Long Hard Road Out of Hell

by Marilyn Manson

  THERE’S something I’ve never told anyone. I didn’t even remember it until recently, when I went to the chiropractor and he snapped my neck, causing me to black out for less than a second. In that time, I traveled back in my mind to Canton, Ohio. I was speeding down Thirty-fifth Street in my old neighborhood and there were hundreds of decaying corpses in the road trying to stop me. Their skin was yellow, and the wind was blowing their loose, nacreous teeth back and forth in their mouths. I kept plowing into them, and the instant the car touched them, they disintegrated into dust. Missi was in the car, and I was trying to save her because the corpses were trying to pull her away from me. I stopped the car and stepped out to try and help her, but there were large, mottled, sinewy dogs everywhere, jumping at me in slow motion with bared fangs. At the end of the street, I saw a group moving toward me, like a tribe. Their leader was Traci Lords. Her skin was even more yellowed than those of the corpses and she had a neon pink cross painted across her face. Her motions seemed animatronic. Her eyes were moving mechanically back and forth in their sockets and her mouth kept snapping open and shut like she was a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  In my dreams, I always return to Canton, Ohio. Usually I am in my bedroom in the basement, which, like my grandfather’s basement, terrified me. Except the horror was not in anything tangible, but in my mind. As a child, I used to get scared down there for no specific reason and run upstairs, not just at night but also in the middle of the day. I never felt comfortable alone in my room and always slept with the television on to cover up the sounds I imagined hearing. If there is one ghost in my past, one skeleton still in a closet I’ve never been able to unlock, it involves that old basement. At night my mind struggles desperately to take me back there, to make me feel as if I’ve never left there, as if my whole life has unfolded in that basement. It places people I’ve met since then and will meet in the future in that room, and once there, they twist and contort, become monstrous and malevolent. Then my mind blocks the exit, making the crooked wooden staircase impassable. I try to run up the stairs but never make it to the top because hands are grabbing my legs through the slats between steps.

  In another recurring dream, I can’t leave the basement because some kind of invisible force or person keeps pushing me back against the wall and trying to trap me there. Or because my cat, O.J., an orange tabby I found on the steps of Christian school, attacks me whenever I make a move to escape. There’s another dream I often have in which the lightbulb in the basement burns out and I try to change it as quickly as possible because I’m afraid to be alone there in the dark. But each new lightbulb I screw in burns out, and I’m stuck perpetually running to change it to keep the room from going dark forever.

  There are simple psychological explanations for these dreams, but none of them ever satisfies me. In only one dream can I remember making it to the top of the stairs. This time the basement floor isn’t carpeted, as it usually is, with the motley green scraps my father brought home from work. It’s cement, and I walk to the side I was always afraid of as a kid, where the washer and dryer sit in the shadow of the low ceiling. I’m rifling through mildewed, cobweb-covered boxes that contain my old belongings, and I’m nervous that some kind of animal—a spider, a rat, a snake, or even a lion, because it seems like anything can happen—is going to bite me. In one small box, I find a Curious George doll. But as I try to pick it up, something moves across the room—an indescribable, incorporeal warm weight that feels white for some reason. It pins me against the wall as the Curious George doll comes to life and runs around, knocking things off shelves and lighting one of the boxes on fire. I try to put it out and, when I can’t, I run. I try to escape up the stairs, but the weight is holding me back. I push harder and harder, and finally get to the top. I tear the door open, and there’s a woman at the top. She looks partly like my mom and partly like the girl who gave me crabs in high school. She has things written all over her arms in lipstick or paint or Magic Marker, and I try to read them but I can’t.

  In another dream, I’m in the basement with my mother and we find a box and pry the lid open. Inside are dozens of different types of bugs, but I can’t make out what kind most of them are. We remove the lid completely and a praying mantis jumps out, flying into the rafters over my head. We look inside the box again and see a spider made of crystal. It is completely transparent: Its legs are like icicles and its organs are all visible. I ask my mother to get some bug spray to kill it before it jumps out and attacks me. But as I spray it, it turns into a woman. She is wearing all black, and she chases me through the basement to a beach covered with rocks. Inside each rock there is a different spider trying to escape.

