Читать книгу Delivered From Evil - Anthony Greve - Страница 9

The Manson Days

The remake of “Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson had just come out. I didn’t know that it was a remake at the time. I would learn that later. When I heard the song, I was hooked. I was an instant Manson fan. He was everything that I loved about rock and roll. He was dirty, rebellious, and most importantly, a showman, or so I thought. As I listened to him, I became more and more interested in the darker things of life. He seemed to have a draw that pulled you in that direction. I needed to wave my Manson banner, so I purchased a Marilyn Manson t-shirt that said “Sweet Dreams” on the back of it. I also bought a White Zombie t-shirt that displayed the number 666 on its back.

I soon purchased the album Smells Like Children by Marilyn Manson. If the title doesn’t say evil, then I don’t know what does. After purchasing Smells Like Children, I also purchased their debut album titled, Portrait of an American Family. Everything about this man and his band was pure evil. It was darker than anything else I had encountered up to this point, yet for some reason, I wanted more of it. I didn’t just become a Manson fan; I became a diehard fan. At thirteen, I started wearing black lipstick, powdering my face white, and wearing eyeliner and mascara. I would put symbolic markings on my face to mimic the Manson family, although I had no idea what the symbols meant. I would even draw stitching over my eyebrows with eyeliner.

To me, all this was nothing more than a form of self-expression. I was expressing who it was I followed by being like Manson. A disciple always looks like his master. Though it was dark, very dark, and I did not understand the implications of what I was doing, I saw this as nothing more than harmless entertainment. It got to the point where I started wearing dresses and ripped nylon leggings on my arms. This is how I would go out in public. I was all in. One dress, in particular, was my favorite. It was a long red dress that I took from my mother’s closet. I would wear that along with nylons and combat boots. To me, this was the ultimate expression of rock and roll. It didn’t get any heavier than this. If you wanted to know whether I had been smoking or not, all you had to do was look for the cigarette butts with the black lipstick on them.

My life got much darker during the Manson era. A friend of mine and I graffitied one of my bedroom walls. We covered it with anarchy symbols, band names, and other demonic stuff. We also took a Lisa Simpson doll that I had and turned her into a voodoo doll. We lit her on fire, spray painted her and put a bunch of pins in her head. She hung around for a while. I’m not sure whatever happened to Lazarus Lisa, but she must have gotten tossed out at some point.

One night, my friend Malcolm came over to hang out. We smoked some cigarettes and listened to rock music in my bedroom. He and I would get together a lot since we were super close friends. We would sit next to my bedroom window with it cracked open so that the smoke would blow directly out of it. We didn’t want my mom to catch on to what we were doing. We would put our cigarettes out and toss them right outside the window into the backyard. Malcolm was staying over, and as we were getting ready for bed, I was staring at my bedroom window trying to figure out what the orange glow reflecting off of it was.

Suddenly it dawned on me, “Fire!” Malcolm and I ran out of the house as fast as we could to see what was going on. We discovered that a portion of the house outside of my bedroom window was on fire. Apparently, one of the cigarettes hadn’t been put all the way out. Lucky for us, there was a hose right around the corner. As if we were a couple of highly trained firemen, we cranked the water faucet on and put the fire out. Had I not caught a glimpse of that orange glow when I did, our house could have easily burned down. Worse yet, it could have burned down with us in it. Even then, God was looking out for my family and for me.

Right when I thought Manson couldn’t get any darker, their second studio album Antichrist Superstar came out. Its first single was titled “The Beautiful People.” I found out that Manson was coming to Michigan, and I told my mother that we had to go to this concert. I remember her saying, “Are you sure you want to go to that concert?” It was as if she knew something that I didn’t. I was adamant, and so we did. From the moment we pulled into the parking lot, I could feel that something was off. There was something here that I hadn’t felt at any other concert before. This was spiritual warfare to the max. People were picketing the concert and protesters heckling the people in line. There were also large groups of Christians praying at various spots in the parking lot. I watched a group of Christians with one girl who had stepped out of line to receive prayer from them. She was crying. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but she was being touched by the Spirit of God. I thought I was just going to another show. I had bit off more than I could chew.

People in line were decked out in black makeup, robes, and other types of dark garments. Once inside, we were immediately seated. The guy sitting directly behind us was smoking a massive joint and had an upside-down cross painted on his forehead. The scene around us was overwhelming. I was almost afraid to move. We saw a woman walking around on the floor with a baby strapped to her back. Even the gentleman behind us said, “Man, that’s just wrong.” Before the show started, they had some creepy children’s music playing over the P.A. system. This was about as demonic as it got. I went down on the floor for a moment only to run right back up to my seat. Everyone seemed drugged out and unfriendly. You could feel the presence of evil in this arena. It just didn’t feel safe on the floor. The band Helmet and a female cello quartet opened the show, but when Manson came out, it was unlike anything I had ever seen or experienced before. This was different. It was as if all hell broke loose, literally.

I remember the lights going down in the arena and the stage curtains gradually pulling back. Manson was dressed in a white corset and had some sort of a cup on. Whatever he was wearing, it wasn’t much. He came walking down what appeared to be the staircase to a Catholic Church. It was a very solemn and dark intro. Once the band kicked in, it was complete chaos in that place. His movements were extremely creepy. At one point, he had the entire crowd spit on him as he wiped his posterior with the American flag. During the show, a tornado touched down, and the authorities wanted to stop the show, but Manson refused. The show went on. They played “Sweet Dreams” in the dark with nothing but a garage light hanging from the lighting fixtures for the first part of the song. All you could see was his face lit by the garage light. Once the whole band kicked in, he smashed the garage light and began to cut himself with the broken shards of glass. He had to step off stage, get bandaged up, and then come back out.

