Long Hard Road Out of Hell (19 page)

After the show, which I don’t even think Trent Reznor watched, I ran into him backstage.

“Remember me?” I asked, trying to pretend like I wasn’t tripping, though my ultradilated eyes probably gave it away. “I interviewed you for
25th Parallel
.”

He politely pretended he remembered me, and I gave him a tape and scurried away before I could say anything too stupid. Crazed on drugs and still under the spell of Nancy, I stumbled to a backstage hospitality area—most likely Nine Inch Nails’s dressing room—where I found her waiting for me. We had sex, and I saw the devil in her eyes again. But I wasn’t scared. We were already well acquainted by then.

When we were finished, we lowered our dresses and walked into the hall, where we ran into Nancy’s boyfriend, Carl, and my girlfriend, Teresa. It was a strange moment of recognition that seemed frozen in time. We stared at them and felt like they looked guilty. They stared at us and felt like we looked guilty. Nobody said anything about it. We all just knew, or thought we knew.

Something had been bothering me about Teresa anyway. From the beginning of our relationship, there was an element of mystery about her, as if there was a skeleton she kept locked in the dark closet of her mind. She lived in a tiny house with her mother, who slept on a couch in the living room, and her brother, a walking contradiction. He was a perpetually drunk pickup-truck-driving redneck who was also into hip-hop and b-boy culture. Theoretically, this meant he should be beating himself up.

It was never much fun sleeping over at Teresa’s, because her brother used to get violent and punch holes in her door, and her dog had fleas so I’d stay up half the night itching. Although it would have been better for both of us if we had just broken up, I was too insecure and too afraid of standing up on my own without using her as a crutch. It wasn’t about sex, it was about support—she paid for everything, gave me advice, treated me like a child, and tolerated my mental abuse. She was sweet, plain and nurturing, which was what I was looking for after my experience with Rachelle, who was cold-hearted, gorgeous and manipulative.

But when I visited Teresa at her home on Mother’s Day, her eyes, which were always ringed with darkness, looked blacker and more clouded than usual. I asked her what was wrong, and, after trying to circumvent the question, she admitted that she had gotten pregnant in high school, carried the child to term and then put him up for adoption. After she said this, I started looking at her differently, noticing the stretch marks on her hips and the maternal way she treated everyone. I felt like I was fucking my own mother when I slept with her. Though I was deceiving her about Nancy, I still couldn’t help being hypocritical and feeling spiteful that, like every woman I had gone out with to that point—from pretentious Asia to two-timing Rachelle—Teresa had lied to me and betrayed me. To this day I still have a complex that every girl I meet has a kid or is going to try to have a kid with me. Usually, I’m right.

I also started noticing that Teresa and Nancy were connected by some sort of balance that kept their collective weight in equilibrium. As Teresa grew fatter, Nancy kept getting skinnier. Part of the reason I fell under the influence of Nancy’s spell was that she saw the holes spreading in my armor and worked her way inside like the corrosive rust that she was.

When I came down off the acid that morning after the Nine Inch Nails show, I also came down off Nancy’s spell. It was as if I had been on one long trip since the fourth of July. I fell asleep angry and confused, trying to figure out what had been wrong with me for the past few months. She called me up late that afternoon—just after I had woken up with the chorus of the worst song I would ever write, “She is not my girlfriend/I’m not who you think I am,” in my head—and gave me her usual shit about kicking Carl out of the house and moving me in. But this time I didn’t take it.

“No, there’s no way,” I exploded. “You know, this is total bullshit. First of all, this whole thing with the band isn’t going to work out. I want you out.”

“But it’s my band, too,” she insisted.

“No, it’s my band. It never was your band. You aren’t even in the band. You’re an extra, a prop, and I appreciate what you’ve done for us on stage, but it’s time to move on.”

“But what about us? I mean, will we still…”

“No. That’s over too. Whatever we had, it was a mistake and I want to end it right now. Teresa is and will remain my girlfriend. I’m sorry if I sound like an asshole, I’m just trying to be final about this.”

