The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

had two naked fat ladies making out in a playpen. Other times we made sure that the spectacle came attached to an idea. During one concert, we had a girl on stage with rollers in her hair and a pillow stuffed under her shirt to make her look pregnant. She stood in front of an ironing board, and as we sang she pressed the wrinkles out of a Nazi flag. As the show progressed, she sat spread-eagled on the ironing board and pretended to perform an abortion on herself. Then she wrapped a fake fetus in the swastika flag and offered it ritualistically to a glowing television set in front of her. If we didn’t drive home our point about the fascism of television and the way the American nuclear family sacrifices its children to this cheap, mind-numbing baby-sitter, at least we looked good trying.
    Not every show went according to plan. For one of our first performances in Tampa, we bought a giant canister filled with some 500 crickets that I wanted to cover myself with. But when I opened the can, they had all died. The stench was one of the most rancid things I had ever inhaled, and the odor clung to my hands as strongly as the smell of Tina Potts’s pussy had. I threw up instantly, and in response half a dozen people in the audience, including our future bassist, Jeordie White, did the same. Even if I hadn’t begun the concert with a message in mind, I ended with one: Disgust is contagious.
    Animal rights activists hounded us as incessantly then as they do now, but, outside of that accidental cricket massacre, we never killed any animals—only effigies of animals. In one of our more cartoonish moments, we spent a week building a giant life-sized cow out of papier-mâché and chicken wire. In a cross between Willy Wonka, Apocalypse Now and one of my grandfather’s bestiality magazines, I stuck my fist up the cow’s ass and pulled out gallons of chocolate syrup, covering the crowd with it as Pogo played a sample of Marlon Brando ranting, from Last Tango in Paris , “Until you go right up into the ass of death, right up in his ass, do you find the womb of fear. And then, maybe…” To antagonize the animal rights people even more, we’d buy mechanical cats and pigs that move in response to sound and hang garbage bags filled with intestines over the stage, so that once the toys started moving spastic and lifelike in response to the music and the gore came tumbling down, activists thought we were committing acts of cruelty to animals when, in fact, we were committing acts of cruelty to the activists themselves. Only human rights were violated during our shows—against ourselves, against the girls we caged, and against the fans—but nobody seemed to care about that.
    Each concert was a new adventure in performance art. Since clubs liked to book us on holidays, we always tried to do something special those nights. For our first set on New Year’s Eve, I wore a tuxedo and a top hat. For the second set, a girl named Terri disguised herself as me, wearing a black wig, a tuxedo, a top hat and a very realistic strap-on dildo. When she walked on stage, everybody thought it was me with my dick hanging out of my pants, which was nothing new by that point. As the band began its version of “Cake and Sodomy,” I crept around her and gave her a blow job, so that it seemed like I was sucking my own dick. Maybe that’s where the rumor that I surgically removed my ribs so that I could give myself fellatio started.

    On February 14, Missi and I tried to get arrested at a local club so we could spend Valentine’s Day together in jail. The club was owned by a mafia type who was perpetually slouched under the weight of his gold jewelry and whose employees had police records longer than our set list. There were cops all over the club that night, so I brought Missi out topless in a mask. This time, I was on the receiving end of a blow job. I taunted the cops, challenging them to arrest me, as she violated several Florida laws. But we weren’t arrested. The palms of the police were greased too well.
    Offstage, Missi continued to be a perfect collaborator. (She would go on to become the girl who punched out Nancy at Squeeze.) We had begun going out in December, and I was determined to turn over a new leaf and be faithful for once, especially since, unlike every other relationship I had up to that point, this one began with the stable foundation of a friendship. In addition, I was