I had never seen a show that took an intermission before, but they did. Maybe it was due to his bleeding. When they came back on after about a fifteen-minute intermission, they had the stage set up to look like Nazi Germany, and he was singing from behind a podium. The band members all had military helmets on. They had huge red banners that draped down each side of the stage with the graphic from the Antichrist Superstar album on them. As he stood behind the podium, moving in a contorted type manner, he began to rip pages out of a Bible and throw them into the crowd. At one point, he stopped the set and said, “Turn the house lights on! I want everyone to shout and show those people outside how much power is in this room!” The place erupted with a loud roar. The people that he had been referring to were the Christians outside of the arena praying. I must add, the most silent prayer of any Christian will always be stronger than the devil’s loudest roar.

When we left the show, I was speechless. I was stunned and reticent. I didn’t have anything to say. I had been to many rock concerts up to this point, but this was something different. It didn’t feel like I left a rock concert; it felt more like I had just left a war zone, and I had. The battle between darkness and light was very evident. It’s as if the people on the inside of the building were at war with those outside of it. I would come to understand, much later in life, what the Apostle Paul wrote in a letter to the church at Ephesus in chapter six, verse 12 (KJV): “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” That night, though, I had no words to describe what I had experienced in that “concert.”

Despite the concert, I continued to be a Manson supporter and continued to wear all his gear. This would cause conflict for me at school. In one instance, a teacher told me that if I wanted to stay in his classroom, I had to turn my Manson shirt inside out. On the front of the shirt, it said “See no truth, hear no truth, speak no truth,” and the back of the shirt said, “Believe,” with the l, i, and e highlighted to spell out the word lie. It didn’t bother me to do so, but a student fought against the teacher for me and won my case. The teacher finally agreed to let me wear the shirt.

On another occasion, I came to school decked out in all my Manson gear. I had the dress on and the whole nine yards. We were just starting class when the teacher looked at me and said, “Is it Halloween?” As everyone laughed, he said, “No, seriously, did I miss it?” It was near the end of October. When I said it wasn’t, he asked me to wash my makeup off as it was a distraction to his class. His student assistant fought for me in this case and persuaded the teacher to allow me to leave it on, but by that point, I had already washed it off. I wasn’t doing this to rebel or to cause trouble. To me, this was an expression of the music that I loved and made.

Music was truly an expression to me and was something that I was deeply passionate about and loved. I didn’t understand the spiritual side of it, and how could I? To me, this was about achieving my goals and my dreams. I just wanted to be a rock star. My friends and I would always talk about what life would be like once I got famous. It was like we knew it was going to happen; it was just a matter of time.

At this point, I had gotten much better musically and had upgraded my gear. My mother saw that I was still serious about music and staying the course, so she took me to Rick’s one day to potentially get me a new guitar. I went into the store and began checking out the guitars. I loved trying out their guitars just to show off. I was a huge Dimebag Darrell fan (Pantera’s guitarist), and because he played a Washburn that meant that I had to play a Washburn. Later in life, I would end up endorsed by Dean and playing his line of guitars. I picked out this beautiful burgundy red Sammy Hagar Cabo Wabo edition Washburn. My mother ended up buying it for me as a gift. This was not easy for her to do as we didn’t have the money for it. It was no cheap instrument. It was well over $1,000.00. But I will say this, she could not have given me a better gift. I played that guitar non-stop. I absolutely loved it. That guitar would be my primary axe (guitar) for a while, and Washburn would become my guitar of choice because of Darrell.

Had my mom not supported me the way that she did, I never would have had the success that I had. She was more than a supporter; she was truly my best friend. I loved spending time with her and just talking about life. In the mornings, before school, we would sit and have coffee together and chat. I would head to school, and she would head to work. She’d even take time to braid my hair for me as it was quite long during this period.

My mom and I really connected. Sometimes in the morning, I would put a shot of Bailey’s Original Irish Cream liqueur in my coffee not thinking anything about it. I used it as a creamer. I didn’t think too much of it until my mom came home one day reeking of booze. I said, “Have you been drinking?” She said, “Just a little Bailey’s in my coffee!” I must have gone to school smelling like that! You could really smell it! I’m surprised I never got questioned by a professor. All it took was one shot to smell like a liquor cabinet. And that was aside from the fact that I also reeked from the cigarettes smoked on my way to school every morning. Sometimes my friends and I would try to cover it up by spraying cologne on ourselves, but that never worked! We just ended up smelling like Tommy Hilfiger and smoke!

As much as my mother and I got along, I was a difficult kid to deal with. I wasn’t a bad kid, just very difficult at times. Getting me up for school was a chore for her. I hated waking up in the mornings, so much so that one day my mom pinned a magazine ad that she had found to my bedroom door. It was a picture of a little boy in a lion outfit crying, and it said, “One cranky king.” That was me. I was definitely cranky in the mornings, to say the least.

One morning, after several attempts by my mother to get me out of bed, I finally woke up and made my way to the kitchen. I sat down in one of our kitchen chairs leaning back against the wall. I was still trying to open my eyes. Suddenly, I sneezed. My mother looked over at me and said, “Oh! God bless you!” I snapped back at her, “Don’t bless me!” She politely said, “I didn’t bless you. I said, God bless you.” I looked at her with an evil little smirk on my face and cursed the name of God. I won’t repeat what I said. Ironically, in that moment, a pan that was hanging on the wall behind me fell off its hook hitting and bouncing off my head. The average person might write this off as a coincidence, but that pan had been hanging there for years, and it had never fallen off the hook before. I’m sure there was an angel there to slide it off the hook when I opened my mouth against God. I just sat there in surprise. My mother looked at me, smiled, and said, “You better watch what you say about God.”