Much like rape, bullying is very much a "blame the victim" crime. People don't just decide to start bullying someone they don't know, surely. You must have done something to antagonize them. You must have drawn attention to yourself, thereby turning yourself into a target. You must have brought it on yourself somehow. So no, I didn't bother reporting the bullying. Because I had partially brought this on myself. And no one else cared. "That's the way life is" - remember?

Angel may not have chosen to join Kris in her campaign of unrelenting harassment, but Kris had other friends who were willing to step up to the challenge. There was LiAnne, a strident, weasel-faced bitch with a temper like a Roman candle and a voice like a dental drill. She started following me around gym class, demanding I give her a cigarette, or to borrow some eyeliner. She seemed to be purposefully baiting me, hoping I'd lose my temper so she'd have an excuse to explode. But I never did. I was too afraid. One day, I made the mistake of laughing when she took a volleyball in the face. She immediately stomped right up in my face and began screaming: "DID YOU LAUGH AT ME YOU FUCKING BITCH?! I'LL KICK YOUR FUCKING ASS!" Funny how the gym teacher was never around to hear these shouted obscenities, or to intervene. But hey, that's the way life is.

From then on, LiAnne became my own personal hemorrhoid: always on my ass. She stopped to scream at me in the hallways, apropos of nothing. There was the usual book-dumping, tripping, laughing, etc. The phone calls to my house became so frequent that I took to just unplugging the phone. I didn't tell my mom. I was already in deep shit for having been caught cutting school; all of my metal posters and cassette tapes had been thrown in the trash and I was to report home immediately after school, no more late nights out (because it had also been discovered that there were no "slumber parties" just endless cruising up and down the nearby Boulevard, where stoners roamed long after midnight.)

One day after school, LiAnne, Kris and some other girl followed Dawn and I off school grounds and halfway home, making threats, walking a good ten feet behind us and laughing nastily, hurling insults. When they began throwing rocks at our heads, I tried to catch the eye of a passing motorist - ANY of them - but though a few did see me mouthing the words "Help" no one stopped. We finally made a quick turn down a side street and ran to a friends house. I called my mom to come and pick me up, and promptly got into trouble for not coming directly home.

I couldn't hide. I couldn't make it stop. I had to go to school. I couldn't cut anymore. Think about that: you are forced to go to a place where you know you will be abused, every day, for hours, and told to simply ignore the abuse. How do you do that? I tried to apologize. I tried to fix things. I stopped doing/dressing/drawing anything and everything that might attract attention. It didn't help. They would not stop.

So I decided there was only one way out. I told Dawn I wanted to die. And Dawn, being the helpful friend she was, brought me a whole bottle of her mom's tranquilizers and told me to do it. She said she'd do it too. We stayed after school one day and methodically swallowed all of the pills, then laid down in the hallway and waited to die.

Except Dawn chickened out as consciousness began to fade, and she ran to the principal's office and told them to call 911. Dawn could do that, because Dawn never took any pills. Dawn was going to watch me die, but Dawn hadn't realized that death was permanent and I was determined. I did not want to live anymore. I couldn't take one more day of the constant bullying. No one cared. No one listened. No one would ever love me, and no one would ever miss me. So fuck it. Goodbye cruel world.

What happened next really was my own damn fault. Yeah, it was Dawn's idea, but I went along with it. I was dumb, I was painfully immature, I was desperate to be anything other than what I was: an ugly loser. I am so utterly fucking embarrassed to admit to this, even anonymously. Stereotypically speaking, heavy metal and Satanism have always walked hand in hand, no more so than in the 1980s, when every preschool was suspected of conducting ritualistic ceremonies between juice box break and nap time, and every record contained backwards messages encouraging teenagers to fuck chickens, shove statues of the Virgin Mary up their asses and then kill themselves. The simple truth of the matter was that it was all bullshit. Oh sure, there really ARE heavy metal bands who DO practice Satanism, but I can count them on one hand. And I've never heard a single record - metal or otherwise - played backward that revealed anything other than gibberish along the lines of "Croberashankamastafus." But when you're fourteen, and poor, and boyfriendless... yeah, it's tempting to believe that praying to a dark deity will grant all of your dearest wishes sooner rather than later. It was all painfully cartoonish and completely ridiculous. We burned a black candle here, recited a cheesy incantation found in a cheap paperback (written by a masturbating cellar gremlin covered in Cheeto dust, no doubt) book there, promised our immortal souls to Satan if His RedSkinned Horned Greatness would just make Kenny love me back, pretty please? Oh and also, could you make my hair as perfect as the girl in the Motley Crue video too? So yeah, I spent a month or two worshipping Satan. Or rather, I wasted a month or two paying homage to the popular image of Satan - red guy, pitchfork, tail with a point on the end, blahdee blahdee blah. God, maybe at this point I should admit to having owned purple E.T. The Extraterrestrial shoelaces when I was 12, or that I liked Barry Manilow when I was 7. It would be less shameful than this. I think I thought on some level that being a Big Scary Satanist would make people leave me alone. They'd smell the evil power I wielded and shrink before my mightiness and stop bullying me. People would be frightened of me, intimidated by me, afraid to antagonize me lest they be smote by a beam of pure sulfurous flame from the sinful pit of hellish doom. God was I stupid. Of course, people found out. Like I wasn't stupidly drawing upside crosses on my brown bag book covers, double derhey. The bullying worsened. I didn't think it was possible. To this day I'm surprised I made it out of high school without being drawn and quartered or burned at the stake. One girl in particular made my life a living Hell, pun definitely intended. Her name was Kris. She was a preppy with stiffly feathered hair, a lacquered complexion and a wardrobe right out of the Sears "Junior Executive Bitch Squad" line. She had one outfit in particular - a matching lavender suit, complete with wide brimmed hat, elbow gloves and a wrap. At fifteen, she looked like a 60 year old PTA president. She called my house at nights and on weekends, informing me that if I dared show my face at school again, I'd get my ass kicked. She would march up to me in the halls and demand to know what/who/why/how I worshipped Satan. One fine day during PE, she came up out of nowhere, right in my face and informed me that she and all of her friends were signing a petition to make me stop doing whatever it was she thought I was doing. At the time, the aforementioned Angel of the beautiful black eyes had listened to Kris's pronouncement and stunningly came to my defense: "Why don't you and your friends mind your own fucking business?" Kris looked horrified. I know I was. I had thought that she and Angel were friends. Angel didn't even look mad, just amused and scornful. Kris stuttered something about how I was sick and evil, and then lamely wandered off. Angel rolled her eyes. That was it. I never complained about this branch of the bullying tree, because even at the age of fifteen, I knew I'd fucked up, brought it on myself and deserved it. And because I refused to offer an explanation, apologize or defend myself, the bullying got worse, and worse and worse. You see, it's not true that ignoring the bullies makes them get bored and leave you alone. Silence is consent, and they will never stop, not once they know and see they've gotten under your skin. Once they wear you down, they won't stop until you're in ruins. And sometimes, you make the mistake of believing that the only way to stop them forever is to ruin yourself.

