You're Making Me Hate You

Chapter 1

Just Before the Storm

Foreboding fake disclaimer: By reading this book and subsequently promoting its contents, whether in physical conversation or digital form, you are entering into an informal contractual congress with the author, one Corey Taylor, known from here on out as "The Neck." This verbal agreement, semilegally recognized in several states and countries (including Guam), gives The Neck permission to smack any of you readers in the face with a plastic wiffle ball bat if and when you commit any of the ridiculously idiotic atrocities that will eventually be described in the tome you now hold in your hands. Herein there will be no warnings or recognition of first offenses regarding violation of this so-called dumbass agreement, and the resulting punishment will most likely happen when you least expect it, coming at the author's earliest convenience, depending on his amateur squash league schedule and other proclivities. If these terms do not appeal to "the better angels" of your judgment, you are encouraged to cease reading this book immediately or, better yet, pass it on to someone you are convinced will be susceptible to breaking this covenant, thus setting the stage for retribution. You will then be enlisted to assist The Neck in finding the offender's residence, affording you a front-row seat to watch the plastic violence firsthand. Thank you.

It was a weird, drunken, spooky night twelve years ago.

I'd love to say I remember it well, but the fact of the matter is my old friend Jack Daniels and I had engaged in a battle of wills that night. Jack won; I placed. So what I can muster from my shitty college dorm room called a memory bank is fuzzy, at least for the first half of the proceedings. Through nobody's fault but my own, shit happened all down my leg. That is as close to foreshadowing as I am going to go at this point because what I do recall is precariously close to the sort of thing you hear about when someone sits you down for a cautionary tale about drugs and booze and bullshit. So pretend for a moment that I am the parent and you are the child. I think it goes without saying that you're snickering, and the paltry attempts to stave off that snickering is not appreciated, but I get it. It is indeed a strain to imagine yours truly as the voice of reason. After all, I'm the guy who stuck his dick in an orange at a meet-and-greet for $26.10 . . . in change. Please just bear with me if you can bear the tension. I promise the following story will not only set the stage for this book in rare form but will also hopefully make you chuckle, chortle, and snort as well. God forbid, you might even learn something. I highly doubt that last prediction.

If you've read any of my other tomes of torment, you will naturally understand that twelve years ago was my notorious epic run during the making of Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses. Honestly, I could milk that period of my life for as long as I punch pain into inputs, but this book is much more about the present and the future. So I am only going to dip into this particular ink well for a brief moment because it has some insight into the topic at hand. It involves alcohol, various nefarious drugs, a party, a redhead, and a man in an ill-fitting bandana wearing leather pants. I don't even remember their names—probably because I never bothered to learn them. So giving them names that are most likely not the ones they were blessed with isn't out of respect; it's because I simply didn't give a shit about them in the first place. In fact, if they do read this and get offended I couldn't care less. They're the ones with enough egg on their faces to make omelets for an entire Los Angeles basketball team, so fuck them.

That's the kind of book this is going to be: tug on your fucking helmets.

Any-who . . .

I started this night at the hole of holes, the heaven of hells: the Rainbow Bar and Grill. I know—this place appears in so much of my writing that I'd have to cast it as an actual person in any movie made about my life. However, it has always been a giant, beautiful nugget in the gold mine of my absurdities. Thank fuck this story is not a spotlight on my dumb shit; I am merely the one who had to witness the buggery. But all tales start somewhere. The starting pistol sounded off at the outside bar, where respectable people can still have a cigarette nuzzled up against finished mahogany while drowning themselves in libations. There's another piece of fine "intelligence": "Hey, I'm going to go inside this place and blow my brains out on alcohol, thereby killing my brain cells and liver while also doing damage to other vital organs. I might even do some blow in the bathroom. But those other fuckers better go outside to SMOKE!" Fuckin' savages . . .

I was hanging out with a friend who had been invited to a party in Silver Lake, a section of LA not too terribly far from the Rainbow. Well, I say not too terribly far: the truth is, I didn't know how far it was—I wasn't driving. All I remember was climbing into my friend's sedan afterward and hanging out the window to let the cool air put the kibosh on my spins. I believe there was even a spirited debate about whether we could cruise through the Del Taco drive-thru for inexpensive meat envelopes. Now that I think about it, I do have a visual of taking a piss behind a dumpster in the parking lot while chatting with a nice gentleman who was none too pleased about the expulsion, maybe because I was singing "And We Danced" by the Hooters at concert volume. People in line at the outside menu couldn't be heard on the speaker. I guess I was calling way too much attention to his rummaging around in those giant canisters for fuck-knows-what. Once I was back in the car and loaded for bear with crappy fast food, we got back on track. Then before I knew it, we were at the party.

