been waiting so long to be where I’m going

(This is one of those creepy autobiographical posts. You have been warned.)

I’ve been recently spending my free time playing the excellent Bully for the PS2, and the experience has induced some not entirely welcome flashbacks to my high school days. Not that I attended some posh boarding school; Woburn Senior High was (and still is) a typical, unremarkable example of a northeastern suburban high school. The Social Darwinist shark tank elements were still in force, but full on feeding frenzies were rare. I was fortunate enough to avoid them. The bite I delivered to an upperclassman’s arm on the first day of my sophomore year served as an ugly message that I would not be assuming the role of the weak pigeon for the next three years.

I spent the early part of my high school career being ignored by my peers for the most part, aside from the occasional taunts. I fell in with a crowd of other marginalized souls - role-players, comic book geeks, and videogamers – and was content passing the time discussing various aspects of nerdity with them, counting the days until graduation.

In the November of my junior year, my mother passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and in the shitstorm that followed I went to live with my maternal grandmother. As horrible as it was to lose my mother, it was even worse that my previous home life, a Bukowski-like downward spiral where both my parents had lost all control, became public knowledge. As a consequence, the same folks who had taunted or ignored me started to approach me and make the effort to invite me into their little cliques. “Oh, he’s not a freak. He’s had a freakish home life.” It was a mistake for all involved, like trying to domesticate a rabid raccoon.

My social skills, long turned inward due to a natural shyness and situational guardedness, weren’t up to dealing with “normal” folks. It also didn’t help that my primary male role model was a master of emotional cruelty and manipulation. But where he wielded his talents like a surgeon’s scalpel, I flailed around like Leatherface at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The threads that bound these poor kids together were easy to discern, and even easier to twist, tug, and knot. The imp of the perverse called the tune and I played the notes to chaotic perfection, causing fights and killing friendships simply because I could.

These tendencies were only gotten under control in the early 1990’s, after I started dating my future wife. She figuratively beat them out of me, and I owe her much for doing so. “I want someone who is an asshole to everyone but me,” she said, and so I settled into my comfortable present role as a low key, sardonic smartass.

Musically, my tastes underwent a massive change during the 1988-1989 period. Prior to my mother’s death, I had been a quasi-mod with an ash blond mop of hair and an extreme devotion to The Best of Sam and Dave and Roger McGuinn-heavy Easy Rider soundtrack. After her death, my tastes shifted toward speed and thrash metal, due to working with a group of metalheads at the local hospital kitchen. Eventually, I fell under the tutelage of the hospital chef, a thirty-something ex-punk rocker who took me along on his lunchbreak record-buying expeditions and would pull classic punk and hardcore discs out of the bins and convince me to give them a try. His relentless evangelism paid off. By the summer of 1989, my long blonde mop had been buzzed out of existence and replaced with Vaseline-slicked orange spikes. Not long after, “Andy” would also go by the wayside in favor of the much more acceptable “Otto Erotic” (which still haunts me to this day, years after I began introducing myself as “Andrew” again.)

Cream – Sunshine of My Love (from Disraeli Gears, 1967) – I can’t estimate how many hours I spent in my bedroom listening to the local classic rock station (before it switched to the execrable “songs by classic artists” format) and reading stacks of books I brought home from the local library. This song must have been on heavy rotation when I read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, because my association between them and the song is unshakeable to this day.

Anthrax – Among the Living (from Among the Living, 1987) – During my brief thrash metal phase, Anthrax were my band of choice, probably because their interests meshes well with my nerdist heritage. They wrote songs about Judge Dredd and Stephen King stories, and avoided the beer buzz suicide ballad ghetto entirely.

The Circle Jerks – Coup D’Etat (from the Repo Man OST, 1984) – The Repo Man soundtrack was the first punk album I ever bought, and I was blown away by what I heard on it: all the anger and aggression of metal, but with a better sense of humor and far less pretentiousness.