Essays, Emails ...

by Palahniuk, Chuck

  His black leather pants flare to cover thick-soled black shoes.

  He says, “I remember that my urethra had grown closed, and they had to put a drill in my dick and drill it out. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to a kid. They told me that after I went through puberty I had to come back and go through it again, but I said ‘No chance. I don’t care what my urine stream is like now. I’m not going back.”

  His mother still keeps his foreskin in a vial.

  “When I was growing up, my dad and I didn’t get along. He was never around, and that’s why I didn’t really talk about him, because I never saw him. He worked all the time. I don’t consider what I do to be work, but I think I’ve inherited his workaholic determinism. I don’t think until I was in my 20s did my dad ever speak to me about being in the Vietnam War. Then he started telling me about people that he’d killed and things that he was involved in with Agent Orange.”

  He says, “My father and I both have some sort of heart disorder, a heart murmur. I was really sick when I was a kid. I had pneumonia four or five times and was always in the hospital, always underweight, scrawny, primed for a beating.”

  Phones ring in the other offices. Four lanes of traffic go by outside.

  “When I was writing the book [his autobiography],” Manson says, “I hadn’t really gotten to the conclusion of how similar I was to my grandfather. Until I got to the end of the book, that hadn’t dawned on me. That, as a kid, I’m looking at him as a monster because he’s got women’s clothing and dildos, and by the end of the story I’ve become far worse than my grandfather was.

  “I don’t think I’ve told anyone this,” he says, “but what I found out over the last year is that my father and my grandfather never got along. My father came back from the Vietnam War and was kind of tossed out on the street and told he had to pay rent. There’s something really dark about that which I never liked. And my father told me last year that he’d found out that that’s not his real father. Which was the strangest thing I’d ever heard, because it started to make sense that maybe he was treated poorly and had this weird relationship. It’s really weird to think that he wasn’t really my grandfather.”

  He says, “I suspect that there’s so much death imagery because as a kid I was always sick and always had sick relatives. There was always a fear of death. There was a fear of the Devil. A fear of the end of the world. The Rapture—which is a Christian myth that doesn’t even exist in the Bible. All of that, I just ended up becoming. I ended up becoming what I was afraid of. That was my way of dealing with it.”

  In the attic, Manson deals his fifth card: The Hanged Man. “The fifth card is more of your recent past,” he says. “It also is meant to mean some sort of change has taken place, in this case it could mean the fact that I’ve become extremely focused and maybe in some ways have neglected friendships and relationships.”

  He says, “I was born in ’69, and that year’s become such a focus for a lot of things, especially this record. Because ’69 was the end of so many things. Everything in culture just changed so much, and I think it was real important that I was born then, too. The fact that Huxley and Kennedy died on the same day. To me, that opened up some kind of schism or gateway to what was going to happen. It all started to show parallels for me. Altamonte was like Woodstock ’99.

  “The house I live in, The Stones lived there when they wrote “Let it Bleed.” I found Cocksucker Blues, an obscure film that they made, and it shows them in my living room writing “Gimme Shelter.” And “Gimme Shelter” was the song that was emblematic of the whole Altamonte tragedy. And then the Manson murders were something I’ve always obsessed over since I was a child. That to me had the same media coverage as Columbine.

  “The thing that always bothered me was,” he says, “this is the exact same thing. Nixon came out and said Charles Manson was guilty during the trial, because Nixon was being blamed for everything that was wrong about the culture.

  “Then the same thing happened with Clinton saying, ‘Why are these kids acting so violent? It must be Marilyn Manson. It must be this movie. It must be this game.’ Then he turns the cheek and sends some bombs overseas to kill a bunch of people. And he’s wondering why kids have bombs and they’re killing people.”

  Manson brings out watercolor paintings he’s done, bright and dark colorful Rorschach-test portraits of McGowan. Paintings he does with, not so much the paints as the murky rinse water he uses to clean his brushes. One shows the grinning heads of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold impaled on the raised fingers of a peace sign.

