Ministry

by Jourgensen, Al

  Another perk to being in the institution was that I had more sex while I was in there than an all-star college quarterback. Here’s the deal: the second floor was drunks, third floor was male crazies, and the fourth floor was female crazies and nymphomaniacs. The fifth floor was a recreation room with a Ping-Pong table, pool table, card tables, and a TV. I would play the orderlies in black jack and beat them every fucking time. And in exchange they didn’t have to pay me money; they just gave me bathroom privileges. So I’d get all the horny MILFS and cougars from the nympho ward, and I’d fuck them in the bathroom. We were all completely wasted on the free drugs they gave us, and the staff totally had my back. I learned a lot about sexual technique while I was in the institution. It was before the age of AIDS, so I’d go down on these chicks and learn how to make them cum, and then I’d fuck them in all these different positions. We’d have threesomes, where I’d be fucking one chick doggy-style, and she’d be eating out another chick’s pussy. It was like Al’s private poon party.

  The only bad thing that happened there was when I talked back to a nurse because I didn’t want to turn off the TV. She must have been in a bad mood that day. The bitch wrote me up for insubordination and called the doctor, so I was given electro-shock therapy. They wheeled me into their little torture room, but they didn’t shave my head or anything; they just put the electrodes on my temples, put a biting plate in my mouth, and juiced me up. That sucked, man. I couldn’t remember anything at all for three or four days until my brain rebooted. I wouldn’t recommend that to anybody.

  The whole time I was in the institution my parents had no idea what was going on or how much fun I was having. I guess they felt sorry for me, so after a year they came up with this plan to rescue me from the institution and move the family to Breckenridge, Colorado. They figured if I was out of Chicago, maybe I wouldn’t be such a juvenile delinquent, so when I was sixteen my dad opened up a Montgomery Ward outlet out there, and we piled into the car and left. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my uncles or my friend Scott. I found out years later that he broke into an animal hospital when he was nineteen, stole a bunch of animal tranquilizers, shot up too much, and overdosed. By that time we had lost touch, but I was totally bummed when I heard the news.

  Moving from an urban city of eight million people to a town in the wilderness with ten thousand people was a major freak out, and I really had to adjust fast. I mean, living in Chicago, I had never been out of doors. I knew there was this place called Wisconsin—and I never went there. I was all about the city, and suddenly I’m in this place that doesn’t have baseball; they had Sasquatches, bears, and foxes—and skiing. Everyone was on a ski team, so I had to learn how to ski just to try to socialize. I was in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and during ski season the population skyrockets from ten to a hundred thousand. That was a mixed bag. I got to meet a lot people from different countries and get drunk with them, so in a weird way I became internationalized.

  But it also made me really fucking pissed. All of a sudden I couldn’t go to my local game room because there were so many tourists. I think that’s why I loathe music conventions like South by Southwest so much. When I was in Austin during the first South by Southwest I had to deal with the same thing—all these industry people and bands and music business wannabes clogged up every club and poured into the street like ants. I used to drive around, and when I saw some musician walking down the street I’d go, “Hey man, do you want a record contract? I have a record label.” They’d come up to the car and I would flip them off and yell, “Fuck you,” and then we would take off and go heckle some more musicians. I just wanted them to get the fuck out of my town. I had already gone through that in Breckenridge, when the entire world comes into your town for a few weeks. It just disrupts everything.

  I finished high school in Colorado, and the way the school was set up I would go to classes for an extra hour from Monday to Thursday and then on Friday I would have off—that was my PE day. I would get PE credit for skiing all day. We’d get a $40 special high school ticket, which gave us access to six different ski areas. So I’d do one run, get my ticket punched, and then sit on top of the mountain and do mushrooms and smoke pot. As long as my card was punched I had Fridays off and I could get wasted. But then at the end of the day I had to get back down the hill. I’d be completely wasted, tripping, seeing all these shapes, colors, and auras around people, and I somehow had to ski back to the bottom. It’s amazing that I didn’t kill myself bashing into a tree.

  It was a pretty crazy way to run a school. The extra hour of school during the week was early, and that was health class. I would get thrown out of that constantly for showing up wasted from the night before. It was total Fast Times at Ridgemont High shit. They would take one look at me and say, “Go to the principal’s office.” So really I would get thrown out of health class for being unhealthy!

