Long Hard Road Out of Hell

by Marilyn Manson

  Afterward, we went to a party in Wiggins’s hotel room on Sunset Boulevard. The entire toilet seat was ringed with cocaine and the room was filled with pretentious L.A. scenesters who were name-dropping like it was going out of style. At the same time, they were mentally taking notes so that they could name-drop Marilyn Manson in another hotel room on another night.

  We ran out of beer, which resulted in a fruitless expedition to Ralphs supermarket that involved Wiggins offering several cops $500 to buy beer for him. Back at the hotel, he donated the money to Twiggy and everything was fine again—until we ran out of drugs. All night, Twiggy and I had wanted nothing more than to make these very cool and with-it L.A. types smoke Freddy’s bones like they were the latest brand of French cigarettes. Now was our chance. We took one of Freddy’s ribs, chipped off a few pieces, and dropped them into a pipe. We lit it up and each took a drag, letting our lungs fill with the fumes of this unknown dead body. Though the room quickly took on the foul stench of a burning corpse, we convinced two annoying girls to take a hit. They both got sick and left the room, which was what we wanted in the first place. Twiggy ended his night in the bathroom vomiting; I ended mine dreaming that I was possessed by an old Baptist minister from turn-of-the-century Louisiana.

  In retrospect, the experience was not nearly as bad as some of the encounters I had with normal plant drugs. When we were hanging out with Nine Inch Nails shortly before the bone-smoking incident, they offered me one of the only narcotics I hadn’t tried before: mushrooms. Pogo, Twiggy, most of the Nine Inch Nails and I ingested several caps as we left for a place called the Mars Bar. It was supposed to be nearby, but the drive took an hour. On the way, we drank short, wide-mouth cans of Budweiser. But no matter how much we drank we couldn’t empty a single one. Either someone at Budweiser was a genius or the mushrooms had kicked in.

  The Mars Bar was exactly the wrong place to be in our state of mind. It was in a creepy abandoned mall on the waterfront, and the only way to get there was to take a rickety elevator flooded in black light. Someone came up with the bad idea to play molecule, and started spinning around and bashing into everyone. One of the people we were with was Bill Kennedy, a notorious heavy-metal producer, and as he knocked into me he transformed into a demon with flaming hair, corn husks for teeth and writhing snakes around his waist. When he cackled, cigarette butts flew in and out of his mouth like popcorn bouncing around the inside of a popping machine. It was a nightmare, and reminded me too late why I should never do psychedelic drugs.

  When the elevator door finally opened, it was into a room full of brown skeletons. Everyone was skinny and tan and, in the black light, they looked an otherworldly brown. The furniture was all undersized like something out of Alice in Wonderland. And the music kept changing: The songs they were playing would have new sections I had never noticed before, or all I’d be able to hear was the hi-hat. We were led by club management to some kind of holding pen and petting zoo, where everyone could stare at us and reach in and touch us. There was nothing to do but sit and be gawked at. I was going crazy. I looked at Pogo and he had a red light shining down on him like he was about to be beamed up by aliens. “Are you alright?” I asked. He just smiled at me and answered, “I’m gonna kill somebody.” And he meant it, which terrified me.

  An exit was conveniently and temporarily provided for me when a friendly looking guy walked up and said he knew me. I remembered him vaguely as a bartender at the Reunion Room, where we had played some of our earliest shows. “This is my club,” he said. “I run this place.”

  “Great,” I replied. “Is there somewhere you could take me to get away from all this? I’m freaking out.”

  He led me to the back of the club and opened the door to a giant cooler. I walked in and he followed me, closing the door behind him. “You know,” he said, “you used to go out with one of my ex-girlfriends.”

  It was a cruel thing to do to someone in my precarious mental state. I felt set up. I tried to tune him out and stared at the walls, out of which grotesque gargoyles were leering back threateningly at me. I tried to think about something else, and all I could imagine was that Pogo was probably killing someone right now, and I was going to have to talk to the cops. I didn’t care who he was killing or whether he was going to fry for it; I just didn’t want to face the police while I was on mushrooms.

