Jeordie was miserable in Amboog-A-Lard because he was the only one in the band with any stage presence or any ambition to be more than just a heavier version of Metallica. I always told him I wanted him to be a Spooky Kid, and he always said he was more into what my band was doing than what his was. But I had all the musicians I needed and he was stuck in Amboog-A-Lard, whose members had started to turn against him because he was too much like us. So we had to content ourselves with side projects like Satan on Fire, a fake Christian death metal act with songs like “Mosh for Jesus.” Our goal was to infiltrate the Christian community (a fantasy I still harbor) but the local Christian club would never book us.
Perhaps because he couldn’t be in Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, Jeordie ended up instigating the mayhem at our most notorious shows. We played at a club called Weekends in Boca Raton, the Florida equivalent of Beverly Hills, and the show was filled with rich Boca girls, conservative jocks and a rebel faction of lame surfer types. While we were playing, Jeordie clambered on stage and pulled down his pants, which was normal behavior for him. Though he didn’t mind that all his life people had told him he looked like a girl, sometimes he felt the need to prove that he wasn’t. The only strange thing was that he didn’t try to light his pubic hair on fire, as he usually does when his pants are down in public and he’s not having sex. Since he was standing next to me and I had a free hand, I started jacking him off. The Boca snobs were aghast, and from that day on there was a rumor that we were gay lovers. It was a rumor we did our best to encourage and spread.
Jeordie brought his ten-year-old brother to another show, and, in order to sneak him into the club, we pretended he was part of the band and stuck him in Pogo’s keyboard cage. Behind him, Missi was tied to a cross, wearing only a black mask and a pint of blood. I thought of the scene as a painting depicting the idea that it was only through such horror and brutality that mankind could be born with any hope of innocence and redemption. Christianity’s crucifixion seemed no different than the pagan sacrifice, in which people thought they could better their own condition by shedding someone else’s blood, a concept that particularly appealed to me in the aftermath of my Nancy death wish. At the end of the show, Jeordie’s brother was so overcome by the desire to try his own hand at performance art that he ran out of the cage and mooned the crowd. That show started another legend that has persisted to this day, that we have naked kids on stage.
On a more helpful day, Jeordie introduced us to our first manager, John Tovar, who also mishandled Amboog-A-Lard. He was a huge, sweaty, cigar-chomping Cuban constantly clad in a black suit and black tie with cheap cologne drowning his body odor. He looked like a cross between Fidel Castro and Jabba the Hutt. As if nature hadn’t already short-changed him, he was also a narcoleptic and would fall asleep during soundcheck directly in front of the speaker. We took advantage of the opportunity to conduct valuable medical research and experiment with different words to wake him, yelling in his ear that he was a piece of shit or the building was on fire. But he wouldn’t stop snoring and heaving his mountainous gut. Only the words “vanilla milkshake” and “Lou Gramm” would rouse him—and he’d open his thick, heavy-veined eyelids, slowly roll his medicine ball eyes skyward and snap back to normal. Then he’d usually pull me aside and whisper some kind of well-meaning advice, like, “You guys need to, you know, tone it down a little bit so we can play at the Slammy awards. Maybe you can do a show with Amboog-A-Lard, the boogie boys.” (The Slammies were Florida’s hard-rock awards.)
The closest we got to satisfying his wish was shortening our name to Marilyn Manson, retiring our drum machine and holding auditions for a human drummer. The only person who showed up to try out was a hobbling little guy named Freddy Streithorst, and our guitarist, Scott Putesky, insisted that we hire him since they had played together in a sissy-pop band called India Loves You. Like most everyone in our band, Freddy soon had several nicknames. On stage, he was known as Sara Lee Lucas. But we called him Freddy the Wheel. The name came from one of our first groupies, Jessicka, who went on to form Jack and Jill, a band that I renamed Jack Off Jill and took under my wing briefly, performing with them a few times. When Freddy was a teenager, he had an accident and, while he was in the hospital, the muscles in his leg atrophied to the point where the limb deformed. As part of his rehabilitation, he learned to play drums.
