Puppy Love and the Red-Headed Humbling

(Pre-script: When I first undertook this blog in mid-2010, I was living and working in Bogota, Colombia in an official capacity for the US Government. My bright idea, at the time, was to add assiduously to the forum every single week. I figured I’d eventually have enough entries to fashion a rough book manuscript. But as so many plans paved with good intentions, life took over and the blog was set aside in favor of more pressing matters. I realize now – in mid-2011 – that I’ve done a paltry three entries TOTAL in the intervening year. And all of them were in the first week or two after opening the blog. Which means I’ve done absolutely nada since. Chalk it up to finishing my tour in Bogota, returning to Washington,DC, doing WAY too much dating on www.okcupid.com (naysayers may abound, but in my assessment it’s the single best dating site EVER), getting ready for my next assignment in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Which is where, by the way, I am as I scribe the caveat you’re reading. I’ve given up believing I’ll actually make time for this blog on any more than an exceptionally infrequent basis. But I’m finally adding to it again, and hope to keep at it at least semi-regularly. Enjoy… And now, onto “Puppy Love and the Red-Headed Humbling”.)

…or how a passion for Spanish and undying devotion to heavy metal jointly shaped the course of my whole life.

In late December 1992, while laboring studiously as a 10^th grader at Quantico High School in Virginia, I volunteered to sing Christmas carols at an old folks’ home. Always the death metal screamer, proudly fronting my own band by that point, my scratchy pipes were poorly suited to serenading half-deaf retirees. Yet I decided to give it the proverbial college try.

Why? Because of Dawn, the 12^th grader who invited me to the event and with whom I was desperately, wholly smitten. An older woman. My first, and God knows I tried to woo her.  I was getting desperate, as she hadn’t responded to my decidedly un-subtle onslaught all school year, and I thought that perhaps ratcheting the ante up to something more obvious would do the trick. In high school two years of class difference constituted a virtual uncrossable chasm separating us, limiting the prospects of my pursuit in a manner not dissimilar to the restrictive Berlin Wall in its day. Thus Dawn was unreachable for lil’ sophomoric me as 1992 faded to 1993. In the mania of my teenage mind, I assessed that perhaps – just perhaps! – crooning to a roomful of geezers would showcase all the qualities I was sure an older woman like Dawn might appreciate: holiday spirit, love of humanity, and if I were really lucky, my on-key delivery of choice Christmas classics.

It was not to be. The night before we caroled, my band performed a concert. While it was a rousing performance in which I turned up the volume far beyond what any decent Peavey speaker cabinet can reasonably endure, my vocal cords were in a state of ruin from all the metal shouting: a collapsing Mayan temple, a dilapidated Appalachian shack. An agonized throat may well be music to a metal fan’s ears, but not so to my elderly audience that day. My pitch was atrocious, a hideous disfigurement of holiday music, and because of it, my much-trumpeted “love of humanity” and “holiday spirit” were sorely lacking by the third song. This was not going according to plan. This shown clearly upon my mournful countenance, and became even more acutely clear to all present after I started sulking. And why did I sulk? Because of an occurrence I had prayed to circumvent, but which the Lord decided to visit upon me that day, a Job-like test of my capacity for punishment.

More specifically: Dawn’s boyfriend made a cameo at the retirement home, held her lily-white hand, and macked on her in the most severe of manners right in front of me, likely aware of my interest in his lady and thusly staking his territory publicly. It is true, I thought pathetically in silence, that possession is indeed nine-tenths of the law! This immediately dashed my Master Plan for the impossible conquest of her heart. Nearly ready to admit defeat and leave the premises of the retirement home, I was looking for my final in-road, scanning desperately about the room to see if something, anything, would present itself as an avenue by which to woo this lass.

And that’s when I saw the Old Spanish Lady.

She was in a wheelchair, secluded all alone in a corner of the bingo room. Whilst the other retirees enjoyed our high school sing-song rendition of their cherished holiday ditties, she stared out through a window, morose and downcast, isolated in her age, clearly pondering with resignation how many un-plucked feathers remained on the chicken of her life. I asked an orderly why she was there. “She’s from Spain and doesn’t speak any English. She doesn’t talk to anyone.” And just like that, I saw the mission set before me, the gauntlet tossed at my feet as though by destiny itself. I would woo her with Spanish phrases I’d learned in school, by extension wooing my fair maiden. Happily-ever-after never looked so probable. At least in theory.

Verily I approached the old Spanish biddy, rolling up my sleeves in focused anticipation as I searched the abyss of my mind for precisely the right Spanish phrase for a knock-out introduction, rapidly reviewing every lesson I’d been taught in Dr. Stewart’s Spanish class, poignantly attempting to cobble together anything bearing even the slightest semblance of proper grammar and pronunciation. I slowly grew aware – neigh, intense was my cognizance! – that the entire room’s attention was on me.

