9
I WOKE UP FEELING LIKE SHIT - not only from the weed and alcohol hangover but also from last night’s experience. It’s hard to explain how I felt. Although I felt liberated from not having to slave into a job everyday, I now was confronted with a newfound identity crisis made worse by the fact that women judge men so strongly by what they do for work and how much they earn. I might be content being unemployed, but would women I’m interested in be also? Would I suddenly fall down even lower in the hierarchy in most women’s eyes? I became acutely aware of just how much a man’s motivations are tied up into how he thinks it will affect his perception to women. Man do an awfully lot of things to attract women. The male drive to make tons of money is in large part an attempt to get women. It is, as they say, what makes the world go round. Funny how it all comes down to pussy and power.
I did have other things on my mind. The camping trip was tomorrow. I had the mushrooms and I had ecstasy. Dan was down and he volunteered to drive us, so I had secured a ride. That also meant we weren’t beholden to the bus schedule, which forces you to get up really early. With Dan and Pete that meant the three of us. But I wanted a fourth person. I thought of Steve and texted him about all the details. An hour went by. No response. It would be hard for him to commit on such short notice. He wasn’t really the camping type anyway. Steve was a no-go. I texted Pete that Dan would drive us and that the plan was for him to pick us up at noon on Saturday. I thought about who else I could add to the trip when I thought of Damian.
Damian was an old friend of mine that I knew from my high school crew, and although we used to be close, I hadn’t hung out with him in over nine months. He was an actual Satanist, complete with a “666” tattoo on his chest. I never really probed how deep he was into Satanism, but I thought it was time to find out. I texted Damian the camping details. I knew he could do it because we’d been camping before six years ago with a mutual friend of ours and had a blast. Within twenty minutes Damian texted me back saying that he was in the studio in Manhattan until late in the afternoon and that I should come by. He said he was interested in the trip but wanted more details. I wrote back saying I’d come on over around the time he’d be done which he said was around six pm. Damian was a recording engineer and he spent most of his time on his metal band Flesh when he wasn’t working in the studio. He was good peeps so my mood got a little brighter. I now had something to do later today.
Thing is, I still had five hours to kill before this, and needed something to do in the meantime. It was Friday and so I went online to see if there were any meetups going on. The atheists were meeting again and not too far away but not for a few hours — around the same time I had to meet Damian. So I cancelled that, and not wanting to waste my newfound freedom indoors in the middle of the summer, I found myself in Manhattan wandering the art galleries in SoHo. What wonders these artists came up with, turning garbage into beautiful garbage, and selling it. I had a knack for art but never pursued it. The life of the struggling artist did fascinate me, as well as the life of the writer. It had always been my dream to write. I started blogging as a hobby, but I wanted to be published. Writers have to be published. Only then can you really call yourself a writer.
I loved SoHo. Celebrities paid top dollar to live in those century old lofts. Heath Ledger was renting here for $20,000 a month when he over-dosed in his SoHo apartment. What a shame. I eventually made my way back towards Union Square Park and a had seat and listened to the Hare Krishna bang away at their drums. Could I be one of them one day? The thought did cross my mind. I wanted to light a cigarette but I remembered the new city ordinances forbidding smoking in public parks. Oh the humanity. I walked over to Sal’s Pizza store and got the two slice and a soda deal for five dollars. It was cheap and filling, and I of course was on a low budget. It was getting near six and I could see the employed returning to their private lives and filling up the streets, so I decided to text Damian to see what he was up to. He got back in ten minutes saying he was heading to Guitar Center in an hour to pick up a new guitar he had being customized. It was the one over on 14th street, and said he had a ride and so he’d be able to give me a lift back to his place to “blaze.”
I had a feeling it would be a long night, so I got a bottle of vodka at a liquor store – one of the small ones that goes for $4.99, and I mixed it with soda in a plastic cup and drank nonchalantly in the park. This was the way we used to drink as teens back in high school – a great way to drink in public undercover. About an hour later I was sufficiently buzzed and I headed over to meet Damian. I hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. I made my way down the stairs and there he was at the counter talking with one of the sales guys. He was rocked out in ripped jean shorts and a death metal t-shirt. His head was shaved on the sides and had a long ponytail on top. He was your quintessential metal head: frozen in time, indifferent to the evolving culture and trends around him. And he was a purist. If music wasn’t some form of heavy metal or hard rock, it sucked. Few exceptions could be made, but very few.
