The guest had arrived at Manson's rented house in the Hollywood Hills. Manson gestured that he should sit between Manson and Twiggy. Down below, you could see Los Angeles twinkling out of the darkness, but Manson didn't look. He had looked out the window enough. Perhaps too much.
This evening, he and Twiggy — Manson's principal musical collaborator, his housemate and closest friend — had hospitality on their minds. They would play the guest their music. They would put him in a long blond wig. They would watch Chevy Chase movies together. They would drown a guitar. They would let him see their prized photo of Lionel Richie. They would do their best to show him a good time. Maybe he'd understand.
There are some things Marilyn Manson would like you to understand. He has changed. Don't get this wrong — there will be no apologies offered or regrets expressed in the pages that follow, at least not about any of those things for which apology and regret have most often been demanded.
But he has changed. The character he became during Antichrist Superstar was emotionless and cold, and that was very much how he was himself. Maybe that's how he had to be to muscle his way to celebrity and attention, but he has not stayed that way. For one thing — and I don't think even he is sure of whether this is a cause or a product of the changes within him — he seems to have fallen in love. "I've learned to have a sense of empathy," he says. "I really feel people's pain now, almost on a weird supernatural level where it really affects me if someone is upset about something, and it will set off a huge depression."
As is his nature, now that he has started feeling, he is overdoing it. "It's almost like if I was a machine or an alien and you granted me some human emotions; they're not working right because I just got them for the first time and I'm not learning how to use them properly," he says.
The story of a man beginning to feel emotion is, in part, what his new album, Mechanical Animals, is about. When Manson began to feel emotion, he began to despair about how little emotion most humans feel. They — we — are the mechanical animals of the title. He imagined a story. A man is somewhere far away — maybe in space, maybe on drugs, maybe just high in the Hollywood Hills — and he is looking to come back. He is looking among the mechanical animals for the thing he needs to make himself whole. He calls it Coma White.
Though, naturally, it's more complicated than that. And a lot sadder.
Manson, a more considerate host than his many detractors would have expected, had noticed the guest's preferred drink when they had met briefly the previous night. He fumbled with a Corona, to no great effect, then announced a little helplessly, "I don't know how to open beer bottles." Twiggy took over.
The record had been finished a couple of days earlier. Manson handed the guest a sheaf of neatly typed lyrics inside a manila folder. Only when the music started did the guest realize how awkward this might be. Secretly, the one part of Marilyn Manson's canon that he had not always been so enthusiastic about was the music. Between the few fine songs, there was too much death-metal riffing, distorted shouting and industrial rancor; he had few problems with Manson styling himself as the Antichrist, but rather more with Manson's role as the anti-tune.
Happily, this was different. From the beginning it was easy to like and exciting to hear. The guest stared around the room. There were anatomical models and charts of anatomy and physiology. Next to the video player was a shrunken Mexican voodoo head. On the wall, framed, was Marilyn Manson's first "Rolling Stone" cover and a poster from "The Doom Generation," the film which Manson's old girlfriend had shown to him and which had sparked his attraction to its leading actress and his current girlfriend, Rose McGowan. The guest thought about the cute grotesqueness of that situation: that his old girlfriend had identified with McGowan, and in doing so had drawn Manson's attention to her. And that, in the end, Manson had simply cut out the middle man.
Half the songs were staccato glam romps; the other half were darker, weirder and more beautiful. The sixth song, "Speed of Pain," sounded sad and brutal and creepy in the best ways. Its title referred to something Manson had read about: that scientists were trying to make computers react organically, like human nervous systems. The idea was that machines would be able to react to the speed of pain in the way that humans do. That interested him — that you could maybe outrace the speed of pain. Another way to run away from your feelings. In the song, the singer was failing to outrace the pain his love brought him and ended up declaring, "I hope that we die holding hands."
"It was meant to be somewhat of a love song," Manson said, a proud grin leaking onto his face. "So that's how it comes out for me."
As the ninth song — "I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)" — revved up, Manson announced, "You can't hear the next song without doing drugs." He and Twiggy gathered around the rivulets of cocaine arranged on a CD case, but the guest demurred. It seemed inappropriate to submit to his hosts' will and choreography on demand.
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