Long Hard Road Out of Hell (16 page)

“Again—the ringing. Slowly, I bustle out of bed. The remnants of an erection still lingering in my shorts like a bothersome guest.

“Again the ringing. Carefully, I abscond to the bathroom so as to not display my manhood to others. There, I make the perfunctory morning faces, which always seem to precede my daily contribution to the once-blue toilet water that I always enjoy making green.

“Again the ringing. I shake twice like most others, as I am annoyed by the dribble that always seems to remain, causing a small acreage of wetness on the front of my briefs. I slowly, languidly, lazily, crazily stumble into the den where my father smokes all the time. Cigars in his easy chair.

“Oh, the stench!”

The song went on, the concert went on, and I lost track of what I was doing until afterward, when I rushed into the club bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I thought it had been a terrible show for watcher and performer alike. But a funny thing happened as I leaned over my putrid amalgamation of pizza, beer and pills. I heard applause, and suddenly I felt something rise inside me that wasn’t vomit. It was a sense of pride, accomplishment and self-satisfaction strong enough to eclipse my withering self-image and my punching-bag past. It was the first time in my life I felt that way. And I wanted to feel like that again. I wanted to be applauded, I wanted to be hissed, I wanted to make people pissed.

Few stories in my life are without an anticlimax, and this one came as I was driving back to Fort Lauderdale at three
A.M
. that night in my mom’s red Fiero. On the overpass arching above the crime-ridden ghetto of Little Havana, the digital radio blinked out in my car. I pulled over to the shoulder to see what was wrong, and discovered that I couldn’t restart the car. The alternator belt had snapped, and, less than an hour after having found my true calling, I was stuck foraging for a phone by myself in Little Havana, where the chances of a makeup-streaked clown named Marilyn Manson not getting beat up were pretty slim. The only good that came out of the experience was that, since the tow truck didn’t arrive until ten
A.M
., I got used to not sleeping after a concert early in my career.

Our first real show took place at the Reunion Room. I booked it by telling the manager and DJ, Tim, “Listen, I got this band and we’re going to play here and we want $500.” Normally bands were paid $50 to $150, but Tim agreed to my price. That was lesson number one in music-industry manipulation: If you act like a rock star, you will be treated like one. After the show, we kicked pimplehead and the fat guy out of the band and they no doubt went off to make sandwiches, squeeze zits and star in the sitcom
Pimplehead and the Fat Guy
, which lasted for two episodes.

We then lured Brad Stewart, the Crispin Glover look-alike from the Kitchen Club, away from a rival band, Insanity Assassin, which featured Joey Vomit on bass and on vocals Nick Rage, a short, stubby guy who had somehow tricked himself into thinking he was a tall, skinny, attractive guy. It wasn’t hard to convince Brad to play bass with us (even though he had played guitar with Insanity Assassin) since we had similar musical goals—and better stage names. He became Gidget Gein. We let Stephen join the band as Madonna Wayne Gacy, even though he didn’t have a keyboard. Instead, he played with toy soldiers onstage.

For better but ultimately for worse, one more character ended up in our freak show. Her name was Nancy, and she was psychotic in all the wrong ways. She knew my girlfriend Teresa, who was one of the first people I met after Rachelle had made a fool of me. I was seeking a motherly figure instead of a model’s figure, and I found it at a Saigon Kick concert at the Button South. Teresa came from the same factory as Tina Potts, Jennifer and most of the other girls I ended up with in Ohio. She had a slight overbite, tiny hands and a blond bob not unlike Stephen’s. The two were perpetually mistaken for twins.

I had seen Nancy once before when I worked at the record store, a hippo Goth looking foolish in a black wedding gown. When Teresa introduced me to her a year later, Nancy had lost fifty pounds and had an I’m-skinny-and-I’m-gonna-pay-back-the-world-for-all-the-times-when-I-was-fat-and-didn’t-get-fucked attitude. She had shoulder-length black curly hair, floppy tits that hung out of a slutty tank top, Hispanic features, a pale face, and a permanent stench that was half flowery, half noxious. Once I told her about the performance art ideas I had for future shows, there was no escaping her: She pushed herself into the band like a tick working its way under an elephant’s skin. Any idea I had that involved a girl—no matter how extreme or humiliating—she immediately volunteered for. Because she was willing and I was desperate—and also since she seemed like somebody other people would dislike as much as they disliked me—I gave in.

Our antics quickly grew from tame to depraved. The first time we performed together, I sang while holding her on a leash the whole time—to make a point about our patriarchal society, of course, not because it turned me on to drag a scantily clad woman around the stage by a leather leash. Soon afterward, Nancy asked me to punch her in the face, so I began giving her progressively cruder beatings each show.

It must have caused some brain damage because she began to fall in love with me—even though I was going out with Teresa, who was good friends with Nancy’s boyfriend, Carl, a tall, goofy, well-meaning klutz with big hips and a soft, girlish figure. This lame
Real World
situation was made even worse when Nancy and I began to explore sexuality as well as pain and dominance onstage. I made out with her and sucked her tits, and she got on her knees and caressed whatever she found down there. Without fucking, we took it as far as we could without getting in trouble with my girlfriend, her boyfriend or the law.

