Long Hard Road Out of Hell

by Marilyn Manson

  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.

  Though I heard rumors about Nancy, I didn’t see her again until four years later at Squeeze. At first, I thought about making peace with her. She was alone, and every time she passed me, she’d slam her body against mine violently without saying a word. My jealous girlfriend, who was probably in elementary school when everything with Nancy had happened, got upset. “I’m going to fucking kick her ass if she does that again,” she said after Nancy rammed into us for the fourth time that night.

  When Nancy passed by again, my girlfriend blocked her path and yelled in her face, “What’s your problem, you ugly bitch?” Nancy took a bottle and smashed it over her head. My girlfriend must have had experience in the matter, because without even seeming dazed she grabbed my claw ring off my finger and punched Nancy in the face five times with it, fucking her up so badly that I’d be surprised if she didn’t have permanent damage. Because I had some kind of clout at that point, the bouncers kicked Nancy out of the club. The old hatred welled up again, and I wanted to do something heinous and more permanent to her, but I couldn’t find out where she lived.

  * * *

  Nancy’s replacement, Missi, not only filled in the gap Nancy left onstage, but the gap Nancy was trying to fill in my life. I met Missi in the midst of the Nancy psychodrama, outside an Amboog-A-Lard concert at Button South, a heavy metal palace where it’s probably still cool to like Slaughter and Skid Row. Brad and I were passing out flyers promoting a show of ours. It was a good way to meet girls, because if they liked you, they knew where to find you. But that’s not what happened with Missi. We exchanged phone numbers right away, and two nights later we were sitting on the beach drinking forty-ounce bottles of Colt 45. I talked about my aspirations for the band. She listened patiently, as she would for years to come.

  MISSI

  I was too insecure to break up with Teresa at first, and Missi and I became friends. I didn’t have a car, a job, or much of a life, so she would pick me up at home and we’d see a matinee while Teresa was still at the restaurant where she worked.

  As our friendship began to grow into a relationship that winter, I asked Missi if she wanted to be in a show. From our earliest concerts, we had named the back corner of the stage Pogo’s Playhouse, and there he had all kinds of homemade gadgets, contraptions and instruments of torture—most notably a large rectangular lion’s cage that he used as a stand for the keyboard he had mastered playing in less time than it took for him to save up to buy it. For Missi’s debut, we put her in the cage and filled it with chickens. She looked great: a pale, topless eighteen-year-old with long black hair in white underpants camouflaged by the flying feathers of half a dozen chickens.

  When people realized that Nancy had left the band, freaks from all over Florida wanted to get in on the act. So we let them. Sometimes we enlisted them merely as part of a provocative (and hopefully discomforting) spectacle, like when, inspired by the John Waters movie Pink Flamingos, we had two naked fat ladies making out in a playpen. Other times we made sure that the spectacle came attached to an idea. During one concert, we had a girl on stage with rollers in her hair and a pillow stuffed under her shirt to make her look pregnant. She stood in front of an ironing board, and as we sang she pressed the wrinkles out of a Nazi flag. As the show progressed, she sat spread-eagled on the ironing board and pretended to perform an abortion on herself. Then she wrapped a fake fetus in the swastika flag and offered it ritualistically to a glowing television set in front of her. If we didn’t drive home our point about the fascism of television and the way the American nuclear family sacrifices its children to this cheap, mind-numbing baby-sitter, at least we looked good trying.

  Not every show went according to plan. For one of our first performances in Tampa, we bought a giant canister filled with some 500 crickets that I wanted to cover myself with. But when I opened the can, they had all died. The stench was one of the most rancid things I had ever inhaled, and the odor clung to my hands as strongly as the smell of Tina Potts’s pussy had. I threw up instantly, and in response half a dozen people in the audience, including our future bassist, Jeordie White, did the same. Even if I hadn’t begun the concert with a message in mind, I ended with one: Disgust is contagious.

  Animal rights activists hounded us as incessantly then as they do now, but, outside of that accidental cricket massacre, we never killed any animals—only effigies of animals. In one of our more cartoonish moments, we spent a week building a giant life-sized cow out of papier-mâché and chicken wire. In a cross between Willy Wonka, Apocalypse Now and one of my grandfather’s bestiality magazines, I stuck my fist up the cow’s ass and pulled out gallons of chocolate syrup, covering the crowd with it as Pogo played a sample of Marlon Brando ranting, from Last Tango in Paris, “Until you go right up into the ass of death, right up in his ass, do you find the womb of fear. And then, maybe…” To antagonize the animal rights people even more, we’d buy mechanical cats and pigs that move in response to sound and hang garbage bags filled with intestines over the stage, so that once the toys started moving spastic and lifelike in response to the music and the gore came tumbling down, activists thought we were committing acts of cruelty to animals when, in fact, we were committing acts of cruelty to the activists themselves. Only human rights were violated during our shows—against ourselves, against the girls we caged, and against the fans—but nobody seemed to care about that.

