Long Hard Road Out of Hell

by Marilyn Manson

  Below that are 30 or so rubber, leather and metal hoops ranging in size from one to four inches in diameter. Apparently, these were invented by the Chinese to promote sexual endurance. I think they look like pirate earrings myself, but hey, what does an average-sex-life-with-a-little-Jell-O-on-holidays kinda guy like me know?

  Farther down, she shows me a small leather and chain parachute. It looks like something for a child’s action figure; I can imagine it now—authentic bondage accessory for Teenage Pervert Ninja Turtles. She explains that this device is used to “stretch the genitals.” I don’t think you will find this one at Toys “R” Us.

  Stranger still, there is a magnifying glass below the Freudian-nightmare-paratrooper gear. She pulls it from its peg and quips, “This is so the males I deal with can get a good look at [what] they have and they can see with their eyes how they view it mentally.”

  Stashed at the bottom of the wall are a collection of spiked slave collars, leather bras, masks, gags and nipple/penis tassels. She picks up the latter and points out, “I make the men dance with these on and the tassels all have to swing in the same direction.” In addition to that treasury of ribald playthings there is also a horse’s tail (complete with fastening “butt plug” for the Mr. Ed aficionado) and a real ball and chain which she claims to have purchased at a garage sale.

  Across the room, on the other wall, is where Mistress Barbara keeps her more dangerous weapons, so to speak. Of course, there is a slew of chains as well as an English birch cane, several paddles (wicker, oak, rubber, leather and plastic), a yardstick, a ruler, a Dutch Boy paint stirrer, a medieval spiked flail that she has nicknamed “ball breaker,” a few cat-o’-nine-tails and enough whips to make Indiana Jones salivate uncontrollably. Furthermore, the drawers that line the floorboard contain things like electronic muscle stimulators, disposable enemas, candles, rubber gloves, condoms (she uses both Traditional Dry and Naturalube Trojans), fake blood, plaster of Paris, Saran Wrap, a soldering iron, plastic garbage ties, Icy Hot, feathers, furs, brushes, baby powder, vitamin E lotion, Vaseline, an entire drawer full of marital aids (in various colors, shapes and sizes), more lingerie than Victoria’s Secret and Frederick’s of Hollywood combined, and a box of sparklers. Being the naïve layman that I am, I ask what the sparklers are used for—I wish I hadn’t.

  “On birthdays and the Fourth of July I put one of these in the end of their penis and light it,” she confesses without a hint of sarcasm. “Most of these things are props but most men love to dress up like women. They come here to be feminine.”

  Carefully, I find a seat on the black fur comforter that covers her full-size platform bed. Below it, where most normal folks might stash, oh say, a Monopoly game or maybe even their KISS dolls, I notice a caged sleeping cell.

  Although Mistress Barbara has only been practicing bondage and discipline commercially (that’s not commercial as we know it; this practice is very illegal) for three years, she has been doing it privately for 45 of her 57 years. Her introduction to the whip-me-beat-me-jab-safety-pins-through-my-sex-organ world of B and D came at the ripe and uncertain age of 12.

  “I was living in California and there was a man who was 21 that came to my house all the time,” she recalls, lighting a cigarette. “One day he was teasing me with his bullwhip and he made me mad. So, I took the bullwhip from him and made him take off his clothes and drive back to town naked.”

  From that day on, she has been abusing men for their pleasure. However, she never actually lost her virginity until she was 16. Thereafter she continued to practice her trade privately, moving to Florida in 1980. Finally, she realized that if she advertised, she could do the same things to strangers for more money. Now, at $200 a session (which can last anywhere from 12 minutes to 13 hours), she earns roughly $25,000 a year, tax-free.

  Her customers, who are between 19 and 74, locate her through a personal ad that reads: “Sincere, mature, dominant woman has slave quarters available for short- and long-term stays.” Generally, her clientele are businessmen with families, she claims. “I believe the higher the executive, the higher the pressure and the more they do these things,” she decides. “I see faces and I recognize them from campaign posters. I find that it’s not unusual that I’ve had firemen, police officers, attorneys, judges, airline pilots and football players.” Laughing, she adds, “I get most of my calls after the three-day holidays when these men are at home with their wives and they’re not accustomed to spending that much time with their families. So I get some pretty frantic calls that they’ve been ‘bad boys’ and that they need to be spanked.”

