Mustaine: A Life in Metal

Mike’s little brother Mark was also a musician. He played bass in a band with a guy named John Voorhees (who later did a stint with a fairly successful band called Stryper). Mark and John heard me playing, asked if I might be interested in joining them.

“Sure,” I said. “Just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t have a guitar.”

No problem, Mark said. I could borrow his acoustic. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just knew I liked the feeling of having a guitar in my hands, making music, being part of…something. I was a smart kid but an indifferent student, even as far back as elementary school. I’d get in trouble for fooling around or failing to have my homework completed, and sometimes I’d have to stay after school. Frankly I found this embarrassing. But I knew in my heart that I was a natural learner, especially if it was a subject that captured my interest.

Like music.

I loved having that secret weapon, that bond—where you sit down with another musician, and you start talking, and everyone else at the table immediately takes notice, because you’re speaking a language they don’t even understand, can’t hope to comprehend. It’s like they think the conversation is going to be empty-headed, but it’s not. It’s just…different. And if you don’t play music (as opposed to just listening to music), you really can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.

So joining a band was about camaraderie as much as anything else, I suppose.

And sex, of course. Ultimately, when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll, it’s always about sex.

ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I was about thirteen years old, we went over to Mark’s house to rehearse. There were a bunch of people hanging out, including one of Mark’s buddies, who lived across the street, and his girlfriend, whose name was Linda. When I walked into the house, Linda caught my eye. I wasn’t exactly a player, even by junior high standards, but I noticed right away that Linda was giving me a hard look. She hung out while we jammed for a bit, and afterward, having seen that I was the new lead guitar player, she introduced herself to me. Within a matter of days, Linda had chucked her old boyfriend for me. Why? Not because of my looks or dynamic personality, but simply because I played guitar. And I recall thinking, as Linda sidled up to me and took my hand in hers, Hmmmm…I kind of like this.

The hormonal inspiration for picking up a guitar is a cliché; it’s also fundamentally true, as pure and honest as any other muse. And it doesn’t change, even as you go from gangly, pubescent teen to full-grown adult male. That was one of the things that surprised me most about the music business: you hear all this stuff about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll…and you laugh it off. Then you get to peek behind the curtain, and guess what? It’s real! You go to Salt Lake City, the pristine capital of that most morally upright of states, and discover there’s a reason the rock stars call it Salt Lick City. You discover the cliché is based on truth. It’s absolutely real, and pretty soon you’re trying to decide which of the two proverbial bulls you want to be: the one that charges down the hill, full speed, and fucks the first cow he meets, or the one who saunters down the hill slowly and fucks them all.

MARK’S HOUSE BECAME a place of inspiration and experimentation. One of the very first songs I learned to play was “Panic in Detroit” by David Bowie, followed by Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes.” There was a pot dealer who lived up the street, and he introduced us to a variety of great stuff (in more ways than one): Johnny Winter; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Triumvirate; and, of course, Led Zeppelin. I mean, if you played guitar, you wanted to be Jimmy Page, right? And if you sang in a rock ‘n’ roll band, you wanted to be Robert Plant. Everyone was trying to learn “Stairway to Heaven,” which I actually picked up pretty quickly. But you know what really got me hooked?

KISS.

Man, I really dug the early KISS stuff—not just musically but stylistically. I was not a Gene Simmons guy, either; I liked Ace Frehley, because he was a lead guitar player. I liked the whole rock star thing, and KISS seemed to have taken it to a new level. In the same way that Axl Rose made people hate rock stars, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley made rock stars seem kind of decadent and megalomaniacal—which wasn’t a bad thing at all, so far as I could tell. KISS was one of the first bands I saw live, and I couldn’t help but notice that a disproportionate number of their fans looked like Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders: they all had blond hair and wore tube tops, and they seemed to be throwing themselves at the band. And if the band wasn’t accessible, well, then the guy next to them in the audience would do.

My love for music, and especially my fascination with the lifestyle it promised, was viewed skeptically by some members of my extended family. My mother, of course, was forever conflicted: on the one hand, I know that she loved me and supported me, and wanted to see me happy and successful. On the other hand, there was no reconciling her son’s drinking, drugging, and “devil music” with the tenets of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; they were fundamentally incompatible. Similarly, my brother-in-law Bob Wilkie grew increasingly disenchanted with my changing interests. He liked me when I was a baseball player or an aspiring martial artist (I first took lessons at the YMCA in Stanton, which was located directly across the street from Bob’s police station). Those were pursuits he could get behind. But playing in a band? Listening to heavy metal music?

Uh-uh.

