Long Hard Road Out of Hell Read online

  TO BARB AND HUGH WARNER MAY GOD FORGIVE THEM FOR BRINGING ME INTO THIS WORLD

  But someday,

  IN A STRONGER AGE THAN THIS DECAYING, SELF-DOUBTING PRESENT, HE MUST YET COME TO US, THE REDEEMING MAN, OF GREAT LOVE AND CONTEMPT, THE CREATIVE SPIRIT WHOSE COMPELLING STRENGTH WILL NOT LET HIM REST IN ANY ALOOFNESS OR ANY BEYOND, WHOSE ISOLATION IS MISUNDERSTOOD BY THE PEOPLE AS IF IT WERE FLIGHT FROM REALITY—WHILE IT IS ONLY HIS ABSORPTION, IMMERSION, PENETRATION INTO REALITY, SO THAT, WHEN HE ONE DAY EMERGES AGAIN INTO THE LIGHT, HE MAY BRING HOME THE REDEMPTION OF THIS REALITY; ITS REDEMPTION FROM THE CURSE THAT THE HITHERTO REIGNING IDEAL HAS LAID UPON IT. THE MAN OF THE FUTURE, WHO WILL REDEEM US NOT ONLY FROM THE HITHERTO REIGNING IDEAL BUT ALSO FROM THAT WHICH WAS BOUND TO GROW OUT OF IT, THE GREAT NAUSEA, THE WILL TO NOTHINGNESS, NIHILISM; THIS BELL-STROKE OF NOON AND OF THE GREAT DECISION THAT LIBERATES THE WILL AGAIN AND RESTORES ITS GOAL TO THE EARTH AND HIS HOPE TO MAN; THIS ANTICHRIST AND ANTINIHILIST; THIS VICTOR OVER GOD AND NOTHINGNESS—HE MUST COME ONE DAY.

  —Friedrich Nietzysche, On the Genealogy of Morals

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION BY DAVID LYNCH

  I. PART ONE: when i was a worm

  1 THE MAN THAT YOU FEAR

  2 FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK, WE SUSPEND YOU

  3 TEEN DABBLER

  4 THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD REJECTION LETTERS

  5 I WASN’T BORN WITH ENOUGH MIDDLE FINGERS

  II. PART TWO: deformography

  6 THE SPOOKY KIDS

  7 DIRTY ROCK STAR

  8 TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T DIE

  9 THE RULES

  10 ALL FOR NOTHING

  11 WE’RE OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD

  12 ABUSE, PARTS ONE AND TWO

  13 MEATING THE FANS / MEAT AND GREET

  III. PART THREE: how i got my wings

  14 THE REFLECTING GOD [DREAMS]

  15 ANTICHRIST SUPERSTAR

  16 FIFTY MILLION SCREAMING CHRISTIANS CAN’T BE WRONG

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTO INSERT

  PHOTO CREDITS

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  ENDNOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  OUTSIDE IT WAS RAINING CATS AND BARKING DOGS. LIKE AN EGG-BORN OFFSPRING OF COLLECTIVE HUMANITY, IN SAUNTERED MARILYN MANSON. IT WAS OBVIOUS—HE WAS BEGINNING TO LOOK AND SOUND A LOT LIKE ELVIS.

  DAVID LYNCH—NEW ORLEANS 2:50 A.M.

  the man that you fear

  AMONG ALL THINGS THAT CAN BE CONTEMPLATED UNDER THE CONCAVITY OF THE HEAVENS, NOTHING IS SEEN THAT AROUSES THE HUMAN SPIRIT MORE, THAT RAVISHES THE SENSES MORE, THAT HORRIFIES MORE, THAT PROVOKES MORE TERROR OR ADMIRATION THAN THE MONSTERS, PRODIGIES AND ABOMINATIONS THROUGH WHICH WE SEE THE WORKS OF NATURE INVERTED, MUTILATED AND TRUNCATED.

  —Pierre Boaistuau, Histories Prodigieuses, 1561

  HELL to me was my grandfather’s cellar. It stank like a public toilet, and was just as filthy. The dank concrete floor was littered with empty beer cans and everything was coated with a film of grease that probably hadn’t been wiped since my father was a boy. Accessible only by rickety wooden stairs fixed to a rough stone wall, the cellar was off-limits to everybody except my grandfather. This was his world.

