Long Hard Road Out of Hell (31 page)

A few days after Halloween the following year, I got a call at four
A.M.
telling me that LaVey had died. I was surprised by how sad I felt, because he had actually become a father figure to me and I never got the chance to say good-bye to him or even to thank him for his inspiration. But at the same time I knew that even though the world had lost a great philosopher, Hell had gained a new leader.

abuse, parts one and two

I
FIND TERRIBLE THE NOTION THAT OTHERS CAN DO TO ME WHAT
I
DO TO THEM.

—
Duran Duran, Barbarella

ABUSE: GIVEN

One hundred and ninety-four pounds of abused flesh, atrophied muscle and hard bone, Tony Wiggins was a vacuum cleaner for sin. His blue eyes shone with the light of a perpetual party and his cyanotic lips curled and uncurled in threatening invitation. Only his red neck charm, emanating from a blond ponytail and Colonel Sanders goatee, hinted at any semblance of manners, decency or morality. No matter where he was at what hour—the smaller the town and the more unlikely the circumstance the better—Tony Wiggins managed to suck the filth, corruption and decadence off the streets and bring it back to us.

We met Tony Wiggins at the right time, when we were weak and vulnerable. That first year on the road had taken its toll, not just on our health and sanity but on our friendships and relationships. In the meantime, all our singles had failed, our music wasn’t on the radio and nobody knew us except for a small cult of Nine Inch Nails fans and a few stray freaks. We had a new drummer, Ginger Fish, and were ready to go back into the studio, give it another shot and, if our next singles flopped, see if Collapsing Lungs needed any backup singers. We didn’t want to be an underground band all our lives. We knew we were better than that.

But, just as we were preparing to record new songs in New Orleans, we were invited to join Danzig’s Spring 1995 tour as an opening act. It was an invitation we couldn’t refuse because the record label considered it a big break and an excellent opportunity to promote
Portrait of an American Family
, an album that, as far as we were concerned, was dead. So we began the Danzig tour reluctant, resentful and pissed off. The fact that during our warm-up show in Nevada some girl fed me crystal meth (telling me it was coke) didn’t help any. I vomited through the entire show and couldn’t sleep on the daylong bus ride to our first show with Danzig in San Francisco.

I walked onstage that first night wearing a hospital smock from a mental ward, a black jock strap and boots. My eyes were red and bleary from three sleepless nights. Right away, I felt something cold and hard hit my face. I thought it was the microphone, but it clattered to the floor and smashed, sending shards of glass splintering into my leg. It was a bottle from the audience. By our second song, there were bottles and refuse all over the stage and a muscled, tattooed fraternity reject in the front row was challenging me to a fight. I was so enraged at this point that I grabbed a beer bottle off the stage, smashed it on the drum kit and stopped the song. “If you want to fight me, come up onstage, you pussy,” I screamed. Then I took the jagged half-bottle and plunged it into the side of my chest, dragging it across my skin until it reached the other side and creating one of the deepest and biggest scars on the latticework that is my torso.

Gushing blood, I dove into the crowd and landed on frathead. When security threw me back onstage, I was completely naked and nearly everyone in the front rows was stained with blood. I grabbed the microphone stand and sent it hurtling through Ginger’s bass drum, destroying it. He looked up at me, angry and confused—it was only his second concert with us since replacing Freddy the Wheel—but quickly caught on, punching through his snare. Twiggy raised his bass over his head and brought it splintering down onto the monitor. Daisy raised his ax and dropped it on his foot. We destroyed everything on stage short of each other.

As we walked off after our fourteen-minute show, we passed Glenn Danzig, who is at most half of my height (though with ten times the muscle mass). I smiled wickedly at him, as if to say, “You asked for us, and now you’re going to pay for it.”

We didn’t want to be onstage playing music. So every night we didn’t. The shows continued to be short exercises in brutality and nihilism, and the road map across my chest began to expand with scars, bruises and welts. We had all become wretched, exhausted, empty containers—
Westworld
automatons gone berserk. But just when even our own violence was beginning to bore us and I was deep in the cavity of misery because Missi had called and said she wanted to end our relationship—the first relationship that meant anything to me—because I was never around, we met Tony Wiggins.

He emerged off Danzig’s tour bus in black jeans, a black T-shirt and a pair of slick black wraparound sunglasses. He looked like the kind of guy who would pummel you mercilessly and then apologize afterward. I complimented him on his sunglasses. He tore them off his head and, without even hesitating, said, “Here, they’re yours.”

