Long Hard Road Out of Hell (41 page)

She was the only person left for whom I was capable of feeling any love, and to lose her would be to destroy my only chance of returning to the normal human world of feelings, sentiments and passion—to destroy, in essence, myself.

I panicked. Not only was I too fucked up to drive but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t because Missi’s car was a stick shift. Despite our recent differences, Trent was still the only person I could count on in New Orleans. I called his cell phone and, together, we rushed Missi to the hospital, the same one she had taken me to when I had overdosed. The nurses wheeled her into the emergency room and shot her with adrenaline to keep her alive. Her temperature was nearly 107 degrees, high enough to scramble the brains of most people. Several hours later, as the sun rose to signal the passing of another punishing day, two doctors brought Missi to the waiting room, where I sat with Trent still by my side. Trent didn’t need to be there: it wasn’t his responsibility. But there he was. Perhaps I had been wrong about Trent’s friendship lately. After all, in a lot of ways, over the past three years Trent had become the brother I never had.

The doctors explained that Missi was three months pregnant and, if she decided to have an abortion, she would have to wait until her flu went away. I knew that during the course of our long relationship I had deformed her personality to suit my own. Now I realized that I had deformed her body as well.

The next night, as I sat alone in the studio’s control room, I played back the rough mixes we had recorded of “Tourniquet,” a song inspired by one of my many apocalyptic nightmares. I thought I was listening to it to try and determine if it should be redone, but in reality I was trying to find myself in the song, to see if I could discover some clue, some answer, some solution, some way out of the mess my life and career had become. I listened to it again and again until I was numb to it, no longer able to tell if the song was good or bad, or even if it was my own or someone else’s. In a daze, I picked up the microphone plugged into the computer, beginning to feel one of the blackouts I had been experiencing more frequently coming on. Very slowly and firmly I drummed my left hand on the table as if tapping an S.O.S. into a telegraph and whispered into the microphone: “This … is … my … most … vulnerable … moment.” I flipped the waveform around, so that it was backwards, and added it to the beginning of the song, a distress call heard by no one but myself.

I collapsed into the swivel chair and tried to clear my head. The words came from a place inside me as pink and sensitive as the head of a newborn baby. I wondered if the debased, demoralized, degraded monstrosity that I had become was dying (or being murdered), making way, as Anton LaVey had predicted over a year ago, for something new, for something confident, for something emotional, for something terrible and beautiful and powerful, for Antichrist Superstar—a world redeemer no one would allow to be born. What neither I nor anyone else around me realized was that the same corrosive that had stripped away my humanity was also responsible for trying to kill Antichrist Superstar in the womb: betrayal. It was a word that rattled around my mind like a rusty tin blade every time something went wrong. From my grandparents to Chad to my teachers at Christian school to my first girlfriends, no one had lived up to the roles they acted out in public. They wasted their years trying to live the lies that they had created for themselves. Only in private could they really be the demons, hypocrites and sinners that they really were, and woe betide anyone who caught them at their game, because the only thing worse than a lie is a lie exposed. I thought I had learned to protect myself from betrayal by trusting and placing faith in no one. But in the weeks that followed, I was to experience more betrayal in less time than I ever thought possible. Each one was like a hammer driving a stake deeper and deeper into my chest.

It began with my decision to do something about the predicament we were in. I called a meeting with the band, Trent and John Malm, and we discussed what could be done to save the album and ourselves. In the end, it was agreed that we needed someone other than Dave to help produce the album, something Trent had been trying to tell us for a month. We needed someone who would help us work, and Dave seemed to have fallen in with our lethargic self-destruction. Like everyone else, he just wanted to get the album over with; but he didn’t want to have to stop playing video games or watching ice hockey to accomplish this goal. In the end, we agreed that we’d all meet with Dave the following afternoon and let him go.

But the next day when I showed up at the studio for the meeting, I found myself alone with Dave. No one else had shown up. I was used to looking like a villain to parents and Christians, but not to musicians whom I used to respect, especially when that musician wasn’t even technically working for me. The meeting, which took place in the office, went as badly as expected and ended with Dave storming out of the room, his final words, “This doesn’t surprise me—this is how everyone in this business operates,” echoing off the walls. I had been left on my own to look like an asshole, and I did.

I didn’t return to the studio for days after that, indulging in a reckless binge that made everything else I had done in New Orleans look like an opening act. I experimented with different prescription drugs—morphine sulfate, Percocets, Lorcets—and shoved sewing needles underneath my fingernails to test my pain threshold because my emotional one had already been crossed. The time when Twiggy and I had been so close that we didn’t even have to speak to write—together—the best music we had ever made seemed so distant and unreachable. I tried to remember what that music sounded like and what was happening to it.

In a rare moment of sobriety, which must have been in the window between the first five minutes I had woken up, I called Twiggy and asked him those questions, and we pledged to return to the studio and get some work done. When I arrived there the next morning, I found Twiggy outside, pissed off.

“What’s wrong, man,” I began.

“Remember how David Lynch wanted us to collaborate with him on the soundtrack for his movie?” he began.

“For
Lost Highway
? Yeah.”

“Well, now he’s in the studio with Trent, who’s fucking doing the soundtrack himself.”

