The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

was engaged to someone else, I promised myself that I would try to close myself off emotionally to the world and trust no one. I didn’t want to get carried away by my feelings again; I needed to stop being victimized by my own weaknesses and insecurities about other people, especially women. Rachelle left me with a scar deeper than any I’ve since inflicted on myself. It was partly out of anger and revenge that I wanted to get famous and make her regret dumping me. Another reason was that I was frustrated with music journalism. The problem wasn’t the magazines or my writing, but the musicians themselves. Each successive interview I did, the more disillusioned I became. Nobody had anything to say. I felt like I should be answering the questions instead of asking them. I wanted to be on the other side of the pen.
    I interviewed Debbie Harry, Malcolm McLaren and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I wrote promotional biographies for Yngwie Malmsteen and other metal assholes. I even published an article on Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails with no premonition that we were about to begin a relationship that, like a long stay in Mistress Barbara’s dungeon, would be strewn with unforseeable peaks of pleasure and pain.
    When I first saw Trent, he was sulking in the corner during soundcheck as his dreadlocked tour manager, Sean Beavan, hovered protectively over him. Once we started talking, he thawed and became affable. But I was just another journalist. Talking to me was as good a way as any for him to kill time before a show in a city where he knew no one.
    The next time Trent Reznor came to town, I was his opening act.

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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!”
    â€” 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