Dark Star: Confessions of a Rock Idol Read Free Page B

evening, I pleaded with Mom to take me again. Dad had been home from work on the line at the rubber plant for several hours. He entered without a word, pulled the shades in the family room, and began hitting the sauce. As he sat staring at the square, wooden TV, its glow bathed his hard, sweaty face in blue, and I didn’t think he heard a word of the pleas I was making to my mom…until he stood up.
    “Let’s go,” he said, tossing me the keys from his black work pants and gliding through the swinging screen door, drink in hand.
    I looked at my mom, she shrugged, and I darted for the Ford.
    But my joy was short-lived.
    Dad insisted I do everything while he observed from the passenger seat. Nervous, I started the car—twice, resulting in a horrible grinding noise and a slap to the back of the head; not a drop of Dad’s drink spilled.
    Pressing the brake pedal hard to the floor, I tentatively shifted into reverse to back out onto McGill Avenue. With no help from the old man, I hit the gas—too hard. The Ford catapulted backward, bouncing straight across McGill and into the Salingers’ front yard.
    I panicked, literally feeling the heat of my father’s wrath as he cursed a string of expletives, fumbled his drink, and scrambled to reach across for the brake with his booted left foot. But I was determined to make things right.
    Having temporarily taken my foot off the gas to stop the madness, I reapplied it to what I thought was the brake. But it wasn’t the brake. And we did not stop.
    Instead, the Ford roared to life again, lurching backward, turfing the Salingers’ front lawn, and barreling smack-dab into the front porch of their two-story Colonial.
    Then we stopped.
    Without missing a beat, my father turned the car off, got out, circled to make sure no one was hurt, and made a beeline for the driver’s door. With rage in his eyes and his face dripping with perspiration, he reached through my open window and, his hands shaking violently, fumbled for my seatbelt, flicked it open, and extracted me through the window. As kids on bikes and neighbors on porches watched, I was kicked and beaten all the way back across McGill, up our driveway, and into my house.

    By the time DeathStroke finally made the cover of Rolling Stone, I was twenty-seven. As usual, I was the centerpiece of the photo, wearing tight black leather pants, no shirt, and a brown, full-length mink coat. At the time, my head was completely shaved, I wore a silver hoop in my nose, and readers could clearly see the many dragons, serpents, and other dark tattoos that marched across my chest and arms and crept up the back of my neck.
    Writing this memoir, my editor asked that I give more details about my personal appearance at this stage of the book. To answer that, all I can say is that my look fluctuated a great deal during that era.
    The Rolling Stone cover caught me at a muscular stage when I had been working out regularly with a personal fitness trainer. At other times, however, when I was too doped up to do anything but perform, I guess you could call me just plain skinny. As for attractiveness, women used to say my dark eyebrows and solid jaw gave me a rugged, handsome look. But now I realize, people will say—and do—anything to get close to a rock star.
    Scoogs, Crazee, and Dibbs surrounded me in the Rolling Stone shot but were dressed tamely compared with me. It was always that way. Our publicist, Pamela McCracken, knew it was my flamboyant personality that sold, so she showcased me whenever and wherever she had the chance.
    By this time, the relationships between us band members were strained, to say the least. We practiced, recorded, and performed together but virtually never socialized anymore. Things became so tense and fragmented that, in many instances, only one or two of us would take the official DeathStroke jet to various tour cities while the others hopped their own private planes at the last minute. To be honest, I was most often the one