“Because he moved out of our home in Leverett when he was sixteen, my brother was never involved with any of the Finches. He had met them and considered them 'freaks.' He also considered out parents 'freaks' and remained as far away from them as possible. He was designing electric guitars for the rock band KISS at the time, so I viewed him with a remote sense of awe.
Once, he even let me hang out with him and the band like a groupie. They were playing the Nassau Coliseum in New York and my brother not only paid for me to fly all the way out there, but he met me at the airport in a white stretch limo.
I got to sit next to the stage and watch the band rehearse. I got to see them without makeup. I even got to watch Paul Stanley talk on a portable phone the size of an assault rifle.
At one point, Gene Simmons came over to me and joked, 'Hey, little boy. Wanna see me without my clothes?'
I wanted to tell him, 'Yes.'
He laughed and stripped off his jeans so he could put on his stage clothes.
I kept watching him until he gave me a funny look and stepped behind an amp.”
“Instead of going to school and drawing happy faces in my notebook or hunkering over a joint on the soccer field, I was seeing black-and-white films by Lina Wertmuller, French movies where first cousins fall in love and then stab each other as a weeping clown appears, representing the loss of innocence.”
“…I was seventeen, I had no formal education, no job training, no money, no furniture, no friends. 'It could be worse,' I told myself, 'I could be going to a prom.'”
-Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors
This book… it's like The Perks of Being a Wallflower meets One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with a bit of acid added and something else… Wow…
It's pretty cool. It's a memoir, hence, it's true.
Wacky/