I Love You, and Another Thing: Pure Fucking Armageddon!
by LC von Hessen
It was a full decade before I learned to stop associating extreme metal with a certain moon-faced McDonald’s employee from Missouri.
In the summer of 1999, I was a 14-year-old baby goth who listened to Marilyn Manson, wore blue lipstick, and read true crime paperbacks, the sort of kid who was destined to get harassed in the wake of Columbine—but that’s another story. I had moved to suburban Kansas the previous fall, an upper-middle-class town where the neighborhood landscape was as beige and lifeless as a disused movie set and my peers were constantly happy and upbeat for no particular reason. Unsurprisingly, they expressed a certain mixture of fear and tentative fascination toward me: a foreign creature who wore black shirts without brand names printed in faux-distressed ink across the front, who had a gleefully morbid sense of humor, and who didn’t attend church, much less identify as Christian.
In such an environment, I was desperately lonely: a romantic idealist of the sort that was “waiting for marriage” but wanted to lose her virginity in a cemetery. A peculiar little necromantic.
I met Tim in July at a week-long acting class on the theme of Edgar Allan Poe, which culminated in a playlet based on “The Masque of the Red Death.” He played the doomed prince; I played the Red Death. We both had last names reminiscent of certain Manson Family members, which was surely remarked on at the time. Prior to him, I hadn’t really known any “alternative culture” denizens beyond a metalhead in my 7th-grade geography class who once claimed in sardonic ‘90s deadpan that he and his girlfriend would cut themselves together.
Tim boasted about reading Mein Kampf and owned a paperback Necronomicon that he probably bought at the mall. He was two and a half years my senior, which was rather scandalous at the time. His wardrobe consisted of baggy pants and black metal t-shirts that he ordered from the internet.
The night I met him, he attempted to woo me online by quoting the lyrics of some song about Jesus Christ being raped in prison.
Our first date was at a mall midway between our respective towns. We were there to watch that CGI-bloated remake of The Haunting. At the food court, he shared some of his terrible gothic poetry with me, including one with a title in the vein of “The Final Night of Sodom.” Because I was naïve and wanted the boy to keep liking me, I told him I enjoyed it, even though I was consciously aware of how shitty it was.
As it turned out, our relationship—my very first—was primarily carried out through words: namely, the confines of AOL Instant Messenger, where his handle was an unintentional misspelling of the word “exhumed.” This particular medium combined the distance and detachment of letter-writing with the immediacy and false intimacy of phone conversations, distilling emotion to boxes of text and code. Naturally, our infatuation grew very intense very quickly and flamed out just as rapidly. The official span of our relationship was barely over a month.
One of Tim’s most beloved things was, as he put it, “death fucking metal.” He was a big fan of black metal as well: at the time I tended to distinguish them as the one with the shrieking and the one with the growling, hyperbolic demon-screeching on the subject of romanticized blasphemy and mush-mouthed gutteral sludge of unintelligible lyrics allegedly about comically-extreme violence. His favorite bands were Cannibal Corpse and Cradle of Filth, claiming that the latter’s song “Black Goddess Rises” reminded him of me.
While I was fascinated by an extremity of aesthetics and subject matter which I had never encountered before, I found black and death metal both impenetrable and slightly silly. Most songs Tim played sounded the same to me. Extreme metal’s instrumentals seemed to consist of little more than the repetitive rapid-fire mechanical clatter of machine guns and factory contraptions—both of which, ironically, were things that I would end up sampling for my own project when I got heavily into noise music and power electronics as an adult.
Tim was also fond of a band called Rorschach Test, which contributed to the soundtrack of a little film called Black Circle Boys that comes off as a sort of sanitized Dennis Cooper death fantasy with its alt-culture murderous teenage homoeroticism. Tim was apparently friends with Rorschach Test’s frontman, who recommended that Tim take Xanax.