We greeted each other with enthusiasm and caught up on where we had been all those passing months. He was still living in his parent’s attic in Queens, and had a job selling weed for some kind of high class distributer in the city. Apparently studio work was only his part time gig. I told him of my recent unemployment and he seemed genuinely saddened. But, I told him I was feeling better actually not having to work a job I hated. The sales guy came out with his new guitar. They went over some of the technical aspects of it, using musical lingo I was only vaguely familiar with. Then we left and Damian told me there was a car waiting for us outside. Apparently a friend of his was a livery cab driver and was sitting in a black livery cab double parked out on 14th street. Damian loaded the guitar in the trunk and we hopped in and headed back to his place in Queens. Damian rode shotgun and I sat in the back on those leathery seats. His friend was a friendly fellow of Middle Eastern descent, very quiet. I can’t quite remember his name to be honest.
Unexpectedly, as we started moving down the dizzying streets and avenues, Damian pulled out a long white joint and lit it. He took a few big pulls from it and passed it back to me without asking. I accepted. The first few pulls got me pretty damn high. I passed it back to Damian and he passed it to his friend who was driving. We all smoked as we headed up 6th avenue, blasting Metallica and Led Zeppelin, and a lot of the heavy metal classics from the 70s and 80s. I had hated Metallica back in the day. All of my best friends in high school had been devout followers. I hated them mostly because of that: they were popular and I had a lot of friends that loved them. They were so highly praised among metalheads back in the 90s. You had to like early Metallica before the Black Album – it was a rule – otherwise you sucked. But I had warmed up to them over the years. Their instrumental “Orion” came on as the high fully kicked in. I thought it was one of their better songs.
Damian’s friend drove very well under the influence. I don’t think I even wore my seatbelt thinking back. We got back to his place after making a quick trip to the corner bodega for some good old fashioned 40 oz beer. I felt like I was seventeen again buying it. We even broke out in refer induced uncontrollable laughter when we paid, the Middle Eastern store clerk giving us a peculiar look as if we were psychotic. Damian's attic was just as I had remembered: cramped and messy with its dank air and suffocating, angled ceilings. Clothes were strewn about with music paraphernalia. But as I found out, Damian had the whole place to himself.
“Yeah so my parents are away in Greece,” he said, lighting a new cigarette.
“Nice,” I said, cracking open the 40 of Budweiser. It meant we didn’t have to stay in his bedroom in the attic. So after we made our way into the more spacious living room and Damian checked out the new specs of his ax, I picked up one of his spare guitars he had lying around and played a few tunes I knew by heart. Damian’s friend was easily impressed at my novice attempts to play some Zep riffs and some Metallica.
After exhausting my repertoire quite easily, I turned to Damian and asked, “Are you still a Satanist?” The question perplexed him. He suddenly looked up and away from his guitar. He paused for about five seconds, appearing if he was trying to think hard about his answer. Then he turned to me and said, “Yeah I guess so,” before immediately returning to what he was doing.
“But what does it mean to be a Satanist?” I followed up. Again this made Damian pause.
“Satanism is a philosophy,” he told me. He had this tendency to mumble when he was fucked up. “To me it’s looking at the world as it really is, there’s evil and suffering and people don’t give a shit most of the time. So we just accept this, and live our lives. It’s reality.”
“But do you really believe in Satan – the devil?” He paused for another long bout and appeared to really be racking his brain for an answer. Maybe it was because he was high. Maybe it was because he was doing something a bit complex. I didn’t mean to have pressed him so hard. After thinking about his answer, he said, “Yeah. In true Satanism there only is the devil, there is no flip side to that. There is no ‘good’ God to worship to counter Satan. There’s only Satan.”
