The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

older and felt obliged to raise her and mold her as if she were a protégé.
    Our relationship began around the time of the Gainesville murders, when eight college students were stabbed, so I took a bunch of photos of Missi lying naked covered in blood, as if she had been brutally butchered. We shot Polaroids of her tits, her pussy, her mouth—all carved up, drenched in blood and jaundiced. Sometimes I covered her head with a black plastic bag to make it look like she had been asphyxiated, or concealed her head with a black cloth and put gory makeup on her neck so that she seemed decapitated. We left our photographs in restaurants and on buses where people could find them and do whatever their consciences dictated.
    The only problem was that we were never able to see the results of our hard work. So we came up with a new prank when we noticed that people were setting up nativity scenes on their lawns for Christmas. Despite my animosity toward organized religion, I’ve always liked Christmas, probably because my parents raised me in a very secular household (the most religious thing they ever did was send me to Christian school) and I never associated Christmas with the birth of Christ. It just meant hanging shit on a tree, getting presents and watching the streets grow chaotic with lights and decorations. But just because I liked the holiday didn’t mean I’d let it get in the way of a good joke.
    Several days before Christmas, Missi and I drove to Albertson’s grocery store, which between the hours of one A.M. and three A.M. was frequented chiefly by teenagers looking for supplies for various pranks. Though I could afford whatever I wanted, I stole things anyway because I felt the need to show my superiority over the uptight assholes working there. Besides, I’ve always believed that shoplifting should be punishable by the death penalty, because it’s so easy that if you’re stupid enough to get caught, you deserve to die.
    That night we ripped off a handful of wire clippers and flashlights. In Missi’s hatchback car, we drove around the neighborhood, stopping in front of every lawn with a nativity scene and stealing two things: baby Jesus and the black wise man. Our intention was to sabotage so many nativity scenes in a single neighborhood that people would think it was a conspiracy. Then we planned to send a ransom note from a phony black militant group to each house, declaring, “We feel that America has falsely illuminated and plasticized the wisdom of the black man with its racist propaganda about his so-called ‘white Christmas.’” The only kink in our plan was that nobody paid attention. There wasn’t a word about it in the newspapers.
    The following Christmas we decided to do something more blasphemous and bought a bunch of big, salted hams at Albertson’s. Unfortunately, they were too big to steal, but I’ve always been prepared to pay a price for my art. We unwrapped them and returned to the same homes, replacing the baby Jesuses with the spoiling meat. It made for a beautiful image, especially when, with our remaining hams, we sabotaged nativity scenes at local churches and, as a symbolic coup de grâce , left pig meat in the manger of the precinct police station.
    Few enterprises in South Florida were free from our pranks, especially places frequented by children, like Toys “R” Us and Disney World. One day, Missi, Jeordie and I were at Disney World with some new toys we had bought at a magic shop—a fireball shooter that propelled flames from our palms and a razor blade attached to a tube filled with blood, so that we could create fake wounds. We were all tripping on acid and hallucinating that everyone in the amusement park was affiliated with the Secret Service. They all seemed to be talking into their wrists, reporting our every movement to headquarters, though in actuality they were probably trying to steer their kids away from us. We were convinced they all knew we were on LSD, which was confirmed (in our minds) when we went on the haunted house ride and, in the middle, the cars stalled and a voice announced, “Please make sure there are no spooks in your doom buggy,” a seemingly deliberate reference to the Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids song “Dune Buggy.” When the buggy jolted to a start again, they said or we imagined the announcement, “Enjoy the rest of your trip.” Afterwards, we