CHAPTER NINE

Looking for a Way Out

Don, Brad, and I were all sharing a water pipe with Brenda, right there in my living room. We had found the archaic 1970s relic hiding in the basement. The device was dark blue and looked like two tiny lava lamps put together bottom to bottom. Brenda’s flawless face was lit in perfect majesty as she again gurgled away, only to explosively cough it all out a second later. Thick smoke was hanging in the house, but this time it was not KNO3—and I was in no hurry to air it out. Brenda then asked me if it was okay to scrape out the last bits, since all of us were completely done, and I said, “Absolutely.” She did as much as she could, and Don then had a great idea. He turned the pipe completely upside down and tapped out the rest of the cool ashes into her hand. “Oh, Don, you’re a genius!” Before she even finished her sentence, the bong made a slurping sound and hideous brown bong water dribbled over her tight, acid-washed blue jeans. “Oh, Don, you’re an asshole!” Everyone laughed again until we could barely even breathe.

Brenda came over only one more time after that. I knew I had no chance with her, and Brad never offered to bring her over again. That didn’t matter, as I was now on an adventure of the mind, and had no intention of stopping. This was absolutely real; it lasted for four to six hours, and I knew exactly what all the hippies were so excited about. I figured it made them feel good, but I had had absolutely no idea that it was so powerful. The smell, the taste, the patterns, the colors, the music—everything was so much greater than I had realized. It was an amazing technology, and I had absolutely no right to hide it from the others. I had to tell the geek clan—Eric and the others—and set them free, just as I had done for Don.

Spreading the Word

Eric, Dave, and the others barely said a thing as they sat there in my bedroom while I laid out the case. I had already come up with a universe of rationalizations for my new addiction. They were very nervous as I told them the government was lying to us about this, just as they had about Watergate and the Iran-Contra hearings. This is something that God made. It grows out of the ground. It is a sacred tool for enhancing the mind and renewing the spirit. You have no right or reason to feel bad about anything in your life with a technology like this at your disposal. It is ridiculous not to do it. People can smoke their entire lives and be perfectly happy and productive members of society. The symptoms they talk about in health class are just propaganda. No one said a word during or after my manifesto. I had no idea at the time how far downward my life was going to go. Very awkwardly, Eric finally said, “We’ve gotta go,” and they all got up and left. The next day, it was over. None of them ever wanted to speak to me again—except to taunt me by saying, “Hey, pothead” in the hallway. That was totally fine. We didn’t need them anyway. Inside I felt horribly betrayed and even more alone—but the chemicals fogged it all out of my mind.

I tried to get Jude to smoke, but given what he and his mother had been through at the hippie commune, he wanted nothing to do with it. Besides, he already had his allergy medicine. Now we took the band seriously, with Jude on bass, yours truly on the drums, my brother as the lead singer, and Michael’s friend Andy as our crunch-guitarist. We originally called ourselves Jude and the Sewer Rats, but then my brother was offended by singling Jude out, so we just shortened it to the Sewer Rats. We did not rehearse. Just as with Organized Noise, if we could fight our way through a song while the tape was recording, that was it—we were done.

Since we had no idea what the heck we were doing, we took simple nursery rhymes like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “The ABC Song” and metalized them. This evolved into original material, and long, improvised jams where Jude and I would do unusual things that rocked hard and were different from anything on MTV. We would listen to each other and I matched whatever he started doing on the drums, adding in interesting fills as we went. We needed a band photo, so to commemorate the occasion, Jude shaved the right side of my head bald. I made my remaining mass of locks rock-hard with Aqua Net hair spray and wore it to school, and people were completely shocked—it was one of the most outrageous haircuts in the building. This attracted tons of attention, and people were talking and laughing behind my back—but no one dared to face me except the math teacher. One day, I got a question wrong in math class and old man Causey said, “Maybe if you shave the other side of your head, you’ll be able to think better.” The entire class cried with laughter.

