Long Hard Road Out of Hell (40 page)

I tried to relax and lay down on the ground and drink water, but my heart was clenched too tight to let me calm down. I could literally see it pounding against my lacerated chest. I wasn’t worried about dying. My overwhelming concern was my usual fear of getting arrested or having to talk to the cops. As Missi tried to make some sort of arrangement to get me to the hospital without a press or police incident, I flushed the empty ziploc bag down the toilet and cleaned off my credit cards. Then I bent over the toilet, dry heaving and spitting, before unlocking the door. I walked to my closet and put on neat, respectable clothes and asked Missi to drive me to the hospital. I was detached from myself as I did this, as if I were watching someone else make these preparations. From that vantage point, I was impressed with how rationally I was acting for someone whose head was reeling from alcohol and whose heart was hammering so fast and heavy that cardiac arrest seemed imminent. My left arm was tingling, and I flashed back to years ago when someone had told me that this was a warning sign of a heart attack.

I woke up in that hospital bed next to a dead man, confused. I remembered the night before as if it were a series of photographs. At first I could only see a few snapshots, but slowly they began multiplying until they formed a complete moving picture. The only missing chunk was arriving at the hospital: I remembered a fat black woman who admitted me, I remembered a metal tube draining my blood for chemical analysis, and I remembered thinking, “Now I know how Brad Stewart felt.”

As I regained consciousness in the hospital bed that night, I tried to figure out what I had meant by that. Brad Stewart—not the person, but the addict—was despicable to me, a creature so much the opposite of what I wanted to be. He was someone who had let something else control his life. I thought I was different, because I could stop. But why hadn’t I? Why did I need drugs to work, to play, to go to sleep, to do anything? I had always told myself that doing a drug is okay, but needing a drug isn’t.

As I lay in the bed, however, I managed to convince myself that I was not Brad Stewart, that I was still in control: this overdose would not be an epiphany or a wake-up call to straighten up. It was simply a mistake. There was too much going wrong with my life to just blame it all on drugs. That would be too easy. Drugs weren’t the root of the problem, they were a symptom.
Antichrist Superstar
had become a figment of our imagination, a fairy tale that had no other function than to scare us, like the bogeyman or Corey Feldman. Not only was nothing getting done, but everyone was telling me that it was weak, poorly executed and simply a repeat of what Trent had already done with
The Downward Spiral
. And maybe they were right. Maybe I had placed too much confidence in the concept of
Antichrist Superstar
. Maybe everyone was trying to save me from myself.

But maybe they had never really taken the time to listen to and understand the idea. Maybe the album they had in mind for Marilyn Manson was not the one I had in mind. It seemed like Trent and I wanted to make different records. I saw
Antichrist Superstar
essentially as a pop album—albeit an intelligent, complex and dark one. I wanted to make something as classic as the records I had grown up on. Trent seemed to have his heart set on breaking new ground as a producer and recording something experimental, an ambition that often ran in opposition to the tunefulness, coherence and scope I insisted on. I had always relied on Trent’s opinion in the studio, but what was I supposed to do now that our opinions differed? No matter what anyone said, I knew that
Antichrist Superstar
was not the same as
The Downward Spiral
, which was about Trent’s descent into an inner, solipsistic world of self-torment and wretchedness.
Antichrist Superstar
was about using your power, not your misery, and watching that power destroy you and everyone else around you. What was happening to me now seemed to be some kind of perverse combination of both types of self-destruction. It had been nearly four months now—four months—and all we had to show for ourselves was five half-finished songs, sore nostrils and a hospital bill. Nobody seemed to realize that the band was falling apart.

At the same time, Trent seemed to be growing more distant as a friend and as a producer each day, perhaps because we were taking up so much of his time on a project that he was rapidly losing faith in. He had said offhandedly in a conversation when we first started recording that it was impossible to make a great album without losing any friends, and I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. Now it was all I could think about, because I was losing the three people who mattered to me most: Missi, Trent and Twiggy. All I had left was my family.

*  *  *

After checking out of the hospital, I booked a flight to Canton, Ohio, to attend Chad’s wedding. I always felt responsible for Chad, like I had somehow knocked him off his path to becoming an actor or comedian. There was no specific reason why I thought this, except maybe guilt that I had escaped Canton while his life was stagnating there. He had nailed himself into the all-American coffin: he’d gone to college, gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and now he was going to marry her and be miserable or, worse still, content.

Talking to Chad, whose buck-toothed, freckled face hadn’t changed except for a goatee, I couldn’t relate to him anymore. How could he understand being on stage in front of thousands of people yelling his name? Staying up for three nights doing drugs and watching people piss, shit, whip and fist fuck one another for sheer amusement? Trying to go to sleep at night with a chest still bleeding from broken glass and a head gashed open by a microphone stand? We could only talk on a superficial level, discussing the strangeness of his getting married, his wife’s wedding gown and the unfathomable concept of actually having children.

The wedding was the first time I had been in a church since I was a kid, and I felt uncomfortable throughout the long service. I wore my black suit with a red shirt, a black tie and sunglasses. Everybody seemed to be staring at me disapprovingly. Not only was the priest giving me dirty looks, but so was the rest of my family. As they all piously recited their prayers and sang hymn after hymn, I studied each and every one of them coldly. I imagined walking down the aisle in Chad’s place, but marrying a black woman or a gay man and watching the confusion and anger that would result. I imagined responding to the priest’s question, “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, till death do you part?” by dousing myself in gasoline and lighting it. I couldn’t figure out why I had turned out different than everybody else. I had the same education, the same advantages, the same disadvantages. It was then that I came up with the lyric that would end the album, “The boy that you loved is the man that you fear.”

