The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

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