The Seven Deadly Sins Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  chapter 1 - In the Beginning—Or How I Learned to Love the Ceiling Fan

  chapter 2 - Wrath of the Con

  chapter 3 - Lust Disease

  chapter 4 - Bonfire for Vanity

  chapter 5 - Three-Toed Sloth

  chapter 6 - My Waterloo

  chapter 7 - I’m with Envy

  chapter 8 - Greedy Little Pigs

  chapter 9 - Glutton for Punishment

  chapter 10 - For Your Consideration. . . The New Magnificent Seven

  chapter 11 - The Dramatic Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  TO MY CHILDREN

  whom I hope I inspire ...

  TO MY WIFE

  whom I hope I endear. . .

  AND TO MY GRANDMOTHER

  who instilled in me the will to succeed.

  I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

  —MARK TWAIN

  Active Evil is better than Passive Good.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  Fuck it all and fuck it—no regrets. . .

  —FROM “DAMAGE INC.,” METALLICA

  chapter 1

  In the Beginning—Or How I Learned to Love the Ceiling Fan

  I always told myself I would write a book.

  I knew one day I would sit myself down and pound words into submission—spinning yarns, webs, and tales of days gone by, of woebegone afternoons tinged with bittersweet delights. I would hunch above the paper and weave in and out of fancy, hoping I would be the next Hunter S. Thompson. . .or at least somebody like Anonymous. But I also made a solemn oath to myself that I would try to write something not only of value but also something that had never been done before. I wanted to do the unthinkable: Bring to the world a whole new subtext, a wholly different genre. I wanted revolution in wood pulp. I wanted death in the sentence. I wanted to reinvent the word.

  Obviously this was not going to happen right away, and on some kind of masochistic level I was okay with that. I was still kicking emotional crabs out of my soul crotch, reaching for the razor while rinsing out the Rid. Anyone confused by that last metaphor can pat themselves on the back and walk away clean, so to speak. Anyone who has dated a stripper or lived with scumbags knows that scenario too well, and we have more than likely met at a survivors’ meeting or two.

  Anyway, between Tony Robbins and Dianetics, I really do not know what the hell is going on in the literary world today. People shill get-rich schemes on late-night TV disguised as tax dodges and government grant programs. “Celebrity” wannabes suck off traffic cops once or twice and are thrown book deals like fish to the porpoises at Sea World. When Paris Hilton can top the bestsellers’ lists, we are one more Connect Four move closer to Armageddon. I wish I were being funny, but I am clearly not. No one this awesome gets incensed for no reason at all. No one in my zip code anyway.

  I was hoping to have my shot at irreverence. I was hoping to be a shot in the arm for some kind of polysyllabic retaliation. Instead I am just hoping to keep from neutering the global book market. I mean, come on. What can I say that has never been said before? Between the Kennedys and the Royals, what could I possibly bring up that has never been uttered? Unless I plan on making up words, I might be lit out of shuck. Last time I checked, the written word has been around since those Celtic Hippies put little crazy tree symbols on anything flat and called it “Beowulf.” So therein lies my conundrum: Much like Cialis, what will I do when the time is right?

  Fast forward years later, when I found myself across a dingy wooden table from a mysterious learned man in an exotic locale, seated for a meal of foodstuffs called “sushi” in a dark and cursed land known as Los Angeles. It was in this dinette of Japanese comestibles that I was toiling over this tome you hold in your hands, and I had reached a point of no return when this man posited writing about the Seven Deadly Sins. Now I countered that the only way to do this subject, one that has been driven into the ground with derisive frequency, was to give it my own unique and cantankerous spin. He offered that in order to do that, I should start at the beginning.

  I thought for a second. Doing so would mean going in harder than I have ever allowed myself to do in the past. So I asked, “The very beginning?”

  He said, “Hey, those are my spicy tuna rolls.”

  “Oh, sorry. I thought they were my B.C.S. rolls.”

