The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

they had in mind for Marilyn Manson was not the one I had in mind. It seemed like Trent and I wanted to make different records. I saw Antichrist Superstar essentially as a pop album—albeit an intelligent, complex and dark one. I wanted to make something as classic as the records I had grown up on. Trent seemed to have his heart set on breaking new ground as a producer and recording something experimental, an ambition that often ran in opposition to the tunefulness, coherence and scope I insisted on. I had always relied on Trent’s opinion in the studio, but what was I supposed to do now that our opinions differed? No matter what anyone said, I knew that Antichrist Superstar was not the same as The Downward Spiral , which was about Trent’s descent into an inner, solipsistic world of self-torment and wretchedness. Antichrist Superstar was about using your power, not your misery, and watching that power destroy you and everyone else around you. What was happening to me now seemed to be some kind of perverse combination of both types of self-destruction. It had been nearly four months now—four months—and all we had to show for ourselves was five half-finished songs, sore nostrils and a hospital bill. Nobody seemed to realize that the band was falling apart.
    At the same time, Trent seemed to be growing more distant as a friend and as a producer each day, perhaps because we were taking up so much of his time on a project that he was rapidly losing faith in. He had said offhandedly in a conversation when we first started recording that it was impossible to make a great album without losing any friends, and I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. Now it was all I could think about, because I was losing the three people who mattered to me most: Missi, Trent and Twiggy. All I had left was my family.
    *  *  *
    After checking out of the hospital, I booked a flight to Canton, Ohio, to attend Chad’s wedding. I always felt responsible for Chad, like I had somehow knocked him off his path to becoming an actor or comedian. There was no specific reason why I thought this, except maybe guilt that I had escaped Canton while his life was stagnating there. He had nailed himself into the all-American coffin: he’d gone to college, gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and now he was going to marry her and be miserable or, worse still, content.
    Talking to Chad, whose buck-toothed, freckled face hadn’t changed except for a goatee, I couldn’t relate to him anymore. How could he understand being on stage in front of thousands of people yelling his name? Staying up for three nights doing drugs and watching people piss, shit, whip and fist fuck one another for sheer amusement? Trying to go to sleep at night with a chest still bleeding from broken glass and a head gashed open by a microphone stand? We could only talk on a superficial level, discussing the strangeness of his getting married, his wife’s wedding gown and the unfathomable concept of actually having children.
    The wedding was the first time I had been in a church since I was a kid, and I felt uncomfortable throughout the long service. I wore my black suit with a red shirt, a black tie and sunglasses. Everybody seemed to be staring at me disapprovingly. Not only was the priest giving me dirty looks, but so was the rest of my family. As they all piously recited their prayers and sang hymn after hymn, I studied each and every one of them coldly. I imagined walking down the aisle in Chad’s place, but marrying a black woman or a gay man and watching the confusion and anger that would result. I imagined responding to the priest’s question, “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, till death do you part?” by dousing myself in gasoline and lighting it. I couldn’t figure out why I had turned out different than everybody else. I had the same education, the same advantages, the same disadvantages. It was then that I came up with the lyric that would end the album, “The boy that you loved is the man that you fear.”
    Afterwards, I walked up to Chad’s brother and mother, who explained that they were upset that I’d mentioned my grandfather in the press. “Why do you feel the need to tell family secrets,” his mother scolded me.
    â€œNo one believes what I say anyway,” I replied curtly. My grandfather had died the previous Thanksgiving, and the fact that I