The last time I ever went on a Boy Scouts trip was shortly after that fight. They took us to Plattsburgh Air Force Base, and we stayed in the same barracks and toured all the same buildings we would have seen if we had been recruited or drafted. My father had warned me severely against joining the military, as a drill sergeant had once told him, “Once you sign on the line, your ass is mine.” We were already wearing military-style uniforms and going through training that would increase our rank, giving us visible badges to wear. Boy Scouts was a gateway drug to the military—and there was something extremely haunting and terrifying about the base. I still had enough ESP to sense clearly the stench of death everywhere. The men who stayed there feared for their lives and were extremely depressed about having to leave their homes, friends, and family.
About a week later, I went to Kevin’s house, and we decided we were going to set up his tent and camp in the backyard. He insisted that we bring everything out in one trip, and it was exhausting. I tried to help him, but I didn’t understand how his tent worked. “Go away, David. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” I went over to his hammock, fearlessly threw myself into it, and was finally able to lie down, after multiple failed attempts on previous visits when my fear had compromised me. Now he was working and I was kicking back. He tried to get his dog, Excalibur, to charge me and knock me down, but it didn’t work. “Get off your lazy ass and come help me with this thing!” I did get out, but then I took plenty of time to clean off the leaves I had left there. I did not like his abusive attitude at all.
Suddenly I heard a whooshing noise behind me. I turned my head and saw a brief flash of silver and light. WHAM! Something hit me in the head—very, very hard. This time it was on the left, right around my ear. The pain was unimaginable—even worse than the ice rock. The outside edge of my ear was in absolute agony—as if it was being stabbed with a knife and burned with white-hot fire at the same time. I instinctively grabbed it and started running around his yard, screaming. He laughed and got Excalibur to chase me: “Go get him, girl!” This collie, who looked just like the TV dog Lassie, was happy to run behind me. When I continued screaming and crying, he started calling me a pussy and saying nothing had happened, I was fine, and I should shut up. I collapsed on the ground and Excalibur started licking my hand, causing huge and disgusting sounds to echo in my ear. I pulled my hand away and it was completely covered in red, top to bottom. You couldn’t see any skin. My white shirt was also splattered with red drops everywhere. I was utterly horrified that this vampire dog was drinking my blood. It took many years for me to realize that she was trying to help save my life by cleaning and sealing the wound.
Kevin ran up, saw the blood, and started chanting, “Oh my God, oh my God,” as he rushed me into the house. He then made me stay alone in the bathroom with the door closed while he called his parents and asked them what to do. He said they had an HMO and they could help me. He told me not to look at myself in the mirror, and opened out the cabinet doors so they were facing the wall. Then he left. My skull and my ear were throbbing in unimaginable pain, which made the smell of the mouthwash, old soap, and mildew in the bathroom much worse. After a few minutes of standing there listening to him freak out behind a closed door, I soberly turned the mirror toward myself. A perfectly circular ring had been carved through the flesh and cartilage on the rim of my ear.
I did not cry. It was actually a very clear moment. This had happened to me. It was real. I had sustained an injury but I was alive and I would be fine. Kevin had obviously thrown an aluminum tent pole at me because he didn’t feel I was moving fast enough to help him. This was another case of “too much revenge”—and now his ridiculous bullying had failed miserably. His parents told him their HMO couldn’t do anything for me, and I should call my mother and have her come get me. I told her Kevin had “thrown a tent pole into my ear,” and she thought it had actually gone down my ear canal, so she was very relieved when she saw it was only a round circle on the edge. We loaded my bike in the car, went home, and put a gauze bandage on my ear, but for the next three days it swelled horribly, was extremely painful, and turned a dark bluish-black all over.
When Dad found out what had happened, and that we hadn’t told him up until then, he was furious. He rushed me over to a plastic surgeon’s office on Union Street in Schenectady. I was told that most of the pole had chopped straight through my ear from one side to the other like a cookie cutter. The entire round piece in the middle had enough blood flow to stay alive, but it could easily die—in which case he would have to reconstruct it with cartilage and skin grafts from other parts of my body. I needed surgery ASAP, and I was booked to go back again two days later. In surgery, I lay there on the operating table like a wounded animal and shuddered in shock as the surgeon injected my ear in multiple places with Novocain—but I did not cry. Each time he pushed the needle in, I could feel it pop-pop-popping through multiple layers of skin and cartilage, and it was unbelievably painful. At this point all he could do was cut off the extra scar tissue of cartilage that had formed around the wound. He also concluded the middle piece was probably going to live.
