Long Hard Road Out of Hell (38 page)

I reached for the table, and a jolt of pain shot through my ribcage. Inside the bag was a toothbrush, toothpaste, a pen, a makeup case and a black composition notebook—my journal.

I turned to the first page and tried to focus my eyes on the wavy blue lines and smudged black ink.

I can’t even stand to watch people in restaurants laughing, having fun, enjoying life. Their pitiful happiness sickens me. And on TV, do people really live like this? Is this all a joke? Do we raise kids to believe in
Baywatch,
canned laughter, Jenny Jones? Stupid fish-white housewives straining their flabby legs together with Suzanne Somers’s Thighmaster? She helped create the dumb blonde stereotype and now she’s a fucking infomercial folk hero hawking a worthless contraption that sounds like a porno movie or an Aerosmith song. Fuck blind consumerism. Stupid people deserve what they get. They’d buy shirts that say “I’m fucking stupid” if Cindy Crawford told them it was cool. I’d love to kill all of them, but I’d be doing them a favor. The worst punishment I can give them is to let them wake up every morning and lead their stupid fucking lives, let them raise their stupid fucking children in their stupid fucking homes, and, of course, make a record called
Antichrist Superstar,
which will annoy and destroy each and every one of them. Fuck you America. Fuck me. The world spreads its legs for another fucking star…

I had written those words the day I arrived in New Orleans, four months ago. I remembered it as if it were yesterday, because every day since had steadily grown worse, until, ravaged by drugs, exhaustion, paranoia and depression, my body had finally given out on me, landed me here in this fetid, white-walled hospital. I was optimistic after fulfilling my obligation to promote
Smells Like Children
. I thought I had shed my skin of self-doubt, watched it peel away inch by inch over the course of two years of touring. What seemed to be emerging from this cocoon was hard and soulless, smooth and terrifying, scarred and numb, a malefic gargoyle about to spread its scabrous wings. My plan then was to write an album about the transformation I had endured during my twenty-seven years, but I had no idea that I was about to undergo my most painful one as I sat writing in my journal in Missi’s car as she turned onto Decatur Street on a wet February afternoon.

In the back seat was our only “child,” a black and white dalmatian-boxer hybrid named Lydia. She barked with excitement or fear as I stepped out of the car and kissed Missi goodbye.

“Don’t wait up,” I assured her. “This is going to be a long day.”

I opened the wrought-iron gate, pressed the buzzer, and waited for the studio manager to let me in. The first thing that greeted me—that greeted anybody who came to the studio—was a menagerie of dogs, which belonged to the studio’s owner, Trent Reznor. They barked, jumping and fighting with each other, and then decided what to tear up next or where to shit.

“Everyone seems to have a dog this summer,” I thought. “Maybe that’s because they know our secrets and, despite that, don’t judge us.”

I sat down on a black leather sofa in the lobby. A big-screen TV filled the room with light and noise from the Alien Trilogy video game that Dave Ogilvie, the engineer hired to coproduce the album with Trent Reznor, knelt in front of, as if praying to the screen. He was a short Canadian with glasses, the kind of guy who looked like he got beat up a lot at school, not unlike Corey Haim in the movie
Lucas
, but he was also childish in a way that I enjoyed. As we killed time waiting for Trent—he was always the last to arrive—I faded out the xenomorphs and barking dogs, and thought about why I was here and what I was about to embark on. My nightmares still hadn’t gone away. In fact, the move to New Orleans had only increased their intensity, a backlash from the dark, secret history that squirmed through the belly of the city like a tapeworm. Life was sucked in and decomposed. Nothing seemed to grow from here.

I had come to accept the fact that the acquisition of too much knowledge had led me to drug use, but it was through that very same drug use that I had acquired my knowledge. As a band, we had agreed that party time was over. There would be no more chasing after drugs, women, and adventure. We were in New Orleans to work. I wanted to focus my hatred and sharpen my contempt, even if I harbored both of those feelings for myself the most.

