Long Hard Road Out of Hell

by Marilyn Manson

  When I brought her to his house the next day, she was a lot more cynical and self-righteous than I had been—at first. She walked in with the attitude that he was a hoax and full of shit, so she debated him whenever she disagreed even slightly with something. But when he said that a louse has more right to live than a human or that natural disasters are good for humanity or that the concept of equality is horseshit, he was prepared to back it up intelligently. She left the house in silence with dozens of new ideas swirling in her head.

  On that visit, LaVey showed me a little more of the house—the bathroom, which was strewn with real or fake cobwebs, and the kitchen, which was infested with snakes, vintage electronic instruments and coffee mugs with pentagrams on them. Like any good showman, LaVey only let you know what he was about in small pieces and revelations, and the more information he gave you the more you realized how little you really knew about him. Near the end of our visit, he said, “I want to make you a Reverend,” and gave me a crimson card certifying me as a minister in the Church of Satan. Little did I know that accepting that card would be one of the most controversial things I had done to that point; it seemed then (and it still does) that my ordainment was simply a gesture of respect. It was like an honorary degree from a university.

  It was also LaVey’s way of passing down the torch, because he was semiretired and tired of spending so many years advancing the same argument. No mainstream rock musician has advocated Satanism in any lucid, intelligent, accessible way since perhaps the Rolling Stones, who in “Monkey Man” came up with a line that could have been my credo, “Well I hope we’re not too messianic/Or a trifle too Satanic.” As I left, LaVey put a bony hand on my shoulder, and, as it lay there coldly, he said, “You’re gonna make a big dent. You’re going to make an impression on the world.”

  LaVey’s prophecies and predictions soon came true. Something important happened in my relationship with Traci, and I began making a bigger dent in the world.

  The day I became a Satanist also happened to be the day the allied forces of Christianity and conservatism began mobilizing against me. Just after our meeting, I was told that the Delta Center, where we were to play in Salt Lake City, would not allow us on the bill with Nine Inch Nails. We were offered, for the first but not the last time, money not to play—in this case, $10,000. Although we were removed from the bill, Trent Reznor brought me out as a guest, and I condensed my entire set to a single gesture, repeating “He loves me, he loves me not” as I tore pages out of the Book of Mormon.

  Ever since mankind created its first laws and codes of communal conduct, those who would break them have had one simple avoidance technique at their disposal: running. And that’s what we did after the show, fleeing to the tour bus and escaping a night of lockdown in the Salt Lake City penitentiary. We never got our $10,000, but the statement seemed more valuable than the money.

  We had made a similar escape earlier in the tour in one of Florida’s most conservative cities, Jacksonville, where the Baptists who ran the town had threatened to arrest me after the concert. But when we returned to perform in Jacksonville for our first headlining dates after the Nine Inch Nails tour, I wasn’t so lucky.

  Beneath my pants I wore my black rubber underwear with the dick hole, which by now had accrued its fair share of blood, spit and semen stains. As usual, halfway through the show I stripped down to the underwear, doused myself with water and convulsed violently, whipping my hair and body back and forth and sending droplets of water flying across the stage. No unseemly body part was ever exposed because my dick was tucked safely inside its rubber casing. But the vice squad, stationed at each exit of Club Five, saw what it wanted to see, which was me jacking off with a strap-on dildo (which I didn’t even have) and urinating on the crowd.

  Near the end of our shows I used to smear my face with red lipstick and, if there were girls near the front of the stage I wanted to meet, I’d grab them and make out with them, leaving on their faces the mark of the beast, which served as an entrance ticket to the hell that was and always will be backstage.

  After the performance, I walked offstage and up the stairs leading to the dressing room. Running after me, however, was Frankie, our tour manager. He was either a drug abuser or an ex-abuser, depending on who you happened to be talking to. He looked like Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe, only with big dark circles under his eyes.

  “The cops are here,” he blurted in a panic. “And they’re coming to arrest you!”