Afterwards, I walked up to Chad’s brother and mother, who explained that they were upset that I’d mentioned my grandfather in the press. “Why do you feel the need to tell family secrets,” his mother scolded me.

“No one believes what I say anyway,” I replied curtly. My grandfather had died the previous Thanksgiving, and the fact that I decided not to attend the funeral seemed to have resulted in a tacitly agreed pact among my relatives to excommunicate me.

Everyone I talked to asked if I was gay or a drug addict or a devil worshipper. No one had anything nice to say, and no one understood anything about me. I wasn’t Brian Warner anymore, I was some kind of inexplicable and repulsive slime that had trickled out of a sewer and filthied their manicured lives. Chad seemed too young and too intelligent to be falling into this trap, and all I could think was that I didn’t want to grow up and have to tolerate this life that everyone thinks they’re supposed to live. On the other hand, my life was no better. There had to be something else.

After the reception, we drove back to my grandmother’s. As everyone sat in the living room drinking wine, eating crackers and struggling to say something interesting. I stole away and walked downstairs to my grandfather’s basement. It looked almost exactly the same, but the train set and the enema bag were gone and someone had emptied the white medicine cabinet. I reached behind the mirror on the ceiling, and the pornography had been removed. I opened up one of the paint cans, and the 16-millimeter films were actually still there. I picked up the top one and held it up to the dusty beam of yellow light streaming in through the window, revealing a black man making love to a fat white blond. I removed another reel of film, and stuffed them both into the waistband of my my pants.

I didn’t feel small and scared in the basement anymore. In fact, I felt at home for the first time since I had returned to Canton. I had much more in common with my grandfather now than with the innocent kid who used to explore his basement, which was an upsetting realization in light of the fact that moments ago I had been sitting in church promising myself that I would never grow up. I even wore women’s lingerie, like my grandfather did, and had engaged in sexual acts far more perverse than the ones in his
Watersports
and
Anal Only
magazines. My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell—dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

*  *  *

The first weeks back in New Orleans served to prove that the situation was even worse than I had imagined. Taking a break had knocked out the one last support I still thought I had under me, and returning to find myself in the exact same pointless, self-destructive studio situation that I had left only compounded it all. I went on drug binges that lasted for days, resulting in blackouts, fights, and the destruction of most everything I owned and used to love. My life was falling apart, my band was falling apart and the record was falling apart. I was a rock and roll cliché, and I hadn’t even really made it yet.

Sitting in the live room with Twiggy preparing to record “The Minute of Decay,” I felt the weight of the futility of this project crush me. I had somehow thought that in my absence, everything would work itself out. But the fact was that we had talked ourselves a great album, but recorded a shitty one. I was preparing to sing into a guitar amp, use a drum machine hooked into a boom box, and let Twiggy play bass through a cheap little amp. The most expensive thing in the room was the half-decimated pile of cocaine in front of us. Like a fly on a fishing pole, no matter how much I flapped, wriggled, and struggled, there was no way to escape. I was dangling from a line I had no way of cutting. I had worked so hard these last few years only to be strung up here, doubting my own artistry and my own existence. At least I knew—I had always known—that there was an exit. But I didn’t want to think about that. The truth is that I was too selfish to kill myself and let them—not just everyone in the studio, but my family, my teachers, my enemies, the world—know they had won.

I began to sing. “There’s not much left to love.” I reflexively took a sniff of the cocaine in front of my face. “Too tired today to hate.” The drug didn’t even affect me anymore. “I feel the empty.” Something wet splashed in the middle of the pile of white powder. “I feel the minute of decay.” It was a tear. “I’m on my way down now.” I was crying. “I’d like to take you with me.” I couldn’t even remember the last time I had cried—even felt—like this. “I’m on my way down.” I completely broke down.

“Could you come up to the control room?” crackled a voice over the P.A. system.

“All right,” Trent said when I arrived, “we think you’re overdoing it.”

“I think you’re laying on the emotion a little too thick there,” Dave added. “We’ll let you do it one more time, but lay off the theater. This isn’t Shakespeare.”

“I don’t think you really…,” I began but stopped myself. I didn’t think it would accomplish anything to tell them that if they were my friends, as I had once thought, they would have understood that my desolation was real.

I should have gone straight home then—I would tell myself that a thousand times later—but I didn’t. Instead, I punished myself with liquor, pills and drugs as I had with increasing frequency and quantity since returning from Canton. But this night was different. Some semblance of humanity had returned to me in the studio, and it scared me. It was unfamiliar and I wanted to push it away. Near dawn, Trent dropped me off at home and I crept inside, fearful of waking Missi. But the bedroom light was on, and Missi was lying on her back on top of the bed, with no covers. She was shivering, but her skin was stippled with sweat, which had soaked into the sheets around her. She didn’t even acknowledge my presence: her eyes were rolled into the back of her head.

I shook her and talked to her, placing a hand over her burning forehead. But she didn’t show any sign of consciousness. I cursed myself for not having come home sooner, for not having paid attention when Missi said earlier in the day she thought she was coming down with the flu, for not even bringing home the medicine she wanted, for all the times I had fought with her and cursed her existence in the past six months. And then I wondered if my own self-centered indulgence had killed her.