And then, the singing of Christmas songs stopped. The crowd watched. Dawn gawked curiously. I had the spotlight and I struck:

“Hoh-lah moo-hair… No haw-blow s-paaaaa-nol paaay-ro feluuuuz ni-va dude!”

It was my first complete Spanish sentence, and I wasn’t about to let the total wrongness of every aspect of it deflate my pride in having spoken a foreign language publicly. Dawn’s douche-bag boyfriend, take THAT! I stood back triumphantly waiting for the Old Spanish Lady’s response. She continued to stare out the window, unaware, unresponsive, her stoicism befitting a character of Shakespearean intrigue. And that’s when the orderly approached me anew with a clarification: “Oh sorry. They just told me she’s actually from Bulgaria.” I didn’t look up as the flop-sweats of shame engulfed me and forced itty-bitty trickles of perspiration down my furrowed brow.

(In the background: the faint sounds of muffled snickers. A snort or two.)

At that very moment, I foreswore that I’d never suffer that kind of public humiliation ever, ever again.

Thus it was a function of terribly unfortunate timing that a mere three weeks later, in early 1993, I was compelled to smack the bejesus out of a chap named Paul. His transgression was egregious in my prideful land o’ leading a garage band: he voided his bladder on one of my band Witch Hunt’s promotional fliers. We used to pass them out during lunch hour. Were we expecting some push back from the other kids? Sure.  Hip-hop and Nirvana were in, after all.  No one had time for fourth-rate teenage Metallica clones. But didn’t we deserve, demand, a modicum of respect for our labors?  We sorta thought we were due.  So letting his lizard fly free-willy on my flier was not something I could, with any dignity, take in stride. Oh, how that pee-peed flier obliged me to a full defense of my offended metal honor, so incensed was I at this fuckin’ punk’s contemptuous and cavalier attitude toward my musical art!

But in truth, though this golden shower was the immediate precipitator leading to Paul’s humiliating comeuppance before half the student body, the roots of out tiff lay in a heavy metal beef set to pasture and grazing for six intense months by that point in the school year. Simply put, Paul hated me for being the superior metal guitarist to him. But it wasn’t my fault that his assigned lot in life was that of loser on the six-string. We cannot all be cut from the cloth of musical glory.  So this, his lack of instrumental ability, I could forgive him as it affected me not.  But what I could not pardon were his frequent public challenges to my birth legitimacy, in which he engaged more times than were tolerable during morning break in school. These insults to my maternal lineage, typical for teenage boys prepping the battlefield for a scrap, were sufficiently vulgar (and creative, I gotta admit) to send an arsenal of angry little rockets screaming from any teenage boy’s affronted ego.  I was certainly no exception. As a (literally) red-headed step child, Paul should have known he was statistically six times more likely to be beaten, and pissing on my flier that day exponentially increased those odds to the point of dead certainty.

The next morning I told my mother, cryptically, that she ought to “be ready to come get me by about 8”, and listened to Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power, strutting and flexing in front of the mirror to dissipate the horror I felt for what was about to happen. Truth be told, I’ve never been a fighter, and hate violence. And I was scared of Paul, who I was told had quite a bit more experience with fisticuffs than me.  But I knew what had to be done, even if I came up the loser.  Thus, by the time I got to school, my jittery nerves counterbalanced only by the simmering ire I felt over my pee-peed flier, I exploded like Van Halen’s “Eruption”. Before homeroom bell struck, I had delivered a sound thrashing with the precision of a smart bomb and the glee of a child on Christmas morning, a million purring kittens playfully swatting at the butterflies in my tummy whilst my clenched fist rocketed into Paul’s unsuspecting cheek.

Dr. Stewart, my 10^th grade Spanish teacher, intervened and broke us up, truncating my splendid brutalizing of the lad. She never let me live it down, constantly reminding me that only “bad students get into fights”, doling out goodly amounts of evil eyes to me whenever I came into her line of sight. And this bothered me: I was always a good and mindful student, filial to the end, and it was a cause of shame to me that a teacher would not think highly of me. I was not a big fan of foreign languages in those days, and unless a foreign tongue would help me nab one of the weather girls on Telemundo or Univision, I wanted nada to do with Spanish class in particular. But seeing that the only avenue by which to bring Dr. Stewart back around to my side was to at least feign an interest in the material, I started paying closer attention in her class. I hoped my scholastic achievements would overshadow her low impression of me, showing her I wasn’t a bruiser but a responsible, upstanding young man.

