The Long Hard Road Out of Hell Read Online Free PDF Page A

from Hit Parader, Circus and Creem . Every morning I woke up staring at Kiss, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, David Bowie, Mötley Crüe, Rush and Black Sabbath. Their hidden messages had reached me.
    The fantasy element of much of this music soon drew me to Dungeons & Dragons. If every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off of your life, every game of Dungeons & Dragons you play delays the loss of your virginity by seven hours. I was such a loser that I used to walk around school with twenty-sided dice in my pockets and design my own modules like Maze of Terror, Castle Tenemouse and Caves of Koshtra, a phrase that, much later in life, became slang for the sensation of having snorted too much coke.
    Naturally, none of the kids in school liked me because I played Dungeons & Dragons, I liked heavy metal and I wasn’t going to their youth group rallies and engaging in social activities like burning rock albums. I didn’t fit in any better with the kids from public school, who used to kick my ass on a daily basis for being a sissy from private school. And I hadn’t been roller-skating much since Lisa slimed me. My only other source of friends was a study and play group for the children of parents who had come in contact with Agent Orange during Vietnam. My father, Hugh, was a helicopter mechanic and a member of the Ranch Hands, the covert group responsible for dumping the hazardous herbicide all over Vietnam. So from the day I was born until the end of my teenage years the government brought my father and me to a research center for yearly physical and psychological studies in search of adverse effects. I don’t think there were any, though my enemies might disagree. One of the side effects the chemical had on my father was that because he went public with information on Agent Orange, resulting in a front-page story on him in the Akron Beacon Journal , the government severely audited his taxes for the next four years.

    Because I wasn’t deformed, I didn’t fit in with the other children in the government study group or at the regular retreats for kids whose parents were suing the government for exposure to the chemical. The other children had prosthetic limbs, physical irregularities and degenerative diseases, and not only was I comparatively normal but my father was the one who had actually sprayed the stuff on their fathers, most of whom were American infantry soldiers.
    In an effort to accelerate my delinquency and feed my growing addiction to money, I graduated from peddling candy and magazines to music. The only other kids in my neighborhood who went to Heritage Christian School were two skinny, all-American, Latter-Day Saint brothers with matching buzz cuts. The older brother, Jay, and I had nothing in common. He was only interested in the Bible. I was only interested in rock music and sex. The younger brother, Tim, was more rebellious. So just as Neil Ruble had turned me on to rock music, I introduced Tim to heavy metal and bullied him the rest of the time. He wasn’t allowed to listen to music in his house, so I sold him a cheap black tape recorder with big rectangular push buttons and a carrying handle on the end.
    Next, he needed some music to hide under his bed with the cassette deck. So I began making regular bicycle rides to a place called Quonset Hut, which didn’t allow minors in the door since it was a head shop as well as a record store. I looked exactly my age—fifteen—but no one stopped me. It didn’t matter anyway because the pipes, roach clips and bongs there were a complete mystery to me.
    When Tim started buying the tapes at the jacked-up prices I told them they had cost me, I realized that there were at least a hundred other potential customers at school. I started buying all the albums played during backward-masking seminars and selling them to schoolkids, from third-graders to upperclassmen. A W.A.S.P. album purchased for seven bucks at Quonset Hut was