  “It turns out that they weren’t fans,” he says. “One Denver reporter did enough research to prove they disliked me because I was too commercial. They were into more underground stuff. It pissed me off that the media took one thing and it just kept snowballing. And it was because I’m an easy target. I look guilty. And I was on tour at the time.”

  He says, “People always ask me, ‘What would you have said to them if you could talk to them?’ and my answer is, ‘Nothing. I would’ve listened.’ That’s the problem. Nobody listened to what they were saying. If you’d listened, you’d have known what was going on.”

  He says, “Strangely, although music is something to listen to, I think music listens back because there’s no judgments. A kid can find something he identifies with. Or an adult. Here’s a place you can go to where there’s no judgments.”

  Manson deals his sixth card: The Star. “This card is the future,” he says. “The Star. This means great success.”

  He says, “For a long time, I never saw myself getting to this point. I never looked beyond this because I thought I was either going to destroy myself or someone was going to kill me in the process. So in some ways I have beaten my dream. And it is scary. It is like starting over, but that’s good because that’s what I needed. I’ve gone back in time in a way, but now I have more ammunition, more knowledge to face the world.”

  He says, “The natural thing for me to do is to be involved in movies, but it really has to be on my terms. I think I feel more suited as a director than an actor, although I like to act. I’m talking to Jodorowsky, the guy who did El Topo and The Holy Mountain. He’s a Chilean director who worked with Dalí. He wrote a script called Able Cain, and it’s a fantastic thing. He’s had it for about 15 years, and he hasn’t wanted to do it, but he contacted me because I was the only person he wanted to work with. And the character is very different from what people know of me, and that’s the only reason I’m interested. Because most people who approach me want me to do different versions of myself. It’s not really a challenge of any sort.”

  Next spring, Manson will publish his first novel, Holy Wood, a narrative covering his first three records. In the attic, he sits on the floor, leaning into the blue light from his laptop and reads the first chapter out loud, a magical, surreal, poetic story, crammed with detail and cut loose from traditional boring fiction.

  He deals his seventh card: The High Priestess. “This,” he says, “I’m not sure about.”

  He deals his eighth card: The World. “The world,” he says, “placed appropriately here represents the environmental or outside things that can prevent you.”

  He says, “I had a great, interesting experience in Dublin. Because it’s very Catholic, I did this performance on the European tour. I had this cross made of TVs that burst into flames, and I came out—I basically was just nude except for leather underwear. I’d painted myself all charred. I came onstage, the cross was on fire, and I saw people in the front row turn around and face the other direction. It was unbelievable. It was the greatest compliment in a performance. They were so offended—and it’s unbelievable to me that someone could be that offended—that they turned around and looked the other way. Hundreds of people.”

  Manson deals his ninth card: The Tower. “The Tower is a very bad card,” he says. “It means destruction, but in the way that this is read, it comes across like I’m going to have to go against pretty muc
h everyone—in a revolutionary way, and there’s going to be some sort of destruction. It will probably be the people who try to get in my way.”

  About his novel, he says, “The whole story, if you take it from the beginning, is parallel to my own, but just told in metaphors and different symbols that I thought other people could draw from. It’s about being innocent and naïve, much like Adam was in Paradise before the fall from grace. And seeing something like Hollywood, which I used as a metaphor to represent what people think is the perfect world, and it’s about wanting—your whole life—to fit into this world that doesn’t think you belong, that doesn’t like you, that beats you down every step of the way, fighting and fighting and fighting, and finally getting there and realizing that now that you’re there, everyone around you are the same people who kept you down in the first place. So you automatically hate everyone around you. You resent them for making you become part of this game you didn’t realize you were buying into. You trade one prison cell for another in some ways.

  “That becomes that revolution,” he says, “to be idealistic enough that you think you can change the world, and what you find is you can’t change anything but yourself.”