I did not want to “borrow” any more from Mom, so that meant I needed to buy some pot. One day, a long-haired kid named Dennis, who always wore Iron Maiden denim jackets to school, told Jude that he had taken five Vivarin caffeine pills before chemistry class—and you only needed one. Every time Mr. Olson asked the class a question, Dennis breathlessly barked the answer back so fast he could barely articulate the words—but he was correct every time. After class I asked him if he knew where I could score some weed, and he told me to come to his locker whenever with twenty-five dollars, and I would be all set.

Ben and the Hippie Van

I hadn’t even finished blowing out my first hit of the stuff from Dennis before I realized this was much, much stronger than the Totem weed. I leaned back into my bed and the whole room was reeling. It was wonderful. I had gotten totally ripped off, but I didn’t realize this until Don brought over his older brother Bob, who was a huge football player and very popular with the ladies in Jude’s grade, the class of 1990. “This guy totally screwed you,” he said. “You need to get in touch with Ben. He’s like a brother to me. He’s family. And he will set you up. Big-time.”

Ben was an excellent mechanic, with bulging pecs, an athletic build, long wavy black hair tied into a ponytail in the back, a thin, pointy jaw, blue eyes, and a forgotten metal brace on one of his teeth that he had never pulled off. He almost always had machine-oil stains somewhere on his body, his hands were heavily calloused, and his blue jeans were filthy. He was very shy and constantly smiling; he looked like a psychedelic human koala bear. He had worked as a taxicab driver and his claim to fame was being able to smoke a bong with both hands while driving, and steering with his knee. He had fully restored a sputtering vintage Volkswagen hippie van, with blue sides, white trim, and the huge VW symbol on the front. It was filthy inside. It was perfect.

We parked behind the Ellis Hospital in Schenectady, in a wide-open parking lot area with no one in sight. The Moon was full and clear as I took my first hit off the new bong—I mean, the water pipe for the use of tobacco. I had just bought it at Orion, the local head shop on Jay Street in Schenectady that reeked of incense. Ben’s stuff was even more powerful than Dennis’s. This was now the greatest moment of my life. Everything came together—the Moon, the trees, the van, and the crisp night air. I was totally and profoundly addicted. I was having a mystical, almost religious experience—and thought no one could hear me as I murmured to myself, “I am going to do this for the rest of my life.” Everyone started laughing. “You’re damn right you are! She’ll never leave you and she always puts out.”

I now refer to marijuana as “the five-leaf lesson,” and based on my own personal experiences, it is not a lesson I care to repeat. I ended up almost completely losing any ability to function as a happy, healthy adult.

Digging for Buried Treasure

Now it was my obligation to venture into my father’s basement and unlock the treasures that awaited my new crew of explorers. My brother had already taped all the Led Zeppelin albums for me off the original vinyl on his record player. Now I went and retrieved albums like Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle, and The Wall by Pink Floyd; Days of Future Passed and In Search of the Lost Chord by the Moody Blues; all the Hendrix albums; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles; and Ricochet and Rubycon by Tangerine Dream. I had done the research first, by asking my parents which were the best psychedelic albums of the 1960s and 1970s, and it really paid off. By far, my strongest experiences came off the Tangerine Dream albums. In fact, some of those trips were so intense that Don would beg me to turn the music off, because he was literally clenching his fists in terror until his knuckles turned white. All those worlds vanished when I hit stop, and in a few seconds he would beg me to turn it back on. I never let him down—and away we went.