  Each concert was a new adventure in performance art. Since clubs liked to book us on holiday
s, we always tried to do something special those nights. For our first set on New Year’s Eve, I wore a tuxedo and a top hat. For the second set, a girl named Terri disguised herself as me, wearing a black wig, a tuxedo, a top hat and a very realistic strap-on dildo. When she walked on stage, everybody thought it was me with my dick hanging out of my pants, which was nothing new by that point. As the band began its version of “Cake and Sodomy,” I crept around her and gave her a blow job, so that it seemed like I was sucking my own dick. Maybe that’s where the rumor that I surgically removed my ribs so that I could give myself fellatio started.

  On February 14, Missi and I tried to get arrested at a local club so we could spend Valentine’s Day together in jail. The club was owned by a mafia type who was perpetually slouched under the weight of his gold jewelry and whose employees had police records longer than our set list. There were cops all over the club that night, so I brought Missi out topless in a mask. This time, I was on the receiving end of a blow job. I taunted the cops, challenging them to arrest me, as she violated several Florida laws. But we weren’t arrested. The palms of the police were greased too well.

  Offstage, Missi continued to be a perfect collaborator. (She would go on to become the girl who punched out Nancy at Squeeze.) We had begun going out in December, and I was determined to turn over a new leaf and be faithful for once, especially since, unlike every other relationship I had up to that point, this one began with the stable foundation of a friendship. In addition, I was older and felt obliged to raise her and mold her as if she were a protégé.

  Our relationship began around the time of the Gainesville murders, when eight college students were stabbed, so I took a bunch of photos of Missi lying naked covered in blood, as if she had been brutally butchered. We shot Polaroids of her tits, her pussy, her mouth—all carved up, drenched in blood and jaundiced. Sometimes I covered her head with a black plastic bag to make it look like she had been asphyxiated, or concealed her head with a black cloth and put gory makeup on her neck so that she seemed decapitated. We left our photographs in restaurants and on buses where people could find them and do whatever their consciences dictated.

  The only problem was that we were never able to see the results of our hard work. So we came up with a new prank when we noticed that people were setting up nativity scenes on their lawns for Christmas. Despite my animosity toward organized religion, I’ve always liked Christmas, probably because my parents raised me in a very secular household (the most religious thing they ever did was send me to Christian school) and I never associated Christmas with the birth of Christ. It just meant hanging shit on a tree, getting presents and watching the streets grow chaotic with lights and decorations. But just because I liked the holiday didn’t mean I’d let it get in the way of a good joke.

  Several days before Christmas, Missi and I drove to Albertson’s grocery store, which between the hours of one A.M. and three A.M. was frequented chiefly by teenagers looking for supplies for various pranks. Though I could afford whatever I wanted, I stole things anyway because I felt the need to show my superiority over the uptight assholes working there. Besides, I’ve always believed that shoplifting should be punishable by the death penalty, because it’s so easy that if you’re stupid enough to get caught, you deserve to die.

  That night we ripped off a handful of wire clippers and flashlights. In Missi’s hatchback car, we drove around the neighborhood, stopping in front of every lawn with a nativity scene and stealing two things: baby Jesus and the black wise man. Our intention was to sabotage so many nativity scenes in a single neighborhood that people would think it was a conspiracy. Then we planned to send a ransom note from a phony black militant group to each house, declaring, “We feel that America has falsely illuminated and plasticized the wisdom of the black man with its racist propaganda about his so-called ‘white Christmas.’” The only kink in our plan was that nobody paid attention. There wasn’t a word about it in the newspapers.

  The following Christmas we decided to do something more blasphemous and bought a bunch of big, salted hams at Albertson’s. Unfortunately, they were too big to steal, but I’ve always been prepared to pay a price for my art. We unwrapped them and returned to the same homes, replacing the baby Jesuses with the spoiling meat. It made for a beautiful image, especially when, with our remaining hams, we sabotaged nativity scenes at local churches and, as a symbolic coup de grâce, left pig meat in the manger of the precinct police station.