  I ran upstairs and made a futile attempt to look respectable, which meant taking off my rubber underwear and putting on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. There was a commotion in the hall, and two undercover policemen burst in and yelled, “You’re under arrest in violation of the Adult Entertainment Code,” a phrase that sounded like “a tart in a tan mint coat” over the disco music the club was now blaring. They handcuffed me behind my back, escorted me out of the club and sped me to the police station. I wasn’t worried because they didn’t seem to have a grudge or any malevolent feelings toward me. They were just doing their job. But all that changed when we arrived at the police station, and I was introduced to several burly rednecks in police uniforms who looked like they wanted to do more than just their job.

  One in particular, with a thick black mustache, a stocky build and a cap that said FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF JACKSONVILLE, seemed to have it in for me. He and his cop friends made numerous ignorant jokes at my expense, and then posed with me for Polaroid photographs, probably so they could show their wives the monkey they had played with at work. It was a slow night, and I was clearly the entertainment.

  Still I had no complaints. After all, I am an entertainer. But then in walked a black colossus, possibly the biggest person I had ever seen in my life. His hands seemed to cast a shadow over my entire body and each vein bulging in his neck was probably as thick as my own neck. He shoved me into a small cell with a mysterious stainless steel contraption that was supposed to be a combination toilet, sink and drinking fountain. As I was trying to figure out which part was the toilet and which was the sink, the colossus ordered me to wash the makeup off my face. All I had was water and a paper towel, which were useless. After watching me struggle, he opened the door and boomed, “Use this,” throwing a plastic container of pink floor cleaner at me.

  With my face scrubbed raw and pink, I sat in the cell dejected and abandoned, waiting for help from the outside world. The colossus returned, slamming the door behind him. “All right,” he ordered in a drill sergeant voice that rattled the room. “You’re going to have to take off all your clothes.”

  No matter how much of an exhibitionist you are, when you stand naked before someone several times your size with the power to do anything they want to you and get away with it, you suddenly learn to appreciate rayon, cotton, polyester and all the wonderful fabrics that protect your body from direct physical contact. Slowly, thoroughly and with the constant threat of violence in his oafish, callused hands, he searched me up, down and inside.

  When he left, a quarrel broke out on the other side of my cell door. The colossus was arguing with two other officers. In my mind, I tried to work out what they were debating because I knew the outcome of their argument would determine my fate in jail. I finally decided that either someone wanted to release me on grounds of lack of evidence or someone wanted to be my new boyfriend.

  Fig. 313. TALISMAN FOR DELIVERANCE FROM PRISON

  The argument died down and the colossus returned and asked as curtly as possible, though I could tell he actually felt embarrassed, “Where’s the dildo?” Before I could keep my smart-ass instincts in check, I asked coquettishly, “What do you want a dildo for?” And that was when all hell broke loose.

  His face turned as red as if it had been scalded with an iron, his chest expanded like the Incredible Hulk’s, and he threw my naked, pale, trembling body against the wall. The other cop, the Baptist shit-kicker, pressed his face against mine and, puffing hot pig breath down my throat, i
nterrogated me. We had a confrontation as long as the concert over the existence of the dildo I had supposedly committed lewd and obscene acts with. After a while, they seemed to relent, and once more started arguing amongst themselves, trying to figure out if they had made a mistake.

  When they finished, the colossus ordered me to get dressed and threw me into a holding tank with half a dozen people who wouldn’t even sit on the same bench as me because my appearance frightened them. My only companion was a guy with the face and mental capacity of an eight-year-old boy and the body of a fat, lonely child molester. He looked like how I imagined Lenny in Of Mice and Men. He told me that his mom, whom he still lived with, had turned him in for forging a check in her name. I wanted to ask him if he was apprehended passing the check at Dunkin’ Donuts, but this time restraint and good sense got the better of me. Our conversation reminded me of when I first met Pogo, because Lenny started sharing handy, time-saving tips on the disposal of dead bodies. The only difference was that this guy had actually killed someone, and his method of disposing of her was the same one Pogo and I had dreamed up for Nancy: fire.

