Studyin' with the Devil

It came to mind while I was eating lunch a few weeks ago, though I'm not sure what prompted it then. It was the first time I'd thought about it in years.

The first time it came to mind?or at least the first time it struck me, and then only briefly, as an odd thing?was in the spring of 1999, in the days following the Columbine shootings. As investigators and pundits and sociologists and psychologists set themselves to the sloppy business of trying to understand and interpret what had driven Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to massacre all those folks, their first order of business (of course) was to look at what sort of music they listened to, what sort of t-shirts they wore, what kind of books they read. What they concluded from these things (again, of course) was so painfully wrong it was funny.

As Blood Axis and that goofy Marilyn Manson character were all but being accused of complicity in the crimes, I remember thinking to myself: It's a damn good thing these guys didn't go to East.

See, because if someone at my high school had gone on a similar rampage, here's what would've happened in the aftermath. When the investigators and interpreters walked through the front door of the school, the first thing they would've seen would've been a 12-foot-tall mural of Satan. And as they wandered the blood-spattered halls and poked around the bullet-riddled cafeteria and looked in the gym, they would've discovered about a dozen more Satan murals. Big, nasty, ugly-looking pictures of Lucifer everywhere. And in that, I'm sure, they would've found all the answers they needed.

See, Satan was my high school's mascot. Sure, it sounds better to say "The East High Red Devils," as opposed to something like "The East High Children of Satan," but that's pretty much what it boiled down to. Everywhere you looked, there he was?flames, pitchfork, hooves, horns, tail, everything. Sometimes he had wings, sometimes not. And nobody thought a thing about it. Nobody ever said, "Gee, ain't it weird that we live in an extremely conservative Christian town, and yet every time we come to school we're inundated with images of the Dark Lord?" Nothing like that. Not even from the crazy fundamentalist biology teacher who refused to teach evolution. At least not that I heard.

There were so many Satan murals around, see, because each graduating class left a new one behind as a legacy. When the school ran out of room on the walls, they'd eventually have to go back and paint over one of the old ones. Still, when I was there, they could be traced back to the early 70s, when Satan had a distinctly psychedelic air about him.

Even the costumed mascot that showed up at the sporting events, though fuzzy and cuddly, was still red, still had horns and a tail, and was known affectionately as "The East Beast." (It occurs to me now that at some point, somebody should have asked, "What is the Number of the East Beast?")

Hell, when I was there, I didn't think a thing about it all, either?and by that time I'd read The Satanic Bible and seen all the Omen movies several times. I never made a connection. I did notice, however?again without making any connection?that there were an inordinate number of Satanists in my class.

This was long before "Satanic Cults" became such a hot-button topic, what with kids stabbing other kids in the woods and naked movie stars and babies being eaten and all that. The Satanists in my school primarily used it as an excuse to piss off their parents, get drunk and stoned, listen to a bunch of Priest and Sabbath, and maybe kill a bunny and drink a little blood?but that was all. They didn't carve any pentagrams into any classmates' bellies. In fact, they never really bothered much of anybody at all, keeping primarily to themselves.

It was kind of funny, though. Although most of my high school's resident Satanists were simple, blank-faced stoners, some were surprisingly bright, and others blessed with real artistic ability. Maybe Satan provided that, I don't know. As a result, they took a lot of art classes. And as the end of every year approached, it was the kids in the art classes (i.e., the Satanists) who were conscripted to design and paint that class' Satan mural. What a sweet deal that must've been for them! I don't know if they had to run the final design past any sort of advisory board before putting it up on the wall, but I do know that as the years progressed, the murals grew darker, bloodier, more menacing.

I'm not going to make much of anything out of that. While I was there, there was simply no problem with crime in the school. There was plenty of bullying, sure, but not much more than that. Even given that we're talking about the early 1980s, they were relatively simple, relatively innocent days. If someone brought a gun to school, it just meant they were going deer hunting that afternoon. There might have been a knife or two, but they were never used on other classmates. At least not until the year after I graduated, when one kid got stabbed in the chest between classes. I don't know if the assailant was a Satanist or not, though I don't recall anyone blaming anything on Satan. I think that was about the time they started blaming things like that on the city's growing minority population.