The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

backyard. It’s dark, it’s empty and something feels wrong. I’m not sure how long I’ve been inside.
    I step outside and wander around. Intricate designs, like sketchy pencil drawings, appear in the air, only to be erased moments later. I trip out on them for a while before I realize it’s raining. It doesn’t really matter. I feel so light and uncorporeal that the rain seems to be dropping through me, penetrating the layers of light my body is emanating. Nancy comes up to me and tries to touch me and understand. Now I’m definitely freaking out.
    With Nancy in tow, filling the air with the store-bought scent of dead flowers, I walk downhill to a small, man-made creek. Everywhere there are gray-skinned toads, jumping on the rocks and in the grass. Each step I take, I squish several of them, squeezing out gray-blue blood. Their entrails stick to my shoe, discolored, dead and yellow like blades of grass trapped under the metal rails of lawn furniture. I’m driving myself crazy trying not to kill these things, who have kids and parents and lives to get back to. Nancy is trying to relate to me and I’m trying to pretend like I’m paying attention. But all I can think about are the dead toads. I feel pretty confident that this is what a bad trip feels like—because if this is a good trip, then Timothy Leary has a lot of explaining to do.
    I sit down on a rock and try to collect myself, to tell myself that this is all just a drug thinking for me, that the real Marilyn Manson will be back in a moment. Or is this right now the real Marilyn Manson, and the other one just a shallow representation?
    My mind is spinning like the wheel of a slot machine around my consciousness. Some images I recognize—the creepy stairs to my old basement room, Nancy playing dead in a cage, Ms. Price’s flash cards. Others I don’t—a leering police officer wearing a Baptist church cap, photographs of a blood-drenched pussy, a scab-covered woman tortously tied up, a mob of kids tearing up an American flag. Suddenly, the wheel stops on one image. It bobbles up and down blurrily in my mind several times before I can make it out. It’s a face, large and expressionless. Its skin is pasty and yellowish, as if jaundiced from hepatitis. Its lips are completely black, and around each eye a thick black figure, like a rune, has been drawn. Slowly, it dawns on me that the face is mine.
    My face is lying on a table near a bed. I reach to touch it, and notice that my arms are stippled with the tattoos I’ve been thinking about getting. My face is paper, it is on the cover of a big, important magazine, and that is why the phone is ringing. I pick it up, and notice that I am not anywhere I recognize. Someone who identifies herself as Traci is trying to tell me that she saw the magazine with my face and it makes her excited. I am supposed to know this person, because she apologizes for not having been in touch for so long. She wants to see me perform tonight at a big auditorium I’ve never heard of. I tell her I’ll take care of it because I am glad that she wants to come but disappointed it is only because she saw my paper face. Then I roll over in a bed that is not mine and go to sleep.
    â€œThe cops are here!”
    Someone is yelling at me, and I open my eyes. I hope that maybe it’s morning and this is over, but I’m still sitting on a rock surrounded by dead toads, Nancy and a guy shouting that the police are busting the party. I can’t figure out which of these things is worse.
    I’ve always been paranoid about the police, because even when I’m not doing anything illegal I’m thinking about doing something illegal. So whenever I’m around a cop, I get uncomfortable and nervous, worried that I’m going to say the wrong thing or look so guilty that they’ll arrest me anyway. Being completely out of my mind on drugs doesn’t help the situation any.
    We start running away. The rain has stopped and everything is wet and soft under my feet, so I feel like I’m sinking into the ground instead of running. Utterly acid-addled, the situation grows to enormous proportions in my mind, and I feel like I’m fleeing for my life. My entire future depends on not getting caught. We arrive and stop dead in front of a Chevrolet covered from hood to trunk with fresh, dripping blood. I’m in too deep.
    â€œWhat the fuck is going on?” I ask