The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

of bones under the bed, I had a Huggy Bear doll on the table filled with cocaine, and I had just come to the realization that I didn’t care whether anyone I knew died so long as I didn’t have to deal with it. On top of all that, there was a transvestite in a tutu smoking crack on the bed next to me. I didn’t tell Missi all that. I just told her that I was freaking out.
    â€œYou know what?” she answered. “You gotta think about how you’re living your life.”
    It was the last thing I wanted to hear at that particular moment.
    Â 

meating the fans / meat and greet
    [S TEAK] IS AT THE HEART OF MEAT, IT IS MEAT IN ITS PURE STATE; AND WHOEVER PARTAKES OF IT ASSIMILATES A BULL-LIKE STRENGTH . T HE PRESTIGE OF STEAK EVIDENTLY DERIVES FROM ITS QUASI-RAWNESS . I N IT, BLOOD IS VISIBLE, NATURAL, DENSE, AT ONCE COMPACT AND SECTILE . O NE CAN WELL IMAGINE THE AMBROSIA OF THE A NCIENTS AS THIS KIND OF HEAVY SUBSTANCE WHICH DWINDLES UNDER ONE’S TEETH IN SUCH A WAY AS TO MAKE ONE KEENLY AWARE AT THE SAME TIME OF ITS ORIGINAL STRENGTH AND OF ITS APTITUDE TO FLOW INTO THE VERY BLOOD OF MAN.
    â€” Roland Barthes, Mythologies

    TRANSCRIPT
Tape seven, side one, 8/9/97
    Q: Do you want to talk about the meat incident today?
    A: Okay. So, the first time I met Alyssa was at the last show that Brad Stewart played in our band and it was the showcase that we had for Freddy DeMann at Maverick Records. She came backstage and she was a short girl with blond hair. Cute. She had a pretty face, but most notably she was big-breasted. Just huge tits. A girl that you’d probably see at a Warrant concert by the way that she dressed and the way that she acted. I immediately realized that she was deaf because of the way her voice sounded. She told me that she could feel the music when she’s close to the stage and that’s how she gets her enjoyment from it. And she sort of came on to me and wanted to have sex or something. But I wasn’t really interested at the time. I think probably because my girlfriend was on the other side of the door. Maybe if she wasn’t there, I would have been interested.
    A year later, when we went to record the B-side to the “Lunchbox” single, we were in South Beach Studios in Miami. And it was me and my band, Trent [Reznor], Sean Beavan [our assistant producer] and Jonathan, who had been hired by Nine Inch Nails as their video documentarian. I guess I became the instigator or director of photography. Or the Chief Executive Officer of Filth.
    I went outside to get something to eat and I ran into Alyssa. So I said, “Come by the studio.” I thought it would be entertaining to introduce her to everybody else. And it was ironic because just that day, Pogo was saying that one of his fantasies was to have sex with a deaf girl because then he could say whatever he wanted without upsetting her or feeling embarrassed. So I brought her into the studio and introduced her to everybody. To break the ice, I usually say whatever is on my mind in the hopes that it will make everyone laugh or that someone will actually follow through with it. So I said, “Why don’t you take off all your clothes?” And she laughed and she took off all her clothes, and she only had her boots on. We were all shocked and amazed that we were commanding that much sexual power and that there was a naked deaf girl in the studio.
    Q: How was she able to understand what you were saying?
    A: She was a flawless lip-reader, a skill she had obviously accumulated from years spent in the front row of heavy metal concerts learning the lyrics to shitty songs like “Fuck Like a Beast,” which brings us to the meat at hand since I was with the author of the recent heavy metal refrain, “I want to fuck you like an animal.”
    Earlier that day we had collected a wide variety of meats. Big round pieces of meat that had the bone in the center, hot dogs, cheese dogs, salami, sausage, bacon, chitlins, pig’s feet, chicken feet, chicken legs, chicken breasts, chicken wings, chicken gizzards. All uncooked meats. So we constructed a meat helmet made out of a large ham with pieces of bacon, sausage links and things like that suspended from it. A meat mobile. We crowned her with the meat helmet, and I took some pimento loaf to cover her nipples. And we put several slices of bologna on her back. That day we all definitely earned backstage passes in hell.
    Before all this began, I