  McGowan calls from the airport and promises to call again when her plane lands. In a week Manson will leave for Japan. In a month, he’ll start a world tour in Minneapolis. Next spring, his novel will complete the past decade of his life. And after that, he’ll start again.

  “In some ways it feels like, not a burden, but a weight has been lifted by putting to rest a long-term project,” he says. “It gives me the freedom to go anywhere. I feel a lot like I did when I started the band. I feel that same drive and inspiration, and that same disdain for the world that makes me want to do something that makes people think.

  “The only fear I have left is the fear of not being able to create, of not having inspiration,” Manson says.

  “I may fail, and this may not work, but at least I’m choosing to do it. It’s not something that I’m choosing to do it. It’s not something I’m doing because I’m stuck with it.”

  Manson deals his tenth card: The Sun. The two Boston terriers are curled up, asleep on a black velvet chair.

  He says, “This is the final outcome, the Sun, which represents happiness and accomplishing a great deal.”

  Juliette: The French Way

  “One time,” Juliette Lewis says, “I wanted to get to know someone better by writing down questions for him.” She says, “These questions are more telling about me than anything I could write in a diary.”

  Juliette says this while sitting on an antique sofa in a rented house in the Hollywood Hill, a very white and vertical, very Getty Museum house—stark modern but full of her antique furniture—a house she’s renting with her husband, Steve Berra, until they can move into their new home near Studio City. She’s holding a hand-written list that she’s just found and reads: “Did you ever stab someone or cut them intentionally with a sharp object?”

  She reads, “Do you like asparagus?”

  She reads, “Do you have a middle name?”

  She drinks chai. She doesn’t watch television. She loves playing cards—“King’s Corner” or “King’s Around the Corner.” She uses that fancy new toilet paper from Cottonelle that feels like you’re using a cashmere sweater. In the basement is Steve’s severed head—a very realistic replica left over from a skateboard video and made by the same team that made Juliette’s pregnant belly for this fall’s The Way of the Gun. From the list, Juliette reads, “Do cats frustrate you as pets or do you admire their independence?”

  Over the past 24 hours, she’s talked about her family, her father Geoffrey Lewis, her career, the Scientology thing, getting married, and writing songs. The songs are important because after years of being scripted, these are her words.

  Juliette’s mother, Glenis Batley says, “OK, this is the great story.”

  This over breakfast in Los Angeles. Glenis drinks lots of coffee and has lots of red hair and is still the lovely woman who once modeled for an old photograph Juliette has framed at home. Glenis says, “I got pregnant, and I was on this incredible diet that was absolutely pure, but I didn’t really want anyone around. I noticed the contractions were five minutes apart, so I called the hospital, and I got this one doctor that I didn’t want, and he said that he’d be there right away. He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t push.’ So I went and sort of reclined, and along comes the next contraction, and I get this irresistible urge to push, and I think, ‘One little push won’t hurt.’ So she’s born. And she’s very noisy. Anyway, I’m holding this infant, and I nearly drop her, and now she’s really sure that I don’t know what I’m doing so she’s crying. And it’s the first light of morning, and the doves are cooing, and up until then I hadn’t known what her name was... Juliette!”

  She says, “I decided to spell it the French way because the tragedy sucks.”

  From the list, Juliette reads: “Did you ever break a guy’s nose?”

  She reads, “Would you say you won more fights than you’ve lost?”

  In her kitchen, grinding coffee beans, Juliette say, “When I was growing up, what influenced me were all these musicals. Like Fame. That was my dream. If I could have had a school where they just sing and dance. So Fame and Flashdance and Grease. Did you ever see the movie Hair? I was sobbing. That’s a musical that kills me.”

  She says, “I was going to be a singer first. Before being an actress, I was going to sing. And I always thought I’d maybe act on the side. I always thought of musicals. Singing and dancing. I want to sing still, so I wrote songs with a friend who’s a musician.

