Long Hard Road Out of Hell (18 page)

Nancy emerges from the bathroom in a blaze of vindictive glory and hands me the note. No one else seems to notice. This is between us. I look into the television to gather my strength. I’m staring at it so hard that I can’t even focus on the picture anymore. In fact, it doesn’t even look like a TV. It looks like a strobe light. I turn away, and look at Nancy. But I don’t see Nancy. I see a beautiful, pouty woman with long, blow-dried blond hair and an Alien Sex Fiend T-shirt hiding her curves. It must be the woman from the telephone… Traci.

Instead of pencil scratching, I hear David Bowie: “I. I will be king. And you. You will be queen.”

I have Traci’s fingers in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. We’re standing on a balcony at a party, which seems to be in my honor. “I never knew you were all this,” she purrs, apologizing for something in the past I’m unaware of. “I thought you were something different.”

There are lights and flashbulbs, Bowie is singing “We could be heroes just for one day,” and everybody is smiling ingratiatingly at us. She seems to be as famous as I seem to be.

“I spent my adolescence masturbating to that bitch,” a roadie—mine?—cackles in my face.

“Who?” I ask.

“That.”

“What’s that?”

“Traci Lords, you lucky fucker.”

On the floor beneath us there is a tall, slouched man with long black hair and a face painted white. He is wearing platform boots, torn fishnet stockings, black leather shorts and a shredded black T-shirt. He looks just like me, or a parody of me. I wonder if he is me.

A fat girl with metal rods and hoops stuck through half of her face and lipstick smeared over the rest notices me staring at the tall man. She comes upstairs, pushes past a stocky bodyguard—mine?—and, as her face strobes grotesquely in the light, explains, “You wanna know who that guy is? Nobody really knows his name. He’s totally homeless. He makes his money hooking, and then spends it trying to look like you. He always comes in here and dances to your records.”

I listen to the music again. The DJ has put on “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. But it’s slower, darker, meaner. And the voice singing is mine. I need to get away from this surreal scene, away from all these people who are treating me like I’m some sort of star they can suck a little brightness out of. Traci takes my hand and leads me away, moving like mercury through the admiring rubble. We step behind a white, gauzy curtain to an empty VIP room full of untouched deli sandwiches and sit down. There is something in my hands … a piece of paper. I try to focus on the thick, smudged lines. “Dear, Lovely Brian,” it begins. “I want to kick my boyfriend out, and I want you to move in with me. You said last week that you weren’t happy with the way things were going with Teresa”—fuck, it’s from Nancy—“I will make you so happy. I know I can. No one will take care of you like I will. No one will fuck you like I will. I have so much to give you.”

I put it down. I can’t deal with it right now, not while I’m on this trip. Will I ever get off this trip? Nancy is standing in the bathroom doorway looking at me, her bare midriff slightly distended below her tight, navy T-shirt. Her thumb is thrust into the waistband of her jeans and she is biting her lower lip. She doesn’t look sexy. She looks freakish and misshapen, like a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph. I stand up and walk over to her. Teresa and Carl sit on my bed watching the movie, completely oblivious to us and Stephen’s freakish chatter.

The breeze blows in cool and logical from the open window of my bathroom, which is pitch black, though the lights in my head strobe on. I grope for the porcelain edge of the bathtub and sit down, trying to still my spinning head and remember what I was going to say to Nancy. I can hear music now, far too big and loud for my bathroom. I feel myself blacking out and try to fight it.

The music grows louder in my head. “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!”

The music is not just in my head anymore. It’s the Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime,” and it’s all over me, vibrating against my back. I’m lying on the floor, blinking open my eyes and trying to regain consciousness.

“And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”

She—Traci—is leaning over me, pulling my shirt over butterflied lacerations I never knew I had. Her other hand is working on the buttons of my pants. Her mouth is hot and syrupy, and I can taste cigarettes and Jack Daniel’s. She begins to do things with that mouth and those tiny hands and pomegranate red nails that millions of men have watched on second-generation videotapes for years—films I was never interested in, despite my fascination with her life. She lowers my pants and, with arms perfectly crossed, pulls off her top. She hikes up her skirt, not to remove it but to show me she’s not wearing any underwear. I’m transfixed. She doesn’t seem dirty, as if she’s playing a role in a porno movie, even when she’s giving me head. She is delicate, protective and angelic, a feather suspended in midair above an inferno of debasement and carnography. I’m drunk and, for that split second, I’m also in love. Through the thin lace curtain separating our tangle of tongue, fingernail and flesh from the rest of the club, I can see the bodyguard silhouetted against the strobing light, guarding the gate like St. Peter.

