The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

decided not to attend the funeral seemed to have resulted in a tacitly agreed pact among my relatives to excommunicate me.

    Everyone I talked to asked if I was gay or a drug addict or a devil worshipper. No one had anything nice to say, and no one understood anything about me. I wasn’t Brian Warner anymore, I was some kind of inexplicable and repulsive slime that had trickled out of a sewer and filthied their manicured lives. Chad seemed too young and too intelligent to be falling into this trap, and all I could think was that I didn’t want to grow up and have to tolerate this life that everyone thinks they’re supposed to live. On the other hand, my life was no better. There had to be something else.
    After the reception, we drove back to my grandmother’s. As everyone sat in the living room drinking wine, eating crackers and struggling to say something interesting. I stole away and walked downstairs to my grandfather’s basement. It looked almost exactly the same, but the train set and the enema bag were gone and someone had emptied the white medicine cabinet. I reached behind the mirror on the ceiling, and the pornography had been removed. I opened up one of the paint cans, and the 16-millimeter films were actually still there. I picked up the top one and held it up to the dusty beam of yellow light streaming in through the window, revealing a black man making love to a fat white blond. I removed another reel of film, and stuffed them both into the waistband of my my pants.
    I didn’t feel small and scared in the basement anymore. In fact, I felt at home for the first time since I had returned to Canton. I had much more in common with my grandfather now than with the innocent kid who used to explore his basement, which was an upsetting realization in light of the fact that moments ago I had been sitting in church promising myself that I would never grow up. I even wore women’s lingerie, like my grandfather did, and had engaged in sexual acts far more perverse than the ones in his Watersports and Anal Only magazines. My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell—dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.
    *  *  *
    The first weeks back in New Orleans served to prove that the situation was even worse than I had imagined. Taking a break had knocked out the one last support I still thought I had under me, and returning to find myself in the exact same pointless, self-destructive studio situation that I had left only compounded it all. I went on drug binges that lasted for days, resulting in blackouts, fights, and the destruction of most everything I owned and used to love. My life was falling apart, my band was falling apart and the record was falling apart. I was a rock and roll cliché, and I hadn’t even really made it yet.
    Sitting in the live room with Twiggy preparing to record “The Minute of Decay,” I felt the weight of the futility of this project crush me. I had somehow thought that in my absence, everything would work itself out. But the fact was that we had talked ourselves a great album, but recorded a shitty one. I was preparing to sing into a guitar amp, use a drum machine hooked into a boom box, and let Twiggy play bass through a cheap little amp. The most expensive thing in the room was the half-decimated pile of cocaine in front of us. Like a fly on a fishing pole, no matter how much I flapped, wriggled, and struggled, there was no way to escape. I was dangling from a line I had no way of cutting. I had worked so hard these last few years only to be strung up here, doubting my own artistry and my own existence. At least I knew—I had always known—that there was an exit. But I didn’t want to think about that. The truth is that I was too selfish to kill myself and let them—not just everyone in the studio, but my family, my teachers, my enemies, the world—know they had won.
    I began to sing. “There’s not much left to love.” I reflexively took a sniff of the cocaine in front of my face. “Too tired today to hate.” The drug didn’t even affect me