Cut

The concert - my first, was over. So was the summer. August burned out like a faulty firework and fizzled away into ashes. September came and I began my sophomore year of high school. I had know way of knowing it, but it would be my last year in the public education penitentiary.

Kevin and I were still boyfriend/girlfriend, but he went to a different school in a different city and our get togethers were limited to weekends, when we would meet at the mall, look at the records we couldn't afford to buy and hang around the food court for hours. Sometimes I went over to his house and hung out with his friends: Brandon, Billy, Ronnie and Mike. We smoked a lot of pot, we played a lot of music, we did a lot of nothing. I didn't give a fuck about the future.

I didn't give a fuck about school either. And to be fair, I don't think school gave much of a fuck about me. Early on, I had made several attempts to reach out to my teachers for help. Math in particular was a challenge. My summer of sickness in 1983 had left a huge hole in my education. I could keep up in all of my subjects except for math, which had somehow gone from simple calculations to mystifying hieroglyphics. I dared not raise my hand in class for fear of drawing attention to myself and admitting my stupidity. To raise your hand was to allow all of your classmates to turn in their seats and stare at you. And laugh, and make faces, or mouth the words "Fuck you, whore." I had assumed that my new identity as a stoner would somehow make me less pick-onable, but still I remained an ugly, geeky, worthless creep. The boys made fun of me as boys will, but the girls were systematically brutal. Girls are so much crueler than boys, more insidious and manipulative. They know they must maintain an outer appearance of sweetness and ladylike innocence, but on the inside they were rotten, venomous spiders, plotting and scheming and always elaborately spinning their webs. This was long before the term "Mean Girls" entered our lexicons. Nobody took bullying seriously.

I had planned to approach my math teacher after class one day to make a plea for help, but that day as the period began, he made an announcement: "Just do the problems on pages 34-37 and don't ask me for help, I'm busy." That was the gist of it. Well, if I couldn't approach him during class, how the hell could I do so after, when he could possibly tell me how he REALLY felt about us ungrateful, scabby little losers?

Another time, I screwed up the courage to approach my science teacher after class. I told him I was being picked on, during class, after class, all day long, every day, and it was interfering with my ability to concentrate on anything else. I was constantly waiting for the next humiliation, the next threat, the next foot stuck out in the hall, the next note passed to me reading "Your an ugly bitch and your ass is getting kicked after school today." Please help me, I said. Do something, make them stop, I don't know what to do.

He shrugged. "Well, you better get used to it because that's the way life is." I was fourteen. I was asking for help. I was trying to improve my situation, but an adult had just told me that my situation was of no concern to them. Thank a lot, grown ups.

I started cutting school. I would get up in the morning, get dressed, walk to school, meet my friends out at the bleachers and then just leave. We'd wander around town, take a bus to the mall, go to our houses and watch horror movies. One memorable day, a third friend invited Dawn and I over to the home of an elderly woman who lived next door to her. The lady was on vacation in Europe and our friend found an open window. We broke in, drank her booze, smoked all of our cigarettes and left. No big deal. I don't even remember now who that girl was.

Another time, we stole a gallon jug of cheap wine from someone's dad's liquor cabinet and drank it in the bushes beside a Catholic school. That was memorable because the beautiful Angel had joined us, she of the Rag City Blues and the flawless skin and the long, natural lashes framing her doe eyes. She got drunk with us and started singing "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore." I told her to shut up and we laughed.

Another banner day brought the beloved Kenny into my house, he of the plaid flannel shirts and the rippling, caramel colored hair. He brought his friend Mike and they, along with Dawn and myself and another girl - I think her name was Ginger - smoked an insane amount of pot and watched Raiders of the Lost Ark on laser disc, which a boyfriend of my mom's had left at our house.

