...There were these two Beavis & Butthead metal buds I rode around with sometimes to get beer or hangout when I was seventeenish. They both reeked of pot and nicotine. One was yer total "River's Edge" cliche' - black eyes from an abusive alcoholic father, military surplus clothes, Stormtroopers Of Death t-shirt and these really stupid looking spiked leather wristbands that took up his entire forearm. Proto trenchcoat mafia/time bomb high school type characters. I watched this loon's hair go through all the predictable changes when I knew him - from feathered to rat tail bleached badly, to perm to mullet, to jock hawk to tri-hawk, to skinhead and back to longish, parted in the middle. He had like thirty stupid bumper stickers on his little Honda or whatever and liked to get negative attention by bragging to all the black satin concert-jacketed stoner chicks about how he just loved to kill cats. Cat killing was a real big pastime where I came from. Sicker still, the cat torturing. Horrific shit, all the time. There were like dozens of these fuckwitted, angry cat killer teenage boys. They all loved Iron Maiden, Anthrax, and Wasp, and argued incessantly about which of Ozzy's lead guitarists totally ruled. They used to carry around "The Book Of Runes" and anything that seemed kinda occult related and just loved anything with some mild shock value. They loved their dirtweed, and one guy kept his pills and roaches and stuff all neatly organized in his fishing tackle-box. There weren't really drugs around back then-some bad acid, speed, whippets, but mostly they did beer, Schnapps, and hadda make a big deal outta their feathered roach clips and High Times magazines. The main goon liked to bully his smaller sidekick, who was this scrawny, sensitive, actually intelligent kid who took his abuse I think mostly, cos the catkiller protected him from all the other hillbilly trailer park bruisers. So he was sort of the punk-bitch of the heavy metal parking lot-but he was a fairly decent artist and he used to get commissioned to paint album covers and Led Zep hieroglyphics on the back of people's denim jackets, like Dio's "Holy Diver" and shit, alot more often than any of the other obsessive pentagram drawers we knew. And on skateboards and some fat girl's bedroom wall for a case of beer-I think he did Vince in his pouty "Shout At The Devil" regalia. I remember that all his rockstar's faces were kind of fat though, which was weird cos the artist was so shrimpy. He wore the customary Vans or Converse, Levis, and black concert t-shirt uniform of the day and would always try to justify his catkilling bodyguard's bad behaviors like an abused spouse. I also still somehow recall the hours he'd spend pondering the lyrics of Blackie Lawless or Kane Robert's era Alice Cooper like they held secret spiritual significance. I could tolerate these guys back then cos they were both pretty tame compared to alot of the real sociopathic arsonists and rapists we grew up with.
___________________________________________________________________________________ 
 

____________________________________________________________________________________