During one concert we put her in a cage, and, as the band played “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band, I revved up a chain saw and tried to grind through the metal. But the chain flew off the blade, smacked me across the eyes and made a huge gash in my forehead, sending blood streaking down my face. I barely made it through the rest of the show because all I could see was red.
Like any good performance art, there was a message behind the violence. Most of the time, I wasn’t interested in inflicting pain on myself and others unless it was in a way that would make people think about the way they act, the society they live in or the things they take for granted. Sometimes, as a concrete lesson in making assumptions, I’d toss into the audience dozens of ziploc bags—half of them filled with chocolate chip cookies, the other half with cat turds.
I was also interested in the danger and menace of seemingly innocent children’s movies, books and objects, like metal lunchboxes, which were banned in Florida because the state was worried kids would use them to beat each other senseless. During “Lunchbox,” I regularly set a metal lunchbox on fire, took off all my clothes and danced around it, trying to exorcise its demons. In an attempt to reiterate the lesson of Willy Wonka in my own style during other shows, I hung a donkey piñata over the crowd and put a stick on the edge of the stage. Then I would warn, “Please, don’t break this open. I beg you not to.” Human psychology being what it is, kids in the crowd would invariably grab the stick and smash the piñata apart, forcing everyone to suffer the consequence, which in this case was a shower of cow brains, chicken livers and pig intestines from a disemboweled donkey. People would slam-dance and slip on this mass of now-spoiled meat, cracking their heads open in a total intestinal freak-out. The outrageous stunts, however, came later, after a disastrous trip to Manhattan during which I wrote my first real song.
A girl with a pretentious name like Asia, who I had met while she was working at a McDonald’s in Fort Lauderdale, was spending the summer in New York and offered to fly me up for a weekend. Although I was going out with Teresa, I accepted—mainly because I didn’t like Asia and just wanted a free trip to New York. I thought that maybe I could find a record executive to sign our band, so I brought along a crude demo tape. I was never happy with our demos, which Scott always recorded, because we sounded like a tinny industrial band and I imagined us playing rawer, more immediate punk rock.
Manhattan turned out to be a disaster. I discovered that Asia had lied to me about her name and age. She had used her sister’s ID to get a job at McDonald’s because she was too young. I got pissed—it wasn’t that big a deal, but it was another case of a girl deceiving me—and stormed out of her apartment. In the street, by a coincidence or not, I ran into two club rats from South Florida, Andrew and Suzie, a couple of dubious sexuality. I always thought they looked sharp and stylish in clubs, but seeing them for the first time in daylight that afternoon I realized that they used makeup and darkness to practice Gothic deception. In the afternoon sun, they looked like decomposing corpses and seemed at least ten years older than me.
In their hotel room, the cable system had public-access channels, a completely new phenomenon to me. I spent hours flipping through the stations, watching Pat Robertson preach about society’s evils and then ask people to call him with their credit card number. On the adjacent channel, a guy was greasing up his cock with Vaseline and asking people to call and give him their credit card number. I grabbed the hotel notepad and started writing down phrases: “Cash in hand and dick on screen, who said God was ever clean?” I imagined Pat Robertson finishing his more-righteous-than-thou patter, then calling 1-900-VASELINE. “Bible-belt ‘round Anglo-waste, putting sinners in their place/Yeah, right, great, if you’re so good explain the shit stains on your face.” Thus “Cake and Sodomy” was born.
I had written other songs I thought were good, but “Cake and Sodomy” was more than just a good song. As an anthem for a hypocritical America slobbering on the tit of Christianity, it was a blueprint for our future message. If televangelists were going to make the world seem so wicked, I was going to give them something real to cry about. And years later, they did. The same person who inspired “Cake and Sodomy,” Pat Robertson, went on to quote the song’s lyrics and misinterpret them for his flock on The 700 Club.
When I came back from New York, my real troubles began. Teresa was supposed to pick me up at the airport, but she never showed up and nobody answered the phone at her house. So I called Carl and Nancy, since they lived near the airport.
“Do you know where the fuck Teresa is?” I asked. “I had a shitty time in New York, I’m stuck at the airport with no fucking money and all I wanna do is go home and go to sleep.”