That’s when she flipped out, worse than when she was tripping the night before. She screamed and cried herself hoarse, threatening me with everything she had. The conversation ended with me trying to convince her not to tell Teresa or Carl about us. She agreed. But hours later, Teresa called.

“Listen to this,” she said, putting the receiver next to her answering machine. There was a message from Nancy, but she was yelling so frantically into the receiver that it was difficult to make it all out. It went something like: “You bitch … what the fuck did you… I told you … never … fucking kill you … if I see you … limb … spread your ugly … fucking … blood all over the walls (click).”

From there, all hell broke loose. Nancy called clubs and canceled Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids shows; she showed up at our concerts, threatened people in the audience, and even climbed onstage and attacked the girl who replaced her, Missi. She called every person I knew and told them what an asshole I was, and she started leaving obscene messages and packages for me. One morning I found a necklace she had borrowed from me lying on my doorstep. But it had been smashed to bits, covered with something resembling blood and sealed ritualistically in a Mason jar with some kind of hair. It was like a curse that John Crowell’s brother would have attempted.

Never in my life had anyone ever made me so violently angry before. She was ruining my life when we were sleeping together, and now that we weren’t, she was destroying it even more thoroughly. Every night when I came home there was a new death threat waiting for me. I already had so many strong feelings about Nancy: repugnance, fear, lust, annoyance, exasperation and the knowledge that any girl who likes me must be crazy. But now they were all superseded by deep, dark, vitriolic hate, which throbbed scaldingly through my veins every time her name came up. I finally called her and laid it on the line: “Not only are you not going to be in the band anymore, but if you don’t leave town I’m going to have you killed.” I wasn’t exaggerating. I was infuriated, I had nothing to lose and I was so emotionally wrapped up in the situation that I had no perspective. It wasn’t just Nancy who was like John Crowell, it was me, because I was losing my own identity in my hatred for the people I thought were trying to destroy it.

My respect for human life had long since dulled. I had realized this just weeks before when I was leaving the Reunion Room and witnessed a head-on collision as I was crossing the street. A middle-aged man stumbled out of one car, a blue Chevrolet Celebrity, with his hand on his forehead screaming for help. He staggered around the street, disoriented and in shock, and then let go of his forehead. The flap of skin covering the top of his head fell over his face, and he collapsed in a growing pool of his own blood, trembling and convulsing as death seized and finally stilled him. When I walked to the other side of the street, where the other car had crashed, there was a woman whose skull had been split open. She was clearly in pain, but she was calm and lucid, as if she had accepted the fact that her world was about to end. As I walked by, she slowly turned her head toward me and begged for me to hold her. “Please, somebody hold me,” she pleaded, shivering. “Where am I? Don’t tell my sister.... Somebody, please. Hold me.” I could see the humanity and desperation well up in her brown eyes. She just wanted some kind of physical, nurturing contact as she died. But I kept walking. I wasn’t part of it and didn’t want to be part of it. I felt disconnected, as if I were watching a movie. I knew I was being an asshole, but I wondered, would she—or anybody—have stopped for me? Or would they have been too concerned with themselves—worried that I’d bleed on their clothes, make them late to a meeting or infect them with HIV, hepatitis or something worse.

With Nancy, while I didn’t think it was right to take a human life, I didn’t think it was right to deny myself the chance of causing someone to die either, especially someone whose existence meant so little to the world and to herself. At the time, taking someone’s life seemed like a necessary growing and learning experience, like losing your virginity or having a child. I began mapping out different ways I could carry out my threat to Nancy with the least possible risk to myself. Was there someone I knew who was so desperate that they’d kill her for fifty dollars? Or could I do it myself, perhaps push her in a lake and pretend it was an accident? Maybe I could sneak into her apartment and poison her food? This was the first time I had ever seriously considered murder. I wasn’t sure what to do. So I called the one person who I knew was an expert: Stephen, our keyboardist, who we had started calling Pogo at this point because neither Madonna nor Gacy seemed to fit his personality and Pogo was John Wayne Gacy’s clown nickname.