  Dangling unconcealed from the wall was a faded red enema bag, a sign of the misplaced confidence Jack Angus Warner had in the fact that even his grandchildren would not dare to trespass. To its right was a warped white medicine cabinet, inside of which were a dozen old boxes of generic, mail-order condoms on the verge of disintegration; a full, rusted can of feminine-deodorant spray; a handful of the latex finger cots that doctors use for rectal exams; and a Friar Tuck toy that popped a boner when its head was pushed in. Behind the stairs was a shelf with about ten paint cans which, I later discovered, were each filled with twenty 16-millimeter porno films. Crowning it all was a small square window—it looked like stained glass, but it was actually stained with a gray grime—and gazing through it really felt like looking up out of the blackness of hell.

  What intrigued me most in the cellar was the workbench. It was old and crudely made, as if it had been constructed centuries ago. It was covered with dark orange shag carpeting that looked like the hair on a Raggedy Ann doll, except it had been soiled from years of having dirty tools laid on it. A drawer had been awkwardly built into the bench, but it was always locked. On the rafters above was a cheap full-length mirror, the kind with a wooden frame meant to be nailed to the door. But it was nailed to the ceiling for whatever reason—I could only imagine why. This was where my cousin, Chad, and I began our daily and progressively more daring intrusions into my grandfather’s secret life.

  I was a scrawny thirteen year old with freckles and a bowl cut courtesy of my mother’s shears; he was a scrawny twelve year old with freckles and buck teeth. We wanted nothing more than to become detectives, spies or private investigators when we grew up. It was in trying to develop the requisite skills in stealth that we were first exposed to all this iniquity.

  At first, all we wanted to do was sneak downstairs and spy on Grandfather without him knowing. But once we started discovering everything that was hidden there, our motives changed. Our after-school forays into the cellar became half teenage boys wanting to find pornography to jerk off to and half a morbid fascination with our grandfather.

  Nearly every day we made new and grotesque discoveries. I wasn’t very tall, but if I balanced carefully on my grandfather’s wooden chair I could reach into the space between the mirror and the ceiling. There I found a stack of black and white bestiality pictures. They weren’t from magazines: just individually numbered photographs that looked like they had been handpicked from a mail-order catalog. There were early-seventies photos of women straddling giant horse dicks and sucking pigs’ dicks, which looked like soft, fleshy corkscrews. I had seen Playboy and Penthouse before, but these photographs were in another class altogether. It wasn’t just that they were obscene. They were surreal—all the women were beaming real innocent flower-child smiles as they sucked and fucked these animals.

  There were also fetish magazines like Watersports and Black Beauty stashed behind the mirror. Instead of stealing a whole magazine, we would take a razor blade and carefully cut out certain pages. Then we’d fold them into tiny squares and hide them underneath the large white rocks that framed my grandmother’s gravel driveway. Years later, we went back to find them, and they were still there—but frayed, deteriorated and covered with earthworms and slugs.

  One afternoon in the fall as Chad and I sat around my grandmother’s dining room table after a particularly uneventful day at school, we resolved to find out what was inside the locked workbench drawer. Always hell-bent on stuffing her brood with food, my grandmother, Beatrice, was force-feeding us meat loaf and Jell-O, which was mostly water. She came from a rich family and had tons of money in the bank, but she was so cheap that she’d try to make a single Jell-O package last for months. She used to wear knee-high hose rolled down around her ankles and odd gray wigs that obviously didn’t fit. People always told me I resembled her because we were both skinny with the same narrow facial structure.

  Nothing in the kitchen had changed as long as I’d been eating her inedible food there. Above the table hung a yellowing picture of the pope in a cheap brass frame. An imposing-looking family tree tracing the Warners back to Poland and Germany, where they were called the Wanamakers, was plastered on the wall nearby. And crowning it all was a large, hollow, wooden crucifix with a gold Jesus on top, a dead palm leaf wrapped around it and a sliding top that
concealed a candle and a vial of holy water.

  Under the kitchen table, there was a heating vent that led to the workbench in the cellar. Through it, we could hear my grandfather coughing and hacking down there. He had his CB radio on, but he never talked into it. He just listened. He had been hospitalized with throat cancer when I was very young and, for as long as I could remember, I never heard his actual voice, just the jagged wheezing that he forced through his tracheostomy.

