Mustaine: A Life in Metal. Dave Mustaine

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СКАЧАТЬ and everyone would light up all over again. What a great place! I saw Fritz the Cat there, too, and Gimme Shelter. I’d have my little two-dollar pipe and my bag of pot, and I’d sit there for hours on end, hiding out, watching the movies. That was the culture. That was my life.

      Mom naturally approved of none of this, and I can’t say that I blame her. On more than one occasion I’d be getting ready to leave, to go hang with my friends or play some music, and I’d have to alert my mother to the possibility of a delivery.

      “Uh, Mom?”

      “Yes?”

      “There’s a good chance this dude will come by around three o’clock. He’s going to pick up a package. It’s in my room. Just give it to him. And tell him I need twenty-five bucks.”

      Mom would look at me like I was insane. “What exactly is in this package, David?”

      “Doesn’t matter, Mom. Just give it to him. Really, don’t worry. It’s cool.”

      Remarkably enough, she went along with it. At least for a while. It’s hard not to love your kids, I guess, even when they’re making your life miserable.

      Eventually Mom had had enough. Unable to reconcile my behavior with her own religious beliefs (and no doubt dreading the day when the cops would break down the door and arrest all of us for drug trafficking), Mom moved out of the apartment. I was not invited to join her. I was fifteen years old and, for all intents and purposes, totally on my own. An emancipated minor.

      Fortunately, the two guys who ran the apartment complex wound up being terrific customers of mine. So if I was a little short on cash when it came time to pay the rent, all I had to do was broker a deal. A few joints here and there usually settled the issue and left everyone happy and high. By this time I was no longer just dabbling in the field; I was moving a considerable amount of dope. And I had no problem with it whatsoever. Here’s the truth of the matter: when you’re a hungry fifteen-year-old with no viable means of income and no parental support or supervision, you don’t have many options. You aren’t old enough to get a real job, so you have to be more…creative. Desperation fueled my entrepreneurial spirit—that and the knowledge that if I didn’t sell dope, about the only other way to make money was to sell myself. Peddle my ass. I knew enough kids who’d gone that route, or at least had heard about them, seen them working the streets, and there was no fucking way I was going to let that happen.

      Under the right circumstances, though, I didn’t mind trading sex for drugs, or drugs for sex, or whatever. There was, for example, a girl named Willow who worked at a music shop at Westminster Mall. We got to know each other through my frequent visits to the store, during which I’d wander around for hours, thumbing through the stacks of vinyl, trying to figure out what I wanted to listen to next, whether there was some way to advance my knowledge. I was a pothead and a dope dealer, but I really did love music, and I wanted to be a great guitar player—I just had no idea how to make it happen. Eventually I struck up a friendship with Willow, who was maybe a year or two older than me, and the friendship evolved into something else. In exchange for free dope, Willow would give me free records. We’d smoke the dope and listen to the records while having sex at my apartment. Not a terrible arrangement, all things considered. It was Willow, after all, who gave me my first AC/DC album, a gift that kept on giving for years to come, long after we’d stopped having sex or even seeing each other casually.

      I never labored under the illusion that I was anything more than a diversion for Willow, someone who shared her taste in music and didn’t mind trading dope for sex. But even at that age I had some meager standards, which bubbled to the surface one afternoon during a postcoital round of pillow talk.

      “You know, my boyfriend likes it when I shave my pubic hair into a heart,” Willow said.

      “Yeah, I noticed. Cool.”

      “You know what else he likes?”

      “What?”

      She leaned over and put her arms around me, then whispered into my ear. “He likes to pour Al steak sauce on my pussy before giving me head.”

      “Whoa…”

      And that was that. Not even the prospect of an endless supply of records was enough to wipe from my brain the indelible image of Willow and her boyfriend and a big sloppy bottle of Al. We never had sex again.

      

      WHEN BUSINESS SLOWED and my stomach rumbled, I had precious few options. I couldn’t really move back in with my mother—our relationship was simply too fractured, and her ties to the Jehovah’s Witnesses precluded accepting my increasingly decadent way of life. Salvation, then, lay to the north. Specifically, in a little town near Pocatello, Idaho. My sister Michelle had moved up there with Stan, who in addition to being a motorcycle cop was also a skilled carpenter. As tourism and an attendant real estate boom hit the region, work for guys like Stan became plentiful; he ditched the badge and uniform and went off to make some serious money. Tired of trying to support myself, and weary of the life I was leading at home, I called Michelle and asked if I could come up and live with her for a while. She graciously accepted, although strict parameters were placed on the arrangement.

      For one thing, I had to get my ass back in school. I also agreed to get a part-time job. Michelle helped me land a gig bussing tables at a restaurant where she worked, a place called the Ox Bow Inn. My nephew Stevie (Michelle’s son) worked there as a busboy as well, so it was kind of a family affair. Stevie, though, turned out to be a real pain in the ass. He wanted to start a band but lacked the money to buy proper equipment. So he kept borrowing gear from other bands playing at the Ox Bow. There were a lot of people who weren’t best pleased.

      That, however, was nothing compared to the grief Stevie caused me at school. Before I even arrived, he had spread the word about the imminent arrival of his uncle Dave, “the kung fu master from California.” Well, of course, I wasn’t a kung fu master; in fact, I hadn’t yet studied kung fu at all. I’d been taking martial arts classes^* for about three years and had progressed to the point where I could handle myself in a fight, if necessary. But it wasn’t like I was a black belt or anything, and I certainly didn’t brag about it. The study of martial arts has been an important part of my life—spiritually and physically—for nearly four decades now, but I was nothing more than a novice at the time, taking classes to enhance my self-esteem and foster some sense of discipline in an otherwise chaotic life.

      Stevie saw it differently, and so did everyone else. By the time I got up there, half the school was ready to fight me just for the sheer fucking sport of it. On the first day of school some dude walked by me at my locker and drove his elbow into my stomach. I was still trying to catch my breath when he looked at me and said, with a nasty, gap-toothed smile, “You and me, boy? We’re gonna fight after school today.”

      “Who the fuck are you?”

      He didn’t answer, just walked away, laughing, with a posse of rednecks.

      Turned out his name was Wilbur. He was—I shit you not—the son of a pig farmer, which actually gave him a relatively prominent place in this particular backwoods social stratum. I had no way out of this. I had to take the bus home, and by the time I got on board, everyone knew there was going to be a showdown between the kung fu master and the pig farmer. Now, getting to and from school in rural Idaho involved numerous transfers and lots of bus time. My rendezvous with Wilbur occurred at one of the transfer points, while waiting for a second bus that would take me back to the mobile home where Stan and Michelle lived. Within seconds of getting СКАЧАТЬ