  Suddenly, the door of the cooler heaved open and a dozen people piled in who had been scouring the club for me. “Are you okay?” someone asked, concerned. I couldn’t speak. I was scared, I was confused, I had to piss, I had to shit, I had to do something. Twiggy was with them, but all he could do was talk nonsense about stealing a paddleboat and escaping into the harbor.

  I fled to another room and found an alcove under the stairs that, for some reason, was stuffed with pillows. I lay on them and enjoyed the solitude. I could hear everybody else outside, particularly Twiggy, who was trying to jump in the water in search of a paddleboat. I kept worrying that he’d drown and I’d have to talk to the cops. That was my main concern: I didn’t care who died or was killed. I just didn’t want to deal with the cops and have to tell them I was tripping.

  When the sun came up, I began to grow more lucid. I stumbled into the hot, humid morning air and about fourteen of us piled in a minivan built for ten. On the way home, Trent suggested stopping at a McDonald’s drive-through, where he ordered enough Egg McMuffins, hash browns, orange juices, large cokes, coffees and sausage biscuits to feed the entire Jacksonville penitentiary.

  Before we had time to eat, Trent, who like myself is an instigator, tossed a soggy hash brown at Twiggy. Wiping potato from his face, Twiggy grabbed an Egg McMuffin, picked it apart and threw it at Trent layer by layer. Soon meat, eggs, drinks, bread, syrup and food morsels in various states of digestion were being tossed and spit all over the crowded van. It was an all out McWar, but with ketchup everywhere instead of blood. Meanwhile, the car was swerving recklessly from lane to lane as our driver, who was sober, tried to keep from barreling over the median.

  If Trent is an instigator, Twiggy is an accelerator, always adding an extra veneer of mischief, recklessness or decadence to a situation. He threw up all over his lap several times. Robin, the guitarist from Nine Inch Nails whose dick I sucked on stage, was sitting next to him. He did what anyone in his situation would have done: he picked up the vomit and threw it at me. I flung it at someone else, and soon we were in the midst not of a food fight, but of a postfood fight. Twiggy at this point was actually throwing up into Robin’s hands, who was sharing the bounty with all of us. By the time we returned to the hotel, those of us who hadn’t thrown up were ready to. At great expense to royalties from “Head Like a Hole,” we left the contents of the van to bake and dry in the heat.

  The first thing we saw upon stepping outside was a drag queen coming out of a club, a black Mr. Clean with a bald head, a tutu and gold gloves. “Hey, baby,” he greeted us. “Hey, Mr. Queen,” someone said, and invited him back to our room to do drugs with us.

  Once inside, the first thing I did was call Missi, who had decided to go out with me again. Relationships never break cleanly. Like a valuable vase, they are smashed and then glued back together, smashed and glued, smashed and glued until the pieces just don’t fit together anymore. I was covered with hash browns and vomit, I had a bag of bones under the bed, I had a Huggy Bear doll on the table filled with cocaine, and I had just come to the realization that I didn’t care whether anyone I knew died so long as I didn’t have to deal with it. On top of all that, there was a transvestite in a tutu smoking crack on the bed next to me. I didn’t tell Missi all that. I just told her that I was freaking out.

  “You know what?” she answered. “You gotta think about how you’re living your life.”

  It was the last thing I wanted to hear at that particular moment.

  meating the fans / meat and greet

  [STEAK] IS AT THE HEART OF MEAT, IT IS MEAT IN ITS PURE STATE; AND WHOEVER PARTAKES OF IT ASSIMILATES A BULL-L
IKE STRENGTH. THE PRESTIGE OF STEAK EVIDENTLY DERIVES FROM ITS QUASI-RAWNESS. IN IT, BLOOD IS VISIBLE, NATURAL, DENSE, AT ONCE COMPACT AND SECTILE. ONE CAN WELL IMAGINE THE AMBROSIA OF THE ANCIENTS AS THIS KIND OF HEAVY SUBSTANCE WHICH DWINDLES UNDER ONE’S TEETH IN SUCH A WAY AS TO MAKE ONE KEENLY AWARE AT THE SAME TIME OF ITS ORIGINAL STRENGTH AND OF ITS APTITUDE TO FLOW INTO THE VERY BLOOD OF MAN.