He told me I needed to massage the scar as much as I could, no matter how painful it was, because otherwise the swelling could get really bad. He also told me I would need to wear a gauze bandage over it at all times for at least a month, and that if anyone hit me there I might need surgery again. This was a field day for all the kids who hated me at school. I now had a great vulnerability and a delicious new target for their bullying in addition to my increasing weight. Everyone started calling me “Vincent Van Gogh” and “Vinnie.” I had kids crying “Vinnie” with joy from all the way down a long hallway whenever they saw me. I didn’t dare try to fight anyone, because if they hit me on the ear, they could force me right back into surgery—and it would hurt so much I would be physically devastated. At one point someone new asked me what the heck had happened to my ear, and wondered if I had fallen off my bike. The kid I had tapped on the forehead said, “Kevin threw a driveway at him.” Everyone exploded into laughter at his lame joke, since they all knew the story.
The whole area was red and swollen like a cherry tomato after the injury first happened. I kept the bandage on my ear for at least two months so the kids couldn’t see it. Thankfully, the little round piece in the middle survived, but I decided that I was not going to cut my hair, at least not until it became long enough that it could completely cover my ear. Dad got a lawyer and we threatened to file a lawsuit against Kevin and his family’s health insurance company. Since Kevin’s parents would scream at him if he got anything less than a ninety-five, they were absolutely disgusted with me for going after their “perfect” son.
Our lawyer was a snarky old Jewish lady with stacks of papers all over her desk and office. A few shards of light tore through the old wooden blinds, revealing all the hanging dust grains and helping to fight the pale fluorescent lighting in the room. No matter what question I tried to ask her about strategy, she kept repeating, “The less you say, the better” in a strong accent. This did make me mad, but it was obviously the one and only thing she was going to tell me to do.
My meeting with the insurance claims adjuster was scheduled to occur at Kevin’s house, which was horrible. Dad went with me and reminded me of what the old lady had said. The adjuster had wet, curly blond hair, thousands of gleaming-white teeth, an athletic build, tanned skin, and a flawless suit. Kevin’s parents glared at me with absolute, seething hatred as I answered every single question Mr. Smiles, the adjuster, asked me with as few words as possible—if not single words. Everyone knew what I was up to, but Smiles couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t catch me. The insurance company paid my medical bills and gave me a $2,000 settlement, which Dad invested into a CD that wouldn’t mature until I was in college. This was another one of the great traumas of my life. I had to face off against one of my best friends and all I got out of it was a small amount of money that I would never see until I was far too old for it to matter. My parents didn’t have to pay my medical bills, but I lost my best friend in the process. Kevin never spoke to me again. I felt no satisfaction in fighting and “winning” that battle. Kevin did have negative behaviors, but he may have become a better friend if I hadn’t threatened his family with a lawsuit. The great spiritual teachings tell us that forgiveness stops the wheel of karma—preventing the same cycles of joy and disaster from perpetually reappearing in our lives with new sets and characters. The balance between forgiveness and self-protection is one of the great “gray areas” in the ascension path, ripe for endless amounts of contemplation and study.
