The longer you stayed in New Orleans, the uglier you became. And the people we hung out with were the ugliest. They were drug dealers, cripples and scumbags. The only attractive people in the city were either coming from the airport or on their way there. Our stomping grounds were dives like the Vault, a Gothic industrial bar the size of a hotel room. The floor was covered with a slime of congealed urine, beer and general condensation from the humid, fetid climate of the city. Solely used for the ingestion of class one substances, the bathrooms didn’t even have toilets. We spent many nights at the club sniffing drugs with the disc jockey and convincing him to play Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast in its entirety so we could watch the Goth kids try to dance to it. At dawn, we would return to our apartment, a miserable two-room flat in a shitty neighborhood where two cops had recently been shot in the face. We all slept in the same squalid room, inhaling the stench of dirty clothes and fending off bugs and rats. When it all got to be too much, we hired a Guatemalan cleaning lady, who cleared away the debris for ten dollars an hour.
Everybody treated us like shit in New Orleans, and we despised them all and in turn treated them like shit. One girl kept hounding after us trying to interview us for her fanzine, and one night I broke down, took her minicassette recorder and brought it around the room, asking people what they thought of Iron Maiden. Then I pissed into the microphone and threw it at her. More and more, our nights were becoming long strings of nihilistic acts.
Another girl who stalked us was someone Trent had introduced me to while we were on tour with him. She was known as Big Darla, and she lived up to the name. She belonged to the class of vampires who hover around me in bars, waiting to make eye contact so they can come over and suck the life out of me. On our first night in New Orleans, she came to the door wearing an old, obscure Marilyn Manson T-shirt with a box of New Orleans delicacies that looked like flattened cow turds topped with olives, mustard and cat urine. Throughout the rest of our stay in New Orleans, she and her sandwiches followed us everywhere, a constant annoyance.
On Trent Reznor’s birthday, we were walking along the banks of the Mississippi River trying to figure out what to get for him, because he has everything and usually tosses gifts in a corner and never looks at them again, when I spotted a panhandler with one leg and hit upon the idea of obtaining his prosthetic limb as a present. As I was trying to convince him to part with it, a cute, scrawny girl passed by, and I started talking to her. I asked if she knew the music of Nine Inch Nails, and she said she did. Then she showed me a cut she had on her arm, as if I would be able to relate.
“It’s Trent Reznor’s birthday today,” I told her. “Do you want to come and like create some kind of funny surprise?”
She looked like she was ten, though she had to be much older. It turned out she was a stripper, and I thought about fucking her when we brought her back to the apartment to get changed for dinner. But she started talking about crack and alluding to prostitution, and scared me away. So we took her to Brennan’s, one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. Trent assumed she was my date, and we didn’t say a word about his birthday. After dinner, as Trent was talking, she nonchalantly climbed on the table, taking off all her clothes and outraging (yet titillating) the rich patrons of this high-class restaurant. She looked like Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, and she succeeded in embarrassing everyone because she made us look like a ring of child pornographers. That got the shenanigans rolling, and we got drunk, we got high, and we talked to people we would never normally talk to unless we were drunk and high. As a fitting finale to a fucked-up night, we returned home and pushed open the doors only to find ourselves confronted with the broad, naked expanse of Big Darla’s back. Smashed underneath her were two skinny legs sticking out feetfirst toward the door. They were Scott’s, and she seemed to be more embarrassed at being caught in the act than he was. Like high-school kids who have just caught a classmate masturbating in the bathroom, Trent and I bonded over the spectacle, adding the memory to our growing list of inside jokes—though Trent was reluctant to make fun of either Scott or Big Darla because he had a soft spot for both of them, for whatever reason.
In the studio, life wasn’t any less bizarre. The chaos of the Tony Wiggins tour and the corruption of New Orleans had sent us on a writing binge, and Twiggy and I churned out thirteen songs, working so closely and so in synch that we didn’t even have to talk to each other to communicate ideas. When we put all the songs together on a demo tape, we saw that we had created one giant metaphor for our past, our present and our future. It was about a dark, twisted, vitiated creature’s evolution from a childhood spent living in fear to an adulthood spent sowing fear, from a weakling to a megalomaniac, from a shit-eater to a shit-kicker, from a worm to a world-destroyer. We had a vision, we had a concept and, even if no one else believed in the music, we knew we had at least several of our best songs. We were ready to start synthesizing our lives into a fully realized record.
