Long Hard Road Out of Hell (34 page)

Knowing that intoxicants are the quickest way to a man’s heart, we gave him a bottle of vodka. Now that we were on the same wavelength, we thought maybe he would join our traveling circus. So we urged him to put on a wig, dance around and sing songs with us. We felt like we were four years old again, and it felt good.

“Hey Joe,” Twiggy sang to urge the gentleman to action. “Hey Joe, what are you doing today? Do you think you could be heading our way?” But Joe didn’t dance or head anywhere. He pissed himself, wetting our bare feet with his 120 proof urine.

We were so taken aback by this unexpected performance art statement that we didn’t notice the sirens wailing behind us. Someone must have called the police. On the Danzig tour, I actually had a tolerable run-in with the cops when they arrested me for exposing my ass on stage and, instead of humiliating me at the station, gave me a ticket, apologized for the inconvenience and then one of them asked if he could take a Polaroid picture with me because he was a fan. But I knew it was just luck, not a trend. I wasn’t about to take my chances in New Orleans, especially while wearing nothing but a cardboard penis sheath.

“Stop what you’re doing and put your hands against the wall,” crackled a loudspeaker atop one of the cop cars. I looked at Twiggy. Twiggy looked at Pogo. Pogo looked at Joe. Joe wet himself again.

Then we did what every self-respecting citizen does in the face of a greater authority. We ran, and never looked back. After a brief intermission that consisted of all of us passing out for several hours we continued our adventures.

Along with a clichéd over-pierced and over-tattooed couple, we drove to a cemetery just outside of town where we were told bones sprouted out of the ground like flowers. Instead of the statues, sepulchers and upright rows of tombstones we expected, the place looked like a nineteenth-century dumping ground for corpses. There were teeth mixed in with the dirt and pebbles, and broken leg and arm bones jutted into the air like tire-flattening spokes at a parking lot. We wandered around for half an hour filling a plastic grocery bag with bones. I suppose we thought they’d make good presents for loved ones or party favors for Twiggy’s next birthday.

Twiggy, drunk again, wanted to take some headstones as well, which I disapproved of. Not out of respect for the dead—I had lost the ability to respect anyone living, let alone dead—but because they were too heavy to carry. We brought them back to the apartment anyway and stored them in the mop closet in the hallway. That probably had something to do with the strange behavior of our cleaning lady the following day, who mysteriously quit, leaving her rosary hanging on the mop closet doorknob.

Throughout our
Smells Like Children
tour, Twiggy lugged the bones from city to city, telling anyone who asked that they were the remnants of our former drummer Freddy, who we had burned alive. Freddy, as the bag of bones was now called, ended up on fire again in Los Angeles. As usual, Tony Wiggins was involved.

When we indulged ourselves, it was usually in tribute to Wiggins, because he had shown us that there are no limits. And every so often, he would hear our call and, when we were most miserable or bored, come flying to us like a sybaritic poltergeist. As the tour was winding down, he materialized backstage before a concert at the Palace in Los Angeles. He was drunk and riled up on some kind of speed. Proving that he can take abuse as well as he can dispense it, he insisted that I cut him. Since I had never used anyone’s body other than my own as a canvas for scarification before, I complied, giving him a temporary tattoo in the shape of a star. He spent the entirety of the show on the side of the stage, bleeding and trying to pour whiskey down our throats whenever we walked past. It was the type of behavior we had come to expect from him.

Afterward, we went to a party in Wiggins’s hotel room on Sunset Boulevard. The entire toilet seat was ringed with cocaine and the room was filled with pretentious L.A. scenesters who were name-dropping like it was going out of style. At the same time, they were mentally taking notes so that they could name-drop Marilyn Manson in another hotel room on another night.

We ran out of beer, which resulted in a fruitless expedition to Ralphs supermarket that involved Wiggins offering several cops $500 to buy beer for him. Back at the hotel, he donated the money to Twiggy and everything was fine again—until we ran out of drugs. All night, Twiggy and I had wanted nothing more than to make these very cool and with-it L.A. types smoke Freddy’s bones like they were the latest brand of French cigarettes. Now was our chance. We took one of Freddy’s ribs, chipped off a few pieces, and dropped them into a pipe. We lit it up and each took a drag, letting our lungs fill with the fumes of this unknown dead body. Though the room quickly took on the foul stench of a burning corpse, we convinced two annoying girls to take a hit. They both got sick and left the room, which was what we wanted in the first place. Twiggy ended his night in the bathroom vomiting; I ended mine dreaming that I was possessed by an old Baptist minister from turn-of-the-century Louisiana.

In retrospect, the experience was not nearly as bad as some of the encounters I had with normal plant drugs. When we were hanging out with Nine Inch Nails shortly before the bone-smoking incident, they offered me one of the only narcotics I hadn’t tried before: mushrooms. Pogo, Twiggy, most of the Nine Inch Nails and I ingested several caps as we left for a place called the Mars Bar. It was supposed to be nearby, but the drive took an hour. On the way, we drank short, wide-mouth cans of Budweiser. But no matter how much we drank we couldn’t empty a single one. Either someone at Budweiser was a genius or the mushrooms had kicked in.

