In one day, I learned two meanings of the word English.

The one was what the Amish called all of us who were not them. We saw Witness, since everybody was talking about it and it was filmed nearby. It seemed like bullshit, that the entire group would call us all “English,” until we heard a couple women at the farmer’s market complaining about us, and sure enough, there it was. We were the English, the punks eating too many free samples and loitering and pissing them off: Bootsy, Ned and me. We bought a couple cheesesteaks and decided to hoof it back to Bootsy’s house. His dad was gone for a while, so it was safe.

On the way, we ate the cheesesteaks sitting on benches in Kerr Park, dodging geese and goose shit, overlooking a creepy green pond. Then we dropped into Cue Corner for some air conditioning and a rest. Waiting for a table, I overheard someone explain English like we were in billiards school: the spin a skilled player could make on the cue ball. The guy was dressed like a biker and looked like he had been on a three-day bender, but sounded like Professor Pool Cue.

We wore denim jackets then with patches. We should not have been in there when the shift changed at the Pepperidge plant, when the guards from the prison got off, but Ned had been in a league and so just assumed it was always safe.

And maybe it was on normal days. But this was not a normal day. A skater punk had been talking shit about Bootsy’s sister, Wendy. Wendy was the kind of girl who didn’t talk much and grew into an adult body way before she was ready and so was always getting a bunch of shit from guys.

This skate punk was mouthing off about her and how he wanted to see her tits and so on. Bootsy was never one for self-control but he was trying to hold it together. Then the kid said something about why didn’t Bootsy ever get a piece of that.

Bootsy grabbed the slingshot he used to pick off squirrels, loaded a stone, and shot. The hit knocked the boy off his board. While he writhed, we saw blood start to move, and ran. By the time we made it to the farmer’s market—a good hour walk along 30—I’d like to say we forgot about it. It’s probably closer to say we stopped thinking about it.

After we paid for a table and racked the balls, some guy covered in tattoos (this was before everyone got covered in tattoos) showed up and started asking Bootsy if he thought he was a big man, and if he was a fucking tough guy and so on. Turns out it was skate punk’s older brother. I didn’t know him, Ned didn’t know him—but turns out Bootsy did.

Bootsy went immediately apeshit, throwing the cue down and yelling as loud as he could I will fuck your shit up I will rip your fucking head off I will blow your fucking brains out and tattoo guy was suddenly stepping back.

That was the thing about Bootsy. He was reliably apeshit.

We left. Tattoo guy tried to make a few remarks as we left but we knew Bootsy was in his head. Anybody who knew the guy knew he was most likely to take it too far. He ripped a classroom phone off the wall once in 10th grade. He kicked a door dent into a teacher’s car. He once threw a book at a vice principal so hard that when the binding hit the wall the book broke.

It was sort of thrilling then to be around him, to feel sort of bulletproof because everyone thought he was crazy, which made us kind of safe. We had to grow up before we knew how absolutely awful it really was. And then wonder about why schools didn’t deal with that kind of thing. He got in trouble, got detentions and everything else, but nothing really more. Today? He’d be committed.

We left Cue Corner and as the adrenaline wore off on the way back to Bootsy’s house, and the heat of the day rose against us, and the sun scalded in the still air, we grew quieter. We decided we were going to jam a bit, since there still would be no one at the house for hours, and that being inside for a while was probably a good idea. Bootsy said tattoo guy had a car and would eventually decide to drive around and do something stupid.

When we got to the block where Bootsy’s house was, the street was clear. We could see a smear on the sidewalk, like a small roadkill. We kept moving.

In Bootsy’s damp basement with the weird mold spot on the wall and the dehumidifier roaring and gurgling in one corner, we turned on the amps and plugged in.

The Demons of Ultimate Hell was our metal band. Our shitty, did-it-for 5-minutes-and-played-one-basement-gig metal band. We wanted it dumber than GWAR, dumber than W.A.S.P. Somebody had a copy of Millions of Dead Children and it captured our stupidly cruel imaginations.

We were too young to understand cruel but we sure understood stupid and so had our drum head acronym before we had the words to fill it out. Bootsy wanted to make sure we could offend as many people as possible so he wrote a song called “I Kicked Your Dog in the Balls.” My own contribution was “Chemo Kitty.” We all wrote “I Want to Be as Fat as Elvis” and “I Hate Rhode Island (Robert Browning Would Be Mad),” the latter because Ned and I didn’t like our English teacher, who was from Rhode Island. No song was longer than 2 minutes. Every time we talked about trying to get a gig, we knew we needed to learn many more songs.

