Long Hard Road Out of Hell (29 page)

I’m not and have never been a spokesperson for Satanism. It’s simply part of what I believe in, along with Dr. Seuss, Dr. Hook, Nietzsche and the Bible, which I also believe in. I just have my own interpretation.

That night in San Francisco, I didn’t tell anybody where I was going. I took a cab to LaVey’s house on one of the city’s main thoroughfares. He lived in an inconspicuous black building collared by a high, brutal-looking barbed wire fence. After paying the cab driver, I walked to the gate and noticed that there was no bell. As I contemplated turning back, the gate creaked open. I was as nervous as I was excited, because, unlike most experiences where you meet someone you idolize, I could already tell this one would not be a letdown.

I timidly entered the house and saw no one until I was halfway up the stairs. A fat man in a suit with a sweep of greasy black hair covering his bald spot stood at the top. Without saying a word, he motioned for me to follow him. In the times I visited LaVey since, the fat man has never introduced himself or spoke.

He brought me into a hallway and swung shut a heavy door, blotting out the light entirely. I couldn’t even see the fat man to follow him anymore. Just as I felt myself panicking, he grabbed my arm and pulled me the rest of the way. As we followed the curve of the corridor, my hipbone collided with a doorknob, causing it to turn slightly. Angered, the fat man pulled me away. Whatever was behind there was off limits to guests.

He finally pulled open a door, and left me alone in a dimly lit study. Beside the door there was a lavishly detailed portrait of LaVey standing next to the lion he used to keep as a house pet. The opposite wall was covered with books—a mix of biographies of Hitler and Stalin, horror by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, philosophy by Nietzsche and Hegel and manuals on hypnosis and mind control. The majority of the space was taken up by an ornate couch, over which hung several macabre paintings that looked like they were taken from Rod Serling’s
Night Gallery
. The oddest things about the room were the oversized playpen in the corner and the television set, which seemed out of place, a token of disposable consumerism in a world of contemplation and contempt.

To some people, this would all seem corny. To others, it would be terrifying. To me, it was exciting. Several years before I had read LaVey’s biography by Blanche Barton and was impressed by how smart he seemed. (In retrospect, I think the book may have been slightly biased since the author is also the mother of one of his children.) All the power LaVey wielded he gained through fear—the public’s fear of a word:
Satan
. By telling people he was a Satanist, LaVey became Satan in their eyes—which is not unlike my attitude toward becoming a rock star. “One hates what one fears,” LaVey had written. “I have acquired power without conscious effort, by simply being.” Those lines could have just as easily have been something I had written. As important, humor, which has no place in Christian dogma, is essential to Satanism as a valid reaction to a grotesque, misshapen world dominated by a race of cretins.

LaVey had been accused of being a Nazi and a racist, but his whole trip was elitism, which is the basic principle behind misanthropy. In a way, his kind of intellectual elitism (and mine) is actually politically correct because it doesn’t judge people by race or creed but by the attainable, equal opportunity criterion of intelligence. The biggest sin in Satanism is not murder, nor is it kindness. It is stupidity. I had originally written LaVey not to talk about human nature but to ask if he’d play theremin on
Portrait of an American Family
, because I had heard he was the only registered union theremin musician in America. He never acknowledged the request directly.

After sitting in the room by myself for several minutes, a woman walked in. She had gaudy blue eyeliner, an unnatural coif of blow-dried bleach-blond hair, and pink lipstick smeared on like a kid drawing outside the lines in a coloring book. She wore a tight baby-blue cashmere sweater, a miniskirt and skin-toned hose with a forties garter belt and high heels. Following her was a small child, Xerxes Satan LaVey, who ran up to me and tried to remove my rings.

“I hope you’re well,” Blanche said stiffly and formally. “I’m Blanche, the woman you spoke to on the phone. Hail Satan.”

I knew that I was supposed to respond with some kind of mannered phrase that ended with “hail Satan,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. It seemed too empty and ritualistic, like wearing a uniform in Christian school. Instead, I just looked at the boy and said, “He has his father’s eyes,” a line from
Rosemary’s Baby
that I was all too sure she was familiar with.

As she left, no doubt disappointed by my manners, Blanche informed me, “The doctor will be out in a minute.”

The formalities I had seen so far, combined with everything I knew about LaVey’s past—as a circus animal trainer, magician’s assistant, police photographer, burlesque hall pianist and all-around hustler—led me to expect a grand entrance. I was not disappointed.

LaVey didn’t walk into the room—he appeared. All that was missing was the sound of an explosion and a puff of smoke. He wore a black sailor’s cap, a tailored black suit and dark sunglasses, even though he was indoors at 2:30
A.M.
He moved toward me, shook my hand and said right off the bat in his rasping voice, “I appreciate the name Marilyn Manson because it’s about putting different extremes together, which is what Satanism is about. But I can’t call you Marilyn. Can I call you Brian?”

