Running Free

                  By now, I could imagine exactly what you may be thinking; probably something along the lines of “What the f**k just happened?!”  Well, I’ll answer your question. Though, you may be here for a while, so be patient. Allow me to fill you in. A whole lot of this traces back to my dad. Before talking about my dad first, I would suppose you want to know about me. But I won’t give much. Eddie’s the name, Eddie Patton. Just seventeen years of age now, but at the time of what you heard before, I was 16 having just left the tenth grade. I promised you I would clarify on some things mentioned earlier, and I will.

                 Regarding the pictures of heavy metal musicians and the instruments, you may say I am a metalhead myself and proud of it. To put it simply, music was and is my life. And nothing, not a damn thing defined my life more than heavy metal. Since I was eleven, no other music could hold my attention and leave me in awe. Every subgenre is wonderful to me; I can’t get enough of each and every one. Since the day I first heard the Powerslave album by Iron Maiden, I’ve always had a metal song stuck in my head. My brain was more or less a music player on shuffle. It’s the one genre of music I feel truly and utterly free in; completely able to be who I want to be and not have to put on an act.

I craved everything metal over the years, and finally understood how much my dad was dedicated to music himself. Every day, I would walk up to the guy and ask to borrow another album in his collection and he would smile and joke, “To think this kid was into The Beatles almost yesterday.” Then once I could afford my own things, I quickly amassed an album collection nearly as large as his. Many long hours were spent upstairs in my room, rattling my head to everything from the classics like Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Van Halen to the more extreme bands like Entombed, Mayhem, and Death. The rest was spent practicing guitar, bass, or keyboard and only the last hour before sleep was spent on homework. I caught up on most of my sleep lost during school, but still remained caught up despite what ignorant a******s in class might think.

Sure, I like other stuff to. Some punk, a lot of rock, a little goth, synth, folk, jazz, ambient, a tiny bit of electronic, and from time to time the blues. But none have ever been as significant as metal has been to me.

Metal has been there for me, always. The aggressive, melancholic, or epic beats were guaranteed to soothe, regardless of how s****y my day was. Music in general has always been a way of escape, a one way ticket to whatever place described in the song being heard. Be it an epic, mystical, dark, intense, sad, joyful, or even downright terrifying place. Music to me=my obsession, future livelihood, and my salvation. That will never change. Even when I’m on my death bed, I’ll without a doubt be thinking of the first loud and distorted guitar I ever heard.

Sure, I have some stereotypical features. The most obvious being the long hair, about four inches past my shoulders. It’s kind of strange though, because it is oddly straight and brown yet it appears brown-blonde to everybody else (think Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom fame) In fact, girls often ask if I straighten my hair, but I don’t. They’re usually shocked, but believe me anyway.

I’m not that tall, just somewhere in the middle ground. And I’m not very muscular-looking, far from some football player, but I’m not weak at all. Enough of that though, there are other things I want to focus on the source of everything that just took place; that being my dad, Adam Patton. You might have heard of him, if you happened to be a listener of his music. Before that day I just told you about, he had been dead for a little over a year. Don’t be sorry, not many really knew of his death. But I really loved the guy, and whoever loved his music, loved him. Yes, he was a musician, and an amazing one at that.

You may wonder why he owned so many instruments. To answer that, he was heavily involved in music, particularly metal. He was a multi-instrumentalist; able to play guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, the lap-steel, violin, saxophone, and he could really sing. He was a member of several different bands outside of his main band, Warning. As well, he also was a guest musician on many albums (most notably the rock opera entitled Illusionary Thoughts)

For over twenty-one years, he wasn’t massively successful, but he was always happy with what he did. My mom, back when they first met, was your typical s**t that you’d see hanging around at the local clubs back in the day. This was in 1989, and my dad always had good judgment when it came to girls, but my mom that night put on a different face. I was never exactly enlightened on what happened that night, but as it was, her and my dad hooked up, and a year later got married. Then a year afterward, Kat was born. And two years later in 1993, I arrived into the world.

Our family was completely at peace for years. As corny as that may sound, it was true. Everything was quiet, until my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor when I had just turned 15. The music community rushed to aid him with fundraisers at various shows so that he could afford the treatment and pay the medical bills. Despite all of the effort, my dad was in a fight he would not win. And three days before my birthday, Kat found him in the studio. He was pitched forward on an office chair and an acoustic guitar (the first one he had ever received as a child) was at his feet having fallen from his hands. I simply can’t say more about this now, but since my dad died, our family went completely crazy. My mom in particular became a raging drunk and addict and absolutely hated both Kat and I. For a year afterwards, things were tense in our house to say the least.

I’ll sum this s**t up for you, over the course of this year, tensions mounted and got more and more complicated. This drove my mom nearly insane. She even began to blame dad for her depression and anger, as though he had intentionally made her feel that way. On some nights she would do something really goddam scary, like after Halloween last year she waited till Kat and I were asleep, and then started putting holes in the wall with a shovel. She was so plastered, that she was screaming for me to go and get dad back so she could “rip his throat out.”

Or there was the time when she thought that Kat was pregnant and kept trying to have the supposed baby aborted, and there wasn’t even a baby to begin with. My mom decided Kat was lying to her anyway, and had made her down half of a bottle of whiskey in order to “kill the baby.” Kat nearly died that night. And you wonder why I didn’t want to leave her behind to my mom?

My mom never had many jobs and hardly any of her own money, so she went about the state of Wisconsin pawning possessions of my dad’s. Instruments disappeared over time. His guitar collection went down from 17 to 9; his basses from ten to five. And his amps all went to. Before I left, you saw that I took the remaining instruments and studio equipment with me. That’s all I really have left of my dad, that and his old journal he had had since junior year of high school. But I’ve never had the will to read a single page of it. Other than that, no other material possessions of him had remained.

For now, I’ll say nothing else. Allow me to now bring you back to the present. After all of those things I just told you about continued for a little over a year, my mom hit her breakpoint and kicked me out of the house. She didn’t care about what would happen to me at all. She had once complained that I was too much like my dad. Now that he was gone, she wanted me gone too. 

Reviews

[Juley Schmidt]

write moooooore!!! i want to read more, there is no reason to stop such an inspiring story