Long Hard Road Out of Hell (14 page)

O
NE OF MY EARLY ILLUSTRATIONS

the spooky kids

H
E THREW UP HIS HANDS IN EXASPERATION.
“I’
M NOT BEING SARCASTIC
, I’
M TRYING TO USE A LITTLE VERBAL SHOCK TREATMENT TO MAKE YOU SEE HOW CRAZY YOU BOTH SOUND
! Y
OU ARE TALKING ABOUT A GODDAMN PEN NAME COMING TO LIFE!”

—
Stephen King, The Dark Half

M
ARILYN
Manson was the perfect story protagonist for a frustrated writer like myself. He was a character who, because of his contempt for the world around him and, more so, himself, does everything he can to trick people into liking him. And then, once he wins their confidence, he uses it to destroy them.

He would have been in a longish short story, about sixty pages. The title would have been “The Payback,” and it would have been rejected by seventeen magazines. Today, it would be in the garage of my parent’s house in Florida, faded and mildewed with all the other stories.

But it was too good an idea to rot. The year was 1989 and Miami’s 2 Live Crew were beginning to make headlines because store owners across the country were getting arrested for selling their album—classified as obscenity—to minors. Pundits and celebrities were rushing to aid the band, to prove that their lyrics were not titillation but art. A culturally significant chain of events had been set in motion simply because of dirty nursery rhymes like: “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet with her legs gapped open wide/Up came a spider, looked up inside her and said, ‘That pussy’s wide.’”

At the time I was reading books about philosophy, hypnosis, criminal psychology and mass psychology (along with a few occult and true crime paperbacks). On top of that, I was completely bored, sitting around watching
Wonder Years
reruns and talk shows and realizing how stupid Americans were. All of this inspired me to create my own science project and see if a white band that wasn’t rap could get away with acts far more offensive and illicit than 2 Live Crew’s dirty rhymes. As a performer, I wanted to be the loudest, most persistent alarm clock I could be, because there didn’t seem like any other way to snap society out of its Christianity- and media-induced coma.

Since nobody was publishing my poetry, I convinced Jack Kearnie, the owner of Squeeze, a small club in the middle of a mall, to start an open-mike night. This way, I could at least get some exposure for my writing. Every Monday, I stood awkward and vulnerable behind the microphone on the small stage and recited a handful of poems and prose pieces to a meager crowd. All the bizarre characters who attended told me my poetry sucked, but I had a good voice and should start a band. I told them to fuck off. But inside I knew that no one really likes poetry anyway and that their advice was right—if only because no one else I interviewed or listened to was writing songs with any intelligence. I had always dreamt of making music because it was such an important part of my life, but until then I never had the confidence or the faith in my abilities to pursue it seriously. All I needed were a few resilient souls to go through hell with me.

The Kitchen Club was the epicenter of South Beach Miami’s burgeoning underground industrial scene and a regular haunt of mine from the time it opened that year, tucked inside a sleazy hotel populated by prostitutes, drug addicts and vagrants. There was a pool in the back with water filthy from being used as a combination bathtub-Laundromat by alcoholics who had pissed and shat themselves. I would go to the hotel on Friday night, rent a room and by the end of the weekend find myself alone and miserable, puking in the bathtub from ingesting too much trucker speed and too many screwdrivers.

One Friday I arrived at the club with a friend from theater class, Brian Tutunick. I was decked out in a navy blue trench coat with “Jesus Saves” painted on the back, striped stockings and combat boots. At the time I thought I looked cool, but in retrospect I looked like an asshole. (“Jesus Saves”?) As we walked in, we noticed a blond guy leaning against a pillar with a Flock of Seagulls haircut hanging in his face. He was smoking a cigarette and laughing. I thought he was laughing at me, but when I passed by he didn’t even turn his head. He was just staring into space, cackling like a madman.