I went cruising with a beautiful girl named Lisa, and a guy I had actually known from grammar school named Steve. We drove nowhere, did nothing, listened to tapes, drank, smoked, and went home at the end of the day as though nothing had happened. Our absences weren't really noticed or recorded - this was 1985, an age before cell phones or computers or GPS. Phone calls were sometimes made, but those were easily redirected. Letters might arrive, but I was a latchkey kid with a mail key. Sick notes were easily forged. I saw no reason to go to a school that didn't care about me. Why should I have an interest in my future when they so obviously did not?

When I did bother to show up for school, I was unresponsive, unproductive, invisible. I did not do my homework. I did not answer questions. I hid in the bathroom during gym, or claimed menstrual cramps. I sat at the back of the class and made myself as small and as unnoticeable as possible.

But I was found anyway. Not by teachers, but by rumors, and bullies, and my own stupidity.

The Decline - Part 2

Fifteen years old. Still a virgin. Heavy makeup melting in the hot August sun. Sitting on the tarry blacktop in the shadow of a car, smoking a joint all by myself. I don't know where Dawn or Kevin or my other friends have gone. I was beyond stoned. The screams and shouts and laughter of a thousand metalheads washed over me, merging into one voice, the voice of a metal god holding a bottle of Jack in one hand and a burning joint in the other. "You belong here" that voice said. "You're having the best day of your life."

I had taken a small, blue compact mirror out of my scuffed purse to check my makeup. But when you're drunk/stoned, you're convinced you look pretty hot, all things considered. Eye makeup smeared, eyes themselves red and glassy, lipstick long gone - traded for Zig Zags, for kisses, for bottle necks. A sudden flash of blinding white light interrupted my contemplation and I looked up.

Three stoner guys were sitting inside of an ancient pickup truck. Apparently, my compact had picked up the sunlight and thrown it back into their eyes, so they retaliated with a busted rearview. It became a game between myself and these three strangers: catch the sun, throw it back, like children with a ball. We were all laughing. I never knew their names.

An immense amount of time passed. It had probably been a minute, stretched into eons by the pungent weed I was sucking into my soul. I looked around and realized I was alone. The mirror fell from my hand and took an hour to make its cheap plastic clatter against the blacktop. I leaned over to retrieve it and stood up quickly. Where were my friends? My blonde boyfriend, my best friend Dawn, her blonde boyfriend? I was alone. I had stood up too fast. I had made the unwise decision to drink half a dozen swallows of Yukon Jack on top of his cousin JD and both were suddenly threatening to eject themselves from my hot, sloshy stomach. There was no food in there to soak it up and calm it down. I wobbled around to the front of the car whose shade I had sought and vomited between the bumpers of it and another slant-hood muscle rod, dry chrome sparkling mercilessly, like robot bones. A pure, fluid jet of yellow gunk shot out of my mouth and splattered all over the blacktop. The sour stink of it made me do it again. I spit and coughed and dry heaved for a few seconds, then nonchalantly wiped my mouth and casually stood up, certain I had gotten away with it, that no one had seen. Yeah man, I was still totally cool, I could handle this badass metal scene.

I saw Kevin and Dawn and Co. running towards me, their faces white, their mouths identical ghostly Oh's of concern. "Are you okay?" they all asked me. "Are you okay?" It became a mantra. It made me okay. My stomach calmed. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. I was given water and more weed. Kevin put his arm around me and stayed with me, not daring to wander off again. No more booze for me, thank you.

I don't remember standing in line, or filing into the stadium where I'd been before, taken to baseball games by my dad a mere ten years previous. I don't remember finding our seats, which were not bad, facing the stage and giving us a clear view of the bands.

Victory took the stage first. I remember none of it. Rising Force was next, featuring Yngwie Malmsteen, who had not yet become a big name and who as of yet did not feel the need to include his middle initial of J. in his name, so as to separate him from all of the other Yngwie Malmsteen's, apparently. I remember singing along with "I Am A Viking" and that was it.

Then Metallica took the stage, the reason for our journey, the peak of the metal Mount Everest we had staggered up or some such poetic shit. There was Cliff Burton, head to toe in denim, smiling and somehow hippie-like. He would not have seemed out of lace standing beside a van with a teardrop window, blaring Foghat from its speakers. But when he began to pick out the first few notes of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" we knew the world had never been more metal than it was right at that moment. The stadium went insane. Fists punched the air. Voices screamed in unison "TIME MARCHES ON!" It was titanium heaven. It was that line from A Clockwork Orange: Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!

We sang along with every single song in their set. We knew all the words. We felt they were there for us and us alone. We were friends, not fans. We were home and they were home in the NorCal Bay Area. This was our time, our music - they were Gods and we were their chose acolytes.

And then their set ended and the joints began to go around again, because nobody cared about Y&T or Rats. Especially Ratt. Fucking poseur glam metal sissies. The guys didn't like Ratt, so neither could I...even though I knew all the words to Round and Round. No WAY was I going to admit that. I wasn't going to be labeled a poster. It was the ultimate cone of shame. So I became a lying hypocrite instead.

We stuck around for half of The Scorpions set. All of us approved of The Scorpions and would have stayed to see the show finish, but the last train back to Hayward was due soon and we had to go. We took the skywalk over the stadium, watching The Scorpions as we walked. I still remember looking down, seeing Rudy Schenker standing spread legged and beating the shit out of his instrument with a smile on his face. The stadium slid away as we walked and another couple of steps brought us a birds eye view of a parking lot filled with tour buses. People were milling about, beer cans in hand. One guy in particular stood out. Dressed all in black, with long, tightly curled black hair brushing the shoulders of a black leather jacket. Fuck me, it was Kirk Hammett!!!! I hooked my fingers through the diamond shaped links of the chain fence that enclosed us and gaped.