Not so shockingly, it worked. Any teacher appreciates an earnest pupil. I was surprised, however, at how quickly I took to the language, and how speedily I began developing a taste and even talent for it. The following school year, my band Witch Hunt broke into the global underground metal tape-trade and fanzine network. We recorded some demos and began shopping them to anyone who would listen to us, yet because of the ever-growing global network to which we were now party, we broke the mold of the typical gonna-go-nowhere after-school band by marketing our material to other countries.  We established low-level distribution with a few helpful pen pals around the planet, panned off free copies of our demo material to select popular fanzines for review, and before I knew it, we were receiving interview requests and even fan mail from foreign lands.

Latin America became a particularly friendly region of the globe for us.  This was almost exclusively because of the efforts of one expatriate German buddy of mine, living in central Mexico with contacts all over the hemisphere as devoted to underground bands as he was. I began receiving weekly letters (mind you, this was in the pre-Internet days in which “snail mail” reigned king) from places like Colombia, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and even Cuba. And unlike the Europeans who usually boasted English better than mine, our Latin American metal brethren spoke only their own tongue. And I understood next to nothing of it. A conundrum; yet if they were confident enough to reach out, then in decency the only proper response on my part was to reach back to them. I began toting the letters to school, asking Dr. Stewart for her assistance in translating them and responding. At first, she was dubious: how many 11^th grade teachers field requests from students who need help translating responses to Chilean fanzine interview requests, or Israel fan letters? But when she saw the proof, she was entertained and, in no small measure, inspired. She realized, and rightly so, that this was her chance to make a difference to a student and a lot of other people that would be tangible.

Dr. Stewart began giving me extra credit for answering the letters in Spanish. She named me, later that year, 11^th grade Spanish Student of the Year. As my knowledge of the language grew at a steady clip – in no small part due to the Puerto Rican and Argentine exchange students who took me under their wing – so grew my understanding of Latin American politics, history, society, and culture.  These I could also discuss with my Spanish-speaking pen pals, who were all more than willing to tell me in languid detail of the circumstances facing each of their respective nations. In this manner I learned about the Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary pickle; Nicaragua’s long decade of the 1980s and their return to democracy in the 1990s; the Cuban censorship police and their occasional crack-down on heavy metal because they believed its political content incited “counter-revolutionary activities”; and even, as one Mexican contact put it, “that Taco Bell is not really Mexican food.” Latin immigrants from Central America were not very visible in those days at metal concerts where I lived, but they were beginning to make a dent; and I always found one to speak with, to ask about his country, and to cut my Spanish chops. They were always more than happy to oblige, simply pleased that a gringo would take the time to try learning their language.

Such was my passion for this language and its people that once I got to college in mid-1995, I knew I would ultimately declare Spanish as a major. I wanted more, in any way I could get it.  Following my junior year in 1998, I spent a summer in Guatemala working as a volunteer with war orphans and street children. A year later in 1999, upon graduation, I took up with the Peace Corps in El Salvador. During that two-year period, I lived in a small community of roughly 300 ex-guerrillas from the Salvadoran civil war, which had ended a few years prior to my arrival, and traveled throughout Central America to places like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica, finally seeing in-person some of the places I had received my first letters from a few years prior. After Peace Corps, I taught Spanish in the US Virgin Islands, made numerous trips in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and back to Central America, obtained a Master’s Degree in Latin American Affairs, and got on full-time with the government. Despite its reputation for being a boring gig, serving The Man as a bureaucrat has been a richly rewarding experience for one reason above all others: it has served as an enabler for traveling, living, and working abroad, from Asia to the Middle East and, eventually, back to Latin America. I now reside in Colombia.

Spanish and metal have been, therefore, my two enduring loves. They have outlasted any pet, girlfriend, or hobby I have entertained over the years. And while my love for the Spanish has developed my career in a different direction than most of the metal kids I used to run with, my dedication to the music has never dampened.  It’s the only music that truly churns me, the only kind I find worth paying to see in concert, and the only tuneage to which the vast majority of my best memories are tagged and cued. Indeed, I can recollect a metal song for every personal highlight dating back all the way to the first time I heard Cinderella’s “Somebody Save Me” in 1987 and, intuitively, knew no other music mattered afterward. At least, not to me.

So this blog will be devoted to metal musings. I will revel pointedly in a deep-seeded nostalgia for the music I’m sure many of you share. It’s the kind of nostalgia Chuck Schuldiner sang about on Symbolic when he screamed “…do you remember when things seemed to eternal and heroes were so real?”  I’ll re-examine the best times of my teenage years when this mighty music gave me a reason to get up in the morning and appreciate every moment of the day. I’ll take discussion of those memories a step further to their logical consequence: looking at the lessons I took from the metal scene; my life is what it is because of what metal brought me. And finally, I’ll share the experiences and adventures the genre has afforded me everywhere I’ve been. Those adventures always happen, even now, when something really metal occurs daily, even in the context of my new life as a paper-pusher working in Colombia.