In the summer of 1987, things got totally bizarre when the Iran-Contra hearings began airing on television as of June 30. I was a fourteen-year-old kid still living under constant threat of nuclear war with the USSR, even though they were making moves toward peace, including glasnost and perestroika. Here was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North on national television, openly admitting that he was involved in financially supporting a cocaine-dealing terrorist group out of Nicaragua called the Contras. Even worse, he was secretly selling weapons to Iran, despite it being illegal under US law, since they were considered a terrorist dictatorship. North was instructed to use the Iranian blood money to fund and train the terrorist Contras. This was also illegal under US law. The administration hoped that the Contras would fight a guerilla war to topple the Soviet-friendly government in Nicaragua at the time, run by a group called the Sandinistas. Apparently, when we were supposed to like a group of terrorists, the media called them “militants” or “rebels,” and that somehow made their actions okay. Examples of US-supported “rebels” were Bin Laden and the Taliban, back when the Soviets held Afghanistan. A senate hearing in March 1985 revealed evidence that the Contras were in fact terrorists. The International Human Rights Law Group, which gathered 145 sworn statements from twenty-eight eyewitnesses, said, “The documentation shows a pattern of brutality against largely unarmed civilians, including rape, torture, kidnappings, mutilation, and other abuses.”24 During this same time, President Ronald Reagan had referred to the Contras as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.”25
This scandal was investigated by the US Congress as well as a three-person team appointed by President Reagan called the Tower Commission. Reagan seemed just like Mr. Smiles when he got on television, shrugged his shoulders, and said he knew nothing about it, but he understood that his guys were just trying to do their part to fight the evil Soviet Union and protect us from nuclear war. I assumed that Ollie North had been severely bullied, since I knew what that looked like. I intuitively felt that they had threatened to rape, torture, and murder his entire family tree if he didn’t take the fall, blame it all on himself, and say that it was his idea. Years later, insiders would tell me that this happens constantly in the Cabal. Anyone who steps out of line is threatened with extreme torture and death for their entire family tree. This is part of how the Cabal has been able to maintain power for so long. It is difficult for newcomers to truly understand just how evil this group really is. Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush were cleared of any and all charges, even though handwritten notes from Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on December 7, 1985, showed that Reagan knew that arms were being sold to Iran in exchange for the release of seven American hostages held in Lebanon.
Only five individuals were charged for supporting the Nicaraguan terrorists, but those charges were conveniently dropped after the administration refused to declassify the documents that proved them, due to “national security.” I sensed there were some good guys in the Pentagon who were fighting for us, knew what these documents contained, and thought they could stop the threat of nuclear war by bringing down the whole administration—but it didn’t work. It would be many years before I came into direct contact with people working for this secret alliance.
Fourteen officials were ultimately indicted for lesser charges, and the trail of corruption went all the way up to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Eleven of these men were convicted. Some filed appeals and got away with it. I was amazed that George H. W. Bush won the election in 1988, just a year after this worse-than-Watergate scandal. All Nixon did was bug the offices of the Democrats. The Reagan administration was caught actively financing, arming, and training two different groups of terrorists. Everyone who had been indicted or convicted was pardoned in the final days of George H. W. Bush’s four-year presidency, once it was already too late for anyone to stop him.26
I decided that if the government could hide or destroy documents and avoid getting punished, then so could I. Every day I started checking the mail as soon as I came home from school. The dreaded progress reports came in a predictable computer-printed envelope with all-capital letters in the window. I was now a master of mixing up blazing KNO3 and sugar mixtures on the backyard patio, as well as lighting firecrackers under an old shot glass—which caused the glass to rocket up into the air, thanks to the potato-gun effect. I burned those evil progress reports to a crisp and crushed the ashes. It was a matter of “national security.” Now the only thing I had to worry about was the report cards, which threatened my administration with criminal charges, indictment, trade sanctions, and an embargo that cut off all my supply lines—and kept me confined in my bedroom prison cell. I was starting to engage in “repetition compulsion”—mirroring the negativity I was seeing in the world with my own thoughts and actions. It took many years to identify this subconscious process and identify how it was working at this time in my childhood.
In the fall of 1987, I started high school, which was just as terrible as going into junior high—if not worse. Now there were three more grades of kids who were older than me. I was getting more and more overweight, topping out with 225 pounds at five feet nine inches. I had a big belly that some people called a “spare tire,” as well as the equally hideous “man boobs.” If I pulled my lower jaw in toward my neck, it formed a nasty double chin. Everyone asked me if I had seen the pool on the third floor—but there was no third floor. This was a typical stunt to harass freshmen on their first day.
More and more at this time, MTV was featuring bands with openly satanic imagery, including upside-down pentagrams, demons, and the like. I was surprised that this was being so openly promoted, but I had also discovered that this music helped me release anger and feel better. I would get a cathartic high from listening to it, much like Dr. van der Kolk’s soldiers with PTSD who watched a war movie and experienced a high equivalent to shooting eight milligrams of morphine. I started wearing nothing but black rock-and-roll T-shirts that Dad was buying me for twenty bucks each at some of the concerts we went to. My hair was long enough that I didn’t need to wear the gauze on my ear anymore, and I was quickly starting to look like a “metal head.”