“Teresa’s out with Carl,” Nancy said, the cold tone of her voice betraying a hint of the jealousy that I also felt.
Nancy offered to pick me up and drive me home. When we arrived, she followed me inside. I just wanted to pass out, but I didn’t want to be mean after she had rescued me. I collapsed onto the bed, and she collapsed on top of me, coming on to me heavier (all puns intended) than she ever had before. She rammed her tongue down my throat and grabbed my dick. I was very apprehensive, mostly because I didn’t want to get caught. By now, I had begun to feel removed from the everyday world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.
I ended up letting her give me a blow job, because Teresa never went down on me. But, as onstage, I wouldn’t let her fuck me. When Teresa and Carl showed up at my house less than fifteen minutes later, we were sitting on the bed innocently watching television. Carl instinctively walked up to Nancy and kissed her on the mouth, unaware that minutes ago that very orifice had received several million of my sperm.
At the time I thought it was funny and appropriately vengeful, but I didn’t realize that this solitary act of fellatio would be the beginning of a six-month reign of full-on Gothic terror.
dirty rock star
THE URGE TOWARDS LOVE, PUSHED TO ITS LIMIT, IS AN URGE TOWARDS DEATH.
—Marquis de Sade
THE place is Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The date is July 4, 1990. The thing in the palm of a hand stretched out in front of me is a tab of acid, and in a moment it will obliterate all these facts.
Teresa, my girlfriend, has done acid before. Nancy, the psycho, has done it. I haven’t. I let it sit in my mouth until it annoys me, then swallow it and return to packing up the remains of Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids’ first backyard performance, confident that my will power is stronger than whatever this tiny square of paper has in store for me. Andrew and Suzie, the couple who gave me the tab, smile conspiratorially. I wink back, unsure of what they’re trying to communicate.
Minutes pass, and nothing happens. I lie in the grass and focus on figuring out whether the acid is working—if my body seems different, if my perception has changed, if my thoughts are warping. “Do you feel it yet?” comes a voice, breathing sticky and sickly on my ear. I open my eyes to see Nancy grinning masochistically through her black hair.
“No, I don’t,” I say briskly, trying to get rid of her, especially since my girlfriend is around.
“I need to talk to you,” she insists.
“Fine.”
“I’m just starting to realize some things. About us. I mean, Teresa’s my friend and Carl, I don’t care about Carl anymore. But we need to tell them how we feel about each other. Because I love you. And I know you love me, even if you don’t know it. It doesn’t have to be forever. I know how you are about things like that. I don’t want this to get in the way of our band”—our band—“and the chemistry we have onstage. But we can try it. I mean, love…”
As soon as she says love that last time, her face appears lit up against the grassy background, like a billboard advertising self-deception. The word love seems to hang suspended in the air for that moment, masking the rest of her sentence. It’s all very subtle. But I realize then that I’m going on a trip, and there’
s no way back.
“Did you feel that—the difference?” I ask, confused.
“Yes, of course,” she says eagerly, as if we’re on the same wavelength. I do need somebody on my wavelength because I think I’m about to freak out. But I don’t want it to be her. Oh, God, I don’t want it to be her.
I stand up and start to look for Teresa, walking through the house slightly disoriented. Everyone is huddled in corners talking in small groups, each cluster of people smiling at me and beckoning me to join them. I keep walking. The house seems endless. I explore about a hundred rooms, not sure whether they’re all the same one or not, before giving up, confident that my girlfriend is having a good time somewhere that I’m not. I reemerge in the backyard. But it’s not the same backyard. It’s dark, it’s empty and something feels wrong. I’m not sure how long I’ve been inside.
I step outside and wander around. Intricate designs, like sketchy pencil drawings, appear in the air, only to be erased moments later. I trip out on them for a while before I realize it’s raining. It doesn’t really matter. I feel so light and uncorporeal that the rain seems to be dropping through me, penetrating the layers of light my body is emanating. Nancy comes up to me and tries to touch me and understand. Now I’m definitely freaking out.
