Like Blood from a Stone: Ch. 01

"Alex? Honey? Are you awake?"

The sound of my mother's voice rang throughout my mind, as if she had been calling down the vast barrel of a shotgun after a wedding. It was a sound I never knew I expected to hear, nor did I expect that I wanted to hear, either, especially with everything that flowed through my veins at the moment. But her voice was thence followed by the soft continuous beep of a heart monitor, and I knew that something had happened. I had done something awful, and something awful enough to land me in a place that wasn't my bedroom at my parents' house.

I was a young boy, lay flat upon his back in the narrow vessel of a hospital bed at the far end of the children's wing, and he had not a single clue as to what had happened up to that point. I was a young boy posted up away from the world at large with nothing more to glean than the pain in his head and the scrape on his palm.

Something had happened. Everything had gone all black.

My eyes had flickered open and I latched onto her own face, her eyes rested behind a pair of half-moon glasses; a firm full feeling had appeared on the right side of my forehead and onto the crown of my head. There should have been a deep pain there, however it had faded out to something that made me think of a rock stuck inside of my skull.

And then I remembered what had happened. It all came back to me in a quick hasty flash and a breath up the side of my head and my shoulders. The weight of the world and everything that made me who I was, all encapsulated within the gash on my head.

She called me again, this time in a much louder voice.

"Mom?" I opened my eyes a bit more, only to find something that obscured my view of my mother's face from the right side. "Mom, what happened?" I gasped and coughed so hard that my whole entire body shuddered and shook from the fall. It wasn't much of a fall from what I could remember but I did take quite the tumble along with the rest of my class down those stones on the hillside.

"It's okay, bubbeleh," she whispered to me, to which she stroked the other cleaner side of my forehead. "You have to rest for a while, though."

"What happened?" My voice broke: the full feeling in my head trickled down the rest of my face, as if she had cracked an egg upon the crown of my head.

"You fell, dear," she cooed at me, to which she kept on stroking my forehead. "Remember? You and your class were at Indian Rock yesterday and you fell."

"I did fall," I muttered. It was right then that I remembered it as if it had just happened, as well: I had climbed up the side of the rock with a couple of my friends and then my foot slipped or something. They tried to help me but I wound up dragging them down with me. Everything after that was impenetrable blackness, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital in my mother's arms and with a helmet of gauze wrapped around my head for a couple of days.

I missed school that Friday and everything.

And I knew the fall was to leave a deep mark on my head, but it was a miracle that I had survived it, even as they released me in the middle of the day on Saturday and I lay down in my own bed that night.

Since the incident, Indian Rock had been fenced off to the public and no one could go there unless they had permission from the city, and I knew that the fall that nearly killed me had a lot to do with it, if not then my friends' parents had said something to the people running the whole entire place. I had no idea about the whole entire story, as to who else wound up in the hospital with me.

And to top everything else all off, by the time I hit thirteen years old, I stood there in my parents' bathroom over the sink basin with my hairbrush nestled in my hand, something on that particular side of my head caught my attention. At first, I thought it was nothing more than the reflection of the bathroom light over me down upon my hair, given it had grown out rather long, down to my shoulders at that point, and it carried a nice full curl near the edge of my shoulders at that point. But as I brushed it on that side, I noticed it again. All I could think was a small piece of my hair shone too brightly, or perhaps I had some blond streaks coming in courtesy of the sunshine. Something I didn't expect to happen, especially since my hair had always been jet-black throughout my childhood.

But I knew something was off when I kept seeing it over and over again, even when I brushed the left side of my head, and even more so when it fell out and landed onto the side of the sink basin. This tiny curl rested upon the swirled porcelain of the basin that I knew was of a completely different color as it so much as lay there.

I glanced down at it and I picked it up.

My hair was a rich jet-black coal color, very much like that of a hard rocker throughout most of the Seventies. When I picked it up and held it between my index finger and my thumb for a better look, I noticed something rather off about it. The black color had faded out to a soft silvery tone.

A single gray hair.