I felt like I had no friends. Shane had flunked eighth grade and didn’t make it to high school with the rest of us. Eric and Dave were part of a small group I called the “geek clan,” and the only thing we had in common was that everyone else hated us. Now I could win any fight that someone tried to start, but that didn’t mean anyone liked me—so I was miserable. I started drawing weird and disturbing sketches of suicide, where I killed myself in extremely bizarre, creative, and grandiose ways. I knew I would never actually do it, but I honestly felt like I had nothing to live for. I was now mirroring the collective trauma of the nuclear “suicide cult” that America had become. School was a nightmare. I kept getting bigger and bigger, my skin was a mess, and I was constantly depressed.
On the first day of high school, a new kid showed up whom we will call Don. He was chubby like me, had wavy light-brown hair, pale skin, and freckles, and wore large glasses with a double-bar frame over the top. The bullies in his old school had called him Froggy. He was sitting with his head down on the desk next to me as if he had passed out, which was quite surprising. I could hardly believe my eyes when Eric walked in and pounded his fist on this new kid’s desk, causing him to bolt up and start cursing at him as if they knew each other. I started talking to Don and found out that he had stayed every summer at the camp Eric’s family owned, so they knew each other very well. He seemed to be a friend of Eric’s, in a sense, but Eric was just as arrogant and dominant toward him as he was toward me. We became best friends almost instantaneously, and bonded over our deep mutual hatred of Eric. Sometimes we called him Erico, like he was a gangster.
I quickly found out that Don was very interested in ninjas, weapons, and the military. He subscribed to Soldier of Fortune magazine, which he called SOF, and fantasized over all the pictures of throwing stars, darts, swords, switchblades, nunchaku or “nunchucks,” and various guns and bullets. He was particularly obsessed with a completely illegal spring-loaded weapon called an “angel blade,” where you hit a button and the knife popped straight out. He talked about how you could file the nut down and the blade would shoot out of the housing like a bullet. He had constant fantasies of violent revenge against the kids who had bullied him just as badly as they had me. I let him know if he wounded or killed anyone, it would destroy his life. I spent months explaining to him what had happened to my father in Vietnam, and strongly encouraged him not to sign up for the military as he could very easily get killed. Still, we spent countless hours killing bad guys in games like Rush’n Attack for the new Nintendo Entertainment System, which was much more addictive than Atari. We started walking to his house together after school with Eric, Dave, and another kid in our “geek clan” who also lived nearby.
Teenagers Who Are Going to Burn in the Lake of Fire Forever
The other kid I met that year was Jude Goldman, who was in a grade above me. They mixed grades in gym class, so you had two years’ worth of kids who had to work together. Jude was just as weird, creative, and intelligent as I was, with wild brownish-black hair that was long on top and short on the sides. He dyed part of his mane to make it a blondish-brown color. He was short and thin, had round Lennon glasses, full facial stubble, and a deep voice. Women invariably found him attractive. He rode a skateboard, wore strange and funky clothes, played music, and somehow had managed to stay cool in his grade. He had a very fast and witty sense of humor that I could keep up with. He started out by teasing me in gym class like everyone else did, but the more we bantered, the more he realized that we had more in common than anyone else in school. He eventually gave me a tape of the music he had been making at home, which he called Organized Noise.
I found out that his mother was an ex-hippie and minor movie star who had joined a commune, only to leave it in disgust and convert to become an extreme fundamentalist Christian. As a result, Jude hated everything having to do with the hippie music and culture—but we were still great friends. His mother played taped sermons from her preacher nonstop, all day and all night. This guy had a laughably extreme southern accent, even greater than what George W. Bush sounded like, and was quite a character—the most exaggerated stereotype of a fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumper imaginable. Rapture was about to cause his flock to soar into the air at any moment, while everyone else was doomed to roast in eternal hellfire. We smuggled out a tape and my favorite passage was: “Young people—you’ve watched them—walking into a Christless hell. I’m talking about teenagers that are going to burn in the lake of fire forever. You can’t help them, but you can start praying for them—and get the burden and the grief of their loss to your gain.” His other classic quotable line was, “He’s gonna take a group of people, not everyone, not everyone, ’cause you’re not gonna make it.”
