Long Hard Road Out of Hell (22 page)

I rushed to the house, but I was too late. An ambulance was already leaving. Jeanine was on the phone with her lawyers because whenever someone overdoses and medics find hypodermic needles and drug paraphernalia, they’re obligated to call the police. I stayed with Jeanine that night until we found out Brad had been resuscitated and then promptly arrested. We talked for hours about it. I felt sorry for Brad because he was a creative, good-natured guy and I loved writing songs with him. But he was also a junkie and a fuck-up. A part of me wished he really had fatally overdosed, for his own and our peace of mind. By then his life was heroin. Playing bass was just a way of killing time between shots.

When I saw Brad again, I sat him down and, for the first time, realized how important this band really was to me and how much I would not tolerate anyone fucking it up. This was not a game anymore. “Listen,” I told him. “You’ve had your final chance. Clean up your act or you’re out of the band.”

Brad broke down and started crying, apologizing in broken sobs for his behavior and promising not to shoot dope anymore. Because I didn’t have any previous experience with junkies, I believed him. I believed him the second and the third times too. He hit the one weak spot still left in my cold black heart: pity, a word that over the course of the arduous year to come would be excised from my vocabulary.

Months later, we drove to Orlando for an important showcase for several record labels interested in signing us. The night before I had gotten another panicked phone call from Jeanine, who was scared because Brad was on heroin again and had sucked some guy’s dick that night. I confronted Brad, and he was in denial about his drug use but he wouldn’t stop bragging about how he had finally fulfilled his fantasy of sucking a guy off, a promiscuous shampoo boy who worked at the salon where he went to get his hair dyed (which was somewhat ironic since Brad’s dreadlocks were always dirty and smelly).

Onstage, Brad seemed out of it, but I had more important things on my mind than his track-marked arms. After the show, he disappeared, but again I had more important things on my mind because we were staying with these cute girls. Normally I would have been concerned, but I was sick of baby-sitting him.

At three in the morning, he burst into the house with three strippers who none of us knew. He was still wearing his outfit from the show—a sleeveless purple seventies shirt with silver stars on it, small glittering women’s shorts over red tights with guns on them and combat boots—and he was beyond wasted. His eyes were darting from side to side so quickly that they were a blur and he was fidgeting manically with his lip ring as he babbled incoherently about something that seemed important to him. Up close, the strippers had bruised and discolored legs, arms and necks, as if they were running out of veins to shoot up into. Their teeth were gapped and gnarled in their mouth like melting white candles on a stale fudge cake. As they teetered nastily around the room, offering everyone heroin, Valium and whatever else was collecting lint in their pockets, Brad seemed to be collapsing into himself, shriveling on the couch and becoming so disoriented that he didn’t even know his own name. Sweat was dripping off his face and landing in droplets on his clothes. For a second, he seemed to come to his senses. He looked me straight in the eye, then toppled onto the floor, passed out. His face was pale green from the hair dye that had seeped with his sweat into the oily creases of his forehead and his unpainted fingernails were now swirled purple and blue.

The strippers, probably used to this situation, fled the house. At first, I tried to wake Brad up—helping everyone roll him around, slap him and dump buckets of water on him. But what I really wanted to do was kick him in the ribs. I was overwhelmed by hatred for him and the cliché his life had become. I had once loved Brad like a little brother, which made it easier to hate him. Not only are love and hate such closely related emotions, but it’s a lot easier to hate someone you’ve cared about than someone you never have.

We stepped away from his motionless, rainbow body and talked—not about how we could help him, but about how we could hurt him. I suggested turning him over and letting him choke on his own puke. If the coroner couldn’t tell he had been moved, Brad’s death would be attributed to his own stupidity. We sat locked in debate, trying to determine whether we would get arrested and charged with manslaughter. Though I still felt a tinge of pity, I thought of his death as an assisted suicide. In actual fact, I felt as if he had already committed suicide, because the Brad I met at the Kitchen Club when I first conceived of the band years ago was dead, a stranger to both of us.

But I didn’t want him to jeopardize the band in death as he had in life. In the end, it was only the fear of being caught that kept us from killing him. It was a monstrous way of thinking, but I couldn’t help it. I was becoming the cold, emotionally crippled monster I always wanted to be, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. But it was too late. The metamorphosis was already well under way.

The next day I called the studio where Jeordie was working on Amboog-A-Lard’s first independent album. It was a big move for Jeordie, because he was playing bass and guitar as well as producing. But I also knew he wanted to join Marilyn Manson so badly that he had actually befriended Brad and had been taking him out to drink and do drugs after Brad had been warned to clean up. I always wondered whether this was a deliberate act of sabotage on Jeordie’s part or not. If it was, it was pretty clever.

“Do you want to be in our band?” I asked.

“Well, I’m in the middle of making this record.” Jeordie sighed.

“You’ve always belonged in our band.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And your band hates your fucking guts and wants to kick the shit out of you.”

“I’ll call you right back,” he said, and I knew that I got him.

Brad was as good as dead, Nancy was as good as dead and my morality was as good as dead. Marilyn Manson was finally on its way to becoming the band I wanted it to be.

the rules

D
O WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW
.

—
Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Friend