Satanic Bible on Interlibrary Loan


Can we allow one cliché? In 8th grade I pronounced it clich. 
"Oh you said that yesterday, that's such a clich." As if. 
The devil lurks beneath all small Texas towns, propelled by 
its music. A well of teenagerness could do it, something 
Radclyffe Hall's couldn't. The well could be one screech 
and scream a mile underground. In the middle of all of your 
friends. What I remembered was the check out slip, the 
carbon copy, my confident signature, the unfazed look of 
the clerk who looked at the title but who already had a 
scrunched face all the time and a wimpy name and a pale 
pale complexion, I didn't know if anything was different to 
him. In my head the interlibrary loan is swathed in snow. 
To drive you to not the devil's music but the library. 
Lighters in the air in the dark. Yes think of the saddest 
song ever but it's not dumb ok? No one's hair caught on 
fire. Moving on a ballad suspended on guitar solos that 
hung on a note that fell off the roof of the concert hall 
where I was headbanging with 4,500 headbangers. I looked it 
up: The Villarreal Convention Center hosted 4,500 revelers 
at the only Metallica show in the area with Cliff Burton 
who died two months later. I close my eyes and I can only 
see snow where there's no snow, The Satanic Bible on 
interlibrary loan, with its pink-paper-taped-badge-of-a-
sash, so I couldn't see the whole cover, stacked in my pile 
of books, some mine, some not, under a stereo playing 
Master of Puppets 24/7 before I knew what 24/7 meant. There 
is no snow in south Texas. There were the Matamoros murders 
that someone sort of connected to heavy metal but I never 
understood. You have to remember the vacuum of a well of 
loneliness, that's where this is all headed. Sort of like 
Alice in Wonderland, but really Laura Ingalls Wilder, one 
mile below sea level, permeating everything. I dreamed one 
of those wells in Little House on the Prairie with me 
inside with my ripped jeans and Reeboks copied off of James 
Hetfield. But he wasn't the one who said to go check out 
The Satanic Bible. It was Slayer but I didn't listen to 
Slayer. It was Ozzy and I did listen to Mr. Crowley but 
Ozzy wasn't my age.  I think back and all I can see is snow 
falling but there was no snow in the border. There were a 
lot of death metallers and that's related to Scandinavia 
somehow but maybe it wasn't snow, maybe what I'm thinking 
of is the whole town in one of those Xmas shakers, all of 
us in there as specks while the glittery flecks swirl 
around and I'm in there somewhere in some well, checking 
this book out. It was the light of the library I remember. 
Which is fluorescent light, which is like snow, but I 
didn't know what light the devil's music was. Someone was 
always saying devil's music and I thought maybe it was a 
dead scroll under the basement of every Catholic Church. In 
1986 in 8th grade I did what the title said I did. I did. I 
did. I did, to answer it in my dreams from here on ever 
after.  It was in the liner notes of so many. One day I 
said I will see, I will see, I will see.  Buried in folded 
paper in the cassettes. I looked for it at the bookstore at 
the mall. One day the postcard came that not Aleister 
Crowley's but Anton LaVey's book was in, The Satanic Bible, 
and my parents didn't see it, I got the mail that day. I 
got it and flipped through it and honestly it sat there in 
my pile of books with the Ayn Rand one I was reading for a 
scholarship essay, Judy Blume's Forever on interlibrary 
loan (look it up) and a stack of records. Reading it, I 
thought every thing would come together, every defunct 
water well shortened to level, the snow I think I saw 
disappearing in the disappeared, every cryptic evil line in 
every song I halfway listened to appear with its 
subliminals exposed, every pentagram come alive, it would 
all make sense once I read it, but I couldn't read it 
backwards, like how we tried to listen to Stairway to 
Heaven backwards for the line Satan, something Satan, which 
is what the video warning us against the devil's music 
said, but backwards or forward, nothing shocked me and I 
think that's what shocked me most of all,  made me wonder 
if the devil's music was already inside my head.