  Not only does she provide services for sexually depraved clients, her personal live-in slaves give her everything they own. Presently, the peon of this V-girl’s bawdy house is a gaunt, middle-aged gentleman named Stan. Despite the fact that he is a good two feet taller than Mistress Barbara, her tyrannical demeanor causes him to cower beneath her like a maimed cat. As my photographer, Marc Serota, prepares some additional lighting, she orders Stan to undress for the picture; the slave scuttles out of the room obediently. Turning back to me, she explains, “You can’t be a good dominatrix without understanding submission. The game that we play is—I play as though I am in control and I’m forcing them to do these things. But in reality it’s what they want to receive.

  “They make no decisions. Not even what to wear or when to speak. I totally control their lives. I am everything to them. These are people who have not been able to run their lives. They’ve made such a mess of their lives and have never been satisfied with any woman. So I just take everything over, they don’t even have to think.”

  Apparently, men like Stan live with her and cater to her every desire whether it is sexual or otherwise. In return for her care, he gives her a nominal amount of money each week that she uses to pay his bills. She becomes a mother of sorts. What they don’t know is that she saves most of their cash and returns it to them when they decide to move on; she likes to give them a fresh start.

  Stan finally returns. I am a little more than surprised by his appearance. Aside from the fact that he is totally naked, his body hair has been shaved entirely and he is wearing four or five (I don’t get close enough to get an exact count) of those attractive metal hoops that I described some 27 paragraphs ago; they jangle as he walks into the room. Sheepishly, he crawls onto Mistress Barbara’s black leather chiropractor’s chair, where she proceeds to crucify him against the wall. After he is secured at the neck, wrists and ankles, she casually applies surgical hemostats to his nipples.

  “Does that hurt?” she asks coyly.

  “Well...” he begins, but before he can finish she grabs his denigrated genitals and squeezes with the ease of any Publix produce shopper.

  “Get a little more uncomfortable,” she commands and her battered boy toy responds quickly, stretching his leg sideways at an awkward angle.

  As pancake-size red welts form around Stan’s mangled breasts, I ask him how he feels. Slowly and carefully he mumbles, “Restrained… I feel something but it’s hard to pin a certain emotion on it.”

  “Stan is not an articulate person and he always understates everything,” the groin-gouging guru interjects. “I’ve always treated men in this fashion. I’ve always felt that men should be kept in cages and stables like dogs and horses and taken out only when you want to play with them. It’s very convenient.”

  The camera begins to flash and Stan winces for the paparazzi as Mistress Barbara answers the door. It’s Bob, her part-time slave. He carries in a large box that she says is filled with black market transvestite videos. Bob is a retired grandfather who serves Mistress Barbara with his wife’s reluctant permission.

  “My wife accepts this but she’s not into it,” Bob explains while fidgeting with the change in his pocket. “She knows it’s a big fantasy of mine and I enjoy it. As long as she knows where I’m at and that the people are sane and discreet, it’s okay. I would never lie to or cheat on my wife. I don’t go with other women, and
there’s no real hanky panky going on here.”

  Whether it’s with Bob, Stan or any of the others, Mistress Barbara leads a hedonistic life. She spends her free time sailing, flying, or diving. She eats when and where she wants and she never has to worry about sexual satisfaction; she has them trained for that. “Stan’s not allowed to have an erection unless I say. He has learned to function on command.”

  She represents everything a woman is about while at the same time contradicting what we believe is normal behavior. Besides that, she has never been arrested and she makes a hell of a lot of money.

  I decide that it’s time to head back into apple-pie-and-no-sex-until-marriage America, so I don my adhesive eye patches and follow her into the humid afternoon sunlight. As we trod forward by Braille, in search of the car, she concludes by whispering, “They think I’m wonderful. Somebody else might think I’m the biggest jerk. So why not be where you have adoration?”