It was a backstage party. Or rather a parking lot party. There were no scantily clad metal strippers, no group orgies, no flamethrowers or piles of cocaine laying about. Just people, wandering about, talking, moving on. Kirk Hammett walked away. It did not occur to me to call out. I was no one. I wasn't even pretty. They wouldn't see me.

But one of them did. A tall guy dressed all in denim, his long brown bushy hair framing a narrow, pale face that turned up to the overpass upon which I stood, surrounded by thousands of teenage metalheads heading home to sleep it off. He locked eyes with me for one second, two perhaps. It was Cliff Burton and he was just standing there, staring at me. At ME. He saw ME. And then he turned away and was gone.

It was two seconds, but I knew it had happened for a reason. It would be my very first brush with fame, recognition from a star, an idol. I had been granted something that few people ever get - a moment. And when another year passed by and news came to us from Europe that Cliff Burton had died in a bus crash, I knew how lucky I was. He'd seen me. He knew me. We'd had two seconds, two seconds that nobody else could have.

Saturday, August 31st, 1985. Concert day. My FIRST concert. I was fifteen and dumber than a box of sticks. But I had a boyfriend named Kevin, a best friend named Dawn and tickets to see Metallica. I was dumb, but invincible.

We'd arranged to meet our boyfriends at the BART station in Hayward around 9am, and from there we'd take the train into Oakland. Except Dawn and I somehow managed to miss the bus from our tiny town that morning and there wouldn't be another one until noon. Already the Fates were conspiring against me. I would not be stopped from seeing my favorite band! I'd gotten up especially early to don my tightest pair of jeans and a blue leopard print shirt. I'd feathered my hair into a gravity defying helmet and applied enough makeup to last for a week. I wore glittery gold earrings that brushed my shoulders and a white leatherette purse with fringe and a bandana tied to the strap. I was M-E-T-A-L. Fuck the bus, I was not going to wait around for three hours in my shitty little cowpoke town while thousands of metalhead were thrashing in the stadium parking lot without me. I stepped out into the street and stuck my thumb out.

I think Dawn was shocked. She put up a limp argument about the dangers of hitchhiking. I didn't give a shit. I had tickets to my first concert and a boyfriend waiting for me. I was going to get there if I had to shove a bottle rocket up my ass and hope for a clear trajectory.

A car pulled over. A station wagon, driven by an oldish guy who looked like he'd peaked in 1973 and stayed there. He asked where we were going. I told him. He told us to get in. We did. He warned us about the dangers of hitchhiking. I put on my most innocent face (which was no easy feat with the pounds of whore makeup caked onto it) and told him "Gosh sir, we wouldn't DREAM of it normally! But we missed our bus and blahblahblah!" He asked for our names. We gave him fake ones. I believe I offered up the improbable moniker of Misty, or Stacy, or something just as stupid. A short time later, he pulled up to the curb of the Hayward BART station and I saw our boyfriends, sitting on the ground, faces turned skywards with identical expressions of impatience and frustration. I made sure to thank Mr. 73 profusely before tumbling out of the car. I was a running glitter bomb; this was going to be the best day ever. Boyfriends met, friends collected, we boarded the next train to Oakland, a city that even then was not a place that any naive teenager should wander about alone. But we were a group of seven, fearless and tough in our metal gear, reeking of cool.

Yeah. Right. Seven scabby, zit-encrusted geeks with godawful hair and no social filter, being obnoxious and abrasive all over the place. I cringe at the memory. I see fourteen year old kids nowadays and I want to slap the skin off of their faces. Please god, don't be like me! Don't make that mistake!

Have you ever seen the documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years" ? The opening scene was exactly what we walked into that morning: a cacophony of partying, drunken, lost teenagers from all over the Bay Area, dressed in rock shirts, in black jeans, in spandex and bleach, in huge heavy boots and spiked heels, denim jackets and lace gloves, chains and spikes, all manner of animal print. The smell of pot was almost thick enough to combat the usual stench of diesel fumes coming in off of the nearby highway. Just underneath that warm smell of Colitas (rising up through the air) was the sour stench of booze-puke. The party was in full swing. No one was sober. No one wanted to be. This was Apocalypse. We were living in a world that didn't want us, a world that was burning out like a last, lonely hunk of charcoal on the grill. This was a wake for the funeral of life. That's what we wanted to believe. That's how we justified our recklessness. Within five minutes of joining the party, Kevin had scored four fat joints and a bottle of Jack and we set about destroying ourselves.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Little Sister

PRESENT: After months and years of searching, I finally found my little sister. We spoke for the first time last night, via Facebook. She had no idea I even existed. We're FB friends now, and slowly getting to know one another. Both of us cautious. She told me I have two brothers, about whom I knew nothing. One, by name of Sean, died several years ago. He was her full brother. The other, named Aaron, is her younger half brother by my father's THIRD marriage. Seems he had quite the history of marrying, siring and leaving. She and I are searching for Aaron now, and wondering just how the hell many more siblings we might have out there.