During one concert we put her in a cage, and, as the band played “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band, I revved up a chain saw and tried to grind through the metal. But the chain flew off the blade, smacked me across the eyes and made a huge gash in my forehead, sending blood streaking down my face. I barely made it through the rest of the show because all I could see was red.

Like any good performance art, there was a message behind the violence. Most of the time, I wasn’t interested in inflicting pain on myself and others unless it was in a way that would make people think about the way they act, the society they live in or the things they take for granted. Sometimes, as a concrete lesson in making assumptions, I’d toss into the audience dozens of ziploc bags—half of them filled with chocolate chip cookies, the other half with cat turds.

I was also interested in the danger and menace of seemingly innocent children’s movies, books and objects, like metal lunchboxes, which were banned in Florida because the state was worried kids would use them to beat each other senseless. During “Lunchbox,” I regularly set a metal lunchbox on fire, took off all my clothes and danced around it, trying to exorcise its demons. In an attempt to reiterate the lesson of
Willy Wonka
in my own style during other shows, I hung a donkey piñata over the crowd and put a stick on the edge of the stage. Then I would warn, “Please, don’t break this open. I beg you not to.” Human psychology being what it is, kids in the crowd would invariably grab the stick and smash the piñata apart, forcing everyone to suffer the consequence, which in this case was a shower of cow brains, chicken livers and pig intestines from a disemboweled donkey. People would slam-dance and slip on this mass of now-spoiled meat, cracking their heads open in a total intestinal freak-out. The outrageous stunts, however, came later, after a disastrous trip to Manhattan during which I wrote my first real song.

A girl with a pretentious name like Asia, who I had met while she was working at a McDonald’s in Fort Lauderdale, was spending the summer in New York and offered to fly me up for a weekend. Although I was going out with Teresa, I accepted—mainly because I didn’t like Asia and just wanted a free trip to New York. I thought that maybe I could find a record executive to sign our band, so I brought along a crude demo tape. I was never happy with our demos, which Scott always recorded, because we sounded like a tinny industrial band and I imagined us playing rawer, more immediate punk rock.

Manhattan turned out to be a disaster. I discovered that Asia had lied to me about her name and age. She had used her sister’s ID to get a job at McDonald’s because she was too young. I got pissed—it wasn’t that big a deal, but it was another case of a girl deceiving me—and stormed out of her apartment. In the street, by a coincidence or not, I ran into two club rats from South Florida, Andrew and Suzie, a couple of dubious sexuality. I always thought they looked sharp and stylish in clubs, but seeing them for the first time in daylight that afternoon I realized that they used makeup and darkness to practice Gothic deception. In the afternoon sun, they looked like decomposing corpses and seemed at least ten years older than me.

In their hotel room, the cable system had public-access channels, a completely new phenomenon to me. I spent hours flipping through the stations, watching Pat Robertson preach about society’s evils and then ask people to call him with their credit card number. On the adjacent channel, a guy was greasing up his cock with Vaseline and asking people to call and give him their credit card number. I grabbed the hotel notepad and started writing down phrases: “Cash in hand and dick on screen, who said God was ever clean?” I imagined Pat Robertson finishing his more-righteous-than-thou patter, then calling 1-900-VASELINE. “Bible-belt ‘round Anglo-waste, putting sinners in their place/Yeah, right, great, if you’re so good explain the shit stains on your face.” Thus “Cake and Sodomy” was born.

I had written other songs I thought were good, but “Cake and Sodomy” was more than just a good song. As an anthem for a hypocritical America slobbering on the tit of Christianity, it was a blueprint for our future message. If televangelists were going to make the world seem so wicked, I was going to give them something real to cry about. And years later, they did. The same person who inspired “Cake and Sodomy,” Pat Robertson, went on to quote the song’s lyrics and misinterpret them for his flock on
The 700 Club
.

When I came back from New York, my real troubles began. Teresa was supposed to pick me up at the airport, but she never showed up and nobody answered the phone at her house. So I called Carl and Nancy, since they lived near the airport.

“Do you know where the fuck Teresa is?” I asked. “I had a shitty time in New York, I’m stuck at the airport with no fucking money and all I wanna do is go home and go to sleep.”

“Teresa’s out with Carl,” Nancy said, the cold tone of her voice betraying a hint of the jealousy that I also felt.

Nancy offered to pick me up and drive me home. When we arrived, she followed me inside. I just wanted to pass out, but I didn’t want to be mean after she had rescued me. I collapsed onto the bed, and she collapsed on top of me, coming on to me heavier (all puns intended) than she ever had before. She rammed her tongue down my throat and grabbed my dick. I was very apprehensive, mostly because I didn’t want to get caught. By now, I had begun to feel removed from the everyday world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.