  Before I got my shit together in school and started getting decent grades I decided to take a shot at being a professional rodeo rider. I figured that if it worked out, I could have a new career that would require me to wear a bad-ass cowboy hat, and if I fell flat on my face…well, it wouldn’t be the first time. I signed up for an amateur rodeo and rode a bull. I had pretty good balance from my years of sports and lasted all eight seconds. I thought, “Shit, this is easy! I’m going to be a rodeo star.” So when I was sixteen years old I joined up with a pro-am rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with a bunch of professionals and amateurs. I had my brand new chaps, cowboy hat, and long hair down to my waist. The other riders looked at me and went, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  Instead of welcoming me or encouraging me to do my best, they sabotaged me. Before my first ride they took a cattle prod and tasered the bull in the chute to get him all riled up. When the chute opened, the bull went ass over teakettle. His back legs went over, and he crushed me while I was on his back. I think it was the shortest ride ever in rodeo history—I lasted .08 seconds. There was an excruciating pain and cracking sounds like stepping on a pile of dry twigs; those were my ribs breaking. He crushed all of them and I slid off. And then he kept attacking me on the ground. He even attacked the clowns who were trying to get him off of me. I was gasping for breath, and blood was dripping out of my mouth. I was trying to crawl to safety, and when the bull was gone they threw me on a stretcher and took me to a hospital. One of my broken ribs punctured my lung, and doctors put me in a body cast. It took a month to recover from that, and during that time I reconsidered my options and decided I better finish high school and get into college so I had something to do with my life besides construction work or joining the military.

  I went from being a straight D and F student to attending class, studying, and getting As and Bs, so I had an overall C average. And over the summer after my junior year I worked for my dad to earn a little money. I got my Class D license to drive eighteen wheelers. I drove trucks around with his refrigerators and washers and dryers in the back, and oddly enough, doing that really got me into country music because I couldn’t find any good rock cassettes at the truck stops where I’d go to fuel up. All they had was Buck Owens, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash. I hated that shit before; I thought it was too whiny and twangy, real white trash redneck stuff. But I picked up a bunch of these tapes, and they totally changed my perspective on music. I realized it was actually a lot of the rock bands that were acting all angry and emotional and putting on airs. These country musicians sang from the heart. When George Jones sang about desperation to get to the liquor store or getting divorced and having nowhere to go, he was speaking from experience.

  The best thing I did in Colorado was move out from my parents’ house after a year. I got my own apartment. It was a shithole one-room place on the edge of Breckenridge, but to me it was a mansion because it was mine and I could tell my parents to fuck off. They protested and all, but to be honest, they were probably glad to be rid of me. I got a job working as a bartender by growing a r
idiculous, scraggly moustache and using a fake ID that made them think I was twenty-one. If they knew I wasn’t, they didn’t seem to care. That was the first time in my life I actually felt popular. I had my own place; I was hot shit. Chicks dug me because I would serve them at the bar even if they were underage.

  When I was looking at colleges, they all saw I had a C average, which isn’t great, so most of them didn’t want me. But my principal, who I had been serving drinks to all summer, found out that I was actually his student and that I wasn’t twenty-one and that I wanted to go to college. So he wrote letters of recommendation for me. I got accepted to four or five midlevel schools in Hawaii, Southern Illinois, and Northern Illinois.

  Now the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley campus, was unique because it’s a teacher’s college, which is what I wanted to do—before this rock thing got in the way. And the best part about it was there were eight chicks to every dude. When I found that out I was like, “I’m going to Greeley, man!” It was near Boulder, where there were places to see shows, and the school itself was nymphomaniac city. It was like a year-long orgy. The dorm, Harrison Hall, was co-ed, and these girls weren’t there to learn how to become great teachers—they wanted to party. We had threesomes and moresomes all the time; I used some of the techniques I learned from the nymphos at the institutions, and these chicks went wild. They had never cum so hard in their lives. It was a total rock-star life, and this was before I was even in a band.