  “Do they look like your B.C.S. rolls?”

  “Well, if you squint and look at them from the side. . .”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Wait, what was the question again?”

  I know what you are thinking. You are asking what that whole last exchange has to do with anything. Well, I will tell you the very key to this whole disaster lies in that little tête-à-tête. For starters, they were indeed his spicy tuna rolls and, by fuck, do not forget it. But more importantly, it gave me a launchpad, an academic Cape Canaveral to blow my little Sputnik into the hearts of a world that might not be ready for this Great Big Mouth.

  From the beginning, huh? Insert long, dramatic sigh. . .and begin.

  For me, it all started one frigid bastard of a night in 1995.

  I was twenty-two years old, a hard-on with a pulse, wretched and vice-ridden. . .too much to burn and not enough minutes in an hour to do so. The year 1995 was a full 365-day year of drinking, fucking, lying, raging, and exploring. It was a time of self-shit: self-importance, self-absorption, self-indulgence, and selfishness. I was the only person in the known galaxy, and I wanted what the fuck I wanted sooner rather than later. The gift of life was horseshit; all I wanted was everything and I wanted it fast. There are certain mornings when I can still feel that year in my joints and the fatty tissue of my back. The crazy thing is that if I could do it all over again, I would, but this time I would take it even further than before.

  I was a drifter with no leash, no money, and no cares. I slept wherever my body fell, sometimes because I was exhausted, other times because the people I had gone to “the party” with just left me in the middle of nowhere. The thing you have to remember about “nowhere” is it is merely a combination of “now” and “here.” Grammatically I know that is incorrect, but if you have not spent your whole life in the Land of Nowhere, you do not know what the fuck you are talking about.

  When you are stuck in an insurmountable situation, things like sin and hell do not really cross your radar or increase the pressure in your moral barometer. You do not give a shit about consequences as long as you get off and get off hard. You have an image, of course, but unless the Holy Ghost himself comes up and points a loaded .38 at your face and compels you to repent, there is a rat’s ass chance in Hades that you would comply. These are the psychoses that fester when your world is a vacuum. Bring on oblivion, just do not change the fucking channel.

  In 1995 I was an absolute crazy person. I caught gonorrhea twice. I took to “stage-diving” off of van roofs and onto strangers in parking lots. I picked fights with douche bags openly brandishing guns. I set myself on fire at parties. You see, this was not Bridge Club; this was hopeless abandon. This was Mad Max and Gummo all rolled into one. Get it done before you drown in a river of shit was our motto. It did not matter: Too many of my friends were dying or going to jail. Pretty soon there would not be anyone left to throw a party. So do what thou wilt with the soul provided. If I was going to burn, it was going to be on my terms.

  Then one night in 1995, there was a party. I know that is a bit redundant because there was always a party. But this one was different. There was a stink like
destiny on the smoke. There was legend around the corner. And for some reason, I was always in the middle of it. To this day, I could not find this house on GPS if you held a gun to my head. I could not tell you the owner’s name if you paid me. But I remember the insides like it was yesterday. And it all started in the garage.

  I am getting ahead of myself. Let me set the scene.

  Every weekend the unclean would descend on a little building in West Des Moines called Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show, a tawdry little place that housed a karaoke bar, a concession area, four bathrooms, and the world’s single greatest movie theater ever. No stadium seating like you see today—just ’70s tables with ’70s chairs and all the ’70s ashtrays you could fill. During the week there was little fanfare—$1 movies reaching the end of their theatrical release and $2 Jell-O shots for caterwauling yuppies “singing” Huey Lewis covers. But on the weekends, this was ground zero. This was our turf because every weekend Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show presented The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  From all over Iowa, tribes of misfits packed the place. The movie did not really matter, you see. There was nowhere else to go. You had to be twenty-one to get in a bar, and this was the era just prior to the great resurgence of all-age shows. There were no youth centers (well, no youth centers you’d want to go to, and some were dangerous), and no one was legally allowed to gather in parks after the curfew, which I never bothered to learn. To quote Henry Rollins, “your choice was fish.” We were the greatest motherfuckers of our generation and we had nothing to do. So we turned nothing into something, mostly out of nothing at all. Billy Joe’s became the rallying point. Billy Joe’s became the catalyst. And we defended it with our own blood.

