Long Hard Road Out of Hell (39 page)

A meeting with Captain Larry Paul had become the typical initiation to a day of worklessness in the studio. Never in a life of prodigious drug use had I ever filled my nostrils with so much white powder. Every day, we would get so wired that we wouldn’t be able to focus on recording anything, a situation that would antagonize us so greatly that we would grow even more paranoid and useless.

By now, everybody in the studio seemed to have given up on the album. Trent was beginning to feel resentful because he needed to be writing and recording a follow-up to
The Downward Spiral
, and Dave never seemed to be around when there was work that needed to be done. Ginger was hardly part of the band anymore, because he was too busy trying to amuse a foul harem of strippers he had picked up near the studio. And Daisy was rarely in the control room. Instead, he spent most of his time in the lobby of the studio with his headphones on, playing hackneyed hard-rock licks into his four-track tape recorder. He had never listened to heavy metal as a teenager, so he constantly mistook his clichés for originality. He used an old Jaguar guitar—like the one Kurt Cobain had used—not because it sounded good but because he had refinished it himself. The guitar was supposed to have been destroyed during the “Sweet Dreams” video shoot, but Daisy had proudly saved it from the scrap pile. “So what if it keeps feeding back,” he would explain. “I put so much time into finishing it that it would be a waste not to use it.”

So excited was Daisy by the progress he was making on his four-track recorder that he wanted to actually get something done and record a few riffs on the album, maybe on “Wormboy,” the song that most incorporated his musical ideas. He walked into the live room, excited to find Trent seated there. The rest of us hung out by the mixing console, monitoring the live room through two closed-circuit television cameras. On screen, we could see Daisy excitedly showing off his refurbished guitar to Trent, who actually seemed interested. We watched as Trent reached for the guitar, crooked it under his arm, strummed the strings a few times and then mercilessly smashed it over the amplifier, consigning it to the fate that was meant for it half a year ago. Trent casually left the room, and Daisy stood there aghast for several seconds before storming out of the studio, giving himself the rest of the day off to try and comprehend what had just happened.

We had turned a new corner in our work on
Antichrist Superstar
. Now, not only were we not productive, we were destructive. In the days that followed, our band’s first drum machine would be thrown out of a second-story window, Trent’s walls would be punched through, Twiggy’s equipment would be smashed and Daisy’s four-track recorder would be placed in a microwave set to high, frying its circuit board beyond repair.

On July fourth, the day in the studio consisted of everybody getting drunk as Trent and I lit fireworks, threw them into the microwave, and tossed the whole radiated mess into the street. This was followed by the destruction of my collection of Spawn toys along with a Venom action figure, a villain from Spider Man comic books taken off the market because it said, “I wanna eat your brains,” much like the drugs were now doing to most of us. The only common thread holding the night together was the constant barrage of bottles thrown at Ginger—not out of good-natured fun, but out of resentment because he had managed to find some semblance of happiness in his shallow strip dancers. The only company the rest of us could find was misery. By sunrise, Twiggy was looking for marsh-mallows to roast over the mixing console that Trent was planning to set on fire. It wasn’t just destruction: it was a very violent form of procrastination.

The state of our equipment was a lot like the state of the band: demolished. Within weeks, Daisy had left the group. The sissy had made the first manly move of his life and called a meeting and quit. The meeting went surprisingly well. In some ways, I actually respected him for staying true to what he wanted to do instead of remaining with us. At the time, I treated it as a joke, telling everyone that the only thing I would miss was watching Daisy, the Sexual Janitor, pick up used condoms as he dusted and mopped behind the band and the crew, buying chocolate and flowers in an attempt to seduce girls we had all slept with. But the truth was that I felt worse than ever. Every single person I had formed the band with was gone, and everyone who was left was beginning to side against me. I was the only one with a girlfriend in New Orleans and the only one who seemed to want to work. Even Twiggy was becoming a stranger, controlled on one hand by Casey’s drugs and on the other by Trent, to whom he was growing so close it seemed like he was more interested in being a member of Nine Inch Nails than Marilyn Manson. He had begun to call me Arch Deluxe, after the McDonald’s hamburger marketed to adults, and everyone soon joined in. I constantly felt like a father figure, hated for trying to make everyone do their homework.

Whenever I wanted to talk about the books I was reading on the apocalypse, numerology, the Antichrist, and the Kabbalah, no one gave a shit. When I finished recording something, everyone invariably hated it and wanted to make it noisier and harsher—or even to use a drum machine instead of a live drummer. Was this production or sabotage? I didn’t know what to think anymore. The only time anyone agreed with me was when I suggested we call Casey.

Outside of the studio, New Orleans was a cesspool. All the places where we had hung out the summer before were now filled with Goth tourists. The city had changed from a place where no one knew us to one where we were walking clichés, parodies of ourselves. Every night I drank, swallowed and snorted what I could to escape. One night, Missi and I ended up at a bar called the Hideout, which, the previous year, had been a biker hangout with three or four customers and a jukebox that played Whitesnake and Styx. We liked to drink there because it was empty, it was a joke and the bathrooms had doors that locked.

When Missi and I returned to the Hideout, the place had become a happening nightspot. Everyone there was cold and indifferent, as if they were too cool to recognize us, even though the only reason they were there was because they knew we would be there. In the midst of the black clothes, eyeliner and hair dye, I saw a beacon of silver—a human disco ball—a brown-haired girl covered in glitter with metallic eye shadow and lipstick. She stood in the middle of the room like a big neon sign bearing testimony to my infidelity—she had sucked my dick the summer before. Whatever special radar girls have, Missi’s was on high that night, and instantly she picked up on the tension between me and the Liberace disco ball. The drunker we got, the more volatile the situation became. Missi kept asking me who she was and if I had slept with her, and I kept denying it. In the meantime, the girl was hitting on me as if Missi were a ghost, which in some ways she had become.

