If you’ve read my short story anthology, Coming of Rage, released through Raw Earth Ink, you may have caught a nod to heavy metal icons Iron Maiden (my favorite band of the genre) in the title story, specifically their 1983 epic, “Flight of Icarus.”

The title story of my compendium is a near-verbatim recreation of true events which happened to me between ages 12 and 13. The 1983 album featuring “Icarus” was, of course, Maiden’s masterwork Piece of Mind, but MTV, when it was still a 24-hour all music station, had begun spinning the video for “Flight of Icarus” well before the album’s release in May.

Keeping in mind only months prior, I had been indoctrinated into heavy metal music from a cousin-by-marriage, Andy, who’d sat me down in his room, knowing I was such a music hound. My rites of passage into metal music were Iron Maiden’s Killers and Ozzy Osbourne’s Diary of a Madman. Suffice it to say, a game-changing moment of my life.

I’d also been played the first side of Maiden’s halcyon classic, The Number of the Beast, forgetting down the road when “Flight of Icarus” stormed my ears and ears, Iron Maiden had changed vocalists from Paul DiAnno to Bruce Dickinson. Hence, my first contact with “Icarus” had me thinking, of all things, the 1960s and 70s rock and soul band, Three Dog Night. Laughing out loud here and feel free to join me. Face palm to follow.

Imagine the look on my face, weeks from turning age 13, to find out “Flight of Icarus” was Iron Maiden! Let me tell you something; only “Icarus” and Devo’s “Whip It” could stir and give voice to my rising anger at having been bullied to a boiling over point. I was an MTV junkie then and I couldn’t wait for “Flight of Icarus” to come again. Heavy metal still being a relative oddity then, the wait for a replay was sometimes long before “Icarus” disappeared from MTV’s regular rotation and we had to wait until such a thing as Headbangers Ball to be created for us metal freaks.

By the time I started fighting back in middle school, the timeline begins in my story “Coming of Rage.” Those sick and sour events served as a linchpin. The way my story ends (and I’ll leave you to read it) closes with my turning on MTV at such a horrible finish to a friendship that never really was, a joyous dishing of “Flight of Icarus” on MTV giving me hope.

I am a man who believes in signs from the divine. I found a christening effect with “Icarus'” emergence right after experiencing betrayal of the highest measure to a persecuted 12-year-old boy in love. “Flight of Icarus” told me I could fly as high as the sun. I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I sang the soaring chorus of “Flight of Icarus” inside my head and in the privacy of my bedroom. I soon retaliated against my aggressors, even if it took me many moments of getting my butt kicked before I had any effect against my peers. Middle school is worse than high school, and those little shits back in the day did their damnedest to break me. They almost did.

It took a point of no return moment where five boys surrounded me and said something nasty about my mom. I lost full control. I crushed all five of them, unleashed, finally. I was brutal in my actions. I nearly went too far. All I can say is that it took the assistant principal who was the size and look of Mr. Weatherbee from the Archie comics to stop me and he had to push his weight down against me as I left those five boys bleeding on the floor.

Later at home after the brawl and immediate three-day suspension, I sang “Flight of Icarus” to myself like a mantra. It soothed me, yes, but moreover, it empowered me. I saw the video for the last time in a prime-time slot before we moved away from the area which had given me such terror and comeuppance. I saved my allowance for two months after our move, skipping comic books all that time so I could snag the Piece of Mind album. The day I had enough money, I begged my mom to take me to the mall so I could buy the vinyl LP.

“You don’t know much this means to me,” I told her when she’d obliged and I’d sat in the passenger seat of her raggedy old Chevy Malibu, in awe of Iron Eddie, the band’s mascot, chained up in a padded room of a garish mental asylum. That level of outrage on Eddie’s hellish face spoke as much to who I was at the time, flailing, kicking, ramming those bullies’ heads into lockers. Yeah, Iron Maiden and “Flight of Icarus” and the entire Piece of Mind album meant everything in its time and place.

Later, it would fuel the first story of my eventual published work, Coming of Rage.

Coming of Rage and my new novel, Revolution Calling, are available at Amazon, Wal Mart.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Lulu, Kindle, Nook and Kobo.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.