The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

untied him, and he rolled onto his side, curling into a fetal position. As he caught his breath and reoriented himself, we quietly and awkwardly put him into the rest of his clothes. I listened at the door. People were laughing again, a sure sign that the police had left. Through some stroke of luck, they didn’t know there was a back room. They were looking for the daughter of some prominent local politician. The boy seemed to want our help but, since the police were still in the club, we urged our new friend to find them and tell them his story, which continues to haunt me.
    Compared to a lot of my fans, I’ve had an easy life. One person who helped me realize this was Zepp, who we met at an earlier show in Philadelphia. As we were walking to our bus after the show, a short, stocky long-haired guy with a square jaw and an Anton LaVey beard beckoned to us from outside the parking lot, promising to give us a canister of nitrous oxide if we signed something for him. Since I’d never inhaled laughing gas before, I agreed. He introduced himself as Zepp, after an old, regrettable Led Zeppelin tattoo on his right shoulder. At our next dozen or so shows, Zepp showed up backstage afterward toting nitrous oxide or pizza or photographs of teenage girls. Eventually, we decided that since he was with us so much, he might as well work for us. I gave him a video camera, paid him and he began touring with us. I knew he would fit in the day I opened the door to the rear lounge of the tour bus and found him filming Twiggy and Pogo, who were having sex with a plastic blow-up doll I had bought as a joke. Pogo had his dick up its ass, Twiggy had his dick in its mouth, and I forgot to check to see whether Zepp had his dick in his hand.

    Gradually, we learned that Zepp wasn’t just a regular guy from Pennsylvania. He claimed to have fucked three hundred girls in his hometown, and one day we opened up the luggage bay of the bus to find him in there on top of girl number 301. He used to inject speed with his aunt, and told us some exotic stories about how at the height of their insane addiction they would shoot up sludge from a mud puddle or whiskey. It was a small miracle he was still alive, and a fortunate one, too, since it was Zepp who introduced us to the slashers, two girls who followed us around the country. They reminded me of the Charles Manson girls from 1969, because they both looked like classic, suburban, all-American teenagers with something gone slightly wrong. In this case, it was the fact that one, an innocent-looking, flush-faced girl with white eyebrows named Jeanette, liked to carve the word Marilyn into her chest before each show and the other, a quiet girl with long brown hair and half a dozen lip rings named Alison, liked to carve the word Manson into her chest, with the S cut in backwards. At nearly every show since, I’ve seen them singing along in front with fresh self-inflicted wounds dripping blood down the front of their dresses or tank tops.
    Between Zepp, Tony Wiggins and my own encroaching madness, the tour became one of the most chaotic, turbulent and decadent periods of my life. One of the most unsettling incidents took place after a show in Boston. I was in the dressing room drinking Jack Daniel’s with the rest of the band when Wiggins motioned to me through the door.
    â€œI’ve got someone who wants to tell you something,” he whispered slyly.
    He walked me to an out-of-the-way room where a girl in white underpants, a white bra and pink socks was waiting for me, bound and trussed in Wiggins’s sin-sucking device. She would have been attractive, but all over her body, particularly on the back of her neck and the backs of her legs, there were red splotches with raised islands of pale white flesh in the middle. It was an uncomfortable sight because, before she even confessed a word, I already felt sorry for her. Despite myself, I was also somewhat turned on because she looked like a beauty who had been mauled by a beast. And few things are more of a turn-on than beauty disfigured. Stranger still, she looked familiar, as if I had seen her somewhere before.
    â€œWhat happened to you?” I asked. It was my turn to be interrogator.
    â€œI have a skin disease. Nothing contagious.”
    â€œIs that what you have to confess?”
    â€œNo,” she said, pausing to gather strength for what she was about to say. “What I have to confess has something to do