The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

dead, in the hospital or passed out in their own vomit. If that someone wasn’t himself, he wouldn’t stop partying until it was.
    Eventually Wiggins, Twiggy and I realized there were ways we could make the best of our situation and try educating ourselves and accumulating valuable knowledge while on the road. We began conducting various psychological experiments, like walking up to a couple and giving only the girl a backstage pass to test their relationship.

    Gradually, the tenor of the tour began to change from miserable to memorable. On tour with Nine Inch Nails and Jim Rose, I had refrained from some of the stupider human tricks they indulged in, but now I didn’t care anymore. As we sat atop a twenty-foot-high steel tower outside a club called Sloss Furnaces in Biloxi, Mississippi, warming up for a show with Jagermeister and drugs, Wiggins, Twiggy and I swore to stop exploiting and humiliating girls backstage. Instead, we decided to perform a therapeutic service for them. To carry out our new plans, all we needed was a video camera and some girls willing to confess their deepest, most intimate sins. Little did we know just how dark and disturbing the lives of our fans really were.
    While we performed that night, Wiggins did the prep work. Underneath the club, he found a network of dark catacombs with metal grates, dripping water and the general atmosphere of a set from A Nightmare on Elm Street . I raced to meet him there after the show, not only because I was excited but also because I needed to hide from the cops, who wanted to arrest me for indecent exposure. As our tour manager detained them, Wiggins took us to the catacombs, where he had two prospective patients waiting. We didn’t know whether our plan to extract confessions would really work, and at the time didn’t really understand what it meant to actually be burdened with the weight of someone’s darkest secrets. People don’t necessarily confide in one another to get something off their chest. They want something: reassurance, which is a hard gift to give convincingly.
    Under a relentless and probing fusillade of questions from Wiggins, the first girl broke down and disclosed that when she was eleven, several boys in the neighborhood would regularly pick on her. One night she awoke to find her window open and four of them standing in her room. Without a word, they pulled down her bed-sheets, tore off her pajamas and raped her one by one. When she told her father the next day, he was indifferent. Within a year, he was sexually molesting her as well. As she told us this, she was kneeling on the floor, staring at the damp ground. When she finished, she looked up at me expectantly with wet eyes, the tracks of her tears tattooed by runny black mascara. I was supposed to do something, to say something, to help her somehow. With my music and in interviews, I never had any problem telling people about the lives they should be leading and the independence they should demand. But that was when I was talking to an aggregate, a mass, an undifferentiated group of people. Now that I was one-on-one and actually had the opportunity to change someone’s life, I froze momentarily. Then I told her that the fact that she was here and could talk about it proved she was strong enough to live through it and accept it.
    I wonder still whether anything I went on to say meant anything to her, or if they were just the same clichés she had heard all her life. She told me that she wanted to trade clothes with me and took off her T-shirt, which was emblazoned with Nietzsche’s “God Is Dead” slogan followed by God’s response, “Nietzsche Is Dead.” I still take that shirt with me everywhere I go.
    The first story was so harrowing that I still can’t remember what the second girl confessed to. All I remember was that she was a beautiful blond girl with the word failure carved into her arm.
    With each show, Wiggins refined his inquisition methodology. His art was brutal and sophisticated, and, some in the field of psychoanalysis may say, unethical. He arrived at a point so advanced that in order to proceed with his work, he had to invent his own investigative apparatus. He unveiled it after a show in Indiana.
    Backstage after Danzig’s set, we discovered our crew videotaping a tiny but full-bodied girl with white hair and pale skin. A boy who seemed to be her brother or boyfriend, about nineteen and skinny and