The Seven Deadly Sins (16 page)

Shit catches up with you in the end, but when you are young, you have no expiration date. You have no idea how precarious life can be, especially when your selfish tunnel vision keeps you focused on what
you
want and nothing else. When you are wound that tightly, even hell feels like home. And why not? My so-called safety net was a mesh of mess made up of binge drinkers, druggies, and inbred horny toolbags. If anyone I used to live with gets butt hurt over that last statement, I really do not give a ragged fuck. Life sucks, so close your mouth so your teeth do not click.

So I fucked and smoked and screamed and sped my way through life. I ran rampant through dark alleys and finite futures just to end up right back where I had always been. I did not want
to be a despot in a sea of fire. I did not want to be a fly in a swarm of wasps. I was different, but I wanted to be different. There is a difference: Some people try and some people just are. Martyrs will beg you to pepper them with stones; enigmas never even notice the first strike.

I was so desperate to have a friend that I ended up hanging out with an older boy whose family lived next door to us. For this book's purposes, I will call him Jason. Jason was five years older than me and was into music just like me. He even turned me onto some great bands I had never heard of before. Every day after school, I would go spend time at his place because it was safer than my own home. It was, that is, until he raped me.

As I look back now, I guess with all the bullshit going on at home, I should have been smart and savvy enough to see it coming. I was a confused scared kid who only wanted to have one person who did not hurt him in his life; he was all of those things because he was a predator and he knew that was what I wanted. So at the age of eleven, my best friend raped me in his basement. When it was over, I went home and never told a soul. Jason's house burned down a week later. His family fled in the middle of the night. The whole neighborhood was convinced that I had done it. I never saw him again.

Some scars run deep and some wounds never heal, but that sweet, sweet anger lives forever. It is what it is, and I have learned to accept it. That does not mean I am happy about it, but I learned a long time ago that holding onto the past too tightly leaves rope burns from the noose you carry around with you. I was so angry about it for so long that it became my only reason to feel. The violation takes time to let go of, but the moment gets farther away if you let go of the chain you have used
to drag it behind you. Sometimes you have to be more than a survivor. Sometimes you have to move on.

We eventually moved out of Corky's place, right back to the same damn trailer park we had started in years before and right back into Lot #20. I shit you not. I was in eighth grade by then, and I finally had a group of friends who were my home away from home. They were dreamers like me, but they could only see so far. I could see the end of the universe. But how do you explain that to people who do not really care? How do you explain to someone that you are fucking searing inside and if you do not go somewhere with your life, you are going to explode? The only difference between a star and a black hole is time.

So I just tried to enjoy what I did have. We spent days on the dike by the river. You could hide there, you see. We used to build forts out of the giant white rocks that were in place to keep the river from spilling over onto people's barbecues and satellite dishes on the other side. Plus we had the forests that lined the river bank, giant trees as far as you could see. It was like
Lord of the Flies
. We learned about acid in those woods. I really do not recommend that: There's nothing worse than watching your buddy attack a tree because “it said some shit about my mother!” We chugged bottles of Robitussin, which is an unhealthy, horrible way to get high. This was years before crunk and all that syrup movement bullshit. We just knew it was going to fuck us up. But that was not all. We ate peyote and smoked ourselves blind. We baptized ourselves in chemicals and clarity. We were trying to find our faith, but all we found at the end of the day was that, by and large, we seemed to be immortal.

When we were not getting closer to nature, we invaded the suburbs, running the streets like denim banshees, high as fuck
and out of control. We stormed a kid's house we did not like and did so much damage the cops showed up. The kid was
home
when we did it. We did anything, anywhere. In Evansdale, there is a park at the end of Myer, right in the middle of everything. We set every tree on fire one night and danced under the cold moon, waiting for judgment that never came for us.

We had no reason for anything because we
had no reason
. I mean, what the fuck did they expect? We were dealing with hormones and psychoses and rising prices and falling rocks and anything else that is dangerous yet completely out of our control. Sins, my ass—these were fucking hobbies. These were the only reasons to get out of bed or, in my case, the bathtub. Yeah, I slept in our bathroom for a year because there was nowhere else to sleep. I would get up in the morning, put my blanket and my pillow in the bathroom cupboard, take a shower, then get my clothes out of the hamper. . .in the same bathroom. Kicks ass, right?

Things like that make me thankful I lived to write about it.

It was not always shitty, you know. Evansdale, which is right outside of Waterloo, was where I ate a Now & Later candy for the first time. When I lived in Dewar, which is right outside of Evansdale, I learned through another group of kids that I was good at football. It is funny what you see and what you refuse to see in retrospect. I suppose I had some great times with that crazy cast of characters. There were even times when I did not feel so different from them, or they did not seem that different from me. In a way, they kept me alive. When I needed to escape, they came with me. When I needed to feel alive, they joined me.
I even started one of my first bands with those guys. But I could never trust them. Maybe that is the real lesson I took away from Waterloo: Do not trust anyone. And I learned it so well that I still have a hard time letting it go. My wife, Stephanie, is one of the greatest people I have ever met, and I still have a hard time fully trusting her. But because she is amazing, she has infinite patience. She understands and helps me every day. I am surviving again, really. It may be a cop out, I know. But it is the biggest reason why I have this type of strength and resolve. I refuse to give up, I refuse to die, and I refuse to lose,
ever
. It is because I remember every word, every scar, and every dirty secret. I am a mass of melodrama disguised as a life. But at least I am not a fabrication from some conference table in a nondescript building. At least I was not put together by executives in some shitty pitch meeting who wanted an edgier artist with better cheekbones—“You know. . .for the kids!” I am everything that ever happened to me. I am real and skin and bone and alive and ready for every day I have.

