The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

of paper towels and duct-taped it around my dick. In an attempt to turn it into a crude jockstrap, I drunkenly tore the television out of the wall and wrapped the cable around my waist like a belt. We tried to get Pogo to do or wear something to amuse us, but our efforts were in vain. We watched for an hour as a drunk hag of a girl with scabs on her legs knelt over his face with her panties around her knees, trying to get over her performance anxiety about dripping urine into his eager mouth. Then we dared Pogo to cut his wrist with a knife, which he did several times, and spray EZ-Cheez on his genitals and masturbate, which he also did but failed to arouse either himself or our interest.
    It was a typical night: We had taken too many drugs and begun driving ourselves crazy with nervous energy until well after the sun had risen. Twiggy grabbed his acoustic guitar and shoved a minicassette recorder set to high-speed into the sound hole, causing the instrument to emit weird Chipmunks-like songs. Since it wasn’t very funny without an audience (or very funny at all to anyone who wasn’t high), we ran screaming into the streets in our homemade ensembles, tripping over a homeless guy sleeping on the sidewalk. “Hey man, what the fuck are you doing?” Twiggy asked, trying to be friendly. But the guy was either too scared to reply or just wanted to be left alone.
    Knowing that intoxicants are the quickest way to a man’s heart, we gave him a bottle of vodka. Now that we were on the same wavelength, we thought maybe he would join our traveling circus. So we urged him to put on a wig, dance around and sing songs with us. We felt like we were four years old again, and it felt good.
    â€œHey Joe,” Twiggy sang to urge the gentleman to action. “Hey Joe, what are you doing today? Do you think you could be heading our way?” But Joe didn’t dance or head anywhere. He pissed himself, wetting our bare feet with his 120 proof urine.
    We were so taken aback by this unexpected performance art statement that we didn’t notice the sirens wailing behind us. Someone must have called the police. On the Danzig tour, I actually had a tolerable run-in with the cops when they arrested me for exposing my ass on stage and, instead of humiliating me at the station, gave me a ticket, apologized for the inconvenience and then one of them asked if he could take a Polaroid picture with me because he was a fan. But I knew it was just luck, not a trend. I wasn’t about to take my chances in New Orleans, especially while wearing nothing but a cardboard penis sheath.
    â€œStop what you’re doing and put your hands against the wall,” crackled a loudspeaker atop one of the cop cars. I looked at Twiggy. Twiggy looked at Pogo. Pogo looked at Joe. Joe wet himself again.
    Then we did what every self-respecting citizen does in the face of a greater authority. We ran, and never looked back. After a brief intermission that consisted of all of us passing out for several hours we continued our adventures.
    Along with a clichéd over-pierced and over-tattooed couple, we drove to a cemetery just outside of town where we were told bones sprouted out of the ground like flowers. Instead of the statues, sepulchers and upright rows of tombstones we expected, the place looked like a nineteenth-century dumping ground for corpses. There were teeth mixed in with the dirt and pebbles, and broken leg and arm bones jutted into the air like tire-flattening spokes at a parking lot. We wandered around for half an hour filling a plastic grocery bag with bones. I suppose we thought they’d make good presents for loved ones or party favors for Twiggy’s next birthday.
    Twiggy, drunk again, wanted to take some headstones as well, which I disapproved of. Not out of respect for the dead—I had lost the ability to respect anyone living, let alone dead—but because they were too heavy to carry. We brought them back to the apartment anyway and stored them in the mop closet in the hallway. That probably had something to do with the strange behavior of our cleaning lady the following day, who mysteriously quit, leaving her rosary hanging on the mop closet doorknob.
    Throughout our Smells Like Children tour, Twiggy lugged the bones from city to city, telling anyone who asked that they were the remnants of our former drummer Freddy, who we had burned alive. Freddy, as the bag of bones was now called, ended up on fire