With Nancy in tow, filling the air with the store-bought scent of dead flowers, I walk downhill to a small, man-made creek. Everywhere there are gray-skinned toads, jumping on the rocks and in the grass. Each step I take, I squish several of them, squeezing out gray-blue blood. Their entrails stick to my shoe, discolored, dead and yellow like blades of grass trapped under the metal rails of lawn furniture. I’m driving myself crazy trying not to kill these things, who have kids and parents and lives to get back to. Nancy is trying to relate to me and I’m trying to pretend like I’m paying attention. But all I can think about are the dead toads. I feel pretty confident that this is what a bad trip feels like—because if this is a good trip, then Timothy Leary has a lot of explaining to do.
I sit down on a rock and try to collect myself, to tell myself that this is all just a drug thinking for me, that the real Marilyn Manson will be back in a moment. Or is this right now the real Marilyn Manson, and the other one just a shallow representation?
My mind is spinning like the wheel of a slot machine around my consciousness. Some images I recognize—the creepy stairs to my old basement room, Nancy playing dead in a cage, Ms. Price’s flash cards. Others I don’t—a leering police officer wearing a Baptist church cap, photographs of a blood-drenched pussy, a scab-covered woman tortously tied up, a mob of kids tearing up an American flag. Suddenly, the wheel stops on one image. It bobbles up and down blurrily in my mind several times before I can make it out. It’s a face, large and expressionless. Its skin is pasty and yellowish, as if jaundiced from hepatitis. Its lips are completely black, and around each eye a thick black figure, like a rune, has been drawn. Slowly, it dawns on me that the face is mine.
My face is lying on a table near a bed. I reach to touch it, and notice that my arms are stippled with the tattoos I’ve been thinking about getting. My face is paper, it is on the cover of a big, important magazine, and that is why the phone is ringing. I pick it up, and notice that I am not anywhere I recognize. Someone who identifies herself as Traci is trying to tell me that she saw the magazine with my face and it makes her excited. I am supposed to know this person, because she apologizes for not having been in touch for so long. She wants to see me perform tonight at a big auditorium I’ve never heard of. I tell her I’ll take care of it because I am glad that she wants to come but disappointed it is only because she saw my paper face. Then I roll over in a bed that is not mine and go to sleep.
“The cops are here!”
Someone is yelling at me, and I open my eyes. I hope that maybe it’s morning and this is over, but I’m still sitting on a rock surrounded by dead toads, Nancy and a guy shouting that the police are busting the party. I can’t figure out which of these things is worse.
I’ve always been paranoid about the police, because even when I’m not doing anything illegal I’m thinking about doing something illegal. So whenever I’m around a cop, I get uncomfortable and nervous, worried that I’m going to say the wrong thing or look so guilty that they’ll arrest me anyway. Being completely out of my mind on drugs doesn’t help the situation any.
We start running away. The rain has stopped and everything is wet and soft under my feet, so I feel like I’m sinking into the ground instead of running. Utterly acid-addled, the situation grows to enormous proportions in my mind, and I feel like I’m fleeing for my life. My entire future depends on not getting caught. We arrive and stop dead in front of a Chevrolet covered from hood to trunk with fresh, dripping blood. I’m in too deep.
“What the fuck is going on?” I ask everyone around me. “What is this? What’s happening? Somebody!”
Nancy reaches out to me, and I push her away and find Teresa. She takes me into her car—dark, factory-scented and claustrophobic—and tries to soothe me, telling me that the other car is just painted red, and the red looks like blood because of the wet rain on it. But I’m completely paranoid: dead toads, cops, a bloody car. I see the connection. Everyone’s against me. I can hear myself screaming, but I don’t know what I’m saying. I try to get out of the car. I do it by punching the windshield, putting my fist through the supposedly shatter-proof glass. The cracks in the glass spiderweb around my hand, and my bleeding knuckles look like a row of open sewer pipes gushing waste.
Then we sit, and Teresa whispers things in my ear and tells me she knows what I’m feeling. I believe her, and I think she believes herself too. We enter that acid mind-meld where we don’t have to talk anymore to know what each other is thinking, and I begin to calm down.