But when we played the rough, four-track demos to Trent to ask his opinion, he seemed primarily concerned with the fact Scott didn’t play guitar on it. “Listen,” I explained. “We don’t even know if we can work with this guy. He doesn’t understand the direction we’re going in at all.”
“He’s the backbone behind Marilyn Manson,” Trent warned. “Marilyn Manson is known for his guitar style.” John Malm, our manager and label head, agreed.
A wave of frustration surged through my body. I dug a fingernail into my side to keep it in check. “I’ve read a hundred articles and not one person has ever even mentioned guitars,” I said, pissed off. “In fact, nobody even talks about the songs. I want to write good songs that people are gonna fucking talk about.”
I offered to show them the lyrics, to tighten the songs, to add extra melodies, but nobody had any faith in the project. Besides, everybody thought we should still be promoting Portrait of an American Family. In many ways, I was my own worst enemy because I still didn’t trust myself. I was so new at this that I looked up to and believed publicists, lawyers and label heads. I followed their instincts instead of mine, so I forgot about the songs we had written and, for the first but soon to be last time, compromised. We began working on an EP of remixes, cover songs and audio experiments to encapsulate our mind-set at the time, which was dark, chaotic and drug-addled.
Whatever flaws I found in Portrait paled in comparison to the disaster that this EP turned out to be. It was like stitching together an elaborate outfit for a party but catching the hem on a nail when leaving the house and watching helplessly as it unraveled and fell apart. The nail, in this case, was Time Warner, Interscope/Nothing’s parent company.
The album we turned in to the label began with one of the most harrowing tape recordings I had ever made. Naturally, Tony Wiggins was involved. It was of a girl he had brought backstage early in the Danzig tour. She begged to be humiliated and abused. Wiggins began teasingly, cutting off her pubic hair, lightly whipping her and wrapping a chain ominously around her neck. But she kept asking for more and more abuse until, finally, she screamed that her life was worthless and begged to be killed on the spot. The tape snippet had Wiggins worrying that he had gone too far. “You’re okay, aren’t you?” he asked as she let loose a flurry of screams that no longer differentiated between pleasure and pain. “You know I’m not going to kill you,” he tried to soothe her.
“I don’t fucking care,” she told him. “This feels so fucking good.”
It was the only time I saw Wiggins exercise restraint.
On the album, as soon as she said her life didn’t matter and begged to be killed there was a loud, ambiguous, cataclysmic crash and then the bassline of “Diary of a Dope Fiend” slowly kicked in. It was a perfect preface to an album about abuse: sexual abuse, domestic abuse, drug abuse, psychological abuse. Midway through the record, we included one of the taped confessions we had gathered, from a girl who had molested her seven-year-old male cousin. It underscored the subplot of the album, about the
most common target of abuse: innocence. I’ve always liked the Peter Pan idea of being a kid in mind if not in body, and Smells Like Children was supposed to be a children’s record for someone who’s no longer a child, someone who, like myself, wants their innocence back now that they’re corrupted enough to appreciate it. Having recently had our own innocence abused by our road manager, Frankie, who we fired when we discovered he had run up $20,000 in expenses he couldn’t account for, we felt justified in adding a song about him called “Fuck Frankie.”
The glue holding all of this together was dialogue from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that had been taken out of context to sound like sexual double entendres. And the centerpiece was our recasting of the Eurythmics’s “Sweet Dreams,” which we had been performing on the road. In a single lyric, it summed up not only the album but the mentality of nearly everyone I had met since forming the band: “Some of them want to abuse you/Some of them want to be abused.” The record label fell into the first category of abuse. They had us excise the Willy Wonka samples because they didn’t think we would be able to get permission to use them and—I should have learned my lesson by now—said that we needed written affidavits from the people in the Tony Wiggins recordings. Most record labels probably would have come to the same conclusion, which is one reason why art and commerce are in essence incompatible.