  “The biggest fun thing is it’s my words.

  “The only break that I got was that my dad had me meet this small agency. Say hello. The big problem for actors starting out is getting the agent. Agents want you to have a SAG card, but you can’t get your SAG card unless you have an agent putting you up for work. It’s a Catch-22. So my dad got me into and agent’s office, but I still had to audition. I did a reading, and they had to see something in me.

  “If you met me when I was younger, I was really quiet. I did a TV show once, and people were asking my agent, ‘Is she OK? She seems really down.’ It was just your typical teenage crap. Just because I don’t smile at everyone and ask them how they’re doing, I have to be sad?”

  From her list, sitting on the antique sofa, Juliette reads, “Was there a time when you were mystified by the workings of your penis?”

  She reads, “Do you look more like your mother of father?”

  The tape recorder goes on and on, listening.

  She says, “Even at eighteen, I’d go, ‘Where is the hidden rule book that says I have to be made up?’ Because they’d have this chair and all this makeup. I was like, ‘Can’t we just take a picture?’ That’s why all my magazines from earlier are not made up, and they’re not raw. They’re in between, and what shaped me is what they called the ‘alternative girl’ or the ‘kookie girl,’ because I couldn’t vamp up at the drop of a hat. “When I was younger, they’d have a rack of clothing I’d never wear. They’d have a makeup person. And I’m supposed to represent myself? It was like this weird thing. I’d always wanted to be like my male predecessors, like Brando or De Niro. You take a man, and you just document him in a picture.

  “What you exude, your sexuality, is just a part of yourself. So a manufactured sex appeal, which includes an open mouth and lip gloss and bright colors, this is the American porn sex appeal which has nothing to do with sex. It’s like blow-up dolls. I could do that. Very easily. It’s not like I can’t. It’s just never been my objective.

  “Now I realize you’re selling things. So you basically become a rack.”

  She reads, “Did you date an older woman who you’d consider an older woman, and what did she teach you?

  “What’s the first image you have of the female body?”

  She asks, “Does the respect factor drop when a woman has breast imp
lants?”

  Juliette says, “I had two dreams about De Niro when I was working with him. I think it was all in anticipation of this scene. Because this in my head was the big scene. In one dream, we were under water and I’d go underwater and we’d glide past each other deliberately, like kids would play in a pool when they like each other. Like a flirtation. But I woke up from that dream and I had a crush on him.

  “In that scene—the little tango dance between our characters—all I knew was he was supposed to walk up to me and then say, ‘Danielle, can I put my arm around you?’ He’s supposed to kiss me in the script, but all Scorsese said was, ‘Bob’s going to do something. Just go with the scene.’

  “Before that scene, I knew we were going to film the kiss part. I had just eaten lunch. It was catfish or something and I was like, ‘Should I rinse my mouth out?’ But I didn’t want to because that would let him know I thought about it. I don’t want to act like I thought about the kiss. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So I didn’t. I didn’t do mouthwash. And then I get to the set, and Bob is right near me, and I smell mouth wash. And then it dawned on me in that moment I felt like such a little kid because I thought, ‘He’s being professional. He’s being considerate of me. He’s being courteous.’ But by then it was too late to go back to the trailer. I don’t know if I was offensive or not.

  “When you watch it, that’s the first take. We did it twice. He puts the thumb on my lips. It’s very intense because we’re only this far from each other, and I’m looking right at him. He starts to put the thumb in my mouth, and she moves it away. And then he persists, and she allows it. And people after that kept talking about the sexuality and burgeoning sexuality at that age, and I never looked at it that way. I looked at it as before he did the thumb thing he was listening to her, he was validating her in a way that her parents weren’t, and then he did this sexual thing. But what you see in my eyes is, after she sucks the thumb and it gets pulled out, she’s looking at him like, ‘Was that good? Did you like that?’ It’s a pleasing thing.”