Behold! The Master of Tangents!
What just happened is what always happens. I sit down with the intention of finally setting in writing something worthy of my mother’s memory, something that conveys the significance of her life and the weight of her passing. Instead, I end up like I am tonight – lying on the floor by my computer listening to Iron Maiden.
My mom never much cared for things like Iron Maiden. Being a suburban mom and housewife in the 1980’s, she was very much informed by daytime television and had an ingrained suspicion of anything it branded Satanic – which was most things. Geraldo Rivera’s famous exposé of Satanism had moms all across America snooping through their teenagers’ closets while they were at school. Much tell-tale contraband, such as candles, black clothing, and heavy metal records were thrown in the garbage.
My older brother tells the story of a favorite record he once had – Hits of the 70’s, or something similar. One day, he decided to serenade my mom with a rendition of Steve Miller’s “Jet Airliner,” and she must have winced when he sang, “…you got to go through Hell before you get to Heaven,” because, after that, the record was never seen nor heard again.
My first Maiden album was Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. I bought it secretly when I wandered away from one of my brother’s little league games and into a small record shop nearby. I was mesmerized by the mysterious cover and I still remember the smell when I removed the plastic, like the gum in a new pack of trading cards. But, for all my excitement, it must have been years before I listened to the thing all the way through; I was too scared and I didn’t want to tempt Satan.
My tastes drifted harmlessly in the direction of They Might Be Giants and the Beetlejuice soundtrack, and Seventh Son wandered into my brother’s collection and was forgotten there. It was not unearthed until twenty-some years later when I was rooting around the basement of his home in Michigan.
I had just returned east after living in Los Angeles for seven years, where, among other things, I had cultivated a mature appreciation for Iron Maiden. Nothing besides my mom’s slowly depreciating health made me decide to return when I did. It just suddenly felt important to be closer to her, and I had made it back just in time for a long overdue family Thanksgiving. The quality time that I spent with my mom on that trip has since become one of my most valuable memories, because, the following week, as I was cheerfully cruising around the South Hills of Pittsburgh, I got the call telling me that my mom had suffered another serious stroke. Her previous one had changed everything and it took me half a decade to properly react. Now it was happening again.
It is difficult to describe how I felt sitting there in a borrowed, blue Saturn on the side of the road, but everything seemed significant somehow, from the uncanny timing of events to the cassette in the tape deck.
I hadn’t effectively demystified Maiden in my mind until the fall of this year. I was watching Live After Death, a live performance filmed at Long Beach Arena in 1985. In his introduction to Number of the Beast, Bruce Dickinson declared to an army of slavering heshers that Maiden was not Satanic and it was stupid to think otherwise. It was not the first time he had said it, but it was the first that I had heard it, not that I was at all surprised. If my mom were still alive today, I don’t think I’d have much difficulty selling Dickinson as a role model. He’s hugely successful, well read and articulate, physically fit well into his fifties, and if heavy metal is still not your thing, he’s also a commercial airline pilot. That’s enough to make any mother proud.
