The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

on my usual deviant way of getting a girl’s attention: malicious, asinine behavior. Every day for nearly a month, Jeordie and I met at a pay phone around the corner from the pagoda, where we could see her but she couldn’t see us. At first, the calls were harmless. But they quickly grew meaner. “We’re watching you,” we’d threaten her at the height of our spite-masked lust. “You better not leave work tonight, because we’re going to rape you in the parking lot and then crush you underneath your own car.” I knew what she must have felt like, because Nancy used to leave similar messages for me.

    Jeordie was miserable in Amboog-A-Lard because he was the only one in the band with any stage presence or any ambition to be more than just a heavier version of Metallica. I always told him I wanted him to be a Spooky Kid, and he always said he was more into what my band was doing than what his was. But I had all the musicians I needed and he was stuck in Amboog-A-Lard, whose members had started to turn against him because he was too much like us. So we had to content ourselves with side projects like Satan on Fire, a fake Christian death metal act with songs like “Mosh for Jesus.” Our goal was to infiltrate the Christian community (a fantasy I still harbor) but the local Christian club would never book us.
    Perhaps because he couldn’t be in Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, Jeordie ended up instigating the mayhem at our most notorious shows. We played at a club called Weekends in Boca Raton, the Florida equivalent of Beverly Hills, and the show was filled with rich Boca girls, conservative jocks and a rebel faction of lame surfer types. While we were playing, Jeordie clambered on stage and pulled down his pants, which was normal behavior for him. Though he didn’t mind that all his life people had told him he looked like a girl, sometimes he felt the need to prove that he wasn’t. The only strange thing was that he didn’t try to light his pubic hair on fire, as he usually does when his pants are down in public and he’s not having sex. Since he was standing next to me and I had a free hand, I started jacking him off. The Boca snobs were aghast, and from that day on there was a rumor that we were gay lovers. It was a rumor we did our best to encourage and spread.
    Jeordie brought his ten-year-old brother to another show, and, in order to sneak him into the club, we pretended he was part of the band and stuck him in Pogo’s keyboard cage. Behind him, Missi was tied to a cross, wearing only a black mask and a pint of blood. I thought of the scene as a painting depicting the idea that it was only through such horror and brutality that mankind could be born with any hope of innocence and redemption. Christianity’s crucifixion seemed no different than the pagan sacrifice, in which people thought they could better their own condition by shedding someone else’s blood, a concept that particularly appealed to me in the aftermath of my Nancy death wish. At the end of the show, Jeordie’s brother was so overcome by the desire to try his own hand at performance art that he ran out of the cage and mooned the crowd. That show started another legend that has persisted to this day, that we have naked kids on stage.
    On a more helpful day, Jeordie introduced us to our first manager, John Tovar, who also mishandled Amboog-A-Lard. He was a huge, sweaty, cigar-chomping Cuban constantly clad in a black suit and black tie with cheap cologne drowning his body odor. He looked like a cross between Fidel Castro and Jabba the Hutt. As if nature hadn’t already short-changed him, he was also a narcoleptic and would fall asleep during soundcheck directly in front of the speaker. We took advantage of the opportunity to conduct valuable medical research and experiment with different words to wake him, yelling in his ear that he was a piece of shit or the building was on fire. But he wouldn’t stop snoring and heaving his mountainous gut. Only the words “vanilla milkshake” and “Lou Gramm” would rouse him—and he’d open his thick, heavy-veined eyelids, slowly roll his medicine ball eyes skyward and snap back to normal. Then he’d usually pull me aside and whisper some kind of well-meaning advice, like, “You guys need to, you know, tone it down a little bit so we can play at the Slammy awards. Maybe you can do a show with