The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

the Garden District rented through Trent’s real estate agent, a stern, frumpy woman. I had recently obtained her permission to repaint the drab living room. But ever since I had begun working on it, the phone had been ringing off the hook—with record-label executives, managers, real estate agents and pencil pushers I didn’t know telling me I wasn’t allowed to alter the house. Just the other day, I had received a call from Dave, a half-witted stage carpenter with a lazy eye who had managed to keep himself on the Nine Inch Nails payroll even though their tour had been over for a year. Although Dave’s new job was to solicit companies to give the band free swag—T-shirts, shoes, bongs, video games—his job duties that day had come to include the honor of calling me and informing me that I’d have to pay the building’s owners $5,000 to return the room to its original colors.
    Every time I saw the half-finished deep red walls and shiny black borders, my mind clouded with hate for everyone who had told me one thing when they meant something else, everyone who had lied intentionally knowing that they would later be caught, everyone who managed to crawl through life unscathed as they left a trail of duplicity and betrayal coagulating behind them. New Orleans was a city populated by two-faced men who were all smiles in your presence but knives and daggers behind your back. Most of the world’s problems could be avoided if people just said what they fucking meant.
    I climbed into the cracked red leather seat of a metal barber’s chair in the living room that served as a womb, protection from a studio that had become a nemesis and a city that had turned against me. I often imagined that it was a pilot’s chair gutted from a helicopter, like the one my father flew in Vietnam. I closed my eyes and focused on my heart, beating triple time against my chest. I let the pulse, the rhythm, the warmth spread through me, then concentrated on lifting that enveloping, warm essence up out of the scarred, abused container of my body, as I had read about in so many books on astral projection. I let myself be carried upwards, higher and higher into the night, until I was immersed in a radiant, consuming white. I felt myself growing, a body wrapping around me now, wings spreading from my back, ribs jutting through my skin like serrated knives, face deforming into the monster I knew I had become. I heard myself laugh an ugly, reboant laugh, my mouth widening in a malevolent sneer large enough to engulf the spinning ball of earth below, a world of petty lives with petty problems and even pettier joys. I could swallow it if I wanted to, dispose of it once and for all. It’s what they had been praying for. It’s what I had been sinning for. “Pray now, motherfuckers,” I heard myself bellow, the sound rattling the firmament. “Pray your life was just a dream.” And the earth answered back with a loud, clattering scream that resounded so loudly in my head that I had to press my palms against my temples to keep my sanity, or insanity.
    It was the phone ringing. I picked it up groggily.
    â€œHey, what’s going on?” came a voice I didn’t recognize.
    â€œWho’s this?”
    â€œIt’s me, Chad.” He seemed insulted that I didn’t recognize him—after all, we were cousins and were once best friends—but a lot had happened since then. “Did you get my invitation?”
    â€œWhat invitation, you fruitcake?”
    â€œTo my wedding. I’m getting married in September, and it would mean a lot to me if you came.”
    â€œI’m in the middle of working on my album right now, but maybe I can get away. I’ll try, okay?”
    â€œYeah, it would mean a lot to me.”
    I felt insincere on the phone, like all the duplicitous, smiling assholes I had hated as a kid, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to go back to Canton, Ohio, and see the normal shitty married life I could be leading right now. I might be tempted—because life in New Orleans fucking sucked.
    When Missi woke up, we drove to the studio. Working there had begun to feel like trying to escape from a Chinese finger cuff: the harder we tried, the tighter the resistance became. No sooner did I enter the foyer then Twiggy, who was becoming more a puppet of Casey’s each day, came swooping out of the back room with a wooden-framed