And for that, grudgingly, I guess I owe Waterloo a thank you.

Thank you, Waterloo. Thank you for making me who I am. Thank you for ripping me to shreds and making me build myself back up in the end. Thank you for setting me on fire, because I used that fire to fight for everything I have ever earned. Thank you for trying so hard to destroy my innocence, so much so that I held on with fingers and nails just to keep it safe. Thank you for showing me the most brutal realities I could stomach and in turn showing me I could survive. Thank you for every example of what parents are not supposed to do so I never do them to my own children. Thank you for an education in ambivalence.

Thank you for the gift of never giving up.

When I think of Waterloo, I think of the tiny little victories I achieved as well. I pushed myself to self-educate and not just rely on the fast-food school system. When shit got to be too much, I wrote for days, or I read any book I could get my hands on, or I pushed myself to get out and find somewhere quiet, just to have some kind of sanctuary. I taught myself how to play guitar and drums. I wrote songs on the back of my homework assignments. When I tried to share them with others, they sneered and detracted from everything I wanted to be and accomplish. People will try to take anything they can away from you, especially when they think you have more than they do. Why is that almost always the case?

So maybe you are all “sinners.” Maybe you deserve the filth that the religions of the world have smeared on your flesh. Maybe we are all just waiting to fry in Satan's Crock-Pot for the spiritual buildup that comes with too many hours left to your own devices. But what if you earn your sins? What if sins are like accolades? If sins are inevitable, and if that is the case, why fucking bother worrying about them in the first place?

All I know is what I have seen, and all I have seen is 98 percent of the world doing what they want. Think of it as the anthill being built out of the bodies the rogues never bothered to feed. Most do not care if they step on feelings, and the rest only care about their own feelings. Selfish hordes of useless boobs, desperately trying not to suck ass, scour the planet for a little piece of heaven before they shoot it all to hell. This is the world we leave behind. This is the world the saints died for. This is the world where I could not care less. Do I sound bitter yet? Yeah, I suppose I do. But you helped raise me, people, so suffer.

Waterloo, Iowa—an oasis of fuck in a world of shit and there are cities just like it all over the country, and if I had my way, I
would use a bulldozer to pull every brick down, then I would pave the ground and leave a parking lot in its fucking wake. I would cleanse the earth to save its soul. It is a concrete cyst on an earthen scar that has been worried at by a half a million tongues until the area around it is chapped and useless.

There is a side of me that will always be the scared little coked-out misfit, stuck in a trailer and grasping at straws. There are nights I dream I am back there and I wake up screaming. There is a part of me that is very scared of the things I am capable of, and much like an addict, I dedicate myself to being better every day. I sin like crazy, but I protect my people. I work every second of my life and I do my very best to be the best father I can. All of this would not be possible if I had been raised in a psychological womb somewhere. I would not be
me
if I had not been
him
first, you know?

Radical change is a decision. You decide who or what you are going to be. If you are strong enough, you can dedicate your life to being exactly that. If you are not, you take the easy route—just going with the flow. People have told me sinning is easy but character takes work. I think it is as simple as this: People are easy and characters take practice. Sinning is just what most of us do when nobody is looking.

So I find myself right back at the place I was at in the first place: Sins are bullshit. They can build panache. They can spawn creativity. They can lead us to the truth.
They can set us free
. They can show us who we are, or who we want to be, if we just press our faces a little closer to the keyhole. What they cannot do is change anything at the end of the day. What are you going to do, dwell on it? Leave behind chances you could have taken advantage of because you think you do not deserve them?

This is either a great time for a story or a quote. I guess I will do both.

It was the summer of ‘88, and I had fallen in love. Her name was Jenny and she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, so much so that she is the face I used to compare every woman to, right up until recently. She had warm red hair and soft white skin, blue-green eyes and a sweet smell that was all her own. If she came in a room today, I could close my eyes and know she was there. She was the crush of a lifetime, the “almost was.” I was a 25-cent rubber ball bouncing off of my own walls, redeyed and blue-tailed, at war with everything around me. For some strange reason, she fell for me, too.

We were together for a summer, teenagers lost in the moment and each other's eyes. I wanted to spend every second with her—seriously. For some reason, when I was with her, I was not the kid who could not afford anything, could not take her anywhere, or could not give her anything. She brought peace and life into my world for a brief second, and then she took it away. She was young; fuck, I was young, too. That is all it was. That did not matter to me at the time. To me, time stopped when she let me go.

So do you know what I did? I did what any disrespecting manboy would do in a similar situation. I dated her sister about four months later and I was the biggest fucking prick on the damn planet. I put that poor girl through hell. I was such a stool sample that her father rightfully threatened to kill me. I did this because I was a stupid kid who did not know any better. I did this because I wanted someone to hurt like I was hurting, and if I could not hurt the one I wanted to hurt, I would hurt her family. Why?