But then, out of the blue, Nothing came to a decision that went strictly against commercial instincts. They didn’t want to release “Sweet Dreams” as a single, which I knew would be a song that even people who disliked our band would like. The label wanted to release our version of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You,” which was far too dark, sprawling and esoteric even for some of our fans. We battled the label this time, and learned that we could win. The other thing I learned was to stick with my instincts, which usually end up serving me better than someone else’s. It was a disheartening experience but it didn’t hurt half as much as the fact that no one at the label ever congratulated us on the success of the song. What began as a very disturbing record had become a record that disturbed only me.
The only solace was that through some unfortunate error someone at the record pressing plant made several thousand copies of our original version of the album, thinking it was the new one. Without even listening to them, the record company sent them out as promotional copies to radio stations and journalists before realizing their mistake. Now, they are available to anyone who wants to hear them on the Internet. Though someone at the label actually accused me of plotting it, I wish I was that resourceful. God, however irrelevant he may be to me, works in mysterious ways.
Another saving grace was that, despite having to remove the recordings we made on tour, we were able to include Tony Wiggins on the lawyer-approved version of the album. The result was one of the record’s more surprising and ironic moments, an acoustic version of “Cake and Sodomy.” Since the song critiques southern, Christian white trash, we thought there was no better way to remix it than to have Wiggins strum and twang a redneck version.
During our entire stay in New Orleans we had exactly one good time. And we had Tony Wiggins to thank for it.
Narcotics were so plentiful there that we became bored with just doing drugs. To entertain ourselves, we had to add special games, rituals and scenarios to drug experiences. On Twiggy’s birthday, a pug-faced, inbred-looking bartender who worked at a dive in the French Quarter came by with a friend, a one-armed musician who played slap-bass with a hook. Since his primary source of sustenance was drug-dealing, he brought us several eight-balls of cocaine. But we didn’t just want drugs. We wanted the combination of drugs, ritual and the situations that Wiggins was capable of getting us into.
On a notepad, Twiggy and I sketched Wiggins in pencil and red crayon, depicting him dying saint-like on the cross, presiding over a Last Supper of maggots and blood, and descending to earth in the guise of the Angel of Death. On a tray on the floor, we arranged several lines of cocaine next to several shots of Jagermeister and chicken in a biscuit (to represent the alleged killing of the chicken and the confirmed torching of our drummer on tour). Behind them, we propped up a battered doll of Huggy Bear, the pimp from Starsky and Hutch, which was missing a leg. Inside that empty plastic socket was where we hid our drugs throughout the Tony Wiggins tour. Whenever we ingested the contents of that extra orifice, we referred to it in code as “dancing with the one-legged pimp.” And the night of Twiggy’s birthday, we had our dance cards out and ready to be punched. I was naked except for a blond wig, a rooster mask with flashing eyes and a homemade red paper crown. Twiggy was wearing a blue plaid dress that looked like a tablecloth, brown pantyhose, an auburn wig, and a cowboy hat. He looked like a slatternly zombie housewife from Texas.
We called Wiggins on his portable phone and, as soon as he answered, conducted our own Communion, attempting to transubstantiate the body and blood of Tony Wiggins into our meal of intoxicants. We snorted a line, licked the head of Huggy Bear, dipped the doll in the remains of the coke and rubbed it on our gums. Then we downed a shot of Jagermeister, and placed the chicken wafer in our mouths. It took no more than forty-five seconds for Twiggy and me each to complete this sacred obstacle course. Wiggins recognized us right away.
As if having eaten the fruit of knowledge, I realized I had to cover my nakedness. So I took the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels and duct-taped it around my dick. In an attempt to turn it into a crude jockstrap, I drunkenly tore the television out of the wall and wrapped the cable around my waist like a belt. We tried to get Pogo to do or wear something to amuse us, but our efforts were in vain. We watched for an hour as a drunk hag of a girl with scabs on her legs knelt over his face with her panties around her knees, trying to get over her performance anxiety about dripping urine into his eager mouth. Then we dared Pogo to cut his wrist with a knife, which he did several times, and spray EZ-Cheez on his genitals and masturbate, which he also did but failed to arouse either himself or our interest.