Freddy was a good guy and I never treated him any differently than anyone else. But I always felt bad pushing him to play better—he was a shitty drummer and everyone knew it except Scott. Jessicka, however, didn’t have any qualms about mocking him. She decided that Freddy had a wheel for a foot and should henceforth be known as Freddy the Wheel. She realized this, of course, after having had sex with him, so she was in no position to mock anyone because she had bowed down before the Wheel and, in fact, gotten caught beneath it.
In the end, Freddy wound up going out with Shana, a Siouxsie Sioux-wannabe I had dated briefly before meeting Teresa. Our relationship didn’t last long because I had the flu, and she’d come over to take care of me and have sex. Daylight was not a good time to get intimate with her because she was among South Florida’s many practitioners of Gothic deception. It wasn’t just that the makeup hiding the potholes on her face flaked away in the sun, I also noticed a mysterious white ring around her vagina. I was never able to decide whether it was a venereal disease, some form of mucus, a yeast infection, the skin from the top of a pudding or a glazed donut that someone may have accidentally left there after intercourse. Discovering it was as appalling and disturbing an experience as my childhood run-in with Lisa’s snot, and I stopped seeing her. Scott Putesky, a pussy vulture who had already tried to prey on Teresa, went on to fall in love with her, but was denied when Freddy stole her away like a little hobbit and indeed went on to become Lord of the Ring.
* * *
Like a used car that keeps breaking down with new problems every time an old one is fixed, the band was beginning to come together when we started having problems with our bassist, Brad. The longer he played with us, the more people came up to me and complained, “That guy’s a fucking junkie.” I always stuck up for him because I was completely naive and had never done any drugs besides pills, pot, acid and maybe glue. Brad was insecure to begin with and was always trying to impress everyone around him. So whenever he mentioned drugs I just thought he was trying to be cool.
Brad was stupid and, unlike Scott, knew it. I liked him, so I usually ended up loaning him money and baby-sitting him. Eventually, I found someone to mother him, a rich, older lawyer named Jeanine. I had slept with her a few times and, even though she bought me anything I wanted, decided that Brad needed her more than I did.
Within two months, they were living together. But whenever I stopped by in the afternoon to visit him while Jeanine was at work, he seemed uneasy, as if he didn’t want me there. One afternoon he was acting stranger than usual, trying to get me out of the apartment. Naturally, I didn’t want to leave because I was curious about what he was hiding. After I spent fifteen minutes watching him play uncomfortably with his green and purple dreadlocks, two black girls emerged giggling from the closet in a cloud of smoke and carrying short glass tubes. As they talked, it dawned on me that the tubes were crack pipes, the girls were prostitutes and Brad was a junkie. Here was another person I thought I knew but later realized had a secret life.
Once I was aware that he was a heroin addict, the signs were obvious. He looked like shit, went through wild mood swings, was incredibly paranoid, drank heavily, missed shows, lost weight daily, showed up late for practice, never had any energy, and always borrowed money. He and his previous girlfriend, Trish, thought they were Sid and Nancy, but I never understood that their tribute went that far. Every time I looked at him now, all I felt was hatred and disgust. My entire message and everything I’d begun striving to be as a person ran in direct opposition to Brad. I wanted to be strong and independent, to think for myself and help other people think for themselves. I could
n’t (and still can’t) tolerate someone who’s a fucking weakling living out of a spoon and a needle.
One night Jeanine called and woke me up. “Brad’s dead!” she kept screaming. “I should have stopped him. He’s dead! He’s finally done it to himself. He’s dead! What should I do? Help me!”
I rushed to the house, but I was too late. An ambulance was already leaving. Jeanine was on the phone with her lawyers because whenever someone overdoses and medics find hypodermic needles and drug paraphernalia, they’re obligated to call the police. I stayed with Jeanine that night until we found out Brad had been resuscitated and then promptly arrested. We talked for hours about it. I felt sorry for Brad because he was a creative, good-natured guy and I loved writing songs with him. But he was also a junkie and a fuck-up. A part of me wished he really had fatally overdosed, for his own and our peace of mind. By then his life was heroin. Playing bass was just a way of killing time between shots.