  Few enterprises in South Florida were free from our pranks, especially places frequented by children, like Toys “R” Us and Disney World. One day, Missi, Jeordie and I were at Disney World with some new toys we had bought at a magic shop—a fireball shooter that propelled flames from our palms and a razor blade attached to a tube filled with blood, so that we could create fake wounds. We were all tripping on acid and hallucinating that everyone in the amusement park was affiliated with the Secret Service. They all seemed to be talking into their wrists, reporting our every movement to headquarters, though in actuality they were probably trying to steer their kids away from us. We were convinced they all knew we were on LSD, which was confirmed (in our minds) when we went on the haunted house ride and, in the middle, the cars stalled and a voice announced, “Please make sure there are no spooks in your doom buggy,” a seemingly deliberate reference to the Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids song “Dune Buggy.” When the buggy jolted to a start again, they said or we imagined the announcement, “Enjoy the rest of your trip.” Afterwards, we stopped at a petting zoo and, while Jeordie tried to communicate with the chickens, I stared fascinated for a full hour into a giant, mud-covered, pulsating pink pig pussy, not unlike the one I would ride years later in the “Sweet Dreams” video.

  In one of the park’s plastic fantasy worlds, there were a dozen families sitting around picnic tables, happy and content as they gnawed on giant turkey legs. It was a barbaric celebration of carnivorousness given an ironic twist by the fact that there were pigeons and seagulls flying overhead, oblivious to the carnage being perpetrated against their fellow fowl. I’m not a vegetarian, but the whole gleefully brutal spectacle seemed wrong and disgusting. So I walked over to a set of twins who were dressed alike, looking like something out of Children of the Damned. As they sat there tearing at their turkey bones, I stood in front of them, raised my sunglasses to reveal my mismatched eyes, gave them as baneful a grin as I could muster in my state, and pulled out my razor and sliced my arm. I let the blood run off my wrist and drip down onto the discarded ticket stubs and popcorn kernels on the ground. They dropped their meat and ran away screaming as I walked away exhilarated by my success, because there’s nothing like the feeling of knowing that you’ve made a difference in someone’s life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.

  Driving back to Fort Lauderdale the next day, we passed the Reunion Room and, on the same corner where I had seen the car crash, there was a prolife demonstrator, a skeletal, gray-haired man in a short-sleeved work shirt with a wife beater underneath and blue work pants. Every afternoon he marched up and down the block like an old factory worker on strike, but instead of a sign demanding more health benefits his was emblazoned with pictures of aborted fetuses. Anyone who would listen was given a long, loud sermon on how we’re all going to hell for killing the unborn.

  Still flushed with mischief from the day before and looking as hideous, pale and unclean as corpses, we pulled up near him and called him to the car. Excited that maybe he’d actually found someone to discuss his views on damnation with, he approached us. When he was close enough to see through the open window clearly, I held out my hand. “I talked to the devil today, and he told me to tell you hello,” I growled, shooting a fireball in his direction. It burst in his face, and he let out an ungodly scream, threw his sign in the air and ran. I didn’t see him on the corner much after that. But I think I actually did him a favor since he probably became a folk hero at his local church; everyone knows that, l
ike Job, you have to be pretty fucking holy and righteous to merit the devil’s attention.

  Jeordie and I had grown close by then, though he still wasn’t a member of the band. The bond that united us was music, a love of havoc-wreaking and a mutual obsession with old kids toys, particularly Star Wars, Charlie’s Angels and Kiss paraphernalia. I had spoken to Jeordie a few times at the mall, but we first became friends when I was at a concert with Pogo. I was carrying one of the metal lunchboxes from my collection, and Jeordie scampered over and said, “I know someone who has more of those. If you want, I’ll take you to him. He’s got tons of lunchboxes.” We exchanged phone numbers, and the next day he drove me to a store run by a corpulent cutthroat named John Jacobas. It was a paradise of Star Wars figures, Muhammad Ali dolls, rusty wind-up monkeys with clapping cymbals, and, in particular, Nazi World War II paraphernalia, which was probably what he made most of his money from. He just looked at you, assessed the degree of desperation in your eyes and then offered you the highest price he knew you’d accept. He was a professional, and he lured me back to the store every week with the promise that he would bring in his treasure trove of lunchboxes, which, like the end of a rainbow, he was never able to find, if it existed at all.

  Jeordie and I also discovered that we had a crush on the same girl, a hot brunette who looked like the kind of person who should be working at the mall. And, in fact, she did—at the piercing pagoda. But she wouldn’t even acknowledge our humanity, no matter what part of our body we asked her to pierce. So I fell back on my usual deviant way of getting a girl’s attention: malicious, asinine behavior. Every day for nearly a month, Jeordie and I met at a pay phone around the corner from the pagoda, where we could see her but she couldn’t see us. At first, the calls were harmless. But they quickly grew meaner. “We’re watching you,” we’d threaten her at the height of our spite-masked lust. “You better not leave work tonight, because we’re going to rape you in the parking lot and then crush you underneath your own car.” I knew what she must have felt like, because Nancy used to leave similar messages for me.