A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (18 page)

The reason I tell you this story is because it eventually ruined their relationship. Frank and his girlfriend did not break up because they wanted to or because they had grown to hate each other or even because they had fallen out of love with each other; they broke up because they felt it was the only solution they could think of to rid each other of this persistent presence. The way Frank put it, these things followed them from that house to every subsequent dwelling they chose to have together. It got to be so intolerable that it drove them apart. And once they split up, these things stopped happening. So Frank and this woman made a decision that it was in their best interests to never have any contact again out of fear that “the kids would come back and want to play again.” I listened to this story in amazement. I started thinking about my ideas on “intelligent energy” and wondered if certain energies were attracted to each other. Certainly electrons cable themselves together in attracted bundles and quarks could do the same thing. Maybe that explains why certain people and their respective souls feel so drawn to one another and experience painful emptiness when they are apart. If this were true for living people, why not spirits? Maybe they sense a sort of sameness or consistency in unique individuals that makes them go crazy, and they cannot help but be around them. Maybe in Frank’s case it was the combined energy of him and his ex that kept those precocious dead scamps coming back around. Now these two lovebirds refuse to be together because it was all too much to bear.

It is one of the saddest stories I have ever heard, but in between the lines there is a romantic sentiment, akin to soul mates and kindred spirits. God, I could not imagine being away from my wife in a case like that—I would go mad. I would rather suffer through a poltergeist than be away from her, plain and simple. I will take flying pots and pans over separation from The Boss any day. Sometimes you have to ask yourself which hell would you rather succumb to: the one in which the outside forces seem to be after you, or the one in which the one you love cannot be with you? Both options are not what you might call awesome, and I would not wish that kind of decision on anyone.

That may explain the kids on the circle, which we will get to later on. Maybe that is why they are still around, because they feel a kinship with me. It may be why that darkness had followed me through the years as well. Energetic attraction: what a fucking concept, eh? Shit, I have said too much. You will just have to wait for more on that in a little bit.

For some weird reason I am reminded of a particular Halloween in 2002, back when my hair was dyed black, I was sixty pounds heavier, I drank a lot, and “Bother” was getting a lot of airplay on the radio. We were on the road with Stone Sour at the time, promoting the self-titled first album. Unbeknownst to me, someone at the record label had involved me in a radio contest for a Seattle station in which one lucky winner got a sponsored Halloween party for their friends . . . and I would show up and play “Bother” in their living room. I had no idea this had been planned, executed, and arranged. But about a week before Halloween, I got wind of this and kind of flipped out. In order for me to make this happen I would have to play a show, leave the tour, fly into Seattle, do the Halloween party, sleep for fifteen minutes, turn around, and fly back for another show the next day. Halloween was my only day off. Now I had been obligated to show up for a party with god knows whomever and try not to suck, all on about ten minutes sleep.

No pressure.

It is not that I did not think it was a cool idea—it was a cool idea. I just hate surprises, especially surprises that add work to an already gnarly work schedule. I rolled with the clichéd punches and did my best to keep a stiff upper lip for the occasion. I also did my best not to get completely blotto before the thing because I was going to a stranger’s house sight unseen, and I wanted to do my best. So I put on my nicest long-sleeved shirt, threw on my Jack Skellington hat, grabbed my acoustic, and headed for the airport. That leg of the shit was fine. It was once I got to Seattle that things started to go awry for yours truly.

The label rep picked me up around 7 p.m. and said it would be a bit of a drive. An hour later we were still driving. I had no idea the deepest recesses of the Congo extended all the way to Washington State. I had given up hope of ever seeing civilization again when we suddenly turned off the pavement onto a gravel road that disappeared into the wilderness. Flashes of Last House on the Left flew through my head—the original, not the remake, although the remake was not half bad. As we got further and further away from the lights of the city, both my hope and my enthusiasm were dissipating. It turned out we were lost. We had to backtrack a bit, and then suddenly there was a row of houses that seemed to have grown up in the middle of nowhere. By houses, I really mean mansions. These were high-end family escapes away from the urban grind.

