The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

my life, but, when needed, I had the necessary willpower and capacity for self-denial on reserve, facilities at least as strong as anyone else’s I had ever encountered. I also had ambition, tremendous ambition, and drugs were now getting in the way of that ambition. One of them had to go.
    When Missi fell asleep, I snuck out of bed and climbed into the barber’s chair, watching the shadows of raindrops play on a white ram’s head perched atop a seven-foot human skeleton, a relic from the altar of the original Process Church in England. Behind me stood two blackened, stained gorilla skulls, staring at me through empty sockets as if angry and impatient. I had a lot of thinking to do. When I first conceived of Antichrist Superstar , I set out to create an apocalypse. But I didn’t realize it was going to be a personal one. As a child, I had been a weakling, a worm, a follower, a small shadow trying to find a place in an infinite world of light. In the end, in order to find that place, I had to sacrifice my humanity—if you could even call such an insecure, guilt-ridden existence humanity. I had to shed my skin, purge my emotions and experience every extreme: I had to keep throwing myself onto the swords until I didn’t feel a thing.
    But in trying everything, all I had discovered was that I didn’t need any of it. From that point, there was nowhere to go but to the grave—or to become more human. After seven stressful months of working (or not working) on the album and dealing with Missi, I had begun to emerge from that soulless cocoon of nonfeeling. As the drugs drained out of my system, humanity—tears, love, hate, self-respect, guilt—was rushing back to me, but not in the same way that I remembered it. My weaknesses had become my strengths, my ugliness had become beauty, my apathy to the world had become a desire to save it. I had become a paradox. Now, more than any other point in my life, I began to believe in myself. I had preached it all the time in my music, but had I practiced it since arriving in New Orleans? Had I ever practiced it? Had I ever been truly capable of it before now?
    The next day, I met Sean Beavan, the sound engineer we had hired to coproduce the album in Dave Ogilvie’s place. We had worked together since Portrait of an American Family , and despite his penchant for cappuccino sipping and roller-blading, we had a lot in common when it came to music and cross-dressing. Though we had to work in an auxiliary studio while Nine Inch Nails mixed “The Perfect Drug” for the David Lynch soundtrack, we didn’t care. We were working, and not just on what I felt was our best song, but the first one I had recorded since quitting cocaine and alcohol. There were songs on the album that took place in the past and the future, but this was one of the only ones set in the present. “You cut off all your fingers/Trade them in for dollar bills/Cake on some more makeup to cover all those lines/Wake up and stop shaking/’Cause you’re just wasting time.” It was the most self-recriminating I had ever been, and it wasn’t just about myself. I had been part of an epidemic of drug abuse, self-abuse and insincerity that seemed to be raging through everyone I met in New Orleans. Their motto: “I’ll be your lover, I’ll be forever, I’ll be tomorrow, I am anything when I’m high.”
    When we played the song for the record company, they hated it. Not only did they want to use the rough mixes instead, they wanted to fire Sean. “Listen,” I was told. “Why don’t we find someone else to mix the album, delay the release, and put it out in January instead of October?”
    â€œNo way,” I insisted, proud for laying down the law, my law. “This is the time to release it, and you know it.”
    That would be the last time I sought anyone’s opinion on my work again.

    Each time I walked to the studio in the weeks that followed, I felt progressively more elated—I was making this album myself, without mentors, managers, and sycophants. The closer we got to completing the album, the more it became like a magnet, drawing the band back in the studio and back together. We found a replacement for Daisy, a deceptively benign Chicago vegetarian with horrible taste in women who now goes by the name of Zim Zum, after sifting through countless videotapes of washed-up metal guitarists kicking dead