by Corey Taylor
Ask yourself this: after we’ve killed each other off or reached a point in our technology at which we can leave this planet and populate the universe with our nonsense, when the aliens come to sift through the wreckage of our civilization in the aeons to come, what do you want them to find? Do you want them to judge us by Bach or Bieber? Do you want them to read Victor Hugo or The View’s Summer Cookbook? Do you think they’ll assume the greatest of us all was Stephen Hawking or Johnny Manziel? Based on what they find, will they come to hunt us down so we can’t spread our buffoonery across the cosmos? Or will they simply look around at all the garbage left behind, contemplating the shit we used to distract ourselves with, scratch their tentacles, look at each other, and say, “Really? This is what they thought was good?”
Yes, I worry about what the aliens will think of us. I’m no “ancient astronaut theorist.” I don’t think we’ve been visited by a more advanced species. I don’t think they’re plotting to come invade. I think that if they’re watching, they’re doing the same thing I am: wondering why the fuck you people are mesmerized by all of this half-assed entertainment. They’re sitting in their spaceships, watching our habits, and they’ve come to the conclusion that we’re all apes in designer clothes. They think we’re fucking dumbasses. They are amazed that we can feed and shelter ourselves with all the stupidity we involve ourselves with. Worse yet, they believe our stupidity is contagious. They think that if they come here to make contact, they might catch our “dummy” virus. It scares the living … well, whatever they call their poop, that’s what gets scared out of them. And these amazing beings, beings beyond our capacity to understand, are leaving us alone. They have quarantined themselves from us. They ain’t coming back until the house is empty and the lights are all off, and only then will they wait to see whether there’s still any “stupid” blowing around in the wind. They’re keeping their distance, which is a disappointment to me. That’s because I really wish they’d come back to pick me up and take me with them. With all the brain damage in the world today, you can’t blame me.
The world’s IQ is approaching single digits. The looks in people’s eyes are glassy and glossy, staring past the person next to them and out into the distance at nothing in particular. The bastard thing about it is that I’m getting too tired to fight it.
Who will help me?
CHAPTER 10
HELLO, POT—I’M KETTLE
I’D LIKE TO use this opportunity and platform to fill in the blanks about some unknown facts regarding the handsome author of the book you hold in your hands. That would be me, if anyone was wondering. Cheeky bastards—you try to slip one nice thing about yourself onto paper, and they pounce on it like a rat on nipples …
Let me just set the record straight: I have never knowingly eaten my own boogers. That might be contrary to popular belief but it’s true—they were all by accident, and let me say, I didn’t enjoy them. Seriously! A few have indeed made their way into my mouth via running or vigorous sweat rotation. However, I’ve never done anything to hasten their descent, like tilting back for easier access. Having read that last sentence, I can honestly say that could be taken a lot of different ways, and I’m embarrassed to have written it. Then again, as you can see I haven’t deleted it, so I must not give a runny-thong stain whether anyone cares—either that, or I need the word count. It’s getting harder and harder to space these fucking books out to the appropriate length. So just to sum up: I have never eaten my nose resin of my own volition, but in certain circumstances I have come to know (and appreciate) the taste and color. I’m not sure what bearing that has on what we’re here to discuss, really, but the point, I guess, is to show that I am no Zeus lording over the council; I am just as horribly fucked up as you are.
I have a long-standing relationship with idiocy. We go way back. We’re “totes close,” as people who will outlive me might say. However, I am not oblivious to its existence like some folks are. I am well aware that I have blank patches in the rearview image of my mind, sort of like the blind spots where you can’t see the other cars or, in this case, the places where your intelligence touches cotton just before the know-how takes a shit. Think about those moments when you’re just about to do something, probably something you’ve done a million times, and suddenly your brain plays a game of Files Not Found. You find yourself standing in the middle of the kitchen, wondering why in the sheer fuck did you wander in there in the first place. Until you reboot, that’s exactly where you stay, twisting a bit with a quizzical look that conveys to everyone who sees it that you are confused and need an adult. That happens to me a lot. Welcome to the Hell of Duh.
The Hell of Duh is a fixed point on a moving moment: it is able to cut across every single smart thing you have ever done and make you feel like a moron who still needs supervision. Every man, woman, and child through history, from Gandhi to Gulliver in his travels, has had to dance at the barrage of bullets called the Hell of Duh, prancing to avoid getting shot in the toes. We are just as prone to Kemp as we are to Kemper—such is life as a slack-jawed human looking for sustenance and satisfaction. I am no stranger to these proclivities; as smart as I purport to be, I am just as much a fuck-up as I am a purveyor of frivolous writ. We all have a golf bag full of crosses to bear. Mine resemble the rakes I’m too stupid to walk around in the yard, ensuring that the big wooden handle smacks me right in the fucking face. It’s been a problem as long as I can remember … in fact, let me tell you about the time I shot a hole in my grandmother’s wall and blamed it on an unfortunate vacuum cleaner accident.
