Mustaine: A Life in Metal. Dave Mustaine

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       2 REEFER MADNESS

       “He likes to pour Al steak sauce on my pussy before giving me head.”

       I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME I GOT HIGH.

       WE WERE LIVING IN GARDEN GROVE AT THE TIME, AND A FRIEND WHO LIVED DOWN THE STREET HAD INTRODUCED ME TO THE MAGIC OF MARIJUANA. THIS KID WAS ONE OF THOSE INGENIOUS LITTLE FUCKERS WHO, IF HE HAD MANAGED TO CHANNEL HIS ENERGY AND INTELLECT IN OTHER DIRECTIONS, MIGHT HAVE EARNED A PHD SOMEWHERE. AS IT HAPPENED, HE PROVED MAINLY TO BE GOOD AT FINDING WAYS TO INGEST POT.

      WE WERE HANGING OUT AT HIS HOUSE ONE DAY AFTER SCHOOL, AND HE SUGGESTED WE SMOKE SOME WEED. BUT NOT IN ANY MANNER THAT I RECOGNIZED. RATHER THAN ROLLING A DOOB, THIS KID WENT TO HIS ROOM and returned with a homemade bong crafted out of a Pringles potato chip can!

      “What do I do with this?” I asked as he proudly showed me the tube.

      And then he demonstrated. A half hour later I was staggering back down the street, red eyed and giggling, absolutely loaded. And that was it. Game on.

      I liked smoking pot, liked the way it made me feel, and so I started experimenting with it. From there I naturally branched out into alcohol and other drugs, and before long I was skipping school, killing entire days at my friend’s house, sucking on the Pringles can. My grades quickly suffered, and I started to see how you could associate with the wrong people and make bad decisions, and pretty soon your life could be spiraling out of control. Not that I gave a shit. I’m just talking about awareness and the fact that as an adult, and a parent, I can look back now and see where it all sort of began. But you have to remember: there were no serious ramifications—none that mattered to me, anyway. Getting high on a regular basis did not make my life noticeably worse. In fact, it made life tolerable.

      More than anything else (and this is true of most kids, I think), what I wanted was to feel as though I fit in somewhere. I wanted to belong. Music helped with that. So did smoking pot. Each time we moved to a new house, a new town, a new school, I endured an indoctrination period. I learned how to deal with this in a variety of ways—first through sports, then through music and partying, and eventually by breaking free of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There was no greater stamp of weirdness than to be associated with the Witnesses, and to escape that stigma I deliberately behaved in a manner that was inconsistent with the teachings of the church. My mom and my aunts and all the other Witnesses would warn me that I was destined to burn in hell if I didn’t clean up my act, but frankly I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away from them. I wanted some semblance of normalcy, whatever that might mean.

      There were times when I felt like the sad hero of some fairy tale. You know the kind—where the kids are left in the care of an evil stepmother or stepfather, or some other surrogate caregiver who really couldn’t give a flying fuck about the kids’ welfare. And the dreary circumstances of my life seemed less appealing than retreating to some make-believe world in which all I had to do was smoke weed, play music, hang out with likeminded slackers, and maybe try to get laid once in a while. Music, in particular, was my avenue of escape—everything else just went along with it.

      THERE WAS, HOWEVER, one significant problem associated with cultivating a healthy appetite for drugs and alcohol.

      Cash flow.

      By the time I was fifteen we’d moved into an apartment at a place called Hermosa Village (which was actually located not in Hermosa or Hermosa Beach, but in nearby Huntington Beach), across the street from Golden West College, where I would eventually take classes. When we moved in there, I lost some friendships and the easy access to pot that came with them, and so I had to figure out how to keep the grass growing, so to speak. At the time, pot was going for roughly ten bucks an ounce. So, with no consideration whatsoever given to consequences or moral conundrums, I borrowed ten bucks from my sister, bought an ounce of pot, and went to work. I rolled forty joints and quickly turned around and sold them for fifty cents apiece. In a matter of just a few hours, I had doubled my money. Now, I was far from an economics wizard, but I knew a good thing when I saw it. From that moment on, I was in business: a low-rent pot dealer who made enough cash to stay high and to put food in his belly when the fridge was empty, which was more often than you might imagine. Before long, the going price for a joint went up to seventy-five cents. Then a dollar. Then Mexican weed gave way to the more potent and expensive Colombian, which in turn gave way to rainbow and to Thai. The culture embraced pot smoking with increasing fervor, which was good for my wallet and maybe not so great for my head. I didn’t really care. I was home. All I needed was some dope and music, and some buddies to hang out with.

      I remember seeing Reefer Madness at the old Stanton Picture Palace, a theater in my brother-in-law’s jurisdiction. There were virtually no rules there in the 1970s; you could drink and smoke as much dope as you wanted. And when the cops came, the owner would get on the public address system and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, so as not СКАЧАТЬ