The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

of denying I had been sleeping with his girlfriend. Teresa stupidly forgave me because she knew how crazy Nancy was. It would have been a happy ending, but I started feeling uncomfortable about the amount of time Teresa and Carl were spending together.
    One afternoon I showed Teresa a demo tape cover I had designed with a gnarled, twisting tree that looked like something from The Wizard of Oz . Days later, a concert poster Carl drew for another band appeared plastered all over town with the exact same tree on it. I was furious with Teresa for giving my idea away to Carl (exacerbated by the fact that I was just bored with her in general), and disgusted by Carl’s sycophantic behavior. I made sure they were both at our next concert and performed a song about Carl, “Thingmaker,” one long rant about how I was sick of his trying to look and act like me, and especially sick of his stealing from me. But the stealing didn’t stop there, because he and Teresa soon started dating, an abomination which continues to this day. Frustrated and betrayed on the day I turned twenty-one, I went to get my first tattoos—a goat’s head on one arm and, on the other, the same tree he had plagiarized from me. It was my way of copyrighting it.
    Though I heard rumors about Nancy, I didn’t see her again until four years later at Squeeze. At first, I thought about making peace with her. She was alone, and every time she passed me, she’d slam her body against mine violently without saying a word. My jealous girlfriend, who was probably in elementary school when everything with Nancy had happened, got upset. “I’m going to fucking kick her ass if she does that again,” she said after Nancy rammed into us for the fourth time that night.
    When Nancy passed by again, my girlfriend blocked her path and yelled in her face, “What’s your problem, you ugly bitch?” Nancy took a bottle and smashed it over her head. My girlfriend must have had experience in the matter, because without even seeming dazed she grabbed my claw ring off my finger and punched Nancy in the face five times with it, fucking her up so badly that I’d be surprised if she didn’t have permanent damage. Because I had some kind of clout at that point, the bouncers kicked Nancy out of the club. The old hatred welled up again, and I wanted to do something heinous and more permanent to her, but I couldn’t find out where she lived.
    *  *  *
    Nancy’s replacement, Missi, not only filled in the gap Nancy left onstage, but the gap Nancy was trying to fill in my life. I met Missi in the midst of the Nancy psychodrama, outside an Amboog-A-Lard concert at Button South, a heavy metal palace where it’s probably still cool to like Slaughter and Skid Row. Brad and I were passing out flyers promoting a show of ours. It was a good way to meet girls, because if they liked you, they knew where to find you. But that’s not what happened with Missi. We exchanged phone numbers right away, and two nights later we were sitting on the beach drinking forty-ounce bottles of Colt 45. I talked about my aspirations for the band. She listened patiently, as she would for years to come.

    M ISSI
    I was too insecure to break up with Teresa at first, and Missi and I became friends. I didn’t have a car, a job, or much of a life, so she would pick me up at home and we’d see a matinee while Teresa was still at the restaurant where she worked.
    As our friendship began to grow into a relationship that winter, I asked Missi if she wanted to be in a show. From our earliest concerts, we had named the back corner of the stage Pogo’s Playhouse, and there he had all kinds of homemade gadgets, contraptions and instruments of torture—most notably a large rectangular lion’s cage that he used as a stand for the keyboard he had mastered playing in less time than it took for him to save up to buy it. For Missi’s debut, we put her in the cage and filled it with chickens. She looked great: a pale, topless eighteen-year-old with long black hair in white underpants camouflaged by the flying feathers of half a dozen chickens.

    When people realized that Nancy had left the band, freaks from all over Florida wanted to get in on the act. So we let them. Sometimes we enlisted them merely as part of a provocative (and hopefully discomforting) spectacle, like when, inspired by the John Waters movie Pink Flamingos , we