  That same night—I often have long strings of nightmares in a row, which I dread as much as I look forward to—I find my grandmother, on my mother’s side, in my room. She is lying on a hospital bed covered with tubes that stick out of nearly every part of her body, which is crisscrossed with wires held in place by duct tape. A round flexible canister on the side of the bed is pumping air into her and the equipment keeping her alive is making whirring noises and electronic pulses. I hear a crash in the closet, and the door opens to reveal my dad lying in a bed. He’s only thirty, his hair is messed up, and he seems to have gone mad. I talk to my grandmother, and she keeps reassuring me that everything is okay, that I did good in life, and that she isn’t mad at me. She has a big bandage over her eye, and it falls open. Inside is yellow pus, which runs over her face and soaks into the pillow, staining it yellow. I bend over her to find out that she has no eye.

  I believe in dreams. I believe that every night on the planet everything that is, was and can be is dreamt. I believe that what happens in dreams is no different and no less important than what happens in the waking world. I believe that dreams are the closest equivalent present-day mankind has to time travel. I believe you can visit your past, present and future in dreams. I believe I’ve dreamt half of my life that hasn’t happened yet.

  I don’t believe in chance, accidents or coincidences. I believe in the Delusional Self, which is to say that I believe that the things I talk and think about change the world around me and result in events that appear to be coincidental. I believe that my life is so important that it affects the lives of everyone else. I believe I am God. I believe everyone is their own God. I dreamt I was the Antichrist, and I believe it.

  I’ve thought about being the Antichrist ever since the word was first taught to me at Christian school. In the Bible, the word antichrist is only used as a description of people who don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He is not described as one satanic entity—as the beast of Revelation which many people believe—but as a person, any person, who deviates from the Christian orthodoxy. But through years of myth-making and fear-sowing, Christianity metamorphosed antichrists into a single Antichrist, an apocalyptic villain and Christian bogeyman used to scare people much as Santa Claus is used to regulate children’s behavior. After years of studying the concept, I began to realize that the Antichrist is a character—a metaphor—who exists in nearly all religions under different names, and maybe there is some truth in it, a need for such a person. But from another perspective, this person could be seen not as a villain but a final hero to save people from their own ignorance. The apocalypse doesn’t have to be fire and brimstone. It could happen on a personal level. If you believe you’re the center of your own universe and you want to see the universe destroyed, it only takes one bullet.

  When my dreams about the Antichrist began occurring more frequently later in life, I knew I was that figure. When I dreamt as a child I’d be performing in front of thousands of people, it seemed just as improbable at the time. Now I doubt nothing. After all, the beasts and dragons of the apocalypse were all born in a dream, a dream of John the Apostle’s now known as Revelation and taught as fact. In one of my own revelations—we all have them—it was the last day of the world, Judgment Day, and there was a giant tickertape parade in New York. Except instea
d of paper, people were throwing vegetables and rotten meat. I was on a giant crucifix strapped to a huge float made from human and animal skin. We were nearing Times Square, the sky was a deep black streaked with jagged stripes of orange, yellow, red and purple, and everyone was celebrating. They were happy that they were finally going to die.

  Another took place in the future in Florida. Most of the human race had been turned into zombies for the entertainment of a small elite. There was a strip club where they had reanimated female corpses and made them dance naked in cages made of thick metal bars. Their flesh was covered in boils and gnarled veins, and their hair was falling out in clumps. Their jaws had been wired shut so that they wouldn’t bite off the dicks of the guys around them masturbating. The world had degenerated to such a Sodom and Gomorrah state of sin that it seemed clear that the appearance of the Antichrist and the Second Coming were imminent.

  I dreamt of little girls strip-dancing as little boys (or dwarves) hit them with rubber snakes, Tonka trucks and lollipops instead of throwing money. And I dreamt of taking my own hair and teeth, saved from when I was a small child, and very ritualistically creating an artificial companion out of them. And all these things became the album Antichrist Superstar. Now I can’t tell which is more real: my dreams or my music.

