Waking the dead!

Interview w/ Gidget Gein

Gein talks about art, pissing, and scraping bodies off the street!

Hollie Stevens – Sunday, April 6, 2008Gidget Gein’s art can be described as UnPoP or GaGA, because it defies yet welcomes the world to put its dirty finger on it and classify it as such. Born in the year of fear and turned over to Mama (catholic school teacher and den mother) and Dada (Police officer and part time professional clown), Gein’s upbringing was a mixed bag of emotions and influences, ranging from melancholy maladjustment to dizzying windmill elation.

Inspired to be stellar somewhere between circumcision and first communion, by drive in movies, AM radio, and the nightly news. This early onslaught of the senses can be seen in Gein’s work today. Gein has traveled many roads, one being original bassist, song writer, and CO-creator of some band called Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. This trip ended in 1994 due to chemical differences and a desire not to be controlled by man or myth. Post Manson, Gein started the Surreal PoP Exploitation group, appropriately titled “thee DALI GAGGERS” described as ” if Ziggy Stardust grew up in the ghetto listening to Slayer and Johnny Cash”.

Lately Gein has been subcontracted by the South Florida Medical Examiners Office for the duty of removing the dearly departed from crime scenes and other attractions of an untimely demise. Absorbing all aspects of this job, Gein injects them into his art. Painting, Music, Film, and other assorted chicanery.

Editors note: To say Gein is interesting is an understatement. When Hollie came with this interview I must say I wasn’t too familiar with his work. I did a lot of scanning through his website @ http://www.gidgetgein.com and was really impressed with his stuff. Make sure you take the time to check it out. Also, there is another piece of this interview (It’s two parts) in the latest issue of Girls and Corpses if you would like to read more. Danny

Hollie – So tell me, what are some of your phobias?

Gidget Gein – Well, it’s not really a phobia. When I was a little kid, my mom and I would always go to the mall and go to the bookstore. She’d always spend so much time in the bookstore. I would always go to the kid section and hang out but after a while I’d have to go to the bathroom and there is no bathroom in the bookstore. I’d have to pee really bad and I knew my mom was not going to leave and I would know better not to go and bother her or I’d get the back of her hand or something. So, eventually I’d piss my pants and I wasn’t a really little kid. I was old enough, 7 years old or something so I shouldn’t have been pissing my pants. This was like a weekly occurrence. I would always piss my pants. So now every time I go to a bookstore, I immediately have to pee. Even if I piss like 2 seconds before I go in the bookstore. One more thing, and I don’t know where this comes from but, every time I go to a hardware store, I have to take a shit. I don’t know if it’s because of the smell of pine from the lumber, but I always have to number 2 so bad in a hardware store.

Hollie – My brother and I hated going to Best Buy with my brother because as soon as we’d walk in, he’d get so excited or something that he’d have to go take a shit. So then I’d have to stand around and wait on him to shit so we could finally go shopping. Is it like that with you and hardware stores?

Gidget Gein – It’s not that it’s like that; I think it has something to do with the smell. The pine smell. I don’t know, it may be some association to something but, as soon as I get in there, I have to go to the bathroom and I hate using public restrooms for the number 2 but, if I have to go, I have to go. I don’t care.

Hollie – Maybe it has something to do with your childhood? The smell of pine sol reminds me of the daycare I went to as a little. These horrible Czech bitches ran it. I can’t stand the smell of pine sol. It brings back bad memories. Maybe the smell of pine has the same affect on you but in a different way?

Gidget Gein – Well, when I was a little kid in summer camp, me and my friend were exploring the wilderness and all of the sudden I had to go number 2 really bad. So I told my friend to stand in front of me so nobody would come around and see me droppin’ a duce in the woods. So I squat and he’s sitting there and I’m trying to go then, all of a sudden, I start peeing and a lot of the time when I have to go to the bathroom I start peeing. I have to go number 1 before I go number 2. I guess that’s why they call in number 1.

Hollie – Makes sense…..

Gidget Gein – So my friend is in front of me and I start peeing and I pee all over him. I gave this kid a golden shower out in the wilderness. He didn’t even get mad. He just started laughing. We were both laughing. As I was laughing I started evacuating all over the place and I then ordered him to go find me some leaves or something so I could wipe my butt.

Hollie – I’m sure he did. He was probably afraid that you might do something else to him.

Gidget Gein – I think this was the same day, like shortly there after; we were all into snakes and trying to catch some snakes. So, I catch this one snake and it bites me. I didn’t think anything of it. So later on we leave and we all get on the bus to go back home and I started to feel sick. Then I vomited and it went all over all of the kids on the bus. Then the bus driver gave me a trash bag just in case I’d throw up again. So, I peed on a kid, took a shit in the woods, got bit by a snake and threw up on a bunch of people on a bus all in one day. I was maybe 6 years old or something.

Hollie – That’s crazy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a day like that.

Gidget Gein – Oh, I’m sure you’ve had a day like that but maybe not the same experience.