By some divine miracle, Jude had secured an invitation to a private Christmas party for all the coolest seniors and a handful of cool juniors, even though he was only a sophomore. The guys all wore tuxedos and the girls wore prom dresses, but this was much better than the prom. The party took place at the huge family home of one of the wealthiest kids in town, and his parents actually allowed everyone to drink alcohol there. Somehow Jude was able to talk them into letting me in, since I was “his drummer.” I had found an amazing black silk smoking jacket in my closet with a rock-star pattern made out of stylized record-album shapes. The basement of the party house had a house band of juniors and seniors who were pretty good; they were playing covers of the popular “hair metal” bands of the day, including “Talk Dirty to Me” by Poison. The entire basement was packed, flesh to flesh, with gorgeous girls pressed against guys in tuxedos. It was a feast for the eyes and the senses, and smoke clouds hung in the air. Jude managed to get permission for us to play after they left the stage, and although I was very nervous, I used the martial arts training to stay calm and centered. Jude cranked up the distortion on the bass and we launched into a loud, interesting, hard-rock jam, in which he kept trying out new ideas and I followed him on the drums wherever he went.

Everyone was cheering—and when I walked off that stage, I was a newly minted hero. The kids in Jude’s class, as well as the older ones, had no idea who I was, or what my own classmates thought of me. They had seen me in some of their classes and now realized that I was a “rock star.” The word quickly got around that I had met all the most famous musicians they worshipped on MTV. In one night, I went from having hardly any friends at all to being one of the weirdest, coolest kids in school—but only to the classes of 1990 and 1989. Women were talking to me with wide eyes, hoping to get their chance to meet the celebrities I routinely saw backstage. I managed not to gawk at their chests, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered. A very attractive blond girl, who was wearing a tight red dress and was almost as tall as I was, got talking to me upstairs by the big Christmas tree, and it really looked like it was going somewhere until I found out she was only thirteen years old. Somehow I had been singled out by the one girl at the party who was even younger than I was, and she had obviously gotten in for her looks. I did not want to fall for “jailbait,” so I was nice to her, but made no effort to take it any further.

Shortly afterward, a jock called “The Blakester” came up to me. He had the look and swagger of a young Frank Sinatra, and he was very drunk. He called me Cox, as in the mispronounced end of my last name, Wilcock, and threw his arm around me. His breath reeked of stale beer, cheese, and death. “Cox. Cox. Cox. You gotta dansh.” I didn’t understand what he was slurring. “You gotta DANSH, Cox! You gotta DANSH if you wanna get laid!” The Blakester took the lead, and soon we were leading a whole group of amazingly hot girls through the most ridiculous dance moves imaginable—like raking, shoveling, swimming, diving, wiggling, and digging. Once the music finally died down and there were no results, the Blakester gave me the bottom line. I needed to start working out, go on a diet, and lose the weight. As soon as I did that, with the talent he now knew that I had, I could snap my fingers and get any girl I wanted. He told me he would be right there by my side, yelling in my face as I did sit-up after sit-up. I would hate him more than I had ever hated anyone in my life—only to love him in the end when my whole universe changed and I was “The Man.”

After the party, I was instantly promoted up to the “stage” area in the cafeteria, where only the coolest jocks sat. I found out that most of the jocks were drinking every weekend, and a surprising number of them smoked weed as well. They saw me as being very entertaining, and I told all my best stories of going backstage at rock concerts. Jude was up there too, and we traded off, creating lots of laughs at the table.

The Safe House

Somehow I was able to convince Mom to let me have friends come over and smoke weed at the house. She had told me before that she didn’t want me to try it until I was sixteen, but that wasn’t far away now, and she begrudgingly accepted it. Her main rule was that I couldn’t do it during the week—and no alcohol was allowed in the house whatsoever. I agreed to those conditions. Brad’s “master plan” had worked exactly as he had hoped. I now had the ideal weed-friendly “safe house” for gatherings. Shane had gone from being a “total loser” in my grade to the most popular kid in the class of 1992, thanks to his athletic abilities, weird skater clothes, and persona. Failing eighth grade had been an absolute godsend for him, and had earned him a cool new name: Baner. Chris, the same kid who had once shot me down Monkey Hill and insulted me every day about my sweatpants, was now a weekly fixture as well. Don was always there, as we were inseparable.