  I will leave you with one more dream, from last night. It was with the slashers, the fans who slice the band’s name into their chests. In my nightmare, I’m in bed with Jeanette, the cherubic looking one. She has Marilyn cut into her, and each letter is dripping like wet paint over her breasts, staining her white tank top. I’m fucking her and we’re both laughing because it seems like something that we shouldn’t be doing. Her friend, Alison, is sitting next to her, with the word Manson bleeding on her chest. One of her eyebrows is bleached white, her lip rings are clattering against each other, and she’s wearing a black dress, thigh-high hose, and black boots to the knees. She seems mad at me because I shouldn’t be doing this with her friend and she’s upset at her friend because she’s laughing about it.

  When we finish, they want to take me to eat. We walk downstairs to a damp, stone-walled, cavernous place, like a dungeon. It could be my parents’ old basement, but it’s also a restaurant. Water is dripping off the ceiling although there’s a hole over our heads with sunlight streaming in. The waiter is a tall, skinny, Aryan-looking gay guy. He brings us big black metal bowls and each one has a live bird in it. They look like crows, but they’re not. They’re just black birds covered with a shiny film of grease. Another blond guy comes to the table and takes a pair of giant clippers, like the kind used to cut bike locks, and snips their heads off and peels the skin back so all that’s left is meat on a skeleton. The birds, though, are still alive. The guy takes one of the bird heads and drinks the blood, then he tells me to take a bite of the skin. I don’t want to because I’m scared of getting some kind of weird disease, but I do it anyway. I drink all the blood out of the bird. When I’m finished, I feel a pain in the back of my neck. I turn around, and the waiter is trying to use the clippers on me for a table of customers sitting on high chairs above me. Except they don’t look like clippers anymore. They’re like a cross between a bird’s beak and a crocodile’s jaws. I try to protest, and then I realize that it’s useless, because I am watching everything upside down as one of them puts my open neck to his mouth and drinks my blood.

  I’ve seen my own death in dreams like this and it’s helped me appreciate life more. I’ve also seen my own life in dreams and it’s helped me appreciate death more.

  antichrist superstar

  IN MY OPINION THE APOCALYPSE … MUST BE PRIMARILY AN INTERNAL, SPIRITUAL EVENT, AND ONLY IN A SECONDARY WAY AN EXTERNAL CATASTROPHE. THE GATES OF THE WATCHTOWERS … ARE MENTAL CONSTRUCTIONS. WHEN THEY ARE OPENED, THEY WILL ADMIT [SATAN] NOT INTO THE PHYSICAL WORLD BUT INTO OUR SUBCONSCIOUS MINDS.... THE APOCALYPSE IS A MENTAL TRANSFORMATION THAT WILL OCCUR, OR IS PRESENTLY OCCURRING, WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS OF THE HUMAN RACE.

  —Donald Tyson, “The Enochian Apocalypse”

  “THIS man is deceased.”

  A male voice was speaking somewhere above my body. His words were the first sounds I had heard for hours, maybe days. I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there. I didn’t even know where I was, or if I was alive. I struggled to move, but I couldn’t. My left arm tingled. Everything else was numb and impotent, like wooden limbs hanging from the severed strings of a discarded marionette. I tried to open my eyes, to command them to raise, but they wouldn’t respond. I needed to wake up, to tell them I wasn’t dead. I was still alive. It wasn’t my time to die. I had too much left to accomplish.

  My eyelids fluttered open, leaving behind a greasy, blurry film obstructing my vision. All I could make out was a blinding white light shining on me, penetrating my being, or what was left of it. It wasn’t my time to die. I knew it.

  The back of a hand, bony and varicose, rubbed my forehead. I wondered if it had been there all along. A hideous shadow, ancient, corpulent and redolent of sour cheese and wet wood, blocked the light. It spoke: “God still loves you.” The speaker was a woman, who coughed phlegm into her palm and shook her crumpled nun’s habit then continued stroking my forehead with the back of the hand she had just spit into.

  I could feel my chest now. It was tight and constricted, crushing my heart. There was a small commotion nearby. An old, emaciated man, his body covered with sores either from the mattress, old age or the bones pushing against his skin, had died in the bed next to me.

