The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

enjoyed it, particularly the story by Clive Barker. I haven’t heard from you, and wonder whether you received the poems that were included with my subscription request. I am more eager now than before to be published in Night Terrors Magazine . I feel that it is the perfect place for my work. Please respond soon and let me know if you received my last submission, or if you’d like me to send it again.
    Sincerely,                  
    Brian Warner             
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    July 8, 1988                 
    Night Terrors Magazine
    1007 Union Street         
    Schenectady, NY 12308
    Brian Warner
    3450 Banks Rd. #207
    Margate, FL 33063
    Hey Brian,
    Nice to hear from you. Thanks for the nice words about NT ; yes, I read your poems, and enjoyed them, but did not think they were right for NT . I’m sorry; I must’ve forgotten to respond to them. But please submit again soon; I’m really enjoying your work.
    Till then,                      
    John Glazer                  
    Editor                          

i wasn’t born with enough middle fingers
    C ’MON BABIES GREASE YOUR LIPS P UT ON YOUR HATS AND SWING YOUR HIPS D ON’T FORGET TO BRING YOUR WHIPS W E’RE GOIN’ TO THE F REAKER’S B ALL .
    â€“Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, “Freaker’s Ball”
    W HEN you have friends, you form a band. When you’re lonely, you write. So that’s how I spent my first months in Fort Lauderdale. As my father worked at Levitz Furniture, supposedly a big opportunity for him, I sat alone at home and brought my most twisted fantasies to life in poems, stories and novellas. I sent them everywhere from Penthouse to The Horror Show to The American Atheist . Every morning I rushed to the door as soon as I heard the mailman. But all he carried in his bag was disappointment: either nothing or a rejection letter. Only one story, “Moon on the Water,” about an alcoholic writer with a cat named Jimi Hendrix and a well that swallows everyone he loves, was ever published—in a small journal called The Writer’s Block .
    Disappointment followed me like a ball and chain that first year in Florida. The more work I did, the less it paid off. I was leading a pathetic life: living with my parents and attending Broward Community College, where I studied journalism and theater because it was all that interested me. For extra money, I became the night manager of a local Spec’s, a record chain where I soon found an opportunity to revert to the type of behavior that had gotten me into trouble in Christian school.
    There were two cute girls who worked at the store. The one that liked me, of course, was heavily medicated and obsessed with killing herself. The one I liked was Eden, named after the garden of earthly delights, but she refused to share any of those earthly delights with me. In a callow attempt to be cool, I made a deal with them: They could smoke pot in the back of the store if they agreed to steal cassettes for me. Since there was a security guard who searched our bags whenever we left the premises, I bought the girls sixteen-ounce soft-drink cups from Sbarro’s and instructed them to fill the containers with as many cassettes by the Cramps, the Cure, Skinny Puppy and so on as would fit. The week Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking came out, I had Eden steal it and then unsuccessfully tried to coax her into coming with me to their concert at Woody’s on the Beach.
    My first article in my college newspaper, The Observer , was a review of that show, headlined “Jane’s Addiction Returns to Shock Crowd at Woody’s.” Little did I know that there was a word in that headline that would go on to be used several thousand times to describe my music, and it wasn’t “woody.” Even more unforseeable was the fact that many years later I would be in a Los Angeles hotel room trying to keep Jane’s Addiction’s guitarist, Dave Navarro, from giving me a blow job as we sniffed drugs together. (If memory serves me correctly, Dave ended up hanging out in the room of my bassist, Twiggy Ramirez, who