I wanted to know how he really felt about his Satanic beliefs. Growing up, many of the metalheads I hung out in high school fashioned themselves as “Satanists” in that they wore Satanic death metal shirts with pentagrams and cut themselves when they got depressed and talked about death often. Some were followers of Anton LaVey, and read the Satanic Bible, but I never really felt any of them were doing anything much more than a superficial teenage rebellion against the norm of the day, and were using Satanism as a tool to achieve that.
“So you believe that Satan is the only supernatural being?” I prodded. “What does Satan want? Does he want to be worshipped?”
Another relatively long pause. “Satanism is not really about worshipping Satan, it’s really more about living your life with a certain recognition of who you truly are – the animal within. It’s about realizing that your desires are nothing to be ashamed about, and that religion is designed to control your mind and make you a slave.”
“But isn’t Satanism a religion?” I asked.
“It’s more a philosophy.”
“But you said Satan is real,” I pressed. “That seems to be more than a philosophy if you actually think Satan is real.”
“Satan is not literal in the figurative sense. He’s a being that manifests itself through a certain way of living.”
I’m not sure what this meant. I suppose the weed was talking more than Damian was. But since I was high too, I must have thought it made sense. I had a very elementary understanding of Satanism myself. I had heard that it was more of a philosophy than a religion and that most Satanists were actually atheists. Philosophically speaking, the principles of Satanism seem like a kind of ethical egoism, which, although it makes a lot of people cringe, many people are ethical egoists without knowing it.
Damian had finished sound checking his guitar and hooked it up to one of his many amps. Considering his apartment was really like a house, he could blast the volume much louder than I could in my dinky apartment. He shredded through a repertoire of riffs, some of them his, some of them others. His metal band had been going through lineup changes for years and had a few decent songs but could never get a decent recording out of them. Professional studio time cost money — money that always seemed to be spent instead on alcohol and drugs. I remember a few years back I used to go visit him and the band in their Brooklyn studio and we’d get high and drunk in between takes.
They were all metal heads. They had long hair and wore dark black almost all the time. They drank cheap beer and smoked weed incessantly. They all brandished a “fuck everything” mentality, emblematic of the nihilism that pervaded the scene. Although none of them could really hold a serious intellectual conversation, they were all quick to give their two cents about “how shit is” via their assessment of life. The thing about metalheads is that they look at life largely through the lens of music. They will judge you by your musical tastes and they categorize people accordingly. Some bands were “gay” and some were alright. Other bands were gods who held the highest respect in their heart of hearts. To get on a metalhead’s good side you just had to like their favorite band and know about them and praise them as they did. If you had seen them live or had met the band members or had something rare about them, like a limited edition album or box set, or a pic or a drum stick, then you were instantly cool in their book. And if you could play their music, you were even cooler. On the flipside, if you liked a band they hated, then you instantly sucked balls in their mind. Everything was about music with metalheads, and many were really picky about sub-genres and bands.
As the years went by, the metalhead crew that I knew in high school had splintered into about a three or four different cliques not long after we graduated, with each clique going their own way. There was a pattern to it based on music. The ones who were more into death metal stuck together, and the ones into industrial metal struck together. Some of them got out of metal altogether and embraced hip hop and techno. They caught stings from the other metal purists who called them “traders.” Some of them accused me of the same thing because I happened to listen to more than just heavy metal and industrial metal. Some of the splinter groups became straightedge – sorta. Some went heavier into drugs. I gravitated towards the more drug friendly group. Once in awhile we’d all reunite and get all back together, usually at a backyard party or a picnic. By the time I got into my mid twenties I started drifting away from the crew too. I started making new friends who enjoyed my evolving interests in philosophy, and the new musical genres I explored. It gets tiring hanging out with the same people every day, doing basically the same things every day, getting high almost every day, drinking almost every day, and dealing with all the silly little drama that goes on because everyone is fucked up on drugs. I had enough when I was about twenty-four. I kept in touch with Damian and a few others who I got along with, but aside from them, I mostly cut off members from the old crew. I wasn’t even friends with many of them on Facebook.