It was a typical night: We had taken too many drugs and begun driving ourselves crazy with nervous energy until well after the sun had risen. Twiggy grabbed his acoustic guitar and shoved a minicassette recorder set to high-speed into the sound hole, causing the instrument to emit weird Chipmunks-like songs. Since it wasn’t very funny without an audience (or very funny at all to anyone who wasn’t high), we ran screaming into the streets in our homemade ensembles, tripping over a homeless guy sleeping on the sidewalk. “Hey man, what the fuck are you doing?” Twiggy asked, trying to be friendly. But the guy was either too scared to reply or just wanted to be left alone.
Knowing that intoxicants are the quickest way to a man’s heart, we gave him a bottle of vodka. Now that we were on the same wavelength, we thought maybe he would join our traveling circus. So we urged him to put on a wig, dance around and sing songs with us. We felt like we were four years old again, and it felt good.
“Hey Joe,” Twiggy sang to urge the gentleman to action. “Hey Joe, what are you doing today? Do you think you could be heading our way?” But Joe didn’t dance or head anywhere. He pissed himself, wetting our bare feet with his 120 proof urine.
We were so taken aback by this unexpected performance art statement that we didn’t notice the sirens wailing behind us. Someone must have called the police. On the Danzig tour, I actually had a tolerable run-in with the cops when they arrested me for exposing my ass on stage and, instead of humiliating me at the station, gave me a ticket, apologized for the inconvenience and then one of them asked if he could take a Polaroid picture with me because he was a fan. But I knew it was just luck, not a trend. I wasn’t about to take my chances in New Orleans, especially while wearing nothing but a cardboard penis sheath.
“Stop what you’re doing and put your hands against the wall,” crackled a loudspeaker atop one of the cop cars. I looked at Twiggy. Twiggy looked at Pogo. Pogo looked at Joe. Joe wet himself again.
Then we did what every self-respecting citi
zen does in the face of a greater authority. We ran, and never looked back. After a brief intermission that consisted of all of us passing out for several hours we continued our adventures.
Along with a clichéd over-pierced and over-tattooed couple, we drove to a cemetery just outside of town where we were told bones sprouted out of the ground like flowers. Instead of the statues, sepulchers and upright rows of tombstones we expected, the place looked like a nineteenth-century dumping ground for corpses. There were teeth mixed in with the dirt and pebbles, and broken leg and arm bones jutted into the air like tire-flattening spokes at a parking lot. We wandered around for half an hour filling a plastic grocery bag with bones. I suppose we thought they’d make good presents for loved ones or party favors for Twiggy’s next birthday.
Twiggy, drunk again, wanted to take some headstones as well, which I disapproved of. Not out of respect for the dead—I had lost the ability to respect anyone living, let alone dead—but because they were too heavy to carry. We brought them back to the apartment anyway and stored them in the mop closet in the hallway. That probably had something to do with the strange behavior of our cleaning lady the following day, who mysteriously quit, leaving her rosary hanging on the mop closet doorknob.
Throughout our Smells Like Children tour, Twiggy lugged the bones from city to city, telling anyone who asked that they were the remnants of our former drummer Freddy, who we had burned alive. Freddy, as the bag of bones was now called, ended up on fire again in Los Angeles. As usual, Tony Wiggins was involved.
When we indulged ourselves, it was usually in tribute to Wiggins, because he had shown us that there are no limits. And every so often, he would hear our call and, when we were most miserable or bored, come flying to us like a sybaritic poltergeist. As the tour was winding down, he materialized backstage before a concert at the Palace in Los Angeles. He was drunk and riled up on some kind of speed. Proving that he can take abuse as well as he can dispense it, he insisted that I cut him. Since I had never used anyone’s body other than my own as a canvas for scarification before, I complied, giving him a temporary tattoo in the shape of a star. He spent the entirety of the show on the side of the stage, bleeding and trying to pour whiskey down our throats whenever we walked past. It was the type of behavior we had come to expect from him.
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