Every word of that sentence is true: I’ll explain …
I must have been twelve years old. My sister Barbi and I were in Des Moines for the summer, staying with my Gram and hanging out with our cousins from Indianola. It was the day after a sleepover at Gram’s house. We’d spent most of the time at the cousins’ house, so we gave my Aunt Sandy a break and went to Des Moines. It was my cousins Craig and Todd, my sister, and myself alone in my Gram’s house while she was at work. Now, I’m on record about my Gram being something of a collector—not a hoarder, just too stubborn to let go of anything. This means her house is a bit of a treasure trove, full of wonders from every decade and the various generations who lived there. To a group of young kids with nothing to do, it’s basically an open-season challenge to see what you can find. Everything from artifacts from the sixties to fancy dice brought home from Vegas were up for grabs. So the scavenger hunt was on.
We fanned out around the house, intent on discovery and a tiny pinch of mischief. My Gram’s house is a fairly simple format: through the front door is the living room. Heading to the left takes you to the kitchen, with access to the garage (to the left) and the basement (down the stairs to the right) through their respective doors. If you turned right through the living room, you gained egress to the bedrooms and the bathroom, all built around a tiny hallway that separates them. You could literally leave one bedroom, take a step, and be in another bedroom—it was close quarters living, but it was and still is a very nice house that I enjoyed living in. Until I bought my own houses, my Gram’s place was the longest I ever lived in one spot, and to this day I still consider that the house I grew up in.
Anyway, Craig went into the garage. Barbo, as I called her, was in a spare bedroom. Todd was in the living room. I was in the spare bedroom closest to the living room, digging about. It was the room that had the most dressers and drawers in it, so I’d called dibs on it. One time I’d found an entire “Paint by Numbers” set in there. Upon completion I saw that it was a very sardonic representation of a clown woman, brown hair flowing back behind her head and white face paint running into her lipstick. Then again, that might have been because I’m terrible at painting or drawing, but to me, it was an unusually stirring example of the eternal struggle between happiness and misery. It was the best thing I’d ever attempted to claim as illustrative art.
My cat named Scratch pissed on it. It was thrown away. Long story …
A thought occurred to me …
Dudes and chicks, listen: I was twelve. I already didn’t know shit from shit. I could barely find my penis on a map, let alone discern a good idea from a bad decision. So let me describe the carnage that ensued with what can only be called “journalistic integrity”—meaning I won’t sugarcoat my Hellish Duh for the benefit of the cameras and those watching at home. It’s quite simple: I wanted to hold the damn thing in my hands like a hunter. Any time this idea had come to me in the past, my Gram had always been there to thwart my stupidity. But now I was on my own, left to devices that were most likely running low on power. So with no one to stop me, I reached up and took the gun from its vaunted place on the rack, cradled it in my hands, and waved it around a bit. It was heavy—American steel and wood comingling in a classic fashion designed to make bad things disappear and living animals turn into dinner. Having that thing in my hands should have registered as a responsibility, not as a toy. But again, I was twelve—literally every idea I’d had up to that point was terrible. But none of them were as bad as the one I was about to make in that moment.
I pulled the trigger.
That’s how I found out it’d been loaded.
Why the hell was the thing loaded? I was twelve: I didn’t know that you always check to make sure that a gun isn’t loaded before you do anything with it. I didn’t know that it was an even bigger mistake to pull the trigger on a strange gun in an enclosed space. So you can imagine what happened next. The gun went off, blowing a hole in the bedroom wall and filling the room with noise and smoke. It was extremely loud. I didn’t hear myself scream bloody murder because it had scared the ever livin’ fuck out of me. I didn’t hear a lot of anything because my ears were ringing like the morning after they choose a new pope. I missed the cries of surprise from the other rooms from my sister and Craig, who I had also scared to death. But the real panic set in when I realized that the wall I’d just shot through faced the living room. Todd had been in the living room. I froze. Suddenly this wasn’t just a mistake; this was turning into a fucking nightmare.
Two things were going for me that day: (1) luck decided to move Todd over a couple of feet just before I’d fired the gun, and (2) the gun had been loaded with weak buckshot, not a slug. So after the initial explosion from the gun and even though it had punched a hole through the wall, the energy was dispersed enough that it merely sent a spray of BBs across the living room. I think one hit Todd, but it was harmless. A few, however, did chip the TV screen a bit, and the carpet was littered with tiny metal balls and drywall. So as I was being screamed at by my family for nearly killing my cousin (I said I was sorry, but you know …), I pulled out Gram’s ancient-ass vacuum cleaner. It was one of the old ones you drug behind you, with a long hose that connected to a long metal tube that then connected to the sucking mechanism. It was a classic POS: tape had been used to keep the metal tube connected to the sucker because it was always coming apart, and the body of the vacuum was so heavy that you needed two hands to drag the fucker anywhere. It was while I was cleaning up the debris that I hatched an ingenious plan.
