You Are a Complete Disappointment by Mike Edison

Author:Mike Edison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling

9

PUNCHING BACK

Now I am going tell you something I have never told anyone before. It’s still very difficult for me to talk about. I didn’t even tell Dr. Headshrinker, not until after I wrote this and sent it to her.

When I was in junior high, I was bullied by a boy much bigger and stronger than me. One day he beat me up and took my green army field jacket I had saved up for and bought at an army surplus store on Route 1. It probably doesn’t seem like a big deal now—teenagers seem to always have those jackets—but in 1978 you couldn’t just go to the mall and buy rebel couture. I lived in a sea of Sears Toughskins®, and I had sought it out very specifically because I saw John Lennon wearing one in a photo. In my pre-punk, proto-hippie daze, he was my authority-questioning, anti-establishment hero. No one else I knew had anything nearly as cool.

With my long hair and mirrored aviator shades, I thought I looked pretty badass in that jacket, but back then I was anything but, and a few blows to the head later—in broad daylight, as they say, right on the fucking sidewalk when I was walking home from school—it was his. He rained fists on my face and took the jacket right off my back as cars filled with kids and parents drove by on their way to after-school piano lessons and gymnastics.

When I was in junior high, the kids who shared my interest in smoking pot were not mellow stoners—they were animals. Getting high with them was like climbing into a lion’s cage. They were unpredictable, and had little higher calling than to get fucked up. They championed Lynyrd Skynyrd (the band most overrated by morons and most underrated by Stones fans, who should know better), and mediocre, second-tier hard-rock acts like Mahogany Rush (who were basically a Jimi Hendrix cover band with a bigger phase-shifter). They were blunt-edged-and-dangerous New Jersey rednecks.

The only reason I ever hung out with them was because they knew where to score pot, or they sold it themselves. Also pills, lots of pills. I used to buy black beauties and bust them open and snort the amphetamine sulfate powder on the inside, which, if I had been a real beatnik—“burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” or some such nonsense—might have been a very hip thing to do. But at thirteen years old, out behind the VFW hall around the corner from my junior high school at eight in the morning, not so much. I was pretty miserable at home, so this was how I got my kicks.

Eventually I came in from the cold—the pot thing evened itself out and I fell in with some dilettante Dead Heads and guys who liked to jam on Black Sabbath—great stuff for your budding drummer. They were actually decent musicians—guys I’d later form bands with to play keg parties and street fairs, which mostly kept me out of trouble (idle hands and all that).

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