“I’m going to kill somebody,” I fumed.

“I would have already if I could,” Twiggy spat, “but we’re not allowed in the studio.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be finishing our record?”

“It only gets worse. Dave Ogilvie is fucking in there, working with Trent.”

Our relationship with Lynch had begun two years earlier through a girl we had met named Jennifer, who claimed to be Lynch’s assistant. At the time, everybody else had dismissed her as a name-dropping groupie. But when it came down to it, her claim was not only true, it resulted in an offer for us to collaborate with him on the soundtrack to his new movie,
Lost Highway
, as well as appear in the film. Now, not only had we been shut out of our relationship with Lynch, but his film was keeping us away from our album. When I called the rest of the band, I discovered that even Pogo had betrayed me, unknowingly, and was working on drones for the soundtrack while we were temporarily barred from the studio.

I decided to return later that afternoon and see if I could talk to Lynch about it all. As soon as I pushed through the iron doors, I nearly collided into him.

“How have you been?” I asked as casually as I could, trying to hide my anger. “Good to see you again.”

“So when are you coming by to work?” Lynch asked. He clearly had no idea that I had been told not to enter the studio.

“I’m not going to be able to, since we’re finishing our album,” I lied, biting my tongue. Trent was standing nearby.

I ran out of the studio, feeling awkward, like a girlfriend who walks in on her boyfriend while he is cheating. I wondered if I had been a fool all along, taking the advice of others when there was no one in this world anyone could trust but themselves. It hadn’t steered me wrong before. I had been trying to fix what I thought was wrong with
Antichrist Superstar:
Dave Ogilvie, Twiggy, Trent. But I hadn’t even considered that the biggest obstacle holding it back was myself. Maybe it was time to quit drugs and start working on myself.

*  *  *

I sat in the women’s clinic waiting room, imagining what was going on just three rooms away as the doctors put a rod the size of a matchstick, with two tiny thread-like strands jutting from the top, up into Missi’s cervix, causing it to dilate before tearing out the brain of our child with a pair of forceps.

“Coffee?” asked a grey-haired nurse as she crossed the room to a white counter. I looked up and noticed that the brand she was offering me was Folger’s. I shuddered, and lowered my head again, not responding. I didn’t drink coffee. “Delusional Self,” I thought, and my mind traveled back to Canton, Ohio, to a time when I used to construct buildings out of blocks in the grass across the street from my home, creating new houses as a way of escaping from my own. One afternoon I found a metal Folger’s coffee can with a rotting, deteriorating, red-and-brown substance inside. I had shown it to my mother, who dismissed it as discarded meat. Only recently had she confessed that it was actually the remains of an aborted fetus. Suddenly I realized why I didn’t drink coffee.

Missi had been scared about this abortion—she was well into her second trimester—and I was scared too, not only for her safety but for myself. I thought about the fact that there was no one else in the world who understood and accepted me as unconditionally as she did, no other girl I would ever feel that close to, no one else who I could share my music and my life with when I came home from the studio. But why was I thinking in the past tense? Was I progressing beyond her? I cared about her and knew I would be crushed if anything bad happened, but at the same time I couldn’t keep a twisted, degenerate thought from crossing my mind. I wondered if she could talk to the doctor about keeping the aborted fetus.

That night, I stayed home with Missi while she recuperated. I had been doing a lot of that lately: staying home. I had quit drugs cold turkey, something I knew I could do. I had come to realize that it was more fun looking for drugs and remembering what you did while on them than actually doing them. I may not have always exercised self-control in my life, but, when needed, I had the necessary willpower and capacity for self-denial on reserve, facilities at least as strong as anyone else’s I had ever encountered. I also had ambition, tremendous ambition, and drugs were now getting in the way of that ambition. One of them had to go.

When Missi fell asleep, I snuck out of bed and climbed into the barber’s chair, watching the shadows of raindrops play on a white ram’s head perched atop a seven-foot human skeleton, a relic from the altar of the original Process Church in England. Behind me stood two blackened, stained gorilla skulls, staring at me through empty sockets as if angry and impatient. I had a lot of thinking to do. When I first conceived of
Antichrist Superstar
, I set out to create an apocalypse. But I didn’t realize it was going to be a personal one. As a child, I had been a weakling, a worm, a follower, a small shadow trying to find a place in an infinite world of light. In the end, in order to find that place, I had to sacrifice my humanity—if you could even call such an insecure, guilt-ridden existence humanity. I had to shed my skin, purge my emotions and experience every extreme: I had to keep throwing myself onto the swords until I didn’t feel a thing.

But in trying everything, all I had discovered was that I didn’t need any of it. From that point, there was nowhere to go but to the grave—or to become more human. After seven stressful months of working (or not working) on the album and dealing with Missi, I had begun to emerge from that soulless cocoon of nonfeeling. As the drugs drained out of my system, humanity—tears, love, hate, self-respect, guilt—was rushing back to me, but not in the same way that I remembered it. My weaknesses had become my strengths, my ugliness had become beauty, my apathy to the world had become a desire to save it. I had become a paradox. Now, more than any other point in my life, I began to believe in myself. I had preached it all the time in my music, but had I practiced it since arriving in New Orleans? Had I ever practiced it? Had I ever been truly capable of it before now?