The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

help any. I vomited through the entire show and couldn’t sleep on the daylong bus ride to our first show with Danzig in San Francisco.
    I walked onstage that first night wearing a hospital smock from a mental ward, a black jock strap and boots. My eyes were red and bleary from three sleepless nights. Right away, I felt something cold and hard hit my face. I thought it was the microphone, but it clattered to the floor and smashed, sending shards of glass splintering into my leg. It was a bottle from the audience. By our second song, there were bottles and refuse all over the stage and a muscled, tattooed fraternity reject in the front row was challenging me to a fight. I was so enraged at this point that I grabbed a beer bottle off the stage, smashed it on the drum kit and stopped the song. “If you want to fight me, come up onstage, you pussy,” I screamed. Then I took the jagged half-bottle and plunged it into the side of my chest, dragging it across my skin until it reached the other side and creating one of the deepest and biggest scars on the latticework that is my torso.
    Gushing blood, I dove into the crowd and landed on frathead. When security threw me back onstage, I was completely naked and nearly everyone in the front rows was stained with blood. I grabbed the microphone stand and sent it hurtling through Ginger’s bass drum, destroying it. He looked up at me, angry and confused—it was only his second concert with us since replacing Freddy the Wheel—but quickly caught on, punching through his snare. Twiggy raised his bass over his head and brought it splintering down onto the monitor. Daisy raised his ax and dropped it on his foot. We destroyed everything on stage short of each other.
    As we walked off after our fourteen-minute show, we passed Glenn Danzig, who is at most half of my height (though with ten times the muscle mass). I smiled wickedly at him, as if to say, “You asked for us, and now you’re going to pay for it.”
    We didn’t want to be onstage playing music. So every night we didn’t. The shows continued to be short exercises in brutality and nihilism, and the road map across my chest began to expand with scars, bruises and welts. We had all become wretched, exhausted, empty containers— Westworld automatons gone berserk. But just when even our own violence was beginning to bore us and I was deep in the cavity of misery because Missi had called and said she wanted to end our relationship—the first relationship that meant anything to me—because I was never around, we met Tony Wiggins.
    He emerged off Danzig’s tour bus in black jeans, a black T-shirt and a pair of slick black wraparound sunglasses. He looked like the kind of guy who would pummel you mercilessly and then apologize afterward. I complimented him on his sunglasses. He tore them off his head and, without even hesitating, said, “Here, they’re yours.”
    From that day on, we weren’t on tour with Danzig anymore. We were on tour with Tony Wiggins, their bus driver. Every morning he knocked on our bus or hotel room door and woke us up with a bottle of Jagermeister and a handful of drugs. When his hair was in a ponytail, which was rarely, it meant that he was doing his job and driving Danzig’s bus. When his hair was down, he was tending to us, making sure our self-destruction wasn’t limited to the stage. One night at a cheap, decrepit motel in Norfolk, Virginia, he burst into the room, carved up a couple lines right onto the dust and roach-powder-covered floor and snorted them. “Get on my back,” he ordered. Twiggy grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the floor and complied. I ignored them because I was busy writing the lyrics to a song called “The Beautiful People.” They ambled out the door, a drunk, double-assed beast that would hereafter be referred to as “Twiggins,” and headed toward the outside stairwell. Suddenly there was a clattering and a string of obscenities. At the bottom of the stairs, I found Twiggy face down in a puddle of rainwater and blood. We rushed him to the emergency room, but we looked so demented—dripping makeup, rainwater and blood—that we were ignored. Instead of complaining, Wiggins just grabbed a metal doctor’s tray and cut up several more lines. That was how nights with Wiggins usually ended. He would stir things up and wouldn’t leave them alone until someone was