unknown
2011-09-03 06:00:53 UTC
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 by
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 16mm
porno films. Crowning it all was a small square window -- it looked like stained glass, but it
was actualy 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. ... A drawer had been awkwardly built into the bench, but it
was always locked. ... This was where my cousin, Chad, and I began our daily and progressively
more daring intrusions into my grandfather's secret life.
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 somen were beaming real innocent flower-child
smiles as they sucked and fucked these animals.
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. ... 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 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 tracheotomy.
We waited until we heard him leave the cellar, abandoned our meat loaf, poured our Jell-O into
the heating vent and ventured downstairs. ... 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 dildos 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 dildos 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. ... 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 appears 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, andhis 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. Bu 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, 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.
[The next week I was back at my grandparents'], playing detective again with Chad. This time we
were determined to solve the mystery of my grandfather once and for all. After forcing down 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 to not spit or
scream as cobwebs clung to our faces.
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 calloused 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 tracheotomy 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.
Suddenly, the hacking sputtered to a halt and grandfather twisted around in his chair, staring
straight at the stairwell. Our hearts froze. He stood up, pants sliding to his ankles, and we
pressed against the mildewed wall. We couldn't see what he was doing anymore. My heart stabbed
at my chest like a broken bottle and I was too petrified even to scream. A thousand perverted
and violent things he was about to do to us flashed through my mind, though it would have taken
nothing more than for to touch me and I would have dropped dead with fright.
The hacking, jacking and shuffling of feet began again, and we let our breath out. It was safe
to peer around the staircase. We didn't really want to. But we had to.
After several excruciatingly slow minutes, a gruesome noise leapt from his throat, like the
sound a car engine makes when someone turns the key in the ignition when it's already on. I
turned my head away, too late to keep from imagining the white pus squeezing out his yellow,
wrinkled penis like the insides of a squashed cockroach. When I looked again, he had lowered
his handkerchief, the same one he'd been using to wipe away his phlegm, and was sopping up his
mess. We waited until he left and then clambered back up the stairs, vowing never to set foot
in that cellar again. If Grandfather knew were down there or noticed the broken workbench
drawer, he didn't say anything to us.
During the ride home, we told my parents what happened. I had the feeling that my mother
believed most if not all of it, and that my father already knew from having grown up there.
Though Dad didn't utter a word, my mother told us that years ago, when my grandfather still
worked as a trucker, he was in an accident. When the doctors undressed him at the hospital,
they found women's clothes underneath his own. It was a family scandal that no one was supposed
to talk about, and we were sworn to secrecy.
[Flash forward several years, when young Brian Warner was attending a Christian school he hated...]
My final desperate caper [at Christian school] involved revisiting the dreaded basement of my
grandfather and stealing a dildo from his secret workbench drawer. I wore gloves so I wouldn't
get any of the crusted Vaseline on me. After school the next day [a friend] and I snuck into
Ms. Price's classroom and pried open her desk drawer. It contained her own secrets, which were
just as taboo to Christian school as my grandfather's were to suburbia: semierotic romance
novels. There was also a handheld vanity mirror, which made sense since Ms. Price was always
very concerned about her appearance. At the time, Chad and I regularly attempted to get the
attention of two sisters who lived near my grandparents by throwing rocks at cars and trying to
cause accidents so they'd come running outside. In the same sick, twisted way, putting a dildo
in Ms. Price's drawer was the only outlet I had for expressing my latent, frustrated lust for her.
To our disappointment, no one said a word about it in school the next day. But I was definitely
the chief suspect, which I discovered when Mrs. Cole called my parents into school. She didn't
mention the dildo; instead, she lectured them on disciplining and instilling the fear of God in
the juvenile delinquent they had raised. That's when I realized that I would never be expelled.
Half the kids at Heritage Christian School were from lower-income families, and the school
received a pittance from the state to enroll them. I was among the children who could pay, and
they wanted the money -- even it if meant dealing with my dildos, heavy metal cassettes, candy,
dirty magazines and smut-filled recordings. I realized that if I ever wanted to get out of
Christian school, I would have to exercise my own free will to walk away. And two months into
the tenth grade I did just that.