A black BMW skidded into the garage and a door slammed shut, announcing the arrival of Trent, who breezed into the room, nodding to me and Dave like men do at malls or at stoplights as he headed into the kitchen. The rest of the band soon arrived at the studio and began setting up their equipment: Twiggy Ramirez, a restless, mischievous child in the body of a silent psychopath; Daisy Berkowitz, a purveyor of leftover food, equipment and girls; Ginger Fish, the quietest and most dangerous of us all, a ticking time bomb gingerly awaiting a cataclysmic explosion; and Pogo, a genius too mad to use his intelligence in any constructive way. He always reminded me of the professor on
Gilligan’s Island:
he was smart enough to build a TV out of coconuts, but he could never fix the boat to take everyone home. If dared to, Pogo would gladly do anything, even drink his own urine; however, he would fall deathly ill if anyone did anything as trifling as putting mayonnaise on his food.

As Trent and Dave played video games, we sat and stared at each other. We had so many ideas, and so much at stake, that we didn’t know where to begin. Only Daisy spoke. He was excited and agitated because he thought he finally understood the album, which he explained was a musical about Jesus Christ going on a rock tour. He even brought along a demo tape of six songs he had recorded, but his concept couldn’t have been further from the execrable truth. Hearing it only depressed us further.

I left the room and climbed the wide staircase—spacious enough to fit the coffins that were once carried through this former mortuary—to the office and picked up the phone. I knew Casey’s number by heart: I had dialed it so much last time we were in New Orleans. Before I had time to roll up a twenty-dollar bill, Casey had arrived, a starstruck leech who sold drugs not for profit but because he wanted to be around musicians and celebrities. Some people become roadies, writers and A&R scouts to accomplish this same goal: Casey had simply become a dealer. The walls of Casey’s apartment were lined with gold and platinum records, each one a testament to the addiction and desperation of a different rock star who had exchanged his trophy for narcotics.

Casey cut up a long, snaking line across the office’s fake wooden desk and invited me to help myself. I called for Twiggy to join me. I wasn’t doing this alone, and I felt like maybe we should celebrate our reunion in New Orleans. Snorting it also seemed like a way to counter the insecurity and intimidation of setting out on a big project, a cop out that would be used to rationalize drug taking in the months to come just as often as the excuse of a reunion would.

We returned to the studio’s live room and prepared to record the title song. Dave, however, was back at the console of the Playstation, wrapped up in Alien Trilogy. Out of respect, since he was practically a member of Skinny Puppy, a band much older than ours, we waited for him to die. By the time he rejoined us, Twiggy had disappeared upstairs to snort another line. Then Pogo had to leave to get some air, having bypassed cocaine for his own personal supply of exotic pot, which he smoked out of a crushed Coke can with holes in the side. Then Daisy vanished into the foyer to play guitar into his four-track. When we were finally all together again, Dave had abandoned us to watch a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game he was looking forward to. We were done for the night.

Days passed, weeks passed, and enthusiasm faded to annoyance as we began to realize that our first day in the studio was not a warm-up exercise but a pattern of inactivity. Every time inspiration struck, no one was around or too many drugs were around, and, like a spark without oxygen, our inspiration dissipated each time.

It could have been any night in the months that followed when I lay in bed staring at the high ceilings, wide awake from all the cocaine still coursing through my desecrated bloodstream. Missi was stretched out next to me, fast asleep, unaware that the reason we hadn’t had sex these past few weeks was not because I was too busy thinking about work but because I was on drugs. Like just about everyone else in the band, I had been spending more time getting high and talking about making music than actually making music.

