As we walked off after our fourteen-minute show, we passed Glenn Danzig, who is at most half of my height (though with ten times the muscle mass). I smiled wickedly at him, as if to say, “You asked for us, and now you’re going to pay for it.”
We didn’t want to be onstage playing music. So every night we didn’t. The shows continued to be short exercises in brutality and nihilism, and the road map across my chest began to expand with scars, bruises and welts. We had all become wretched, exhausted, empty containers—Westworld automatons gone berserk. But just when even our own violence was beginning to bore us and I was deep in the cavity of misery because Missi had called and said she wanted to end our relationship—the first relationship that meant anything to me—because I was never around, we met Tony Wiggins.
He emerged off Danzig’s tour bus in black jeans, a black T-shirt and a pair of slick black wraparound sunglasses. He looked like the kind of guy who would pummel you mercilessly and then apologize afterward. I complimented him on his sunglasses. He tore them off his head and, without even hesitating, said, “Here, they’re yours.”
From that day on, we weren’t on tour with Danzig anymore. We were on tour with Tony Wiggins, their bus driver. Every morning he knocked on our bus or hotel room door and woke us up with a bottle of Jagermeister and a handful of drugs. When his hair was in a ponytail, which was rarely, it meant that he was doing his job and driving Danzig’s bus. When his hair was down, he was tending to us, making sure our self-destruction wasn’t limited to the stage. One night at a cheap, decrepit motel in Norfolk, Virginia, he burst into the room, carved up a couple lines right onto the dust and roach-powder-covered floor and snorted them. “Get on my back,” he ordered. Twiggy grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the floor and complied. I ignored them because I was busy writing the lyrics to a song called “The Beautiful People.” They ambled out the door, a drunk, double-assed beast that would hereafter be referred to as “Twiggins,” and headed toward the outside stairwell. Suddenly there was a clattering and a string of obscenities. At the bottom of the stairs, I found Twiggy face down in a puddle of rainwater and blood. We rushed him to the emergency room, but we looked so demented—dripping makeup, rainwater and blood—that we were ignored. Instead of complaining, Wiggins just grabbed a metal doctor’s tray and cut up several more lines. That was how nights with Wiggins usually ended. He would stir things up and wouldn’t leave them alone until someone was dead, in the hospital or passed out in their own vomit. If that someone wasn’t himself, he wouldn’t stop partying until it was.
Eventually Wiggins, Twiggy and I realized there were ways we could make the best of our situation and try educating ourselves and accumulating valuable knowledge while on the road. We began conducting various psychological experiments, like walking up to a couple and giving only the girl a backstage pass to test their relationship.
Gradually, the tenor of the tour began to change from miserable to memorable. On tour with Nine Inch Nails and Jim Rose, I had refrained from some of the stupider human tricks they indulged in, but now I didn’t care anymore. As we sat atop a twenty-foot-high steel tower outside a club called Sloss Furnaces in Biloxi, Mississippi, warming up for a show with Jagermeister and drugs, Wiggins, Twiggy and I swore to stop exploiting and humiliating girls backstage. Instead, we decided to perform a therapeutic service for them. To carry out our new plans, all we needed was a video camera and some girls willing to confess their deepest, most intimate sins. Little did we know just how dark and disturbing the lives of our fans really were.
While we performed that night, Wiggins did the prep work. Underneath the club, he found a network of dark catacombs with metal grates, dripping water and the general atmosphere of a set from A Nightmare on Elm Street. I raced to meet him there after the show, not only because I was excited but also because I needed to hide from the cops, who wanted to arrest me for indecent exposure. As our tour manager detained them, Wiggins took us to the catacombs, where he had two prospective patients waiting. We didn’t know whether our plan to extract confessions would really work, and at the time didn’t really understand what it meant to actually be burdened with the weight of someone’s darkest secrets. People don’t necessarily confide in one another to get something off their chest. They want something: reassurance, which is a hard gift to give convincingly.
