We walked offstage ready to kick the shit out of Trent and his band to pay them back for a joke that had gone too far, but it wasn’t over. I was wearing just a pair of leather shorts and wet socks, and we were all covered with beer, sweat, lipstick and every backstage condiment imaginable. Before we could even reach the safety of our dressing room, we were ambushed again and smothered in whipped cream. A bunch of security guards grabbed us and handcuffed our hands behind our backs, led us out the backstage door and threw us into a pickup truck.
They closed the doors and drove off, and at this point it had gone beyond a joke. In retrospect I’m impressed by the planning that went into it. But at the time I was scared shitless because they drove us for half an hour. We ended up in downtown Philly, where they pulled us off the truck and threw the keys to the handcuffs into a trash can. They crumpled up a dollar bill, threw it on the ground and laughed, “That’s to help you get back to the concert.”
It was about twenty-five degrees and we were practically naked and freezing, especially because we were drenched from the filth of the night. We looked so scary, pathetic and degenerate that nobody would even walk on the same side of the street as us. We ended up begging some college kids to drive us back to the arena.
Did you have any hard feelings?
No. If I can dish it out, I’ve got to be prepared to take it. I wasn’t so calm at the time, but now I see it as a good prank, definitely more elaborate and crueler than anything I could have come up with. That kind of symbolized the ending of our freshman year so to speak. We graduated to the next level.
But not without a little bloodshed along the way, like your drummer and several chickens, right?
Okay, I’d better address this. Some people think we killed a chicken during a show in Texas; some people say that it didn’t die. The truth is that after we left the Nine Inch Nails tour, we did some shows on our own before going to New Orleans to work on the EP we’re making now, Smells Like Children. I put in our tour rider as a joke that we had to have a live chicken. I guess in Texas it’s pretty commonplace to have chickens running around because in the midst of our celery and Jack Daniel’s backstage at one of our shows there we found a chicken sitting around clucking in a cage. I named him Jebediah, and I was particularly attached to him. I didn’t want to kill him at all. But our stage set looked like a strange cross between Ziggy Stardust and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I thought that visually the chicken added something to what we were trying to present. So we let him tour with us, and sometimes I even miked the chicken and let him sing along. But during a show at Trees in Dallas, somehow the chicken cage got kicked open and the chicken flew into the crowd. They tossed him around, but he didn’t die. He went back on the farm, although he’s probably Chicken McNuggets right now. Heaven forbid I kill a chicken, but it’s okay for Ronald McDonald.
From then on, “kill the chicken” became a euphemism for either getting high or going all the way. If we were getting ready to do a show, instead of giving each other a high five or saying “Let’s rock,” we’d say, “Let’s kill the chicken.”
There’s one more line left. Who wants it?
I think I need to get to sleep soon. What I could really use is some Valium. [He opens a hidden compartment on a ring on his left index finger and takes out a blue pill, which he washes down with a sip of wine.]
Before I let you go to sleep, what happened with Freddy?
On the last day of that tour, we were playing at a gay bar in South Carolina. There weren’t many people in the audience so we thought we would do something different. Twiggy put on a suit, and I put on a black cowboy hat, a long black coat, and painted a black line from my forehead all the way down to my dick. Pogo was shirtless and he was wearing my underwear with the dick hole and a giant studded leather belt that said Hate in red letters. He looked like a big creepy hairy baby man with a bald fetal head, a giant bushy chest, some kind of steroid Olympics wrestling belt, a flaccid dick encased in black vinyl and combat boots. He was definitely the gayest looking person in the place. I tried to get Daisy to do something different and enjoy himself more, and he said something ridiculous like [speaking in a slow, dumb drawl],“Oh, I get it. I should become more the character of Daisy Berkowitz.”
Everybody knew that Freddy was going to be fired except for Freddy because just a week before, while Freddy the Wheel was polishing his spokes or something, we auditioned a quiet, older drummer from Las Vegas named Kenny Wilson and asked him to join the band as Ginger Fish. He actually rode the tour bus with us one night and we told Freddy that he was just a friend of our tour manager. He bought it.
We didn’t want to be cruel to Freddy because we liked him as a person. We just felt obliged to make his last show with the band a memorable one. Twiggy and I had shaved our eyebrows off, but he still had his as well as a goatee and a hairstyle that was just black bangs in front of an otherwise shaven head. I think he did this because he was starting to go bald in back. He was a very self-conscious person. But somehow we convinced him to shave his entire head and his face, and he ended up looking like this weird cancer patient version of Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. We thought it was the coolest he had ever looked, and wished for a second that he was still going to be in the band.
So we took the stage and immediately we weren’t having a good time because the crew had decided that, as their way of ending the tour with a memorable prank, they were going to put raw chicken feet all over the stage. So I slipped and fell on a beer bottle, and it shattered. I was so pissed I took it and fucking slashed my chest from one side to the other. And that was my first real act of self-mutilation in front of people. We sacrificed Freddy by setting his bass drum on fire, but the whole drum kit burst into flames, followed by Freddy. As Freddy escaped backstage to find a fire extinguisher we started smashing everything. So that last day of the tour was really the chrysalis of a new stage of development for us, a sort of ritual bloodletting followed by a sacrifice to what we are in the process of becoming, which I can’t entirely explain right now because I don’t fully understand it myself.
