When I was 14….
Well let’s go back to when I was 10, I guess.
I was a big fan of John Lennon and David Bowie and Elvis Presley.
But I had a condition..
Dexterity/motor skill problem.
I still have it to this day.
my hands are always shaking, And I exhibit the penmanship of a toddler to this day
I found an old guitar in my grandma‘s closet while we stayed with her in Los Banos before we moved to Reno Nevada From San Jose California.
My grandma and grandpa did not know how the guitar even got there in the first place, but they were old and maybe one of them bought it at one time and forgot.
I asked Grandma If could take the guitar.
I think the guitar was called “Aslin Dane. Ariel Pro III…”
This unique strat-style guitar seemed older than the redwoods my family had recently said goodbye to.
That was when I was 10….
We lived a normal life in Reno after that and we all loved the high dessert and mountain air.
I was 14 and now and we were assimilated in northern Nevada.
I had spent four years trying to even play a chord or a note on this mysterious guitar and ground my fingers away on it daily, but my hands were too shaky.
I couldn’t write a song.
I couldn’t do anything.
I prayed to God, even though it was a joke.
I didn’t believe in angels or God or the Bible.
My parents are both atheist my father is a man of science.
I grew up as an atheist I had no religious disposition at the time.
Subsequently, I got into heavy metal, dark hair, dark music and occult Ouija board shit. Not because I believed in anything really, but because I thought it was cool.
I was like: “there’s no god anyways so I might as well just be dark as I can be”.
it was a phase.
It was a fad.
So, arrogantly, I came home one day.
I still could not even pretend to play the guitar and I was angry because I thought I deserved talent.
So…. midnight one night, I decided to take every family album; every picture of myself that I could find in the house, my yearbooks throughout the years. I took these pictures and I drew pentagrams on my forehead and crossed out my eyes.
I then lit some candles and I said: “I know there’s no god, because if there was a god I would be able to play this guitar”
….I swore allegiance to the devil if he would come right now and show himself and make me able to play.
Maybe five minutes after I said this out loud and had lit the candles and did the séance…
Well, i should say that it must’ve been 2004 and there were zero electric vehicles at the time.
Though there weren’t electric vehicles in those days, I would describe what I heard and five minutes later; slowly prowling up to the front of my house, as an electric car.
It sounded like a heavy piece of metal moving with no engine.
Almost like how the Jetsons ship sounds.
And then I immediately started to sweat cold sweat.
The candles were still lit and I swear…across the wall in front of me, I saw an anthropomorphic face… A devilish face, cast a shadow that spread across my closet doors in front of me.
I was like “well at least the car stopped and they went somewhere else” because another five minutes later it was silent.
Just when I thought the coast was clear, I heard the rickety glass screen door being pulled open from our front door. It was an incredibly heavy and loud outer-door… But I didn’t hear the actual wooden front door, or anything like the locking mechanisms, nothing like that. So I thought it was just the wind blew this the heavy glass door wide open, so abruptly.
After five minutes or so, I heard heavy footsteps in the house, spaced between at least 30 or 40 seconds.
They were coming up the stairs to the second floor where my bedroom was.
I used to sneak out and smoke pot with my neighborhood friends, so I knew the spots on the staircase to avoid and it seemed like whatever was coming up there, purposely stepped on the loudest parts of it…like they knew the house as I did.
Another five minutes in silence, I just think that I’m imagining it all, but then….I start hearing footsteps 30 seconds apart.
Heavy footsteps, taunting me, by stepping on the loudest parts of the sub-floor underneath the carpet of the second landing.
I tried to convince myself it was a dream, but I was too alert and conscious of what I was trying to summon.
I could not have slept that night if you paid me $1 million dollars.
I was wide awake and terrified.
So…these footsteps came down through the hallway, to my door and they stopped loudly
I’m thinking to myself “why won’t my dad get up? I want my mom get up.
Nor did my brothers awake nor my sister…aren’t they terrified too?’
10 minutes passed. I didn’t hear anything.
Then just as I was saying “phew” and wiping the sweat from my forehead; I heard three loud knocks; “boom, boom, boom.”
I was like ‘this is not happening right now!’
I tried to get up to turn the candles off and shred the Satanic photos I made of myself, but I’ve never been so afraid and I was unable to move.
“Boom boom boom!’
it was always three knocks… each set louder and louder, until at least 6 or 7 AM.
The next day, of course, I was still awake and only opened the door when I heard my family having breakfast.
I went downstairs and I literally shoved my older brother while he was sitting having eggs and hashbrowns at the table and I accosted him and I said “what the hell man? Why were you banging on my door all night?
He genuinely had no idea what I was talking about.
My dad‘s room was only 5 feet across the hall from where I was, and my sisters room was literally a foot away from my door to the left.
Nobody heard anything and they looked at me like I was crazy.
I felt I was crazy.
I had just stayed up all night listening to this thing pounding like a fireman or policeman at my door and that was when I first genuinely Said a prayer to God.
Two or three weeks later I casually picked up the old creepy guitar that was still in my closet….And I could play.
I mean, oh, boy could I play.
But there was nothing inside of me that was cheerful about this new gift that I was given.
And I always knew from then on out that it was a curse.
Since then, I have become a protégés guitar, bass player and singer.
But every time I write a new song, there is a shadow of my soul standing over me.
I try to think that, since I didn’t open the door for Satan; that God has rewarded me with the gift to play, but I know that my gift is a curse and I may either already be in hell or I am going that way soon.