The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

of procrastination.
    The state of our equipment was a lot like the state of the band: demolished. Within weeks, Daisy had left the group. The sissy had made the first manly move of his life and called a meeting and quit. The meeting went surprisingly well. In some ways, I actually respected him for staying true to what he wanted to do instead of remaining with us. At the time, I treated it as a joke, telling everyone that the only thing I would miss was watching Daisy, the Sexual Janitor, pick up used condoms as he dusted and mopped behind the band and the crew, buying chocolate and flowers in an attempt to seduce girls we had all slept with. But the truth was that I felt worse than ever. Every single person I had formed the band with was gone, and everyone who was left was beginning to side against me. I was the only one with a girlfriend in New Orleans and the only one who seemed to want to work. Even Twiggy was becoming a stranger, controlled on one hand by Casey’s drugs and on the other by Trent, to whom he was growing so close it seemed like he was more interested in being a member of Nine Inch Nails than Marilyn Manson. He had begun to call me Arch Deluxe, after the McDonald’s hamburger marketed to adults, and everyone soon joined in. I constantly felt like a father figure, hated for trying to make everyone do their homework.
    Whenever I wanted to talk about the books I was reading on the apocalypse, numerology, the Antichrist, and the Kabbalah, no one gave a shit. When I finished recording something, everyone invariably hated it and wanted to make it noisier and harsher—or even to use a drum machine instead of a live drummer. Was this production or sabotage? I didn’t know what to think anymore. The only time anyone agreed with me was when I suggested we call Casey.
    Outside of the studio, New Orleans was a cesspool. All the places where we had hung out the summer before were now filled with Goth tourists. The city had changed from a place where no one knew us to one where we were walking clichés, parodies of ourselves. Every night I drank, swallowed and snorted what I could to escape. One night, Missi and I ended up at a bar called the Hideout, which, the previous year, had been a biker hangout with three or four customers and a jukebox that played Whitesnake and Styx. We liked to drink there because it was empty, it was a joke and the bathrooms had doors that locked.
    When Missi and I returned to the Hideout, the place had become a happening nightspot. Everyone there was cold and indifferent, as if they were too cool to recognize us, even though the only reason they were there was because they knew we would be there. In the midst of the black clothes, eyeliner and hair dye, I saw a beacon of silver—a human disco ball—a brown-haired girl covered in glitter with metallic eye shadow and lipstick. She stood in the middle of the room like a big neon sign bearing testimony to my infidelity—she had sucked my dick the summer before. Whatever special radar girls have, Missi’s was on high that night, and instantly she picked up on the tension between me and the Liberace disco ball. The drunker we got, the more volatile the situation became. Missi kept asking me who she was and if I had slept with her, and I kept denying it. In the meantime, the girl was hitting on me as if Missi were a ghost, which in some ways she had become.
    When I stood up to go to the bathroom, the girl squeezed in as I was closing the door. I was drunk and dizzy, and stuck with this filthy girl in this filthy room, its white tiled floor caked with congealing, pubic hair-encrusted urine. The first thing the filthy girl did was sit on the toilet and take a piss. I tried not to look or care, but she called to me. “Look at this,” she said, gesturing to a ring stuck through the hood of her clitoris and another in the crevice where her thigh met her crotch. “I got these when I was fifteen.”
    â€œThat’s great,” I said, disgusted by the reddened, infected skin around both the piercings as well as the raw, irritated flesh surrounding her entire genital area, which had recently been shaved. I didn’t know if I was supposed to lick her, finger her or fuck her, so I just stood there dumbly, telling her I was going to get caught. Instead of leaving, she pulled up her pants and reached into her pocket, producing a tiny ziploc bag. I’ve always wondered who makes those minuscule