Chapter 9

Which leads me back to my stepfather, I’d taken mushrooms, tripped balls at a Grateful Dead show. (At this juncture, my friends and I had moved from metal to grunge to classic rock).

At the Dead show we scored primo shrooms in the parking lot. Actually, me and another guy had gotten real ones, while my other friends, in another part of the parking lot, had lamentedly gotten fakes.

It was an incredible show, however, and we had shit-tons of weed to smoke. We saw the Steve Miller Band open the show, and The Dead, still with Jerry Garcia, played “Casey Jones” live for the first time in over a decade. The place erupted.

The whole concert was beautiful. Not only musically, but it had such a peaceful vibe. Everyone was grooving, chilling. There were Deadheads, stoners, hippies in hacky sack circles; everybody was having fun.

There were no fights. No guns. No aggro-bullshit, just happy friendly people. Only negative, besides my friends getting ripped off with those fake shrooms, was these two older girls, twenty-somethings, seeing my friends and me smoking weed and chastising us for being too young to smoke weed. They weren’t wrong. Probably.

It was nonetheless an amazing evening that lasted way into the early morning. I’m not sure how I got home, but when I did, my mother was angry at me for something, what, I don’t know, but I’m sure I deserved it. I still wasn’t a normal human being...

I was ranting, groggy, high off the shrooms, and I began cursing about my stepfather, who was downstairs, listening to loud classical music, banshee shriek opera. It’s not until this moment that I realize the irony of a kid’s cavil complaining about his parents’ loud music!

(Usually it was them forcing me to turn down the Motley Crue or NWA and lamenting my taste in oeuvre!)

So I was screaming about my stepfather and his shitty opera and he came storming upstairs, burst into the room with my mom and me and angrily declared that I ought to “say what I’m saying to his face.”

And I did. Years of pent up rage seethed out. It was the end of détente.

We’d not even talked in years, since the incident where he slammed me to the floor. He’d given me the perpetual cold shoulder. We’d pass by each other in the kitchen, hallway, and he’d not say a single word to me, or me to him.

But he was talking to me then. And I talked back. I stood up to him, was ready to fight him, told him so directly, raised my voice to him, threatened him. Told him, in no uncertain terms, “fuck you.”

He was no large man, maybe 5’8, not muscular or anything, and I was about the same height, but skinny. If I were a betting man, I’d put my cash on him to beat my ass, in all likelihood.

He didn’t, though. He completely backed down. With a look of utter shock, he said, meekly, in a cracking voice, that he’d “call the police” if I touched him. It was quite the reversal.

He sulked away and our détente resumed. It was, to this day, and probably will forever be, the last time we shared words.

A couple years later, he and my mom split up, and he left the house.

Around when he moved, he’d recently bought a new cat (his previous one, called “Gidget” had died. Gidget, a super furry Maine Coon Cat, an adorable looking cat, was the meanest fucking animal I’d ever come across. She would hiss, scratch, run away from anyone who came near her, except my stepfather and stepsister. My stepsister said it was because my stepbrother had tormented the cat when it was a kitten. Perhaps he enjoyed chasing cats as much as me! But given what a sadistic prick he was, I believe it was more sinister... )