  For the ensuing nine hours, Lenny courted and wooed me, regularly interrupted by the cops, who kept marching me through the station to show off their prize catch. After the eighth parade of the night, they didn’t return me to the holding cell. Instead, they said I was being transferred to general population. On the way, they handed me over to a nurse, who gave me a psychological test. Any smart psycho knows how to deal with a test like this: There are normal person answers, there are crazy person answers and there are trick questions in which they try to trap crazy people to see if they’re just pretending to be normal. I looked over the questions—“How do you feel about authority?” “Do you believe in God?” “Is it okay to hurt someone if they hurt you first?”—and gave them the answers they wanted, thus avoiding a short vacation in the psychiatric ward.

  Having been deemed a normal, I was brought to a doctor for a physical. The first thing he did was bring out a pair of pliers. “You’re going to have to take that out,” he said, gesturing to my lip ring.

  “It doesn’t really come out.”

  “If we don’t take it out, someone will rip it out for you when you get beat up in general population,” he said in measured tones, the corners of his mouth creeping upward in a sadistic smile he could barely restrain.

  They cut off the lipring and led me into a corridor. There were two routes to general population: One was past a herd of huge ox-men working out with weights and looking for someone with long hair to sodomize. The other was past the flotsam of society—drunks, vagrants and junkies. For some reason, the cops leading me broke their unspoken code of sadism and sent me down the easy path. Nobody tried to fuck with me and, relieved, I fell asleep instantly.

  I was awoken an indeterminable amount of time later to find a plate of wilted lettuce sprinkled with watered-down vinegar, a piece of stale bread, and, for dessert, the news that someone had posted bail for me. I was told that I had been in prison for sixteen hours. The worst part about it was that my manager had posted bail the minute I was imprisoned. But that kind of information travels slowly when you’re someone the police hate. Normally, the shittiness of an event like this would be offset by the free publicity afterward, something we desperately needed at the time. But it never made the papers because, as a precaution, the judge made a deal with my lawyers that if I talked to the press or publicized the incident, they would come down harder on me. Since the police had no evidence, the charges were eventually dropped anyway.

  When I next met with LaVey a year and a half later on our Antichrist Superstar tour in 1996, we had a lot to discuss. I had seen the enemies I was up against, and not only were they capable of stopping shows and making unreasonable demands on our performances, but they were capable of, for no reason at all, taking away the one thing LaVey and I both stand for: personal freedom. Like LaVey, I had also discovered what happens when you say something powerful that makes people think. They become afraid of you, and they neutralize your message by giving you a label that is not open to interpretation—as a fascist, a devil worshipper or an advocate of rape and violence.

  On this visit to LaVey’s house, I brought Twiggy with me. We were allowed to enter one of the only rooms in his thirteen-chamber house I hadn’t been in. It was behind the door his fat steward had jerked me away from when I first visited the house. The room was a private museum of arcana. The entrance was a giant Egyptian sarcophagus that had been propped up against the doorway. There was a rocking chair that had supposedly belonged to Rasputin, Aleister Crowley’s pipe, a satanic altar with a giant pentagram above it, and a couch lined with the fur of some endangered species. We sat at an old wooden dining table (probably something Aleister Crowley used to snort heroin off of) and ate steak.

  We spoke of religion, and how much of it is just a custom preserving practical codes of health, morality and justice that are no longer necessary for group survival (like not eating animals with cloven hooves). It makes a lot more sense to follow The Satanic Bible, written with twentieth-century humanity in mind, than a book that was written as a companion to a culture long since defunct. Who’s to say that a hundred years from now some idiot isn’t going to find a Marilyn Manson T-shirt—or a Collapsing Lungs baseball cap for that matter—nail it to a wall and decide to pray to it.

  As we discussed this, every ten minutes LaVey would leave the room. I had the feeling then that he was watching us through the eyes of one of his oil paintings, so I consciously kept quiet when he wasn’t around.

