The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

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.
    â€œI 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