I asked Pogo everything there was to know about murder and the disposal of bodies. I wasn’t going to accept any other alternative. She had to die. In my mind, I built her into a symbol, a representation of everyone who had ever tried to possess me or control my mind, whether it be through Christianity or sex, and I wanted revenge—compensation—for the boy they had warped and destroyed. Pogo and I went about this task very meticulously. We plotted the perfect murder, with not only no evidence that we had been involved but no evidence that there had even been a murder. We followed her, cased out her house and figured out her routine before coming up with the solution: arson.

P
OGO

That Thursday night, Pogo and I put on all black (which wasn’t that much different from how we usually dressed); filled a shoulder bag with kerosene, matches and rags; and drank some courage at Squeeze. Before leaving the club, I phoned Nancy to make sure she was home. As soon as she answered, I hung up. We were on.

She lived in an area of town called New River, underneath a bridge that sheltered much of Fort Lauderdale’s homeless population. As Pogo and I neared her house, a black vagrant chased after us. “Hey, what is this, Halloween?” he yelled as he approached, the fetid stench of his breath signaling his arrival. He had a large gold-colored ring across his knuckles that spelled out his name, Hollywood, and he kept telling us about the drugs he had for sale. The fact that he looked like Frog, the kid who had beaten me up at the roller-skating rink, only served to compound the hate I felt at that moment and add to my determination to kill this girl.

But Hollywood kept following us, all the way to Nancy’s door. Pogo and I looked at each other. We didn’t anticipate there being a witness in this deserted neighborhood. The look we gave each other was a question mark: Do we kill him, too? Or do we abandon the plan for tonight?

We decided to walk around the block and pretend Nancy’s building wasn’t our destination. But he kept trailing us and trying to get us to buy crack. If I had known better at the time, I probably would have taken him up on the offer.

As we neared Nancy’s house a second time, we heard sirens. Two fire engines whizzed by, followed by a police car and an ambulance. We were so tightly wound that we fled in the opposite direction, leaving Hollywood, Nancy and New River alive and unscathed.

I’ll always wonder if Hollywood was some kind of messenger, a portent of the better things I had to accomplish. Because after that night, I became too paranoid to kill Nancy, too scared of getting caught and sent to prison. I woke up to the fact that I had told too many people of my hatred for her, and even the best plan Pogo and I could come up with wasn’t good enough to protect us from chance events like passing police cars. So I set about harming Nancy in a way that could never be traced back to me. In every malicious moment of my waking day, I visualized her destruction, her misery, her disappearance from Fort Lauderdale and my life. I walked down the streets enveloped in a cloud of hatred. For a curse, Satan and
The Necronomicon
weren’t necessary; the power was within me. And the next afternoon, after telling Carl (the only friend she had left) that she was breaking up with him, Nancy disappeared.

Instead of holding this against me, Carl began emulating me. Perhaps it was his way of denying I had been sleeping with his girlfriend. Teresa stupidly forgave me because she knew how crazy Nancy was. It would have been a happy ending, but I started feeling uncomfortable about the amount of time Teresa and Carl were spending together.

One afternoon I showed Teresa a demo tape cover I had designed with a gnarled, twisting tree that looked like something from
The Wizard of Oz
. Days later, a concert poster Carl drew for another band appeared plastered all over town with the exact same tree on it. I was furious with Teresa for giving my idea away to Carl (exacerbated by the fact that I was just bored with her in general), and disgusted by Carl’s sycophantic behavior. I made sure they were both at our next concert and performed a song about Carl, “Thingmaker,” one long rant about how I was sick of his trying to look and act like me, and especially sick of his stealing from me. But the stealing didn’t stop there, because he and Teresa soon started dating, an abomination which continues to this day. Frustrated and betrayed on the day I turned twenty-one, I went to get my first tattoos—a goat’s head on one arm and, on the other, the same tree he had plagiarized from me. It was my way of copyrighting it.