As Laibach’s Yugoslavian military march version of “Life Is Life” blasted out of the sound system, I spotted a girl with black hair and huge breasts (which, when they were on a Goth girl like her, we called Dracula biscuits). Shouting over the music, I explained to her that I had a hotel room and tried to convince her to come up with me. But, for the ninety-ninth time that summer, I was denied because she had come to the club with a date, which turned out to be laughing boy. She brought me to his pillar, and I asked him what he was laughing about. His response came in the form of a tutorial on the proper ways to commit suicide, which included essential details like the exact angle to hold the shotgun at and what type of ammunition to use. The whole time he had a strange way of laughing at everything he said. He’d just start cackling, and within that cackle he’d repeat what he had just said—a word like
twelve-gauge
or
cerebral cortex
—so that both you and he knew what was so funny.

His name was Stephen, but, he explained in the ensuing seminar, if anyone called him Steve, it pissed him off. If anyone spelled his name with a
v
instead of a
ph
, it pissed him off too. The subject of names didn’t change until Ministry’s “Stigmata” came on and the Goths and pseudo-punks stopped dancing and started violently slamming. Much of the commotion was instigated by an effeminate, Crispin Glover-looking guy with purple hair, a mini-skirt and a leopard-skin leotard. He would eventually become our second bassist. Completely oblivious to the activity around him, Stephen told me that if I liked Ministry, I should listen to Big Black. He then delved into a detailed analysis of Steve Albini’s guitar playing—the techniques he used and the tones he produced—followed by a dissertation on Albini’s methods of production and the lyrical content of his album
Songs About Fucking
.

I didn’t get laid that night, which pissed me off, though it was nothing new. But I did exchange numbers with Stephen. He called me the next week and said he wanted to make me a cassette of
Songs About Fucking
and bring me something else he thought I’d be extremely interested in. He wouldn’t say what it was. He just wanted to come over and give it to me.

Instead of Big Black, he brought me a tape of a band called Rapeman, and he spent several hours extemporizing on the lineage between the two bands, rocking back and forth autistically all the while. I later learned he had a problem with hyperactivity as a child, which his parents had treated with Ritalin. Now that he wasn’t on medication, he often turned into a babbling blur that was dizzying to watch. His mystery surprise was a rusty can of spiced sardines that had expired in June 1986. He never offered an explanation for it, and I never figured one out. Maybe he thought I was going to pull an Andy Warhol and make silk screens of it.

We began spending a lot of time together, hanging out at my poetry readings and going to concerts by shitty South Florida bands that I thought were halfway decent at the time. After a show one night, we came back to my house and pawed through poems I wanted to turn into songs and lyrical scraps I had written. I was hoping he played an instrument since he seemed to know everything there was to know about all things electrical, mechanical, and pharmaceutical. So I asked. The answer came in the form of a long-winded monologue about how his brother was a jazz musician and played a variety of reed, keyboard and percussion instruments.

Eventually, he confessed, “I can play drums—heh, heh, heh, drums, heh, heh—sort of—heh, heh, sort of, heh.”

But my vision didn’t include drums. I wanted to start a rock band that used a drum machine, which seemed somewhat novel at the time since only industrial, dance and hip-hop bands used drum machines. “Just buy a keyboard and we’ll start a band,” I told him.

Stephen didn’t end up in the first incarnation of the group. Neither did the next person I found that I liked. I was at a record store in Coral Square Mall buying Judas Priest and Mission U.K. tapes as birthday presents for my cousin Chad. A well-tanned store employee who looked like an exotic Middle Eastern skeleton with an afro bigger than Brian May’s walked over and tried to foist Love and Rockets albums on me. His nametag identified him as Jeordie White. One of his coworkers, a girl named Lynn, had given blow jobs and much more to most of the South Florida scene, excluding me but including Jeordie (though he denies it to this day). Almost a year later, Jeordie and I would form a joke band called Mrs. Scabtree and perform a song about Lynn’s legacy to the music scene. It was called “Herpes.” Jeordie sang it dressed like Diana Ross and I played drums using a chamberpot as a stool. Jeordie would go on to play in my band as Twiggy Ramirez. But for now, Jeordie was just a friendly freak in a Bauhaus T-shirt trying to find someone who understood him.