Angelhead by Greg Bottoms Page A

spectacle.
    Michael’s decline, both mentally and physically, was astonishingly fast. He had gone from being a decent student and an amazing athlete to failing everything in the space of four years; had gone from being a black belt in karate—lithe, aggressive, handsome—to being a disheveled, Bible-toting one-man show in less than one year. The rapidity of his decline once he hit twenty—particularly his physical decline—caught us all off guard. His poor marks in school had nothing to do with aptitude, but rather with his shifting of focus. He had a mission in life and little time to pursue other things, even if people insisted these things—school, a job, friends—were important.
    His body softened dramatically, his hygiene could produce a gag reflex. Where he had once been inordinately handsome, he now had smears of blackheads across his nose, a double chin, greasy hair. All of this happened so rapidly that when I remember it I think I must be wrong, the physical deterioration must have taken two or three or even five years. But it didn’t. It all happened in only several months.
    He started smoking three packs of Camels a day, sometimes rocked back and forth uncontrollably in the school smoking section during lunch, looking up through his long bangs at the other dopers to tell them that Jesus loved them, loved us all, that none of us, if we would only believe, would ever, ever die. Eternity was real, he would say, as kids stubbed out their cigarettes and headed inside, laughing. By the end of the year he had the smoking section to himself.
    At home he locked himself in his room, smoked, watched evangelical preachers, Robert Tilton mostly, and
The 700 Club
until late in the night, lighting one Camel off another, the sounds of praise, the screams of rapture, brightening his face in blue light, leaking under his door.
    His teeth and fingers turned yellow from tobacco tar. He listened to Led Zeppelin, somehow finding a Christian message in it.
    He never slept—or if he did, it was maybe an hour or two at a time. He drank huge amounts of Folger’s (
only
Folger’s) instant coffee from a giant thermos.
    Sometimes he'd scream in the middle of the night. None of us dared check on him.
    We lived
around
him, not
with
him. He would go days without speaking to any of us. Get home from school, disappear over to Bill’s, get high on whatever was available, come home, whispering prayers, talking to himself, the voices and his thoughts his only company. He became the most dogmatically Christian drug addict ever, memorizing—
memorizing
—large parts of both the Old and New Testaments. Everything he said—which was very little—came laced with biblical quotes.
    When everyone was in bed, he lurked about the house, hung out in the garage, sitting in a lawn chair, smoking, talking to himself, puzzling over his strange and cruel distance from God.
    At two, three in the morning, he cooked, rattled pots and pans. He ate fried bologna, endless cheese slices, bowl after bowl of soggy cereal, instant grits, Wonder Bread, Vienna sausages, beef jerky. He stopped lifting weights and working out. He became as compulsive about eating as he was about smoking or drinking coffee or quoting scripture. My parents told him to go to bed; he told them to fuck off; they went back to bed because they had to get up for work, to start another one of their regimented days. They didn’t have time for this. They had busy lives. They couldn’t devote all their time to him.
    Michael gained thirty pounds in a matter of months. He wouldn’t shower unless my father insisted, often with the threat of not giving him any money.
    No one knew what was wrong with him. The counselors at school were predictably baffled. He refused to go to psychologists or psychiatrists, and my father subscribed to the shake-it-off, snap-out-of-it, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps school of manliness, so he wasn’t