  We waited until we heard him leave the cellar, abandoned our meat loaf, poured our Jell-O into the heating vent and ventured downstairs. We could hear our grandmother calling futilely after us: “Chad! Brian! Clean the rest of your plates!” We were lucky all she did was yell that afternoon. Typically, if she caught us stealing food, talking back or goofing off, we were forced to kneel on a broomstick in the kitchen for anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour, which resulted in perpetually bruised and scabbed knees.

  Chad and I worked quickly and quietly. We knew what had to be done. Picking a rusted screwdriver off the floor, we pried the workbench drawer open wide enough so we could peek in. The first thing we saw was cellophane: tons of it, wound around something. We couldn’t make out what it was. Chad pushed the screwdriver deeper into the drawer. There was hair and lace. He wedged the screwdriver further, and I pulled until the drawer gave way.

  What we discovered were bustiers, bras, slips and panties—and several tangled women’s wigs with stiff, mottled hair. We began unwrapping the cellophane, but as soon as we saw what it concealed, we dropped the package to the floor. Neither of us wanted to touch it. It was a collection of dildoes that had suction cups on the bottom. Maybe it was because I was so young, but they seemed enormous. And they were covered with a hardened dark orange slime, like the gelatinous crust that builds up around a turkey when it is cooked. We later deduced that it was aged Vaseline.

  I made Chad wrap the dildoes up and put them back in the drawer. We’d done enough exploring for the day. Just as we were trying to force the drawer shut, the cellar doorknob turned. Chad and I froze for a moment, then he grabbed my hand and dove under a plywood table that my grandfather had his toy trains set up on. We were just in time to hear his footsteps near the bottom of the stairs. The floor was covered with train-set paraphernalia, mostly pine needles and fake snow, which made me think of powdered donuts trampled into dirt. The pine needles were prickling our elbows, the smell was nauseating and we were breathing heavily. But grandfather didn’t seem to notice us or the half-open drawer. We heard him shuffling around the room, hacking through the hole in his throat. There was a click, and his toy trains began clattering around the large track. His black patent leather shoes appeared on the floor just in front of us. We couldn’t even see as high as his knees, but we knew he was sitting. Slowly his feet began scraping against the ground, as if he were being violently rocked in his seat, and his hacking grew louder than the trains. I can’t think of any way to describe the noise that issued from his useless larynx. The best analogy I can offer is an old, neglected lawn mower trying to sputter back to life. But coming from a human being, it sounded monstrous.

  After an uncomfortable ten minutes passed, a voice called from the top of the stairs. “Judas Priest on a pony!” It was my grandmother, and evidently she’d been yelling for some time. The train stopped, the feet stopped. “Jack, what are you doing down there?” she yelled.

  My grandfather barked at her through his tracheostomy, annoyed.

  “Jack, can you run to Heinie’s? We’re out of pop again.”

  My grandfather barked back, even more annoyed. He didn’t move for a moment, as if debating whether or not to help her. Then he slowly rose. We were Safe, for the time being.

  FIG. 984.—Transverse section of the trachea, just above its bifurcation, with a bird’s-eye view of interior.

  After doing our best to conceal the damage we had done to the workbench drawer, Chad and I walked to the top of the stairs and into the breezeway, where we kept our toys. Toys, in this case, being a pair of BB guns. Besides spying on my grandfather, the house had two other attractions: the woods nearby, where we liked shooting at animals, and the girls in the neighborhood, who we were trying to have sex with but never succeeded until much later.

  Sometimes we’d go to the city park just past the woods and try to pick off little kids playing football. To this day, Chad still has a BB lodged beneath the skin in his chest, because when we couldn’t find any other targets we would just shoot at each other. This time, we stuck close to the house and tried to knock birds out of trees. It was malicious, but we were young and didn’t give a shit. That afternoon I was out for blood and, unfortunately, a white rabbit crossed our path. The thrill of hitting it was incommensurate, but then I went to examine the damage. It was still alive and blood was pouring out of its eye, soaking into its white fur. Its mouth kept meekly opening and closing, taking in air in a last, desperate attempt at life. For the first time, I felt bad for an animal I had shot. I took a large flat rock and ended its suffering with a loud, quick and messy blow. I was very close to learning an even harsher lesson in killing animals.

