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

first time in my life I felt that way. And I wanted to feel like that again. I wanted to be applauded, I wanted to be hissed, I wanted to make people pissed.
    Few stories in my life are without an anticlimax, and this one came as I was driving back to Fort Lauderdale at three A.M . that night in my mom’s red Fiero. On the overpass arching above the crime-ridden ghetto of Little Havana, the digital radio blinked out in my car. I pulled over to the shoulder to see what was wrong, and discovered that I couldn’t restart the car. The alternator belt had snapped, and, less than an hour after having found my true calling, I was stuck foraging for a phone by myself in Little Havana, where the chances of a makeup-streaked clown named Marilyn Manson not getting beat up were pretty slim. The only good that came out of the experience was that, since the tow truck didn’t arrive until ten A.M ., I got used to not sleeping after a concert early in my career.
    Our first real show took place at the Reunion Room. I booked it by telling the manager and DJ, Tim, “Listen, I got this band and we’re going to play here and we want $500.” Normally bands were paid $50 to $150, but Tim agreed to my price. That was lesson number one in music-industry manipulation: If you act like a rock star, you will be treated like one. After the show, we kicked pimplehead and the fat guy out of the band and they no doubt went off to make sandwiches, squeeze zits and star in the sitcom Pimplehead and the Fat Guy , which lasted for two episodes.
    We then lured Brad Stewart, the Crispin Glover look-alike from the Kitchen Club, away from a rival band, Insanity Assassin, which featured Joey Vomit on bass and on vocals Nick Rage, a short, stubby guy who had somehow tricked himself into thinking he was a tall, skinny, attractive guy. It wasn’t hard to convince Brad to play bass with us (even though he had played guitar with Insanity Assassin) since we had similar musical goals—and better stage names. He became Gidget Gein. We let Stephen join the band as Madonna Wayne Gacy, even though he didn’t have a keyboard. Instead, he played with toy soldiers onstage.
    For better but ultimately for worse, one more character ended up in our freak show. Her name was Nancy, and she was psychotic in all the wrong ways. She knew my girlfriend Teresa, who was one of the first people I met after Rachelle had made a fool of me. I was seeking a motherly figure instead of a model’s figure, and I found it at a Saigon Kick concert at the Button South. Teresa came from the same factory as Tina Potts, Jennifer and most of the other girls I ended up with in Ohio. She had a slight overbite, tiny hands and a blond bob not unlike Stephen’s. The two were perpetually mistaken for twins.
    I had seen Nancy once before when I worked at the record store, a hippo Goth looking foolish in a black wedding gown. When Teresa introduced me to her a year later, Nancy had lost fifty pounds and had an I’m-skinny-and-I’m-gonna-pay-back-the-world-for-all-the-times-when-I-was-fat-and-didn’t-get-fucked attitude. She had shoulder-length black curly hair, floppy tits that hung out of a slutty tank top, Hispanic features, a pale face, and a permanent stench that was half flowery, half noxious. Once I told her about the performance art ideas I had for future shows, there was no escaping her: She pushed herself into the band like a tick working its way under an elephant’s skin. Any idea I had that involved a girl—no matter how extreme or humiliating—she immediately volunteered for. Because she was willing and I was desperate—and also since she seemed like somebody other people would dislike as much as they disliked me—I gave in.

    Our antics quickly grew from tame to depraved. The first time we performed together, I sang while holding her on a leash the whole time—to make a point about our patriarchal society, of course, not because it turned me on to drag a scantily clad woman around the