Under a relentless and probing fusillade of questions from Wiggins, the first girl broke down and disclosed that when she was eleven, several boys in the neighborhood would regularly pick on her. One night she awoke to find her window open and four of them standing in her room. Without a word, they pulled down her bed-sheets, tore off her pajamas and raped her one by one. When she told her father the next day, he was indifferent. Within a year, he was sexually molesting her as well. As she told us this, she was kneeling on the floor, staring at the damp ground. When she finished, she looked up at me expectantly with wet eyes, the tracks of her tears tattooed by runny black mascara. I was supposed to do something, to say something, to help her somehow. With my music and in interviews, I never had any problem telling people about the lives they should be leading and the independence they should demand. But that was when I was talking to an aggregate, a mass, an undifferentiated group of people. Now that I was one-on-one and actually had the opportunity to change someone’s life, I froze momentarily. Then I told her that the fact that she was here and could talk about it proved she was strong enough to live through it and accept it.
I wonder still whether anything I went on to say meant anything to her, or if they were just the same clichés she had heard all her life. She told me that she wanted to trade clothes with me and took off her T-shirt, which was emblazoned with Nietzsche’s “God Is Dead” slogan followed by God’s response, “Nietzsche Is Dead.” I still take that shirt with me everywhere I go.
The first story was so harrowing that I still can’t remember what the second girl confessed to. All I remember was that she was a beautiful blond girl with the word failure carved into her arm.
With each show, Wiggins refined his inquisition methodology. His art was brutal and sophisticated, and, some in the field of psychoanalysis may say, unethical. He arrived at a point so advanced that in order to proceed with his work, he had to invent his own investigative apparatus. He unveiled it after a show in Indiana.
Backstage after Danzig’s set, we discovered our crew videotaping a tiny but full-bodied girl with white hair and pale skin. A boy who seemed to be her brother or boyfriend, about nineteen and skinny and effiminate with red hair in a bowl cut, a light smattering of freckles and a discolored bruise around his cheekbone, stood on the side, anxiously picking at an unlit cigarette in his hands. The smell of fresh shaving cream was in the air, and they had coaxed the girl into shaving herself and committing other unspeakable acts. It seemed like the kind of traditional exploitation that Wiggins and I were trying to avoid.
As soon as they saw me, the girl and the boy dropped to their knees. “The gods have answered our prayers,” she cried.
“I just wanted to meet you,” he told me. “That’s why we’re here.” So, naturally, Wiggins and I asked them if they had anything to confess, besides the atrocities the girl had just taken part in with our road crew. Instantly, the girl looked over at the boy, and he bowed his head in shame or sadness. We knew we had found the perfect person to test out Tony’s new invention.
Wiggins asked the boy if he minded being tied up and restrained, then brought him into the back room of the dressing area, requesting several minutes to set up. When I walked in, he was hog-tied with his hands behind his back in an apparatus that forced him to keep his legs spread at a ninety degree angle and his hands behind his back. The device was intended for women, but it looked even more disturbing to see a naked guy spread-eagled there. If he moved any limb from that position, the rope around his neck would tighten and begin to choke him. In order to keep from strangling himself, he had to work to keep himself in this awkward, vulnerable position. Tony stood over
him with a video camera, capturing his struggle from every angle.
“Is there anything you’d like to confess?” Wiggins began in a genteel Southern accent with an undercurrent of menace. Outside the door, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” provided a soundtrack to our mock-priestly endeavor.
He hesitated, and tried to squirm into a comfortable position, which was impossible. With a free hand, Tony lifted his chin up towards the video camera, and he started talking. “My sister and I, we ran away from home like two years ago. So to…” His words shortened and fragmented as he struggled with the ropes.
“Is that your sister out there?” Wiggins asked. He never let anyone get away with vagueness.
“No. Just a friend. She begs in the street with me.”
“Why did you run away?”