  We ran back to the house, where my parents were waiting outside in a brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville, my father’s pride and joy since landing a job as manager of a carpet store. He never came into the house for me unless it was absolutely unavoidable, and rarely even talked to his parents. He usually just waited outside uneasily, as if he were afraid of reliving whatever it was he had experienced in that old house as a child.

  Our duplex apartment, only a few minutes away, wasn’t any less claustrophobic than Grandpa and Grandma Warner’s place. Instead of leaving home after she married, my mom brought her mother and father home with her to Canton, Ohio. So they, the Wyers (my mother was born Barb Wyer), lived next door. Benign country folk (my dad called them hillbillies) from West Virginia, her father was a mechanic and her mother was an overweight, pill-popping housewife whose parents used to keep her locked in a closet.

  Chad fell ill, so I didn’t go to my father’s parents for about a week. Although I was disgusted and creeped out, my curiosity about my grandfather and his depravity still hadn’t been satisfied. To kill time while waiting to resume the investigation, I played in our backyard with Aleusha, who in some ways was my only real friend besides Chad. Aleusha was an Alaskan malamute the size of a wolf and distinguishable by her mismatched eyes: one was green, the other was blue. Playing at home, however, was accompanied by its own set of paranoias—ever since my neighbor, Mark, had returned home on Thanksgiving break from military school.

  Mark was a roly-poly kid with a greasy blond bowl cut, but I used to look up to him because he was three years older than me and much more wild. I’d often see him in his backyard throwing stones at his German shepherd or thrusting sticks up its ass. We started hanging out when I was eight or nine, mostly because he had cable television and I liked watching Flipper. The television room was in his basement, where there was also a dumbwaiter for dirty laundry from upstairs. After watching Flipper, Mark would invent games like “Prison,” which consisted of squeezing into the dumbwaiter and pretending like we were in jail. This was no ordinary jail: the guards were so strict that they didn’t let the prisoners have anything—even clothes. When we were naked in the dumbwaiter, Mark would run his hands all over my skin and try to squeeze and caress my dick. After this happened a few times, I broke down and told my mother. She went straight to his parents, who, though they branded me a liar, soon sent him to military school. From then on, our families were bitter enemies, and I always felt that Mark blamed me for tattling on him and causing him to be sent away. Since he had returned, he hadn’t said a word to me. He just glared maliciously at me through his window or over his fence, and I lived in fear that he’d try to exact some kind of revenge on me, my parents or my dog.

  So it was somewhat of a relief to be back at my grandparents’ the next week, playing detective again with Chad. This time we were determined to solve the my
stery of my grandfather once and for all. After forcing down half a plateful of my grandmother’s cooking, we excused ourselves and headed for the cellar. We could hear the trains running from the top of the stairwell. He was down there.

  Holding our breath, we peered into the room. His back was to us and we could see the blue-and-gray flannel shirt that he always wore, with the neck stretched out, revealing a yellow and brown ring around the collar and a sweat-stained undershirt. A white band of elastic, also blackened with dirt, clung to his throat, holding the metal catheter tube in place over his Adam’s apple.

  A slow, tense wave of fear shuddered through our bodies. This was it. We crept down the creaky stairs as quietly as we could, hoping the trains would cover up the noise. At the bottom, we turned around and hid in the stale-smelling alcove behind the staircase, trying not to spit or scream as cobwebs clung to our faces.

  JACK WARNER

  From our hiding place, we could see the train set: There were two tracks, and both had trains running on them, clanking along the haphazardly built rails and letting off a noxious electrical smell, as if the metal of the track were burning. My grandfather sat near the black transformer that housed the train’s controls. The back of his neck always reminded me of foreskin. The flesh hung wrinkled off the bone, old and leathery like a lizard’s and completely red. The rest of his skin was gray-white, like the color of birdshit, except for his nose, which had reddened and deteriorated from years of drinking. His hands were hardened and callused from a lifetime of work, his nails dark and brittle like beetle wings.

  Grandfather wasn’t paying attention to the trains circling furiously around him. His pants were down around his knees, a magazine was spread over his legs, and he was hacking and moving his right hand rapidly in his lap. At the same time, with his left hand, he was wiping phlegm from around his tracheostomy with a yellow-crusted handkerchief. We knew what he was doing, and we wanted to leave right away. But we had trapped ourselves behind the stairs and were too scared to come out into the open.