I have to back up a bit. One does not simply walk into Day on the Green without building up some metal cred beforehand. I'd spent the first six months of 1985 trying to transform myself into a "stoner girl." I didn't dare attempt to emulate Mary Ann or Angel: I didn't have the clothes, the cosmetics, the hair or the confidence to pull it off. So I slung myself into that subgroup of stoner girls that didn't have a name, but all looked the same: poor. Plain. Often pudgy, always dumpy, dressed in hand-me-downs from brothers and ex boyfriends. I didn't have either, so I had to pull it off with plain T-shirts, jeans and a cigarette. Anyway, Mary Ann got my foot in the door. Dawn opened it a little wider, especially when she began to date an actual metalhead guy. His name? Guy. I shit you not. Guy knew all the stoner boys. He had all the tapes, wore all the shirts, smoked all the pot and wasn't stingy with it. Dawn was determined that we both lose our drug cherry and get stoned with the boys ASAP. Then we'd be official and cool and accepted and all that crap that somehow seems so All-Important when you're a geek. And that's how I ended up in an abandoned dugout, on a deserted Little League field in the middle of the night, just one month before my fifteenth birthday, watching as the Ever Popular Dutchie was passed along the left hand side and gradually making its way to me. But alas, much like Bill Clinton, I didn't inhale. Not because I didn't want to but because I didn't know how. I thought smoking a joint was the same as smoking a Marlboro, and didn't understand when several of the boys Guy had brought along started quietly laughing when I took a drag and let it out immediately. I sensed my carefully constructed attempt to be cool unravelling quickly. Fortunately, one of the more compassionate metal headed pot smokers took pity on me at that point and came over to assist. I wanted to think it was because he liked me and that this kind gesture would lead to a metallic romance the likes of which would outshine Romeo and Juliet. But it was far more likely that he didn't want a noob wasting his expensive doob. That boy's name was Kenny. 32 years later I still remember his name and his street address. I admit I've forgotten his phone number, and even the details of his facial features. I know only he had long hair, hanging in caramel colored ripples halfway down his back. He wore long sleeved plaid flannel shirts even in the summer, with a rock shirt underneath. Faded jeans, beat up sneakers. He carried a skateboard with him wherever he went. He had very large eyes, almost the same caramel color as his hair. He used his hair as a shield, hiding his shyness around girls behind it, preventing anyone from getting a clear look at his face simply by looking down at his shoes and allowing the heavy drapery to close around his high cheekbones and full lips. Yeah, I was in love with Kenny. The small, scabby fourteen year old inside of me still is. Hey man, the guy taught me how to smoke a joint properly. You never forget your first.

Meeting Mary Ann definitely opened doors for me, but she wasn't my best friend. She was too cool, too pretty, too tall and confident to be MY best friend. No, she was a swan, swimming with the other swans with names like Lena and Angel, who wore Rag City Blues jeans and feathered their hair, framing their perfect, acne-free faces with soft wings. I resented the beauty that came so naturally to these girls - especially Angel, with her stunning black eyes as big as tea saucers and naturally glossy lashes that never needed mascara. Why was it so easy for them? Why, whenever I tried to emulate them, did the Fates seem to conspire against me, and punish me for daring to attempt to improve myself and my situation? Plagues of zits, floods of menstrual fluids, burning curling irons raining down and sizzling my hair into a dried up pile of straw?

So I found a girl as dumpy as myself, who had also recently begun to float around the edge of the smoker's circle. Her name was Dawn. Her face was a blocky butter sculpture of bland - blunt lump of a nose, waxen pallor, huge brown eyes, plain blonde hair that hung shapeless and limp to her shoulders. She dressed like a boy; denim jacket, faded jeans, old rock shirts with holes in them, ratty sneakers. She was short, like me. Invisible, like me. Naturally we became best friends.

Dawn had an older brother, from whom she inherited his rock shirts once he got tired of them. It was through him that she became a fan of far more extreme metal than I was used to: Venom, Slayer, Bathory, etc. We took the bus to the mall every weekend - there was precious little else to do. We spent hours at the record store, flipping through the vinyl library and scrutinizing the violent and intimidating art of heavy metal. We rarely bought anything because we were both only 14 and did not have income. We had pocket change for bus fare and that was about it. So we looked, and wandered around, and stayed far away from the trendy clothing shops where the Popular girls hung out, spending their parents money on tight jeans with zippers up the sides, lace gloves, leg warmers and hot pink enamel earrings. Every once in a while we'd have actual money - given to us as birthday presents or babysitting income - and we'd actually buy records. I purchased Mercyful Fate's "Melissa." Dawn bought a copy of Venom's "Possessed." We flipped through Kerrang and Hit Parader. I personally began a handwritten list, alphabetically listing every metal band I'd ever heard of. This was a stupid idea, because as soon as a new metal band formed, I had to rip up the old list and start all over.

One fateful day, as we fucked about the mall doing absolute shit-all, Dawn and I met three boys at the food court. Their leader was Kevin, a tall, skinny boy with fried blond hair and more zits on his face than the night sky had stars. But he was nice, and he thought I was pretty, and beggars can't be choosers, so I decided I'd let him be my boyfriend. Nobody else was asking me. Dawn hooked up with the other blond boy and the other boy was completely discarded. I don't even remember his name or what he looked like.

Kevin and I dated all summer. It was 1985. He was the lead guitarist for his own band, with Dawn's boyfriend on drums and Mr. Discarded on bass. They asked me to be lead singer. I couldn't sing worth a single fuck, but I was fourteen and desperate to be popular, liked, respected and envied. I wrote crappy song lyrics inspired by the films of Cronenberg. Don't ask me what the hell any of them were, I don't fucking remember. I think our band rehearsed a total of two times before we lost interest.

But our love for metal culminated at last that August, when we all of us scored tickets to see Day on the Green 1985.

