into substance abuse, drinking a ith of whiskey a day, writing terrible poetry and short stories about tortured young men succumbing under the strangling malaise of lost love. All of the roommates attempted to comfort me, but it was of no use. One night Daphne and I were alone in the house, and she came on to me, cuddling up to me on the couch. Sure, she was smoking hot, but I was simply too fucked to care, and made out with her halheartedly before retiring to my bedroom; the incident was never brought up again.
On my 20th birthday, Che took me to the 5 00 Club, a bar in the Mission District that was notoriously lax when it came to checking identiication. Ater several hours of drinking, I got it into my head that I wanted to call Amy. Che tried to talk me out of it, but I ignored him and went to the pay phone in the back of the bar.
I dialed the number. I ' m not sure exactly what I said. It was loud and I had diiculty hearing her, but I know one thing: I told her that I still loved her. Will you write me a letter? Do it immediately, ater I hang up. Happy birthday," and hung up. I walked back over to where Che and his girl were sitting. I knew that I wasn't ever going to get that letter. I sat down on a stool and dej ectedly watched some guys playing pool. My mind was a blank. As one of the guys lined up his shot across from me, I had a premonition that the ball was going to jump the table and come straight at me.
He drew back his stick and followed through. Sure enough, the cue ball lew up and of the felt. Since I had been ready, I caught it with one hand. Everybody i n the room gasped and looked at me. Without saying a word, I threw the ball back on the table, tuned, and walked out of the bar, alone. H ovel When the school year ended, the household split apart. Neil and I found a place on 1 9th Avenue, a shithole in-law apartment next to a gas station.
Shortly thereafter, Neil 's friend Fortez began staying over, under the pretense that he was looking for a place in the city. The guy was a "performer" and I found him incredibly annoying. He was constantly singing and doing magic tricks. Neil, although still irmly in the closet, was in love with him, and Fortez gladly took advantage of this fact to weasel his way into the house.
I began converting the backyard, a plot of land littered with junk and overrun with blackbery vines, into a beautiful garden complete with fountains and prize rose bushes. I ' d started growing pot instead of buying it wholesale, and as a result had developed an interest in plants in general. Gardening became an escape for me. The physical exertion required in ripping up weeds and digging holes served as a release valve for my rage. Ater a long day out in the yard, exhausted, I simply couldn't summon the energy to be angry anymore. Frankly, I didn't give a shit. With debts accumulating, I began to search for a job.
I was hired at a local garden center and began to lean as much as I could about horticulture. I ' d found something that I could put my mind to, and in a short time I became quite knowledgeable on the subject. Neil and Fortez were at each other 's throats constantly, and ater several months of this, Neil moved out. Coincidentally, my oId pal Hudson, who by this time had dropped out of college himself to start his own sotware company, had moved to the Bay Area in order to be closer to Silicon Valley. He stepped in to ill Neil 's spot.
With Hudson and I reunited, things quickly deteriorated. After Amy left, hatred and rage was all I had let, so I ully embraced it. I don't know if there was something in the water from the gas station next door, but for whatever reason, we lived like animals. We started spray painting the walls of the lat with graiti, until they were completely covered.
Then we decided to just go all the way and painted the entire interior of the house black, including the ceilings. We ' d randomly kick and punch holes in the wall, and bum books in the living room while watching television. Every time we inished a beer, we ' d throw it out the back window, which over time resulted in a knee-deep pit of broken glass in the yard. Eventually, we just started breaking bottles in the house, which necessitated the wearing of shoes at all times, even in the shower. We set up a television dedicated to playing Nine Inch Nails ' banned "Broken" video in an incessant loop, and on top of this we placed a small boombox tuned to Christian radio which played throughout the house , as we found scripture being read aloud a nice complement to the video 's images of a man being castrated and shit on by a serial killer.
Hudson developed an obsession with "unconventional meats," and he ordered them in bulk online; he often ended up discarding them on the loor if they weren't to his liking. The comers were littered with the decaying lesh of crocodiles, bufalo, ostriches, and springbok. All in all, it wasn't exactly "Martha Stewart Living. For no reason, I ' d attack Hudson, perhaps throwing an ashtray at him i n the middle o f the atenoon. Hudson enjoyed punching Fortez in the head while he slept, or waking him with a knife to the throat.
I nailed several belts to the pole near ground level and screwed eyelets into it. To these, I padlocked a set of handcufs and a collar.
Madness - Mumbo Jumbo Lyrics
Using a bait-and-switch tactic with fake cufs, I persuaded Fortez to allow himself to be chained up to the pole. Once he discovered that he ' d been fooled, he began to struggle as Hudson and I sprayed his legs with lighter luid and set them ablaze while reading the Bible to him, taking hits of nitrous oxide out of a tank as we did so, then tuning the tank on his legs to put the ire out. His pants were frozen solid by the pressurized gas, and he began to scream. A neighbor popped his head out of a second story window, peering down to see what the commotion was all about.
A few minutes later when the cops arrived, I told them that we had simply been doing "exotic photography" and that we had "gotten a little carried away. I directed a lot of the violence toward mysel. One night at a paty, I let a random woman pierce my nipples, just for the hell of it. I contemplated tattooing my entire penis black, but with no money, this was of course not an option. I developed a habit of putting cigarettes out on my forearms.