One day when I was not quite fifteen years old, Bob came home and discovered me hanging out in his house, listening to Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny. He walked in the front door, marched over to the turntable, and turned down the volume.

“What the hell is this?” he said, waving the album jacket in disgust.

“Judas Priest,” I answered, somewhat sheepishly.

“Who does it belong to?”

I shrugged. “It’s mine.”

And with that Bob dropped the jacket, took two big steps in my direction, and punched me in the face.

“No more of that shit in my house! You understand?”

I stood there, stunned and dazed, holding a hand to my cheek, fighting back tears.

“Yes, sir.”

What else could I do? I respected Bob too much to fight back. He would have kicked my ass anyway. I mean, the guy was a professional athlete—and a cop! Not only that, but Bob had come into our family—and into my life—as a good guy. He’d married Suzanne, adopted her son, and generally conducted himself in an old-fashioned, chivalrous manner. This seemed completely out of character.

But as I retreated to the kitchen to get some ice out of the freezer and applied it to my swollen jaw, I had to wonder: Who the hell punches a fifteen-year-old?

And…

What the fuck does he have against Judas Priest?

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 to violate fire codes, please extinguish all smoking materials now.” And then the fans would come on and clear the fog, and the cops would leave 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 off the bus, Wilbur and I found ourselves at the center of a big, heaving circle of bloodthirsty teenagers.

Damn it, I did not want this to happen.

Wilbur put up his hands, like some bare-knuckle fighter, and smiled confidently.

“Come on, motherfucker,” he yelled. “Hit me! Flip me or something.”

For some reason I heard that—“Hit me! Flip me…”—and the thought occurred to me that it sounded like the title of a punk song. A calm washed over me. The whole thing just seemed so ridiculous, me standing there in the middle of a bunch of strange, screaming kids, getting ready to fight this big Idaho pig farmer’s son. I thought I’d left California to get away from dangerous situations. How the hell did this happen?

“Come on, man! You gonna give me a karate chop or what?! Kung fu faggot!”

Stalemate. Wilbur didn’t want to hit me first because he was bigger; I refused to hit him because I had been taught by my sensei that I was to strike only in self-defense. And so it went, the two of us dancing awkwardly, until the bus arrived. We boarded, uneventfully, and the bus pulled away.

Crisis averted.

Or so I thought, until we reached Wilbur’s stop. As he exited the bus, he cocked his arm and drilled me in the back of the head with an elbow. I knew instantly I was fucked—and not because I was now compelled to engage Wilbur in battle, but rather because I’d worked up a sizable wad of chewing tobacco, a big chunk of which was now sliding down my throat. If you’ve ever accidentally swallowed chew, you know what came next. Within seconds I was incapacitated; by the time I got home I was vomiting from my shoes.

In response, I did what anyone in my situation would have done: I put a hex on the guy.

Well, maybe not anyone, but anyone with a sister who was heavily into witchcraft and black magic. Indeed, for me, this was the beginning of a very long and disturbing flirtation with the occult, the effects of which haunted me for years. At the time, though, it seemed just a handy tool to have at my disposal. Having been baptized Lutheran and harassed into stupefaction by the JWs, I was by my teenage years an empty vessel when it came to religion. Contrary to popular belief, while I did read The Satanic Bible I never became an actual Satanist—the whole concept seemed kind of silly, to be perfectly candid—but I certainly did dabble in the dark arts, and I don’t doubt for a second that it fucked with my head to an almost immeasurable degree.

I believed in the occult, and some people will say, “How can you believe in the occult and practice black magic and not be satanic?” Well, there’s a line there. Talk to anyone who has been involved in the occult and they will tell you that there are a lot of different factions for different types of magic. And as with anything else, there are good and bad aspects to the occult.

I only know that both witchcraft and the Jehovah’s Witnesses caused me a good deal of pain for a great many years. They’re different, of course. The pain from getting into witchcraft was residual. The pain of the religiosity of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that was causal. It’s like when people say, “Hey, you’re on drugs, so your relationships are shitty,” and you respond with, “No, my relationships are shitty, and that’s why I’m on drugs.” Either way, you’re fucked-up.

But that afternoon, as I tried to calm my raging stomach? Witchcraft seemed like a perfectly reasonable coping mechanism.

Since Michelle was reluctant to offer, I stole some of her books; after just a few days of study, I went to work, crafting a doll out of bread dough, using poppy seeds to spell out W-I-L-B-U-R and tying a noose made out of string around the doll’s neck. Then I recited an incantation from the book of spells. Finally, at the very end, I picked up the doll and snapped off one of its legs.