When I stood up to go to the bathroom, the girl squeezed in as I was closing the door. I was drunk and dizzy, and stuck with this filthy girl in this filthy room, its white tiled floor caked with congealing, pubic hair-encrusted urine. The first thing the filthy girl did was sit on the toilet and take a piss. I tried not to look or care, but she called to me. “Look at this,” she said, gesturing to a ring stuck through the hood of her clitoris and another in the crevice where her thigh met her crotch. “I got these when I was fifteen.”

“That’s great,” I said, disgusted by the reddened, infected skin around both the piercings as well as the raw, irritated flesh surrounding her entire genital area, which had recently been shaved. I didn’t know if I was supposed to lick her, finger her or fuck her, so I just stood there dumbly, telling her I was going to get caught. Instead of leaving, she pulled up her pants and reached into her pocket, producing a tiny ziploc bag. I’ve always wondered who makes those minuscule ziploc bags. What sandwich is going to fit in one of those?

“All of my boyfriends are either dead or in jail,” she informed me as she crushed out a line of coke on the lid of the tank in the back of the toilet. As soon as I snorted it, my nose began burning, followed by my eyes, which welled with tears. Her drugs were definitely cut with speed or glass or Pop Rocks or something. As I sat there reeling from the alcohol and bad drugs, she grabbed my face and started making out with me, covering me with incriminating glitter. My pants were half off and she pulled on my flaccid cock. I wasn’t thinking about getting caught anymore: All I could think about was urine. I seemed to have inhaled some, because it was all I could smell, and I still had to pee. The stench filled my head and permeated my body. I felt like I was going to vomit. I thrust my hand down her pants and violently yanked the ring on the hood of her clitoris, making her yell in pain, surprise or delight. Then I thrust my thumb inside her, bending my middle finger around her and ramming it up her asshole. “Why am I doing this?” I thought to myself. I wasn’t trying to turn her or myself on. I was just trying to be dirty. The situation seemed to call for it. I could have just as easily stuck my hand in a garbage can and accomplished the same thing.

I pulled my fingers out as quickly as I had inserted them, urinated and left the bathroom to find Missi. But she had left, no doubt stormed off in a rage, leaving me stuck with the disco queen and so pissed at Missi that I was determined to plunge deeper into the sordid trench I had begun digging for myself. As I was asking if anyone knew where Missi had gone, a short, fat girl with a bag of stomach flesh hanging over her too-tight jeans and a white tank top dampened from sweat, revealing saggy, bra-less breasts, walked directly up to me, thrust her face inches away from mine and just stared at me.

M
ISSI AND ME

“What?” I asked, annoyed and uncomfortable.

She responded by throwing her drink in my face—not just the liquid, but the glass as well. I whipped my bottle of beer at her, and soon I was covered with hands trying to restrain me and pull me out of the bar. She followed me out and began yelling something unintelligible, most likely a reference to me selling out or sucking or being too cool for her. She seemed to be suffering from some delusion that her existence was important enough for me to pretend not to acknowledge it.

With the disco ball still rolling along behind me, I ran drunkenly and dizzyingly into a nearby alley alongside a large white Spanish church and hid in the corner. A house of worship was probably the last place the cops would look for me. I had stuck the ziploc bag in my compact, so I brought it out and we snorted a few bumps off my house keys. I don’t know why I did more of that girl’s coke other than the fact that it was there. But as soon as I did, I regretted it. My heart began to feel like it was going to explode. I ran away, leaving the girl behind like the decade she seemed to belong to, and hailed a cab. The driver, a white ox in a wife beater with a big brown mustache and greasy hair, instantly struck up a conversation.

“Have you ever seen
Planet of the Apes
?” he asked. “Isn’t this just like
Planet of the Apes
? All these fucking niggers everywhere.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Well, look around you.”

“The South can be so charming,” I said with an air of disgust, evidently visible to him.

“Are you a queer or something?” he fired back maliciously.

I don’t remember exactly what I said next, but no doubt it contained one of the following—“fuck off,” “asshole” or “suck my dick”—because he screeched to a halt in the middle of the street, smashed his hairy monkey fist into me through the divider and told me to get the fuck out of his cab.

As I walked the quarter mile left to my house with a bloody nose and a pounding head and heart, a combination of bad drugs and a good punch, all I could think of was Charlton Heston saying, “Get your dirty paws off me, you filthy ape.” When I opened my front door, all hell broke loose. My records were strewn all over the apartment and the tops of them were scratched, courtesy of Polly, Missi’s white cat, which looked exactly like the familiar that belonged to John Crowell’s brother, except one of its eyes was blue and the other was green. I placed the keys on the table, and Polly lunged for my hand, tearing away the flesh over my tendon. I grabbed her violently by the neck. Missi was on the phone complaining to a girlfriend and ignoring me, but when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw me go on to throw her cat against the wall, she slammed the receiver down and began screaming at me. It only got worse when she saw the glitter, now mingled with the blood, on my face.

Everyone in the house was against me. Even the dog had, as usual, managed to find the exact book I was reading
(Tetragrammaton)
and tear it to shreds. My heart kept speeding up and swelling against my chest, and I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. From outside, Missi could hear me vomiting messily into the toilet, and her attack softened and turned into the sympathy I definitely didn’t deserve. Blows of panic upon panic were hitting me because the more you get worried about being too high, the worse your situation becomes because the stress only makes your heart beat faster. To make matters even more dire, all I could think about was the fact that, like my dad, I had Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome—an erratic, rapid heartbeat—and probably wouldn’t make it through the night without the help of a doctor.