Long Hard Road Out of Hell (28 page)

I’m told that on the last night of the tour, Nine Inch Nails got their revenge on you. Is this true?

It wasn’t revenge exactly. Traditionally on the last night of the tour the opening act expects to get fucked with by the main act. So on the last show of the tour in Philadelphia I was leaving the bathroom backstage before our show when I saw two naked girls making out and touching each other all over. Next to them there was some weird naked bisexual guy. Everybody from our band and from Nine Inch Nails was standing there watching. So the guy goes to me, “I’ve heard you say that if anyone has the guts, you’ll fist-fuck them backstage. I’d like to know if I could take you up on that offer.”

Nine Inch Nails thought that they were gonna pull one over on me because I had made a habit of saying onstage, “Who’s gonna come backstage and let me stick my fist up their ass?” They thought, “Oh, we’ll show him. We’re gonna bring someone back and he’ll chicken out.” But, more to destroy their plans than to keep from being a hypocrite, I said, “Okay. No problem.” I put on a big rubber glove that came up to my wrist, and there wasn’t any sort of lubrication nearby other than margarine. So I wiped that all over my fist and then tried my hardest to get most of my hand, probably up past my knuckles, into this guy’s anxious, pouting rectum.

I thought that was all. But when I went to go on stage five minutes later, Nine Inch Nails ambushed us and covered us with every disgusting substance they could find backstage—flour, salsa, Vaseline, guacamole, ketchup, baby powder. So we had to go on stage covered in all this shit, and as we were performing five male strippers ran on stage and started dancing. I felt like maybe this had gone too far because now they were messing with our performance, and I didn’t want the crowd to think that I would be responsible for something so stupid.

We walked offstage ready to kick the shit out of Trent and his band to pay them back for a joke that had gone too far, but it wasn’t over. I was wearing just a pair of leather shorts and wet socks, and we were all covered with beer, sweat, lipstick and every backstage condiment imaginable. Before we could even reach the safety of our dressing room, we were ambushed again and smothered in whipped cream. A bunch of security guards grabbed us and handcuffed our hands behind our backs, led us out the backstage door and threw us into a pickup truck.

They closed the doors and drove off, and at this point it had gone beyond a joke. In retrospect I’m impressed by the planning that went into it. But at the time I was scared shitless because they drove us for half an hour. We ended up in downtown Philly, where they pulled us off the truck and threw the keys to the handcuffs into a trash can. They crumpled up a dollar bill, threw it on the ground and laughed, “That’s to help you get back to the concert.”

It was about twenty-five degrees and we were practically naked and freezing, especially because we were drenched from the filth of the night. We looked so scary, pathetic and degenerate that nobody would even walk on the same side of the street as us. We ended up begging some college kids to drive us back to the arena.

Did you have any hard feelings?

No. If I can dish it out, I’ve got to be prepared to take it. I wasn’t so calm at the time, but now I see it as a good prank, definitely more elaborate and crueler than anything I could have come up with. That kind of symbolized the ending of our freshman year so to speak. We graduated to the next level.

But not without a little bloodshed along the way, like your drummer and several chickens, right?

Okay, I’d better address this. Some people think we killed a chicken during a show in Texas; some people say that it didn’t die. The truth is that after we left the Nine Inch Nails tour, we did some shows on our own before going to New Orleans to work on the EP we’re making now,
Smells Like Children
. I put in our tour rider as a joke that we had to have a live chicken. I guess in Texas it’s pretty commonplace to have chickens running around because in the midst of our celery and Jack Daniel’s backstage at one of our shows there we found a chicken sitting around clucking in a cage. I named him Jebediah, and I was particularly attached to him. I didn’t want to kill him at all. But our stage set looked like a strange cross between
Ziggy Stardust
and
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, and I thought that visually the chicken added something to what we were trying to present. So we let him tour with us, and sometimes I even miked the chicken and let him sing along. But during a show at Trees in Dallas, somehow the chicken cage got kicked open and the chicken flew into the crowd. They tossed him around, but he didn’t die. He went back on the farm, although he’s probably Chicken McNuggets right now. Heaven forbid I kill a chicken, but it’s okay for Ronald McDonald.

From then on, “kill the chicken” became a euphemism for either getting high or going all the way. If we were getting ready to do a show, instead of giving each other a high five or saying “Let’s rock,” we’d say, “Let’s kill the chicken.”

There’s one more line left. Who wants it?

I think I need to get to sleep soon. What I could really use is some Valium. [
He opens a hidden compartment on a ring on his left index finger and takes out a blue pill, which he washes down with a sip of wine
.]

Before I let you go to sleep, what happened with Freddy?

