Almost Home (11 page)

As I sat in the county jail waiting to go to trial I saw that youth minister on the television screen. He was practically rabid as he ranted about “pacts with the devil.” He seemed psychotic. Simply the fact that I wore such a shirt to a church function was enough to convince a great many people that I had to be guilty.

My influence on Brian’s life crept in gradually. His manner of dressing changed, his hair grew long and shaggy, and he no longer listened to Christian rock bands. He soon fell into the “freak” category. He wore silverware for jewelry and chain-smoked clove cigarettes. He was no longer above sneaking into his mom’s cabinet for a drink or two every now and then. He took up skating, and became better than I had ever been.

He was better because he was fearless. It was as if the possibility that he could fall and hurt himself never even crossed his mind. Some part of me was always scared that I was going to fail when trying something new, so there was a slight hesitation or a sense of holding back. Brian never had that—he hadn’t yet learned that pain waits for you around every corner—and it was apparent just by watching him.

Soon I was staying at his place on weekends, or he at mine. On spring days, we went to the convenience store down the street from his house to get chocolate milk, Popsicles, and cigarettes. Then we sat on the curb and watched people going in and out. It doesn’t sound very fun, but it was relaxing to me. I called it

“people watching.”

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For some reason—I can no longer remember why—I began keeping an odd

sort of journal during this time period. It was a plain black notebook with no special characteristics, but in the years since it has become one of the most embarrassing and humiliating monuments to my existence. Everyone else is free to forget their period of teenage angst. I am not. That damnable notebook is always there to remind me. To be honest, I’m always amazed that I still get letters from people telling my how much they’ve enjoyed reading the parts that are known to the public, and asking for more. There is no accounting for taste. I’m appalled that I ever wrote such trash. One day while watching my favorite sit-com a character on the show remarks, “Ever since they decided poems don’t have to rhyme, everyone thinks they’re poets.” How true. He may as well have been pointing at me.

Over time the notebook grew tattered and filled with all sorts of

things—quotes, bits of information, lines from my favorite stories, and “poems”

that I myself had written. I can only bring myself to call them that with tongue in cheek. When I hear or read someone quote from them now, I want to crawl under a chair and hide.

The topics covered were pretty narrow in scope, limited to typical teenage bullshit: depression, loneliness, heartache, angst, free floating anxiety, thoughts of suicide, etc. All the things that people tend to outgrow and leave behind somewhere in their early twenties. Even after I tired of it I was enticed to keep it up by the only factor that has motivated boys since the beginning of time—a girl. She kept the notebook, and I forgot all about it. I never even saw it again until a couple of years later.

Not only did I find myself on trial for something I was innocent of, but they saw fit to rub salt into my wounds by reading my most private thoughts and feelings before a packed courtroom, television cameras, and newspaper reporters.

Somehow this was considered “evidence.” A bad hairdo, a black wardrobe, teenage angst-ridden “poetry,” and a taste for hair bands is enough to send you to prison. Death row, no less. You’d think they’d install safety nets within the justice system for when such bizarre things occur. Evidently I’m the only one who sees the need.

Brian was my sounding board for such “masterpieces,” and after hearing them day in and day out, he even decided to try his hand at writing a few. I don’t know what happened to them, but I’m certain the world is a better place for their loss.

Unfortunately, my own bad taste has been immortalized.

XVIII

On the last day of school our principal organized a huge “play day” every year. In hindsight, he was a tremendously cool guy to have running a school. He rented small, portable basketball games like the ones found in sports bars and arcades, and they’d be set up outside the gym. Inside the gym were volleyball tournaments and basketball tournaments, while outside on the baseball diamond the World Series of Marion high school took place. There were drinks, ice cream, and candy for sale. It was a day on which to say goodbye to the school year and hello to summer vacation.