I was expected to perform in one of their living rooms.

We entered the winner’s house and two things struck me at once, and both made me want to run for my life. One, everything in this house looked like it cost a million fucking dollars. Just out of self-preservation I did not want to touch anything; if these people sued me, I would owe them money after death. Two, I found myself surrounded by a contingent of hopped-up teenagers, all decked in costumes, ready to party with Corey Taylor. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this was going to be a long night.

They set me up in the corner of the living room on a wooden bar stool, with an intern from the radio station trying in vain to get a very modest PA system to work so I could sing for these people. The speakers themselves were about the size of two packs of cigarettes and sounded about as savory. Finally, we jettisoned the PA idea in favor of having everyone there crowd around so they could hear me clearly. It was a surreal scene out of Spinal Tap: to my right were the radio people, to my left was my label representative, immediately in front of me were all the costumed folk, and behind them were all the parents, staring in disbelief that any of these kids gave a bear’s fart about the fat Goth in the beanie with the guitar. I played my song and a couple others, retired my gig fiddle to its case, and went directly to the kitchen, where the parents were guarding the alcohol.

The rest of the night is a befuddling blur. After fifteen minutes the parents and I were doing shots of Canadian Club, challenging each other to see how many we could do inside thirty seconds. Within an hour I was so shit-faced I was back in the living room teaching the youngsters how to do “The Time Warp” from Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was on VH1. I have no idea when I left or how I got back to my hotel room, but when I came to, the sun was up, my pillow was stuck to my face, and a very confused housekeeper had ignored my “do not disturb” sign, leaning over me and asking me in broken English if I wanted turn-down service. To put it mildly, I did not.

I cannot even remember why I told you that story. I know there was a reason, but now that reason has escaped my Nerf-like brain. You know what? Give me til the end of this chapter—I am sure it will come back to me. Either that or I will end up wandering the house in my Doctor Who pajamas picking at my gums with a no. 2 pencil and talking to the dust particles swarming around my head in a vain attempt to communicate with their kind. I am here to tell you: too much coffee in the morning makes for very strange habits when no one else is paying attention. But I suspect there might be some interesting YouTube footage coming your way if my family planted hidden cameras around that place. I will be the first to say it: I apologize . . . and my family is a bunch of bastards.

Just when I thought things would never get as weird as I had already discovered, it just went ahead and fucking did without asking.

I have homes in Des Moines, where my kids and grandmother live, and Las Vegas, where my family on my wife’s side live. I split time between the two, but lately I have been spending more time in Las Vegas because, as the paternal catalyst, I have a responsibility to my married side to come take up too much space on the couch and occasionally kill a spider. Just recently we moved into a new house in a very nice neighborhood, with more space and speed bumps and everything. It felt like a proper place to raise kids and have dinners with family friends—all the stuff you do when you are either getting older or looking for an investment property or both. I was very excited myself because the place came with recessed speaker systems in every room and a pool table—you know, the important stuff. So we eagerly moved in. The house directly across the street was empty, but some of the neighbors on either side waved, smiled, and made us feel pretty good as we shoved all our stuff into our new home. There was parking for almost everyone (which is no easy feat—there are a lot of us) and a wonderful backyard. It was perfect in every way.

Then the “empty” house across the street turned out to be not so empty.

When you peek inside the windows, it looks innocuous enough: just a collection of big, empty pseudo-adobe rooms painted Southwestern Peach in an attempt to give it that modern rustic feel. There is not a scrap of furniture in the joint, not even a remnant abandoned in haste because there was no room left on the truck for anything else. It is flat-out un-fucking-lived in. But every other night, 8 p.m. until 11 p.m., that house turns into some sort of crazy rave-like TV party. There are eerie blue lights that illuminate the upstairs rooms and hallways, concentrating in the upper living room area. It looks like a group of Gremlins are dragging twenty-five-inch plasmas around while tripping on massive tabs of E. I have seen it with both eyes, and it is fucked up. These events are punctuated with really loud fucking noises as well, like a rugby match between Australia and Great Britain just across the street and everything is on the line. It is fucking out of control over there, and it just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Shit is starting to bleed into our house now, with unexplained activity going on in the west part of the damn house. What the hell am I going to do with another fucked up house? Am I supposed to wander around with invisible vittles and treat this like an undead soiree? James fucking Francis, I cannot win!