At first, I believed that it wasn't my own, especially when I had shed a few other hairs in the meantime. No way I was about to be fucking reprimanded for something as trivial as leaving hair in the bathroom sink basin, but I had saved this one for last, though. I switched off the light and headed into the living room to show it to her.

"Mom?" I called out.

"Yes, dear?" she returned the favor to me. I doubled back out to the hallway to show it off to her. She peered over her half-moon glasses at me as I made my way into the living room.

"What's that?"

"I found this while I was brushing my hair just now," I told her. "Just lying in the sink basin." I handed it to her and she nudged her half-moons up her nose for a second look.

"Oh. A gray hair. Well, it must be one of your father's."

"Dad's completely bald, though," I pointed out, and she glanced over the rims of her glasses at me, albeit with a thoughtful look upon her face.

"You know, I was getting gray hairs by the time I was eighteen, bubbeleh. It's just a part of life. Just a thing that happens."

"But I'm fourteen, though."

"Tell you what," she started again. "If you see any more of them, don't pluck them because more will grow right in their place. We'll find you some black hair dye in the meantime, too."

Since her promise, more gray hairs did in fact come in, right there at that singular spot at the crown of my head, and right where I hit my head from the fall, too. By that time, I started taking my first guitar lessons with Satriani; and the streak had only grown to of considerable size, a singular plume of gray the size of my pinky finger, right over the right side of my forehead. No one really knew about the true origin of the streak, from a mutation to a scar to a birthmark on my hair, but I had my questions and curiosity about it, much like how I had my curiosity about other things.

When I joined my first band, The Legacy, at sixteen years old, I knew that thing had set up roots on my head and it was there forever. What struck me as peculiar, aside from the fact that it had even showed up in the first place, was the fact that it grew in a singular plume. The rest of my hair was a helmet of solid black waves and tiny tight ringlets.

I thought about wearing a hat more and more since my parents had never gotten black hair dye for my hair, either. But other than my yarmulke, I had no other hats at my disposal.

When the five of us went into the studio to record our first album together, I had taken my spot there by the door of the sound room and with one hand rested upon the right side of my forehead to hide it from any onlookers. I saw myself age by about fifteen years from having gray hair already, and it didn't help matters that I still had to do my homework every night, either. At least until school let out.

No way I was about to drop out during my junior and senior years, though, all to go out on tour with a band that had just formed.

I lived in a time in which every person alive seemed to be catering to me and people my age. On one hand, as a sixteen-year-old boy right smack in the middle of the Eighties. I had to have the large poofy hair sprayed beyond recognition and my nose sozzled full of the ripest form of cocaine if I wasn't already hiding it from my superiors; on the other hand, I had to shed the long lush curls and become a good Christian boy who abstained from any sort of drugs or from listening to Kiss and Van Halen.

Ironic given I walked around with a knit yarmulke stuffed in my back pocket, even after I turned thirteen. Even more ironic given I only smoked a cigarette all of twice this year and the taste of it alone was enough to make my stomach turn.

But then he took his spot next to me, on my right.

He was almost identical to me, as if he had been my elder brother in another life. His long smooth mousy brown hair sprawled over his collar bones and when he smiled, it showcased his prominent chin as well as a cute little dimple on one cheek. I had only ever gone out with one girl before but I never thought I would find myself feeling attracted to boys before.

"What's up with you?" he asked me with a gesture to my hand upon my head; he had the slightest Long Island accent, an accent I had heard many a number of times growing up with my parents having relocated over to the Bay Area from New York City. He didn't have that bold, distinctive Jewish mannerism to him, however.

"My head hurts," I quipped back at him.

"Not enough water?" he teased me.

"Yeah..." I replied reluctantly.

"Yeah...?" he retorted back to me. "Would you like a drink of water?"

"Please. I haven't had anything to drink since this morning, anyway."

He sauntered across the floor for the water cooler and one of those little paper cups for me. He filled it up with two lanky fingers: I looked on at the seat of his pants. He did have a nice shape to his derriere, but then again, it served as nothing more than my own idea of what a guy's ass should look like. I was more acquainted with that of a girl than anything, so my guess was that he had a very nice ass. He doubled back with it nearly full all the way, and then he hesitated right before me.