  Call one of us a fag, and we all threw down. Call one of us a loser, and you’d be dealt with severely. Just because you did not understand us, it did not mean we were wrong. We were amazing because we wanted to be, and fuck you if you could not keep up. We felt like the latest and maybe last great iconoclastic surge, and it did not matter if the world did not know our names. The world was not allowed to join our club.

  The party began at the theater, as always. We would pass the hat, buy as much shitty booze as possible, and eventually invade some house with a bit of room, a radio of some sort, and a lot of insurance. This night we managed to procure shelter from the storm in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, two-story, cookiecutter house in the suburban hell known as West Des Moines. That, as they say, is when the real fun began. In fact, to this day, people merely refer to the following series of events as The Night.

  I have faint memories for the first few hours: shots of Jager, vomiting, jumping on moving cars, more shots of Jager, smoking on a couch when I was not even supposed to be smoking inside, even more shots of Jager. . .it is always the nights you cannot remember that eventually become the stories you don’t forget. During a lull in the roar of the insanity, I made myself scarce to catch my breath.

  I found myself in the garage, smoking a cigarette, freezing my ass off, and sitting on an unforgiving metal folding chair in the middle of a concrete void. I was coming around again, the proverbial second wind, which was usually when I ended up doing the most damage. The halo of liquor was giving way to the horns of ingenuity, and I was reveling in the moment, sober enough to appreciate it and drunk enough not to take notes. Later I learned that you have to live in those moments, not for them. If you look too hard, they blow right by you. If you do not live enough, you will regret every breath. So I was reflecting, but not too much. I was just getting started.

  And as it turns out, at that exact moment, the starter pistol happened to walk through the garage door. For the sake of our story, we will call her “Beth.” She was a fiery-eyed, raven-haired miscreant from parts unknown, prone to wearing black and fluttering her heavily shadowed eyelashes. She had a pheromone about her that just screamed “lust.” And we had been flirting for weeks.

  Beth slid slowly through the door and stopped at the top of the stairs leading into the garage. As I looked up, she said something low and seductive. Being smoother than chocolate pudding, I fired back, “Huh?”

  “I said, ‘whatcha doin’, silly?’” Her eyes were burning with a cross between mischief and innovation. Something was on her mind, and God help me I wanted to know what it was.

  She came and sat in my lap and kissed me slowly. It was then that she revealed her plans: I was to be the lucky winner of a threesome with her and another girl who we will call “Kelly,” who was on the other side of the sexual spectrum but equally enchanting. As if on cue, Kelly came in the garage and sat on my lap as well. I have got to tell you, when two girls are straddling you like a pommel horse, you are subject to the will of your crotch. Lust is a lozenge I live to savor for days. But we will get back to that sooner than later.

  So let’s review: Our hero has just imbibed copious amounts of alcohol, thrown up, and has now been propositioned for a threesome with two comely vixens. Things could not look better, right? Well, as I have been shown time and time again, fate hates us all.

  We sequestered ourselves to one of the bedrooms, most likely the host’s parents’ room based on the Spartan layout and garish décor. But it didn’t matter what it looked like; the lights were soon off and pesky clothes shed in haste. Mouths found skin—those “sticky fumblings” that Hannibal Lecter described with such relish—and soon the three of us were a Chinese puzzle with no solution, a delicious triangle of heat and ferocity. The girls were giggling and moaning. I was happy for them to do what they wanted to each other, as I, too, was extremely busy.