When I saw Brad again, I sat him down and, for the first time, realized how important this band really was to me and how much I would not tolerate anyone fucking it up. This was not a game anymore. “Listen,” I told him. “You’ve had your final chance. Clean up your act or you’re out of the band.”
Brad broke down and started crying, apologizing in broken sobs for his behavior and promising not to shoot dope anymore. Because I didn’t have any previous experience with junkies, I believed him. I believed him the second and the third times too. He hit the one weak spot still left in my cold black heart: pity, a word that over the course of the arduous year to come would be excised from my vocabulary.
Months later, we drove to Orlando for an important showcase for several record labels interested in signing us. The night before I had gotten another panicked phone call from Jeanine, who was scared because Brad was on heroin again and had sucked some guy’s dick that night. I confronted Brad, and he was in denial about his drug use but he wouldn’t stop bragging about how he had finally fulfilled his fantasy of sucking a guy off, a promiscuous shampoo boy who worked at the salon where he went to get his hair dyed (which was somewhat ironic since Brad’s dreadlocks were always dirty and smelly).
Onstage, Brad seemed out of it, but I had more important things on my mind than his track-marked arms. After the show, he disappeared, but again I had more important things on my mind because we were staying with these cute girls. Normally I would have been concerned, but I was sick of baby-sitting him.
At three in the morning, he burst into the house with three strippers who none of us knew. He was still wearing his outfit from the show—a sleeveless purple seventies shirt with silver stars on it, small glittering women’s shorts over red tights with guns on them and combat boots—and he was beyond wasted. His eyes were darting from side to side so quickly that they were a blur and he was fidgeting manically with his lip ring as he babbled incoherently about something that seemed important to him. Up close, the strippers had bruised and discolored legs, arms and necks, as if they were running out of veins to shoot up into. Their teeth were gapped and gnarled in their mouth like melting white candles on a stale fudge cake. As they teetered nastily around the room, offering everyone heroin, Valium and whatever else was collecting lint in their pockets, Brad seemed to be collapsing into himself, shriveling on the couch and becoming so disoriented that he didn’t even know his own name. Sweat was dripping off his face and landing in droplets on his clothes. For a second, he seemed to come to his senses. He looked me straight in the eye, then toppled onto the floor, passed out. His face was pale green from the hair dye that had seeped with his sweat into the oily creases of his forehead and his unpainted fingernails were now swirled purple and blue.
The strippers, probably used to this situation, fled the house. At first, I tried to wake Brad up—helping everyone roll him around, slap him and dump buckets of water on him. But what I really wanted to do was kick him in the ribs. I was overwhelmed by hatred for him and the cliché his life had become. I had once loved Brad like a little brother, which made it easier to hate him. Not only are love and hate such closely related emotions, but it’s a lot easier to hate someone you’ve cared about than someone you never have.
We stepped away from his motionless, rainbow body and talked—not about how we could help him, but about how we could hurt him. I suggested turning him over and letting him choke on his own puke. If the coroner couldn’t tell he had been moved, Brad’s death would be attributed to his own stupidity. We sat locked in debate, trying to determine whether we would get arrested and charged with manslaughter. Though I still felt a tinge of pity, I thought of his death as an assisted suicide. In actual fact, I felt as if he had already committed suicide, because the Brad I met at the Kitchen Club when I first conceived of the band years ago was dead, a stranger to both of us.
But I didn’t want him to jeopardize the band in death as he had in life. In the end, it was only the fear of being caught that kept us from killing him. It was a monstrous way of thinking, but I couldn’t help it. I was becoming the cold, emotionally crippled monster I always wanted to be, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. But it was too late. The metamorphosis was already well under way.
