Demons are Real?

Art by Andy Mister

by Steven Karl

It was evening. I was depressed. I was in bed, my secret Sony Walkman tucked under the covers. The lights were off. My parents were in bed. My sister had already been kicked out. Another hushed-up and closed-in night. Outside bats began to rise and fall while cats hunted voles. The moon a static smirk.

I clicked play and the opening notes of Slayer’s “South of Heaven” bombarded my ears—a steady death march. In secrecy, I had spent the entire week trying to learn the song on my BC Rich bass. I do not remember much else about this night, except that I awoke with my body plastered to the ceiling. 

It was definitely not a dream. At times, I can still feel it. 

My parents’ religion taught you how to fend off the Devil and his cohort of malicious demons. You had to repeat the good lord’s name over and over and then say Satan release me. In complete terror, I leaned into this religious incantation. I said these words over and over again. 

Then I dropped. 

The gravity of my body being slammed back into my body.

The weight. The force. 

So absolute in its terror.

So absolute in my horror.

I was back in my body. My clothes wore soaked through with sweat. I was shaking uncontrollably. 

*

Much later, especially with the phenomenal rise of the television show, X-files I would read a lot of alien abduction testimonies that are eerily like my own experience. But at this time, at the time it happened. I was certain it was a result of my evil manifestations. I was certain it was the Devil. Just as the Devil showed himself to Young Goodman Brown, he showed himself to me. I was certain that God let it happen. That God was sending me a message. The wrath of God, so devout in its violence. So serious in its terror. 

The reality is that I was brain-washed by my parents’ religion. Although I attended public school, I was not allowed to have friends who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were referred to as “worldlings,” the word always pronounced with a haughty disgust. I was to be “no part of this world,” which meant limiting interactions with those who were not witnesses. I kept my school friends a secret; our friendship only valid during school hours. It’s not like I could go to their houses, or attend birthday parties, or school dances, or join the track & field team, or drama club, or engage in any myriad of other ways to foster real friendships outside of “the truth.” That was what my parents and their associates used as shorthand for their religion. You hear something over and over from such a young impressionable age, even if common sense denies it—lurking in the deep of the brain, is always the phrase, “the truth.” The more I rejected the truth, the more I lived a lie. It’s a confusing kind of guilt that eats away from the inside out. 

*

I had a stockpile of thrash and metal cassette tapes that my friend Billy dubbed for me. Billy was unique in that he was once a part of “the truth.” His father and my father were good friends. Then Billy’s father, Bill Sr., got disfellowshipped, which means he was kicked out of the religion. No one was allowed to talk to Bill Sr. until he repented. “Bad Associations spoil useful habits.” I don’t remember why Billy’s dad was kicked out of “the truth,” but he never repented. 

Billy didn’t have to attend the Kingdom Hall again. Billy got to grow his hair long and became a core member of our school’s less-than-popular metalheads. Billy had numerous girlfriends, whereas the witnesses only believed in dating for the explicit purpose of marriage. But even with all of Billy’s newfound freedom, he remained sympathetic towards my situation. He’d once been there. 

Billy and all the other “long hairs” were into thrash and punk. I wasn’t allowed to grow my hair long, but I was into the music too. I kept metal t-shirts that I bought second-hand from kids in school, and a jean jacket filled with Metallica, Anthrax, and Testament pins in my school locker. 

Although I did not subscribe to my parents’ religion, I was forced to attend religious meetings of worship three days a week since birth. It gets to you. It seeps inside you. There was always a part of me that felt like watching Children of the Corn was a solicitation for the devil. That listening to Slayer was giving myself away to demonic cravings. I did it anyway. I lived in a constant state of anger and rebellion, but also terror and fear. Fear of getting caught by my parents. Fear of my double life getting exposed to the kids I hung out with at school. Terror that my parents were right. Terror that the Satan would come for me. 

*

On the bed, sweat oozing and my body trembling—still amid a mind wreck and driven to absolute panic I made a promise that I would walk the righteous path. Through God’s might Satan released me. The lord showed me mercy. I would leave the shadows and secrets behind. I would do my honest best to walk firm and upright in the footsteps of my father. I would be subservient and repentant. I would be the son my parents always wanted, not the one they were ashamed and disappointed by. I would be a good boy.

