Emerald eyes, redhair like wild fire

Medea had stunning red hair, the kind that you can't get out of a box prepackaged from the store. Red as red was intended by whatever or whomever put us on this planet to beautify or destroy it at will. Her face was pale white with a galaxy of freckles, her smile as contagious as the flu. Her sunny disposition lent itself easily to any situation but when she was sad the whole world seemed to cry along with her.

Born into a North Carolina farming family she seemed destined for greater things, but having parents that thought only in matters of practicality, breaking out of the household and into the vastness of the world seemed next to impossible. Enter an asshole like me. Homewrecker, barbarian, hedonist. Some people are better off when I'm not around, and she was one of them......

I was sitting on the couch, stoned, watching Tool videos, hungover from last nights foray into the wilds of Raleigh, North Carolina. My bands performance at 'Axe to Grind'-a makeshift death metal club that used to be a pool hall-had been notable of sorts. During the first song I screamed so long and hard that I blacked out, collapsing onto the stage, cracking my head on the edge of the bass drum. I arose seconds later-felt like days-blood trickling down the side of my face, leering like an insane rapist on a killing spree and launched into the vocal of our opening number 'Fucked with a baseball bat'. Cavorting about the stage like a monkey on crystal meth, I climbed speaker towers, threw myself into the outstretched arms of the audience and writhed on the floor while spewing out the demented lyrics:

"Assaulted epiphany encroached and wrapped in bloody barbwire, creeping in the hedges where the lights will never find me, swallowing a tablet and finding where I'm at, this is where death finds you: fucked by a baseball bat!"

Yeah, I never claimed to be a poet but I could growl and scream like a motherfucker. My band, Toxic Orgasm, had been touring around the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area for about a year, making more enemies than friends because of our violent, destructive shows. Clubs were getting wise to us and after six months we had been banned from Chapel Hill altogether, but Raleigh still had a few clubs we could violate. We had a guitar player who always wore a tattered woman's robe and jerked off at least twice in a forty minute set, a bass player who always wore some kind of food as his costume-peanut butter was his favorite-and a sampler/sound effects engineer that suspended himself over the stage with hooks inserted in rings pierced in his back. No one could say that we weren't original...

My roomate, Tab, introduced me to Medea. She was his sister. He didn't think for a moment that I would be attracted to her, judging by all the sleazy skanks I drugged and screwed on a nightly basis, but there are some things in life that just can't be depended upon, taste being one of them. She lit up the room like a neon sign, and when I offered her the joint I was smoking she pulled on it like it was the elixir of life itself, expelling a cloud that nearly filled up the entire room. I smiled, asked her if she would like to sit down.

Four hours later I was in her car and headed to her parents house in a small town three hours south of Raleigh. During the day we had talked about everything from politics to religion, and she told me of the church she attended, one that was multi-denominational and accepted everybody. I asked if it accepted Satanists and she laughed, told me I wasn't a Satanist and that no, you had to believe in God to attend. Maybe it was her smile, or her red hair, or all the dope I smoked, but I wanted to go with her, wanted to check it out. In all honesty I couldn't care less about the church, I just wanted to go where ever she was going, and that seemed like a good way to break the ice: meet her family, go to her church. I may have been a diobolical fuckhead but I still understood that there were some things in life that were sacred.

Her mother welcomed me warmly but her father was another case altogether. At the dinner table Medea's younger brother didn't want to eat his peas and when he sassed his father the man got up from his chair and in one smooth motion removed his belt from his pants, grabbed the boy and bent him over the table, delivering the blows that would leave welts on the kids ass for a week. As much as I loved the dishing out of required punishment this actually shocked me. The father was like a well-oiled machine of discipline. He had been back in his chair only minutes later, forking another porkchop into his bearded face, asking nonchalantly if I would pass him the gravy. It was a move that would haunt me for the rest of my stay, one that warned me to watch how I treated his daughter, leading me to question if my motives were self-serving or not, which they were, of course, but it just brought the question to the forfront of my mind. Everything I did was for me and me alone. Even in my band I did everything with my own best interest in mind; I couldn't give a fuck about the rest of the guys. Eat, drink, fuck, kill...that was my motto. You can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned.

But Medea, well, she brought something else out of me completely, an urge to share, to give, to make someone happy other than myself. It was kind of creepy.
At her church I was greeted with mixed reviews. My full body tattoo's didn't go over too well, along with my shoulder length black hair and many facial piercings. I could have worn clothes that covered the ink, but that wasn't my style, to pretend to be somebody I wasn't. As the preist looked on, laughing and cavorting demons carved into my chest poked fun at him and his establishment, made him feel as if he were being challenged by Satan himself. In a way, he was, because when I am in a church I feel nothing but spite, anger, revulsion. I wish I could watch everybody's head explode in a choreographed ballet of brainsoaking beauty. First every other head in the front row would explode, followed by every third head in the second, then a zig-zag pattern in the third, followed by everyone's in the fourth row and so on. At length, the service was over and I hastened to find my way outside to smoke a joint and reflect on all that I'd witnessed.

Medea found me huddled against the back of the church, and she took the joint from my hand and smoked it down to a tiny ember.

"Let's go for a ride." She said.

In a field a few miles from her home I took her, or maybe she took me, that is up for debate, and in the heat of passion I told her I loved her. It was her warm green eyes, her flowery scent, the way her mouth curved in a giant frown as climax took her....

She drove me back to Raleigh the next day because I had a show that night and I was sad when she said she could not attend as she had to get back home to her family. I promised I would call her, soon, and she smiled and kissed me, told me that she knew I would.

The show that night at The Green Beast marked the end and the beginning of Toxic Orgasm as we knew it. An A&R rep from Road Runner records caught the show and signed us to the lable over beers and shots of cheap whiskey. Within a weeks time we were whisked off to L.A. to record our debut album and then put on tour with Cannibal Corpse and GutRot. We toured Europe, Australia, The Netherlands, South America, China....all of it a blur of faces and endless crystal meth and crack cocaine binges. Somewhere in there I called Medea, as I hadn't even had a chance to say goodbye to her before I left. Her mother answered the phone.

"Hello, is Medea there?" I asked in a voice cracked and ragged from shouting screaming and smoke inhalation. I was leaning heavily on the payphone as I had a groin injury from falling off of a twenty foot speaker column.

"No she isn't." Her mother said remotely. "May I ask who is calling?"

"It's Dirk." I said and I could feel tenticles of ice surge through the phone and wrap silently around my neck.

"She waited for you to call." Her mother said quietly. "She thought you were very special."

"Yeah, I was gonna but, ya know, one thing kinda lead to the other and..." I felt stupid, my own voice sounding fake, my own life like an endless joke on me.

"They tried to save her, they really did, but that many sleeping pills, well, we didn't find her in time. Even if we had the hospital is six miles away. There really is no telling..."

'Yeah, sure, I understand." My voice sounded hollow, I longed for my glass pipe. "Well, sorry, um, take care..."

I hung up the phone and stared darkly at the wall for a moment, conjuring up her face in my mind. The galaxy of freckles, the dimples so deep you could get lost in them, the eyes so green they sparkled like emeralds. A choked sob issued from my throat and died there, tasting like bile and the residue of free-base. Life is sometimes as intangible as the feelings we have, as improbable as the various chemical reactions that put us here in the first place. There are things in this world that are bigger than we imagine ourselves to be, reasons as elusive as the questions asked. When all is said and done, the show must go on....