Jude’s mom constantly yelled at him over the most ridiculously minor things. He wasn’t allowed to listen to any music that wasn’t 100 percent born-again Christian, and nothing could interrupt the nonstop twenty-four-hour loop of sermons—so the entire area underneath his mattress was lined with hidden tapes of all his favorite bands. She once found his copy of Prince’s album Dirty Mind, which led to an “emergency meeting” with her church elders. They told Jude he could never listen to any of Prince’s music again or he would become gay. After that incident, he got much better at hiding his music, and his mother never again discovered his precious contraband. His grandparents had enough money to buy him an Alesis Midiverb, which allowed him to put an echo on instruments and voices, along with a multitrack tape-cassette recorder and a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard. He had bad allergies, and every time he took his medicine his mind got weird and spacey. This was when he wrote the Organized Noise music. Despite using a dirt-cheap keyboard with terrible sounds, he still managed to do some very unique, interesting, and bizarre stuff. The sampler was the key. Any sounds he could find could be looped and turned into music.
The summer of 1988 brought an end to my freshman year, and I was still quite depressed. I was playing drums more and more, and Jude and I were talking about starting a band since he had a cheap knockoff Paul McCartney–style bass that he had painted all sorts of words and images onto, including his name. He was self-taught on the bass and the keyboard and could do enough to get by on either instrument.
One of the concerts I went to that summer was Dokken, where I saw the very drunk lead singer backstage being surrounded by a crowd of about eleven incredibly hot women in miniskirts. From my perspective, any one of them would be a keeper for life—and everywhere he went, they followed, like baby chicks. He was saying really silly things that weren’t very funny, but every time he made even the weakest attempt at humor, they exploded into giggles as if he was hilarious. He also got huge points for playing Led Zeppelin on the stereo system.
Once again, I was seeing the same story. Rock stars were just ordinary people who worked hard, learned how to sing or play an instrument, started a band, wrote some decent songs, got signed, and ended up making the record label enough money that they went on tour. The tours would just about kill these guys. Almost every band I ever met was extremely exhausted, constantly fighting not to get sick, and prisoners of the tour bus. All the cities just blended together and the idea of going home seemed like an impossible dream. Tours could go on for an entire year, with dates every two or three nights and no vacations—ending with just enough time to record another album and repeat the process. Bon Jovi captured this dilemma perfectly in their classic tune “Wanted Dead or Alive”—and two or three times a month I witnessed what guys like this were going through firsthand. Even though it was obviously a very hard life, I would have been more than happy to get my own chance at suffering with unstoppable female attention and screaming crowds every other night. It didn’t matter what you looked like. Once you were up on that stage, you were in.
This was the promise of glory that we were all taught to aspire to by the media. Like addicts, many of us lust for the high of fame and recognition, which has become more of an issue now than ever with the rise of social media. Yet, every time I met the people who had “made it,” they were totally miserable. I ultimately coined the term “Elvis-Marilyn Syndrome” to describe this. Elvis and Marilyn were two of the greatest celebrities of the twentieth century, known by their first names. Yet they both died alone, drug addicted and miserable. I have spoken to various well-known film actors since moving to Los Angeles, and they all have said that they are treated very disrespectfully by the upper-level bosses in Hollywood, even when they are succeeding. As soon as one of their films doesn’t sell well, they get dumped—and former celebrities often refer to themselves as “veterans.” Many famous musicians told me the same story. Recognizing the illusion of celebrity and the truth of Elvis-Marilyn Syndrome, and learning to be at peace with who you are, is a key element of the ascension process. You ultimately have to choose to be happy no matter how many goals and successes you seem to have achieved—and a life of simplicity can be far more rewarding than the constant chaos involved in being a public figure.
That same summer of 1988, Dad took Michael and me on a trip to Lake George for his friend Rick Siciliano’s birthday. Rick was the drummer and lead singer in the Out of Control rhythm and blues band, a local group, and was also a professional photographer. He was big, tall, and fairly muscular, had bulgy, animated eyes, and was by far the funniest, wittiest, and most sarcastic person I had ever met. It was impossible to keep up with him; sometimes he would say things that made me feel terrible until I couldn’t help but explode into laughter along with everybody else. We all drove up in Rick’s weird-smelling green van, and when we were already in the Adirondacks, he brushed his teeth in the driver’s seat. He tried to spit the toothpaste out the window while going sixty-five miles an hour. The toothpaste flew all over the side of his van in long white streaks, and he made a huge joke out of it. You were constantly laughing until your stomach hurt around Rick.
