Early Life
Beahm had a troubled childhood; His older brother died of a drug overdose and he grew up believing that his biological father left the family. When in his teens, his sister revealed in an argument that his biological father was really a Swedish sailor named William Björklund. Beahm lived with his mother for much of his life, but their relationship was tumultuous. The accounts given of her in Mullen's Lexicon Devil portray her as having a mental illness, which caused her to behave erratically and be verbally abusive toward her son.
Beahm attended IPS (Innovative Program School), a school within University High School in Los Angeles. The IPS program combined elements of est large group awareness training and Scientology.
Though Beahm was charismatic and had intellectual potential, he did not take the IPS program seriously. As students in the IPS program were given the liberty to form their own classes, Beahm and fellow student Georg Ruthenberg made a class for themselves called Fruit Eating in which they would go to a market, eat fruit for an hour, then return to school. Frequent users of LSD, Beham and Smear developed a following of other IPS students who would also use the drug. The two were accused of brainwashing the other students and causing them to behave subversively, which led to the dismissal of Beahm and Smear from the school in 1976.
Read more about this topic: Darby Crash
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Undershaft: Alcohol is a very necessary article. It heals the sick—Barbara: It does nothing of the sort. Undershaft: Well, it assists the doctor: that is perhaps a less questionable way of putting it. It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)