The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

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    Our first real show took place at the Reunion Room. I booked it by telling the manager and DJ, Tim, “Listen, I got this band and we’re going to play here and we want $500.” Normally bands were paid $50 to $150, but Tim agreed to my price. That was lesson number one in music-industry manipulation: If you act like a rock star, you will be treated like one. After the show, we kicked pimplehead and the fat guy out of the band and they no doubt went off to make sandwiches, squeeze zits and star in the sitcom Pimplehead and the Fat Guy , which lasted for two episodes.
    We then lured Brad Stewart, the Crispin Glover look-alike from the Kitchen Club, away from a rival band, Insanity Assassin, which featured Joey Vomit on bass and on vocals Nick Rage, a short, stubby guy who had somehow tricked himself into thinking he was a tall, skinny, attractive guy. It wasn’t hard to convince Brad to play bass with us (even though he had played guitar with Insanity Assassin) since we had similar musical goals—and better stage names. He became Gidget Gein. We let Stephen join the band as Madonna Wayne Gacy, even though he didn’t have a keyboard. Instead, he played with toy soldiers onstage.
    For better but ultimately for worse, one more character ended up in our freak show. Her name was Nancy, and she was psychotic in all the wrong ways. She knew my girlfriend Teresa, who was one of the first people I met after Rachelle had made a fool of me. I was seeking a motherly figure instead of a model’s figure, and I found it at a Saigon Kick concert at the Button South. Teresa came from the same factory as Tina Potts, Jennifer and most of the other girls I ended up with in Ohio. She had a slight overbite, tiny hands and a blond bob not unlike Stephen’s. The two were perpetually mistaken for twins.
    I had seen Nancy once before when I worked at the record store, a hippo Goth looking foolish in a black wedding gown. When Teresa introduced me to her a year later, Nancy had lost fifty pounds and had an I’m-skinny-and-I’m-gonna-pay-back-the-world-for-all-the-times-when-I-was-fat-and-didn’t-get-fucked attitude. She had shoulder-length black curly hair, floppy tits that hung out of a slutty tank top, Hispanic features, a pale face, and a permanent stench that was half flowery, half noxious. Once I told her about the performance art ideas I had for future shows, there was no escaping her: She pushed herself into the band like a tick working its way under an elephant’s skin. Any idea I had that involved a girl—no matter how extreme or humiliating—she immediately volunteered for. Because she was willing and I was desperate—and also since she seemed like somebody other people would dislike as much as they disliked me—I gave in.

    Our antics quickly grew from tame to depraved. The first time we performed together, I sang while holding her on a leash the whole time—to make a point about our patriarchal society, of course, not because it turned me on to drag a scantily clad woman around the stage by a leather leash. Soon afterward, Nancy asked me to punch her in the face, so I began giving her progressively cruder beatings each show.

    It must have caused some brain damage because she began to fall in love with me—even though I was going out with Teresa, who was good friends with Nancy’s boyfriend, Carl, a tall, goofy, well-meaning klutz with big hips and a soft, girlish figure. This lame Real World situation was made even worse when Nancy and I began to explore sexuality as well as pain and dominance onstage. I made out with her and sucked her tits, and she got on her knees and caressed whatever she found down there. Without fucking, we took it as far as we could without getting in trouble with my girlfriend, her boyfriend or the law.
    During one concert we put her in a cage, and, as the band played “People Who Died” by the Jim Carroll Band, I revved up a chain saw and tried to grind through the metal. But the chain flew off the blade, smacked me across the eyes and made a huge gash in my forehead, sending blood streaking down my face. I barely made it through the rest of the show because all I could see was red.
    Like any good performance art, there was a message behind the violence. Most of the time, I wasn’t interested in inflicting pain on myself and others unless it was in a way that would make people think about the way they act, the