Jude almost never came over, as he had a hot young girlfriend from an extremely fundamentalist Christian family. Every time we made plans, she would seduce him with the offer of a night of secret lovemaking and get him to cancel out at the last minute. This became a source of incredible pain throughout the remainder of my high school years. We would make plans, I would set everything aside to have him come over as an exclusive so we could work on our music, but he would only make it about one out of every seven or eight times. This, coupled with my rapid onset of drug-numbed apathy, killed off our band within a month or two after the Christmas party.

Damaged Justice

On March 15, 1989, Dad took Michael and me to RPI Fieldhouse to see Metallica on their “Damaged Justice” world tour, supporting their hit new album And Justice for All. They had been a band only the real “burnouts,” like Dennis, listened to, but then they came out with their video and single “One,” about a soldier whose mind was trapped in a motionless body, and the band became huge overnight. We saw them right as they were cresting the wave of fame, on the fourth month of a grueling yearlong world tour with no breaks. I smuggled a ten-inch-long Kodak 110 flash camera down the front of my pants, and miraculously the security guard waved his wand over everything but the camera and passed me through.

The show was extremely loud and raunchy, but thankfully the label only allowed a small group of people to go backstage. The guitarist, Kirk Hammett, was so shy he hid in the hallway and wouldn’t talk to anyone. The lead singer, James Hetfield, was extremely tall and staggeringly drunk. When I posed for a picture with him, he belched loudly, and it reeked of beer and bile. We all laughed, which caused my brother to wiggle the camera and ruin the shot. The drummer, Lars Ulrich, was significantly shorter than I was, and I was dying to ask him some questions. Although he seemed uninterested in talking to me at first, since I was a huge, hairy, sweat-drenched mess, I quickly found out that it was the same story—they were already burned out, had a very difficult time being famous, and were exhausted from touring. I was a prisoner in high school and they were prisoners in a tour bus.

Lars confessed that he had tried to become a tennis pro, but had failed. He had been playing drums for only three or four months when he started in Metallica, but he could run really fast. He took those feet and danced on the double-bass pedals, developing their now signature sound.

After the pictures from the Metallica show were developed, I realized I looked like a mess, and I needed to try to improve my appearance. I had become hugely overweight, with a double chin that remained visible no matter how I was holding my head. I had not cut my hair since getting hit in the ear, and before then my mother had always done it. The hair I had now was the result of just letting it go, and I hadn’t even tried to comb or style it until I shaved the side. I wore it up at school only about twelve times because it created such an intense reaction. Now I wanted my hair to have a more stylized and feathered look, while keeping all the length—which would make me look even more like a true metalhead. Baner’s mother was always drunk, slurring her words, but she worked as a hairstylist, and he set up a deal through which she agreed to cut my hair in her house after work for five bucks. Don sat there in the linoleum kitchen that smelled like a sick dog as I told her I wanted her to take off only two inches, make it look good, and otherwise leave it the way it was. She slurred back, “Just two inches,” and I said, “Yes, just two inches.”

I was surprised that it was taking her so long, and it seemed like there was an awful lot of hair all over the ground. Don kept smiling as though he was trying not to laugh. To my horror, when it was all over she had given me the ultimate scumbag haircut, also known as the mullet—short on the top and sides, or “business up front,” with a little rat-tail “party in the back.” Now I looked exactly like the kids who smoked cigarettes on the corner before school, and who were trying to have long hair but had never really committed to it. I was furious with Don for not telling me what she was doing or making any effort to stop her. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I had the exact same feeling of sobriety and major life change that I had had when my ear was first cut. My ear now had no discoloration, and if you didn’t look closely you couldn’t even tell there was a scar there. “Chop it off,” I told her. “Chop off the rat tail and let’s just go with a normal clean-cut look.”