  —Roland Barthes, Mythologies

  TRANSCRIPT

  Tape seven, side one, 8/9/97

  Q: Do you want to talk about the meat incident today?

  A: Okay. So, the first time I met Alyssa was at the last show that Brad Stewart played in our band and it was the showcase that we had for Freddy DeMann at Maverick Records. She came backstage and she was a short girl with blond hair. Cute. She had a pretty face, but most notably she was big-breasted. Just huge tits. A girl that you’d probably see at a Warrant concert by the way that she dressed and the way that she acted. I immediately realized that she was deaf because of the way her voice sounded. She told me that she could feel the music when she’s close to the stage and that’s how she gets her enjoyment from it. And she sort of came on to me and wanted to have sex or something. But I wasn’t really interested at the time. I think probably because my girlfriend was on the other side of the door. Maybe if she wasn’t there, I would have been interested.

  A year later, when we went to record the B-side to the “Lunchbox” single, we were in South Beach Studios in Miami. And it was me and my band, Trent [Reznor], Sean Beavan [our assistant producer] and Jonathan, who had been hired by Nine Inch Nails as their video documentarian. I guess I became the instigator or director of photography. Or the Chief Executive Officer of Filth.

  I went outside to get something to eat and I ran into Alyssa. So I said, “Come by the studio.” I thought it would be entertaining to introduce her to everybody else. And it was ironic because just that day, Pogo was saying that one of his fantasies was to have sex with a deaf girl because then he could say whatever he wanted without upsetting her or feeling embarrassed. So I brought her into the studio and introduced her to everybody. To break the ice, I usually say whatever is on my mind in the hopes that it will make everyone laugh or that someone will actually follow through with it. So I said, “Why don’t you take off all your clothes?” And she laughed and she took off all her clothes, and she only had her boots on. We were all shocked and amazed that we were commanding that much sexual power and that there was a naked deaf girl in the studio.

  Q: How was she able to understand what you were saying?

  A: She was a flawless lip-reader, a skill she had obviously accumulated from years spent in the front row of heavy metal concerts learning the lyrics to shitty songs like “Fuck Like a Beast,” which brings us to the meat at hand since I was with the author of the recent heavy metal refrain, “I want to fuck you like an animal.”

  Earlier that day we had collected a wide variety of meats. Big round pieces of meat that had the bone in the center, hot dogs, cheese dogs, salami, sausage, bacon, chitlins, pig’s feet, chicken feet, chicken legs, chicken breasts, chicken wings, chicken gizzards. All uncooked meats. So we constructed a meat helmet made out of a large ham with pieces of bacon, sausage links and things like that suspended from it. A meat mobile. We crowned her with the meat helmet, and I took some pimento loaf to cover her nipples. And we put several slices of bologna on her back. That day we all definitely earned backstage passes in hell.

  Before all this began, I had put on yellow latex gloves, basically because I didn’t want to handle the salami. No other reason.

  We had one half hour of pure meat cavorting. Meat handling. Working with meat. Meat cuddling. Meat shenanigans.

  Q: We could call this chapter “Meating the Fans.”

  A: I was also thinking of “Meat and Greet.”

  Q: That’s good. So go on.

  A: We documented this in all sorts of ways. Pencil sketches, photography, videotape, whatever way we could capture this great moment in art history. At this point, I didn’t think it was very sexual. It was more of a living meat sculpture. What happened next was the result of me always trying to escalate everything to the next level. I asked Twiggy and Pogo to scotch tape their penises together to see if she could put two penises in her mouth at the same time. But it turned out that they couldn’t stand next to each other to create that, so they had to face their dicks front to front, and it became like a penis tug-of-war. She sort of licked it like some sort of dick harmonica. Some giant dick harmonica. That’s when all the trouble started to break out. Because that was when we decided that Pogo should get to live out his fantasy and have sex with the deaf girl.

  So, he put on a condom…

  Q: Hold on. How did he separate himself from Twiggy?

  A: She gnawed through the tape like a rat looking for a piece of cheese. And then Pogo put this condom on, which made his dick look like a chitlin. And he started to fuck her from behind, which was appropriate because she had a dog leash on at the time and he was holding the leash. So, he’s shouting all these obscenities at her…

  I should mention that I do not feel that she was being exploited by any means because, despite however many cameras, street musicians, and sketch artists were in the room clapping and dancing around to Slayer or whatever was playing at the time, she was very excited to be a part of it. I think she, too, found it to be art and was having a good time. Everybody was having a good time—except for the guys in Nine Inch Nails, who were keeping their distance.

