The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

drunken, raspy voice screaming, “Jeordie! Jeordie! Where the fuck’s Jeordie?” And Courtney came limping on the bus because apparently the night before she had fallen and hurt her leg. She saw a girl sitting there and immediately started telling her, “You don’t need to be on this bus. You should get a keyboard and start your own band. Then these guys’ll be on your bus.”
    Then she looked at us and asked, “You got any donuts?” I had just gotten a dozen glazed donuts and she took four and devoured them before I even saw her mouth open. Then she whipped off her bandage and winged it at our tour manager, who started freaking out because getting blood on him, whether it belongs to someone famous or not, was not in his contract. When Twiggy came out from the back of the bus, no doubt hiding the several teenage girls he had back there, he seemed semi-embarrassed and semi-entertained by the whole situation. It was at that point that I started to like Courtney and gain a bizarre respect for her because she made me laugh and I thought she was cool.
    I’m told that on the last night of the tour, Nine Inch Nails got their revenge on you. Is this true?
    It wasn’t revenge exactly. Traditionally on the last night of the tour the opening act expects to get fucked with by the main act. So on the last show of the tour in Philadelphia I was leaving the bathroom backstage before our show when I saw two naked girls making out and touching each other all over. Next to them there was some weird naked bisexual guy. Everybody from our band and from Nine Inch Nails was standing there watching. So the guy goes to me, “I’ve heard you say that if anyone has the guts, you’ll fist-fuck them backstage. I’d like to know if I could take you up on that offer.”
    Nine Inch Nails thought that they were gonna pull one over on me because I had made a habit of saying onstage, “Who’s gonna come backstage and let me stick my fist up their ass?” They thought, “Oh, we’ll show him. We’re gonna bring someone back and he’ll chicken out.” But, more to destroy their plans than to keep from being a hypocrite, I said, “Okay. No problem.” I put on a big rubber glove that came up to my wrist, and there wasn’t any sort of lubrication nearby other than margarine. So I wiped that all over my fist and then tried my hardest to get most of my hand, probably up past my knuckles, into this guy’s anxious, pouting rectum.
    I thought that was all. But when I went to go on stage five minutes later, Nine Inch Nails ambushed us and covered us with every disgusting substance they could find backstage—flour, salsa, Vaseline, guacamole, ketchup, baby powder. So we had to go on stage covered in all this shit, and as we were performing five male strippers ran on stage and started dancing. I felt like maybe this had gone too far because now they were messing with our performance, and I didn’t want the crowd to think that I would be responsible for something so stupid.
    We walked offstage ready to kick the shit out of Trent and his band to pay them back for a joke that had gone too far, but it wasn’t over. I was wearing just a pair of leather shorts and wet socks, and we were all covered with beer, sweat, lipstick and every backstage condiment imaginable. Before we could even reach the safety of our dressing room, we were ambushed again and smothered in whipped cream. A bunch of security guards grabbed us and handcuffed our hands behind our backs, led us out the backstage door and threw us into a pickup truck.
    They closed the doors and drove off, and at this point it had gone beyond a joke. In retrospect I’m impressed by the planning that went into it. But at the time I was scared shitless because they drove us for half an hour. We ended up in downtown Philly, where they pulled us off the truck and threw the keys to the handcuffs into a trash can. They crumpled up a dollar bill, threw it on the ground and laughed, “That’s to help you get back to the concert.”
    It was about twenty-five degrees and we were practically naked and freezing, especially because we were drenched from the filth of the night. We looked so scary, pathetic and degenerate that nobody would even walk on the same side of the street as us. We ended up begging some college kids to drive us back to the arena.
    Did you have any hard feelings?
    No. If I can