You know, my doctor once explained it to me this way: "You have a type of cancer. It can be treated with medication, but you will have it for the rest of your life, and it will go in and out of remission. And if it spreads, it can be fatal." He was referring to my chronic, lifelong depression disorder.

You don't get over depression. It's not curable. It's a disease that eats away at you over time. It hurts. It IS physical as well as mental. When cancer patients die, we don't fault them for not being strong enough to fight it off. So don't assume that someone who commits suicide had a choice. Just as cancer eats away at your body, depression eats away at your soul. It alters your thoughts, it drains your energy and it tricks you into thinking that you will never feel better. It is a sinister parasite that invades your body and takes control. But because it does not manifest physically, we tend to dismiss it as weakness.

Believe me, it's not weak to fight against the black hopelessness every single day, force yourself to go to work, talk to people, act like you're happy, remain responsible and functional. It's a Herculean effort. It's exhausting. Feigning normality is painful, but it's better than admitting that you're depressed. Nobody wants to hear that because nobody knows how to deal with it, least of all the afflicted.

Depression is a serial killer. Its victims weren't asking for it. Chris Cornell was murdered. Don't fault him for succumbing.

Art class: my one safe space. We didn't have individual desks, we had tables at which sat four or five students, so all of the predetermined subgroups flocked together - the stoners at one table, the cheerleaders at another, and the losers in the back. I don't remember who the other outcasts at my table were, I only remember the day we were joined by a new girl.

She should have been sitting with the stoners. She was already seated at our table when I walked into class one day, holding a compact mirror in one hand and an eyeliner pencil in the other. She had delicate, almost Asian features and no sign of acne on her porcelain face. Her hair was dark, and stiffly sprayed into feathers on either side of her head. She wore a tight zebra print blouse and a pair of Rag City Blues that couldn't have been any tighter if she'd painted them on. I was horrified to find this swan at the ugly ducks table. I couldn't sit elsewhere, it was midterm and our seats had been established. So - with my face full of zits and my secondhand clothes and my complete and utter lack of self esteem, I sat down at the table across from her and turned my back on her.

I was fucking terrified. I was sure she'd demand that I leave the table at once, or haughtily inquire why the hell someone as uncool as me was polluting her aura. But she said nothing. Just went on fixing her immaculate eye makeup.

I don't know if it was the same day or the very next week, but she started talking to me. Her name was Mary Ann, her surname was French. She never did change seats, or abandon us for the stoner girls table - where sat the likes of Angel, Crystal, Stephanie and Lori with their Def Leppard Tshirts and their scorn. Mary Ann stayed at my table, and talked to me like I was a normal person. Eventually, she was calling me after school, hugging me in the hallways and making tapes for me. It was through Mary Ann that I finally received Metallica's "Kill 'Em All" and "Ride The Lightening." She was a huge fan, had been to the nearby SF Bay Area to see them perform and claimed she'd flirted with the guitarist. And though Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and Duran Duran were currently ruling the charts and the closest I'd ever come to listening to metal was riding in my uncle's car while he played Molly Hatchet, I became a metal fan. Well, a Metallica fan, anyway.

It was 1983 in Northern California - the birthplace of Bay Area thrash metal. Metallica literally lived down the street from us. I walked past Cliff Burton's apartment every damn day. It wasn't at all uncommon to run across members of Exodus, Testament, Death Angel and Possessed just hanging around. A classmate of mine - with whom I had once gotten stoned beneath the bleachers late one night - was a cofounder of the band Vio-lence. He graduated the year I became a sophomore and disappeared into the land of metal musicians. I have no idea where he is now, or if he's still in a band, or what.

Anyway, my unlikely friendship with Mary Ann led to my hanging around the smoking section on my lunch hour, which was a Stoners Only Area. I literally stood on the fringes, waiting for Mary Ann to realize that I was not cool enough to be there and dump me for a cooler circle of friends. But she didn't. She made me more tapes: Venom, Celtic Frost and, her favorite, Mercyful Fate. She claimed she'd once been to a party at King Diamond's house and that he'd sent the entire night talking to his reflection in the bathroom mirror and being creepy. She taught me how to fix my hair and do my makeup and never made fun of me, or tried to humiliate me the way the girls in Jr. High had done.

I wonder what happened to her fairly often. I haven't seen her since 1988. Searches of her name on Google and Facebook have led nowhere. A lot of people told me she had lied about her entire life, had never met any member of Metallica let alone flirt with them. I came to suspect she was lonely and had a lot of family problems. I don't really give a shit if she lied about everything - she never lied about being nice to me. She always was, no matter what. I hope she's okay.

So did I forget to tell you about the time my dad was arrested for rape? Oh yeah. It happened when I was a very little girl, too young to know about such things. I found out maybe thirty years later. Turns out, I still wasn't ready to handle the truth.

My dad did a lot of rotten things. He cheated on my mom with so many women. He fucked them in the same bed he slept next to my mom in and left the evidence for her to find: lipstick smeared cigarette butts, bobby pins, etc. He hit on my babysitters. He said he "forgot" to send my mom his military paycheck one month, with which to feed and clothe both her and his newborn daughter (me) but a fellow soldier sent my mom a letter informing her that my dad had used the money to buy a flashy sports car and often bragged about picking up hot chicks with it. I'm not sure how he managed not to get his ass dishonorably discharged. He bought a green FIAT in the late seventies, wore polyester slacks with football jerseys, farted a lot. I'm not even sure what girls saw in him. I suppose he was good looking for the times: over six feet tall, curly black hair, porny mustache. I don't even really remember what he looked like exactly, his face has been blurred by time and hate, but what I do remember is of a singularly nondescript seventies guy. I know I have his blue eyes, but that's about it. I have my mother's small stature, my grandfather's red hair, my sister's voice. I inherited nothing else from him, certainly not his immorality, his selfishness or his childishness.