  We also discussed Traci Lords because LaVey asked me what had happened with her. I told him that she had blown me off and his optimistic prediction about our relationship was wrong. But after our show the next day, I found out she had been trying to hunt me down all along. Since by then I had a top-ten album and had been on the cover of Rolling Stone, our relationship had flipped on its axis, as LaVey said it would. When I first met Traci the fact that she was a star made her seem distant and unattainable. It crushed me, which made me stronger, filling me with the desire—the need—to become more of a fucking rock star. Now I had become one. This time around I was in charge, and I didn’t give a shit because I only wanted her when I couldn’t have her.

  A few days after Halloween the following year, I got a call at four A.M. telling me that LaVey had died. I was surprised by how sad I felt, because he had actually become a father figure to me and I never got the chance to say good-bye to him or even to thank him for his inspiration. But at the same time I knew that even though the world had lost a great philosopher, Hell had gained a new leader.

  abuse, parts one and two

  I FIND TERRIBLE THE NOTION THAT OTHERS CAN DO TO ME WHAT I DO TO THEM.

  —Duran Duran, Barbarella

  ABUSE: GIVEN

  One hundred and ninety-four pounds of abused flesh, atrophied muscle and hard bone, Tony Wiggins was a vacuum cleaner for sin. His blue eyes shone with the light of a perpetual party and his cyanotic lips curled and uncurled in threatening invitation. Only his red neck charm, emanating from a blond ponytail and Colonel Sanders goatee, hinted at any semblance of manners, decency or morality. No matter where he was at what hour—the smaller the town and the more unlikely the circumstance the better—Tony Wiggins managed to suck the filth, corruption and decadence off the streets and bring it back to us.

  We met Tony Wiggins at the right time, when we were weak and vulnerable. That first year on the road had taken its toll, not just on our health and sanity but on our friendships and relationships. In the meantime, all our singles had failed, our music wasn’t on the radio and nobody knew us except for a small cult of Nine Inch Nails fans and a few stray freaks. We had a new drummer, Ginger Fish, and were ready to go back into the studio, give it another shot and, if our next singles flopped, see if Collapsing Lungs needed any backup singers. We didn’t want to be an underground band all our lives. We knew we were better than that.

 
But, just as we were preparing to record new songs in New Orleans, we were invited to join Danzig’s Spring 1995 tour as an opening act. It was an invitation we couldn’t refuse because the record label considered it a big break and an excellent opportunity to promote Portrait of an American Family, an album that, as far as we were concerned, was dead. So we began the Danzig tour reluctant, resentful and pissed off. The fact that during our warm-up show in Nevada some girl fed me crystal meth (telling me it was coke) didn’t help any. I vomited through the entire show and couldn’t sleep on the daylong bus ride to our first show with Danzig in San Francisco.

  I walked onstage that first night wearing a hospital smock from a mental ward, a black jock strap and boots. My eyes were red and bleary from three sleepless nights. Right away, I felt something cold and hard hit my face. I thought it was the microphone, but it clattered to the floor and smashed, sending shards of glass splintering into my leg. It was a bottle from the audience. By our second song, there were bottles and refuse all over the stage and a muscled, tattooed fraternity reject in the front row was challenging me to a fight. I was so enraged at this point that I grabbed a beer bottle off the stage, smashed it on the drum kit and stopped the song. “If you want to fight me, come up onstage, you pussy,” I screamed. Then I took the jagged half-bottle and plunged it into the side of my chest, dragging it across my skin until it reached the other side and creating one of the deepest and biggest scars on the latticework that is my torso.

  Gushing blood, I dove into the crowd and landed on frathead. When security threw me back onstage, I was completely naked and nearly everyone in the front rows was stained with blood. I grabbed the microphone stand and sent it hurtling through Ginger’s bass drum, destroying it. He looked up at me, angry and confused—it was only his second concert with us since replacing Freddy the Wheel—but quickly caught on, punching through his snare. Twiggy raised his bass over his head and brought it splintering down onto the monitor. Daisy raised his ax and dropped it on his foot. We destroyed everything on stage short of each other.