You're Making Me Hate You
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Corey Taylor
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
CHAPTER 1: JUST BEFORE THE STORM
CHAPTER 2: FUCKED IN PUBLIC
CHAPTER 3: FLIGHT OF THE DUMBKOFFS
CHAPTER 4: DYSFUNCTION OVER FASHION
CHAPTER 5: DRIVING ME CRAZY
CHAPTER 6: MONEY—WELL … SPENT
CHAPTER 7: GET ALONG, LITTLE DOGGIES
CHAPTER 8: CHILDREN OF CLODS
CHAPTER 9: WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE?
CHAPTER 10: HELLO, POT—I’M KETTLE
CHAPTER 11: AFTER THE BASTARDS GO HOME
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Book
Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor’s new book is a searingly hilarious trawl through the endless backwaters of human stupidity, by the bestselling author of Seven Deadly Sins and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven.
Corey Taylor has had it. Had it with the vagaries of human behaviour and life in this postmodern digital blanked-out waiting room that passes for a world. Reality TV, awful music, terrible drivers, airports, family reunions, bad fashion choices, other people’s monstrous children, and badly behaved ‘adult’ human beings are warping life in the 21st century into an often-unbearable endurance test of one’s patience, fortitude and faith. You’re Making Me Hate You is a blisteringly funny diatribe that skewers the worst aspects of human behaviour with a knowing eye for every excruciating detail, told in the vivid way that only Corey Taylor can.
Like his previous bestselling forays, You’re Making Me Hate You is an unsparing glimpse into the mind of Corey Taylor, who spares no one from his seething gaze. Make no mistake: this is not the Corey Taylor you run into at meet-and-greets or in line at the coffee shop. This is not the kind and cuddly guy who kisses babies and takes pictures with your mum while leaving a voicemail for your distant cousin. This is not the loveable scamp who can poke just as much fun at himself as he does at the various rubes around him – though to be fair he does save one chapter for a brutal and lacerating self-analysis. This is Corey Motherfucking Taylor. This is the Great Big Mouth. This is that bastard you wonder about when you listen to Slipknot and Stone Sour.
Funny, profane, blasphemous and, above all, right on target, You’re Making Me Hate You is pure Corey Taylor unleashed, exposing the underbelly of human depravity in all its ragged glory.
About the Author
Corey Taylor is the author of two Sunday Times bestsellers, Seven Deadly Sins and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven. Lead singer of rock bands Slipknot and Stone Sour, Taylor has earned 11 platinum records, 43 gold records, and a Grammy Award. A native of Iowa, he spends his time between there, Las Vegas and his suitcase.
ALSO BY COREY TAYLOR
Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between
Born Bad and Damaged Good
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven:
Or, How I Made Peace with the Paranormal and
Stigmatized Zealots and Cynics in the Process
To Ryan and Griffin, Haven and Lawson, Angeline and Aravis …
I love you all with the whole of my heart …
I only hope you grow to be better than me.
—CT
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
—Albert Einstein
I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things,
and I have succeeded fairly well.
—Robert Benchley
Hell is other people.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Which one of these words don’t you understand?
Talking to you is like clapping with one hand!
—Anthrax, “Caught in a Mosh,” Among the Living
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 ha
s 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 ai
r 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.