“Abuse, really. Just abuse. Our stepfather, mostly. So, anyway, we needed to get money for tickets. To see the concert. And for some other things. So we hitched a ride out to a sort of rest station-truck stop. I wanted to sell her. Her body.”
“What was she wearing?” Wiggins’s inquiring mind wanted to know.
“Just high heel shoes we had found. A tube top. Jeans. Some makeup we stole. But it wasn’t for sex. Just blow jobs.”
“Was that the first time you pimped her?”
“Sort of.”
“Yes or no?” Wiggins was a master.
“For money, yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“This trucker.” The boy began crying, and his face turned crimson from a combination of emotion and the fact that the rope was tightening around his neck. He flexed his freckled thighs to keep from choking. “This trucker, he took her inside. His truck. And I heard her yelling, so I climbed up. To the window. But before I could…” He gagged for a moment, then regained his equilibrium. “He hit me. He hit me. And.” He was crying, and his legs were trembling. “And I don’t know where she is…”
“You mean he drove away with her?” Wiggins asked incredulously. He wasn’t even paying attention to the camera anymore. I’d never seen him surprised by anything before and I haven’t since. We both knew we were in over our heads and we were scared the boy wouldn’t be able to hold his own against the ropes.
Suddenly, the music outside the door stopped and we heard several voices barking out orders. I opened the door a crack and spied into the dressing room, where two cops were looking through our make-up bags and examining the driver’s licenses of several girls there. I closed the door, locked it and looked around in a panic. I had drugs in my pocket, a naked runaway tied up in a bondage apparatus and a video camera documenting the whole thing as evidence. We quickly untied him, and he rolled onto his side, curling into a fetal position. As he caught his breath and reoriented himself, we quietly and awkwardly put him into the rest of his clothes. I listened at the door. People were laughing again, a sure sign that the police had left. Through some stroke of luck, they didn’t know there was a back room. They were looking for the daughter of some prominent local politician. The boy seemed to want our help but, since the police were still in the club, we urged our new friend to find them and tell them his story, which continues to haunt me.
Compared to a lot of my fans, I’ve had an easy life. One person who helped me realize this was Zepp, who we met at an earlier show in Philadelphia. As we were walking to our bus after the show, a short, stocky long-haired guy with a square jaw and an Anton LaVey beard beckoned to us from outside the parking lot, promising to give us a canister of nitrous oxide if we signed something for him. Since I’d never inhaled laughing gas before, I agreed. He introduced himself as Zepp, after an old, regrettable Led Zeppelin tattoo on his right shoulder. At our next dozen or so shows, Zepp showed up backstage afterward toting nitrous oxide or pizza or photographs of teenage girls. Eventually, we decided that since he was with us so much, he might as well work for us. I gave him a video camera, paid him and he began touring with us. I knew he would fit in the day I opened the door to the rear lounge of the tour bus and found him filming Twiggy and Pogo, who were having sex with a plastic blow-up doll I had bought as a joke. Pogo had his dick up its ass, Twiggy had his dick in its mouth, and I forgot to check to see whether Zepp had his dick in his hand.
Gradually, we learned that Zepp wasn’t just a regular guy from Pennsylvania. He claimed to have fucked three hundred girls in his hometown, and one day we opened up the luggage bay of the bus to find him in there on top of girl number 301. He used to inject speed with his aunt, and told us some exotic stories about how at the height of their insane addiction they would shoot up sludge from a mud puddle or whiskey. It was a small miracle he was still alive, and a fortunate one, too, since it was Zepp who introduced us to the slashers, two girls who followed us around the country. They reminded me of the Charles Manson girls from 1969, because they both looked like classic, suburban, all-American teenagers with something gone slightly wrong. In this case, it was the fact that one, an innocent-looking, flush-faced girl with white eyebrows named Jeanette, liked to carve the word Marilyn into her chest before each show and the other, a quiet girl with long brown hair and half a dozen lip rings named Alison, liked to carve the word Manson into her chest, with the S cut in backwards. At nearly every show since, I’ve seen them singing along in front with fresh self-inflicted wounds dripping blood down the front of their dresses or tank tops.