  * * *

  I soon met a woman who would torture me in ways much more subtle and painful than anything Mistress Barbara could devise with her hellish instruments of sadism. Her name was Rachelle. I was nineteen and she was twenty-two when we met at Reunion Room, a local club that, though I was underage, let me in because I was a journalist. She was so beautiful she was painful to look at because I knew I could never have her. She was a model, with red hair in a Bettie Page cut, a gently curving body and a face stretched perfectly over well-defined cheekbones.

  As we talked, Rachelle explained that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, who was still living with her but trying to find his own place. Once I realized she was on the rebound, a slow flush of confidence began to creep over me. She was leaving for Paris for the entire summer in a month, which gave me just enough time to pursue and miraculously catch her. The letters we exchanged across the Atlantic were as steamy as they were inspirational. I was smitten. When she returned, our relationship resumed even more passionately than before. In desperate need of her affection (or just to get laid) one night, I paged her. My phone rang minutes later, and I picked it up.

  “Why are you paging this number?” asked a hostile man’s voice.

  “This is my girlfriend’s number,” I told him belligerently.

  “It’s also my fiancee’s number,” he fired back, and at that moment I felt my heart freeze and shatter, each shard dropping painfully through my insides.

  “Did you know,” I stammered, “that she’s been sleeping with me?”

  He didn’t get angry or threaten to kill me. He was in shock, like I was. I walked around for months in a heartbroken daze. Just as I was beginning to pull myself back together, she called.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “but I’m pregnant.”

  “Why are you telling me?” I asked as coldly as I could.

  “I don’t know if it’s yours or his.”

  “Well, I guess we’re just going to have to assume that it’s his,” I snapped back, hanging up before she could say anything else.

  Two years later, I ran into her in a local diner. She looked the same—drop-dead gorgeous—but modeling hadn’t worked out for her. She had become a police officer, and looked like every man’s fantasy dominatrix in her blue uniform, cap and nightstick.

  “You should meet my son,” she said. “He looks just like you.”

  My face blanched and my jaw dropped open in the process of trying to exclaim, “What?!” I pictured child support payments, weekends spent baby-sitting and a husband plotting brutal revenge.

  After savoring my shock, she pulled her dagger out of my chest just as swiftly and cruelly as she had plunged it in. “But I know it’s not yours. I had a blood test.”

  As a result of discovering that Rachelle had betrayed me and was engaged to someone else, I promised myself that I would try to close myself off emotionally to the world and trust no one. I didn’t want to get carried away by my feelings again; I needed to stop being victimized by my own weaknesses and insecurities about other people, especially women. Rachelle left me with a scar deeper than any I’ve since inflicted on myself. It was partly out of anger and revenge that I wanted to get famous and make her regret dumping me. Another reason was that I was frustrated with music journalism. The problem wasn’t the magazines or my writing, but the musicians themselves. Each successive interview I did, the more disillusioned I became. Nobody had anything to say. I felt like I should be answering the questions instead of asking them. I wanted to be on the other side of the pen.

  I interviewed Debbie Harry, Malcolm McLaren and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I wrote promotional biographies for Yngwie Malmsteen and other metal assholes. I even published an article on Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails with no premonition that we were about to begin a relationship that, like a long stay in Mistress Barbara’s dungeon, would be strewn with unforseeable peaks of pleasure and pain.

  When I first saw Trent, he was sulking in the corner during soundcheck as his dreadlocked tour manager, Sean Beavan, hovered protectively over him. Once we started talking, he thawed and became affable. But I was just another journalist. Talking to me was as good a way as any for him to kill time before a show in a city where he knew no one.

  The next time Trent Reznor came to town, I was his opening act.

  ONE OF MY EARLY ILLUSTRATIONS

  the spooky kids

  HE THREW UP HIS HANDS IN EXASPERATION. “I’M NOT BEING SARCASTIC, I’M TRYING TO USE A LITTLE VERBAL SHOCK TREATMENT TO MAKE YOU SEE HOW CRAZY YOU BOTH SOUND! YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT A GODDAMN PEN NAME COMING TO LIFE!”