Perhaps because I was somewhat lacking in school spirit, I didn’t participate in any of these activities. Instead I wandered from one place to another, looking for other amusements. I went into the gym thinking perhaps I would find Jason, but didn’t see him anywhere. I decided to sit in the stands and hang out for a while, talking to a girl who lived down the street from us in Lakeshore. As we talked, three of her classmates came to sit with us. One of them told me that she had been in my gym class all year, and that I’d never even noticed her because I was so busy practicing disruptive antics. I got along particularly well with one girl (Laura) and we spent the rest of the day hidden in the crowd, talking. The Lakeshore girl acted as a sort of mediator, and Laura and I were “going together” by the end of the day.

“Going together” was the high school vernacular which meant that you were boyfriend and girlfriend. When it was time to leave we exchanged phone numbers, writing them on each other’s hands. We talked that night and set up future meetings over the summer.

That last night of school Brian stayed at my house and we ordered pizza to celebrate the beginning of summer vacation. We sat at the kitchen table eating and watching the occasional person walk down the darkened street outside. When I informed him that sometime during the course of the day I had somehow 58

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acquired a new girlfriend, his curiosity was piqued. When I told him her name, thinking he’d have no idea who I was talking about, he was incredulous and asked more than once, “Are you serious?”

His shock came from the fact that he saw this girl and her two sidekicks on an almost daily basis, because one of them lived on the street directly behind him.

We decided to call her, and it so happened that both the other girls I’d met earlier in the day were there with her. The one that lived right behind Brian was named Ashley, and we all decided to meet at her house the next day.

That set the tone and daily routine of our entire summer. Every single day after Ashley’s parents had left for work, Brian and I headed straight over to her house where we spent the day, and all five of us passed the hours watching music videos or swimming in her backyard pool. The third girl’s name was Carrie, and before the summer was over Laura and I broke up, and Carrie and I paired off.

Brian and Ashley were an item all summer. There was something magickal about that season and the small group the five of us formed. When the summer ended, so did we. They went back to their world and we to ours.

We didn’t meet them often on the weekends, because that would have

involved the hassle of dealing with parental figures. We kept in constant contact by the phone, but no in-the-flesh meetings. Instead, Brian and I spent the weekends ice skating, riding around the streets of Memphis with his older brother, or watching videos and talking. That was the summer of much talking.

I also got my first job, and it was one of the most horrendous experiences of my life. I woke up one morning and decided I was tired of being broke and pen-niless, it was time for me to join the workforce.

I started by putting in applications at all the usual places that hire teenagers—grocery stores, fast food joints, Wal-Mart, etc. No one was hiring. Then one day I remembered a small seafood restaurant next to the highway. I had never been inside the place before, and I was growing desperate because potential employers didn’t seem to value the exceptional intellectual giant that was present-ing himself to them. The seafood restaurant was my last option.

I stepped inside the place one afternoon, and it was so dark that it took my eyes a minute to adjust. The floors were bare concrete, the tables were small and covered with red-and-white checkered tablecloths made of plastic. The cash register stood a few feet away from me, and sitting on a barstool next to it was a small, grey-haired, humpbacked man. He seemed to be engrossed in paperwork of some sort. I approached him and asked if this fine establishment might be hiring. He looked at me for a moment in a way that would lead one to believe he was calcu-Damien Echols

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lating shrewdly before asking, “Can you start tonight?” I responded in the affir-mative, and was told to show up at five o’clock.

I returned home elated. I had a job and would soon be able to afford whatever I wanted. The future was wide open and my mind was filled with possibilities.

Reality would soon smash my youthful idealism.

When I arrived at five I was told that I was the new busboy. My uniform was an apron that looked as if it may have once been white in previous years. I distinctly remember using my fingernail to scrape off pieces of eggshell that were cemented to the front of it. After putting it on I was shown to the kitchen, where I witnessed a vision from the very bowels of hell.