  A softer hand gripped my jaw and pulled it open. “This is going to give you a headache, but it will make your heart feel better.” She placed something under my tongue, which bubbled, fizzed and tickled, then switched off the bright lights over my bed. My body sank deeper into the bed, and a warm, enveloping wave of blood raced toward my head and rocked me back to sleep.

  When I awoke again, it was dark and the room was empty. My temples throbbed against my skin and my left arm still felt numb, but my strength seemed to be returning. I was wearing just a green, open-backed hospital gown. My clothes sat in a neat black pile on the floor and on the bedside table slouched a tall, lemon-yellow kitchen garbage bag. I tried to remember what had brought me here.

  I reached for the table, and a jolt of pain shot through my ribcage. Inside the bag was a toothbrush, toothpaste, a pen, a makeup case and a black composition notebook—my journal.

  I turned to the first page and tried to focus my eyes on the wavy blue lines and smudged black ink.

  I can’t even stand to watch people in restaurants laughing, having fun, enjoying life. Their pitiful happiness sickens me. And on TV, do people really live like this? Is this all a joke? Do we raise kids to believe in Baywatch, canned laughter, Jenny Jones? Stupid fish-white housewives straining their flabby legs together with Suzanne Somers’s Thighmaster? She helped create the dumb blonde stereotype and now she’s a fucking infomercial folk hero hawking a worthless contraption that sounds like a porno movie or an Aerosmith song. Fuck blind consumerism. Stupid people deserve what they get. They’d buy shirts that say “I’m fucking stupid” if Cindy Crawford told them it was cool. I’d love to kill all of them, but I’d be doing them a favor. The worst punishment I can give them is to let them wake up every morning and lead their stupid fucking lives, let them raise their stupid fucking children in their stupid fucking homes, and, of course, make a record called Antichrist Superstar, which will annoy and destroy each and every one of them. Fuck you America. Fuck me. The world spreads its legs for another fucking star…

  I had written those words the day I arrived in New Orleans, four months ago. I remembered it as if it were yesterday, because every day since had steadily grown worse, until, ravaged by drugs, exhaustion, paranoia and depression, my body had finally given out on me, landed me here in this fetid, white-walled hospital. I was optimistic after fulfilling my obligation to promote Smells Like Children. I thought I had shed my skin of self-doubt, watched it peel away inch by inch over t
he course of two years of touring. What seemed to be emerging from this cocoon was hard and soulless, smooth and terrifying, scarred and numb, a malefic gargoyle about to spread its scabrous wings. My plan then was to write an album about the transformation I had endured during my twenty-seven years, but I had no idea that I was about to undergo my most painful one as I sat writing in my journal in Missi’s car as she turned onto Decatur Street on a wet February afternoon.

  In the back seat was our only “child,” a black and white dalmatian-boxer hybrid named Lydia. She barked with excitement or fear as I stepped out of the car and kissed Missi goodbye.

  “Don’t wait up,” I assured her. “This is going to be a long day.”

  I opened the wrought-iron gate, pressed the buzzer, and waited for the studio manager to let me in. The first thing that greeted me—that greeted anybody who came to the studio—was a menagerie of dogs, which belonged to the studio’s owner, Trent Reznor. They barked, jumping and fighting with each other, and then decided what to tear up next or where to shit.

  “Everyone seems to have a dog this summer,” I thought. “Maybe that’s because they know our secrets and, despite that, don’t judge us.”

  I sat down on a black leather sofa in the lobby. A big-screen TV filled the room with light and noise from the Alien Trilogy video game that Dave Ogilvie, the engineer hired to coproduce the album with Trent Reznor, knelt in front of, as if praying to the screen. He was a short Canadian with glasses, the kind of guy who looked like he got beat up a lot at school, not unlike Corey Haim in the movie Lucas, but he was also childish in a way that I enjoyed. As we killed time waiting for Trent—he was always the last to arrive—I faded out the xenomorphs and barking dogs, and thought about why I was here and what I was about to embark on. My nightmares still hadn’t gone away. In fact, the move to New Orleans had only increased their intensity, a backlash from the dark, secret history that squirmed through the belly of the city like a tapeworm. Life was sucked in and decomposed. Nothing seemed to grow from here.