I eased out of bed as quietly as I could and creaked barefoot on the dusty wooden floor to the living room, careful not to trip over the buckets of red and black paint. I was living in a large, traditional New Orleans house in the Garden District rented through Trent’s real estate agent, a stern, frumpy woman. I had recently obtained her permission to repaint the drab living room. But ever since I had begun working on it, the phone had been ringing off the hook—with record-label executives, managers, real estate agents and pencil pushers I didn’t know telling me I wasn’t allowed to alter the house. Just the other day, I had received a call from Dave, a half-witted stage carpenter with a lazy eye who had managed to keep himself on the Nine Inch Nails payroll even though their tour had been over for a year. Although Dave’s new job was to solicit companies to give the band free swag—T-shirts, shoes, bongs, video games—his job duties that day had come to include the honor of calling me and informing me that I’d have to pay the building’s owners $5,000 to return the room to its original colors.

Every time I saw the half-finished deep red walls and shiny black borders, my mind clouded with hate for everyone who had told me one thing when they meant something else, everyone who had lied intentionally knowing that they would later be caught, everyone who managed to crawl through life unscathed as they left a trail of duplicity and betrayal coagulating behind them. New Orleans was a city populated by two-faced men who were all smiles in your presence but knives and daggers behind your back. Most of the world’s problems could be avoided if people just said what they fucking meant.

I climbed into the cracked red leather seat of a metal barber’s chair in the living room that served as a womb, protection from a studio that had become a nemesis and a city that had turned against me. I often imagined that it was a pilot’s chair gutted from a helicopter, like the one my father flew in Vietnam. I closed my eyes and focused on my heart, beating triple time against my chest. I let the pulse, the rhythm, the warmth spread through me, then concentrated on lifting that enveloping, warm essence up out of the scarred, abused container of my body, as I had read about in so many books on astral projection. I let myself be carried upwards, higher and higher into the night, until I was immersed in a radiant, consuming white. I felt myself growing, a body wrapping around me now, wings spreading from my back, ribs jutting through my skin like serrated knives, face deforming into the monster I knew I had become. I heard myself laugh an ugly, reboant laugh, my mouth widening in a malevolent sneer large enough to engulf the spinning ball of earth below, a world of petty lives with petty problems and even pettier joys. I could swallow it if I wanted to, dispose of it once and for all. It’s what they had been praying for. It’s what I had been sinning for. “Pray now, motherfuckers,” I heard myself bellow, the sound rattling the firmament. “Pray your life was just a dream.” And the earth answered back with a loud, clattering scream that resounded so loudly in my head that I had to press my palms against my temples to keep my sanity, or insanity.

It was the phone ringing. I picked it up groggily.

“Hey, what’s going on?” came a voice I didn’t recognize.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s me, Chad.” He seemed insulted that I didn’t recognize him—after all, we were cousins and were once best friends—but a lot had happened since then. “Did you get my invitation?”

“What invitation, you fruitcake?”

“To my wedding. I’m getting married in September, and it would mean a lot to me if you came.”

“I’m in the middle of working on my album right now, but maybe I can get away. I’ll try, okay?”

“Yeah, it would mean a lot to me.”

I felt insincere on the phone, like all the duplicitous, smiling assholes I had hated as a kid, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to go back to Canton, Ohio, and see the normal shitty married life I could be leading right now. I might be tempted—because life in New Orleans fucking sucked.

When Missi woke up, we drove to the studio. Working there had begun to feel like trying to escape from a Chinese finger cuff: the harder we tried, the tighter the resistance became. No sooner did I enter the foyer then Twiggy, who was becoming more a puppet of Casey’s each day, came swooping out of the back room with a wooden-framed photograph in his hands, yelling, “Captain Larry Paul is ready for takeoff!” Captain Larry Paul was the nickname Twiggy had given a photograph of a fan’s pencil sketch of Trent. Twiggy thought it looked like a goofy manager he once worked under at a record store in Florida where, like myself, he used to steal CDs. The picture had become a portable surface for the cutting and sniffing of drugs, ritualistically dug out of its hiding place in an old closet full of air-conditioning ducts, water heaters, and a musty, miasmal smell reminiscent of my grandfather’s basement.