In retrospect I can only call it a party in passing. If I can be completely frank, I've had crazier bowel movements. First of all, there were too many dumbasses and not enough chemicals. In other words, there wasn't enough "happy" to go around. Second, the men and women entrenched in this place would make the world's most brain-dead frat brothers look like Mensa members in comparison. It's the same problem I've come across at other parties I've gone to in Hollywood: too much posing and strutting and not enough actual partying. You have to remember the kind of people I was used to throwing down with. I was accustomed to maniacs jumping off of roofs and setting walls on fire once they were done sniffing the gasoline fumes. This was basically a bunch of shit heels running around a two-bedroom ranch-style box on a side street in suburban California, trying like hell to look good and catch a buzz before the beer and pills ran out. It didn't exactly move the needle on my RPMs.

I found myself sitting in the middle of a bedroom floor surrounded by atavistic morons, with a redhead on opiates who was convinced she could read my thoughts and tell me my future. That would have been simple: the future had me trying to escape this fucking awful "party." The redhead, who we will call Janice, was equal parts pretentious, innocuous, and full of shit. Janice was an actress (an actress in LA . . . what were the odds?) and was trying out for a role in a health food commercial. Judging by the shape she was in, I could have told her that she had an ice cube's chance in Cuba of making that dream a reality. She looked more like Wynonna Judd than Julianne Moore, complete with the face of a long-haired Clint Eastwood squinting into the desert sun. But being a respectful prick, I kept it to myself, kindly wished her luck in her endeavors, and made to take my leave of it all, grabbing for the front doorknob with one hand and dialing for a cab on my cell phone with the other. Unfortunately Janice wasn't done with me, much to my chagrin. I explained to her I was leaving; she asked whether she could catch a ride back to her apartment. Knowing full well that nothing was going to happen with this person, I said sure.

That's when Janice fucked up my night completely.

She said, "Great! Can my friend Charles come along?"

Charles?

It was then that Charles came stumbling up in all of his embarrassing glory. I had noticed him lurking around the fringes of the "party" like a sort of B-Movie actor trying too hard to play a rock-and-roll vampire. Picture Ed Wood meets Jim Morrison and it all starts to tragically make sense. He was dressed in black leather pants on a Thursday. Even I know that's just not cricket—if he were trying to be ironic, I might have cut him some slack. But I don't think Charles could have spelled "ironic." To complete this ensemble, he'd matched these pants up with a sleeveless Ratt T-shirt, a black suit jacket, low-top tennis shoes, and a blue bandana that was more Bret Michaels than Axl Rose. Basically he was shooting for the Izzy Stradlin outfit without being as cool as Izzy Stradlin. Now, I can't say much when it comes to fashion; I myself have a tendency to take good clothes and make bad decisions with them. But even compared to my fashion disasters, this guy looked like a douche pickle soaked in toilet water.

His behavior wasn't helping his Q points at all. He'd been making attempts to engage in conversation with almost everyone, but once he joined a group, he didn't say anything. He just stood there, leaning in a little too close, staring alternately right into your eyes and directly into your chest, leaving the cluster of folks mired with uncomfortable silence and bad breath. When he did say something, all he did was try to pimp his band. But it all came out garbled in vowel sounds and hand gestures. It was as if a rookie mime wanted to hand you a demo tape. At the time I didn't know he was on heroin; I just thought he was wasted—perhaps he'd even resorted to snorting Clorox in the bathroom when all the jubilant goodies were gone. I didn't find out about the heroin until Janice told me later, but we'll get to that. At that moment I just wasn't impressed. Naturally I wasn't very stoked about giving him a ride anywhere. But I was still buzzed enough to be talked into worse shit than that, so I said okay. The cab arrived, I ushered them into the backseat, and I jumped up front. We were all three going separate places, but I assured the cabbie I had ample funds so he would be taken care of.

We'd gone maybe a mile when Charles started to get sick.