“Sure, whatever you feel comfortable with,” I replied.

“Because of my relationship with Marilyn in the sixties, I feel uncomfortable because she has a special place in my heart,” LaVey said, closing his eyes gently as he spoke. He went on to talk about a sexual relationship he had with Monroe that began when he was the organist in a club where she was a stripper. In our conversation, he planted the seed that his association with her made her career flower. Taking credit for such things was part of LaVey’s style, but he never did it arrogantly. It was always done naturally, as if it were a well-known fact.

He removed the sunglasses from his goateed gargoyle head, familiar to thousands of teen dabblers from the back cover of
The Satanic Bible
, and instantly we were enmeshed in an intense conversation. I had just met Traci Lords backstage after a show at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, and she had invited me to a party with her the next night. Nothing sexual happened, but it was an overwhelming experience because she was like a girl version of me—very bossy and constantly playing mind games. Since LaVey had a relationship with another sex symbol, I thought that maybe he could give me some advice on what to do about Traci, whom I was both confused and captivated by.

The advice that ensued was very cryptic, which was no doubt another way for him to maintain power. The less people understand you, the smarter they think you are. “I feel like you both belong together, and I think something very important is going to happen with your relationship,” he concluded. It sounded more like the result of fifty dollars and five minutes spent calling the Psychic Friends Network than something I expected LaVey to say. But I pretended like I was grateful and impressed, because LaVey was not someone you could criticize.

He continued by sharing sordid details about his sex life with Jayne Mansfield and said that after all this time he still felt responsible for her death in a car crash because he had put a curse on her manager and boyfriend, Sam Brody, after a dispute with him. Unfortunately for Jayne Mansfield, she happened to be with him that night in New Orleans when a mosquito-spray tanker crashed into his car, brutally killing them both. Although I was suspicious about some of LaVey’s claims, his rhetoric and confidence were convincing. He had a mesmerizing voice, perhaps from his experience as a hypnotist. The most valuable thing he did that day was to help me understand and come to terms with the deadness, hardness and apathy I was feeling about myself and the world around me, explaining that it was all necessary, a middle step in an evolution from an innocent child to an intelligent, powerful being capable of making a mark on the world.

One aspect of LaVey’s carny personality was that he liked to align himself with stars like Jayne Mansfield, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tina Louise of
Gilligan’s Island
, who were all members of the Church of Satan. So it wasn’t surprising that as I left he encouraged me to bring Traci to visit him.

The next day, Traci happened to be flying in from Los Angeles for our show in Oakland. I was badly bruised and banged up after the concert, so she came back to the hotel, where she bathed and mothered me. But, once again, I didn’t sleep with her because I was still determined to remain faithful to Missi, though Traci was the first person I had met who seemed capable of melting my resolve. I told her about my meeting with LaVey, and she gave me the whole Deepak Chopra,
Celestine Prophecy
, healing crystal, New Age rap about destiny, resurrection and the afterlife. She didn’t seem to understand what he was about, so I tried to clue her in as I sunk into restless sleep: “This guy’s got an interesting point of view. You should listen to him.”

When I brought her to his house the next day, she was a lot more cynical and self-righteous than I had been—at first. She walked in with the attitude that he was a hoax and full of shit, so she debated him whenever she disagreed even slightly with something. But when he said that a louse has more right to live than a human or that natural disasters are good for humanity or that the concept of equality is horseshit, he was prepared to back it up intelligently. She left the house in silence with dozens of new ideas swirling in her head.

On that visit, LaVey showed me a little more of the house—the bathroom, which was strewn with real or fake cobwebs, and the kitchen, which was infested with snakes, vintage electronic instruments and coffee mugs with pentagrams on them. Like any good showman, LaVey only let you know what he was about in small pieces and revelations, and the more information he gave you the more you realized how little you really knew about him. Near the end of our visit, he said, “I want to make you a Reverend,” and gave me a crimson card certifying me as a minister in the Church of Satan. Little did I know that accepting that card would be one of the most controversial things I had done to that point; it seemed then (and it still does) that my ordainment was simply a gesture of respect. It was like an honorary degree from a university.

It was also LaVey’s way of passing down the torch, because he was semiretired and tired of spending so many years advancing the same argument. No mainstream rock musician has advocated Satanism in any lucid, intelligent, accessible way since perhaps the Rolling Stones, who in “Monkey Man” came up with a line that could have been my credo, “Well I hope we’re not too messianic/Or a trifle too Satanic.” As I left, LaVey put a bony hand on my shoulder, and, as it lay there coldly, he said, “You’re gonna make a big dent. You’re going to make an impression on the world.”

LaVey’s prophecies and predictions soon came true. Something important happened in my relationship with Traci, and I began making a bigger dent in the world.