To sum up this chapter, I find myself thinking about more than just the tales I have been told and the various chats I have been privy to over the years. You see, if you have not already figured it out, I am very much an extroverted social vessel who loves nothing more than to drink shit tons of coffee and chew the metaphorical fat with me and mine, my collection of crazy iconoclasts that I have surrounded myself with for what feels like centuries. I have always been fascinated by tales of the Algonquin Round Table from yesteryear, an amazing confluence of intellect and personalities that saw the likes of Dorothy Parker, Will Rogers, and others trading barbs over dinners and dexterous displays of heady witticisms. In my life I have had these same types of moments, going all the way back to 1992 when we the people could invade a Perkins Restaurant at midnight, plunk down a dollar for a bottomless pot of coffee (split among twelve people), smoke our asses off for hours, and just talk good shit until the sun came up. Those are truly some of my most cherished memories—traversing the psyches of my fabulous friends, who were just as fucked up and brilliant as I was, jotting down notes on receipts, writing lyrics on McDonald’s applications, discovering ways to make every dream you ever had come true. I can recall nearly every conversation that occurred at those tables and in those booths. I had not just found my place in the world; I found myself in that particular world. I saved myself from that clichéd and depressed destruction most crazy geniuses find when they are young. The damnable tragedy is that I will never get to thank those long-lost friends for helping me get through it all. So I go on, moving through different talks into this place we call the future, feeling the road more than seeing it, because to me that is so much more rewarding once you reach your destination.

Ultimately that is what this chapter is: a way to collect these spirit-laden yarns together for posterity while simultaneously offering a subtle little dedication to those souls out there who helped mold me, shape me, chisel me out of pure attitude and profundity into the glorious fuck up I am today. I want them to know I am doing my best to carry on those conversations, to continue that Silly String Theory we loved so much back then. That, to me, is the real proof of relativity: time may not exist forward, but I can trace my own back across the years with the help of the safety line provided by a thousand pure hours of smiling cogitation and wild-eyed postulation, solving world hunger and starting fake bands, being a man and learning to love women and vice versa or both. Things like convention matter so little when the world is new to you. All that really matters is finding a place in that world that feels like no one else was there before you. Nothing kills ingenuity like that tired sense that maybe you are just repeating someone else and their fading footsteps. Therefore, I use these memories to track the unexplained and the undiscovered because they were and remain wonderful, they were and remain eloquent and irreverent, and they are very much alive in my minefield of a mind.

My kitchen table has replaced that Perkins Restaurant. I draw people in like a vegan spider to rip through their creative bends and offer my own inspiration to them in return for a blast of quickened curiosity. Sure, I certainly do not enjoy them as often as I used to; I am, of course, the workaholic machine that is Corey Fuckin’ Taylor after all, and I have shit to do every spare second not spent allowing myself to inexplicably go unconscious for another round of sleep cycles. But I still have great friends who I like to verbally joust with at every stolen opportunity. It definitely keeps me interested in this sadly banal and barren place called Earth, and it helps me accrue things like the different ghost stories some of us have dragged behind us for years, suddenly ready to dump them off to share with the world. I had a simile here about new shoes at a Salvation Army drop box, but I really do not feel that is correct, because we are not letting go of them; we are surely only sharing them with the rest of the class. At a time when so many of us are so desperately trying to find ways to connect with the rest of the aberrant cell divisions called humans, why not try something like sitting down and talking? And if you are talking, why not try sharing? And if you are sharing, why not share a bit about something as exciting and polarizing as ghosts? Just a thought . . .