Chapter Text
PART ONE
1965-1986
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In Which Your Hero’s Humble Life Is Turned Upsidedown; Includes Meditations On DnD, Metallica And Murder, ; Also, Your Hero’s Most Unpleasant Altercation With The Law
I.
I was born a week late on the 13th of May, 1965. Herman’s Hermits was at the top of the charts and the Vietnam War was raging. Maybe I could foresee the events of my life and wanted to hang on to a peaceful nonexistence for as long as I could. The first thing I saw, after the blasé face of the Obstetrician, were the bland walls of Arnett hospital in the cornfield that is Lafayette, Indiana. After the doctor swung his scalpel and severed my umbilical cord I was bestowed the name Edward Damien Munson. Edward after my grandfather on my mother’s side, a car mechanic from Jackson County who was unfortunately crushed beneath a station wagon; Damien after my grandfather on my father’s side who was drafted in 1943 and never made it out of the Pacific Arena of World War Two, literally biting the bullet at the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Sometimes I wonder if the circumstances of my life might have been less disastrous if I had been named after people who had not been struck down early by painful deaths. Perhaps if I had been dubbed Agnes Mildred Munson after my grandmothers I could have lived a life full of cats and love affairs with the local priests. Then again my father was named Felix, derived from the Latin word fēlīx which literally means ‘lucky’, and he spent most of his life in and out of prison for armed robbery, fraud and arson among various other enterprises. Maybe I was destined for this life, name aside. Maybe when I didn’t come for a life of hard crime, the crime came for me. What’s in a name, and all that.
Besides Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting one other person whose moniker truly encapsulates who they are and always will be, and that was Grigori ‘Terminator’ Johnson. Looming over most of the yard at more than six feet tall, Terminator was a middle aged man from Ohio whose mind oscillated between frantic paranoia that the Russians were after him and a separate set of memories when he would assume the identity of his pursuers. During episodes of violence he was physically unstoppable unless multiple correctional officers were there to subdue him. Not only was he tall, he was broad, too. He had some big arms on him. Both of my arms combined equaled one of his, plus an extra arm on top of that. They were enormous, he probably did push-ups for breakfast. He would march around the yard with a hand to his ear––perhaps listening for orders from the Soviet headquarters––speaking in some garbled attempt at imaginary pseudo-Russian and within the next hour be threatening to punch the lights out of some guy for ‘looking like a commie’. His physique, his face––which remained expressionless as a plank of wood for as long as I knew him––and his proclivity for taking long strides through the yard lead to the other inmates at Indiana State Prison nicknaming him Terminator.
The threat of violence followed Terminator like a bad odour. You had a chance at reasoning with a sane person: bargaining, logic, et cetera , but Terminator’s motives and actions could not be predicted. He would kill you because the Russians told him to. If there is one thing I learnt from my years in prison, it’s that able-minded people don’t usually commit the sort of crimes that put you on death row. Terminator shot and killed several people in cold blood during a Fourth of July festival and when civilians began screaming and running for their lives, he dropped to the ground to do push-ups. By the time the police apprehended him security cameras revealed that he had managed to get in three reps of fifty. What’s in a name , and everything, but Terminator certainly lived up to his. The same gentlemen who nicknamed Grigori gave me a moniker too, but that is a story for a later time.
For better or for worse, I came into this world as Edward Damien Munson, Eddie for short. My mom is a gamine face with wild brown hair in my memory, who wore T-shirts and denim overalls and read books to me to help me fall asleep. Listening to her steady voice in the low lamplight narrate A Wrinkle in Time and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with all the different voices are some of my only warm memories before Hawkins. Bruises coiled around her shoulders like rat snakes, spilling from the cuffs of her short sleeves whenever she reached for a dish towel or the green hose in the backyard. When my father was not there the radio would be on at all times. Simon & Garfunkel, The Carpenters and The Bee Gees permeated most of the stations with their isolated vocals, airy harmonies and smooth disco falsettos. We liked them well enough, but a haircut in 1970 would forever alter my relationship with music.