"How old are you?" he asked me.

"I'm sixteen--I'll be seventeen this September, though. Seventeen and a junior."

"Oh, cool! I just turned seventeen. Heh. I'm a senior."

"I'm jealous," I retorted back to him.

I didn't think to use my non-dominant hand for the cup; I took my hand off of my head and he almost dropped the cup right onto the tiles between us.

"What?" I asked him.

"Wow," he remarked. I froze, with my mind blank.

"It's real," was all I could muster out right then.

He blinked a few times at the sight of it. "Oh."

"Yeah. It's big."

"No, no," he swore to me with a shake of his head and a wave of his free hand. "I kind of like it." His bright eyes locked onto the streak and he showed me a small smile. "It's kinda cool looking, actually."

"Oh?" I raised an eyebrow at that. "You don't think it makes me look old?"

"Nah, man. If anything, it makes you look wise. Or fearsome, like you're the kind of guy I wouldn't fuck around with in a dark alley." He handed me the cup of water and his smile warped into a sly smirk.

"I'm kind of curious about you now," he confessed to me. "Like, what caused it and whatnot."

I lowered my gaze to his chest and I saw that he had a silver Star of David medallion around his neck: it was about the size of my thumbnail, and I realized I had missed it the first time around.

"You're Jewish," I remarked.

"Born and raised in a Jewish household, straight outta New York City. We're based out of Florida, though."

"Ouch," I groaned with a grimace.

"Yeah, my parents, my sister, and I all moved there when I was real little, but I've always felt my ties back to New York, though."

"Same here," I told him with a slight raise of my other hand, and I sipped down the water right then. Even though I didn't have that type of headache, or a headache of any kind, when that water hit my tongue, it gave me the strangest euphoria at that very moment, one that shot a chill up my spine and down my arms. "Except my parents moved to the Bay Area before I was born, though, so I grew up here."

"We're both men with no country," he remarked.

"Jewish men who--kind of look similar to one another," I added.

"Yeah, we kinda do," he said with a nod and that smirk still firmly in place. "Maybe if I dyed my hair solid black like yours, we could pass off as brothers or something."

"Not sure if my actual brother would be okay with that, though," I pointed out as I took another sip of water.

"Fuck 'em," he joked, to which I almost spat out my drink right then. I coughed and set the paper cup down on my knee.

"So, are you here to audition or--?" I started again.

"Here to record some things," he answered with a nod. "It was either come here or find a studio in Florida, which--" He shook his head and rolled his eyes at that. "--no way I was going to do that. Things just feel easier over here on the West Coast for some reason."

"Probably 'cause they are," I teased him. "I can take one look at the dick of Florida and just be like 'nope.'"

He chuckled at that.

"What's your name?" he asked me.

"Alex."

"Alex? I'm Chuck. Chuck Schuldiner."

"Yeah, that's definitely a Jewish name," I swiftly replied. "Mine's Skolnick."

"Yeah, right, my name is Jewish," he laughed at that.

"Somewhere, in another life, I grew up in the Soviet Union and became a superstar student who can uncover the meaning of life in one fell swoop." He laughed again.

"You know, if you and I are going to be in bands and whatnot," he started again. "This is just what I'm told anyway--we're going to have to be selected for spouses."

"Why is that?" I asked him.

"It's so the band doesn't crumble apart at the seams," he said. "They don't want any more bands with bad blood between them."

"Oh, I see--they don't want another Beatles situation on their hands."

"Exactly, yeah! Anyway, the reason why I asked you your age was because of this rule here. Since we're both teenagers, we can't marry as of yet, which means there's still plenty of time to figure ourselves out before we're both supposed to get hitched."

I nibbled on my bottom lip at that.

"What about--guys in other bands?" I asked him with a clearing of my throat.

"I don't really know," he admitted in a soft voice. "We might. You know, because we never know how these things play out in the end."

"Especially since even the Beatles paid their dues to one another in the end," I pointed out.

"Oh, yeah. I think it was Paul who made amends with George and Ringo? Or it was George who made the amends first. I can't remember, to be honest."