  The first day of college my roommate, Pete, who was from New Jersey, came in with a gunny sack of fresh peyote buds. He’d gone to Arizona first and picked them. The buds taste nasty when they’re fresh; they’re gross when they’re dry too. But these were green and bulbous, so we threw them in a blender with chocolate milk and made peyote milkshakes. Peyote is the same as psilocybin, which is in mushrooms. It’s the exact same high, which is what they try to duplicate chemically with ecstasy and MDMA—it’s a molecular replica of peyote and psilocybin. So for anyone who’s watched Oliver Stone’s The Doors movie too many times and thinks peyote will take you on this spiritual journey and allow you to discover your inner self—no, it didn’t work like that for me. But at least I got to trip balls for my first week of college.

  After all the peyote was gone, my roommate went back home. He never went to class. I started going to classes and now had my own dorm room, which was like winning the Powerball jackpot. I pimped it up, put a waterbed in, and started renting it out to the chicks in the school who wanted somewhere to go to fuck their boyfriend. I needed to find something to do while they were using my room, so I started jamming in a band.

  I started out in a cover band, and we’d do songs by Aerosmith, Tommy Bolin, and Blue Oyster Cult. I played guitar and another guy sang. Like I said, I never wanted to be Robert Plant; I wanted to be Jimmy Page. Here’s the funny thing: Our name was Slayer. It started out as Rain Slayer. The bassist was the leader of the band because he was a lot older than the rest of us. He was twenty-six and we were all eighteen or nineteen. He came up with the original name, but I was like, “Dude, drop the Rain or I’m leaving. That’s Hobbit shit.” So we became Slayer. Then, much to my surprise, fifteen years later I find out there’s actually another band named Slayer.

  We practiced a lot and got gigs at these local clubs where the college girls would go to dance, and we would do three sets of covers a night. We tried to throw in an original every now and then, but we were booed; they wanted to hear songs they knew. So we stuck to the classics. I didn’t know anything about punk or alternative back then. It was all Skynyrd, Pink Floyd, ZZ Top, Zeppelin, the Stones—the good shit. We played this circuit around Colorado, which is called the three-point-two circuit because they served watered-down beer that was only 3.2 percent alcohol. They had specific bars for that. They paid us mostly in beer, which was okay because I was already making money from selling coke. And I got laid, so everything was cool. Except one night when I was returning from playing a Slayer show and I had five chickies in my 1977 Volkswagen Superbeetle, I got in my first major car crash. It was actually really cool: I got abducted by aliens.

  We were driving in the middle of bumfuck nowhere right in front of this nuclear reactor Area 51-type place, going about 110 miles per hour. I definitely had it maxed when this gigantic albino deer crossed the road. I didn’t have any time to react—just BOOM! The front of the Beetle doesn’t have an engine, so the car crunched like an accordion. There were no airbags back then, and there were five or six people shouting, “Are you okay?” The car was trashed, but somehow I was alright, and amazingly so were the five girls. But for years none of us had any recollection of what happened right after the crash. The next thing I knew, it was the next day and I’m waking up in my dorm room bed, which is insane because the car was not drivable. I didn’t even have any memory of having owned a car. My friend, who’s now an Alaska state senator, was like, “What happened to your car?” And I reacted like there was no car. I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He just thought I was being weird.

  From that point on I took buses and hitchhiked all over the place. Also, I was missing twenty-four hours of my life. It was just gone. It took me almost two years of asking questions to the girls who were with me that night to finally remember that we were even in a car wreck with an albino deer. All at once we suddenly said, “Yeah, yeah! I remember that!” I never got my car back. I don’t know what happened to it. And I’m sure there was some sort of alien activity that took place. These extraterrestrials took us somewhere and checked us out for a full day and then sent us home. Throughout my life these guys have kept tabs on me. I don’t know what they want, but whatever it is I’ll give it to them. I like these fuckers. I think they’re cool. I’m not scared. I just feel kind of impatient, like, “Whatever it is you’ve got planned for me, just do it. Let’s go.”

  Aside from the alien visitations—which continue to this day—I had the world sussed back in college. I was majoring in history and political science, and I actually went to class—usually—and sometimes even did the homework. Academically I was doing okay, and life was never better socially. But I needed money to fund my education and my collegiate lifestyle and I didn’t want to ask my parents for a handout, so I decided to start selling coke. I met this gay guy, R. R., who was from Coral Gables, Florida. He wanted to be a teacher, but he encountered a lot of intolerance and homophobia in Greeley. There was no gay scene there. People were very closed-minded. He was picked on and bullied, and he was fed up. I didn’t care that he was gay, so we became friends, which seemed advantageous because he had this massive coke connection down in Florida. He would hook me up with whatever I needed. While R. R. was at school I was sitting pretty. The drugs were flying out the door.

