Long Hard Road Out of Hell (35 page)

meating the fans / meat and greet

[S
TEAK] IS AT THE HEART OF MEAT, IT IS MEAT IN ITS PURE STATE; AND WHOEVER PARTAKES OF IT ASSIMILATES A BULL-LIKE STRENGTH
. T
HE PRESTIGE OF STEAK EVIDENTLY DERIVES FROM ITS QUASI-RAWNESS
. I
N IT, BLOOD IS VISIBLE, NATURAL, DENSE, AT ONCE COMPACT AND SECTILE
. O
NE CAN WELL IMAGINE THE AMBROSIA OF THE
A
NCIENTS AS THIS KIND OF HEAVY SUBSTANCE WHICH DWINDLES UNDER ONE’S TEETH IN SUCH A WAY AS TO MAKE ONE KEENLY AWARE AT THE SAME TIME OF ITS ORIGINAL STRENGTH AND OF ITS APTITUDE TO FLOW INTO THE VERY BLOOD OF MAN.

—
Roland Barthes, Mythologies

TRANSCRIPT
Tape seven, side one, 8/9/97

Q: Do you want to talk about the meat incident today?

A: Okay. So, the first time I met Alyssa was at the last show that Brad Stewart played in our band and it was the showcase that we had for Freddy DeMann at Maverick Records. She came backstage and she was a short girl with blond hair. Cute. She had a pretty face, but most notably she was big-breasted. Just huge tits. A girl that you’d probably see at a Warrant concert by the way that she dressed and the way that she acted. I immediately realized that she was deaf because of the way her voice sounded. She told me that she could feel the music when she’s close to the stage and that’s how she gets her enjoyment from it. And she sort of came on to me and wanted to have sex or something. But I wasn’t really interested at the time. I think probably because my girlfriend was on the other side of the door. Maybe if she wasn’t there, I would have been interested.

A year later, when we went to record the B-side to the “Lunchbox” single, we were in South Beach Studios in Miami. And it was me and my band, Trent [Reznor], Sean Beavan [our assistant producer] and Jonathan, who had been hired by Nine Inch Nails as their video documentarian. I guess I became the instigator or director of photography. Or the Chief Executive Officer of Filth.

I went outside to get something to eat and I ran into Alyssa. So I said, “Come by the studio.” I thought it would be entertaining to introduce her to everybody else. And it was ironic because just that day, Pogo was saying that one of his fantasies was to have sex with a deaf girl because then he could say whatever he wanted without upsetting her or feeling embarrassed. So I brought her into the studio and introduced her to everybody. To break the ice, I usually say whatever is on my mind in the hopes that it will make everyone laugh or that someone will actually follow through with it. So I said, “Why don’t you take off all your clothes?” And she laughed and she took off all her clothes, and she only had her boots on. We were all shocked and amazed that we were commanding that much sexual power and that there was a naked deaf girl in the studio.

Q: How was she able to understand what you were saying?

A: She was a flawless lip-reader, a skill she had obviously accumulated from years spent in the front row of heavy metal concerts learning the lyrics to shitty songs like “Fuck Like a Beast,” which brings us to the meat at hand since I was with the author of the recent heavy metal refrain, “I want to fuck you like an animal.”

Earlier that day we had collected a wide variety of meats. Big round pieces of meat that had the bone in the center, hot dogs, cheese dogs, salami, sausage, bacon, chitlins, pig’s feet, chicken feet, chicken legs, chicken breasts, chicken wings, chicken gizzards. All uncooked meats. So we constructed a meat helmet made out of a large ham with pieces of bacon, sausage links and things like that suspended from it. A meat mobile. We crowned her with the meat helmet, and I took some pimento loaf to cover her nipples. And we put several slices of bologna on her back. That day we all definitely earned backstage passes in hell.

Before all this began, I had put on yellow latex gloves, basically because I didn’t want to handle the salami. No other reason.

We had one half hour of pure meat cavorting. Meat handling. Working with meat. Meat cuddling. Meat shenanigans.

Q: We could call this chapter “Meating the Fans.”

A:
I
was also thinking of “Meat and Greet.”

