Dave Mustaine - Mustaine - A Life in Metal

“How long before the feeling returns?” I ask.

“You should have about eighty percent within a few months…maybe four to six.”

“What about the other twenty percent?”

He shrugs. The man is all Texas, in movement and delivery. “Hard to say,” he drawls.

There is a pause. Once more, nervously, I try to squeeze my hand into a ball, but the fingers are unwilling. This is my left hand, the one that dances across the fretboard. The one that does all the hard creative work. The moneymaker, as we say in the music business.

“What about playing guitar?” I ask, not really wanting to hear the answer.

The doc draws in a long breath, slowly exhales. “Aw, I don’t think you should count on that.”

“Until when?”

He looks at me hard. Takes aim. Then he hits the bull’s-eye. “Well…ever.”

And there it is. The kill shot. I can’t breathe, can’t think straight. But somehow the message comes through loud and clear: this is the end of Megadeth…the end of my career…the end of music.

The end of life as I know it.

“No more of that shit in my house! You understand?”

FLIP THROUGH A STACK OF SCHOOL YEARBOOKS FROM MY CHILDHOOD OR ADOLESCENCE, AND MORE OF TEN THAN NOT YOU’LL FIND ONE OF THOSE GRAY SILHOUETTES, OR MAY BE EVEN A BIG QUESTION MARK-THE GREAT SCARLET LETTER OF YEAR BOOKS!-WHERE MY PHOTO SHOULD BE. LIKE A LOT OF KIDS WHO BOUNCE AROUND FROM SCHOOL TO SCHOOL, TOWN TO TOWN, I WAS FREQUENTLY ABSENT AND THUS BECAME SOMETHING OF A PHANTOM, A SULLEN, RED-HAIRED MYSTERY TO CLASSMATES AND TEACHERS ALIKE.

THE JOURNEY BEGAN IN LA MESA, CALIFORNIA, IN THE SUMMER OF 1961. THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN, ALTHOUGH IT’S POSSIBLE I WAS CONCEIVED IN TEXAS, WHERE MY PARENTShad lived during the latter stages of their tumultuous marriage. There were two families, really: my sisters Michelle and Suzanne were eighteen and fifteen years old, respectively, by the time I came along (I often thought of them as aunts rather than sisters); my sister Debbie was three. I don’t know exactly what happened in the years between the two sets of children. I do know that life unraveled in a great many ways, and in the end my mother was left to fend for herself, and my father became some sort of shadowy figure.

For all practical purposes, John Mustaine was out of my life by the time I was four years old, when my parents finally divorced. Dad, as I understand it, had once been a very smart and successful man, good with his hands and head, skills that helped him rise to the position of branch manager for Bank of America. From there he moved to National Cash Register, and when NCR transitioned from mechanical to electrical technology, Dad was left behind. As the scope of his work narrowed, his income naturally declined. Whether this failure contributed to his escalating problems with alcohol, or whether alcohol provoked his professional failures, I can’t say. Certainly the man who ruled the Mustaine household in 1961 was not the man who married my mother. Much of what I know of Dad was passed down in the form of horror stories from my older sisters—stories of abuse and generally insane behavior perpetrated under the shroud of alcoholism. There are snapshots tucked away in the back of my mind, memories of sitting on Dad’s lap, watching TV, feeling the razor stubble on his cheeks, smelling booze on his breath. I don’t have memories of him not drinking—you know, playing ball in the backyard, teaching me how to ride a bike, or anything like that. But neither do I have a catalog of despicable images.

Oh, there is one—the time I was down the street, playing with a neighbor, and for some reason Dad came strolling up the driveway to take me home. He was angry, yelling, though I don’t recall the exact words he used. Something about me being late. What I do remember is the sight of the channel locks in his hand. Channel locks are like pliers, only bigger, and for some reason I guess my father felt like he needed them to corral his four-year-old son. Or maybe he was working on something in the garage and forgot to put them down before setting off. Regardless of the motivation, the channel locks were soon taking a big bite out of my earlobe. I remember screaming and Dad seeming oblivious. He dragged me down the street, never releasing his grip as I stumbled and fell, then scrambled to my feet, trying to keep up, hoping my ear wouldn’t just rip right out of its socket. (Do ears have sockets? I was a little kid—what did I know?)

Over the years I’ve generally defended my father against the allegations of abuse. But I have to admit—this particular incident does not serve as much of a defense. It doesn’t exactly reflect the actions of a sober, loving daddy, now, does it? But sober is the important word in that sentence. I know better than most that people under the influence are capable of unspeakably bad behavior. My father was an alcoholic; I choose to believe that this did not make him an evil man. A weak man, perhaps, and a man who did some bad things. But I have other memories as well. Memories of a benign man smoking a pipe, reading the newspaper, and calling me over to kiss him good night.

After the divorce, though, my father became a monster. Oh, not in the literal sense of the word, but in the sense that he was referred to by everyone in my family as someone to be feared and despised. He even became a weapon to be used against me, to keep me in line. If I misbehaved, my mother would yell, “Keep it up and I’m going to send you to live with your father!”

“Oh, no! Please…no! Don’t send me to Dad’s house!”

There were periodic reconciliations, but they never lasted long, and for the most part we were a family on the run, always trying to stay one step ahead of my father, who supposedly was devoting his entire life to two things: drinking and stalking his estranged wife and children. Again, I don’t know if this was accurate, but it was the way things were portrayed to me when I was growing up. We’d settle into a rented house or apartment, and the first thing we’d do is run down to Pier 1 and get a roll of crummy contact paper to turn the shithole of a kitchen into something usable. Things would be quiet for a while. I’d join a Little League team, try to make some friends, and then all of a sudden Mom would tell us Dad had figured out where we were living. A moving van would show up in the middle of the night, we’d pack our meager belongings, and like fugitives we were on the run.

My mother was a maid, and we lived off her salary along with a combination of food stamps and Medicare and other forms of public assistance. And the generosity of friends and relatives. In some cases I could have done with a little less intervention. For example, it was during this period of transiency that we lived with one of my aunts, a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Very quickly this became the center of our lives. And trust me—this was not a good thing, especially for a little boy. Suddenly we were spending all our time with the Witnesses: church on Wednesday night and Sunday morning, Watchtower magazine study groups, guest speakers on the weekends, home Bible study. Then I’d get to school, and while everyone stood with their hands over their hearts during the Pledge of Allegiance, I’d have to stand quietly with my hands at my sides. When the other kids were singing “Happy Birthday to You” and blowing out candles, I’d stand mute. It’s hard enough to make friends as the new kid in school, but when you’re the JW freak as well…forget it. I was a pariah, always getting picked on, always getting smacked around, which really hardened me.

I remember going to work one day with my mother, in a very wealthy neighborhood called Linda Isle in Newport Beach. There was a little sand pit near the boat dock, and a group of boys was tossing around a football, playing a game that is sometimes referred to as Kill the Guy with the Ball, although in the politically incorrect world of adolescent boys in the early 1970s, it was more commonly known as Smear the Queer. These guys were all bigger than me, and they took great joy in kicking the shit out of me, but I didn’t care, and I had no fear. Why? Because by this time I’d grown accustomed to getting knocked around in school, and disciplined by aunts and uncles, and harassed by a variety of cousins. I blamed almost all of it on the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I mean, the fucking insanity of having a brother-in-law or uncle spank me because I supposedly violated some obscure rule of the Witnesses. And this was all stuff that happened under the guise of religion—in the service of a supposedly loving God.