That day we decided to learn “War Pigs.” It sounded easy. We already knew “Paranoid” and “N.I.B.” (without the bass intro), and Bootsy refused to learn any AC/DC because it wasn’t hard enough, so that left us with Sabbath, the best music for people to learn who can barely play their instruments but can stay safely within the arena of the badass.

Bootsy was the most committed to the concept. Looking back, I guess he had the most reason to be. Ned and I were technically honors students, but in a noncommittal way, shrugging at it, bitching about the losers in the National Honor Society, avoiding work as much as possible, carrying borrowed bravado from people who, it turned out, were not so much badass as in a bad way.

Years later a woman said to me, “When you tell these stories you forget that you got out. I don’t think you realize that you sound sort of like a dick when you talk about it like it’s all just funny as hell.” She was the kind of woman who would call me Andrew at times like this. Because I did not need a mother—my distanced beachcomber matriarch was quite sufficient—she and I no longer speak.

We only stopped playing when Bootsy’s stepdad showed up, barreling down the stairs, still in uniform, yelling to knock it off with that shit. What the fuck, Eric. Shut it down. Why the fuck is there broken glass in front of the fucking house what the fuck are you losers doing.

The man was big as a house, made bigger by the belt and the weapon and the vest and all the other equipment that makes a cop look larger than life. He was breathing heavy and looked like he wanted nothing more than to punch Bootsy in the face.

“You guys should probably go,” Bootsy said, deadpan, audible as a clock.

We dragged our instruments up the stairs and just before we made to the front door we heard the yelling start and the first audible body blow, the first crash of something. Broken glass spangled the front porch, bottles hurled against the brick. Down the street, we saw tattoo guy in a purple Chevy SS smoking a cigarette and watching us.

As I tried to step carefully around the glass, Ned stopped and looked back at the door, “Man, we can’t just leave.”

I looked over at tattoo guy and then back, “What are we gonna do? What can we possibly do? Guy’s a cop. It’s not our business or whatever.”

Ned looked like he was going to cry. I heard a car start and knew without looking that it was tattoo guy.

“Dude,” I said. “We gotta fucking go. It’s not our deal.”

A bottle smashed against the bricks next to me. Tattoo guy yelled something and his car tore off. Ned jumped off the porch and took off, his guitar gig bag banging against his legs. He did not look back.

I waited as long as I could endure the noise in the house. I didn’t want to walk away just to have tattoo guy waiting for me. But he wasn’t after me, I figured, and then I felt worse.

Down the block, at a pay phone at the side of a grocery store, I called my mom’s work. I said I needed her to come get me. She had questions and I just said please come get me there’s some guy looking to kick my ass can you please just come get me.

Bootsy showed up to school a few days later with his head fully shaved and a bruise on the side of his head, above his ear, like a small purple nation on a pale world globe. A few weeks later we had our gear moved out of Bootsy’s house and into Ned’s parents’ garage, where we felt it would be better, when we meant safer. The Demons of Ultimate Hell scored a gig, if you could call it that, at a basement party some rich kid in Chester Springs was throwing while his parents were traveling on business. We played everything we knew in one hour and then just got hammered and jammed until everyone left the basement and hung out in the yard.

That was the second-to-last badass day. I am embarrassed to say how we felt on top of the world that night.

But on the final bad-ass day of the Demons of Ultimate Hell, when we returned to Ned’s garage the next day to practice because we had made the drunken decision that it was time to record a demo, Bootsy was late. No one said it, but we worried about his dad.

When he finally showed up he told us he had enlisted. Navy. He was leaving high school.  We told him it was stupid, there was gonna be a war, it had been too long since there had been a war, and then he’d find himself stuck in Russia or something. But he was the kind of guy who if you told him not to do something, he did it anyway, and then did it again. And then he’d tell you all about it.

“Fuck you guys,” he said. “And fuck this. You’re never gonna see me again.”

And then he left.

We all stood there for a long time, waiting for him to come back in, say he was joking around, or to yell about how we were all stuck up rich kids—which, we weren’t, but to him we were, since we had a future that was inconceivable to him at the time and may well still be. We expected him to have more to say about it. Or for him to smash something.

“So, does that mean that, like, tomorrow he goes off to the Navy?”

We all shrugged and looked at one another. Nobody knew that answer, or any other answer.

As the weeks went on, we still played, got different band names, learned more about how to actually make music, started going back to Cue Corner to shoot pool on non-league days, learned more about English and how to shape a journey with the cue. We prowled the farmers market and shoplifted jelly just to piss off the Amish women. We drank more and learned how to handle it better. We dropped the bad ass and eventually lost the denim. We applied to colleges and left. We no longer assumed it was safe.