The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

dish it out, I’ve got to be prepared to take it. I wasn’t so calm at the time, but now I see it as a good prank, definitely more elaborate and crueler than anything I could have come up with. That kind of symbolized the ending of our freshman year so to speak. We graduated to the next level.
    But not without a little bloodshed along the way, like your drummer and several chickens, right?
    Okay, I’d better address this. Some people think we killed a chicken during a show in Texas; some people say that it didn’t die. The truth is that after we left the Nine Inch Nails tour, we did some shows on our own before going to New Orleans to work on the EP we’re making now, Smells Like Children . I put in our tour rider as a joke that we had to have a live chicken. I guess in Texas it’s pretty commonplace to have chickens running around because in the midst of our celery and Jack Daniel’s backstage at one of our shows there we found a chicken sitting around clucking in a cage. I named him Jebediah, and I was particularly attached to him. I didn’t want to kill him at all. But our stage set looked like a strange cross between Ziggy Stardust and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , and I thought that visually the chicken added something to what we were trying to present. So we let him tour with us, and sometimes I even miked the chicken and let him sing along. But during a show at Trees in Dallas, somehow the chicken cage got kicked open and the chicken flew into the crowd. They tossed him around, but he didn’t die. He went back on the farm, although he’s probably Chicken McNuggets right now. Heaven forbid I kill a chicken, but it’s okay for Ronald McDonald.
    From then on, “kill the chicken” became a euphemism for either getting high or going all the way. If we were getting ready to do a show, instead of giving each other a high five or saying “Let’s rock,” we’d say, “Let’s kill the chicken.”
    There’s one more line left. Who wants it?
    I think I need to get to sleep soon. What I could really use is some Valium. [ He opens a hidden compartment on a ring on his left index finger and takes out a blue pill, which he washes down with a sip of wine .]
    Before I let you go to sleep, what happened with Freddy?
    On the last day of that tour, we were playing at a gay bar in South Carolina. There weren’t many people in the audience so we thought we would do something different. Twiggy put on a suit, and I put on a black cowboy hat, a long black coat, and painted a black line from my forehead all the way down to my dick. Pogo was shirtless and he was wearing my underwear with the dick hole and a giant studded leather belt that said Hate in red letters. He looked like a big creepy hairy baby man with a bald fetal head, a giant bushy chest, some kind of steroid Olympics wrestling belt, a flaccid dick encased in black vinyl and combat boots. He was definitely the gayest looking person in the place. I tried to get Daisy to do something different and enjoy himself more, and he said something ridiculous like [ speaking in a slow, dumb drawl ],“Oh, I get it. I should become more the character of Daisy Berkowitz.”
    Everybody knew that Freddy was going to be fired except for Freddy because just a week before, while Freddy the Wheel was polishing his spokes or something, we auditioned a quiet, older drummer from Las Vegas named Kenny Wilson and asked him to join the band as Ginger Fish. He actually rode the tour bus with us one night and we told Freddy that he was just a friend of our tour manager. He bought it.
    We didn’t want to be cruel to Freddy because we liked him as a person. We just felt obliged to make his last show with the band a memorable one. Twiggy and I had shaved our eyebrows off, but he still had his as well as a goatee and a hairstyle that was just black bangs in front of an otherwise shaven head. I think he did this because he was starting to go bald in back. He was a very self-conscious person. But somehow we convinced him to shave his entire head and his face, and he ended up looking like this weird cancer patient version of Uncle Fester from The Addams Family . We thought it was the coolest he had ever looked, and wished for a second that he was still going to be in the band.
    So we took the stage and immediately we weren’t having a good time because the crew had decided that, as their way of ending the tour