Long Hard Road Out of Hell (15 page)

The next time I ran into Jeordie at the mall, he was playing bass in a death metal outfit called Amboog-A-Lard. So I didn’t even bother trying persuade him to quit. I just asked if he could recommend a good bass player, but he insisted that there weren’t any in South Florida. And he was right. I ended up talking Brian Tutunick, my friend from theater class, into playing bass with us. I knew this was wrong from the start because he had been talking about forming his own band for some time, and had no intention of including me. He may have thought he was doing me a favor when he joined Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids as part of the rhythm section instead of as the frontman that he wanted to be, but it wasn’t much of a favor because he was a bad bassist, a fat hairdresser, a wanna-be vegetarian and a devotee of Boy George, which placed him at the bottom end of the aggressivity meter. He lasted two shows before we kicked him out. He wound up forming Collapsing Lungs, a bad, watered-down industrial metal band with songs like “Who Put a Hole in My Rubber?” They thought they were God’s gift to South Florida, especially after they got signed to Atlantic Records. But I cursed them. Now they’re God’s gift to the unemployment line, though I can’t entirely take credit for their downfall. Bad musicianship and industrial metal songs about saving sea turtles didn’t help their career any.

I found the next piece of the band at a drunken house party. An intoxicated, pie-faced twit with greasy brown hair and long monkey arms flopped onto the couch next to me, pretending he was gay and talking about the drapes. He introduced himself as Scott Putesky. He seemed to know a lot of technical information about music-making and, even better, he owned a four-track cassette recorder. I had a concept but no musical skills whatsoever, and I was easily impressed. Scott was the first real “musician” I had come in contact with, so I asked him to join the band and later rechristened him Daisy Berkowitz. He immediately proved to be a fuck-up when I called him the day after the party and his abrasive mother rasped nasally at me, “Sorry, Scott isn’t here. He’s in jail.” I thought she was kidding, but it turned out he had been picked up for drunk driving on the way home from the party.

Scott had been in several local rock and new wave bands before, and almost everyone he worked with wanted to kill him because he was very pretentious and had deluded himself into thinking that he was much more talented than he actually was. Some people talk better than they play, but Scott did neither well. He always knew just what to do to annoy people. He’d tell girls, “You look great from the waist down,” and think it was a compliment.

I would have performed using my own name, but I needed a secret identity in order to write about my music in
25th Parallel
. So I carefully chose a pseudonym, a moniker with a magical ring to it like
hocus-pocus
or
abracadabra
. The words
Marilyn Manson
seemed like an apt symbol for modern-day America, and the minute I wrote it on paper for the first time I knew that it was what I wanted to become. All the hypocrites in my life from Ms. Price to Mary Beth Kroger had helped me to realize that everybody has a light and a dark side, and neither can exist without the other. I remember reading
Paradise Lost
in high school and being struck by the fact that after Satan and his angel companions rebelled against heaven, God reacted to the outrage by creating man so that He could have a less powerful creature companion in his image. In other words, in John Milton’s opinion at least, man’s existence is not just a result of God’s benevolence but also of Satan’s evil.

As a bipedal animal, man by nature (whether you call it instinct or original sin) gravitates toward his evil side, which may be one of the reasons people always ask me about the darker half of my name but never about Marilyn Monroe. Although she remains a symbol of beauty and glamor, Marilyn Monroe had a dark side just as Charles Manson has a good, intelligent side. The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity. I could elaborate further, but it’s all on the Internet (try the alt.life’s-only-worth-living-if-you-can-post-it-online-later newsgroup). All I’ll add is that the first article written on Marilyn Manson was by Brian Warner. And he completely misunderstood what I was trying to do.

At the time, Charles Manson had been resurrected as a news item and television special in the name of Nielsen ratings. In high school I had bought his
Lie
album, which featured him singing bizarre, almost comical original songs like “Garbage Dump” and “Mechanical Man,” which I incorporated into one of my own poems, “My Monkey.” “I had a little monkey/I sent him to the country and I fed him on gingerbread/Along came a choo-choo, knocked my monkey coo-coo/And now my monkey’s dead/At least he looks that way, but then again don’t we all/(What I make is what I am, I can’t be forever.)”

“Mechanical Man” was the beginning of my identification with Manson. He was a gifted philosopher, more powerful intellectually than those who condemned him. But at the same time, his intelligence (perhaps even more so than the actions he had others carry out for him) made him seem eccentric and crazy, because extremes—whether good or bad—don’t fit into society’s definition of normality. Though “Mechanical Man” was a nursery rhyme on the surface, it also worked as a metaphor for AIDS, the latest manifestation of man’s age-old habit of destroying himself with his own ignorance, be it of science, religion, sex or drugs.

After we turned four or five of my poems and ideas into songs, we felt we were ready for South Florida to see our ugly faces, which we strategically covered with makeup. Unfortunately, Stephen still hadn’t bought a keyboard, so we found an acne-faced nerd named Perry to fill in.

Another problem was that among the many neuroses that Christian school had instilled in me was a crippling stage fright. In fourth grade, the drama teacher chose me to portray Jesus in a school play. For the crucifixion scene, he wanted me to wear a loincloth. Forgetting the cruelty kids were capable of, I borrowed an old, frayed terrycloth towel from my father and wore it without underwear. After dying on the cross, I walked backstage, where several older kids yanked the towel off me, started whipping me with it, and chased me through the hall. It was your classic preteen nightmare come to life: running down a corridor naked in front of all the girls you like and all the boys who hate you. Oddly, I got over my fear of exposing myself on stage, but I never got over my resentment of Jesus for traumatizing me.

Our first show was at Churchill’s Hideaway in Miami. Twenty people showed up, though now that we’re famous at least twenty-one claim to have been there. Brian the fat hairdresser (name changed to our trademark starlet-serial killer combination of Olivia Newton-Bundy) played bass; Perry the pimplehead (who renamed himself Zsa Zsa Speck without realizing the pun on his speckled complexion) played keyboards; and Scott the fascist of the four-track (Daisy Berkowitz) played guitar. We used Scott’s Yamaha RX-8 drum machine (which, like Scott, would one day leave us, although the drum machine was never heard from again).

Being very literal-minded, I wore a Marilyn Monroe T-shirt, but I added a Manson-style swastika to her forehead. Droplets of blood had leaked through the shirt, staining Marilyn Monroe’s left eye, a result of my having had a potentially cancerous mole recently removed from beneath my nipple in the same spot where Jesus was wounded. Although the doctor warned me not to touch the area around the incision, as soon as I returned home I stretched the skin around it as tautly as I could. The results were my first new hobbies as Marilyn Manson: scarification and body modification, which I furthur pursued with a plastic surgeon, who clipped my drooping earlobes down to human size.

The stage at Churchill’s consisted of several pieces of plywood over rows of bricks, and the P.A. was basically a pair of Walkman headphones snapped apart and scotch-taped to the wall on either side of the stage. We opened with one of my favorite poems, “The Telephone.”

“I am awakened by the incessant ringing of the telephone,” I began, my croak turning to a growl as I wondered whether there was enough chaos on stage to hold the audience’s attention. “I still have dreams caked in the corners of my eyes and my mouth is dry and tastes shitty.