  —Stephen King, The Dark Half

  MARILYN Manson was the perfect story protagonist for a frustrated writer like myself. He was a character who, because of his contempt for the world around him and, more so, himself, does everything he can to trick people into liking him. And then, once he wins their confidence, he uses it to destroy them.

  He would have been in a longish short story, about sixty pages. The title would have been “The Payback,” and it would have been rejected by seventeen magazines. Today, it would be in the garage of my parent’s house in Florida, faded and mildewed with all the other stories.

  But it was too good an idea to rot. The year was 1989 and Miami’s 2 Live Crew were beginning to make headlines because store owners across the country were getting arrested for selling their album—classified as obscenity—to minors. Pundits and celebrities were rushing to aid the band, to prove that their lyrics were not titillation but art. A culturally significant chain of events had been set in motion simply because of dirty nursery rhymes like: “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet with her legs gapped open wide/Up came a spider, looked up inside her and said, ‘That pussy’s wide.’”

  At the time I was reading books about philosophy, hypnosis, criminal psychology and mass psychology (along with a few occult and true crime paperbacks). On top of that, I was completely bored, sitting around watching Wonder Years reruns and talk shows and realizing how stupid Americans were. All of this inspired me to create my own science project and see if a white band that wasn’t rap could get away with acts far more offensive and illicit than 2 Live Crew’s dirty rhymes. As a performer, I wanted to be the loudest, most persistent alarm clock I could be, because there didn’t seem like any other way to snap society out of its Christianity- and media-induced coma.

  Since nobody was publishing my poetry, I convinced Jack Kearnie, the owner of Squeeze, a small club in the middle of a mall, to start an open-mike night. This way, I could at least get some exposure for my writing. Every Monday, I stood awkward and vulnerable behind the microphone on the small stage and recited a handful of poems and prose pieces to a meager crowd. All the bizarre characters who attended told me my poetry sucked, but I had a good voice and should start a band. I told them to fuck off. But inside I knew that no one really likes poetry anyway and that their advice was right—if only because no one else I interviewed or listened to was writing songs with any intelligence. I had always dreamt of ma
king music because it was such an important part of my life, but until then I never had the confidence or the faith in my abilities to pursue it seriously. All I needed were a few resilient souls to go through hell with me.

  The Kitchen Club was the epicenter of South Beach Miami’s burgeoning underground industrial scene and a regular haunt of mine from the time it opened that year, tucked inside a sleazy hotel populated by prostitutes, drug addicts and vagrants. There was a pool in the back with water filthy from being used as a combination bathtub-Laundromat by alcoholics who had pissed and shat themselves. I would go to the hotel on Friday night, rent a room and by the end of the weekend find myself alone and miserable, puking in the bathtub from ingesting too much trucker speed and too many screwdrivers.

  One Friday I arrived at the club with a friend from theater class, Brian Tutunick. I was decked out in a navy blue trench coat with “Jesus Saves” painted on the back, striped stockings and combat boots. At the time I thought I looked cool, but in retrospect I looked like an asshole. (“Jesus Saves”?) As we walked in, we noticed a blond guy leaning against a pillar with a Flock of Seagulls haircut hanging in his face. He was smoking a cigarette and laughing. I thought he was laughing at me, but when I passed by he didn’t even turn his head. He was just staring into space, cackling like a madman.

  As Laibach’s Yugoslavian military march version of “Life Is Life” blasted out of the sound system, I spotted a girl with black hair and huge breasts (which, when they were on a Goth girl like her, we called Dracula biscuits). Shouting over the music, I explained to her that I had a hotel room and tried to convince her to come up with me. But, for the ninety-ninth time that summer, I was denied because she had come to the club with a date, which turned out to be laughing boy. She brought me to his pillar, and I asked him what he was laughing about. His response came in the form of a tutorial on the proper ways to commit suicide, which included essential details like the exact angle to hold the shotgun at and what type of ammunition to use. The whole time he had a strange way of laughing at everything he said. He’d just start cackling, and within that cackle he’d repeat what he had just said—a word like twelve-gauge or cerebral cortex—so that both you and he knew what was so funny.