I Was a Son of Satan
On fatherly confusion and worry
During the “satanic panic” of the late ’80s, Oprah warned her viewers of teen listeners of heavy metal being brainwashed into worshipping the devil, and worse, killing themselves on his behalf. Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden found themselves both at the center of lawsuits. My mother, a loyal Oprah viewer and conclusion jumper, frantically told my father about this, who in turn—due to my rather grim demeanor at the time—suspected me of being satanic, which would explain, at least in his mind, my difficulty with girls, household chores, and gym class. Perhaps my morose ways lit the darkness around me.
So what seemed very probable to my father was finally confirmed when he saw the cover of The Cure’s Disintegration, which I had just bought with my long awaited monthly allowance, featuring a ghoul-like Robert Smith in thick mascara seemingly reporting from the depths of below.
“Why is it so dark?” he asked, slipping past Stop signs on our way home from the mall.
“You mean the cover?” I asked. “It’s artistic.” I was already a snob.
His gaze seemed flattened by the windshield, as if there wasn’t anywhere to look but inward. “Do you worship the devil?” he finally asked. “I’ve been talking to your mother.”
I sneered and said he was a deeply confused person. That he had his genres totally mixed up. That working full time at a lousy corporate job had slowly stripped him of any aesthetic intuition. That there were, you know, like, sensitive people on this earth who made art that he would never understand. That life wasn’t just about paying taxes and mowing the damn lawn. “Whatever, man.” I said.
He punched me in the arm, then tried but couldn’t take it back with his eyes. There was the faintest bruise the next morning.
Amy would always sing “Pictures of You,” and I suppose that by buying the album I could somehow get closer to her; yet, in my self-loathing, I tried but couldn’t reasonably see myself—in the stage play behind the automatic curtains of one’s eyelids—the subject of this titular photograph she so endearingly hummed about during study section. I imagined a better looking, cooler guy who would finger bang her at an indie movie one night, a mini nip of whisky in his pocket like an alternative hard-on, on which they mutually sucked, the only cool kids in this daft town, while I masochistically ran this premature cuckold’s anti-fantasy in my mind. I ripped open the CD and played the song.
“Let me see that,” my mom said, already braced at the doorway like the gate keeper between me and the rest of this world. My father must have told her everything.
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said.
I walked over and handed her the cover. She snatched it and looked hard into Robert Smith’s eyes, as if trying to gauge from what ring of hell he was whining about. “Is this them?” she asked, the song listlessly playing, perhaps cooed by his dreamy depression. “Yes,” I said, with a tinge of exasperated sarcasm. “Not satanic.”
She must have gone back downstairs and told my father not to worry, that if anything, I was just gay. They mumbled about me, then quieted. The sitcom laugh tracks died down, lights to the house eventually went off, and in complete darkness—save the moonlight lapping against the pane, that constant reminder of a bright day somewhere else—I looked for Amy in the songs.
My father never questioned me about my music anymore, and from such reluctant acceptance—culturally quarantined in Dadland, capital city Cornyville—came a kind of cordial and yearning distance. He grew to know less and less about me, my esoteric ways now alien, which I found both relieving yet quaintly sad. We still played tennis on some weekends, his love and worry safety on the other side of the net, a conversation muted in physics. I had a great back swing. Occasionally, when it got bad, I wanted to explain to him the stupid troubles I had, which at the time seemed the handy work of the devil himself, of a beautiful girl who liked this band but didn’t like me back. It was hell.
