A Thunderclap and a Crash of Lightning
Still today, whenever I enter Virginia from 95 South in Maryland, I notice the blue sign with a red cardinal sitting in the corner on a dogwood branch: Welcome to Virginia, it says. That was the same sign my mom and I took a picture of from the highway as we drove down to Richmond for the first time after the memorial service for my grandfather in Baltimore. His ashes were scattered from a helicopter over a lake. My mom still visits that lake sometimes today. It was 1988. I was 11 years old. My mom planned to marry my first stepdad, Bob, at a service in my grandmother’s backyard in Chicago at the end of that summer. Sixth grade was going to start for me shortly after that.
Mysticism surrounded my grandfather’s death. A thunderclap and a crash of lightning signaled a storm had begun the moment the doctor told GB, my mother’s stepmother, my grandfather had passed away. A symbolic piece of cutlery broke when my mom moved GB into her new home in Florida. A shadow followed them in their train compartment all the way from Maryland. I believed in magic. I believed in spirits. My California grandmother had taught me their reality. My grandfather resided on a plane I didn’t have access to except in dreams and meditation. He watched over me. He could guide and speak to me. All I needed was to be open and listen.
We had a basketball hoop in our driveway in the house we rented outside Richmond. I spent every day out there dribbling, shooting baskets and playing made-up games. The kid across the street had a hoop as well. He was a year older than me. My mom and Bob said I should challenge him to a game. We might even become friends, they said, but I was too shy. I preferred to play alone.
I spent the evenings alone in my third-floor bedroom with my dog, Juli. The third floor only had two rooms. Each was half the size of the entire house. I covered the walls of my bedroom with heavy metal posters from Hit Parader and Circus Magazine.I never went across the hall to the other room. We set my old Commodore 64 computer up in there, but I wasn’t interested in playing the sports and fantasy video games I’d always played at our old place in Houston any longer.
Juli and I would listen to old Kiss albums from the 1970s, back when the band still wore makeup. I’d prance around with a broomstick like I was performing on MTV, and I’d develop movie plots based on the lyrics the band had written. The movies were always some variation on a teen drama. I’d been inspired by Grease and The Outsiders. They revolved around a bad boy with a heart of gold whose soul was saved by a beautiful girl. I pictured how that would be my life by the time I got to high school.
One night as I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, I noticed hair was growing on my chest. None of the rockers on my posters had hair on their chests. I was embarrassed. With a hairy chest, I’d never be the rock n roller I’d envisioned myself becoming. I made a deal with God. If I wound up with a hairy chest, I’d write books. If not, I was going to be a rock star. I was certain that’s what God wanted me to become. Rock n roll was my destiny.
Bob’s parents were supposed to join us for Christmas that year, but a snowstorm where they lived in upstate New York necessitated they stay home. They lived in the Catskill Mountains. I knew about the Catskills from My Side of the Mountain, a book I’d read in elementary school.I liked that book. Bob’s father delivered heating oil for a living. The people in his town were counting on him to keep them warm during the storm. My parents decided to borrow an RV from one of Bob’s coworkers in Richmond and drive the three of us up there to visit them instead.
I’d never seen snow like the snow I saw on that trip to upstate New York. It was piled up in high walls along the side of the road. When we’d still lived in Texas, there’d been snow one year, too. But that storm was nothing more than a dusting. My dad still lived with us, then. My grandfather and GB were down visiting us from Baltimore that year. Our pool froze. My dad spent Christmas Eve breaking up the ice on it so the pump wouldn’t get damaged.
When my dad told me that story on Christmas morning, I realized if he’d been outside all night, he must have seen Santa Claus. My dad didn’t miss a beat. He told me he came inside for a moment to get a cup of coffee. While he was in the kitchen, he heard something on the roof. He went out to the living room. When he got there, all our presents were under the tree. He rushed outside to catch a glimpse of the mythical man and his flying reindeer, but Santa Claus and Rudolph had vanished.
By the time I got to sixth grade, though, there was very little I looked forward to about Christmas any longer. One of the presents my mom bought said on the card that it was “to help grow” my extensive vocabulary.
“You didn’t buy me a dictionary, did you?” I asked. I was hoping she’d bought me a warlock’s grimoire that could give me the language I needed to conjure the spells I imagined myself performing alone in my third-floor bedroom. Although, I knew that couldn’t be the case, I imagined she might have been guided by some otherworldly presence. Maybe she didn’t even know what she’d bought. Maybe she’d been in a trance. But when I said those words, my mom was visibly hurt. Her gaze brought a lump to my throat. As I unwrapped the present, I was more disappointed in my attitude than I was in her gift.
My mom also gave me The Rolling Stones’ Singles Collection that year. That was a present I was excited about. I didn’t know The Stones very well yet, but I wanted to. They scared people. I considered them one of the godfathers of heavy metal. My dad had taught me there were two kinds of people in this world—Beatles people and Stones people. My mom was a Beatles person. The Stones were my uncle in California, Jeff’s, favorite band. My Uncle Jeff had been to jail. He rode a motorcycle and smoked pot. I only owned one tape by The Rolling Stones. It was a live collection called Love You Live. I used to listen to it on my Walkman during the drives to and from school with my mom before we left Texas. I’d never listened to the whole album. Star Star and It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll were my favorite tracks. The Singles Collection contained even earlier work. I wanted to listen to all four cassette tapes on our drive back to Richmond.
Halfway through our trip, the final song on the collection came on—Sympathy for the Devil. I’d never heard that song before, but I’d heard about it. My dad had told me there was a debate as to whether Sympathy for the Devil or Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven was the greatest rock n roll song ever recorded. Those songs formed two poles of a duality between good and evil. My dad came down on the side of Zeppelin. Uncle Jeff liked Sympathy for the Devil.
