Plastic Jesus Read Online Free PDF Page B

They snorted lines off the cover of their third album and fell about laughing like everyone else. Somebody took a picture that night that they ended up using, along with many others, on the inner sleeve of the next album: arms around each other's shoulders, cheeks pressed together, identical fucked-up grins on their faces.
    Later, Seth would remember this time in London with nostalgia: nothing to compete with the time when his mother was alive, but nostalgia nonetheless. He would remember it more precisely as the last time that was really his own, the time before things went insane.

    * * * *

    Because soon, oh, soon it was all too much. He remembered his grandmother calling something “much of a muchness,” and though she'd probably meant something quite different, that was exactly what it felt like.
    The world wasn't just America and London and Amsterdam now; it was Australia, Germany, the Phillipines, Japan, and all were a mass of writhing, screaming little girls. Japan was where it all went wrong for Seth somehow. This might have had something to do with the ten hits of blotter acid he'd smuggled through customs in his rock star bag. The rock star bag seemed to be taken for granted by customs inspectors the world over. It was simply a small bag the rock star carried on his person, and no one ever looked inside it. The very first time they'd gone overseas, Harold had told them, “Do not bring anything illegal, but if you must bring something questionable , be sure to pack it in your in-flight bag."
    From then on, their in-flight bags were known to the Kydds as rock star bags, and all manner of illicit substances traveled back and forth in them. “What have you got in your rock star bag today then, Peyt?” “Oh, nothing much, Dennis, nothing that would get you arrested in Singapore.” Nonetheless, some paranoia impelled Seth to get rid of the ten hits of acid before leaving Japan, and the only acceptable method of doing this was to eat them all at once.
    Locked in a small room with black lacquer fixtures and rice paper walls, he began to freak. He started dialing room numbers. Harold was out. So was Peyton. No one else seemed to be in the hotel. His throat tightened painfully; the air swirled with colorful motes. From somewhere far below, he could hear screaming. He crawled into bed and piled all the pillows over his ears, and he could still hear the screaming, shrill and incessant. A vivid hallucination took shape in his mind, a scene from Goya going on seventeen floors down. Someone had built an enormous funeral pyre and the little girls were throwing themselves onto it, twisting in the flames like medieval martyrs, burning and screaming. That was it, that was the symbol. His entire career had been built on the pain of thwarted little girls, and everywhere he went, more girls were begging for it, elbowing each other aside to be the first to die screaming in agony as a demonstration of love for him. In his head, a girl swallowed a box of tacks; her sister drank a gallon of lye. An Australian girl shot herself in the guts. A creative lassie in Scotland tied her four limbs to four strong horses...
    And they never stopped screaming.
    The door slammed open. The sound brought Seth back to the hotel room. Peyton stood in the doorway, a Japanese schoolgirl dangling from each arm. “Around the world to the sound of screams, eh, Sethy? These two were asking for you—"
    The little girls caught sight of Seth, naked on the bed wrapped in a sheet, brains fizzing out his ears, and they both started to scream. And Seth sat up and screamed back at them, screamed and SCREAMED into their avid, empty faces until his throat was raw —
    No. There were no Japanese schoolgirls in the room, no girls at all. Peyton was on the bed with him, gathering him up like an armload of laundry. “You didn't take all that blotter, did you? Oh Christ, of course you did. Right, let's just be quiet."
    He lay with his