You never actually fired Freddy?
No. We didn’t tell him he’d been fired and he didn’t tell us he quit. I think he knew that he’d been sacrificed because the next day he just got on a plane and went home. I never got to say goodbye to him, and I haven’t said a word to him since. He was very peaceful about it, and I respect him for that. So if he sues me now, I’ll break his kneecaps.
we’re off to see the wizard
AS FAR AS I KNOW, THERE IS NOT ONE WORD IN THE GOSPELS IN PRAISE OF INTELLIGENCE.
—Bertrand Russell,
“Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?”
I had written, I had called, I had pleaded. Finally, I was granted an appointment. During a day off on the ’94 Nine Inch Nails tour in San Francisco in October, the hotel phone rang.
“The doctor wants to meet you,” came a woman’s voice, stern and husky.
I asked her if the doctor would care to see our show the following night. I knew everything there was to know about the doctor but he knew very little about me.
“The doctor never leaves his house,” she replied icily.
“Okay, when do you want me to come over? I’m in town for a few days.”
“The doctor really wants to meet you,” she replied. “Can you come between one and two tonight?”
No matter what time the doctor called for me and where he summoned me to, I planned to be there. I admired and respected him. We had a lot of things in common: We had experience as extravagant showmen, successfully placed curses on people, studied criminology and serial killers, found a kindred spirit in the writings of Nietzsche, and constructed a philosophy against repression and in support of nonconformity. In short, we had both dedicated the better part of our lives to toppling Christianity with the weight of its own hypocrisy, and as a result been used as scapegoats to justify Christianity’s existence.
“Oh,”
the caller added before she hung up. “Make sure you come alone.”
The doctor was the preferred name of Anton Szandor LaVey, founder and high priest of the Church of Satan. What nearly everybody in my life—from John Crowell to Ms. Price—had misunderstood about Satanism was that it is not about ritual sacrifices, digging up graves and worshipping the devil. The devil doesn’t exist. Satanism is about worshipping yourself, because you are responsible for your own good and evil. Christianity’s war against the devil has always been a fight against man’s most natural instincts—for sex, for violence, for self-gratification—and a denial of man’s membership in the animal kingdom. The idea of heaven is just Christianity’s way of creating a hell on earth.
I’m not and have never been a spokesperson for Satanism. It’s simply part of what I believe in, along with Dr. Seuss, Dr. Hook, Nietzsche and the Bible, which I also believe in. I just have my own interpretation.
That night in San Francisco, I didn’t tell anybody where I was going. I took a cab to LaVey’s house on one of the city’s main thoroughfares. He lived in an inconspicuous black building collared by a high, brutal-looking barbed wire fence. After paying the cab driver, I walked to the gate and noticed that there was no bell. As I contemplated turning back, the gate creaked open. I was as nervous as I was excited, because, unlike most experiences where you meet someone you idolize, I could already tell this one would not be a letdown.
I timidly entered the house and saw no one until I was halfway up the stairs. A fat man in a suit with a sweep of greasy black hair covering his bald spot stood at the top. Without saying a word, he motioned for me to follow him. In the times I visited LaVey since, the fat man has never introduced himself or spoke.
He brought me into a hallway and swung shut a heavy door, blotting out the light entirely. I couldn’t even see the fat man to follow him anymore. Just as I felt myself panicking, he grabbed my arm and pulled me the rest of the way. As we followed the curve of the corridor, my hipbone collided with a doorknob, causing it to turn slightly. Angered, the fat man pulled me away. Whatever was behind there was off limits to guests.
He finally pulled open a door, and left me alone in a dimly lit study. Beside the door there was a lavishly detailed portrait of LaVey standing next to the lion he used to keep as a house pet. The opposite wall was covered with books—a mix of biographies of Hitler and Stalin, horror by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, philosophy by Nietzsche and Hegel and manuals on hypnosis and mind control. The majority of the space was taken up by an ornate couch, over which hung several macabre paintings that looked like they were taken from Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. The oddest things about the room were the oversized playpen in the corner and the television set, which seemed out of place, a token of disposable consumerism in a world of contemplation and contempt.
To some people, this would all seem corny. To others, it would be terrifying. To me, it was exciting. Several years before I had read LaVey’s biography by Blanche Barton and was impressed by how smart he seemed. (In retrospect, I think the book may have been slightly biased since the author is also the mother of one of his children.) All the power LaVey wielded he gained through fear—the public’s fear of a word: Satan. By telling people he was a Satanist, LaVey became Satan in their eyes—which is not unlike my attitude toward becoming a rock star. “One hates what one fears,” LaVey had written. “I have acquired power without conscious effort, by simply being.” Those lines could have just as easily have been something I had written. As important, humor, which has no place in Christian dogma, is essential to Satanism as a valid reaction to a grotesque, misshapen world dominated by a race of cretins.