When the other boys were turning up to elementary school with coiffed high and tights or shiny bowl-shaped locks, I was rocking a short bob with bangs since my head could grow hair. Every few months my mom would sit me on a fold-out chair in the backyard and give me a haircut. Unlike a certain brunette bombshell from Hawkins, my hair didn’t need expensive hair products and always fell in a really chic, natural way. The radio could always be heard from the kitchen and she would hold my head still while my shoulders boogied to whatever was playing, laughing. These haircuts would be the gateway to my passion for––and, let me be honest with you, Dearest Reader, obsession with––punk rock and heavy metal music. What came to be known as the ‘Unholy Trinity’ debuted and released influential records during this time: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. The zing and thrum of the guitar, the emphatic rhythm of the drums, all these there like nothing I had ever heard before. The vocals weren’t lilting lyrics waxing poetic about stuff I knew nothing about (romance and disco), they were raw and forceful. They sang about being lonely, about being poor, about feeling low. But the music was fast and vigorous, listening to it made me feel alive. Led Zeppelin sang about Queens and princes, horses’ thunder and dragons in ‘The Battle of Evermore’. Robert Plant laid down vocals like no other. He was not subtle, when critics bashed him he only screamed louder.
Black Sabbath was my favorite. At school I would close my eyes and imagine the riffs in ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Iron Man’. I was dying to get my hands on a guitar, but we just couldn’t afford one. Not to mention it would probably fall victim to my father’s fickle moods. Instead, I memorized every song they released inside and out. This was before I knew musical logistics, so instead of staffs, clefs, notes and time signatures the inside of my mind looked like a lot of sound and fury. I have to thank the ingenuity of my young self, as these long hours of training in my youth allowed me to evade insanity in prison’s SHU (that’s the Solitary Housing Unit, to you). When trapped in a windowless room six feet by nine feet by nine and a half feet high with nothing to look at and nothing to do, imagining a Dio concert does wonders for the mind. Holy diver, you've been down too long in the midnight sea, and so on and so forth. In a time of great need music was there for me as a form of meditation, you could say. I think for my mother it was the same, and that’s why she always had the radio on when my father wasn’t there to throw a fit.
The thought of her leaving our small yellow house with a suitcase rolling behind her gives me a stomach ache, or at least it did for several years after. I never actually saw her leave, but that didn’t stop me from imagining it. My father was a fire-starting, gun toting crook, so I was not surprised when one day she didn’t stand for it anymore. What surprised me was that she didn’t take me with her.
That was when I was ten. It took one year for that living situation to unravel.
On a hot and dry day my eleventh summer on this earth I was found wandering shoeless down a quiet road adjacent to the Wabash River by a cop. Ambition for adventure is what I would like to say this was, but in reality my father had not been home for several days and I was hungry. My officer companion did not listen to my excuses about the cereal running out, especially when my instructions home led him to park on a pothole-pockmarked road in front of a small yellow house with the front door ajar and no one home. He was also eyeing my rogue haircut, which was at this point a buzz cut with longer strands around the ears and neck. I had returned home from playing in the woods—with my mom gone there was no one to tell me to go to school––and caught him in an unfortunate mood. He had pushed my head into the kitchen sink and haphazardly buzzed away my long hair, calling me words I didn’t fully understand and reeking of whiskey. Down the drain went my hair, and with it any hope my mom might return to take me away with her.
When a call back to the station supplied the officer with the information that this was the abode of known felon Felix Munson, who had spent the night in the drunk tank and could not pay bail for a charge of aggravated assault the night before, I found myself uprooted and repotted in the much smaller, tight-knit community of Hawkins, Indiana. That is how I came to live with my father’s brother, the only family member who would take an otherwise unwanted eleven-year-old child, my Uncle Wayne.
My relationship with my Uncle reminds me of the rapport between Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn in Charles Portis’ True Grit, in that Wayne is the reluctant father figure to my troubled and admittedly ‘off the rails’ youth. When I was dropped off on his front door with nothing but the clothes on my back he seemed unsure of what to do with me. He grunted and waved me in to give me the grand tour.