I went to school with that haircut the next day, and used what I had learned about hair spray to make it perfect. I wore the dressiest shirt I had: a tan shirt with a blue collar. Nothing black. One dressed-up jock kid named Brian was so shocked he literally backed up seven feet in the hallway when he saw me. Jude passed up the temptations of his girlfriend to visit me that night. It was an emergency, and he told me I needed to do something fast. My long hair had “hidden the weight,” he said, and made me look cool, whereas now I was just “the fat kid.” There was no edge, no story, no reason to see me as a wild rock star. I thought back to what the teacher’s assistant had told me about having unusually beautiful eyes, and realized Jude was absolutely right. I had lost the hair, and now I needed to lose the weight. I would have to become my own personal trainer, even if I hated myself for driving so hard—just as the Blakester told me at the party. I already knew how to make my body impervious to pain for short periods, and now I decided to will my way through a diet, for however long it would take. My main goal in doing it, at the time, was to use my newfound stardom to end up with a girl like Brenda.

I started an aggressive, very unhealthy diet. I stopped eating breakfast cereal with milk and drinking a large glass of orange juice before school. Instead, I drank nothing but a V-8 each morning, and then filled my stomach with water in between classes. This also forced me to run to the bathroom every hour. I would rock in hunger all through the day, which transformed school into complete agony. Then I headed back to Don’s house, where we had grilled cheese sandwiches. Mom made her normal healthy dinners, with slices of apple, vegetables, and the main course, which was usually macaroni and cheese. I took my five-dollar-a-week allowance and my dollar-twenty-five-a-day lunch money and saved it all to go toward weed. Skipping school lunch meant I no longer ate the huge pile of French fried potatoes that, along with sugar-laced ketchup, had been declared a “vegetable” by the Reagan administration, and the pounds started flying off. I absolutely hated jogging after two years of the Turkey Trot, and did not do any more exercise than before—not a single push-up, sit-up, or chin-up.

I lost most of the weight in the first few months, as much as five pounds a week. It took six more months to get the last third of it to go away. As soon as I started visibly losing weight, and had a house full of weed buddies every weekend, Don became suicidal. I didn’t know how serious he was, but it wasn’t looking good . . . at all. After school on weekdays it was just me and him. I decided to have him write out what he wanted to say to all the people he was friends with, including the girls. I wanted him to apologize to them for killing himself and say why he felt it was necessary. I felt this would help him work through it and realize this was a terrible and stupid thing to do. I was sitting on the floor in gym class when a random mullet kid told me Don had slumped over at his desk, crying out that he had taken eighty-six aspirin and didn’t want to die. They had rushed him out in an ambulance, pumped his stomach, and fed him charcoal, and he was probably going to be fine. I was very upset that he had actually tried to do it and never bothered to tell me. He also had refused to leave any statements for me when we wrote out his good-byes.

After this failed suicide attempt, Don started buying Marlboro Red cigarettes and drinking alcohol in addition to smoking weed. I tried drinking myself but I did not like it, and found that hard liquor in particular would just about destroy my stomach and send me into crippling pain. I smoked a total of fewer than twenty cigarettes in my life and quickly decided they were disgusting, even though the first time I smoked one I got so wasted I could barely walk down the street. I realized they were always this strong, and people’s bodies simply adjusted to the nicotine dose. I did not want that to happen to me—but both Don and his brother became totally hooked. That same day I tried my first cigarette, we met a friend of Bob’s who was already out of school and high. I told him I smoked pot only on the weekends, and he looked genuinely dazzled. “How can you possibly wait that long? It’s so good I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to do it every day.”

I scoffed. “That’s never going to happen. I’m not an addict.” However, in less than a year he would be right. A lifetime of bullying, and growing up in a sick society, had made me a prisoner of “repetition compulsion,” where I kept attracting the same types of tormentors over and over again. Yet, instead of doing anything to stand up for myself, I continued to self-medicate more and more to alleviate the pain they caused me. The more I did this, the weaker I became, and the more I was attacked. It was truly a vicious cycle that just kept on snowballing. The cosmic days of my youth now seemed like a distant, almost forgotten memory.

