The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

famous as I seem to be.
    â€œI spent my adolescence masturbating to that bitch,” a roadie—mine?—cackles in my face.
    â€œWho?” I ask.
    â€œThat.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œTraci Lords, you lucky fucker.”
    On the floor beneath us there is a tall, slouched man with long black hair and a face painted white. He is wearing platform boots, torn fishnet stockings, black leather shorts and a shredded black T-shirt. He looks just like me, or a parody of me. I wonder if he is me.
    A fat girl with metal rods and hoops stuck through half of her face and lipstick smeared over the rest notices me staring at the tall man. She comes upstairs, pushes past a stocky bodyguard—mine?—and, as her face strobes grotesquely in the light, explains, “You wanna know who that guy is? Nobody really knows his name. He’s totally homeless. He makes his money hooking, and then spends it trying to look like you. He always comes in here and dances to your records.”
    I listen to the music again. The DJ has put on “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. But it’s slower, darker, meaner. And the voice singing is mine. I need to get away from this surreal scene, away from all these people who are treating me like I’m some sort of star they can suck a little brightness out of. Traci takes my hand and leads me away, moving like mercury through the admiring rubble. We step behind a white, gauzy curtain to an empty VIP room full of untouched deli sandwiches and sit down. There is something in my hands … a piece of paper. I try to focus on the thick, smudged lines. “Dear, Lovely Brian,” it begins. “I want to kick my boyfriend out, and I want you to move in with me. You said last week that you weren’t happy with the way things were going with Teresa”—fuck, it’s from Nancy—“I will make you so happy. I know I can. No one will take care of you like I will. No one will fuck you like I will. I have so much to give you.”
    I put it down. I can’t deal with it right now, not while I’m on this trip. Will I ever get off this trip? Nancy is standing in the bathroom doorway looking at me, her bare midriff slightly distended below her tight, navy T-shirt. Her thumb is thrust into the waistband of her jeans and she is biting her lower lip. She doesn’t look sexy. She looks freakish and misshapen, like a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph. I stand up and walk over to her. Teresa and Carl sit on my bed watching the movie, completely oblivious to us and Stephen’s freakish chatter.
    The breeze blows in cool and logical from the open window of my bathroom, which is pitch black, though the lights in my head strobe on. I grope for the porcelain edge of the bathtub and sit down, trying to still my spinning head and remember what I was going to say to Nancy. I can hear music now, far too big and loud for my bathroom. I feel myself blacking out and try to fight it.
    The music grows louder in my head. “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!”
    The music is not just in my head anymore. It’s the Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime,” and it’s all over me, vibrating against my back. I’m lying on the floor, blinking open my eyes and trying to regain consciousness.
    â€œAnd you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”
    She—Traci—is leaning over me, pulling my shirt over butterflied lacerations I never knew I had. Her other hand is working on the buttons of my pants. Her mouth is hot and syrupy, and I can taste cigarettes and Jack Daniel’s. She begins to do things with that mouth and those tiny hands and pomegranate red nails that millions of men have watched on second-generation videotapes for years—films I was never interested in, despite my fascination with her life. She lowers my pants and, with arms perfectly crossed, pulls off her top. She hikes up her skirt, not to remove it but to show me she’s not wearing any underwear. I’m transfixed. She doesn’t seem dirty, as if she’s playing a role in a porno movie, even when she’s giving me head. She is delicate, protective and angelic, a feather suspended in midair above an inferno of debasement and carnography. I’m drunk and, for that split second, I’m also in love. Through the thin lace curtain separating our tangle of tongue, fingernail and flesh from the rest