Hollie – Yeah, probably. Ok, enough with the sentimental childhood stories of familiar smells and evacuation. I’m sure people would like to hear about your experience as former bass player for Marilyn Manson or about your artwork (which I am a fan of) but, I’d like to talk about another profession that you were involved in. Picking up dead bodies. Tell me how it all began.

Gidget Gein – I was homeless so I ended up living at my mom’s house and she told me that I had to get a job. So, I’m living at my mom’s house and somehow I ended up finding this job service were they had these computers with classified adds on them. I go to this place and I get on the computer and look though jobs. I stumble upon this add that says Mortuary Assistant Wanted. So I’m thinking well, this sounds cool. I get to work in a funeral home or morgue or whatever a mortuary assistant does. So, I call the guy and go in for an interview. I go to this warehouse district in Ft. Lauderdale. It’s a real desolate type of place. So I find this building and I it’s a real stank type of warehouse. I go into the back room and there’s this 400-pound guy sitting behind a desk smoking a cigar. He starts telling me about the job. “Hey kid, do you know what you’re getting into? Your job is to remove the dead from the crime scenes and take them to the coroner. You might get some mother who killed her baby and put it in a microwave and then killed herself and there’s blood everywhere and you’ve got to take the baby out of the microwave.”

Hollie – Did you ever see the movie Microwave Massacre?

Gidget Gein – No?

Hollie – It was a cheesy 80’s horror movie. Had a great soundtrack. Anyway, It was about this guy who would fuck a numerous amount of women but the only way he would get himself off was knowing that he was going to kill her later and put her in the microwave. He worked at some construction site and he’d bring “left overs” for the other crew, not knowing that they were eating women. He died at the end though because he had a pacemaker and was standing too close to the microwave. The whole microwave reference just reminded me of that movie.

Gidget Gein – I have a bunch of pace makers that I got out of dead people. You have to take the pace makers out of them before you put them into the crematorium. If you put them in the oven, they’ll explode.

Hollie – I had a friend of mine whose dad had an ears necklace. Guess that’s nothing like collecting pacemakers.

Gidget Gein – Did you see it?

Hollie – No, I didn’t see it. My friend just told me about it and how is dad went kind of crazy during Vietnam and cut the ears off of the dead enemy and wore them as a trophy.

Gidget Gein – Supposedly a lot of soldiers did that. I’d love to see that.

Hollie – I’m guessing it was some sort of trend. I suppose you wouldn’t be able to get away with something like that at your job.

Gidget Gein – Yeah, I showed up at one scene where there was this biker and he got hit by a semi and was dragged by it for about a quarter of a mile. There were chunks of skull all over along with the other parts. I picked up the largest chunk and threw it on the side of the road to try and hide it because I was planning on coming back to get it but one of the guys at the scene caught me and made it put it in the biohazard bag with the rest of the parts.

Hollie – What’s one of the craziest crime scenes that you’ve had to encounter?

Gidget Gein – There was a case where this guy tried to commit suicide. This is a sure fire way to commit suicide. If you want to die, this will definitely kill you. There’s a book called The Final Exit. It’s for terminally ill people. They’re going to die soon anyway and want to end their suffering so they wrote this book for these people. This was one of the ways out of the book. What he did was, he got a helium tank and put a bag over his head and you have to get the doctors mask. The reason for the doctor’s mask is if you just put a bag over your head then the bag will go into your mouth and it’s very uncomfortable and eventually you’re going to pull the bag off of your head. The mask makes it a little bit easier. So, the guy did everything in the book, hooked up the helium tank up to him and we found him like this. He successfully killed himself. I couldn’t help but wonder what his last words were after being hooked up to a helium tank. I imagine it was high pitch squeal shouting “goodbye cruel world!” Or some sort of cartoon voice.

Hollie – Usually when kids suck the air out of a helium balloon they start singing “The Lollipop Guild” I’m sure that song didn’t come to mind though while the guy was trying to off himself.

Gidget Gein – Yeah, that’s the first thing that usually pops into everyone’s mind though. But, if you really want to kill yourself you have to combine several elements like take pills and put a bag over your head. That’s how a friend of mine did it after checking into a hotel room in New York. I checked my email one day while I was still working for the medical examiner and this was while I was clean for about 2 years or so and I got an email from a kid that I was in rehab with and I wanted him to play guitar for me in a band I was in at the time but for some reason he just wasn’t on the same page as far as what we wanted to do. But I hadn’t talked to the guy in a while and he sends me this email telling me that he’s doing good and he’s been clean for 16 months and telling me that we should hang out sometime soon. I didn’t answer the email because as I was reading this I got a call to go pick up another body. A day or two later, I get another call to pick up a body. So I go into the apartment where the body’s at and my partner leaves to do the paperwork and get the guys name and this and that and I see the guy on the floor and I’m wrestling the body, throwing him over and checking his pockets. I didn’t know how he died but his face was all bashed in. He had been there for like 12 hours so the rigor mortis is starting to set in so he’s a little bloated. So, I’m processing the body and then I’m looking around the apartment and I see on his bed there’s some photos and stuff. I look at the pictures and I realize that I know the people in these pictures. I then asked my partner what the guys name was. So he tells me his name and it’s the guy who had sent me the email. My friend. At that point, I was in shock. I began screaming at him “You idiot! What the fuck is wrong with you?!” He just emailed me 2 days earlier telling me that he’s been clean for 16 months. Well, what happened, I don’t know if he was clean or what but he overdosed and when overdosed, he hit his face on the sink and that’s why he was all bloody. It was so weird. When you have that job you’re so detached. But I knew eventually living in South Florida and knowing so many drug addicts that I’d eventually run into somebody.