LaVey had been accused of being a Nazi and a racist, but his whole trip was elitism, which is the basic principle behind misanthropy. In a way, his kind of intellectual elitism (and mine) is actually politically correct because it doesn’t judge people by race or creed but by the attainable, equal opportunity criterion of intelligence. The biggest sin in Satanism is not murder, nor is it kindness. It is stupidity. I had originally written LaVey not to talk about human nature but to ask if he’d play theremin on Portrait of an American Family, because I had heard he was the only registered union theremin musician in America. He never acknowledged the request directly.
After sitting in the room by myself for several minutes, a woman walked in. She had gaudy blue eyeliner, an unnatural coif of blow-dried bleach-blond hair, and pink lipstick smeared on like a kid drawing outside the lines in a coloring book. She wore a tight baby-blue cashmere sweater, a miniskirt and skin-toned hose with a forties garter belt and high heels. Following her was a small child, Xerxes Satan LaVey, who ran up to me and tried to remove my rings.
“I hope you’re well,” Blanche said stiffly and formally. “I’m Blanche, the woman you spoke to on the phone. Hail Satan.”
I knew that I was supposed to respond with some kind of mannered phrase that ended with “hail Satan,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. It seemed too empty and ritualistic, like wearing a uniform in Christian school. Instead, I just looked at the boy and said, “He has his father’s eyes,” a line from Rosemary’s Baby that I was all too sure she was familiar with.
As she left, no doubt disappointed by my manners, Blanche informed me, “The doctor will be out in a minute.”
The formalities I had seen so far, combined with everything I knew about LaVey’s past—as a circus animal trainer, magician’s assistant, police photographer, burlesque hall pianist and all-around hustler—led me to expect a grand entrance. I was not disappointed.
LaVey didn’t walk into the room—he appeared. All that was missing was the sound of an explosion and a puff of smoke. He wore a black sailor’s cap, a tailored black suit and dark sunglasses, even though he was indoors at 2:30 A.M. He moved toward me, shook my hand and said right off the bat in his rasping voice, “I appreciate the name Marilyn Manson because it’s about putting different extremes together, which is what Satanism is about. But I can’t call you Marilyn. Can I call you Brian?”
“Sure, whatever you feel comfortable with,” I replied.
“Because of my relationship with Marilyn in the sixties, I feel uncomfortable because she has a special place in my heart,” LaVey said, closing his eyes gently as he spoke. He went on to talk about a sexual relationship he had with Monroe that began when he was the organist in a club where she was a stripper. In our conversation, he planted the seed that his association with her made her career flower. Taking credit for such things was part of LaVey’s style, but he never did it arrogantly. It was always done naturally, as if it were a well-known fact.
He removed the sunglasses from his goateed gargoyle head, familiar to thousands of teen dabblers from the back cover of The Satanic Bible, and instantly we were enmeshed in an intense conversation. I had just met Traci Lords backstage after a show at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, and she had invited me to a party with her the next night. Nothing sexual happened, but it was an overwhelming experience because she was like a girl version of me—very bossy and constantly playing mind games. Since LaVey had a relationship with another sex symbol, I thought that maybe he could give me some advice on what to do about Traci, whom I was both confused and captivated by.
The advice that ensued was very cryptic, which was no doubt another way for him to maintain power. The less people understand you, the smarter they think you are. “I feel like you both belong together, and I think something very important is going to happen with your relationship,” he concluded. It sounded more like the result of fifty dollars and five minutes spent calling the Psychic Friends Network than something I expected LaVey to say. But I pretended like I was grateful and impressed, because LaVey was not someone you could criticize.
He continued by sharing sordid details about his sex life with Jayne Mansfield and said that after all this time he still felt responsible for her death in a car crash because he had put a curse on her manager and boyfriend, Sam Brody, after a dispute with him
. Unfortunately for Jayne Mansfield, she happened to be with him that night in New Orleans when a mosquito-spray tanker crashed into his car, brutally killing them both. Although I was suspicious about some of LaVey’s claims, his rhetoric and confidence were convincing. He had a mesmerizing voice, perhaps from his experience as a hypnotist. The most valuable thing he did that day was to help me understand and come to terms with the deadness, hardness and apathy I was feeling about myself and the world around me, explaining that it was all necessary, a middle step in an evolution from an innocent child to an intelligent, powerful being capable of making a mark on the world.
One aspect of LaVey’s carny personality was that he liked to align himself with stars like Jayne Mansfield, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tina Louise of Gilligan’s Island, who were all members of the Church of Satan. So it wasn’t surprising that as I left he encouraged me to bring Traci to visit him.
The next day, Traci happened to be flying in from Los Angeles for our show in Oakland. I was badly bruised and banged up after the concert, so she came back to the hotel, where she bathed and mothered me. But, once again, I didn’t sleep with her because I was still determined to remain faithful to Missi, though Traci was the first person I had met who seemed capable of melting my resolve. I told her about my meeting with LaVey, and she gave me the whole Deepak Chopra, Celestine Prophecy, healing crystal, New Age rap about destiny, resurrection and the afterlife. She didn’t seem to understand what he was about, so I tried to clue her in as I sunk into restless sleep: “This guy’s got an interesting point of view. You should listen to him.”
Long Hard Road Out of Hell Page 16