The Mars Bar was exactly the wrong place to be in our state of mind. It was in a creepy abandoned mall on the waterfront, and the only way to get there was to take a rickety elevator flooded in black light. Someone came up with the bad idea to play molecule, and started spinning around and bashing into everyone. One of the people we were with was Bill Kennedy, a notorious heavy-metal producer, and as he knocked into me he transformed into a demon with flaming hair, corn husks for teeth and writhing snakes around his waist. When he cackled, cigarette butts flew in and out of his mouth like popcorn bouncing around the inside of a popping machine. It was a nightmare, and reminded me too late why I should never do psychedelic drugs.

When the elevator door finally opened, it was into a room full of brown skeletons. Everyone was skinny and tan and, in the black light, they looked an otherworldly brown. The furniture was all undersized like something out of
Alice in Wonderland
. And the music kept changing: The songs they were playing would have new sections I had never noticed before, or all I’d be able to hear was the hi-hat. We were led by club management to some kind of holding pen and petting zoo, where everyone could stare at us and reach in and touch us. There was nothing to do but sit and be gawked at. I was going crazy. I looked at Pogo and he had a red light shining down on him like he was about to be beamed up by aliens. “Are you alright?” I asked. He just smiled at me and answered, “I’m gonna kill somebody.” And he meant it, which terrified me.

An exit was conveniently and temporarily provided for me when a friendly looking guy walked up and said he knew me. I remembered him vaguely as a bartender at the Reunion Room, where we had played some of our earliest shows. “This is my club,” he said. “I run this place.”

“Great,” I replied. “Is there somewhere you could take me to get away from all this? I’m freaking out.”

He led me to the back of the club and opened the door to a giant cooler. I walked in and he followed me, closing the door behind him. “You know,” he said, “you used to go out with one of my ex-girlfriends.”

It was a cruel thing to do to someone in my precarious mental state. I felt set up. I tried to tune him out and stared at the walls, out of which grotesque gargoyles were leering back threateningly at me. I tried to think about something else, and all I could imagine was that Pogo was probably killing someone right now, and I was going to have to talk to the cops. I didn’t care who he was killing or whether he was going to fry for it; I just didn’t want to face the police while I was on mushrooms.

Suddenly, the door of the cooler heaved open and a dozen people piled in who had been scouring the club for me. “Are you okay?” someone asked, concerned. I couldn’t speak. I was scared, I was confused, I had to piss, I had to shit, I had to do something. Twiggy was with them, but all he could do was talk nonsense about stealing a paddleboat and escaping into the harbor.

I fled to another room and found an alcove under the stairs that, for some reason, was stuffed with pillows. I lay on them and enjoyed the solitude. I could hear everybody else outside, particularly Twiggy, who was trying to jump in the water in search of a paddleboat. I kept worrying that he’d drown and I’d have to talk to the cops. That was my main concern: I didn’t care who died or was killed. I just didn’t want to deal with the cops and have to tell them I was tripping.

When the sun came up, I began to grow more lucid. I stumbled into the hot, humid morning air and about fourteen of us piled in a minivan built for ten. On the way home, Trent suggested stopping at a McDonald’s drive-through, where he ordered enough Egg McMuffins, hash browns, orange juices, large cokes, coffees and sausage biscuits to feed the entire Jacksonville penitentiary.

Before we had time to eat, Trent, who like myself is an instigator, tossed a soggy hash brown at Twiggy. Wiping potato from his face, Twiggy grabbed an Egg McMuffin, picked it apart and threw it at Trent layer by layer. Soon meat, eggs, drinks, bread, syrup and food morsels in various states of digestion were being tossed and spit all over the crowded van. It was an all out McWar, but with ketchup everywhere instead of blood. Meanwhile, the car was swerving recklessly from lane to lane as our driver, who was sober, tried to keep from barreling over the median.

If Trent is an instigator, Twiggy is an accelerator, always adding an extra veneer of mischief, recklessness or decadence to a situation. He threw up all over his lap several times. Robin, the guitarist from Nine Inch Nails whose dick I sucked on stage, was sitting next to him. He did what anyone in his situation would have done: he picked up the vomit and threw it at me. I flung it at someone else, and soon we were in the midst not of a food fight, but of a postfood fight. Twiggy at this point was actually throwing up into Robin’s hands, who was sharing the bounty with all of us. By the time we returned to the hotel, those of us who hadn’t thrown up were ready to. At great expense to royalties from “Head Like a Hole,” we left the contents of the van to bake and dry in the heat.

The first thing we saw upon stepping outside was a drag queen coming out of a club, a black Mr. Clean with a bald head, a tutu and gold gloves. “Hey, baby,” he greeted us. “Hey, Mr. Queen,” someone said, and invited him back to our room to do drugs with us.

Once inside, the first thing I did was call Missi, who had decided to go out with me again. Relationships never break cleanly. Like a valuable vase, they are smashed and then glued back together, smashed and glued, smashed and glued until the pieces just don’t fit together anymore. I was covered with hash browns and vomit, I had a bag of bones under the bed, I had a Huggy Bear doll on the table filled with cocaine, and I had just come to the realization that I didn’t care whether anyone I knew died so long as I didn’t have to deal with it. On top of all that, there was a transvestite in a tutu smoking crack on the bed next to me. I didn’t tell Missi all that. I just told her that I was freaking out.

“You know what?” she answered. “You gotta think about how you’re living your life.”

It was the last thing I wanted to hear at that particular moment.