The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

down, took her minicassette recorder and brought it around the room, asking people what they thought of Iron Maiden. Then I pissed into the microphone and threw it at her. More and more, our nights were becoming long strings of nihilistic acts.
    Another girl who stalked us was someone Trent had introduced me to while we were on tour with him. She was known as Big Darla, and she lived up to the name. She belonged to the class of vampires who hover around me in bars, waiting to make eye contact so they can come over and suck the life out of me. On our first night in New Orleans, she came to the door wearing an old, obscure Marilyn Manson T-shirt with a box of New Orleans delicacies that looked like flattened cow turds topped with olives, mustard and cat urine. Throughout the rest of our stay in New Orleans, she and her sandwiches followed us everywhere, a constant annoyance.
    On Trent Reznor’s birthday, we were walking along the banks of the Mississippi River trying to figure out what to get for him, because he has everything and usually tosses gifts in a corner and never looks at them again, when I spotted a panhandler with one leg and hit upon the idea of obtaining his prosthetic limb as a present. As I was trying to convince him to part with it, a cute, scrawny girl passed by, and I started talking to her. I asked if she knew the music of Nine Inch Nails, and she said she did. Then she showed me a cut she had on her arm, as if I would be able to relate.
    â€œIt’s Trent Reznor’s birthday today,” I told her. “Do you want to come and like create some kind of funny surprise?”
    She looked like she was ten, though she had to be much older. It turned out she was a stripper, and I thought about fucking her when we brought her back to the apartment to get changed for dinner. But she started talking about crack and alluding to prostitution, and scared me away. So we took her to Brennan’s, one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. Trent assumed she was my date, and we didn’t say a word about his birthday. After dinner, as Trent was talking, she nonchalantly climbed on the table, taking off all her clothes and outraging (yet titillating) the rich patrons of this high-class restaurant. She looked like Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby , and she succeeded in embarrassing everyone because she made us look like a ring of child pornographers. That got the shenanigans rolling, and we got drunk, we got high, and we talked to people we would never normally talk to unless we were drunk and high. As a fitting finale to a fucked-up night, we returned home and pushed open the doors only to find ourselves confronted with the broad, naked expanse of Big Darla’s back. Smashed underneath her were two skinny legs sticking out feetfirst toward the door. They were Scott’s, and she seemed to be more embarrassed at being caught in the act than he was. Like high-school kids who have just caught a classmate masturbating in the bathroom, Trent and I bonded over the spectacle, adding the memory to our growing list of inside jokes—though Trent was reluctant to make fun of either Scott or Big Darla because he had a soft spot for both of them, for whatever reason.
    In the studio, life wasn’t any less bizarre. The chaos of the Tony Wiggins tour and the corruption of New Orleans had sent us on a writing binge, and Twiggy and I churned out thirteen songs, working so closely and so in synch that we didn’t even have to talk to each other to communicate ideas. When we put all the songs together on a demo tape, we saw that we had created one giant metaphor for our past, our present and our future. It was about a dark, twisted, vitiated creature’s evolution from a childhood spent living in fear to an adulthood spent sowing fear, from a weakling to a megalomaniac, from a shit-eater to a shit-kicker, from a worm to a world-destroyer. We had a vision, we had a concept and, even if no one else believed in the music, we knew we had at least several of our best songs. We were ready to start synthesizing our lives into a fully realized record.
    But when we played the rough, four-track demos to Trent to ask his opinion, he seemed primarily concerned with the fact Scott didn’t play guitar on it. “Listen,” I explained. “We don’t even know if we can work with this guy. He doesn’t understand the direction we’re going in at all.”
    â€œHe’s the backbone