From that day on, we weren’t on tour with Danzig anymore. We were on tour with Tony Wiggins, their bus driver. Every morning he knocked on our bus or hotel room door and woke us up with a bottle of Jagermeister and a handful of drugs. When his hair was in a ponytail, which was rarely, it meant that he was doing his job and driving Danzig’s bus. When his hair was down, he was tending to us, making sure our self-destruction wasn’t limited to the stage. One night at a cheap, decrepit motel in Norfolk, Virginia, he burst into the room, carved up a couple lines right onto the dust and roach-powder-covered floor and snorted them. “Get on my back,” he ordered. Twiggy grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the floor and complied. I ignored them because I was busy writing the lyrics to a song called “The Beautiful People.” They ambled out the door, a drunk, double-assed beast that would hereafter be referred to as “Twiggins,” and headed toward the outside stairwell. Suddenly there was a clattering and a string of obscenities. At the bottom of the stairs, I found Twiggy face down in a puddle of rainwater and blood. We rushed him to the emergency room, but we looked so demented—dripping makeup, rainwater and blood—that we were ignored. Instead of complaining, Wiggins just grabbed a metal doctor’s tray and cut up several more lines. That was how nights with Wiggins usually ended. He would stir things up and wouldn’t leave them alone until someone was dead, in the hospital or passed out in their own vomit. If that someone wasn’t himself, he wouldn’t stop partying until it was.

Eventually Wiggins, Twiggy and I realized there were ways we could make the best of our situation and try educating ourselves and accumulating valuable knowledge while on the road. We began conducting various psychological experiments, like walking up to a couple and giving only the girl a backstage pass to test their relationship.

Gradually, the tenor of the tour began to change from miserable to memorable. On tour with Nine Inch Nails and Jim Rose, I had refrained from some of the stupider human tricks they indulged in, but now I didn’t care anymore. As we sat atop a twenty-foot-high steel tower outside a club called Sloss Furnaces in Biloxi, Mississippi, warming up for a show with Jagermeister and drugs, Wiggins, Twiggy and I swore to stop exploiting and humiliating girls backstage. Instead, we decided to perform a therapeutic service for them. To carry out our new plans, all we needed was a video camera and some girls willing to confess their deepest, most intimate sins. Little did we know just how dark and disturbing the lives of our fans really were.

While we performed that night, Wiggins did the prep work. Underneath the club, he found a network of dark catacombs with metal grates, dripping water and the general atmosphere of a set from
A Nightmare on Elm Street
. I raced to meet him there after the show, not only because I was excited but also because I needed to hide from the cops, who wanted to arrest me for indecent exposure. As our tour manager detained them, Wiggins took us to the catacombs, where he had two prospective patients waiting. We didn’t know whether our plan to extract confessions would really work, and at the time didn’t really understand what it meant to actually be burdened with the weight of someone’s darkest secrets. People don’t necessarily confide in one another to get something off their chest. They want something: reassurance, which is a hard gift to give convincingly.

Under a relentless and probing fusillade of questions from Wiggins, the first girl broke down and disclosed that when she was eleven, several boys in the neighborhood would regularly pick on her. One night she awoke to find her window open and four of them standing in her room. Without a word, they pulled down her bed-sheets, tore off her pajamas and raped her one by one. When she told her father the next day, he was indifferent. Within a year, he was sexually molesting her as well. As she told us this, she was kneeling on the floor, staring at the damp ground. When she finished, she looked up at me expectantly with wet eyes, the tracks of her tears tattooed by runny black mascara. I was supposed to do something, to say something, to help her somehow. With my music and in interviews, I never had any problem telling people about the lives they should be leading and the independence they should demand. But that was when I was talking to an aggregate, a mass, an undifferentiated group of people. Now that I was one-on-one and actually had the opportunity to change someone’s life, I froze momentarily. Then I told her that the fact that she was here and could talk about it proved she was strong enough to live through it and accept it.

I wonder still whether anything I went on to say meant anything to her, or if they were just the same clichés she had heard all her life. She told me that she wanted to trade clothes with me and took off her T-shirt, which was emblazoned with Nietzsche’s “God Is Dead” slogan followed by God’s response, “Nietzsche Is Dead.” I still take that shirt with me everywhere I go.

The first story was so harrowing that I still can’t remember what the second girl confessed to. All I remember was that she was a beautiful blond girl with the word
failure
carved into her arm.

With each show, Wiggins refined his inquisition methodology. His art was brutal and sophisticated, and, some in the field of psychoanalysis may say, unethical. He arrived at a point so advanced that in order to proceed with his work, he had to invent his own investigative apparatus. He unveiled it after a show in Indiana.

Backstage after Danzig’s set, we discovered our crew videotaping a tiny but full-bodied girl with white hair and pale skin. A boy who seemed to be her brother or boyfriend, about nineteen and skinny and effiminate with red hair in a bowl cut, a light smattering of freckles and a discolored bruise around his cheekbone, stood on the side, anxiously picking at an unlit cigarette in his hands. The smell of fresh shaving cream was in the air, and they had coaxed the girl into shaving herself and committing other unspeakable acts. It seemed like the kind of traditional exploitation that Wiggins and I were trying to avoid.