So when I hung out with Damian it was like getting back in touch with my old teenage self. The old high school me suddenly came back to life. I instantly grew 10 years younger and suddenly got the urge to drink cheap beer and smoke weed. Damian was the first generation of hard working Greek immigrants. He had a very working class Queens thing about him that I didn’t have. I fashioned myself more cosmopolitan, more sophisticated, more intellectual. Damian didn’t give too fucks about looking smart. He hadn’t changed at all in ten years. If anything he got more metalhead. Metalheads generally don’t keep up with trends. I did. I had changed my look so many times since high school. I had grown into so many other genres. I had arrived at my present mode, as the deep thinking philosopher, and it seemed that I barely had anything in common left with Damian other than partying. He perhaps existed only as someone whose worldview I could probe to see if it made any sense or was worth exploring. And that night in his living room, drunk and high as I was, his Satanism didn’t really seem all coherent to me in retrospect. I wondered if it was even a good idea to ask him to go on the camping trip.
I tended to get very philosophical when high and introspective. So turned to Damian’s friend and asked if he was Muslim and he said “Yes.” I knew from the beer bottle in his hand that he must have been a very liberal Muslim. “Do you eat pork? I asked him. He gave me an awkward look, probably because it was an awkward question for a non-Muslim to be asking a Muslim, but he responded back, “No. Not really.” I had a Muslim coworker who was the same way. Somehow the prohibition on drinking alcohol was more easily disobeyed than eating pork. Damian riffed away at a feverish pace on his new axe. I decided to leave his friend alone with the questions since he didn’t seem too keen on being interviewed about his faith. When Damian got tired a while later he blurted out a question with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as he cracked open a new 40, “Did you hear about that Higgs Boson they found?”
“Yeah” I told him, “I went to a lecture recently about it. It’s a really important component to the standard model of physics.” I always appreciated someone scientifically inclined, but I didn’t really feel like talking science. I wanted to talk philosophy, particularly about the Satanism Damian believed. Unable to control myself, I asked him, “What is the purpose of life under Satanism?” This seemed to elicit an annoyed response. Perhaps I was asking too many difficult questions. After another long pause Damian replied back, “There is no purpose to life under Satanism. It’s what you make it.” That was pretty much what I expected it to be.
Satanism was a kind of nihilism. I had no problem with nihilism myself. I had been a de facto nihilist my entire life. And I had never even thought about it until I was in my early twenties after I had learned some philosophy. Being an atheist meant not believing there was ultimate purpose or meaning to life or existence. Life just was; it was just a natural byproduct of the laws of physics on matter in certain conditions. Any meaning to life would have to be subjective; given by the self. I didn’t have a problem with this. I had more or less accepted that some form of nihilism was true, but that didn’t stop me from asking questions about existence and asking others what they thought about life and its possible meanings. Metaphysics and ontology were two things that I could not pry my mind away from.
We went out to the backyard to get some fresh air as the room had become too smoky. I drank my beer so slowly that it had become lukewarm in my hand. A midsummer night’s 40 it was, just like back in high school. I had smoked way too many cigarettes by this time. Being around chainsmokers like Damian always did that. I had to mention the camping trip.
“So yeah we’re going camping tomorrow upstate just like last time,” I blurted out. “Me, Pete and my friend Dan, who I don’t think you met. You down to come?” Damian lit a cigarette, and took a big inhale before coughing a bit. He stared forward with his half-baked eyes barely open. A long pause ensued.
“Um, nah dude I got some shit to do,” he said, sounding high as fuck.
I laughed. I had hung out with him all this time really to ask him if he wanted to go camping, and now it was ten-thirty at night, and it turned out Damian had shit to do tomorrow. The first time we tried to go camping, I remembered, he showed up late and it ruined the whole trip. Maybe it was better we didn’t rely on him, especially given his condition.
“Alright man,” I said back, after I got over my disbelief. “Maybe next time.”
“Yeah, let me know,” he said. And that was that.
We spent the rest of the night watching bands live on the internet and talking about music. Damian wasn’t in the mood to hang out late and neither was I, so we called it a night while it was still relatively early and I took a car service home.