I've had my share of satanic moments in the backs of taxis. For all I know, there's a flyer with my face on it tacked onto corkboard in most of the cab stations around the world. But this was distressing. Charles was all over Janice, moaning and clutching at his belly as if we were on the way to the hospital and his water had just broken. There was a lot of thrashing around. Then he kicked the back of my seat. I glanced at the driver, who was now undeniably in the midst of second thoughts about this particular fare. He kept checking his rearview mirror and muttering under his breath about "fuckin' junkies." This was obviously not his first experience with heroin addicts, but it was new for me, and I refused to be subtle about it. I turned around in my seat and stared through the plastic divider that we all know and love in cabs. This was like an episode of Cop Rock—so bad you can't take your eyes off of it. It was a novel sensation because normally I was the one who'd screwed the karmic pooch a little too long and was inevitably caught with his dick in the dog. But that wasn't the case this time. I was going to enjoy it . . . or so I thought.

That's when the farting started.

Initially I just laughed like a hyena. Farts make me laugh harder than a whole nation at a Carlin concert. Maybe it's because like most men, my sense of humor stopped developing right around the time I discovered you could make bubbles in the bathwater with a burst of ass air. Whatever the reason, I started fucking HOWLING. Janice didn't appreciate it and laid into me with some passive-aggressive hippie babble: "You know, it's not funny to scoff at another person's pain, Corey. He's coming off of heroin, so his system is really messed up. You might try being a little more empathetic." Fuck all that—this was awesome! I wasn't giggling about the horse DTs; I was giggling at the gas. Not only was I giving a ride to two wastes of dignity, but one was also in the throes of an invisible poop onslaught. Call me a dick all you want—that shit is hilarious. Thankfully we were in California, where you can set your watch to the weather, because the driver cranked all four windows down at once, letting in fresh air to replace the acrid smell invading our territory from the backseat. As much as I was enjoying this Broadway production of a terrible reality show, this shit was starting to get out of hand.

Charles let out a howl that sounded like, "I need to stop and be sick!" I wasn't sure that was a good idea, however; we were deep in the trenches of suburban LA, so really there was nowhere for Charles to do his business. But between Janice's nagging protests and Charles's inaudible pleas, I nudged the driver to pull over on a back street in front of a clutch of one-story duplexes. It was 3 a.m. It was intensely quiet. It was dark as could be. This was the only place I thought was appropriate to take care of this situation. So we slid up to the curb. Janice asked me to go with Charles to make sure he was going to be okay. I didn't want to. I hate people. But I agreed because I knew someday I would need the same type of help from a hapless stranger. Against everything in my fiber, everything in my cellular structure, everything in my mind and everything in my selfish capacity, I made ready to take care of this dildo so I could get back to my own bed as quickly as possible.

We got out of the car.

The following events are absolutely true.

I helped Charles creep through the front lawn to a shadowy patch closer to the backyard. I helped him square his stance then backed up quickly—splash back is bad for any man, but splash back from vomit is just cruel and unusual, especially when it's not your own. So I retreated a good distance in order to help if needed but not so close that I would wear his tactical chowder. As if on cue, Charles threw up. Then he threw up and farted simultaneously. I chewed back a gut laugh so the neighbors didn't lynch us. Thinking we were finished here, I stood up a little straighter to help this yutz back to the cab. But apparently Charles wasn't done. With faltering hands and a complete lack of realization for where he was or who was with him, he began to undo his leather pants.

Um, what the fuck, dude?

If you've ever seen someone try to take leather pants off by themselves, you will know how silly it looks. For those of you not privy to this sight, it is in fact futility in motion: it takes two to three pairs of hands, some leverage, and a little traction. Even that requires a little prayer and help from a friend who understands you're not laughing at them, and that's for someone who's sober. But this was so far beyond asinine that I thought I was being Punk'd. This poor boob of a man was tugging his skin-tight leathers down in the middle of domestic paradise at an hour when most paperboys are tying their bundles together. I thought to myself, "This prick thinks he's at home. He thinks he's getting ready for bed." Even this was proven to be false, however, when Charles, in a display of mammoth stupidity I had never seen up to that point, stopped pulling his leather pants off at the knees, squatted uncomfortably . . . and began to take a shit. I should qualify that with he was trying to take a shit, because it wasn't going well. He fell three times, all of which deposited him into his own pools of sick. When he finally produced turds, the straining and the breaking of winds were almost too much to take. Then the eventual catastrophe happened. After falling in his own puke, Charles finally added masterful insult to monster injury by falling backward onto his own fresh piles of poop. Then, as if it were written in an Edgar Wright screenplay . . . he passed out.