On the last day of that tour, we were playing at a gay bar in South Carolina. There weren’t many people in the audience so we thought we would do something different. Twiggy put on a suit, and I put on a black cowboy hat, a long black coat, and painted a black line from my forehead all the way down to my dick. Pogo was shirtless and he was wearing my underwear with the dick hole and a giant studded leather belt that said
Hate
in red letters. He looked like a big creepy hairy baby man with a bald fetal head, a giant bushy chest, some kind of steroid Olympics wrestling belt, a flaccid dick encased in black vinyl and combat boots. He was definitely the gayest looking person in the place. I tried to get Daisy to do something different and enjoy himself more, and he said something ridiculous like [
speaking in a slow, dumb drawl
],“Oh, I get it. I should become more the character of Daisy Berkowitz.”

Everybody knew that Freddy was going to be fired except for Freddy because just a week before, while Freddy the Wheel was polishing his spokes or something, we auditioned a quiet, older drummer from Las Vegas named Kenny Wilson and asked him to join the band as Ginger Fish. He actually rode the tour bus with us one night and we told Freddy that he was just a friend of our tour manager. He bought it.

We didn’t want to be cruel to Freddy because we liked him as a person. We just felt obliged to make his last show with the band a memorable one. Twiggy and I had shaved our eyebrows off, but he still had his as well as a goatee and a hairstyle that was just black bangs in front of an otherwise shaven head. I think he did this because he was starting to go bald in back. He was a very self-conscious person. But somehow we convinced him to shave his entire head and his face, and he ended up looking like this weird cancer patient version of Uncle Fester from
The Addams Family
. We thought it was the coolest he had ever looked, and wished for a second that he was still going to be in the band.

So we took the stage and immediately we weren’t having a good time because the crew had decided that, as their way of ending the tour with a memorable prank, they were going to put raw chicken feet all over the stage. So I slipped and fell on a beer bottle, and it shattered. I was so pissed I took it and fucking slashed my chest from one side to the other. And that was my first real act of self-mutilation in front of people. We sacrificed Freddy by setting his bass drum on fire, but the whole drum kit burst into flames, followed by Freddy. As Freddy escaped backstage to find a fire extinguisher we started smashing everything. So that last day of the tour was really the chrysalis of a new stage of development for us, a sort of ritual bloodletting followed by a sacrifice to what we are in the process of becoming, which I can’t entirely explain right now because I don’t fully understand it myself.

You never actually fired Freddy?

No. We didn’t tell him he’d been fired and he didn’t tell us he quit. I think he knew that he’d been sacrificed because the next day he just got on a plane and went home. I never got to say goodbye to him, and I haven’t said a word to him since. He was very peaceful about it, and I respect him for that. So if he sues me now, I’ll break his kneecaps.

we’re off to see the wizard

A
S FAR AS
I
KNOW, THERE IS NOT ONE WORD IN THE
G
OSPELS IN PRAISE OF INTELLIGENCE.

—
Bertrand Russell
,

“Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?”

I
had written, I had called, I had pleaded. Finally, I was granted an appointment. During a day off on the ’94 Nine Inch Nails tour in San Francisco in October, the hotel phone rang.

“The doctor wants to meet you,” came a woman’s voice, stern and husky.

I asked her if the doctor would care to see our show the following night. I knew everything there was to know about the doctor but he knew very little about me.

“The doctor never leaves his house,” she replied icily.

“Okay, when do you want me to come over? I’m in town for a few days.”

“The doctor really wants to meet you,” she replied. “Can you come between one and two tonight?”

No matter what time the doctor called for me and where he summoned me to, I planned to be there. I admired and respected him. We had a lot of things in common: We had experience as extravagant showmen, successfully placed curses on people, studied criminology and serial killers, found a kindred spirit in the writings of Nietzsche, and constructed a philosophy against repression and in support of nonconformity. In short, we had both dedicated the better part of our lives to toppling Christianity with the weight of its own hypocrisy, and as a result been used as scapegoats to justify Christianity’s existence.

“Oh,” the caller added before she hung up. “Make sure you come alone.”

The doctor was the preferred name of Anton Szandor LaVey, founder and high priest of the Church of Satan. What nearly everybody in my life—from John Crowell to Ms. Price—had misunderstood about Satanism was that it is not about ritual sacrifices, digging up graves and worshipping the devil. The devil doesn’t exist. Satanism is about worshipping yourself, because you are responsible for your own good and evil. Christianity’s war against the devil has always been a fight against man’s most natural instincts—for sex, for violence, for self-gratification—and a denial of man’s membership in the animal kingdom. The idea of heaven is just Christianity’s way of creating a hell on earth.