But, the rape charge:

It was the 70s. People hitchhiked. There are entire issues of Playboy devoted to hitchhiking scenarios, I'm sure. Anyway, my dad picked up some hot young thang who was hitching on the highway. They had sex, as people were wont to do in the 70s, and then the girl cried rape and had my dad arrested. It came out before too long that she'd made the whole story up because she wanted her parents to buy her a car. The charges were dropped and my dad was allowed to go home. But that does not excuse the fact that my father fucked a teenage girl. While he was married. With a young daughter at home. I don't care if that hitchhiker was the biggest, most disease ridden lying slut in the world - my father was an adult, and he fucking knew better. My father was a rapist. A scumbag, pigfuck rapist.

Rape is utterly despicable to me, every bit as serious as murder. I only wish it were punished as severely. Any man who rapes should die. Period. No exceptions, no room for discussion. You can't "accidentally rape" someone. And you can't undo the damage it does.

I had every intention of doing this chronologically, but it's damn near impossible. The more I write, the more I'm remembering and of course it's out of sequence. I'll be jumping around for a while until I get into my teens and twenties, because childhood memories are watery Jello before the mold. Hope you like yours with fruit suspended in it.

Birthday Party, 1978

Yes, one of these girls is me. I’m not going to tell you which one. It doesn’t matter anyway.

I was never comfortable being social. Whenever I was called upon to feign enthusiasm, I cringed. I hated being the center of anyone's attention and loathed being stared at. When I was - 6 or 7? - I remember sitting on the floor of the classroom in a semi-circle with five or six other classmates. The teacher was trying to get us to complete sentences. She would begin a sentence, and the child had to finish it with the correct words. If they failed to do so, they were asked to leave the circle. When my turn came, she told me: "Now, if you cannot finish this sentence, then you will have proven that you cannot take part in conversations" or something like that. I don't remember her exact words, but in a nutshell, it was apparently some sort of social experiment.

She began her sentence: "Her hair was as smooth as...." and looked at me expectantly. And I froze. And drew a total blank. What did she want? Was there only one correct answer? Could I say anything? I thought of smooth things: rocks, kittens, the slide on the playground. Would any of those do? I didn't know what to say or how to react. Finally, she said: "You cannot complete the sentence, and you have to leave the circle." So I did, guiltily, sensing I had committed some enormous error and would forever after be branded awkward and unworthy. As I slunk away, I saw the hands of the other children shoot up into the air, and several of them yelled "SILK!" The teacher congratulated them on their correct answer, and I remember wondering: "What the hell is silk?"

I don't know who the hell came up with that sadistic lesson plan, but I hope they - AND that smug, coldhearted teacher who ejected me from the circle - suffered a lifetime of painful hemorrhoidal discomfort. Fucking stupid lesson - what the hell was I supposed to learn from that? That there is only one acceptable answer to every question? That we all have to use the same words and experimenting with metaphors is forbidden? Fuck you, language Nazi's.

When I was 9, going grocery shopping with mom was the ultimate snorefest. However, I was small enough that I could sit comfortably on the undercarriage of the cart and enjoyed being pushed around the glossy aisles, eye level with the bottom shelves. But then I was spotted in my hiding place by a number of plasticine hausfraus who began pointing at me and commenting on my cuteness in that tone of voice reserved for baby showers and tea parties: phony and sugary as fuck. I smiled at them politely but quickly looked down at my hands and, at the first opportunity, I crawled out from my hiding place and walked beside my mother, hoping I wouldn't attract anymore attention.

I didn't want to be talked down to as if I were an idiot, or an object. I didn't understand why my age and stature demanded a tone of voice from adults that was condescending and syrupy. I never felt like a child, whatever that means. I always had adult thoughts and articulated carefully, in full sentences. I'm not saying I was super intelligent, I just never saw the reason to act like I was something I wasn't. I didn't want to pretend I was a cutesy, or feign naiveté. I had a name, I was a person. My age shouldn't have determined how adults spoke to me, and I resented baby talk and compliments. I wouldn't learn the word "scorn" for some time yet, but I would recognize it when it came along.

This story should end with me becoming a rock star or something. But it doesn't.

Alright. (sigh) Nineteen eighty two. Christ, what a shit year. Shit music, shit clothing trends, shit president, shit cold war. I really didn't understand how wearing certain clothes would make me a better (i.e. cooler) person. I didn't give a shit. I mean, I had my ears pierced and liked lip gloss, but brand names and designer labels were a mystery to me. I just wanted to watch horror movies.

I was in luck. 1982 saw the release of John Carpenter's The Thing, and when it came on the cable channels, I watched it every single time it was on. That and Beastmaster and Flash Gordon. My mom took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark every weekend, because it was our favorite movie. We never got tired of it. I didn't like Excalibur, but I LOVED Dragonslayer and watched it repeatedly.

I also watched some movies I probably shouldn't have watched. The Elephant Man was always on, and I watched it every time. I fell in love with both John Merrick AND John Hurt. The movie was painful: it was a punishment to watch it. I cringed with pity and cried when he ran through the train station in a panic, pursued by those shitty little children with their cruel laughter and their nasty, snatching hands. I was heartbroken when he chose to die at the end of the movie, but I understood it too. I was already suicidal, at the age of 12. I just didn't know the word "suicidal" yet. I thought how nice it would be to just go to sleep and never wake up again and never have to worry about another day of school and bullies and their endless shaming. I didn't really want to die, per se. I just wanted to leave. Take a break. Get away from the noise of other people's criticisms.

