Anyone into metal? What's your story?

Around the age of 11 or 12 I "discovered" music.  My parents never really listened to the radio in the car or the stereo in the house, although they had tons of records and 8-tracks.  My mother was also stay-at-home for most of my childhood until around the age of 10 or so and she was fairly overbearing so I wasn't allowed to go to other kids houses and play.  I played outside and kids came over to my house a lot, but I never really experienced anything else.

So around age 12 (mid-late 80's) a family with 7 kids moved into a house down the street.  Needless to say I started hanging out with them a lot and mother was finally laying off the over-protectiveness so I ended up down at their house more often than not.

They had an older son, probably around 17 or 18 who had long hair and tattered clothes.  I never really saw much of him as he stayed in his room and the younger kids my age and I were always outside.  Anyway, one friday evening he was sitting in the window of his room overlooking us running around the yard like idiots, and he turned up the stereo in his room..

I'd never heard anything like it before.  

I couldn't tell you what the song or band was, but I was hooked.  I asked him about it and he told me that it was a local college station that played this music friday nights after a certain time.

I went home and told my parents about it, and they offered to let me listen on their stereo..  And so I did, and my mother being overprotective and my dad being a police officer immediately turned it off and sent me to my room.  I could hear my dad telling my mother how I was going to turn into a hoodlum and end up in jail if I listened to that stuff, which was funny considering that they had piles of Doors, Jefferson Airplane, etc albums..  I had no idea at the time but it turns out they were both pretty counter-culture back in their day..

Any other time I would have thought that was the worst thing, but I saw the looks on their faces and I knew I was on to something BIG.

That year I kept asking for a stereo for my birthday, xmas, good grades, etc, but they kept saying "we'll see" and it never happened.  I finally traded an old bike frame I had for a ratty boombox type stereo.  At first my parents wanted to take it and ban me from having it, but I finally wore them down with promises about keeping my grades up and all that noise.

Anyway, that's how I started listening to metal.  My first love was extreme metal and the first song was definitely death metal.  I blossomed into quite the metalhead, seeking out the most extreme and brutal stuff I could.  I even sent off to get an underground metal magazine, which I can't remember the name of now, where I found even more stuff I could mailorder.

I suppose this could also be the story of learning how to order things over the phone and write money orders and all kinds of stuff at an early age too.  I'd go to the grocery store to do a money orders to europe to buy tapes (and later CDs) of bands that nobody had heard of before (Black metal).  In fact, I still have one of the first Darkthrone CDs that ever existed in the USA.

Today I still listen to metal, although not nearly as solely as before.