I tried, I really tried. I mean I really fucking tried. But it was not a promise I could keep. The more I attempted to be the Lord’s servant. The more I attempted to believe in religion and prayer and paradise the worst I felt. The self-hatred was indescribable. My face became a constellation of acne, there was a constant ache in my stomach like a rat gnawing on my gut. 

*

The vast majority of Witnesses were into the religion for the payoff of paradise. One of the main tenants of the religion was that only 144, 000 were going to heaven. Although the “how” was always vague at best—Witnesses believed with all their heart that eventually Satan would be put in an abyss and the physical earth would be transformed back into a paradise. The project of paradise was stalled when Adam and Eve sinned. But the earth would one day be transformed back into a place of verdant forests and blooms ablaze. A Garden of Eden gifted to God’s only true believers. 

And here’s the problem, my problem. I could not fathom living for all eternity with the Witnesses. It sounded like a fate of slow, never-ending torture. I hated attending the religious meetings, I hated how two-faced many of them were, I hated how I was repeatedly told to be “cautious” and “on guard” because reading novels, poetry, and philosophy were littered with the devil’s seeds. 

The Witnesses dream, my parents’ dream—their present-day sacrifices for some magical future in this imaginary paradise, was a reoccurring nightmare for me. I would wake up trembling and crying. Feeling trapped. Feeling lost. Suicidal. I tried so hard to be a believer. But I just wasn’t a believer. Ye of little to no faith. I no longer had my coping mechanisms since I’d given up listening to thrash and punk. I no longer had the respite of friendship and daily laughter since I stopped hanging out with my friends at school. I was all alone, surrounded only by witnesses, who I secretly loathed. 

*

A miserable year later.

I broke my promise.

A miserable year later.

I went the other way.

All the way.

The other way.

*

I got a part-time job at Getty gas station. One of many gas stations that lined the Black Horse Pike. In South Jersey gas was full-service, so it attracted high school and college students as well as the slightly older and significantly more disillusioned employee eager for seemingly easy part-time work. In my part of the world, students either worked in fast food, the grocery store, or the mall. I was definitely not mall material. Even for a place like Sam Goody, I simply wasn’t cool enough. Besides, my parents would never let me work at a mall. They knew it was a hub where Satan pedaled his latest seductions—endless trends and devotions to material pleasures. 

Most of the other employees at Getty were older than me. At night, when the gas station was mainly desolate, except for the occasional car, I started drinking shit-ass beer with Lincoln. Lincoln was maybe 19 or 20. At the time, we were the two youngest employees at Getty. Lincoln’s older brother, who was rumored to sell coke, would bring beer for us. He’d park his car. Crack open three beers and then launch into some completely made-up fantastical rubbish of machismo. Lincoln adored his older brother; I was kinda scared of him. We would drink mostly Yuengling and whatever that beer was with the fisherman and hooked fish on the can. Removed from my parents’ constant surveillance, I listened to whatever thrash I wanted to. I had missed out on so much music in my year away, my year attempting to be a good little servant of God. I let the music spill out of the boombox speakers FUCK-EVERYONE-LOUD. 

*

I started cutting classes and getting Saturday detention. Up to this point, I always managed to get A’s or B’s without bothering to study. Now I was failing classes. I was becoming Williamstown High School’s number one example of a wastiod. I was a shadow of my sister’s various rebellions, but for the first time I was openly leaning into my derelict desires. No more secrets. No more faking. I was ready for death. If it came at the hands of my parents, then so be it. 

Now, for really the first time ever. I honestly just didn’t give a fuck. If it meant the Satan came for me again, if it meant that my body would be plastered to the ceiling then so be it. That reckless and intoxicating freedom that comes when you no longer care what comes next. But my parents cared. They had had enough, so my mother kicked me out. They were not going to stand by and let me be a gateway for the devil. Not in their house. I was 16 going on 17. 

*

The gas station changed owners and I was the only one left. Everyone else either quit or got fired. Lincoln was the first to go. My friend, Rich—one of those “long hairs” worked with me at Getty. I had recently gotten him the job. 