Twenty-six Years

Someone told me about a technique involving hyperventilation that got you very high. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it involved creating a “blood choke” to the brain, which I knew from my martial arts training was lethal if it lasted for very long. Since no one actually put their hands or arms around your neck, I didn’t realize that this technique did the same thing. I heard about it as a fairly vague rumor, with instructions to have your friend push on you for seven seconds. I recruited Jude for this task, since I wanted to have a psychedelic adventure, and told him, “Forget seven seconds. Let’s go for fifteen.” I was standing with my back against an old-smelling thick hardwood door with a rounded top when he did it—but I never made it to fifteen. My body slumped down unconscious after eleven. I landed on my left foot in a funny way, causing the metatarsal bone attached to the pinky toe to snap about an inch below where the toe met with the foot—leaving my toe bending well over to the side, almost on a ninety-degree angle. I thought it was only dislocated and didn’t realize I had actually broken it until many years later.

I was thrown into a very bizarre situation in which “my life flashed before my eyes”—only it was the wrong life. I experienced what seemed to be twenty-six years of time as a series of blindingly fast snapshots. As each one went by, the full range of experiences for that time was loaded into my memory. I was part of a primitive community that lived by a river. Almost everyone was illiterate. Our equivalent of the daily news was a guy who stood up on a platform in the center of town and told us what was going on, using theatrical storytelling techniques. We had a huge problem with irrigation. We were trying to get the river water to go through brick canals to the crops, but most of the water was seeping out between the cracks. I was having ESP experiences and contact with an “old man” similar to my own dreams as a child, and I was taught how to create a gooey material that was burned black and would stop the water from leaking.

I had a wife whom I got together with when I was young, and we had kids before we really knew what we were doing. She took care of the kids and I was mostly disconnected and focused on myself and my work. We still had love in our family, but I was always out doing something. I was obsessed with the idea of having an out-of-body experience, and being able to travel wherever I wanted in this ghostly form. I was taught to hold up a lotus-type flower to my face and stare into it. If I could see my own face in the lotus, I could change places with my astral body, so now I was looking back at the eyes of my physical body. The lotus pattern would then extend into a tunnel and I could fly through it and go wherever I wanted.

My life ended when a group of rogue barbarians invaded, riding animals and carrying weapons. We were completely outmatched, and I knew they were going to kill every single person in our village. I couldn’t run and I couldn’t hide—so I dropped down, holding a flower, and I tried harder than ever to see my own face in its spiraling pattern. The ground was shaking from the power of the oncoming horde. Finally I started seeing my face—but something was wrong. My eyes looked just about the same as they normally would, but I had dark skin and different features. The flower extended into a tunnel and I started hearing Jude and my brother shouting my name. I was very confused by what I was seeing, as it was my face, but it wasn’t my face. I decided to fly through the tunnel and go to the voices instead of waiting for the barbarians to kill me.

I slammed back into my body, and I was in very serious trouble. My eyes would not stop going up and down, up and down, from my top left to my bottom right, about two times a second. I also was in terrible pain, but at first I couldn’t identify it. I started screaming when I realized I had landed on my foot in a funny way, and yelled even more loudly when I wrestled it out and saw my toe off to the side. I frantically ordered Jude to pop it back, which he did—and it hurt tremendously. Then I yelled, “Twenty-six years! I was gone for twenty-six years! How the hell did I make it back here?” They had no idea what I was talking about. As I regained control of my body and bound my toe to the other two with Scotch tape, I explained to them what had happened. I did not believe in reincarnation at the time, though it would become a major part of my life in the future. Nonetheless, I could not deny that I seemed to have relived a past life at flash-forward speed. The strangest thing about it was that my eyes looked the same as they do now, though I had been a black man. Although the whole experience fascinated me, I realized that I came very close to dying—and I never tried it again.

Around this time, I also started having a highly bizarre thing happen to me as often as once or twice a month. I would get up for school as I always did, take a shower, get dressed, go downstairs, pack my book bag, have breakfast, and walk out the side door to go to school. Everything outside would be pitch-black. It was the middle of the night. “What the hell is going on?” I would come back into the house and realize that I had been in some kind of trance. I thought I heard my alarm going off, but it was a hallucination. I went through all the motions in a robotic way. I gazed at the clock on the microwave but didn’t register what time it was.