This restaurant was the only place on earth that I’ve seen which was more filthy than prison. You could have literally vomited on the floor and no one would have noticed it. They would have stepped over the puddle and kept right on walking. The place was family owned, and the family consisted of a father, mother, and three children. The hunchback who hired me was the father.

The mother was a 250 lb. lump who never made eye contact with anyone and never spoke a word. She was filthy from laboring day and night in this kitchen.

The three children—two boys and a girl—were hellspawn. The youngest son, who was only about two years old, wore nothing but a pair of filth-caked under-pants. The older son, who was about three or four, usually wore shorts but no shirt or shoes. The little girl couldn’t have been older than five, and she wore a set of super-hero themed underwear and T-shirt everyday. All three had crud-smeared faces, runny noses, and tangled hair.

The kids had to be kept in the kitchen and out of sight of any customers at all times. They weren’t even allowed to use the restroom. Instead, they used a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat balanced precariously atop it. This meant there was a five-gallon bucket of shit and piss sitting right in the middle of the kitchen at any given time.

The kitchen itself looked much like a room from the house in
The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre
. The walls were greasy and stained black from smoke, the counter tops looked like tiny garbage barges, and the entire place carried the aroma of rotting fish. As a matter of fact my first task was to clean about ten pounds of spoiled fish out of the sink, which I did while continuously swallowing my own vomit. More than once I walked in to find the mother giving one of the kids a bath in one side of the sink as fish fillets or crab legs soaked in the other half. The first night, I moved a large bag of cornmeal to witness a large rat nursing a little of hairless pink babies.

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I had been working there about three weeks when several of the other workers showed up at my door. They said they had to round everyone up and get to work quickly because someone had called the health department and they were coming to inspect the place. We cleaned, scrubbed, and hauled garbage from 2:30 in the afternoon until after eleven o’clock that night and still seemed no closer to making the place presentable. At that point I knew I couldn’t take this for another second. I stood before the hunchback with my clothes looking as if they had been plucked from a dumpster, and every inch of my body covered in sludge, filth, and crud that defied any attempt at description. I told him that I was going home and was not returning. I couldn’t escape it in my nightmares, though. I dreamed about the place for longer than I worked there.

Brain and I began to drift apart once we started school again, for many reasons. One of those reasons was that I had once again failed, and would be spending another year as a freshman. This resulted in my celebrating my seventeenth birthday in the ninth grade. Coincidentally, one of my childhood heroes had managed to do the same. His name was Andy, and he was the only guy in eighth grade with a five o’clock shadow. He paid no mind to trends or changing fashions; he always wore jeans with the knees ripped out and a battered green army jacket. He had shoulder length black hair and wore a long, dangling earring that looked like a crucifix. Andy was the most laid back guy in the school and either slept through every class or drew. Nobody messed with him, and he didn’t mess with anyone. During the summer Brain and I had gotten rides from Andy’s little sister, Dawn, who was our age. She loved both of us, and was great just because she was so normal. She didn’t care about high school politics and didn’t fit into any particular group. She also consumed more vodka than a teenage girl should be able to.

Brain advanced to tenth grade and grew closer to the freak crowd. I completely quit skating and became what people now call “goth,” though I had never heard the word, and there were no Goths in our school. I did what I did because it was aesthetically pleasing to me. In addition to Slayer, Testament, and Metallica, my musical taste expanded to include things like Danzig, the Misfits, Soux-sie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode. All the old skateboarding posters disappeared from my room and were replaced with old prints I found in odd books. Most of them looked a great deal like images from Goya’s etchings and
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sketches. I caught a couple of filthy, vindictive pigeons and allowed them to fly around the room as they pleased.

I spent much less time with Brian and found myself falling back into the old patterns Jason and I had established. Brian was becoming much more melan-choly, and one day in the fall we found ourselves standing on Ashley’s street. He was looking at her house, lost in thought, when he asked, “Do you miss it?” I knew exactly what he was talking about, but still asked what he meant. “The way things were that summer.”