My parents discarded me like a hot Ouija board. Rich’s sister was away at college so his parents said I could crash in her room. I never told anyone about waking up in pure terror, about being plastered to the ceiling. I knew it was real, too real, so I did the only thing I could, the only thing that made sense. I kept my mouth shut; I kept my secret a secret. Driven to utter madness from psychological despair, forsaken and smeared by the devil or abducted by alien beings. Who knows. What matters most, if one is lucky enough to survive a terror is what one does with the life that is left in front of you. The aftermath. 

That afternoon a haunted body walked into Rich’s house. Rich lounged on the sofa with his Ibanez guitar half falling off his lap. Sex Pistols pouring out of the stereo. We were surrounded by 5 or 6 friends when Jay came barreling down the stairs and crashed the scene. Completely winded, he told us that Overkill was playing at Bonnie’s Roxx in a few hours. It was a school night. Rich immediately vanished, racing up the stairs then another set of stairs straight into his parents’ bedroom. Half-smirked he returned and asked if I had any money. 

“Yeah.”

“Enough to cover me too?”

“Yeah.”

A few hours later we were piled up in two cars making our way through the dark streets of New Jersey. The roads barely visible beneath the flickering streetlamps. The world seemed to a fall away or perhaps just became inconsequential. The thrash music blaring from our car speakers felt like a force field as if we were tunneling through time—an adrenaline rush into oblivion. 

*

I’d never been to Bonnie’s Roxx. The club wasn’t anything special. Just a nondescript building in a row of nondescript buildings along the White Horse Pike. Although the show was all ages, the floor was gross and sticky with beer. Bonnie’s smelled of heat and sweat although it was mostly desolate when we arrived. We arrived too early and were left to mill around drinking Cokes and trying to quell anticipation. Each of us getting antsy in our own way. 

It feels ridiculous to say, but that club felt a bit like how I imagined heaven. My heaven, which was in such stark contrast to the Kingdom Hall. I’d been living a double life for so long presenting one version of myself to my parents and another to the kids at school. Suddenly, I was relieved of the burden. A faker no more. Now I was hanging out, going to shows, forming real friendships and coming alive for the first time in my life. Not that I was aware of any of that. It was my first ever thrash concert and all I could think about was Overkill.

I don’t remember the opening act. But I remember the house lights being turned off and just barely making out bodies as they walked on stage. Then in the darkness the sound of a distorted guitar rising and falling like a battle ax swung in slow motion followed by drums, guitar riffs and a bass riding on top. The opening seconds of “Time to Kill.”  The stage floods in lights and the music takes off warp speed. There are bodies being thrown around in the mosh pit. Exaggerated stomps, elbows swinging. Typically, I didn’t dance but the adrenaline got the best of me. There I was right in thick of it. My friends looked on shocked and astounded. A few wild stomps and I was completely unhinged. It didn’t last long. I got my ass handed to me over and over again. I was out of the mosh pit and off to the side of the stage even before the second song was over. When Overkill’s set finished, we drove home in silence. Each of us exhausted and still sweat glistened. The next morning, we yawned our way through 1^st period Algebra II—our heads split open and ears still ringing. 

*

I didn’t realize it then but that was the beginning of who I was becoming or maybe I was beginning to become whoever I already was. I was still confused and often prone to timidity. Still a bit of a faker, pretending to belong when I mostly felt otherwise. Yet, at night when I would lie in Rich’s sister’s bed in a house I didn’t grow up in, I was no longer consumed in fear. 

Never once did I feel like the demons were coming for me. Never once did I feel like I might be plastered to the ceiling or to wake up in bed sweating and shaking in utter confusion of some incomprehensible act done to me against my will. Slowly I was coming out of the fog of being brainwashed. My days were filled with the usual teenage immaturities: the crushes, the coarse jokes, small-scale acts of rebellion and our obsession with music. At night I no longer needed to sneak listen to thrash music in a contraband portable cassette player. Secrets that once defined me, secrets that once scarred me were no longer mine. I feel asleep eager to wake into another day. The morning light a ringing guitar in the distance; I was ready to rise. Ready to be young and foolish and stumble into whatever my life would become, surrounded by friends one song after another. Demons be damned. 

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