From the Peace Sells Album
I keep thinking about a moment that happenen almost 20 years ago. A very poignant moment for me. Actually it’s not quite a single moment, it’s a series of events. It started with my sitting on a bus listening to music on a walkman and ended with an attempted suicided.
Let me start at the beginning.
I was listening to music on the bus when one of the “cool” kids came up and asked me if I had any extra batteries. I did, so he invited me to sit at the back of the bus with him and his friends. After talking about what I was listening to (I think Whitesnake, White Zombie, Guns’N'Roses at the time) he offered to let me borrow a couple of tapes. I went with him after school that day since I only lived down the street, he played me music that I’d never dreamed of. Things like Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer. Music that I had no idea existed. I asked him where he learned of this music and he told me that it was his brother’s friend who told him. His brother was 4 or 5 years older then he was (and that would have made him 5-6 years older then me). He was the coolest person I had ever seen. He looked just like the guys on the backs of the albums that he was showing me. And he had a car. An old Mercury Cougar, a big black car that spewed black smoke.
Fast forward about 6 months and Jon (the cool kid) and me are friends, at least as close to friends as I could be with a kid 2 grades above me and going to a different school. The new Megadeth album was out and I had it. I wanted to share it with Jon but he wasn’t on the bus. Things were quiet at his place and the kids who got on the bus at the same stop as him had no idea what was happening. A few days later we found out that Jon’s brother had attemped suicide. I never really got the reason why, all I found out was that his friend the one who’d introduced Jon to metal had killed himself earlier in the week. It was a huge moment in all of our lives, we’d never experienced anything like that, Jon got a lot more quiet after that and we eventually drifted apart. I haven’t seen Jon in almost 20 years and I don’t think I’d even recognize him all these years later.
Still, some of the best memories I have are being invited to sit with the cool kids and sitting in that dark basement all those years ago and hearing “What do you mean I don’t believe in God? Talk to him every day” and that killer riff in the middle of Fade to Black and seeing that big black car pulling into the driveway and the guy who looked like the guys in the bands driving it.