I stood for a second staring at this imbecile, feeling like a burned-out sentinel watching the meteor streak toward the planet, bracing himself for the lethal impact. The Devil's Whisper—the fart that happens just before you run for the bathroom to expel your waste—still hung in the air like the Grim Reaper blowing you a kiss as he passes by. I was too stunned to speak and too incensed to stutter. But I'm glad I was there, for as I regarded this kiddy pool of a grown child lying in a horrific amalgam of Technicolor Yawn, top soil, and literal shit, certain things started to occur to me: contemplation of my own misdeeds, realization that if I didn't rein in my own uncontrollable urges, I might end up looking as pathetic as this pain in my ass. All of this shot through my big-ass brain in what felt like an eternity but in actuality was possibly just a millisecond. In that moment of clarity a tone was set. I also remembered how early it was in the morning. So I did what anyone with half an IQ would have done in my shabby shoes.

I fucking left him there.

You can boo me all you want. You can talk as many shades of judgmental shit as you like. There was no—and The Rock means NO—no fucking way I was letting that fraction of a man, covered in three-fifths of his own fluids (I think he pissed himself when I wasn't looking) get back in the cab with me for any reason. I wasn't going to put that nice taxi driver through it, I wasn't going to put his cab through it, and I certainly wasn't going to subject myself to the kind of olfactory assault that would present itself once all of those interesting liquids finished seeping deep into the fabric of his fabulous leather pants. Janice? Hell, I only wish I could have left her there with Captain Dipshit; it was her idea to bring him along in the first fucking place. I got in the cab and told the driver to hit the gas. Janice protested, but I quieted her with the knowledge that this was my fare—if she wanted to stay in this car and complain, she could pay for it herself. We dropped her off down the street from her apartment without a good-bye, and I haven't seen her since. On a good day I wish her luck. On a bad day I have hopes that she woke up one morning with her face buried deep in Charles's putrid leather chaos.

It was in that moment long ago, watching a grown man coat himself in excrement and grass stains like a toddler who can't hold its own head up, that I realized something in myself that maybe I had never been asshole enough to see before: when it comes to incompetence and mental oblivion, when it comes to deep-seated stupor and offensive ignorance, my tolerance level is decidedly low. Being around stupid, callous people makes me feel like I have the flu: I get aches, I get anxious, I sweat, and I look for any available exit to fight my way to freedom. This is all while trying to restrain myself from lashing out at the offender. My good friend Geoffrey Elizabeth Head once imparted to me a saying that bears repeating: "Son, if you're going to be dumb, be tough because you ain't going to make it on your brains or your looks." Judging by my own observations as of late, this world must be full of tough motherfuckers.

And so we come to the root of this book's evil, bitches.

You see . . . I have been watching you all for a very long time. Yes, as creepy as that sounds, it is unfortunately true. Just as most of you gripping these pages have been following my actions for nearly twenty years, I have been studying your habits and your whims, your qualities and your qualms since before many of you were born. I have observed your shameless daring and your unchecked anger. I have considered your histrionics and your ridiculous gatherings. I have walked among you at event after event, marveling at your behaviors and individualities. Having done so and after all these years, I can unequivocally say that most of you are all so far off the fucking reservation that I fear for the future of our species.

Not the ones who bought this book—you have shown exceptional savvy! You are part of the 2 percent that gives me hope! But the other 98 percent of the population, you can simultaneously thank and blame alcohol and YouTube for that statement. You can also throw some expletives in the directions of reality TV, atrocious drivers, Justin Bieber, Kanye, fast food, infomercials, regular commercials . . . basically just people. I've said it before and, Buddha forgive me, I am going to proclaim it again: if it weren't for my family and my friends, I WOULD FuckING HATE YOU ALL, EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE.

There are just too many reasons for writing this book, nearly all of which will be headlining the many chapters inside. But I feel it imperative to say this right out of the gate: I am just as guilty of being a meandering cocker as you are. My track record as an occasional mouth-breathing dickhead may have just as many high (low) points as the dozens of "stars" that appear on the assorted TV shows running clip after disturbing clip showing men and women alike making some of the most idiotic moves imaginable. Whether it's selfie footage of women falling through coffee tables while they film themselves twerking or whether it's men shooting each other in the chest with live handguns to show their "toughness" while wearing bulletproof vests, there is an alarming trend of human beings tossing caution to the wind for a trickling glimpse of fame through shame, and what's most sad is they have none. They have no shame. They don't care that they are spreading moronic activity like a virus across the landscape. They don't give a flying fuck that this shit looks like a live feed from a mental hospital; they just want enough time to throw a bandage on the head wound so they can immediately check to see how many hits the video received in the last twenty seconds. If they took another twenty seconds to watch the video, they might realize they have a concussion.