I had my hunches, that this Chuck liked me, or that he had a feeling on his end, like he knew that I liked him. But before I could say anything more to him, someone called him into the sound room.

I had been called over to the next room to jam with The Legacy: it was a tiny room with a few little stools that looked as though they had just come out of a bar up the street and our banner, this big white cloth tapestry with black lettering like someone took a felt-tip pen and wrote it out, had been pinned up on the wall over Mike Ronchette's drum kit. Lead singer Steve, who insisted on being referred to as "Zetro" after a cartoon whale he had seen a few years back and thought it was the most adorable thing ever, had vocals akin to Bon Scott but with far more of a sear and a snarl behind them. A small band straight out of the streets of the Bay Area in the heart of the Eighties.

We stood under the shadows of Metallica and The Scorpions, plus Slayer and Megadeth. There was that band Anthrax out of New York City coincidentally enough; and then there was us.

I thought about Chuck, and I thought about asking him out when I saw him again.

But I never did see him again, however. I wanted to at the very least have his phone number on hand, or his address to write him a good long letter. I had those feelings and they ran so deep with me, even from the get-go.

All the while, I knew that this was the band I would be with from thence forth, even as Zetro left for Exodus and another Chuck took his place on vocal duties, and when our other guitarist Eric changed the band name from The Legacy to Testament given there was a hotel cover band in the south that had the name trademarked. Though I was happy being lead guitarist with Testament and we officially found ourselves on our way to releasing our first record, I woke up one morning with a letter at my front step and a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach when I opened it up.

Chuck was completely right about the arrangements. They all came courtesy of the label: I had to get married to the one other bachelor in the band, and that was our singer, the other Chuck, given Eric and Louie had already hitched up their wagons to each other and Greg had somehow escaped it for himself.

His band travelled back East and he never gave me his number or his address, and thus I couldn't call him up when I so felt like it.

Now, as a seventeen-year-old young man, I lay on the doorstep of my own wedding day, which was to take place the Saturday following my eighteenth birthday, which took place on a Monday to boot, and while I was still a senior in high school as well. It was all a whirlwind and a flash, all too much for me to even so much as digest let alone realize that it was really genuinely happening to me.  

Overnight, I had become young and old at the same time, to the point the streak on my head had been rendered obsolete, and all of it was about to be summed up on a fresh wedding day under the October haze courtesy from the Bay Area.

I gazed on at the wedding band on my left ring finger, the bit of silver in junction with my engagement ring given to me by those higher up than me or anyone else who was to be in that room with us. My own band of silver paled in comparison at that very moment.

And my mother being emotional did very little to comfort me, either.

"I can't believe my baby is already getting married," was something I heard more times than I would like over the course of a whole entire month up to the wedding day. I wound up tuning it out most of the time because it did nothing to sum up as to how I was feeling all the while. I wanted Chuck, the other Chuck, the boy who looked like me to be near me.

But my very own personal crossroads were not the thing that perturbed me in the least. I was going to graduate high school early and at eighteen years old to boot, and I had to leave my childhood in the past at some point anyway. The thing that bothered me was I had been selected the wrong Chuck, especially when during that month before the wedding, I had received word that he was diagnosed early with brain cancer and the tumor had to be surgically removed.

Something about being bonded by a head injury, and one that nearly threatened our lives as well, like something about it gripped me and I could not for the life of me stop thinking about it.

And then, like clockwork, it all clicked.

I had my doubts, but I swore that the removal of the brain tumor signified the scar that I needed to feel out for myself, the thing that indicated my soul bond over to Chuck. We had far too many similarities otherwise for it to be a pure coincidence of some sort. I had to be with that Chuck in the end. I could feel our bond in my bones, as well as within the scar on the crown of my head.

Instead, I had paired up with our new lead singer, especially if I even so much as wanted to find my way out of the Bay Area and with some sort of financial backing to boot. A tour could only do so much for me, or for any of us for that matter, especially since we were just starting out in the world in comparison to a band like Metallica, whom had already put out something like three albums at that point. Though we hailed from the burgeoning Bay Area, we were still nobodies at the time.