‘Bathroom’s that way,’ said he. ‘Don’t flush and let the sink run at the same time or the plumbing’ll come back up.’ I came to realize that he was a man of few words. My first morning in Hawkins, he made me a hot breakfast of bacon, eggs and waffle fries which I dutifully vacuumed up at a speed that would put professional food eaters to shame. The whole while he stared silently at me from overtop a copy of that day’s Hawkin’s Post. When I finished he pushed another plate of bacon towards me. All my eleven-year-old mind could think was what a feast!
‘Coffee?’ Wayne offered, to which I obviously accepted. I had never had it before, but why stop the roll now? While I sipped the hot coffee (no sugar or milk because I was too afraid to ask and Wayne didn’t know to offer because that’s how he always drank his) he took up a pair of scissors and gently snipped away the long strands my father had left. Thus, my first full day in Hawkins I resembled a shrunken Full Metal Jacket character rather than a slightly fleshier Gollum.
No one ever found out that I had missed almost a year's worth of the fifth grade in 1975. When all the Hawkins kids were whizzes at pre-Algebra, concepts like multiplying fractions might as well have been an alien language to me. Naming the differences between Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes?––forget it! My Uncle had a lot on his plate with his long hours at the power plant in addition to suddenly having to provide for a miniature human, and the teachers most likely assumed I was stupid. To be fair I didn’t give them much reason to think otherwise, as I quickly gave up on trying to catch up when it was so easy to be ignored at the back of the classroom and retreat to the music stored up in my head.
Uncle Wayne had brought home a guitar for my thirteenth birthday and I had been practising religiously ever since. It was bashed up and the plug to the amp had to be twisted clockwise a few times until it worked, but it was perfect. That guitar was all I could think of when I was at school. I had even signed up for the middle school talent show that was to take place at the end of the year.
Blocking out Mr. Stapley’s sermons on The American Civil War was a top priority for Gareth Jones as well, but while my attention on music gave my eyes a glazed-over look, his were firmly planted on the book in his lap. Gareth has always been a big reader, his puckish face buried in the pages of some novel or another, fluffy curls hiding his furrowed brow like a curtain. The two of us stuck out at Hawkins Middle School, our hand-me-down wardrobes (his consisting mostly of red shirts of the flannel variety and mine a handful of plain black T-shirts scavenged from the local Goodwill) marking us apart from the GAP and J.Crew the hallways brimmed with. Birds of a feather we were, and it wasn’t long before my obsession with music had him hooked on Black Sabbath’s Sabotage album. When he picked up the drums we actually sounded pretty decent playing together in his garage. His name was added next to mine on the end of year talent show and together we made Corroded Coffin. We didn’t place even though our music was much more interesting than Jessica Simmons’ gymnastics routine and to this day I believe we were snubbed. While I got Gareth on the music he tried to get me invested in his pile of science fiction: John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up and later Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , for instance, but words on pages didn’t light the same fire under me that they did for him. I also suspected that I knew about half the words he did, my rampant truancy in Lafayette coming back to bite me in the ass.
My reading abilities might have stayed at a fourth grade level forever if it weren’t for a discovery Gareth and I made under the bed of his other brother, who had left Hawkins to pursue dentistry in Michigan the September prior. Besides a load of dusty junk, it turned out Gareth’s brother had quite the haul hidden beneath his mattress. Several books, all dog-eared and worn, velvety bags filled with dies that had more sides than the polygons in Mrs. Perkins’ geometry class, and notebooks filled with descriptions of imaginary characters. Until then, music had been my single focus. That summer the two of us combed through every Dungeons & Dragons rulebook and every Choose Your Own Adventure we found underneath that bed. The Queens, princes and dragons that appeared in Led Zeppelin’s music were what DnD was all about, and I was immediately captivated. We were too small of a group to start an actual campaign with just the two of us, but we enjoyed it all the same. Escaping into the fantasy worlds we created, away from how we were supposed to speak and act and appear was exhilarating. The performing arts teacher let us hang out on the stage after school hours, and our group slowly grew with the additions of Jeff Baker and Grant Clarke in eighth grade. Jeff smiled more than anyone I had ever met, maybe because he could never completely close his mouth on account of how goddamn crooked his teeth were, and Grant could do a mean electric bass line. The summer before freshman year we started calling ourselves The Hellfire Club.