  As this was taking place, a coup was being plotted downstairs. A bum rush was about to happen, the definition of that phrase being “a large group of people invading a space they were not invited to, nor has enough room to handle their numbers.” Forty people whispered and giggled, determined to inject themselves into our festivities, at just the right moment. It did not help matters that my best friend, Denny, was Cobra Commander behind this fiendish scheme, but it made sense because he was the guy I had appointed to watch the door so nobody would interrupt us.

  Well, just as three bodies were learning new ways to occupy the same space (and just when it was getting very, very good), the door burst open, the lights flew on, and a multitude of cheers and jeers sounded the great chorus that officially put an end to our sweet little tryst. Needless to say, I was very angry, but seeing the good-natured mischief on everyone’s faces, I slowly let that ebb from my mind and, climbing out of bed buck naked, proceeded to throw my soiled yet unfulfilled condom at the closest gawker.

  As I was putting my clothes back on and watching the crowd gathered at the foot of the bed getting larger, I had a magnificent idea. Maybe it was the booze coursing through my blood stream. Maybe it was my eyes still recovering from the shock of the lights being turned on. Maybe it was because I just wanted to give these fuckers a taste of their own medicine. But I had the idea in my head, and no one was going to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. It was simple: I was going to stage dive off the bed onto the big pocket of onlookers, and they would crowd surf me out the door and down the stairs to the bar in the kitchen, where I would make myself a drink.

  It bordered on ingenious. How could it not work? I was Corey Fucking Taylor, even then. So, pulling on my pants (I was at least that courteous), I leapt onto the bed and jumped. . .and flew head on into a ceiling fan that I had either forgotten was just above the bed or just did not see because of drunken tunnel vision. I swear to you, and this is not for comedic value or to belie any weakness on my part, this had to be the strongest ceiling fan known to humankind. I am talking industrial strength, folks. It hit me three times in the space of two seconds: once in the forehead, once right between my eyes, and the last bruised the tip of my nose. It gashed my head open and gave me two black eyes. I mean, one second I was the coolest dude at the concert, the next I was on my back trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. It was so fast that I did not even know it until I realized someone
was helping me, in a daze, off the floor. And God love my friends, they never told me how fucked up my face was, so I mingled amongst them looking like Rocky Balboa until I caught my own reflection in a bathroom mirror an hour later. I should have just carried around a sign that said, “Take a Picture with the Party Zombie.”

  I tell you this story not to brag nor to build up some kind of false image of myself. It is just very important to this collection of insights and incites that you understand right out of the gate that when I talk about “sin,” I know what I am talking about. This is no novice you are dealing with: Decades have not washed my hands clean yet. Think about this: In one night—hell, in one five-hour period—I experienced every single one of the so-called seven deadly sins. I was a mad-dog linebacker running the moral gamut of gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, wrath, envy, and vanity. And to this day, I recall this confounding chain of events with fondness and a knowing smile.

  Which brings me to the reason behind this book, a reason I have embraced like a summer romance. I have cleared my schedule and my throat to call all of your attentions to a fading little fact that no one wants to admit because they are so mired in habit and weird guilt. I know you can handle the truth. I know you can take a shot to the brain groin. I believe in you, so believe me when I tell you this.

  The seven deadly sins are bullshit.

  Everybody still here? Anybody convert to Scientology because I let fly that little nugget of reality? No? Then we may continue.

  For centuries, these so-called “weapons against morality” have been the big scary banners waved in the faces of millions. They have been used as the righteous fist packs by the Right or the Holy Brigade to keep masses of normally free-thinking, free-spirited folks under a multitude of firebrand thumbs. When the world seems to be jumping up and down and celebrating a little too much, fun-hating fuckfaces trot out these Golden Rules of Control to knock us all off of the Giddy Wagon. Why most of us cannot mind our own business I will never know, but I do know this: Nine times out of ten, sin is a matter of opinion, and in my opinion sins are only sins if you are hurting other people. So if you are not hurting anyone else, where is the damn sin?