Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Neil Strauss, Marilyn Manson Page A

named Perry to fill in.
    Another problem was that among the many neuroses that Christian school had instilled in me was a crippling stage fright. In fourth grade, the drama teacher chose me to portray Jesus in a school play. For the crucifixion scene, he wanted me to wear a loincloth. Forgetting the cruelty kids were capable of, I borrowed an old, frayed terrycloth towel from my father and wore it without underwear. After dying on the cross, I walked backstage, where several older kids yanked the towel off me, started whipping me with it, and chased me through the hall. It was your classic preteen nightmare come to life: running down a corridor naked in front of all the girls you like and all the boys who hate you. Oddly, I got over my fear of exposing myself on stage, but I never got over my resentment of Jesus for traumatizing me.

    Our first show was at Churchill’s Hideaway in Miami. Twenty people showed up, though now that we’re famous at least twenty-one claim to have been there. Brian the fat hairdresser (name changed to our trademark starlet-serial killer combination of Olivia Newton-Bundy) played bass; Perry the pimplehead (who renamed himself Zsa Zsa Speck without realizing the pun on his speckled complexion) played keyboards; and Scott the fascist of the four-track (Daisy Berkowitz) played guitar. We used Scott’s Yamaha RX-8 drum machine (which, like Scott, would one day leave us, although the drum machine was never heard from again).
    Being very literal-minded, I wore a Marilyn Monroe T-shirt, but I added a Manson-style swastika to her forehead. Droplets of blood had leaked through the shirt, staining Marilyn Monroe’s left eye, a result of my having had a potentially cancerous mole recently removed from beneath my nipple in the same spot where Jesus was wounded. Although the doctor warned me not to touch the area around the incision, as soon as I returned home I stretched the skin around it as tautly as I could. The results were my first new hobbies as Marilyn Manson: scarification and body modification, which I furthur pursued with a plastic surgeon, who clipped my drooping earlobes down to human size.

    The stage at Churchill’s consisted of several pieces of plywood over rows of bricks, and the P.A. was basically a pair of Walkman headphones snapped apart and scotch-taped to the wall on either side of the stage. We opened with one of my favorite poems, “The Telephone.”
    “I am awakened by the incessant ringing of the telephone,” I began, my croak turning to a growl as I wondered whether there was enough chaos on stage to hold the audience’s attention. “I still have dreams caked in the corners of my eyes and my mouth is dry and tastes shitty.
    “Again—the ringing. Slowly, I bustle out of bed. The remnants of an erection still lingering in my shorts like a bothersome guest.
    “Again the ringing. Carefully, I abscond to the bathroom so as to not display my manhood to others. There, I make the perfunctory morning faces, which always seem to precede my daily contribution to the once-blue toilet water that I always enjoy making green.
    “Again the ringing. I shake twice like most others, as I am annoyed by the dribble that always seems to remain, causing a small acreage of wetness on the front of my briefs. I slowly, languidly, lazily, crazily stumble into the den where my father smokes all the time. Cigars in his easy chair.
    “Oh, the stench!”
    The song went on, the concert went on, and I lost track of what I was doing until afterward, when I rushed into the club bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I thought it had been a terrible show for watcher and performer alike. But a funny thing happened as I leaned over my putrid amalgamation of pizza, beer and pills. I heard applause, and suddenly I felt something rise inside me that wasn’t vomit. It was a sense of pride, accomplishment and self-satisfaction strong enough to eclipse my withering self-image and my punching-bag past. It was the