The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

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.

    The anger I had pent up for being sent to Christian school,