Rick’s first birthday cake was chocolate, with no candles, and Dad shoved it in Rick’s face. Everyone roared with laughter, including Rick, who milked it for all it was worth. The second cake was larger and had white frosting with candles. After Rick got cleaned up, we all went out into his sailboat on the lake—and disaster struck. Clouds rolled in. The wind howled. Lightning crashed and the rain was cutting us apart. In a horrific groan, the normal upright angle of the boat tilted and was now listing very badly, lying nearly sideways on the water. Dad and Rick had Michael and me hide in the cabin so we were less likely to get washed away—but that didn’t help us very much.
Michael and I were standing on what was supposed to be the sidewall, and we could look down and see water in the windows that would normally be at eye level. For at least fifteen minutes, I absolutely believed we were about to die. We were screaming and crying in terror. We kept looking at each other and thinking we were only seconds from having water explode into the cabin. Even if we managed to survive the sinking of the boat with our life jackets, the water might be cold enough to kill us from hypothermia—and we were much too far from the shore to swim back. I reached a supreme moment of clarity, even in the midst of screaming—and realized that I definitely did not want to leave this world. In that moment, I prayed to God to save my life, I apologized for the wrongs I had done and begged for another chance—even though I did not consider myself a Christian. In that sudden instant when you believe you are about to die, it is amazing how quickly you go back to the basics. As soon as I surrendered and made that request from deep within myself, things changed. Somehow they managed to get the boat upright, and we limped back to shore. I was shattered from nerves and adrenaline, but I definitely noticed the synchronistic timing between my prayer and the solving of the problem. Dad said we had been in much greater danger of being struck by lightning than of sinking. The whole thing was incredibly traumatic for all of us.
As I entered tenth grade in 1998, I decided I wanted to get a class ring, and picked out a silver-colored choice with a blue aquamarine stone. We had to go to the local jewelry store to place the order. My hair had become so long by this point that the old woman asked my mother what kind of ring her “daughter” wanted. Mom said, “This is my son,” and the whole thing was incredibly awkward. It only caused me to feel even more traumatized and drawn into myself.
Luckily, I was struck with amazingly good fortune by ending up in the same chemistry class as Jude, with Mr. Olson as our teacher. We sat right next to each other, and this was where the great majority of our friendship in high school actually played out, other than in the lunch room. I ended up having a very hard time with chemistry class, because I could not visualize little particles whirling around a nucleus. Normally when I was tapping into a scientific truth, my ESP would kick in with visions of what something looked like—but with the chemistry models they were trying to teach me, I drew a complete blank. It would be many years before I discovered the scientific proof to back up what I did see, which was the lattices of sacred geometry. Over the course of a year, I ended up failing the class—I would have to go to summer school, which was something I never even imagined was possible. Kevin’s parents couldn’t handle less than a ninety-five. He and I were of comparable intelligence. Failing a class and attending summer school, particularly with how strict my parents were about good grades, was literally unthinkable—but it happened.
Shortly after the school year started, while it was still fairly warm outside, my tenth-grade Honors English class went on an all-day field trip to Salem, Massachusetts. We visited the very place where all the events of The Scarlet Letter had occurred; we had read the book in class. The original buildings where women were tortured and executed for witchcraft were still standing. I touched the gnarled wood of ducking tanks in which people were put to death by drowning by religious fanatics. I realized that this sort of bullying was still going on today, and I was a victim of it myself—though, thankfully, I hadn’t died. The whole place radiated with the evil of what had been done—all in the name of God.
We were all thrown in together on the long bus ride, and I ended up talking to the ultimate girl of my dreams, whom we will call Brenda Fisher. She seemed so completely out of my league that it was ridiculous to even talk to her, but I was immensely attracted to her for her sharp wit, her sarcastic sense of humor, and her incredible ability to stand up to the teacher and anyone else who stood in her way. She definitely appeared to be the most powerful woman in my grade. If anyone had tried to put her on trial for being a witch, she would have torn them to pieces. I had studied palm reading ever since junior high school, thanks to reading the book Palmistry by Edith Niles, and was able to tell her several things about herself that were very accurate. Most people think the lines on the hand are fairly random, but I have cross-checked the data in the book on hundreds of different hands over the years and found it to be remarkably precise in describing the individual’s character, personality, and future. The Salem trip only confirmed that Brenda was “the one.”
Not long after I got back from Salem, a female student teacher from one of my classes ran into me in the hallway over by the auditorium. She was disarmingly attractive. For some strange reason, she stopped me in the hallway, gazed into my eyes without speaking for a minute, took a sudden breath, and then said, “You have unusually beautiful eyes.”