The next day I called the studio where Jeordie was working on Amboog-A-Lard’s first independent album. It was a big move for Jeordie, because he was playing bass and guitar as well as producing. But I also knew he wanted to join Marilyn Manson so badly that he had actually befriended Brad and had been taking him out to drink and do drugs after Brad had been warned to clean up. I always wondered whether this was a deliberate act of sabotage on Jeordie’s part or not. If it was, it was pretty clever.
“Do you want to be in our band?” I asked.
“Well, I’m in the middle of making this record.” Jeordie sighed.
“You’ve always belonged in our band.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And your band hates your fucking guts and wants to kick the shit out of you.”
“I’ll call you right back,” he said, and I knew that I got him.
Brad was as good as dead, Nancy was as good as dead and my morality was as good as dead. Marilyn Manson was finally on its way to becoming the band I wanted it to be.
the rules
DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.
—Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Friend
PEOPLE always want to know about my religious and philosophical beliefs. But few people ever ask me about my everyday ethics—the rules I use when dealing with day-today society. Here are a few of them. Feel free to cut them out and post them on the door of your mother’s refrigerator for easy reference.
DRUGS
There is a stereotype among people who have never gotten high that anyone who has ever done drugs, no matter what that drug is, is an addict. The truth is that addiction has little to do with what drugs you use or how often you use them. There are other factors, like the extent to which you let them run your life and your ability to function normally without them. I make no secret of my drug use. But at the same time I have nothing but utter contempt for anyone who is addicted to drugs. It is the people who abuse drugs that make the people who use them look bad. Here are a few simple rules to help you determine whether you are a user or an abuser of cocaine, pot and other substances. Consider yourself an addict if…
1
… YOU ACTUALLY PAY FOR DRUGS.
2
… YOU USE A STRAW AS OPPOSED TO A ROLLED-UP DOLLAR BILL.
3
… YOU USE THE WORD blow.
4
… YOU’RE A GUY AND YOU’RE BACKSTAGE AT A MARILYN MANSON CONCERT (UNLESS YOU’RE A DEALER OR A POLICE OFFICER).
5
… YOU OWN MORE THAN ONE PINK FLOYD RECORD.
6
… YOU DO COCAINE DURING A SHOW. (IF YOU DO IT AFTER A SHOW, YOU’RE OKAY. IF IT’S BEFORE, YOU’RE TEETERING ON THE BRINK.)
7
… THE MERE MENTION OF COCAINE MAKES YOU PASS GAS OR THE SIGHT OF IT MA
KES YOU WANT TO TAKE A SHIT.
8
… YOU’VE WRITTEN MORE THAN TWO SONGS THAT REFER TO DRUGS.
9
… YOU GET KICKED OUT OF A BAND FOR BEING A DRUG ADDICT.
10
… YOU’RE FRIENDS WITH A MODEL.
11
… YOU LIVE IN NEW ORLEANS.
12
… YOU PAY FOR YOUR GROCERIES WITH ROLLED-UP DOLLAR BILLS.
13
… YOU’VE EVER BEEN IN DR. HOOK OR KNOWN THE LYRICS TO A DR. HOOK SONG.
14
… THE EMBOSSED NUMBERS, PARTICULARLY THE O’S, 6’S AND 9’S, ON YOUR CORPORATE CREDIT CARD ARE FILLED IN WITH A MYSTERIOUS WHITE POWDER.
15
… YOU’RE ALONE IN YOUR HOTEL ROOM ON TOUR AND YOU DO DRUGS.
16
… YOU DO DRUGS BEFORE 6 P.M. OR AFTER 6 A.M.
17
… YOU HATE EVERYBODY. (IF YOU LIKE EVERYBODY, YOU’RE ON ECSTASY AND I’M AGAINST YOU.)
18
… YOU KNOW THE NAME FOR THE FLESHY CREVICE BETWEEN YOUR THUMB AND INDEX FINGER.
Long Hard Road Out of Hell Page 12
