The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

photograph in his hands, yelling, “Captain Larry Paul is ready for takeoff!” Captain Larry Paul was the nickname Twiggy had given a photograph of a fan’s pencil sketch of Trent. Twiggy thought it looked like a goofy manager he once worked under at a record store in Florida where, like myself, he used to steal CDs. The picture had become a portable surface for the cutting and sniffing of drugs, ritualistically dug out of its hiding place in an old closet full of air-conditioning ducts, water heaters, and a musty, miasmal smell reminiscent of my grandfather’s basement.
    A meeting with Captain Larry Paul had become the typical initiation to a day of worklessness in the studio. Never in a life of prodigious drug use had I ever filled my nostrils with so much white powder. Every day, we would get so wired that we wouldn’t be able to focus on recording anything, a situation that would antagonize us so greatly that we would grow even more paranoid and useless.
    By now, everybody in the studio seemed to have given up on the album. Trent was beginning to feel resentful because he needed to be writing and recording a follow-up to The Downward Spiral , and Dave never seemed to be around when there was work that needed to be done. Ginger was hardly part of the band anymore, because he was too busy trying to amuse a foul harem of strippers he had picked up near the studio. And Daisy was rarely in the control room. Instead, he spent most of his time in the lobby of the studio with his headphones on, playing hackneyed hard-rock licks into his four-track tape recorder. He had never listened to heavy metal as a teenager, so he constantly mistook his clichés for originality. He used an old Jaguar guitar—like the one Kurt Cobain had used—not because it sounded good but because he had refinished it himself. The guitar was supposed to have been destroyed during the “Sweet Dreams” video shoot, but Daisy had proudly saved it from the scrap pile. “So what if it keeps feeding back,” he would explain. “I put so much time into finishing it that it would be a waste not to use it.”
    So excited was Daisy by the progress he was making on his four-track recorder that he wanted to actually get something done and record a few riffs on the album, maybe on “Wormboy,” the song that most incorporated his musical ideas. He walked into the live room, excited to find Trent seated there. The rest of us hung out by the mixing console, monitoring the live room through two closed-circuit television cameras. On screen, we could see Daisy excitedly showing off his refurbished guitar to Trent, who actually seemed interested. We watched as Trent reached for the guitar, crooked it under his arm, strummed the strings a few times and then mercilessly smashed it over the amplifier, consigning it to the fate that was meant for it half a year ago. Trent casually left the room, and Daisy stood there aghast for several seconds before storming out of the studio, giving himself the rest of the day off to try and comprehend what had just happened.
    We had turned a new corner in our work on Antichrist Superstar . Now, not only were we not productive, we were destructive. In the days that followed, our band’s first drum machine would be thrown out of a second-story window, Trent’s walls would be punched through, Twiggy’s equipment would be smashed and Daisy’s four-track recorder would be placed in a microwave set to high, frying its circuit board beyond repair.
    On July fourth, the day in the studio consisted of everybody getting drunk as Trent and I lit fireworks, threw them into the microwave, and tossed the whole radiated mess into the street. This was followed by the destruction of my collection of Spawn toys along with a Venom action figure, a villain from Spider Man comic books taken off the market because it said, “I wanna eat your brains,” much like the drugs were now doing to most of us. The only common thread holding the night together was the constant barrage of bottles thrown at Ginger—not out of good-natured fun, but out of resentment because he had managed to find some semblance of happiness in his shallow strip dancers. The only company the rest of us could find was misery. By sunrise, Twiggy was looking for marsh-mallows to roast over the mixing console that Trent was planning to set on fire. It wasn’t just destruction: it was a very violent form