During this same time, I was listening to the song “Sister Morphine” by the Rolling Stones. When Mick Jagger sang, “Why does the doctor have no face,” I got a sudden flash of a scene in which two “doctors” were standing over me. They both had unusually large heads with tapered jaws, and skinny bodies. There were three round lights above them in a triangle shape as they bent over to look down at me. I drew the scene for my art class, but I gave them squared-off military jaws instead of what I actually saw, and gave their bodies wide military shoulders as well. I did not draw any facial features on them, because in this split-second flash vision I could not see any. My drawing was good enough that it won an award and was displayed in the school hallway for a period of time. I still have it framed and hanging on my bedroom wall. I got a tremendous chill when my mother got a copy of Whitley Strieber’s first book, Communion. The big-eyed being on the front cover looked very similar to the “doctors” I had drawn, and in the book they abducted people and performed medical experiments. This creeped me out so much that I would flip the book facedown every time I saw it. The combination of extraterrestrial and square-jawed human features may indicate that military personnel were part of my experience, thus suggesting there may have been a “MILAB” or Military Abduction.²⁷ If I was in fact abducted, I have still never been able to remember any details to this very day. However, my mother did wake up one night feeling a terrible negative presence in the room, and saw a three-foot-tall being quietly walking out. It had a normal-sized head, not like one of the Gray extraterrestrials with the large heads, huge black eyes, and spindly bodies—but she was very afraid of it. My art also formed the image of the Egyptian “winged disc,” which I would not consciously realize for over a decade.

David Wilcock’s High School Illustration of ET-like Beings

The Left Eye of Horus

In the summer of 1989, one of the “burnout” kids I had smoked with a few times called me up and said I had to see something, right now, as I would never believe him otherwise. He just had to show me. We rushed over to the Sunnyside Road bridge, which went over the railroad tracks, where he had been riding his motorcycle. The suspense was killing me as we climbed down the hill—and there it was. A gigantic, Egyptian-style Left Eye of Horus was painted on the concrete slope that went all the way up the hill under the bridge. It was easily fifty feet wide and thirty feet tall, and was made out of at least four different paint colors—a lot of red, some blue, and black for the iris with white for its reflection. The paint was glossy and fresh as if it had just been done, or was very carefully maintained.

It wasn’t at all easy to get down there. This would have taken gallons and gallons of paint to produce—and it was flawless. Who would have had the time, money, and energy to do something like this? College kids? And why? What could possibly possess them to invest such a significant part of themselves into making this gigantic piece of art that no one would ever see except a train conductor?

As I tried to use ESP to tune into whatever this was, I sensed incredible evil and darkness. I had flashes of people wearing robes and masks, chanting around a fire. There may have even been some sort of animal sacrifice as well as weird sex rites. I found that the logical place for a fire had been all too neatly raked, as if someone had deliberately cleaned it up to hide the evidence. Suddenly it dawned on me that this could be a ritual site for the same Rosemary’s Baby–type group that my parents had seen going into the house across the street. Years later I would speak to multiple insiders who confirmed that sites like this were used to practice occult religious rites.

Now I was consumed with terror. I quickly scanned all the trees to see if there was a hidden camera. Nothing obvious. “We need to get the hell out of here. Right now.” The burnout kid was right behind me. After we left, we both tried to figure out why in the hell there was an Egyptian eye there. How could this have anything to do with a weird, satanic cult that might want to light a fire and do a ritual while they were safely hidden under a bridge? At the time, it didn’t make any sense. Egyptian religion and Satanism were supposedly two completely different things. I decided that those ESP hits must have been my imagination—but the whole experience haunted me for years to come. I would eventually discover that the Cabal’s main religion was Luciferianism, and they had adapted the Egyptian trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Horus as being the three main manifestations of Lucifer on Earth.