Tim’s little brother was a child model. Their living room was dominated by a blow-up photo of the kid’s face poking out from a pile of autumn leaves. The first time I went to Tim’s house, he took me to his bedroom—which, as I recall, had a smeary pentagram drawn on the door in his own blood—and showed me the body-sized crawlspace built into the wall. He gave me some photos of himself with his ex-girlfriend obviously cut out, her hair and limbs and furniture visible off to the side, a vaguely-puffy female hand resting on his shoulder as he gazed at the camera wearing black lipstick with an inverted cross crudely daubed onto his forehead. Later we’d walk to his neighborhood cemetery and photograph each other in melodramatic poses against the gravestones.
We’d spend most of our time in the basement, eating pizza and watching horror VHS rentals. One of these was a gore-spewing b-movie by local director Todd Sheets, and Tim would later go on to “act” in one of Sheets’s films, an entry in the Zombie Bloodbath franchise, presumably shuffling around in shoddy whiteface with surplus cow parts dangling from his mouth while credited on IMDB as a generic “zombie.”
Tim was my first kiss—I believe it was during Evil Dead—and he was unsurprisingly terrible in nearly every way: bad breath, just enough second-day stubble to scratch, too much tongue and saliva. I thought I just didn’t like kissing until I made out with somebody else a few months later. Nonetheless, I was pleased to have somebody to kiss at all, and we once made out on top of the wet bar in his parents’ basement, where I could feel both his hard-on and his wallet chain pressing against my leg through our wide-legged jeans.
Tim was . . . contradictory. He proudly sent me an image of Mayhem’s crime-scene snapshot album cover and an mp3 of something called “Fist-Fucking God’s Planet,” yet was disgusted by the idea of going down on a girl. He loved Faces of Death and corresponded with convicted French cannibal Nico Claux, yet prudishly referred to his dick over AIM as his “ahem.”
Naturally he’d been diagnosed as bipolar: in fact we once had a chance meeting in our respective psychologists’ waiting room. He claimed he had been involuntarily sent to a mental institution twice: once for threatening to kill himself, once for threatening to kill his mother—though he was also a pathological liar, making shit up for no particular reason because he was angry or just flat-out bored. It should come as no surprise that he was manipulative with me, dropping casual lies about his drug use and sexual past, claiming that he “loved” me before we’d even gone on one date and telling me literally the next day that he wanted to kill himself. While we both shared interests in true crime and BDSM, he would drop casual remarks about his alleged murderous fantasies, which I suspect were largely for shock value: how many 16-year-old boys tell their girlfriends they fantasize about raping someone with a knife? As if he were some drug-free Ricky Kasso, some Hot Topic knockoff of Ian Brady.
Eventually I was dumped by email, dotted with stock phrases like “we’re going too fast” and “I’m afraid of commitment,” after which he got a rebound girlfriend with an IM name taken from a Looney Tunes character. I learned about this the following day on his typo-riddled Angelfire page. Her parents made her break up with him a few weeks later because he wasn’t Christian enough.
Around the same time, he’d started taking an introductory psychology class at a local community college: by the end of his first week he’d “diagnosed” me with schizophrenia. In just a couple of months, Tim had gone from “you – me – us – SATAN!!” and “I wanna fuckin’ kill everyone” to “all that goth hate-everybody-for-no-reason crap is for little kiddies,” claiming I was only “confused” and “attention-thirsty.” When we argued about how condescending he was toward me, he told me he’d showed respect for me because he could’ve raped me back at his house and didn’t.
So why did I want to stay with this asshole? Well, when you’ve never known life outside of the suburbs, when everyone your age smiles emptily while compiling wardrobes from the exact same store like a swarm of overly-tanned cultists, and when the short years of your isolated life already seem very long indeed, you genuinely don’t think there will ever be anyone else. And in fact, for years, there wasn’t.
Extreme metal was tarnished for a decade as a result of Tim, though recently I’ve started giving it another chance, largely thanks to my present circle of friends—who also contradict teenage Tim’s assertion that nobody stays goth after high school. Meanwhile I went in a different direction: around the time we broke up I was discovering Wax Trax!-era industrial bands. A few months later I listened to Throbbing Gristle for the first time, which changed the way I thought about music: both engrossing and deeply unsettling, it touched me in a way that Tim’s corpsepainted heroes presumably did for him.
rocktrauma 