I liked music too, but hadn't been exposed to much beyond what was played on Casey Kasem's weekly countdown. Ultimately, thank god for MTV, at least initially. You know, when they played actual music? I discovered strange, hypnotic music like Missing Persons, Oingo Boingo and The Clash. I already loved Blondie and had since the 70s. I thought she was the coolest, most beautiful chick in the world and I wanted to be just like her. But I wasn't blond, or cool, or pretty. So shit on that dream.

I didn't care much for the groups that all the other girls liked. I didn't get all gushy over George Michael or Simon LeBon. I didn't even really like boys yet and didn't know why I should. They were still icky, scabby, snot encrusted creatures to me. I couldn't play with them anymore because I was "growing up." So I started to view them with suspicion.

But anyway, yeah. Music. I still hadn't really found my niche. I liked some of this and some of that. I didn't know what genres were, I just knew what I liked. But nothing really moved me. (Except for Pink Floyd, of course.) It wasn't easy to discover new music in the early 80s, especially when you were poor and had no friends to play records with. We didn't have internet or YouTube or iTunes back then. We had records. Vinyl records. I listened to what my mom listened to, and my sister, but nothing had yet leaped up and made me an ardent fan and claimed me as its own.

Until 1983 came along.

The auditory hallucinations started around the same time my period did. The voices were deafening, a sea of babble from which no one discernible word could be plucked. Male voices, female voices, calm, conversational, but always rising in volume, as if a party were taking place in the next room and growing ever larger. It happened most often when I went to bed at night. Head on the pillow, swallowed in darkness, and that fucking head radio would turn on. It would start out low, and slowly swell, until it was a cacophony. I would open my eyes wide and silence would slam against my eardrums so hard it would wake me up fully like a shot of adrenaline.

As I got older, the voices would come during waking hours. There was never just one voice, it was always a head party - dozens, hundreds, talking talking on and on. Sometimes I would press my fingers into my ears so forcefully that I caused myself pain, but that didn't help. The voices were coming from inside of my head and couldn't be silenced.

Then a strange thing happened. I began hearing music. The songs were not real, had never been written, recorded or played, but I would hear them in full: guitar, percussion, vocals, all complete. The song would play over and over, looping in my head for hours until I was half mad, shoving my fists against my ears and begging it to stop. It never did. It hasn't still. In time of great stress and/or despair, the music starts and plays relentlessly, like a tiny little cockroach jamboree deep inside of my ears. I took pills for it for a while - the lovely Sarah Quell, of the Quiet Pines - but she packed the pounds onto my frame and drove my blood pressure up so high it could be seen in Tibet.

So I'm skinny and mad, forever tortured by invisible parties that I wasn't invited to.

I don't remember much of 7th grade. I attended a small inner city Jr High which was over a mile from my home. I walked to school every morning, usually alone. Sometimes with my friend Tanisha. She often walked home with me after school too. One day, as I waited for her at the gate that separated the school from the streets, I saw a fight break out. I couldn't see the actual fight itself, just the clog of humanity that surrounded it, cheering and yelling and egging them on. I stayed far away from it. Eventually it broke up and scattered, and I saw Tanisha running from the center of it, her face a bloody, swollen ruin. Another girl had attacked her with a knife, because her boyfriend was attracted to Tanisha.

I ran after her for two blocks before finally catching up with her. I saw people passing her by and doing double takes, but no one tried to help her. I was twelve. So was she. I finally caught up with her and she told me what had happened in a tear-choked voice, one eye already turning black and swelling shut, blood running from her nose and lip. I remember hugging her and telling her I was sorry. I never saw her in school again - her mother pulled her out and transferred her.

With Tanisha gone, my friends dwindled. There were a few girls who were willing to hang out with me at lunch, but unwilling to admit I was a real friend. I was a zitty, oily haired outcast who didn't have a boyfriend, or nice clothes, and who had bled through her jeans once and everyone saw. I was the ultimate gross out. The boys made dog barking noises at me as I walked by. The girls called me "Zitface" and "Bitch" and somehow simultaneously made everyone believe that I was both a total whore and a terminal virgin.

My grades began to slip, from straight As to Cs and Ds. My health began to go to shit as well. I was tested for everything from diabetes to mono, had a spinal tap, endless blood work and a disgusting daylong test where I was forced to drink a bottle of thick, syrupy crap that tasted like sweet snot and then had my piss tested once every hour. I was finally diagnosed with Reactive Hypoglycemia. A few weeks later, a terrible pain in my side sent us back to the hospital where it was found that I had a huge cyst on my ovary. I was prescribed birth control, which would shrink the cyst without surgery, but of course my few friends found out that I was on "The Pill" and pretty soon, I was a gang banging slut who would fuck any boy out behind the gym before school, during lunch hour and after school.

Finally, about 2 months before I was scheduled to graduate the seventh grade, I was pulled out of school and sent to bed for the summer. The Jr. High I had attended closed that year and its students shipped to another Jr High. My mom took that opportunity to move us to a new town a few miles away, a town she hoped would be safer than the crime ridden city we'd been living in for a decade. 

I started the eighth grade at a brand new school, which stood on the top of a hill in a small town in Northern California, where I knew no one. It was 1983. Things would not get better.