With a head full of eighties’ metal, Sympathy for the Devil didn’t sound like I’d expected it to. I’d thought it would be heavier, angrier and scarier. But the hand drums and acoustic guitar contained an eeriness mimicked by the lyrics. The woo-hoos confirmed that. As I listened, I started seeing visions. The music was a ceremony. The lyrics were the incantation.
As I listened to that mystical track for the very first time, I envisioned my grandfather. I’d often seen him in my inner mind’s eye as I drifted off to sleep ever since he’d passed away. He looked the same in all my visions. He wore a monk’s white robe, and instead of the combover of his later years, he was bald. He walked with his hands in his sleeves. We were going down a path together. He was talking, giving me sage advice.
Then, the landscape changed. What had been a verdant scene died. My grandfather grew wary. We were on our way down a rocky slope. Fiery coals greeted our descent. A decaying city rose in the distance. At the mouth of hell, I told my grandfather to follow me across the burning coals into Pandemonium’s citadel. He didn’t want to, but for my sake, he agreed. As soon as we set foot on those coals, with a scream, my grandfather vanished in a puff of smoke. I scrambled on to discover the damnable city of my dreams. My grandfather never visited me in that guise again.
~ ~ ~
When I was a little kid, I called our dog, Juli, my sister. At the very least, next to my grandfather, she was my best friend. The day I met Juli, I had just returned from visiting my grandfather and GB for the first time alone in Baltimore. It was the summer after first grade. My parents drove me to the airport where we lived in Houston, put me on a plane, and I flew the whole way by myself. My grandfather and GB met me at the gate. That was long before 9/11, when you didn’t need a ticket to get past security. Anybody could go anywhere in an airport.
My mom gave me a journal to record that trip. I didn’t write much, but GB did. She helped me record thoughts and events in there. It wasn’t until a few years later, after my parents divorced, I started using that notebook to keep track of the lyrics I wrote every night to help me go to sleep.
Juli was a present from my dad to our family. We’d had another dog since before I was born, but she’d passed away earlier that same year. She’d had kidney disease. She couldn’t stop urinating everywhere. The first vet my dad took her to told my dad that the dog simply wasn’t trained very well. My dad redoubled his efforts. After the second vet told him she was sick, my dad never forgave that first vet. Not until the day he died. He felt so guilty about how he’d treated that dog at the end of her life, trying to train her not to go to the bathroom inside when she couldn’t help herself. Both Juli and our first dog were springer spaniels.
I met Juli as soon as I walked in the door from that first visit to my grandfather. I didn’t know we were getting a dog. Nobody had told me. It was a surprise. I dropped down on my knees immediately. She was only a puppy. Juli and I rolled around on the floor and wrestled and played and got to know each other. When my parents asked what I wanted to name her, I told them Juli, in honor of the character, Princess Anjuli, from a miniseries about the British occupation of India I’d recorded from HBO.
From the moment she moved into our home, Juli and I spent all our time together. We played throughout the day, and she slept in my bed at night. Juli was big for her breed. Her father had been a champion show dog, and the breeder my dad had bought her from kept calling us to say he wanted Juli back. It was a shame for a dog as beautiful as Juli to be a household pet, he said. But Juli and I were such good friends, my dad would never let her go.
Juli and I wrestled and cuddled. I used her as my pillow and chased her around our living room coffee table. I raced her at the end of our walks and bounded through my parents’ flowerbeds with her. Then, my parents divorced. My mom remarried, and we moved from Houston, Texas to Richmond, Virginia. Along with my own, Juli’s personality changed.
By seventh grade, I’d started calling myself a Satanist. I inverted my value system. Everything I’d been taught was good, I had to believe was bad. Everything that seemed bad, had to be good. I developed a skewed worldview from that reckoning.
I didn’t act on many of my thoughts, but I believed in them. I shared them with others. I drew up a contract with the devil and marked it with my own blood. I encouraged friends to act in concert with my visions, and I conducted rituals in my bedroom to unleash that prism upon the world. I’ve never forgiven myself for the things I said during that phase of my life. Even though I was only in seventh grade. Ideas have power. Words have meaning. Once something is brought into this world, it never disappears.
My dog could tell what I’d become. She must have been able to smell the evil boiling beneath my skin. She turned and started attacking me. I’d enter a room, and she’d snarl. She’d get up from where she was lying, and she’d run at me. I’d slam the door in her face, and she’d froth and snap at the air. The vet said she had a pituitary tumor. But that didn’t make a difference. She couldn’t sleep at the foot of my bed anymore. She couldn’t be left alone in a room with me anymore. Juli didn’t like Bob either. He had to fight her off one night in bed. He held her by the jaws as she went for his throat. Eventually, my mother was able to get her out of the room. Juli had been my dog, but by then, she would always huddle around my mom as if she were protecting my mother from the scent of violent masculinity wafting off Bob and me. My mom was the only one of us in that house who Juli never attacked.
We had to put Juli to sleep that year. She was too dangerous and unpredictable to keep around any longer. We had no idea who she might attack next. It might have been one of us. It might have been some neighborhood kid who tried petting her. We were afraid she’d get ahold of somebody soon, and we didn’t know whether she would let go without drawing blood. We took her to the vet one afternoon. Bob went into the room with her and the doctor. I wasn’t thrilled Bob was the last of us to say goodbye to her. My real dad had picked her out. Juli had been my sister, my best friend. I should have been there with her, but I was too young.
By Michael Anthony Adams, Jr.
From his memoir, Disorder: An Avant-Garde Memoir of Psychosis, Healing & Love.