  But R. R. quit college after three months because he was getting harassed so much for being gay. Fortunately, he liked me so he kept dealing coke with me. My dealing days were not like sitting on a street corner in some ghetto whistling at cars; it was nice and clean and couldn’t have been easier. I’d score an ounce, go to six different fraternities, dropping off about an eight ball at each one. I’d be done within a half-hour, and I’d keep some for myself. It paid my tuition and seemed foolproof. I was hanging out at these frats, and they’re loving me because I’m hooking them up. It’s funny because I looked so out of place with these blue-blood, jock white boys. My hair was down to my ass, I was playing in a rock band, shooting cocaine at least every night, and drinking with these frat boys who were paying my tuition. It’s crazy the way shit works out, though, because while I was in fraternity-land I met the first love of my life. I was at the bottom of this ornate stairwell at a frat house in Boulder, which was the city I lived in after I left Greeley. I looked up and saw this girl who looked like a young Michelle Pfeifer. Her smile was pearly white, and her eyes were bright and mischievous but a little bit sad, like a puppy after her owner leaves the house. Her name was Shannon, and she was walking around with
her rich, boring boyfriend. When he went to get them drinks I went up the stairs, stopped next to her, and said, “We’re going to get married someday.” She laughed—not to mock me or anything—but she clearly saw humor and promise in the possibility. It was a small campus, so we kept in touch, and a few months later she left her boyfriend and we hooked up.

  Shannon was everything—smart, funny, hip, and totally into the counterculture. She worked at night as a stripper to fund her education, but she played the coolest music while she took off her clothes—the Ramones, Buzzcocks, Sex Pistols. Of course, I didn’t know what any of that shit was yet—I was still listening to Skynyrd and Zeppelin—but she turned me on to all this new music as well as stuff that was more underground.

  I actually went with her to see the Ramones on their first tour at Ebbets Field in Colorado. It was totally a case of the stars aligning. The band played in front of about twenty people, so it wasn’t a commercial triumph by any means. But standing in the audience with me were Jello Biafra and one of the Wax Trax! owners, and the band was amazing. None of us even knew each other back then, but as we met down through the years, we all found out we were at that show because it was an eye opener. The Ramones were a real inspiration for anyone who did anything with punk rock. The thing about them was they weren’t just fast, loud, and simple; they had melodies as strong as any pop group. Their main influences besides the Stooges and the New York Dolls were pop bands like the Beach Boys and the Kinks and ’50s girl groups like the Ronettes and the Supremes. That’s where I decided that hooks had to be a primary element in my music, and no matter how fast, dissonant, or aggressive as my songs got, I always made sure there was a glimmer of melody in there somewhere.

  Life with Shannon was pretty wild. She made me put away my Stones and Zeppelin records, kicking and screaming, and had me listen to crazy English shit like Public Image LTD, Bauhaus, Throbbing Gristle, and Joy Division as well as Krautrock like Can, Faust, Neu!, and Kraftwerk. We went to all these punk clubs, and the dudes who went to those places were pretty hardcore. I’d say, “Can’t we just take acid and listen to Pink Floyd?” and she’d say, “No. Get your ass up. We’re going to hang out with my friends.” Everyone there had Mohawks, shaved heads, or military-length haircuts. They didn’t take kindly to hippies with hair down to their ass. Whenever we went to one of these places I’d always end up getting in a fight, and some of these fuckers were rough as sandpaper, so I’d usually get my ass kicked. All I wanted to do was take drugs and listen to Floyd. So fuck it, eventually I cut my hair just to stop getting into fights. Well, that was part of the reason. My major motivation was the same reason guys end up doing shit they don’t want to do and later regret: I did it for pussy. I did it for love. I was crazy about Shannon. She was weird, funny, sexy, beautiful, and warm. She wasn’t addicted to anything. She was just a party girl and a stripper. But the funny thing is that I never got to see her strip. I tried to go a couple times, but I got too drunk on the way and never made it. But it didn’t bother me that she was taking off her clothes in public. My attitude was, “Well, you can look and shove dollar bills in her G-string, but at the end of the night she’s gonna come back home and fuck me.”