The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Amboog-A-Lard, the boogie boys.” (The Slammies were Florida’s hard-rock awards.)
    The closest we got to satisfying his wish was shortening our name to Marilyn Manson, retiring our drum machine and holding auditions for a human drummer. The only person who showed up to try out was a hobbling little guy named Freddy Streithorst, and our guitarist, Scott Putesky, insisted that we hire him since they had played together in a sissy-pop band called India Loves You. Like most everyone in our band, Freddy soon had several nicknames. On stage, he was known as Sara Lee Lucas. But we called him Freddy the Wheel. The name came from one of our first groupies, Jessicka, who went on to form Jack and Jill, a band that I renamed Jack Off Jill and took under my wing briefly, performing with them a few times. When Freddy was a teenager, he had an accident and, while he was in the hospital, the muscles in his leg atrophied to the point where the limb deformed. As part of his rehabilitation, he learned to play drums.
    Freddy was a good guy and I never treated him any differently than anyone else. But I always felt bad pushing him to play better—he was a shitty drummer and everyone knew it except Scott. Jessicka, however, didn’t have any qualms about mocking him. She decided that Freddy had a wheel for a foot and should henceforth be known as Freddy the Wheel. She realized this, of course, after having had sex with him, so she was in no position to mock anyone because she had bowed down before the Wheel and, in fact, gotten caught beneath it.
    In the end, Freddy wound up going out with Shana, a Siouxsie Sioux-wannabe I had dated briefly before meeting Teresa. Our relationship didn’t last long because I had the flu, and she’d come over to take care of me and have sex. Daylight was not a good time to get intimate with her because she was among South Florida’s many practitioners of Gothic deception. It wasn’t just that the makeup hiding the potholes on her face flaked away in the sun, I also noticed a mysterious white ring around her vagina. I was never able to decide whether it was a venereal disease, some form of mucus, a yeast infection, the skin from the top of a pudding or a glazed donut that someone may have accidentally left there after intercourse. Discovering it was as appalling and disturbing an experience as my childhood run-in with Lisa’s snot, and I stopped seeing her. Scott Putesky, a pussy vulture who had already tried to prey on Teresa, went on to fall in love with her, but was denied when Freddy stole her away like a little hobbit and indeed went on to become Lord of the Ring.
    *  *  *
    Like a used car that keeps breaking down with new problems every time an old one is fixed, the band was beginning to come together when we started having problems with our bassist, Brad. The longer he played with us, the more people came up to me and complained, “That guy’s a fucking junkie.” I always stuck up for him because I was completely naive and had never done any drugs besides pills, pot, acid and maybe glue. Brad was insecure to begin with and was always trying to impress everyone around him. So whenever he mentioned drugs I just thought he was trying to be cool.
    Brad was stupid and, unlike Scott, knew it. I liked him, so I usually ended up loaning him money and baby-sitting him. Eventually, I found someone to mother him, a rich, older lawyer named Jeanine. I had slept with her a few times and, even though she bought me anything I wanted, decided that Brad needed her more than I did.
    Within two months, they were living together. But whenever I stopped by in the afternoon to visit him while Jeanine was at work, he seemed uneasy, as if he didn’t want me there. One afternoon he was acting stranger than usual, trying to get me out of the apartment. Naturally, I didn’t want to leave because I was curious about what he was hiding. After I spent fifteen minutes watching him play uncomfortably with his green and purple dreadlocks, two black girls emerged giggling from the closet in a cloud of smoke and carrying short glass tubes. As they talked, it dawned on me that the tubes were crack pipes, the girls were prostitutes and Brad was a junkie. Here was another person I thought I knew but later realized had a secret life.
    Once I was aware that he was a heroin addict, the signs were obvious. He looked like shit, went through wild mood swings, was incredibly