“Once in a lifetime…’”

I am thrusting into her now, and she screams. I grab her hair, but instead of long tresses of yellow, I get something short, clumped and stiff that tears out in my hands. My arms are shorn of tattoos, and the moans, muffled by my hand, reverberate against the silence. Shit, I’m fucking Nancy. What am I doing? This is not the kind of mistake you can get away with. Fucking a psycho is as good as killing one. There are consequences, repercussions, prices to pay. In strobing flashes, I see Nancy’s face gazing up at me as she sits on the bathtub, her legs opening and squeezing shut, foaming wet like the jaws of a ravenous dog. With every flash, her face grows more and more distorted, more twisted and inhuman, more … demonic. That’s the right word. My body keeps moving, fucking her hard, but my mind is screaming for it to stop.

This is it. I’m fucked. I’m screwing the devil. I’ve sold my soul.

“And you may ask yourself, ‘Where does that highway go?’”

Someone bites the cartilage of my ear. I think it is Traci, because I like it. She grabs my choker and pulls my head toward hers. Her breath, hot and moist on my ear, whispers: “I want you to come inside me.”

The music stops, the flashing stops and I come inside Nancy like a bouquet of milk white lilies exploding in a funeral hole. Her face is dead and emotionless. Her eyes are like burned out flash bulbs. Is that where the flashing was coming from?

“And you may ask yourself, ‘Am I right? Am I wrong?’ And you may tell yourself, ‘My God! What have I done?’”

to all the people who didn’t die

M
ALDOROR WAS VIRTUOUS DURING HIS FIRST YEARS, VIRTUOUS AND HAPPY
. L
ATER HE BECAME AWARE THAT HE WAS BORN EVIL
. S
TRANGE FATALITY
! H
E CONCEALED HIS CHARACTER AS BEST HE COULD FOR MANY YEARS; BUT IN THE END, BECAUSE SUCH CONCENTRATION WAS UNUSUAL TO HIM, EVERY DAY THE BLOOD WOULD MOUNT TO HIS HEAD UNTIL THE STRAIN REACHED A POINT WHERE HE COULD NO LONGER BEAR TO LIVE SUCH A LIFE AND HE GAVE HIMSELF OVER RESOLUTELY TO A CAREER OF EVIL … SWEET ATMOSPHERE
! W
HO COULD HAVE REALIZED THAT WHENEVER HE EMBRACED A YOUNG CHILD WITH ROSY CHEEKS HE LONGED TO SLICE OFF THOSE CHEEKS WITH A RAZOR, AND HE WOULD HAVE DONE IT MANY TIMES HAD HE NOT BEEN RESTRAINED BY THE THOUGHT OF JUSTICE WITH HIS LONG FUNERAL PROCESSION OF PUNISHMENTS
.

—
Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror

F
OR
weeks after the trip, I was depressed and terrorized, stalked and successfully captured by Nancy. I let her make creative decisions for the band and, even worse, fucked her all the time behind Teresa’s back. The sex was good, but I didn’t want it. Somehow, every direction I turned, she was there. And every time she was there, she wanted to get naked. I was completely possessed. She had me doing things I knew I shouldn’t, like taking acid again. This time it was before a performance.

I had gotten a call from Bob Slade, a punk-rock DJ in Miami with a Monkees-style bowl haircut. We didn’t have a manager at the time, so I was mishandling our business affairs.

“Listen,” he said in his nasal, obnoxious radio voice. “We need you guys to open up for Nine Inch Nails at Club Nu.” Club Nu was a guido bar in Miami that we all hated.

Though we only had seven songs, Brad was still learning to play bass and Stephen hadn’t bought a keyboard yet, I agreed. It was too good an opportunity to pass up just because we sucked. Before the show, Nancy handed me a tab of acid. As if the fourth of July had just been a bad dream that had nothing to do with drugs, I stuck it under my tongue without a second thought—until afterwards.

On stage, I wore a short, orange dress and dragged Nancy around by her usual leash and collar. For some reason, I didn’t freak out on the acid: Nancy did. She cried and screamed throughout the show, begging me to beat her harder and harder, until welts rose up on her pale, anemic back. I was frightened by what I saw myself doing, but excited too, mainly because the crowd seemed to be getting so much enjoyment out of our psychedelic sadomasochistic drama.