Wormwood Tales are stories written by the Wormwood creative team, designed to tell stories before, after and around our central tale. These stories may contain clues to the mysteries of Wormwood. Or they may not. We’ll never tell.

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Wormwood Tales: The Secret Origin of Jimmy Details
by Jimmy Details (as told to David Accampo)Rebels are made; they are not born, my friends.

Listen to me now, and I’ll tell you true. As with any great legend, Jimmy Details’ was borne of fire and honed on the forge.

Listen and I will reveal secrets never before told.

This is the origin of Jimmy Details, for our young Master James was not always the guitar-wielding hero who stands before you now.

No.

He was actually kind of a nerd.

Young James entered the second decade of his life just as the first, distant growls of grunge marked the death knell of hair metal. But grunge was not for Jimmy, no.

Jimmy still listened to Roxette and Wilson Phillips.

Jimmy liked Madonna.

You’ll ask yourself why, but the answer is simple. Fear. Jimmy’s only exposure to metal was his older cousin’s basement bedroom in Lyonsville. The basement room was dingy, unkempt. Faded posters of women in bikinis and lingerie were taped and re-taped to the walls. He had slippery piles of Playboy magazines and hundreds of cassette tapes stacked in tall rows of an old metal bookshelf. Slayer, Ozzy Ozbourne, Motley Crue. There, in the darkness, in the basement’s permanent gloom, these savages shrieked and howled with rage and pain, and Jimmy, for the first time, knew fear. Their angry masks terrified the boy. This was why his parents referred to his cousin as a “loser,” as “headed for trouble”, as “bad news.” His cousin would turn on the stereo in his room, pop in a cassette, and turn the volume all the way up. Guitars shrieked and chewed the air, drums exploded like staccato gunfire, throats screamed and teeth gnashed, and upstairs…upstairs in the living room, his aunt and uncle would yell uselessly and stomp their feet.

After that, Jimmy had mostly stayed away.

His cousin was arrested several months later, anyway, for possession of drugs. Which is exactly what his family expected. “No surprise there,” said Jimmy’s father at dinner that night.

Jimmy went on, playing video games and listening to pop music. He played Frisbee. He watched cartoons. He was, in short, blissfully unaware.

That is, until.

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This entry was posted by Wormwood on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 2:09 am and is filed under fiction, horror, magic, mystery, occult, stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.