Between Zepp, Tony Wiggins and my own encroaching madness, the tour became one of the most chaotic, turbulent and decadent periods of my life. One of the most unsettling incidents took place after a show in Boston. I was in the dressing room drinking Jack Daniel’s with the rest of the band when Wiggins motioned to me through the door.
“I’ve got someone who wants to tell you something,” he whispered slyly.
He walked me to an out-of-the-way room where a girl in white underpants, a white bra and pink socks was waiting for me, bound and trussed in Wiggins’s sin-sucking device. She would have been attractive, but all over her body, particularly on the back of her neck and the backs of her legs, there were red splotches with raised islands of pale white flesh in the middle. It was an uncomfortable sight because, before she even confessed a word, I already felt sorry for her. Despite myself, I was also somewhat turned on because she looked like a beauty who had been mauled by a beast. And few things are more of a turn-on than beauty disfigured. Stranger still, she looked familiar, as if I had seen her somewhere before.
“What happened to you?” I asked. It was my turn to be interrogator.
“I have a skin disease. Nothing contagious.”
“Is that what you have to confess?”
“No,” she said, pausing to gather strength for what she was about to say. “What I have to confess has something to do with you.”
“Fantasies don’t count.”
“No. It’s from when I met you in person. A year ago. When you were on tour with Nine Inch Nails.” She stopped and struggled with the apparatus. She was puny and weak.
“Go ahead,” I said, knowing that if I had done anything unspeakable to her I definitely would have remembered those splotches.
“I was backstage and you said hi to me. I was the girl that went back to the hotel with Trent that night.”
“Okay, I remember,” I said, and I did.
“What happened was that I was going out with someone at the time, and he was angry at me because I wanted to go backstage and sleep with Trent. But I did it anyway.”
TONY WIGGINS
“So he broke up with you?”
“Yes. But that’s not what I … what I’m trying to say. The next day, my stomach started to ache and I started to have all these pains. I went to the doctor and he told me that I was several months pregnant. But,” and she broke down in tears, “I would never have the baby. I had miscarried from having sex.”
I don’t know if I believed what she said, but she seemed to. Her last word, “sex,” escaped from her throat like a dart out of a blow-gun. She had become so overwhelmed by
the memory that she released the pressure on her hands and legs and allowed Wiggins’s contraption to snap tightly around her neck. Her head hit the floor, unconscious. Still shocked by her confession, I bent down in a daze and began fumbling with the knots and rope, unable to do a thing as her face swelled from red to purple. Wiggins pulled an army knife out of his pocket and sliced through the cord trailing from her neck, releasing the tension. But she didn’t wake up. We slapped her, screamed at her, dumped water on her. Nothing worked. This was bad. I didn’t want to be the first rock-and-roller to have actually killed a girl due to backstage hedonism.
After three minutes, she groaned and blinked her eyes open. That was probably the last time she ever wanted to go backstage again.
ABUSE: RECEIVED
When we returned to New Orleans to start recording after the tour, we thought life would return to normal. But just as Wiggins had shown us the true meaning of indulgence, a word we only thought we understood up till then, New Orleans taught us about hate, depression and frustration. People like to think of hate and misanthropy as protective shells built up against the world. But in my case, they came not from a hardness but from an emptiness, from the fact that my humanity was draining away like the blood from all the wounds I had inflicted on myself. In order to feel anything—pleasure or pain—I had to chase after experiences that were more than normal and more than human. New Orleans, where the only thing to do was laugh about how depressing it was, had to be the worst possible place to search for meaning and humanity. It was like trying to find warmth in a hooker’s embrace. If touring had extinguished what little was left of my morality, New Orleans devoured my soul.
Long Hard Road Out of Hell Page 18
