Long Hard Road Out of Hell (27 page)

That’s like 200,000 records.

Exactly. And always in my head it felt defeating. I want to be bigger than Kiss. I don’t want to be some fucking dispensable thing. I probably shouldn’t say this, but what the fuck, nobody reads your magazine. [
He straightens out a line and snorts half of it
.]

Anyway, I felt there was always a competition from the beginning. Not from my end but from them. It made me feel defeated because I was always ahead of myself. I was always thinking of the big picture, and nobody else was. It was very disappointing all the time. What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen. And I think nobody saw that back then but me and my band, or at least the core of the band, which was Pogo, Twiggy and myself.

Let’s get back to the tour.

Yeah, okay. We had a lot of interesting things that happened with Jim Rose [leader of a traveling troupe of freaks and contortionists called the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow]. He was always a great thrill to be around because he instigated a lot of interesting scenarios. There was one girl that had followed us around to most of the cities, and she was sort of overweight but cute, like a koala bear with Gothic udders, I suppose. Somehow one night she was talked into standing naked and bent over as everybody took turns trying to spit in her asshole, a game that even I found crude and couldn’t take part in.

You’re just saying that for my benefit.

No, that’s true. For a moment I thought, “Well, maybe.” But I was uncomfortable because I felt a little sorry for her. She seemed like the type of person that just really wanted to be accepted. She was basically being exploited for her anxiousness and her neediness, and I have a soft spot for people like that because I’m so used to wanting to be accepted that I’ve let people exploit me. There are actually certain lines I will draw as far as what I do. I’m not trying to be self-righteous: I thought it was entertaining. I just didn’t participate.

There were things I took part in, though. The most memorable was toward the very end of Jim Rose’s time on the tour when we were getting really rowdy. What happened was Jim Rose had gathered together quite an assortment of people this time. He had really done some work. He had about ten girls, very nubile and ready to get fucked. Unfortunately that’s not what happened to them. I’m sure they were all disappointed.

Instead, he devised a bowel movement contest to see who could receive an enema and hold it in the longest. The person who shit it out first lost. Three girls agreed to compete, and they were all rather attractive for people who would participate in such an event. I ended up giving the enemas, and also holding a bowl of Fruit Loops underneath each of their asses. The first girl shot right away—sprayed out some brown water that wasn’t even really shit. It was sort of a Yoo-Hoo colored liquid. And Mr. Lifto, who is the strongman of the Jim Rose show except he uses his dick instead of his biceps, ate the bowl of cereal. The girl who ended up winning didn’t even spray or shit at all.

Was she rewarded?

She was rewarded with our respect and admiration.

Did you feel vindicated coming back to Fort Lauderdale as a rock star?

Actually, our first big homecoming show was in Miami, and everyone was in the audience. My parents, every girl I had ever slept with, every girl I had ever wanted to sleep with, and everyone I had kicked out of the band. But what happened was while we were performing, Robin [Finck], the guitarist in Nine Inch Nails, ran out on stage in a G-string with some kind of powdered confectionery item he planned to dump on me for whatever reason. In the midst of this sabotage attempt, I grabbed him and pulled his pants down and placed his limp, salty penis in my mouth and sort of, uh, teethed on it for a few moments, but not long enough to really constitute it being a blow job. It should be noted that I didn’t have a hard-on, which should relieve me of any accusations of being gay. Afterwards, he ran off stage sort of embarrassed and I had to flee from the cops when the show ended. They came backstage looking for me, and I hid in the bathroom where, conveniently, some drugs had been stashed. Luckily, they never issued a warrant for my arrest or prosecuted me for that particular incident.

We staged a private encore several days after the original incident. We were retelling the anecdote for the twentieth time at a Nine Inch Nails after-show party filled with a cast of characters that Jim Rose had hand picked—mildly attractive girls who seemed foolish enough to do anything he suggested. And I was asked to make a repeat performance, so I went ahead and did it again just to prove that it was not only for art, it was for pleasure as well. This time I did a better job and once again did not get a hard-on, although I believe that he may have had one.

What else happened on that tour?

I think my first real experience in the rock and roll world came in Cleveland the day that Hole joined the tour. The lineup was actually Marilyn Manson, Hole and Nine Inch Nails. Courtney showed up late. She had flown in and was completely wrecked when she got to the concert. She went on to play probably one of the worst shows in her life, and I’m sure she would admit this. She took off her top, said something sarcastic speculating whether Trent Reznor was a top or bottom to piss off the audience, and then dove into the crowd. A lot of people tried to grope her breasts and tear off the rest of her clothes.

After she finished, she decided to come into our dressing room because we had adjoining ones. She was pretty much just in her underpants and her bra, and lying around sprawled out, high or drunk. I’m not sure which, probably a combination of both. I was kind of confused by the situation because—other than Trent—she was one of the first infamous (rather than famous) people I had come across. So I kept my distance. I’m not sure if I was scared of her or if I just didn’t want to get involved.

She was trying on everyone’s clothes, and I remember Daisy was pissing me off because, in particularly bad taste, he was trying to trade some of his clothes to get her to send him one of Kurt Cobain’s guitars. She was very cool about it and didn’t take any offense.

