The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

society they live in or the things they take for granted. Sometimes, as a concrete lesson in making assumptions, I’d toss into the audience dozens of ziploc bags—half of them filled with chocolate chip cookies, the other half with cat turds.
    I was also interested in the danger and menace of seemingly innocent children’s movies, books and objects, like metal lunchboxes, which were banned in Florida because the state was worried kids would use them to beat each other senseless. During “Lunchbox,” I regularly set a metal lunchbox on fire, took off all my clothes and danced around it, trying to exorcise its demons. In an attempt to reiterate the lesson of Willy Wonka in my own style during other shows, I hung a donkey piñata over the crowd and put a stick on the edge of the stage. Then I would warn, “Please, don’t break this open. I beg you not to.” Human psychology being what it is, kids in the crowd would invariably grab the stick and smash the piñata apart, forcing everyone to suffer the consequence, which in this case was a shower of cow brains, chicken livers and pig intestines from a disemboweled donkey. People would slam-dance and slip on this mass of now-spoiled meat, cracking their heads open in a total intestinal freak-out. The outrageous stunts, however, came later, after a disastrous trip to Manhattan during which I wrote my first real song.

    A girl with a pretentious name like Asia, who I had met while she was working at a McDonald’s in Fort Lauderdale, was spending the summer in New York and offered to fly me up for a weekend. Although I was going out with Teresa, I accepted—mainly because I didn’t like Asia and just wanted a free trip to New York. I thought that maybe I could find a record executive to sign our band, so I brought along a crude demo tape. I was never happy with our demos, which Scott always recorded, because we sounded like a tinny industrial band and I imagined us playing rawer, more immediate punk rock.
    Manhattan turned out to be a disaster. I discovered that Asia had lied to me about her name and age. She had used her sister’s ID to get a job at McDonald’s because she was too young. I got pissed—it wasn’t that big a deal, but it was another case of a girl deceiving me—and stormed out of her apartment. In the street, by a coincidence or not, I ran into two club rats from South Florida, Andrew and Suzie, a couple of dubious sexuality. I always thought they looked sharp and stylish in clubs, but seeing them for the first time in daylight that afternoon I realized that they used makeup and darkness to practice Gothic deception. In the afternoon sun, they looked like decomposing corpses and seemed at least ten years older than me.
    In their hotel room, the cable system had public-access channels, a completely new phenomenon to me. I spent hours flipping through the stations, watching Pat Robertson preach about society’s evils and then ask people to call him with their credit card number. On the adjacent channel, a guy was greasing up his cock with Vaseline and asking people to call and give him their credit card number. I grabbed the hotel notepad and started writing down phrases: “Cash in hand and dick on screen, who said God was ever clean?” I imagined Pat Robertson finishing his more-righteous-than-thou patter, then calling 1-900-VASELINE. “Bible-belt ‘round Anglo-waste, putting sinners in their place/Yeah, right, great, if you’re so good explain the shit stains on your face.” Thus “Cake and Sodomy” was born.
    I had written other songs I thought were good, but “Cake and Sodomy” was more than just a good song. As an anthem for a hypocritical America slobbering on the tit of Christianity, it was a blueprint for our future message. If televangelists were going to make the world seem so wicked, I was going to give them something real to cry about. And years later, they did. The same person who inspired “Cake and Sodomy,” Pat Robertson, went on to quote the song’s lyrics and misinterpret them for his flock on The 700 Club .
    When I came back from New York, my real troubles began. Teresa was supposed to pick me up at the airport, but she never showed up and nobody answered the phone at her house. So I called Carl and Nancy, since they lived near the airport.
    â€œDo you know where the fuck Teresa is?” I asked. “I had a shitty