She then went on to insult me: “There is a beautiful man hiding inside all that weight and hair, and you should let him come out.” She paused as the seismic wave of shock rippled through me from what she had just said. Then she touched me on the arm and gave me a million-dollar smile that could melt steel. Admittedly, I was dumbstruck that she would make such a brazen statement, but instead of getting angry or defensive, I soberly thanked her for the compliment. I soon started having sudden flashes when I looked into the mirror of what my face would look like without the hair and the weight—essentially the way I look now. Within less than six months I started a rigorous diet that I did not stop until I had lost eighty-five pounds.
Brad ended up sitting next to me in my tenth-grade French class. He knew my mother had visited a hippie commune called Totem, and I had shown him a big bag of Totem weed hiding in the basement freezer. I now had the complete look and feel of a pot-smoking fifteen-year-old—the long hair, the black rock-and-roll T-shirts, and the “don’t mess with me” attitude. Brad rekindled our friendship for the third time, and every day he relentlessly pressured me to try weed. He told me it would set me free and it would be the greatest I had ever felt in my life. I made the mistake of telling him how fascinated I was by Brenda Fisher. I had no idea that he had already made out with her at a party, and possibly more than that, but he had since dumped her. He reconnected with her, and then told me the impossible: “Brenda wants to hang out with you. With us. Both of us!” He watched as disbelief flickered over my face for several seconds. Then he continued by saying, “As long as she gets to smoke some of your mom’s Totem weed with us. She thinks that would be totally amazing—and hopes you will say yes.”
I felt like I was falling into a bottomless pit. I asked him if she would still want to hang out with us if we didn’t do drugs—and he said no. Although it was a common thing for rock-and-rollers to smoke weed, I was just fifteen years old. It was illegal, and at that time no one talked about it having any medical uses. The attitude around it was vastly more suppressive than we see today. In health class we were taught that marijuana was extremely destructive—and no one dreamed of taking on all those symptoms voluntarily. It took me almost half a minute of gaping silence, my mind running thousands of desperate calculations, before I told Brad I needed twenty-four hours to give him an answer. He just smiled. I was the delicious white rabbit that had stepped perfectly into his snare. It was already too late.
The glow of the pipe lit up Brenda’s stunningly gorgeous face as we shivered in the cold under the pine tree in late October. She had stolen a metal screen from her jewelry class. Brad had stolen some copper pipe parts from his mother’s basement and fashioned a crude but effective pipe out of them, wrapping the whole thing up in duct tape. A yellow electrical cap with a hole at the end became the mouthpiece. Everything seemed to be pulsing with light and geometric patterns. I was incredibly high, and the only thing I could compare it to was the feeling of opening presents on Christmas when I was a kid. Having Brenda there made it the greatest moment of my young adult life by far. She gave me a piece of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum, and—my God!—it was the most magnificent combination of flavors I had ever tasted. Suddenly I was skiing down a gorgeous mountain—just as the commercials had programmed me to think. As we staggered toward the door of her house, she asked me in rapture if I could get her any more. I managed to throw my arm around her shoulder, lean in, and say, “I can get you anything you need.”
Her house was hot and bright and filled with college kids. Brad was much too high, and this terrified him. I couldn’t handle it either. When he managed to say, “Mom wants me back at the house in five minutes, we’ve gotta go,” I said, “No problem”—and we were off, just like that. He insisted we run all the way home, just like we used to do after school. There were ice and wet leaves on the road and I nearly fell several times, but I managed to keep up with him. We were laughing the whole way as we slipped and slid.
I got home and collapsed on the couch. The surge of blood into my head caused the drug to take off like a rocket ship. I turned on the TV; it was the middle of The Deer Hunter on HBO, with scenes of a snowy wilderness and a pained guy holding a gun. I had no idea what was going on in the movie and I didn’t care. Everything was spinning, the walls were pulsing, and the television seemed like it was three-dimensional. All sounds appeared to be reaching me through a long tunnel. The gum had become a dead, flavorless mass, but I was chewing it like my life depended on it. I wanted to go throw it out, but I absolutely could not move. In a sudden burst of inspiration, I spat the gum out as hard as I could, and it landed on the carpet seven feet in front of me. I laughed for about ten minutes at my staggering comic genius. Then I picked up the phone, called Don, and slurred, “Don, you’ve gotta come over here right now. You’re not gonna believe this.” As soon as he saw the state I was in, that was it. He was in.