Dare The Devil

Chapter 4 - Death Bed

The very first arrow the Devil shot at me not only penetrated my “impermeable” shield of faith, it almost killed me.

It was early February 1975, and I had just landed the lead in the school play.  Wow.  I mean, I was going to be the star.  The play didn’t matter, the role didn’t matter, none of that mattered.  What mattered was that I had won.  Over all of the locals, and the real actors who had been at Uni High for years, even some seniors, I had been chosen by Mrs. Terry the director as the Main Man, a Junior in the Lead Role.  The boys looked at me with respect.  The girls looked at me with awe and desire.  Well, at least I imagined they did.  There were actually no outward signs of any concern whatsoever, but that didn’t matter either.  I felt as though I have been named President, Pope and King all at once.

The problem was, I was sick.  Just a cold, but pretty nasty.  Sore throat, fever, sweating, and very, very tired.  So I stayed home from school on that fateful Monday and slept.  School didn’t matter.  What did matter was me and the play and today was the first day of rehearsals and I had to be there I was the star after all…

“Gee, you don’t look so good” was how Mrs. Terry greeted me at 3:00 when I arrived for rehearsal, having ridden my bicycle the 3 miles from home.

“Oh, I’m fine.  Just a little tired.”  You see, if I let on that I was too sick, then she’d have to give somebody else my role, and I was the star!  And that just couldn’t be.  So somehow, practically sleeping during the tiny breaks, I made it through the rehearsal and rode the bike back home. 

You see, there was another problem, well, not a problem really…actually it was really great except it turned into a real problem…That is, that night I was going to the 3^rd rock concert of my entire life!  The first was Yes in February of ’74, followed by Emerson, Lake and Palmer in August, and now, in February of 1975, I had a ticket to see Jethro Tull’s Warchild tour!  And there’s just no way I can describe how excited I was…This was almost as good as sex, which I had never had, and since I was so gawky and geekie and insecure and as a transplanted 16 year old none of the girls liked me anyway, well, this was actually much better than sex.  This was something I could do.  Would do.  No matter what.

My best friend at that time was named Richard.  Another egghead transplant who loved ping pong and chess and the same music and certainly we competed equally well for the ugliest guy on campus award, and we bonded immediately.  As a real plus, he had a car, the Key to the Magic Kingdom when you are a teen, and was able to take it almost anywhere, including down town Los Angeles where Tull was playing the Forum.  I slept in the back seat all the way there, but he didn’t seem to mind since we were really good friends.

Of course the concert was wonderful….Great music, imaginatively presented with colorful stagecraft (hey, I knew about these things, I was a star), and so loud, Loud, LOUD!  I didn’t think such volume was scientifically possible, but it was.

And then someone passed a joint.  That’s right, marijuana.  Mary Jane.  Weed, wacky tobaccy, call it what you will, it was real, it was strong, and it was real strong.

But I was weak.  And I could not resist it.  Didn’t want to.  Saw no reason to.  I’d started smoking weed about a year ago while we were still in Pittsburgh, and indulged whenever I could, which was really not all that often because back in the 70’s it was not all that plentiful, at least for me.

The first time I ever got high I was in my bedroom in Pittsburgh.  I had my own little pipe and stash a friend had given me.  I was wearing headphones, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, when I took a very, Very deep drag on the pipe….the world spun….I felt tingling at the ends of my fingers and toes, and as the world faded into fuzzy darkness I passed-out cold, hitting my head on the hardwood floor.  As I “came to” the room was spinning wildly, as the music throbbed through my brain, and I looked to the door to see my dear ole Dad asking if I was OK, which I said I was, I just tripped and he said “silly,” not noticing the smell or the pipe because he was too drunk anyway.

After such an auspicious beginning a smarter person would have reconsidered the entire drug thing, but don’t look for any wisdom here.  This is not a pretty story, these people did not deserve the pain I brought to them, and I am certainly not a hero.  More like an anti-hero, along the lines of Al Bundy or Homer Simpson, only without the cute funniness.  There was nothing funny about this, there was nothing funny about me, and as I sat smoking that joint in the Jethro Tull concert I had no idea whatsoever of how stupid I was being, how much tangible danger I was in, or the demons who were literally biting at my heals.

I saw no problem with marijuana.  Having been a Christian for almost 2 whole months I hadn’t had a chance to go to the Bible study yet where they teach you those types of things could be bad for you….Open up psychic doors in the brain, allowing all types of strange thoughts to come in, along with strange beings who might not be all that well intended….That type of thing.  Nope.  Hadn’t heard that part yet.  All I knew was that I believed in Jesus and that was supposed to mean that nothing bad could ever happen to me again.

The problem was I was wrong.  Way wrong.  And the problem was that my cold had turned into the flu.  And the problem was that our seats were 13 rows from the top of the ceiling and I had to go to the bathroom twice and I had just had to get a program, and repeatedly walking up those stairs in my condition was exactly not what the doctor ordered but with all the drugs in me and the flashing lights and the pounding music I couldn’t feel anything, let alone that the flu was turning into mononucleosis. Or that in my weakened state the weed was actually etching my bronchial tubes and I had no resistance left in my body, or that the bronchitis and the mono slammed into my system like a Mac truck, opening me to a full-blown case of hepatitis.  That, dear friends, was the problem.

When I somehow crawled from Richard’s car back into my bed that night after the concert, I was still too stoned to know I was knocking on death’s door.

I was so sick the next morning I literally could not move.  I was a mass of disease.  Mononucleosis, bronchitis, the flu, along with hepatitis just to make it interesting.  When my poor parents who had to clean up after me could finally get me into the doctor, he said in his 40 years of doctoring he’d never seen such abnormal test results, that my brother and sister and anyone else my age had to stay away from me because I was contagious and could hurt them although my parents were probably healthy enough not to get sick.  “But whatever you do, do not give him any chocolates or sugars because if you do his liver could ‘pop’ from the strain, and he could die.  Seriously.”

I didn’t walk again for 6 weeks. 

Satan 1, Shield of so-called faith 0.

No food.  The sore throat made it impossible.  Drinking any water was hard enough.  No friends.  No school.  No playing.  No play.  No staring role.  Nothing, unless you count coughing and wheezing and spitting and….well, you get the idea.

Nothing except hurt, sorrow, loss and disease.

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