It fucked me up for a while. Every once in a while I’d think about him and it would bring tears to my eyes because when I see somebody like that, I’d see myself. I’d begin to question why him and not me? I mean, I’ve done so many crazy things and so many drugs for me not to be dead or in jail. People talk about gods will and that god had a plan for you. That’s egotistical to think that. So you’re telling me that I’m better than him? Since I’m alive and he’s dead, god has a plan for me but gods plan for him was to die? I don’t believe in all that “gods will” garbage.

Hollie – So what made you drop the profession?

Gidget Gein – Well, I quit in Miami because I was still strung out from doing drugs. It wasn’t that bad but it was bad enough to where…well, I don’t know if this had anything to do with it but you know when you’re trying to kick drugs, or anything, and it makes you really emotional? Where you think you’re going to go crazy? Well, almost every body that I’d pick up, I would think I was having some sort of psychic experience where it seemed like I could feel their pain and emotions when they died. They weren’t speaking to me, but say if I was to pick up a suicide. I’d feel their emotions right before they died. I thought about it too much and it really got to me so I had to quit. I went to Key West where nobody could find me. This was before cell phones so I had a pager that was going off every fifteen minutes. Actually that was the first time that I’d quit. The last time I got fired right before I came here [Los Angeles]. I wanted to get fired though because it started to become a bit too much. I was on call 24/7 and paid $20 a body. I still needed the job but I had money coming in from other places so it was more like an experience. But after 3 years of being on call 24/7 the novelty wore off but I didn’t want to quit. This was my job.

There’s this paper called the New Times. It’s kind of like the L.A. Weekly of South Florida. They were interested in doing an interview with me about my life and my art but most of the interview was about me picking up dead bodies. It ended up being the cover story. So I told all of my crazy stories and was telling the truth. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful or anything, I was just telling it like it was. This paper was all over South Florida like the LA. Weekly is out here. And I’m on the cover. It’s a weekly paper so I thought it’d be cool and my bosses wouldn’t see it. (Here is the link to the story: http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2004-07-29/news/d-o-a-delivery/) But, a week passes and my boss called me in for a meeting and began screaming, “What is this shit! What is wrong with you!” ended up firing me over the story. I guess it was a good way to go out. I didn’t say anything bad. What’s funny, there was an art gallery in New Orleans that I was supposed to do a show at and the guy who owned it was originally from south Florida. His gallery was very edgy and showed some crazy stuff and he wanted to do a show with me until he somehow saw the article. He wrote a letter to the editor, which was printed in the paper. Something along the lines of “This guy is messed up and I’m appalled and sickened to think that my mother might die and this guy is going to go and pick up her remains.” I thought he was joking so I called him up and asked him, “Are you kidding me? What are you talking about?” the guy says, “No, No, that was completely offensive!” My story was really no different than anybody else that I had worked with. I wasn’t some kind of freak. Other people that I’d work with were people that I was scared of. One guy I worked with seemed like the type of guy that would have bodies in his house…Prostitutes. He seemed like a normal guy but, as I got to know him, turned out was a nudist and would go to the nudist colonies on the weekends. He was just creepy. He would say inappropriate stuff when we where at a scene and when we’d go to the hospital he’d always talk nurses. Not being offensive but would say things to them that were really creepy.

I had my head together but everybody else at this company had no ambition in life. They were happy with what they were doing but I had other things going on. I was the guy with the attitude and pissed off at work because I’d be on call all of the time and never got a raise. So I was the guy that rocked the boat so they were happy to fire me. I understood why they fired me because it really didn’t make the industry look good, but I didn’t lie or say anything that was untruthful. They just didn’t like some of the things I said. One of the things that my boss brought up was “What do you mean you’re not doing it for the money? That makes me believe that you’re sick and you’re doing it for some other reason.” Come on, he knew me for 3 years. He knew my sense of humor.

Hollie – Wasn’t like anything you said was going to put them out of business?

Gidget Gein – (Laughs) Well, nothing’s going to put them out of business. But, another thing that sucked was that we had an account with a medical examiner in addition to all of the funeral homes. Maybe 3 months prior to me getting fired, they lost that account so we only had funeral homes. The job wasn’t that entertaining anymore!!