The day before, in the offices of his record label on Santa Monica Boulevard, Manson sat on a black leather sofa, wearing black leather pants, and whenever he shifted, the leather-on-leather made a deep growl sound, amazingly similar to his voice.
"I tried to swim when I was a kid, but I could never deal with the water in my nose. I have a fear of the water. I don't like the ocean. There's something too infinite about it that I find dangerous."
The walls are dark blue and there are no lights on. Manson sits in this dark-blue room with the air conditioning blasting, drinking cola and wearing sunglasses.
"I guess I have a tendency to like to live in places where I don't really fit. I started out in Florida, and maybe that made me not fit. That was the thing that drove me to like and be attracted to everything opposite of my surroundings, because I didn't like the beach culture."
He says, "I used to just like to look. When I didn't know anybody and I first moved to Florida, I'd sit and I'd watch people. Just listen to conversations and observe. If you intend to create something that people will observe and listen to, you've got to listen to them first. That's the key to it."
At home, in the attic of his five-story house, drinking a glass of red wine, Manson deals his third card: the Fool
"The third card is to represent my goals," he says, the leather-rubbing-leather sound in his voice. "The Fool is about to walk off of a cliff, and it's a good card. It represents embarking on a journey, or taking a big step forward. That could represent the campaign of the record coming out or going on tour now."
He says, "I have a fear of crowded rooms. I don't like being around a lot of people, but I feel very comfortable onstage in front of thousands of people. I think it's a way of dealing with that."
His voice is so deep and soft, it disappears behind the rush of the air conditioning.
"I am very shy, strangely enough," he says, "and that's the irony of being an exhibitionist, being up in front of people. I'm really very shy.
"I like to sing alone, too. The least amount of people are involved whenever I'm singing. When I'm recording, sometimes I'll make them hit record and leave the room."
About touring, he says, "The threat of death makes it all worth living, makes it all exciting. That's the ultimate relief of boredom. Being right in the middle of it all. I thought, 'I know that I'm going to have to take things to such an extreme to get my points across that I'm going to start at the bottom and make myself the most despised person. I'm going to represent everything that you're against and you can't say anything to hurt me, to make me feel any worse. I only have up to go. I think that was the most rewarding, to feel like there's nothing you can do to hurt me. Aside from killing me. Because I represent the bottom. I'm the worst that it gets, so you can't say that I did something that makes me look bad, because I'm telling you right now that I'm all of it. It was very liberating to not have to worry about how people are going to try and knock you down.
"If you don't like my music, I don't care. It doesn't really matter to me. If you don't like what I look like, if you don't like what I have to say, it's all part of what I'm asking for. You're giving me just what I want."
Manson deals his fourth card: Death
"The fourth card is your distant past," he says. "And the Death card most represents transition, and it's part of what has got you to this, how you are right now. This makes a good deal of sense, regarding the fact that I've just gone through such a grand transition that's taken place over the course of the last ten years."
Sitting in the dark-blue room at his record label, he says, "I think that my mom has in some ways that Munchausen syndrome, when people try and convince you that you're ill so they can hang on to you longer. Because when I was young, my mom used to always tell me I was allergic to different things that I'm not allergic to. She used to tell me I'm allergic to eggs and fabric softener and all kind of weird things. That's part of the medical element, too, because my mom's a nurse."
His black leather pants flare to cover thick-soled black shoes.
He says, "I remember that my urethra had grown closed, and they had to put a drill in my dick and drill it out. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to a kid. They told me that after I went through puberty I had to come back and go through it again, but I said, 'No chance. I don't care what my urine stream is like now. I'm not going back.»
His mother still keeps his foreskin in a vial.
"When I was growing up, my dad and I didn't get along. He was never around, and that's why I didn't really talk about him, because I never saw him. He worked all the time. I don't consider what I do to be work, but I think I've inherited his workaholic determinism. I don't think until I was in my twenties did my dad ever speak to me about being in the Vietnam War. Then he started telling me about people that he'd killed and things that he was involved in with Agent Orange."
He says, "My father and I both have some sort of heart disorder, a heart murmur. I was really sick when I was a kid. I had pneumonia four or five times and was always in the hospital, always underweight, scrawny, primed for a beating."
Phones ring in the other offices. Four lanes of traffic go by outside.
"When I was writing the book [his autobiography]," Manson says, "I hadn't really gotten to the conclusion of how similar I was to my grandfather. Until I got to the end of the book, that hadn't dawned on me. That as a kid, I'm looking at him as a monster because he's got women's clothing and dildos and all these things, and by the end of my story I've become far worse than my grandfather ever was.
"I don't think I've told anyone this," Manson says, "but what I found out over the last year is that my father and my grandfather never got along. My father came back from the Vietnam War and was kind of tossed out on the street and told he had to pay rent. There's something really dark about that I never liked. And my father told me last year that he'd found out that that's not his real father. Which was the strangest thing I'd ever heard, because it started to make sense that maybe he was treated poorly and had this weird relationship. It's really weird to think that he wasn't really my grandfather."
He says, "I suspect that there's so much death imagery because as a kid being afraid of death-because I was always sick and always had sick relatives-there was always a fear of death for a long time. There was a fear of the Devil. A fear of the end of the world. The Rapture-which is a Christian myth that I discovered doesn't even exist in the Bible. All of that I just ended up becoming. I ended up becoming what I was afraid of. That was my way of dealing with it."
In the attic, Manson deals his fifth card: the Hanged Man
"The fifth card is more of your recent past," he says. "It also is meant to mean some sort of change has taken place, in this case it could mean the fact that I've become extremely more focused and maybe in some ways have neglected friendships and relationships."
He says, "I was born in 69, and that year's become such a focus for a lot of things, especially this record, Holy Wood. Because 69 was the end of so many things. Everything in culture just changed so much, and I think it was real important that I was born then, too. Just the end of the sixties. The fact that Huxley and Kennedy died on the same day. To me, that opened up some kind of schism or gateway to what was going to happen. It all started to show parallels for me. Altamonte was like Woodstock 99. The house I live in, the Stones lived there when they wrote 'Let It Bleed. I found Cocksucker Blues, an obscure film that they made, and it shows them in my living room writing 'Gimme Shelter. And 'Gimme Shelter' was the song that was emblematic of the whole Altamonte tragedy. And then the Manson murders were something I've always obsessed over, since I was a child. That to me had the same media coverage as Columbine.