The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

colossus ordered me to get dressed and threw me into a holding tank with half a dozen people who wouldn’t even sit on the same bench as me because my appearance frightened them. My only companion was a guy with the face and mental capacity of an eight-year-old boy and the body of a fat, lonely child molester. He looked like how I imagined Lenny in Of Mice and Men . He told me that his mom, whom he still lived with, had turned him in for forging a check in her name. I wanted to ask him if he was apprehended passing the check at Dunkin’ Donuts, but this time restraint and good sense got the better of me. Our conversation reminded me of when I first met Pogo, because Lenny started sharing handy, time-saving tips on the disposal of dead bodies. The only difference was that this guy had actually killed someone, and his method of disposing of her was the same one Pogo and I had dreamed up for Nancy: fire.
    For the ensuing nine hours, Lenny courted and wooed me, regularly interrupted by the cops, who kept marching me through the station to show off their prize catch. After the eighth parade of the night, they didn’t return me to the holding cell. Instead, they said I was being transferred to general population. On the way, they handed me over to a nurse, who gave me a psychological test. Any smart psycho knows how to deal with a test like this: There are normal person answers, there are crazy person answers and there are trick questions in which they try to trap crazy people to see if they’re just pretending to be normal. I looked over the questions—“How do you feel about authority?” “Do you believe in God?” “Is it okay to hurt someone if they hurt you first?”—and gave them the answers they wanted, thus avoiding a short vacation in the psychiatric ward.

    Having been deemed a normal, I was brought to a doctor for a physical. The first thing he did was bring out a pair of pliers. “You’re going to have to take that out,” he said, gesturing to my lip ring.
    â€œIt doesn’t really come out.”
    â€œIf we don’t take it out, someone will rip it out for you when you get beat up in general population,” he said in measured tones, the corners of his mouth creeping upward in a sadistic smile he could barely restrain.
    They cut off the lipring and led me into a corridor. There were two routes to general population: One was past a herd of huge ox-men working out with weights and looking for someone with long hair to sodomize. The other was past the flotsam of society—drunks, vagrants and junkies. For some reason, the cops leading me broke their unspoken code of sadism and sent me down the easy path. Nobody tried to fuck with me and, relieved, I fell asleep instantly.
    I was awoken an indeterminable amount of time later to find a plate of wilted lettuce sprinkled with watered-down vinegar, a piece of stale bread, and, for dessert, the news that someone had posted bail for me. I was told that I had been in prison for sixteen hours. The worst part about it was that my manager had posted bail the minute I was imprisoned. But that kind of information travels slowly when you’re someone the police hate. Normally, the shittiness of an event like this would be offset by the free publicity afterward, something we desperately needed at the time. But it never made the papers because, as a precaution, the judge made a deal with my lawyers that if I talked to the press or publicized the incident, they would come down harder on me. Since the police had no evidence, the charges were eventually dropped anyway.
    When I next met with LaVey a year and a half later on our Antichrist Superstar tour in 1996, we had a lot to discuss. I had seen the enemies I was up against, and not only were they capable of stopping shows and making unreasonable demands on our performances, but they were capable of, for no reason at all, taking away the one thing LaVey and I both stand for: personal freedom. Like LaVey, I had also discovered what happens when you say something powerful that makes people think. They become afraid of you, and they neutralize your message by giving you a label that is not open to interpretation—as a fascist, a devil worshipper or an advocate of rape and violence.
    On this visit to LaVey’s house, I brought Twiggy with me. We were allowed to enter one of the only rooms in his thirteen-chamber house I hadn’t been in. It was behind