The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

been—at first. She walked in with the attitude that he was a hoax and full of shit, so she debated him whenever she disagreed even slightly with something. But when he said that a louse has more right to live than a human or that natural disasters are good for humanity or that the concept of equality is horseshit, he was prepared to back it up intelligently. She left the house in silence with dozens of new ideas swirling in her head.
    On that visit, LaVey showed me a little more of the house—the bathroom, which was strewn with real or fake cobwebs, and the kitchen, which was infested with snakes, vintage electronic instruments and coffee mugs with pentagrams on them. Like any good showman, LaVey only let you know what he was about in small pieces and revelations, and the more information he gave you the more you realized how little you really knew about him. Near the end of our visit, he said, “I want to make you a Reverend,” and gave me a crimson card certifying me as a minister in the Church of Satan. Little did I know that accepting that card would be one of the most controversial things I had done to that point; it seemed then (and it still does) that my ordainment was simply a gesture of respect. It was like an honorary degree from a university.
    It was also LaVey’s way of passing down the torch, because he was semiretired and tired of spending so many years advancing the same argument. No mainstream rock musician has advocated Satanism in any lucid, intelligent, accessible way since perhaps the Rolling Stones, who in “Monkey Man” came up with a line that could have been my credo, “Well I hope we’re not too messianic/Or a trifle too Satanic.” As I left, LaVey put a bony hand on my shoulder, and, as it lay there coldly, he said, “You’re gonna make a big dent. You’re going to make an impression on the world.”
    LaVey’s prophecies and predictions soon came true. Something important happened in my relationship with Traci, and I began making a bigger dent in the world.
    The day I became a Satanist also happened to be the day the allied forces of Christianity and conservatism began mobilizing against me. Just after our meeting, I was told that the Delta Center, where we were to play in Salt Lake City, would not allow us on the bill with Nine Inch Nails. We were offered, for the first but not the last time, money not to play—in this case, $10,000. Although we were removed from the bill, Trent Reznor brought me out as a guest, and I condensed my entire set to a single gesture, repeating “He loves me, he loves me not” as I tore pages out of the Book of Mormon.
    Ever since mankind created its first laws and codes of communal conduct, those who would break them have had one simple avoidance technique at their disposal: running. And that’s what we did after the show, fleeing to the tour bus and escaping a night of lockdown in the Salt Lake City penitentiary. We never got our $10,000, but the statement seemed more valuable than the money.
    We had made a similar escape earlier in the tour in one of Florida’s most conservative cities, Jacksonville, where the Baptists who ran the town had threatened to arrest me after the concert. But when we returned to perform in Jacksonville for our first headlining dates after the Nine Inch Nails tour, I wasn’t so lucky.
    Beneath my pants I wore my black rubber underwear with the dick hole, which by now had accrued its fair share of blood, spit and semen stains. As usual, halfway through the show I stripped down to the underwear, doused myself with water and convulsed violently, whipping my hair and body back and forth and sending droplets of water flying across the stage. No unseemly body part was ever exposed because my dick was tucked safely inside its rubber casing. But the vice squad, stationed at each exit of Club Five, saw what it wanted to see, which was me jacking off with a strap-on dildo (which I didn’t even have) and urinating on the crowd.
    Near the end of our shows I used to smear my face with red lipstick and, if there were girls near the front of the stage I wanted to meet, I’d grab them and make out with them, leaving on their faces the mark of the beast, which served as an entrance ticket to the hell that was and always will be backstage.
    After the performance, I walked offstage and up the stairs leading to the dressing room. Running after me, however, was