The hole in the wall was very visible from the living room; you could see the bedroom through it. But there was a closet door that swung open and obscured the light flooding through it. So I stuck a rag in the hole on the bedroom side and opened the closet door to hide the evidence—nobody was going to open or close it to get a better look if they didn’t know what to look for. By putting the rag in the hole, from the living room side it just looked like a hole in the wall, not the scene of a crime. I told my cousins and my sister my plan and threatened them with silent violence if they didn’t toe the line. When Gram came home, she totally knew that something had happened; she just didn’t know what. That’s when I explained to her that “as I was vacuuming the hallway, that damn metal tube had come unhooked from the tube. The slip threw me off balance, and all my weight fell on the metal tube, which then punched a hole in the wall of the living room.” She listened dutifully, nodding a bit and studying the hole. Because the rag was in the hole on the other side, it appeared that it was only on the living room side. With a pinch of skepticism, she bought it. At least she said she did. I’m fairly certain you could still smell the gunpowder and there was still a bit of plaster on the floor. But she said she believed me.
My cousins and Barbo couldn’t believe it. Todd didn’t speak to me for a while.
Obviously I’m not twelve anymore. I’ve gotten older, but I haven’t gotten any better. You know what it is? I’m great at the big shit and the trivial shit but I suck at the little things. Well, they may not seem little to anyone else, but that’s how I look at them anyway. Cook a big dinner for the whole family? No sweat—I’m your man. But ask me to program a garage-door opener? Nope—I’m as lost as a remote in the couch cushions. Mow the lawn, call some shots, or wax eloquently about the Battle of Hastings in 1066? Gimme the ball skipper and I’ll take it to the hole. Adjust the settings in the car, change out the filter in the furnace or AC unit, or deal with some shit at the Department of Motor Vehicles? I might as well be ten years old with a bus ticket: I don’t know what to do, where I’m going, or who to meet when I get there. I know to some of you this shit is pretty simple. To me, it’s like trying to work calculus with a hacky sack. I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m great at some shit and rubbish at others. But it took patience and about twenty years to figure it out.
If I’m being completely honest, most of my profound ignorance seems to circle around any dealings I have with money. It’s the biggest reason I have a very powerful man I only quietly refer to as “Mr. Shore” handling these things for me—and God help me, if I don’t call him “Mr. Shore.” He has a paddle in his office with my name branded into the wood. Money is a motherfucker if you don’t know how to handle it. I’ve mentioned some of my bigger financial missteps in Seven Deadly Sins. But those are just the whales. My pond still has a few quirky fish swimming in it. I once paid $100 to a guy selling speakers out of the back of a van. I received one speaker that I then had to drag home, only to find out from Economaki that it wasn’t worth a shit. One time I traded my old drum set for a guitar worth half as much. Can you see the trend here? I’m not great with “worth,” really. As recently as a year and a half ago I decided I was going to get tickets for my family and I to attend a Daniel Tosh concert in Las Vegas. Feeling like a real adult, I went online, found a site that was selling tickets, and bought enough for all of us. I didn’t look at other sites and I didn’t compare prices to see whether I could find them cheaper; I just hit “Buy Now.” You can imagine my embarrassment when I was shown I’d paid about four times too much for these seats. My defense? “But they’re second row!” It didn’t help my case.
If I had a defining story for how abysmal I am with money, it would be the Overpriced Rickshaw Story.
Now to the people who inhabit New York City and any other metropolis that is infested with these modes of transportation, you know what a rickshaw is. Anyone who has watched more than twenty-six episodes of Seinfeld may remember Kramer’s gambit with his own rickshaw and the ensuing rigmarole. But for those who don’t know, a rickshaw is basically a bike connected to the backseat of a car, usually with a canopy of some sort to shield the passengers from the sun. The originals were more like carts, with the controller pulling it along by its two long handles like a running back training in the off season. But the modern rickshaw looks like it has more in common with Lance Armstrong than Forrest Gump, and you don’t need dope or new blood to tool along the mean streets of that city. They fe
el a little rugged when they first cast off, but once they get a head of steam going, they fly like a bomber on a night raid and inflict about as much damage on the flow of cars and trucks as well as your spine. Now you can visualize what a rickshaw is. So now my tale can begin …
A few years ago Steph and I had brought the kids out on the Mayhem Tour with us: Griff, my niece Haven, and my nephew Drew along with my sister-in-law Jackie and our family friend Kira. We were lucky enough to have a couple of days off in New York City, so we all went on a family sightseeing adventure. Ironically the day would be capped off by dinner with Mr. Shore and his lovely wife. When it was time to head to the restaurant, we discovered there were a few too many of us to get in one cab. No big deal: there are cabs all over the island. But I had a better idea, and by “better” I really mean “a terrible idea that started out as an innocent way to have fun.” Don’t all terrible ideas start out that way? I’m sure when Napoleon invaded Russia, he was thinking, “Christmas will be great! Snow and vodka for EVERYONE!”
