Dave Mustaine - Mustaine - A Life in Metal

I liked smoking pot, liked the way it made me feel, and so I started experimenting with it. From there I naturally branched out into alcohol and other drugs, and before long I was skipping school, killing entire days at my friend’s house, sucking on the Pringles can. My grades quickly suffered, and I started to see how you could associate with the wrong people and make bad decisions, and pretty soon your life could be spiraling out of control. Not that I gave a shit. I’m just talking about awareness and the fact that as an adult, and a parent, I can look back now and see where it all sort of began. But you have to remember: there were no serious ramifications—none that mattered to me, anyway. Getting high on a regular basis did not make my life noticeably worse. In fact, it made life tolerable.

More than anything else (and this is true of most kids, I think), what I wanted was to feel as though I fit in somewhere. I wanted to belong. Music helped with that. So did smoking pot. Each time we moved to a new house, a new town, a new school, I endured an indoctrination period. I learned how to deal with this in a variety of ways—first through sports, then through music and partying, and eventually by breaking free of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. There was no greater stamp of weirdness than to be associated with the Witnesses, and to escape that stigma I deliberately behaved in a manner that was inconsistent with the teachings of the church. My mom and my aunts and all the other Witnesses would warn me that I was destined to burn in hell if I didn’t clean up my act, but frankly I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away from them. I wanted some semblance of normalcy, whatever that might mean.

There were times when I felt like the sad hero of some fairy tale. You know the kind—where the kids are left in the care of an evil stepmother or stepfather, or some other surrogate caregiver who really couldn’t give a flying fuck about the kids’ welfare. And the dreary circumstances of my life seemed less appealing than retreating to some make-believe world in which all I had to do was smoke weed, play music, hang out with likeminded slackers, and maybe try to get laid once in a while. Music, in particular, was my avenue of escape—everything else just went along with it.

THERE WAS, HOWEVER,one significant problem associated with cultivating a healthy appetite for drugs and alcohol.

Cash flow.

By the time I was fifteen we’d moved into an apartment at a place called Hermosa Village (which was actually located not in Hermosa or Hermosa Beach, but in nearby Huntington Beach), across the street from Golden West College, where I would eventually take classes. When we moved in there, I lost some friendships and the easy access to pot that came with them, and so I had to figure out how to keep the grass growing, so to speak. At the time, pot was going for roughly ten bucks an ounce. So, with no consideration whatsoever given to consequences or moral conundrums, I borrowed ten bucks from my sister, bought an ounce of pot, and went to work. I rolled forty joints and quickly turned around and sold them for fifty cents apiece. In a matter of just a few hours, I had doubled my money. Now, I was far from an economics wizard, but I knew a good thing when I saw it. From that moment on, I was in business: a low-rent pot dealer who made enough cash to stay high and to put food in his belly when the fridge was empty, which was more often than you might imagine. Before long, the going price for a joint went up to seventy-five cents. Then a dollar. Then Mexican weed gave way to the more potent and expensive Colombian, which in turn gave way to rainbow and to Thai. The culture embraced pot smoking with increasing fervor, which was good for my wallet and maybe not so great for my head. I didn’t really care. I was home. All I needed was some dope and music, and some buddies to hang out with.

I remember seeing Reefer Madness at the old Stanton Picture Palace, a theater in my brother-in-law’s jurisdiction. There were virtually no rules there in the 1970s; you could drink and smoke as much dope as you wanted. And when the cops came, the owner would get on the public address system and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, so as not to violate fire codes, please extinguish all smoking materials now.” And then the fans would come on and clear the fog, and the cops would leave and everyone would light up all over again. What a great place! I saw Fritz the Cat there, too, and Gimme Shelter. I’d have my little two-dollar pipe and my bag of pot, and I’d sit there for hours on end, hiding out, watching the movies. That was the culture. That was my life.

Mom naturally approved of none of this, and I can’t say that I blame her. On more than one occasion I’d be getting ready to leave, to go hang with my friends or play some music, and I’d have to alert my mother to the possibility of a delivery.

“Uh, Mom?”

“Yes?”

“There’s a good chance this dude will come by around three o’clock. He’s going to pick up a package. It’s in my room. Just give it to him. And tell him I need twenty-five bucks.”

Mom would look at me like I was insane. “What exactly is in this package, David?”

“Doesn’t matter, Mom. Just give it to him. Really, don’t worry. It’s cool.”

Remarkably enough, she went along with it. At least for a while. It’s hard not to love your kids, I guess, even when they’re making your life miserable.

Eventually Mom had had enough. Unable to reconcile my behavior with her own religious beliefs (and no doubt dreading the day when the cops would break down the door and arrest all of us for drug trafficking), Mom moved out of the apartment. I was not invited to join her. I was fifteen years old and, for all intents and purposes, totally on my own. An emancipated minor.

Fortunately, the two guys who ran the apartment complex wound up being terrific customers of mine. So if I was a little short on cash when it came time to pay the rent, all I had to do was broker a deal. A few joints here and there usually settled the issue and left everyone happy and high. By this time I was no longer just dabbling in the field; I was moving a considerable amount of dope. And I had no problem with it whatsoever. Here’s the truth of the matter: when you’re a hungry fifteen-year-old with no viable means of income and no parental support or supervision, you don’t have many options. You aren’t old enough to get a real job, so you have to be more… creative. Desperation fueled my entrepreneurial spirit—that and the knowledge that if I didn’t sell dope, about the only other way to make money was to sell myself. Peddle my ass. I knew enough kids who’d gone that route, or at least had heard about them, seen them working the streets, and there was no fucking way I was going to let that happen.

Under the right circumstances, though, I didn’t mind trading sex for drugs, or drugs for sex, or whatever. There was, for example, a girl named Willow who worked at a music shop at Westminster Mall. We got to know each other through my frequent visits to the store, during which I’d wander around for hours, thumbing through the stacks of vinyl, trying to figure out what I wanted to listen to next, whether there was some way to advance my knowledge. I was a pothead and a dope dealer, but I really did love music, and I wanted to be a great guitar player—I just had no idea how to make it happen. Eventually I struck up a friendship with Willow, who was maybe a year or two older than me, and the friendship evolved into something else. In exchange for free dope, Willow would give me free records. We’d smoke the dope and listen to the records while having sex at my apartment. Not a terrible arrangement, all things considered. It was Willow, after all, who gave me my first AC/DC album, a gift that kept on giving for years to come, long after we’d stopped having sex or even seeing each other casually.