We return to the party. People are still there, though there are less of them, and there’s no evidence that the cops have ever been there. Just as I’m beginning to cross the border from bad drug experience to tolerable one, someone—not realizing I’m tripping my balls off—tries to push me in the pool as a joke. It doesn’t take a math major to figure out that acid plus swimming pool equals certain death. So I panic and start flailing. Soon, we’re locked in a fistfight, and I’m tearing at him like he’s a doll I’m trying to mutilate. I punch him in the face with my raw, skinless knuckles and don’t even feel the pain.
After he stumbles out of range, I notice everyone staring at me slack-jawed. “Listen, let’s just go over to my house,” I say to the people around me. We pile into the car—it’s me, my girlfriend, Nancy and her boyfriend—the exact four ingredients necessary in a recipe for personal misery. Back at my parents’ town house, we make our way to my room, where we find Stephen, my keyboardless keyboardist, lying on the bed like gasoline waiting for a match. He tries to interest us in the video he is watching, Slaughterhouse Five, the kind of strange, disconnected head-trip film you don’t want to think about when you’re on acid.
Carl instantly gets engrossed in the movie, the television glow playing on his open, drooling jaw. Without saying a word, Nancy stands up hastily—annoyingly—and marches to the bathroom. I’m sitting on the bed with my girlfriend, my mind flashing in the same way the movie is flickering on Carl. Stephen is babbling about how the special effects in the movie were done. From the bathroom, I hear a spastic scratching sound, like the claws of dozens of rats skittering around the bathtub. In a rare moment of lucidity, I realize that the sound is of a pencil writing furiously on paper. The sound grows louder and louder, drowning out the TV, Stephen and everything else in the room, and I know that Nancy is writing something that is going to completely make me miserable and ruin my life. The louder the sound surges, the more crazy and twisted I imagine the words getting.
Nancy emerges from the bathroom in a blaze of vindictive glory and hands me the note. No one else seems to notice. This is between us. I look into the television to gather my strength. I’m staring at it so hard that I can’t even focus on the picture anymo
re. In fact, it doesn’t even look like a TV. It looks like a strobe light. I turn away, and look at Nancy. But I don’t see Nancy. I see a beautiful, pouty woman with long, blow-dried blond hair and an Alien Sex Fiend T-shirt hiding her curves. It must be the woman from the telephone… Traci.
Instead of pencil scratching, I hear David Bowie: “I. I will be king. And you. You will be queen.”
I have Traci’s fingers in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. We’re standing on a balcony at a party, which seems to be in my honor. “I never knew you were all this,” she purrs, apologizing for something in the past I’m unaware of. “I thought you were something different.”
There are lights and flashbulbs, Bowie is singing “We could be heroes just for one day,” and everybody is smiling ingratiatingly at us. She seems to be as famous as I seem to be.
“I spent my adolescence masturbating to that bitch,” a roadie—mine?—cackles in my face.
“Who?” I ask.
“That.”
“What’s that?”
“Traci Lords, you lucky fucker.”
On the floor beneath us there is a tall, slouched man with long black hair and a face painted white. He is wearing platform boots, torn fishnet stockings, black leather shorts and a shredded black T-shirt. He looks just like me, or a parody of me. I wonder if he is me.
A fat girl with metal rods and hoops stuck through half of her face and lipstick smeared over the rest notices me staring at the tall man. She comes upstairs, pushes past a stocky bodyguard—mine?—and, as her face strobes grotesquely in the light, explains, “You wanna know who that guy is? Nobody really knows his name. He’s totally homeless. He makes his money hooking, and then spends it trying to look like you. He always comes in here and dances to your records.”
I listen to the music again. The DJ has put on “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. But it’s slower, darker, meaner. And the voice singing is mine. I need to get away from this surreal scene, away from all these people who are treating me like I’m some sort of star they can suck a little brightness out of. Traci takes my hand and leads me away, moving like mercury through the admiring rubble. We step behind a white, gauzy curtain to an empty VIP room full of untouched deli sandwiches and sit down. There is something in my hands … a piece of paper. I try to focus on the thick, smudged lines. “Dear, Lovely Brian,” it begins. “I want to kick my boyfriend out, and I want you to move in with me. You said last week that you weren’t happy with the way things were going with Teresa”—fuck, it’s from Nancy—“I will make you so happy. I know I can. No one will take care of you like I will. No one will fuck you like I will. I have so much to give you.”
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