But I am no Lord of the Hill; these hands pitching fastballs at glass houses are just as dirty as yours are. However, there are a lot of exemptions in my favor. One, much of my calamitous behavior occurred prior to the Digital Age, so no footage or real proof exists (thank fuck) and can only be found in hearsay and interviews. Two, I understand the difference between "getting it out of your system" when you are young and not giving a shit outright about making buffoonery seem like a career and not an aberration as you get old enough to actually know better. Three—and this is most important—it is my book, so I can do no wrong. Shit happens; it just so happens to be yours and not mine. So guess what? Even if you are not devoid of gray matter, even if you are not technically by definition bereft of intuitive mental faculties, you are all guilty by association. This is a RICO case, and I am the district attorney in charge of bringing justice to the world. I may not be infallible, but I can wear a suit and use big words, and it won't even look like someone put peanut butter on the roof of my mouth.

This means I believe most of you can't be trusted to pull the underwear out of your own ass let alone remember to change into clean ones after you have defecated in them. And I hate to say it but you don't make it very difficult to prove my point.

I have a bunch of shit I want to say, and the sad part is there's so much that I don't even know where to start. Airports, megamalls, shitty drivers, family reunions, sex, food, dickless music, clothes, and children—yes: children—all of these topics are targets for my venomous brand of vitriol in this book, and it is happening all over the world. As much as most of my international friends and foes would love to believe that this is a singularly American pandemic, I am begging you to give me the chance to differ. I have had the privilege to travel all over this blue, green, and white marble in space. I don't just run around yelling and screaming; I have been known to settle in the background and observe, taking notes when I'm not taking naps on painful, uncomfortable chairs en transit. As much as I realize my country owns its unfair share of stock in this zeitgeist of gibberish, I have also discovered that this is a global catastrophe. I haven't been everywhere, but I've been to enough "wheres" to know that Earth has pockets of stupid popping up north, south, east, and west. From the equator to the prime meridian—dumb does not so easily wash off.

The wonderfully liberating thing about this mounting sense of rage is that I DON'T GIVE A Fuck ANYMORE. I know I've said that in the past, but for better or worse, there has always been a side to me that usually holds a little bit back out of respect and to spare anyone the sting of hurt feelings. Well, as you are about to find out, my gloves are off. Not only are the gloves off, but I've also set fire to them like a Viking Boxer, throwing the burning mitts in a leaky bucket and kicking them across the sea with a hardy sigh and a stout middle finger flown in disrespect. Subsequently, don't get mad at me; you fuckers brought this on yourselves. It's not my fault that your entire population has fallen all over each other to popularize insignificant, irrelevant, talentless garbage. But it'll truly be my sadistic pleasure to rip it all to shreds before your very eyes.

But like I said before, not you guys, readers! We're all cool here. I'm sure none of you would take the Cinnamon Challenge or drink yourselves stupid and pass out with your panties presented for all to see outside the McDonald's in SoHo. I'm unwavering in my assertion that none of you would use a ridiculous, pathetic term like YOLO. "You Only Live Once" . . . yeah thanks for that, Confucius. I didn't fucking realize that "You Only Live Once." This is such meaningless, pseudo-analytical bullshit that it makes me madder than anything else at the moment. It'd be one thing if people were using YOLO when it pertained to something meaningful, like climbing a mountain or painting a portrait of that same mountain while sipping exotic teas on a veranda near the sea. I could understand it if you were attempting to put a little culture in your caboose. If YOLO were used in this context, I wouldn't want to shoot spitwads soaked in cunt juice into the face of God. But it's not. It's just fucking not. It's used to excuse the most ignorant, disgusting behavior I have come across in my life, and I grew up in a fucking trailer park in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa. I heard someone use "YOLO" while he tried to convince some idiotic teenage girl to jump sideways onto a moving treadmill while it was going like 60 mph. Guess what: long story short, she ate shit and now her face looks like shit. "You Only Live Once" . . . yeah you only die