Q: That’s good. So go on.

A: We documented this in all sorts of ways. Pencil sketches, photography, videotape, whatever way we could capture this great moment in art history. At this point, I didn’t think it was very sexual. It was more of a living meat sculpture. What happened next was the result of me always trying to escalate everything to the next level. I asked Twiggy and Pogo to scotch tape their penises together to see if she could put two penises in her mouth at the same time. But it turned out that they couldn’t stand next to each other to create that, so they had to face their dicks front to front, and it became like a penis tug-of-war. She sort of licked it like some sort of dick harmonica. Some giant dick harmonica. That’s when all the trouble started to break out. Because that was when we decided that Pogo should get to live out his fantasy and have sex with the deaf girl.

So, he put on a condom…

Q: Hold on. How did he separate himself from Twiggy?

A: She gnawed through the tape like a rat looking for a piece of cheese. And then Pogo put this condom on, which made his dick look like a chitlin. And he started to fuck her from behind, which was appropriate because she had a dog leash on at the time and he was holding the leash. So, he’s shouting all these obscenities at her…

I should mention that I do not feel that she was being exploited by any means because, despite however many cameras, street musicians, and sketch artists were in the room clapping and dancing around to Slayer or whatever was playing at the time, she was very excited to be a part of it. I think she, too, found it to be art and was having a good time. Everybody was having a good time—except for the guys in Nine Inch Nails, who were keeping their distance.

While all this was happening, Pogo said something, and we might not want to mention it because it’s pretty offensive.

Q: Go ahead. We can always take it out of the book later if we want.

A: He shouted, “I’m going to come in your useless ear canal,” and it seemed to echo through the room as maybe one of the darkest things we had ever heard. At that point, I felt that what I did with the baby Jesuses paled in comparision.

Then what happened was that Alyssa wanted to take a shower because she was covered in meat slime and assorted body fluids from the act of filth. So, since she was going in the shower anyways, I asked, “Can we urinate on you?” What she said next was probably darker and more profound than what Pogo had said. She said, “Just not on my boots.” And we all looked at each other, like how you just looked at me: “Wow.” At least she had some sort of morals. And then, adding icing to the cake—or dressing to the meat, in this case—she told us, “And don’t get it in my eyes. It burns.” Obviously she had experience in these matters.

So she got into the shower stall, and the camera crew watched while Twiggy and I put one leg on the stall and one leg on the toilet and hosed her down with urine. She just kind of sat there delighted and splashing her breasts as pieces of meat flaked away from the pressure of the urine.

Then what happened was that Twiggy’s aim went in the wrong course and hit her in the face, and that was when everyone else in the room completely shut down and realized things had gone too far.

Sean Beavan said something that completely captured the moment. We kept repeating it all the time on tour afterwards. But I can’t remember what it was right now. Maybe Twiggy knows.

[Picks up phone, dials, waits.]

He’s not there. It’ll come back to me.

Now, as the urine was dripping off her chin, the Sexual Janitor [Daisy Berkowitz] came in and went, “What’s going on? What are you doing?”

And we were like, “Alyssa is taking a shower.” We didn’t feel the duty to tell him everything that had gone on before because he was the Sexual Janitor and we thought it would be amusing. So, we were like, “Alyssa is in the shower and would like you to get in with her.”

I think the fact that he had very little experience with girls, good looking or ugly, made him get into the shower. So, Daisy took off his clothes right in front of us—he didn’t even care—and jumped into the shower with her. The water hadn’t really rinsed her off yet, and he started making out with her where urine had just been on her lips. And we were freaking out. Of course, he thought we were freaking out because we thought he was this sexual madman and dynamo and we were impressed with his dick size. If he knew that she was covered in urine, he probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

We finished off that little cinematic episode by taking the last final piece of meat that hadn’t fit into the program—a big raw salmon, head and eyes and scales and all—and throwing it into the shower and blocking the door. That was the end.

Q: Do you remember what it was that Sean Beavan said?

A: Yeah, he said, “This is so wrong.” Make sure you accentuate the
so
when you write that with a lot of
o
’s.