Ministry: The Lost Gospels According To Al Jourgensen
Al Jourgensen with Jon Wiederhorn
Da Capo Press (2013)
|
|
You know you’re in trouble when you try to say goodbye to your wife and all you can do is gargle blood. I was dying. Well, that was nothing new. I’d tempted fate for more than four decades. I’ve had kidney failure; liver failure; hepatitis A, B, and C; and I tried to invent D, but all the doctors I saw were too dumb to grasp my creativity. I lost a toe, all my teeth, and nearly an arm, and I’d overdosed on heroin twice and had to be resuscitated.
That’s how I was supposed to go out, like a rock-star cliché with a needle in my arm and a groupie on my dick. But that wasn’t happening. See, I’ve always done things back-assward. I became a singer even though I hated singing, sold out to a major record label before anyone even knew who I was, and then wrote slow, desperate, crushing music when everyone wanted to hear fast thrashy stuff.
So there I was, bleeding to death from a goddamn ruptured ulcer. Turned out I’d had ulcers for years without knowing it. I mean, what the fuck? I’d always thought ulcers were the kind of thing that neurotic old ladies got and then they took some medicine and got better. Like I said, back-assward. In retrospect the whole thing is a blur, and I don’t remember much except sitting on the toilet and blood pouring out of my asshole, falling off the toilet, puking pints of blood, and trying to crawl across the floor. Then I was in an ambulance.
March 27, 2010 — the 13th Planet Compound Massacre. Everyone tells me that’s what it looked like. I was passed out for most of it.
Here’s what I do remember combined with what Angie (Jourgensen, wife) and Sammy (D’Ambruoso, engineer) told me later. I was lying on the couch with my helmet on, feeling pretty crappy, and suddenly I desperately had to take a shit. I stumbled to the toilet, dropped my pants, and sat down. Only I didn’t shit. All that came out of me was blood, and there was so much pouring out of my dick and my asshole that I started to panic. I didn’t want the toilet to overflow, so I took off the helmet, held it to my ass and let the blood pour in there. Then I had a major seizure because I had lost so much blood. I fell off the toilet and tried to put the helmet back on, and about 12 ounces of blood matted down my hair and ran down my face, pooling with the blood that was dribbling out of my mouth and nose. That’s where Sammy found me an hour later and went to get Angie. It looked like the aftermath of a murder scene. There was blood on the floor, all over the toilet, and running across the tile floor. I was having massive seizures and I was blue. Angie called 911.
When the paramedics arrived it must have looked like a scene from CSI or one of the many other popular crime shows I’ve never watched. I kinda wish someone taped it so I could watch it later after I recovered. At the time recovery seemed about as likely as getting struck twice by lightning. They usually don’t let anyone but patients ride in the ambulance, but my blood pressure was 30/20. I had lost 65% of the blood in my body, and no-one thought I would survive, so they let Angie ride in the ambulance after they carted me out of the house on a stretcher. I wouldn’t have been the first celebrity to croak from a perforated ulcer. That’s what killed writer James Joyce when he was 58, jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker at age 35, J. R. R. Tolkien when he was 81, and Rudyard Kipling at 71. That’s not such bad company.
|
|
Angie checked me into Providence Hospital in El Paso under the name Dick Sohard, which is funny, but she didn’t do it for laughs. El Paso’s not a big city. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, and she didn’t want any media attention. In Los Angeles, when a musician goes to the hospital for something, a publicist gets on the phone immediately to notify the press, and by the time they get to the hospital, there are camera crews waiting. It’s just another example of the music industry trying to make money from ambulance chasers and press vultures looking for a big scoop. We wanted to avoid that, which is why nobody found out I almost died until much later.
I remember waking up in the ER and Angie was holding my hand and crying. I looked up at her, and because I had already died twice before from overdoses, I said, “Third time’s the charm, baby. Sorry, I gotta go.” I really thought I was a goner. Then I passed out. Next thing I know I’m in the ICU with 10,000 tubes sticking out of me. I hate doctors. All they want to do is take away your body parts and make things worse, but this time I had no choice but to listen to them. I didn’t have the strength to move or the energy to argue.
They gave me blood, poked me and prodded me, and determined I had to have immediate surgery. They got out a tube with a camera and a laser attached to it and stuck it down my esophagus to look at the damage. It must have looked like the aftermath of a Vietnam village bombing in there. The main ulcer that caused all the damage had opened up over an artery between my stomach and large intestine, and then they found five more active ulcers. They cauterized all that with the laser and then another seven ulcers that had been scarred over years ago when I didn’t know what was going on in my stomach. Because I had lost so much blood, the doctors gave me a complete transfusion, replacing every ounce of the poisoned blood in my system with new fresh blood. Out with the old, in with new, just like an oil change at Jiffy Lube. Besides, Keith Richards highly recommends it!
A couple days later, although still in the ICU, I could tell I was getting better because I started getting cranky. They took the intubation tube out of my throat, but I was still pretty doped up and was flipping through the channels on the TV, barely half-cognizant. Suddenly it dawned on me that they didn’t have the cable hockey channel on their TV. The NHL playoffs were about to start, and the Chicago Blackhawks were playing. Now, far be it for me to second-guess these experienced doctors who just saved my life, but I’m the biggest Hawks fan ever. My dad used to take me to games when I was six years old. I know the owners of the team. Their son Danny Wirtz is a good friend of mine, and I’m always at the games when I’m in Chicago. So I pushed the call buzzer, and when the nurse came around, I said, “Look, I really need the hockey channel. I’ll pay for it — just have it wired into my room.”
|
|
Well, they said they couldn’t do that and I needed to rest. Nobody tells me what I need to do. After three days in the ICU I pulled all the fucking wires out from my arm — I was supposed to be there a week — and said, “C’mon Angie, we’re leaving.” She tried to argue that I needed to stay in the hospital, but she understands that when I have my mind set on something, nothing’s gonna stop me. I looked around for my clothes and my cell phone, but they had stashed them away and wouldn’t give them to me. I said, “I don’t care. I don’t fucking need clothes.” I walked into the lobby in my tissue-paper hospital gown. Usually you wear those things open in the back with your ass hanging out. I turned it around so I was full-frontal because I thought that was a much cooler look.
By this point Angie finally got my doctor to come over to try to talk some sense into me. She’s looking at me in my gown with my dick hanging out and says, “I strongly advise you stay in the hospital so we can monitor your recovery. If the ulcers open up again, you could die.”
And I said, “Yeah, but the puck drops in three hours. I’m going home.”
Finally she gave me a shoebox full of pills for my stomach and agreed to let me check out. They got my cell phone and my clothes, and Angie drove me home. She yelled at me the whole way home and called me an idiot, but we got back just in time for the first puck drop, so it was worth it. I got to watch the whole hockey game.
Adapted from Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen by Al Jourgensen with Jon Wiederhorn. Reprinted courtesy of Da Capo Press.
|
|
|
|
|