  While all this was happening, Pogo said something, and we might not want to mention it because it’s pretty offensive.

  Q: Go ahead. We can always take it out of the book later if we want.

  A: He shouted, “I’m going to come in your useless ear canal,” and it seemed to echo through the room as maybe one of the darkest things we had ever heard. At that point, I felt that what I did with the baby Jesuses paled in comparision.

  Then what happened was that Alyssa wanted to take a shower because she was covered in meat slime and assorted body fluids from the act of filth. So, since she was going in the shower anyways, I asked, “Can we urinate on you?” What she said next was probably darker and more profound than what Pogo had said. She said, “Just not on my boots.” And we all looked at each other, like how you just looked at me: “Wow.” At least she had some sort of morals. And then, adding icing to the cake—or dressing to the meat, in this case—she told us, “And don’t get it in my eyes. It burns.” Obviously she had experience in these matters.

  So she got into the shower stall, and the camera crew watched while Twiggy and I put one leg on the stall and one leg on the toilet and hosed her down with urine. She just kind of sat there delighted and splashing her breasts as pieces of meat flaked away from the pressure of the urine.

  Then what happened was that Twiggy’s aim went in the wrong course and hit her in the face, and that was when everyone else in the room completely shut down and realized things had gone too far.

  Sean Beavan said something that completely captured the moment. We kept repeating it all the time on tour afterwards. But I can’t remember what it was right now. Maybe Twiggy knows.

  [Picks up phone, dials, waits.]

  He’s not there. It’ll come back to me.

  Now, as the urine was dripping off her chin, the Sexual Janitor [Daisy Berkowitz] came in and went, “What’s going on? What are you doing?”

  And we were like, “Alyssa is taking a shower.” We didn’t feel the duty to tell him everything that had gone on before because he was the Sexual Janitor and we thought it would be amusing. So, we were like, “Alyssa is in the shower and would like you to get in with her.”

  I think the fact that he had very little experience with girls, good looking or ugly, made him get into the shower. So, Daisy took off his clothes right in front of us—he didn’t even care—and jumped into the shower with her. The water hadn’t really rinsed her off yet, and he started making out with her where urine had just been
on her lips. And we were freaking out. Of course, he thought we were freaking out because we thought he was this sexual madman and dynamo and we were impressed with his dick size. If he knew that she was covered in urine, he probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

  We finished off that little cinematic episode by taking the last final piece of meat that hadn’t fit into the program—a big raw salmon, head and eyes and scales and all—and throwing it into the shower and blocking the door. That was the end.

  Q: Do you remember what it was that Sean Beavan said?

  A: Yeah, he said, “This is so wrong.” Make sure you accentuate the so when you write that with a lot of o’s.

  the reflecting god

  [DREAMS]

  AS I WALKED THROUGH THE WILDERNESS OF THE WORLD, I LIGHTED ON A CERTAIN PLACE, WHERE WAS A DEN; AND I LAID ME DOWN IN THAT PLACE TO SLEEP: AND AS I SLEPT I DREAMED A DREAM. I DREAMED, AND BEHOLD I SAW A MAN CLOTHED WITH RAGS, STANDING IN A CERTAIN PLACE, WITH HIS FACE FROM HIS OWN HOUSE, A BOOK IN HIS HAND, AND A GREAT BURDEN UPON HIS BACK. I LOOKED, AND SAW HIM OPEN THE BOOK, AND READ THEREIN; AND AS HE READ, HE WEPT AND TREMBLED: AND NOT BEING ABLE LONGER TO CONTAIN, HE BRAKE OUT WITH A LAMENTABLE CRY; SAYING, “WHAT SHALL I DO?”

  –John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

  THIS ISN’T ME! I’M SOMEONE ELSE! THIS ISN’T ME!

  –Marilyn Manson to his bodyguard, Aaron Dilks, during an alcohol blackout en route from Leipzig to Berlin