Executing a hygienic #2 at any scout camp in 1978 likely involved, at best, bearing down in a concrete block structure with active hornet’s nest. As dad was on the Scout Troop 150 cooking team, the rules of nepotism allowed me to use the toilet in the kitchen of the mess hall at Camp Rising Sun. The option was the loo of the mom’s cabin. Mom let me use it once but the other moms, who were more withholding with their boys, made mom-drama about it.
In general, she didn’t like the other moms, with their complex hair, echoing shaky, libertine mores.
I performed my morning necessity in the small white kitchen shitter bu the pantry while Dad cracked multiple 24 packs of extra large eggs under the vent hood into a really big skillet.
I was spellbound by the circulation fan. Head back, eyes up- hypnotized. “What-WHO is on the other side?”The mysteries that hung in the periphery of my imagination- all the angels, the UFOs, the cryptids, Chuck Mangione, God, Jesus Christ, faded in the periphery as i focused on the hum behind a circular grate installed into rough cut dry wall.
“What is up there?” I thought, the rest of the bathroom disappearing in a haze.
It came to me that it was 70s shock rock legends KISS rustling around in the ductwork. KISS occupied the space behind the fan, the space in my unconscious, and, with their bat’s wings, blood, fire and lightening, would come down and flay me on the toilet, leaving me in a bloody, smoking heap, sending my 10 year old soul straight to Hell.
Dad knocked on the door to see if I was okay.
From 45 years in the future, I’d like to answer, “Dad, I think I just had my first panic attack- do you have a Xanax?”
My first taste of KISS came on the playground at St, Elizabeth’s School. Classmate Brian reached into his pocket one day and pulled out a perfect recreation of their album “Rock and Roll Over” on tracing paper. The four of them, originally drawn by artist Michael Doret, each in a corner of their own cartoon hell, fiends coming at me like a buzz saw in the sky, sneering at me, inviting me into the abyss to suffer.
As he unfolded his work, my jaw dropped. A pink ridged kickball hit me squarely on the head, eliciting stars and a bloodied bitten tongue. I was supposed to be paying attention- I was in the outfield.
My team sang a lively round of “Little Wille Won’t Go Home”.
My brothers would assert that The Boogey Man would eventually get me. But I befriended The Boogey Man. We reached a metaphysical detente, became cool with each other. Not so much with KISS. I would fixate on them in the gatefold of Kiss Alive 2 at the neighbor kid’s house- raised on hydraulic platforms, engulfed in fire, damned entities I couldn’t escape. Destroyers of grade school Catholic theology. Vile creatures of an underworld that kept me up at night and made my little heart race at the thought of inifinte suffering. I’d repeat the Hail Marys over and over until I calmed or drifted to a thin sleep.
But they came back. On magazine racks, on TV commercials, The walls of Musicland, Paul Lynde Halloween specials. I secretly craved them before I’d even heard a note of their shitty music.
The devil wind from their storm front of corruption blew through my life, fascinating, unavoidable, entirely available.
The best line in this story is at the end, “before I heard a note of their shitty music”! I agree wholeheartedly. Their shitty music!😆😆