Do you want any more wine?

Sure. I need to go to sleep eventually. [
He refills his glass
.]

Now, Courtney has always said that she had some kind of relationship with Trent but Trent has always denied it. What’s the truth?

I probably shouldn’t talk about that. All I’ll say is that it seemed that Trent had picked Hole to be on the tour as a bit of a novelty. He seemed to dislike her greatly, and I think he wanted her on tour either to make a fool out of her or just to study her. But as the tour progressed I noticed that Trent and Courtney were hanging around a lot together, and it was a part of the tour where he wasn’t talking to us too much. He had disappeared into his own world—or hers.

So you didn’t really know whether they were sleeping together?

Well, things started to get weird a month or so down the road as the tour was ending. Courtney showed up at Trent’s bungalow trying to break down the door and doing some other stuff that I forgot about because I was drunk. But it was some sort of outburst that comes from a girl only if you fuck her. So I could tell that there was something going on that Trent wasn’t telling us about, especially since he was stumbling around her hotel room at certain hours of the night that were very suspicious. Still to this day he won’t admit to any of us what happened. So you can make your own judgment.

I thought this interview was to tell the truth about everything that happened in the past year.

I’m telling the truth, but Twiggy can probably tell you more because he had an undocumented, undisclosed relationship with her afterwards.

Is that true, Twiggy?

TWIGGY:
It’s true that I need whiskey and speed.

MANSON:
What happened was that after the leg of the tour with Hole was over, for some reason we kept running into Courtney. Whenever she would pop up, it would cause great amounts of stress for Trent. He’s a nonconfrontational person so rather than dealing with it he would let it torment him.

There was a night that we were all partying. I think it was in Houston, and Trent was working on the
Natural Born Killers
soundtrack. Twiggy and I went out to a bar and some guy gave us drugs. We had one of our very first nights of terror where I felt like I was gonna die, and I wanted to call everybody I knew and tell them that I loved them and that I was afraid. In the midst of the terror, Twiggy disappeared because he had gotten some frantic phone call in the middle of the night. Apparently Courtney was in town and told him, “Come over. I’m freaking out!”

He didn’t come back until about seven o’clock the next morning. I asked him what happened, and he pulled up his shirt and had these giant red claw marks on his back. He kind of sheepishly admitted to doing some very graphic and very obscene sexual acts. Very exciting. I’ll leave it up to your imagination.

So they continued to have this secret relationship, probably because Twiggy wasn’t famous enough at the time for Courtney to admit that she was having sex with him.

Do you think she was manipulating him to get to Trent?

MANSON:
I don’t know, but Trent seemed to think so. And it worked. Because not long afterwards we got a call from John Malm, the president of Nothing. During the tour, we had fired our management from Florida, which was too busy taking care of that country band the Mavericks to really care, and let Nothing take over. So now John Malm, our new manager, was telling us, “Listen, you can’t hang out with Courtney because she’s trying to find out where Trent’s staying and she’s gonna use you to do it.”

So which did you choose, Twiggy, Trent’s peace of mind or your budding relationship with Courtney?

TWIGGY:
Whiskey and speed.

MANSON:
He kept seeing her, but not to rebel against anyone. He was just into her. I think he was also starstruck by Courtney because he had never had a relationship with anyone of her stature. At the time I didn’t really understand Courtney and was siding with Trent. I sympathized with him and believed his side of the story. I felt like Courtney was a bad thing and I didn’t want any part of it. [
Twiggy suddenly stands up from his chair, slightly flushed
.]

TWIGGY:
Everyone was accusing me of being used when at the time it was genuine. It meant something. I learned a lot from that relationship, more than any other one. It was inspiring. But the closer we got to each other, the more pressure there was to stay away. I think there was also this idea at the beginning that I was discrediting Trent’s trophy. [
He collapses back into the chair
.] I guess the timing was wrong.

Is there anything else you want to add, Twiggy?

TWIGGY:
Whiskey and speed.

MANSON:
I never really ever had a conversation with Courtney until just recently, when I found out that she is a very smart person and more in control than most people think. We were playing somewhere on the West Coast and there was a knock on our tour bus door. I heard this drunken, raspy voice screaming, “Jeordie! Jeordie! Where the fuck’s Jeordie?” And Courtney came limping on the bus because apparently the night before she had fallen and hurt her leg. She saw a girl sitting there and immediately started telling her, “You don’t need to be on this bus. You should get a keyboard and start your own band. Then these guys’ll be on your bus.”

Then she looked at us and asked, “You got any donuts?” I had just gotten a dozen glazed donuts and she took four and devoured them before I even saw her mouth open. Then she whipped off her bandage and winged it at our tour manager, who started freaking out because getting blood on him, whether it belongs to someone famous or not, was not in his contract. When Twiggy came out from the back of the bus, no doubt hiding the several teenage girls he had back there, he seemed semi-embarrassed and semi-entertained by the whole situation. It was at that point that I started to like Courtney and gain a bizarre respect for her because she made me laugh and I thought she was cool.