-- Marilyn Manson, "The Long Hard Road Out of Hell"
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 by
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 16mm
porno films. Crowning it all was a small square window -- it looked like stained glass, but it
was actualy 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. ... A drawer had been awkwardly built into the bench, but it
was always locked. ... This was where my cousin, Chad, and I began our daily and progressively
more daring intrusions into my grandfather's secret life.
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 somen were beaming real innocent flower-child
smiles as they sucked and fucked these animals.
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. ... 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 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 tracheotomy.
We waited until we heard him leave the cellar, abandoned our meat loaf, poured our Jell-O into
the heating vent and ventured downstairs. ... 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 dildos 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 dildos 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. ... 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 appears 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, andhis 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. Bu 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, 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.
[The next week I was back at my grandparents'], playing detective again with Chad. This time we
were determined to solve the mystery of my grandfather once and for all. After forcing down 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 to not spit or
scream as cobwebs clung to our faces.
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 calloused 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 tracheotomy 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.
Suddenly, the hacking sputtered to a halt and grandfather twisted around in his chair, staring
straight at the stairwell. Our hearts froze. He stood up, pants sliding to his ankles, and we
pressed against the mildewed wall. We couldn't see what he was doing anymore. My heart stabbed
at my chest like a broken bottle and I was too petrified even to scream. A thousand perverted
and violent things he was about to do to us flashed through my mind, though it would have taken
nothing more than for to touch me and I would have dropped dead with fright.
The hacking, jacking and shuffling of feet began again, and we let our breath out. It was safe
to peer around the staircase. We didn't really want to. But we had to.
After several excruciatingly slow minutes, a gruesome noise leapt from his throat, like the
sound a car engine makes when someone turns the key in the ignition when it's already on. I
turned my head away, too late to keep from imagining the white pus squeezing out his yellow,
wrinkled penis like the insides of a squashed cockroach. When I looked again, he had lowered
his handkerchief, the same one he'd been using to wipe away his phlegm, and was sopping up his
mess. We waited until he left and then clambered back up the stairs, vowing never to set foot
in that cellar again. If Grandfather knew were down there or noticed the broken workbench
drawer, he didn't say anything to us.
During the ride home, we told my parents what happened. I had the feeling that my mother
believed most if not all of it, and that my father already knew from having grown up there.
Though Dad didn't utter a word, my mother told us that years ago, when my grandfather still
worked as a trucker, he was in an accident. When the doctors undressed him at the hospital,
they found women's clothes underneath his own. It was a family scandal that no one was supposed
to talk about, and we were sworn to secrecy.
[Flash forward several years, when young Brian Warner was attending a Christian school he hated...]
My final desperate caper [at Christian school] involved revisiting the dreaded basement of my
grandfather and stealing a dildo from his secret workbench drawer. I wore gloves so I wouldn't
get any of the crusted Vaseline on me. After school the next day [a friend] and I snuck into
Ms. Price's classroom and pried open her desk drawer. It contained her own secrets, which were
just as taboo to Christian school as my grandfather's were to suburbia: semierotic romance
novels. There was also a handheld vanity mirror, which made sense since Ms. Price was always
very concerned about her appearance. At the time, Chad and I regularly attempted to get the
attention of two sisters who lived near my grandparents by throwing rocks at cars and trying to
cause accidents so they'd come running outside. In the same sick, twisted way, putting a dildo
in Ms. Price's drawer was the only outlet I had for expressing my latent, frustrated lust for her.
To our disappointment, no one said a word about it in school the next day. But I was definitely
the chief suspect, which I discovered when Mrs. Cole called my parents into school. She didn't
mention the dildo; instead, she lectured them on disciplining and instilling the fear of God in
the juvenile delinquent they had raised. That's when I realized that I would never be expelled.
Half the kids at Heritage Christian School were from lower-income families, and the school
received a pittance from the state to enroll them. I was among the children who could pay, and
they wanted the money -- even it if meant dealing with my dildos, heavy metal cassettes, candy,
dirty magazines and smut-filled recordings. I realized that if I ever wanted to get out of
Christian school, I would have to exercise my own free will to walk away. And two months into
the tenth grade I did just that.
-- Marilyn Manson, "The Long Hard Road Out of Hell"