My first encounter with Steve Harrington was violent and unavoidable, which does a pretty nifty job at setting the precedent for how our lives would intersect repeatedly without warning as often as Stephen King describes women’s breasts as ‘healthy knockers bobbing’. The Hellfire club was having a meeting on one of the picnic benches on the grassy knoll behind the high school cafeteria, hidden away from the prying eyes of staff and students alike. It had rained that morning, and although the sky had cleared patches of muddy water still covered the field. We were organizing a campaign for the coming semester, eager for something to focus on besides actual school assignments. The jump from middle school to high school was already taking a toll on me, homework and reading assignments piling up. Money was also getting tighter as gas prices went up, forcing my Uncle to take on even more hours at the power plant.
‘Would Aboleth be too similar to the Abhorrent Overlord?’ Grant mused.
‘As your benevolent DM it’s my job to worry about that,’ said I, running a hand through my hair. I had started growing it out from its number three and it was beginning to hang in front of my eyes. My dream was to look like Eddie Van Halen. Gareth and Jeff began squabbling about something from our previous campaign and the four of us burst into playful banter.
‘I can’t believe you killed the dragon with your nat twenty,’ Jeff hadn’t been able to stop mentioning how he couldn’t believe Gareth had killed the dragon by launching into its sphincter and emerging out the other end completely unscathed thanks to a lucky roll.
‘That’s Gareth the Great for ya,’ said I, before the board in front of us was flipped sky-high, sending pieces and notes scattering every which way by a foreign hand.
‘Well if it isn’t Eddie. The. Freak.’ I looked up to see Tommy Hagan with his polo shirt buttoned all the way and a smug smile on his face. Behind him stood Carol Perkins smacking gum, itching to witness her boyfriend dish out some torment, and Steve Harrington with his arms crossed. Moments like these were frequent occurrences during our first few years of high school. We quickly learned to avoid people like Tommy H., but when they grew bored they began to actively seek us out to create conflict. It wasn’t until my first run through senior year, when I began getting a little bit of a reputation, that those folks started giving me a wide berth.
What ensued on this particular day was a flash of movement, a cuff to Gareth’s eye socket from Tommy and a twisted wrist in retaliation, followed by an elbow to the gut of yours truly. I didn’t get the chance to fight back—I was regrettably thoroughly winded—because my eyes had caught sight of Harrington jumping forward (at the behest of Tommy’s squeaky ‘get it! Get the book!’), to snatch up one of our manuals. To understand how devastating it was to watch Harrington drop the manual into a nearby puddle, to stand by as the three of them laughed and stepped on it as they left, you have to realize that one of the reasons we were outcasts was because we didn’t have as much as them. None of us could afford new clothes or textbooks for school, let alone a thick Dungeons & Dragons manual. The book had also been filled with our own notes that had been written up over the course of the past several years. It was an original from the collection found beneath Gareth’s brother’s bed. Summa summarum , we were pissed.
Conflicts between Hellfire and Tommy H.’s clique continued like this until my junior year when the three of them graduated. All I could think about was how their bribed test scores and daddy’s money probably got them rides to fancy colleges where they could forget about Hawkins. That wasn’t even a possibility for me. I had no money saved up for college because everything we had went to rent and putting food on the table. Besides, with the grades I was getting it would be a miracle if I even graduated high school. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t even jealous of Harrington’s McMansion in Loch Nora. I was just angry that he never seemed to realize what he had. I resented him for being a push-over, for doing whatever Tommy wanted him to do. We weren’t even people to him. I wasn’t a person to him, then.
That’s a funny thought.
He hated me when I was no one, but turned out to be one of the very few people who didn’t want me dead a few years down the line when Eddie Munson became a household name.